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by Claire North

  “I know,” she muttered, and they walked.

  The mud path narrowed to the width of one person, brambles pulling at legs, then widened again to a pebbled thing that crunched underfoot, then split in two. Theo chose a fork at random, followed it down to a country lane, shuddering whenever a car went by.

  Another path away from the road brought some relief, and they walked until they came to another village, smaller than the first, the houses white-timbered and spread apart, a flag hanging limply from the branch of a tree overhead, the café shut, the charity shop boarded up, the chippie still doing a roaring trade.

  Theo bought fish and chips.

  They sat a while on a little wooden bench as the drizzle blew in sideways, threatening something close to rain, and ate in silence. After a while Theo realised that he’d put so much vinegar on his chips that the paper bag was starting to tear through, and he pulled off a strip of paper from the top to secure the greasy mess at the bottom before his meal ended up in his lap.

  Helen ate one chip at a time with a little wooden fork, but struggled to find a decorous way to eat the fish, and eventually used her fingers, holding it by the tail to bite off chunks. There they sat, and no one looked at them, and no one asked any questions, and the helicopter vanished from the skies, and the rain gave up before it could really get going, and the sun began to set.

  A cemetery, busier and neater than the village that protected it, spread behind a well-trimmed dark green hedge. White stones in perfect rows, a white pillar at its core. Monuments to soldiers fallen in battle. D. Aaron, d.1917. W. Acroyd, d.1915. E. Dwyer, d.1916. S. Gilson, d.1918.

  FOR THEIR TOMORROW, WE GAVE OUR TODAY.

  Theo looked down and saw that his legs were splattered in mud.

  Helen’s fingers shimmered with grease, and her lips were blue.

  He murmured, “We can’t stay here,” and she nodded, and they waited by the bus stop to catch the fourth and final bus of the day, going north towards Stafford, and kept their heads down and eyes turned away from the CCTV cameras as it bounced and rattled its way through the country lanes.

  They stayed in a room above a pub called the Stag. The pub advertised itself as being authentically historical, and the taps splurted and spluttered yellowish water into the sink. They stayed there because the landlord was impressed by Helen’s accent, and needed a cataract operation, and had to stumble his way up the stairs by memory, and knew the feel of a £20 note more than he could remember the face of the monarch that adorned it.

  At night Helen groaned and couldn’t hide the pain in her belly, the slow pulling-apart of things inside. Theo tried to calm her, and when that didn’t work, he lay awake with his hands over his ears and prayed that she’d stop, that the nightmares would pass, that she’d exhaust herself into slumber, and at some point this must have happened. They slept too long, and woke when the sun was already high and their trousers still damp from scrubbing the night before, and their shoes squelched as they settled into them, and they walked.

  “He was a terrible child really. At the time you don’t think of it that way, you just say he’s got high spirits—that’s what you call it. If you call him terrible you have to ask yourself why, you have to blame yourself and no one wants to do that. It’s the hardest thing in the world to say ‘I am a bad mother, and he is a bad father,’ it is impossible, it is devastating it is …

  because if I am a bad mother then I am … there is nothing worse.

  So of course Philip’s not a bad child, because I’m not a bad mother. I’m not. I know this as much as I know anything, and the only thing I know more is that I love him.

  Then he was a teenager, and I suppose he was well behaved as a teenage boy. He was always careful to hide the worst from me. He was indulged. He knew he could get away with things and I thought well in a way if he gets away with it I suppose …

  It’s very hard to deny your child in these circumstances. It’s very hard to say ‘I’ll show you the stuff of life’ if you don’t really have the stuff of life in you. And I did not. Then when he got into a duel at university, I managed to tell myself that it was probably Simon Fardell’s fault. He told me that the boy had done something awful. Hurt a woman or something. I didn’t really believe it, but you make yourself believe because the alternative is much worse.

