by Alison Moore
On the corner, waiting to cross over to the bus stop on English Street, she glanced back, and saw that he had gone.
On the bus, she sat in front of a youth who was listening to music through headphones. Jessie could only hear the tinny edges of tracks which, as the miles went by, she failed to identify; even so, she thought that the music must have been very loud in the young man’s ears, and she worried about his ear drums and the possibility of perforation.
The bus followed the A7 all the way to Hawick. When it crossed the border, Jessie recalled Eleanor’s bewilderment at crossing the invisible border between France and Belgium; how inconceivable it was that they could have slipped so silently into a different country. Perhaps she would always think of Eleanor when she crossed a border.
Jessie had felt just the same way when she travelled from Cambridgeshire up to the Scottish Borders all those years ago. Hours had gone by, and still she had been travelling, on and on, further and further north, and she had kept thinking that she must be in Scotland now, but she had not seen a sign; but perhaps, she thought, she had just been looking the other way. It had felt most peculiar, not to know which country she was in; besides, there was so often a gap in between the sign that said you were now leaving one place – a town or a county or a country – and the sign that said you were now entering another place. Jessie had always wondered about these gaps, which were like stretches of lawless wilderness. And then she saw it: the SCOTLAND welcomes you sign, and she could have wept.
She had come to a country that the ancient Romans had struggled to conquer, for all their marching along their long, straight roads, for all their armies, for all the noise of their heavy boots.
It was the first time she had been into Scotland since childhood, when she had spent an Easter week at Loch Ness with her parents and Gail. They had taken a detour on their way home, driving down a side street in Hawick. Her dad stopped the car outside an old house and said, ‘That’s where your great-great-grandmother lived.’ From the back seat of the car, with the window wound down, Jessie had seen a woman in an upstairs room, standing at the lowered sash window, looking out. Ever since then, this woman had been inextricably linked in Jessie’s mind with the great-great-grandmother she had never met and who was long dead even as she met that woman’s eye through the open windows.
Years later, Jessie had looked up her great-great-grandmother, Lenore, in the census records. She found her still alive in all the records up to 1891, after which she disappeared. She could not find a death certificate, or any further mention of her. She did not know if Lenore had made it into the twentieth century.
She had, of course, more than one great-great-grandmother: she had eight of them, a good number for a dinner party, she thought. She imagined having them all over, all the great-great-grandmothers, and cooking a huge lasagne for them. Mentally, she sat them down around her dining table – it would necessitate putting the extra leaf in the table to make it long enough, and she would have to bring in the piano stool and a couple of folding garden chairs so that there would be enough seats. Their faces were fuzzy; their colours were muted – they were monochrome and sepia. Their necklines were high and their skirts were long. She knew only snippets about them: one had been taken to see a king when she was little but did not know until afterwards that she had seen the king, because she had been looking for somebody wearing a crown, not an ordinary hat. Another one had gone to Cambridge to see Queen Victoria and came home saying that she had only seen the backs of other people’s heads. This was mostly what Jessie knew of her great-great-grandmothers, these tales of them trying to glimpse royalty. It wasn’t much, but these were the things, these little stories, that had survived into the twenty-first century.
It was early in the new century that, newly divorced and briefly Jessie Noon again, she had found the Hawick house for sale online. She had recognised it, and began at once to put into motion her move up north. When she crossed the border, it was summertime and everything was green. Now it was autumn and the leaves were orange and falling.
The walls of the house still held the gas light fixtures from Lenore’s day, although they no longer worked; they had been painted over, painted the same colour as the walls, and Jessie had draped some fairy lights over them. There had been people in the house since Lenore of course, including the woman Jessie had seen at the window when she was a child. Talking to Isla, Jessie had wondered aloud whether a house might remember past occupants, whether it might miss them. Isla said, ‘I wouldn’t have thought so,’ and went back to pegging out her washing. But Jessie liked how connected she felt to Lenore in her house, and she did feel welcome in the town.
During her first year in Hawick, Jessie had met Will, who at the time was separating from his first wife. Within months, he and his dog had moved in with Jessie; she had married him quickly, as if there were a child, though there was not. They got married in a register office without inviting anyone they knew; they had strangers for witnesses. The early anniversaries hardly sounded real: paper, fruit, salt, tin. Then, after thirteen years together, he had walked out.
Will had never liked Jessie’s books; he did not like to live with so much stuff; he did not like the way that all this stuff, all her books, gathered dust. Free surfaces attracted piles of books, and bare walls attracted shelves which filled with books, which attracted dust. He did read, but he did not like books. Jessie had once got him a biography that he had been wanting; she got it out of the library and when he opened it he found a stranger’s crumbs in the hinge, nestled between the pages, and was infuriated.
The routine of Jessie’s days and weeks was much the same now as it had been during their marriage, as it had been before their marriage: she woke at fifteen minutes to seven, lay in bed until seven, and then got up, took a shower, made a cup of tea, ate fruit for breakfast. She was not sure whether the routine helped or not when it came to missing Will, whose presence lingered in the shape of the dog that he had not taken with him, and the shirts of his that still hung in his half of the wardrobe, and the coat of his that still hung on a peg near the door, and the things in the freezer that only he ate but which she had not thrown away, and so many other things, and yet he was not there. What was more, she did not know where he was, and might never know again.