  You’re going to tell me not to blame myself, aren’t you, Mr. Miller? You’re going to tell me that it’s not my fault, the way Philip turned out.

  Aren’t you?

  Aren’t you?”

  They walked a while.

  Then Theo said, “I honestly don’t know.”

  They walked a while longer.

  “I think … some of it probably is your fault. I think it probably is. I think it has to be someone’s fault, at some point. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it isn’t. There was a time when he was a child, but then there was a time when he was a man, and when he was a man … there must be a moment when you take responsibility for your own actions, and stop blaming the past and stop blaming … so maybe I don’t. I don’t think I can. But I think it’s my fault that Lucy is in prison, and if it’s my fault that the daughter I’ve never met is in that place, then it’s got to be someone else’s fault too. You have to be a bad mother, you see, if I am going to spend the rest of my life knowing that I failed as a father. It’s not right. It’s probably not even true. It’s just the way I feel about it. Sorry.”

  A forest of falling leaves, slippery underfoot. Yellow and spotted browns and greys, brilliant crimsons and faded ochres, black-tinged curling auburns and vein-riddled purples, frost in the morning, a herd of deer looking up, startled from a field, before realising that the people passing by were no threat, and returning to their chewing.

  A path down to a river, round stepping stones over the running water, green moss and yellow lichen, white foam caught in whirlpools, a perfect hollow carved out at the bottom of a waterfall, a place where tiny fish played in the winter light.

  Theo helped Helen wobble across, and for a while they sat by the water, listening to the wind through the trees.

  Then Helen said, “Or maybe we’re just both totally fucked in our own delightfully unique ways.”

  Theo considered this a while, then shrugged, and they kept on walking.

  From a farm halfway up a yellow, treeless hill they stole two rusted bicycles that had been left behind an iron barn. Theo’s bicycle didn’t have any brakes. Helen’s was stuck in third gear. They pedalled down the country lanes until Helen could pedal no more. Then they sheltered from the wind beneath the silent spire of a concrete plant, sand and dust blowing in their faces, and ate pork pies purchased from a corner shop in a village where they used to make pottery and now made nothing at all, a population of seven still hanging on, hanging on, and didn’t talk, and didn’t sleep.

  “So how ill are you?” asked Theo when Helen threw up without warning, a vomit with no matter in it, just clear acid and yellow slime.

  They sat on the side of the path, morning frost melting beneath them, breath puffing thick in the air.

  Helen thought about the question for a while, then smiled, shrugged, murmured, “Some things they don’t make a pill for.”

  On this she had nothing more to say.

  On the third day they came to a statue of an angel set in the middle of a treeless, stone-pocked landscape. The angel was carved from white stone, and stood four or five feet taller than them, its wings spread out in thin spires of cracked lime to catch the wind, its face turned downwards in sorrow at the sins of men. Tears of red paint had been daubed onto its eyes; names had been scratched into the hem of its robe. T♥P. LAUREN & J 4EVR. THE DOOGLES. K, L * W WER ERE.

  A few hundred yards further on, a cairn of flat, faded stones, barely knee-high, grown a little taller over the years, built by travellers who paused to pick up stones and lay them on top of the uneasy structure, constructing a thing that might one day be ancient.

  A sign stood next to it.

&nb
sp; TURN BACK

  They kept on walking.

  At night, as they huddled down on the edge of a treeless moor, they heard the sound of a single voice raised in rage from a village below, which was soon joined by the barking of a lone dog, somewhere higher in the valley. The screaming went on for nearly an hour, before whoever it was ran out of breath or stopped to make a cup of tea.

  Chapter 59

  “Helen?”

  Theo’s voice was distant, carried away by starlight.

  “Theo?”

  He stared up at the sky, and couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen so many stars. Not in Shawford, not by the English Channel, where light from both sides of the water blurred everything to an orange-stained muck of factory shite. Not in London, where the sky was an eclipsed line between grey houses. He half-closed his eyes, and tried to remember, and couldn’t find anything that wasn’t a figment of his imagination.

  “There’s something I want to ask you,” he murmured, and was surprised to hear himself speak so calmly. “I think I can destroy them. I think I can destroy your son. But I might have to put you in danger to do it.”

  “Yes. And?”

  “You might be hurt.”

  “My own son was poisoning me, dear.”

  “It might be bad.”

  A slight sound of movement in the dark as Helen shifted, uncomfortable and cold on the ground. “Well,” she mused at last, and thought about it a little longer. “Well. I am a grown woman who knows the things to be said, and the things best left unsaid. I make my own choices, and that is all that can be asked. What did Dani say to you?”

  “What?”

  “When she died. Your friend Dani, you said she told you …”

  “She said that Lucy was my daughter.”

  “And?”

  Theo cast his memory back, struggling to find a thing from a very, very long way away. “She said ‘Don’t fuck it up.’”

  Helen nodded in the darkness, and for a moment Theo thought he could hear her expression, hear the twitching of her lips. “Sound advice that. Stuff of sense.”

  Theo stared into an endless sky, and neither of them had anything more to say on the subject.

  In the night in the dead of night in the dead place where the dead moved in the forest in the

  A burst of torchlight an explosion of men and women they came from nowhere and they filled the world behind the torchlight they came from the dark they

  grabbed Helen by the hair grabbed Theo by the throat they

  there were dogs and torches and someone possibly had a gun but even if they didn’t they were

  and they shouted and pushed and pulled at skin and faces and there weren’t really any questions in there just a lot of noise and that made it hard to answer and

  they were pulled through the dark the dogs nipping at their heels the men half-running along gravel paths there was

  a farmhouse where no lights shone and the skull of a sheep was nailed to the letterbox and there were

  two trucks, the headlights on, the engines running, and

  Theo was put in one Helen in the other he called out and tried to grab her hand, knew if he didn’t that he really would be a failure the greatest failure in the history of mankind

  but they pulled them apart and he went in one and she went in the other and when he tried to see where they were going, someone kicked him in the ribs and it really bloody hurt

  so he did as he was told, and stayed on the floor, one leg tucked to his chin the other stretched out behind and wondered if these people knew what it meant to make like a heron and whether they

  Dawn, grey through the square open canvas at the back of the truck.

  Someone turned the radio on and it was really bad pop, the pop played at a disco for the old folks who used to be sexy back when flares were in fashion and before the moonwalk made all the young things scream.

  Theo realised he was sleeping, and the thought was so astonishing that he jerked wide awake.

  One man in the truck

  no—a boy

  —no! A woman. Her hair cut short, tall and skinny but with a face that could have been a boy if she’d wanted, could have been a youthful beautiful boy but look at her hands, long fingers around her rifle she is

  Praying.

  Her words half-caught, a whisper between the rattle of the suspension as they bounce through potholed, ravaged roads.

  “For those who lived for those who died,” she whispers. “For the children born to the sun for the ones who lie beneath the old man’s moon for those who …”

  Theo prays.

  He prays to the dead, who he thought he was helping and was almost certainly letting down.

  He prays to his daughter, that one day she will open her eyes and see the sun and there will be only radiance on her face.

  Knows he’s absolutely fine with dying, as long as it’s for her.

  Neila prays.

  To those she wronged to those she helped to the world she thinks she helped build, not in any spectacular form not in war or stone or blood or iron or

  but in her deeds.

  In her choices.

  In the kindness bestowed on others there is a world somewhere where the children will be different from the kids of her days.

  Dani gave up praying a long time before she died, but then, just before the end, there was a moment when she got on her knees to a deity unknown, to an idea that needed to be real and …

  If Helen prays, she keeps her prayers to herself.

  They came to a place called Newton Bridge.