The morning he left – when, at a quarter to seven, the clock radio shocked her back into the land of the living – Jessie lay in bed and listened to the news of the discovery of a roundhouse from the Bronze Age, from so many hundreds of years Before Christ, when the people had gods, of course, but not God, not the God she knew, or had thought she did. She had, at times, taken a passing interest in other gods. She had favourites: the Hindu Trimurti, in which destruction and creation were two faces of one being; and Janus, the Roman god of doorways and thresholds; and Odin, the Norse god of death and healing.
The roundhouse was on stilts, perfectly preserved. There had been a catastrophic event – a fire, something like that – and people had left in a hurry as they did at Pompeii; they left their food bowls where they fell. There was a single human skull. This had happened in the Cambridgeshire Fens, not far from where she used to live.
Will left in the middle of winter, and now winter was coming again. At first, people had kept asking where he was, and she sometimes thought they asked in a way that made her sound responsible, as if she had been careless with him, or as if she might be keeping him trapped somewhere in the house. But after a while, word got around; he was known to have left, and people stopped asking about him. When Will had been gone for nine months, Jessie began using her own name again. Some people, elsewhere, had only ever known her as Jessie Noon anyway, and some still knew her by her first married name. In different circles, she was known by different names.
She missed him most first thing in the morning, when she had only one cup of tea to make, and when she walked the dog, especially in the evening, when she liked to hear about his day and tell h
im about hers, and when she sat down to eat alone, and in bed, before sleeping. She brought her work and her books into bed instead. She was reading less fiction than she used to; she found herself wanting non-fiction, facts, real people. She had read a book about scientists recording the faint sound of two black holes colliding more than a billion years ago, the collision causing waves that could still be detected now. People were always finding things that you had not realised anyone was looking for. She would not even have known where to start.
1985
‘But how can we be in a different country?’ Eleanor asked, and kept asking. She needed there to be a barrier that had to be raised to let them through, or a guard to observe their crossing from one territory to the other, or at the very least a visible line to cross, but there was not even that.
‘You can just drive from one country to the other,’ said Gail. ‘You can’t see the border.’
Was there even a sign to say that they had entered Belgium? Jessie had not seen one. There was just, here and there, some slight difference – the language on the motorway signs suggested that they had crossed over.
They drove for some hours, while Eleanor nibbled on crackers to stave off travel sickness. They spent the first half of the journey playing car games: they played I Spy, though the things Eleanor chose were never big, obvious things like the sky or the road, or things that were travelling right along with them like her parents or the windscreen; she chose the most obscure things, which were already out of sight by the time Jessie started guessing. Jessie failed again and again, and said that Eleanor was not playing fairly, and then Eleanor refused to play at all.
Eleanor spent the second half of the journey seeing how long she could hold her breath, though Gail did not like her doing this and had to keep telling her to stop.
Eleanor said to Jessie, ‘I can hold my breath for a hundred seconds.’
‘That’s a long time,’ said Jessie.
‘I could hold it for longer,’ said Eleanor.
If you looked, you could see her doing it: she got a certain expression on her face, although Jessie was not really paying attention; she was gazing out of the window at the world going by. She heard her sister saying, ‘Stop it, Eleanor,’ and she heard Eleanor’s breath coming out. Eleanor would gnaw on another cracker or try to see shapes in the clouds, and then she would do it again, going silent, stiffening, her eyes going blank.
Communication
I’ve begun the long journey home. I travel through time zones, the climate changing around me, and as I make my way I’m sending messages, to let her know I am coming, to say that I will be there soon.
It was just after eight in the evening when the bus arrived at the Mart Street stop in Hawick, just past The Baby Shop. Some people stood up early, ready, but Jessie waited for the bus to come to a standstill, fearful of sudden braking.
It was not too late to pop into Morrisons, and Jessie did so, wanting apples and milk. She got more shopping than she had meant to, and stood in a queue at the checkout with her basket precariously overfilled. She would be able to put her basket down and unpack it when the woman in the navy coat in front of her moved forward. Jessie stood, with everything balanced. It was only when the woman in the navy coat turned very slightly to the side, so that Jessie could see the outline of her forehead, her cheekbone, her jaw, that she realised who it was. Jessie started to turn and move away, but the movement caused the shopping in her basket to shift; a tin that had seemed safe on top of a packet of raisins now rolled over the edge of her basket and onto the floor. The noise caused the woman in navy to glance in her direction before turning away again. ‘Hello,’ said Jessie. She knew the woman’s name, which was Kirstin, but she did not feel able to use it as they had never actually been introduced. And was it Kirstin, not Kirsteen or Kristen? She was unsure. The woman in navy was busy with her shopping now; she was fetching a voucher out of her purse. Jessie had no idea if she had recognised her or if she realised that it was her to whom Jessie had been speaking. The greeting hung in the air between them. Jessie picked up her tin and returned it to her basket. She thought about moving to another checkout, but she stayed put, gripping her basket with both hands, her arms aching.