  It had begun with a bridge across a river. The bridge was stone and mortar, and horses and carts went across it, carrying cotton, mostly, which they wove at the watermill, before the businessmen discovered it was cheaper to pay for coal and build factories in places where the workforce was plentiful and less likely to go on strike.

  Then for a while the bridge wasn’t crossed very much, except by the shepherds who roamed the hills and the farmers who built the walls that divided the fields.

  Then one day it fell down and stayed broken.

  And then one day it was rebuilt, restored even, only a bit of ironwork underneath to give a clue as to the industrial labours that went into its repair.

  And then one day the town got a sponsor, a company specialising in executive glamping, and wooden huts were built on the edge of the village beneath the trees that spread morning shade and people came and drank red wine and it was all terribly lovely until the railway company stopped sending trains down the slow line.

  And then the company left.

  As did the doctor, teacher, vet, rubbish man, hairdresser, plumber, electrician—pretty much anyone, really, anyone who could get out, and only the buildings remained.

  For a little while.

  They pulled Theo from the truck with busy hands and roaring faces, which seemed unnecessary given he wasn’t going anywhere else.

  Pulled Helen down too, for a moment he called out her name but she was pulled away, up a street towards a grey concrete hall that maybe had been a library once, or perhaps some sort of council office where they sorted the tax and where now …

  He couldn’t see what now. Dragged down to the river, to the old watermill, pushed through a door onto a wooden floor, an abandoned bar where once they’d made cream teas or home-made fudge and where now the dust was imprinted with different shapes of trailing hands and doodles made with fingertips.

  Locked the door.

  Left him there a while.

  Theo waited, knees huddled to his chin.

  Shadows moved and though he couldn’t see them moving, every time he checked they’d travelled a little bit further and he waited.

  Theo waits.

  The door opens.

  Helen steps inside. Perhaps it’s her face, or something of her dignity, but they’re not in such a hurry to push her around.

  Perhaps it’s his face, and his lack of dignity, maybe that’s the swing of things. />
  “Just tell them the truth,” she murmured quickly as a man in an oversized tweed jacket and rubber boots picked Theo up by the arm. “Tell them the truth.”

  They led Theo outside, locked the door behind him, leaving Helen to watch the shadows. He wondered if she’d see them moving, even if he couldn’t.

  Pulled through tight, curling streets up a hill, past shattered windows boarded up with card, children in bare feet who squatted on the pavement and glared, past a patch of ground where geraniums grew amongst the potatoes, an abandoned fire station where now men sat cleaning rifles, a once-fine town hall where the merchants used to gather to argue about the price of wool and where now the old people sat with one tooth per length of pink gum and chewed on air and glared at the passing skies.

  Up, to the top of the town and then a little bit beyond, feet stumbling on muddy paths, to a cottage between the trees.

  The cottage lay within a stone wall. In the garden the owner grew tomatoes, the vines long since plucked, and potatoes, and carrots, and cabbage. On the windowsills there were nasturtiums, blue cornflowers and trailing crimson-streaked dangles of ivy. Above the low front door was a pottery sign which said HOME SWEET HOME. Solar panels sat on the roof of the house, a tendril of cable running from them and heading back down into the village. Smoke carrying the smell of burning wood rose from a crooked chimney. A woman was tending the flowers. Wearing yellow rubber gloves she squashed the plague of black-bodied aphids that clung to the green stems of the nasturtiums, squeezing and scraping in oily genocide. Her hair was a faded yellow, spread through with oncoming white. Her chin rolled down into a secondary flange of flesh that bobbed in and out of existence as her neck moved. Her shoulders were broad, her legs were short, she wore a dark red body warmer over a torn grey woolly jumper, a brown skirt that stopped just above her knees and green boots that started just below, revealing a hint of expanding, pasty joint. She didn’t pay the men much attention as they deposited Theo on her garden path, but kept on tending her flowers, peering under leaves and fading yellow petals in her quest to exterminate her tiny-bodied enemies.