From the supermarket, it was only a short walk, a few minutes, to her door. She passed the Congregational Church, admiring it. It was a beautiful structure, a listed building. She had never gone inside. She had thought about doing so many times, but had never yet climbed the stone steps to the imposing double doors. She imagined the iron ring of the door handle, cold to the touch, turning under her hand; she imagined the weight and creak of the door as she pushed it open, and the hush on the far side.
At her front door, she took her keys out of her coat pocket and slid the door key into the lock, thinking how lovely that was, to have a key that fitted a lock, a key that turned and opened the door and let her inside. You heard about people changing their locks so that those who had left them could not return, could not come back for their belongings. She imagined Will coming home and finding the locks changed. She would not do that.
She carried her travel bag over the threshold and closed the door behind her. She had once read a true story about a woman whose house burnt down and who had no home insurance, and Jessie had thought that if that happened to her she would take enough money out of the bank to buy a campervan, an old one, whatever she could afford – leaving enough in her account for petrol and food – and she would live on the move. Now she knew that she would not do that; now she knew she needed walls and ceilings, ones that stayed put. She would not be able to stand it, forever arriving in places that she did not know, always having to look on a map to know where she was, feeling like a runaway, every morning waking up and having to remember.
On the doormat, there was some mail addressed to the previous occupant of the house, whom Jessie had never met, and there was a postcard from Gail. Jessie was always surprised that her sister could bear to speak to her. She was glad to get these postcards, with some pleasant picture on the front and Love from Gail on the back. Gary’s name was missing, though he would be there too. They were not far from home in fact; they were still in East Anglia, but spending a week on the coast. It was a funny time of year to choose, Jessie thought – November was rather cold for a week of English seaside – but of course they no longer had to stick to the school holidays.
Jessie had not seen Gail since New Year, after making a last-minute decision to accept the invitation to Gail and Gary’s New Year’s Eve party. Jessie had worn her silver trouser suit, and silver shoes, and Gail had said that she looked like a spaceman, and Jessie thought that maybe she did, maybe she did look like a spaceman, who might not know the rules of this place. Gary had not wanted Jessie to be there, and Jessie had seen that, but still she had stayed; she had stayed too long. When she went upstairs to use the bathroom, she went along the corridor to Eleanor’s bedroom, which shared a partition wall with the guest room in which Jessie slept when she visited. Jessie remembered Eleanor’s tired crying at bedtime, the sound of it coming through the wall, and then even after Eleanor fell asleep the partition wall still felt sad, as if her crying was still in there, trapped beneath the wallpaper, stuck in the wallpaper paste.
Jessie was starving. Her mother had always disliked her saying that. ‘You’re not starving,’ she would say. ‘You’re just hungry.’ So Jessie was just hungry, and that was easily solved. Leaving her travel bag in the hallway, she went into the kitchen, dropped Mrs Moffat’s mail into the recycling bin, and took a portion of shepherd’s pie out of the freezer. She liked to cook. She found it soothing – the chopping, chopping, softening, boiling down. She cooked more food than she could possibly eat on her own; she made enough to feed a family. What she could not eat, she froze. In her freezer, she had weeks’ worth – perhaps months’ worth – of shepherd’s pie and chilli; she had about a square foot of lasagne, in individual portions, which she took out, on
e at a time. She blasted them in the microwave.
The dog was at her legs, whining, pawing. ‘Not yet,’ Jessie said. She would feed the dog after she had taken it out for its walk, and she would take it out for its walk after she had eaten.
While she was waiting for the microwave to beep, she took the kettle to the sink, and while she was waiting for the kettle to fill, she saw the crack, a hairline crack, in one of the window panes. She touched it. She could not really feel anything, any gap or misalignment, but she could see it. Perhaps it had been there for a while and had just gone unnoticed. Or perhaps the crack was fresh. Perhaps a child had kicked a ball against her window. The broken pane would have to be replaced.
She made a cup of tea in her Silver Jubilee mug. She vividly remembered the day of the jubilee. She had been ten years old, and she and all the other primary school children had been in a parade. They walked in pairs, wearing the colours of the Union Jack and cardboard crowns with boiled sweets or jelly sweets stuck on for jewels. They waved little flags on sticks. And she had been given a Silver Jubilee mug, which she had looked after now for nearly forty years and out of which tea always tasted better.
She drank her tea and ate her portion of shepherd’s pie at the kitchen table, and when she had finished, and had washed up her few things, she took the dog out. Sometimes she walked it along the track that passed the top of the street, where the trains used to run, but more often she walked it down to the river, as she did now even though it was dark, letting it off its lead on the stony shore.
The dog really belonged to Will. She wondered if it still missed Kirstin, if it ever thought of her. She remembered when she was first dating Will and the two of them were walking hand in hand through town and the dog got terribly excited when it found this woman who fussed it and spoke briefly to Will and did not look at Jessie. When they walked on, Jessie asked Will who she was, and Will said, ‘She’s my wife.’ They were separated, he said, but – as Jessie turned to look at the woman in the navy coat who was walking away, the dog on its lead straining after her – still living together.