by Helen Slavin
Clearly I needed a hobby.
He’d been watching me. Just standing there watching. I startled a little as he appeared in the periphery of my vision. I stopped. Thinking for just a moment that I looked scruffy. Smelled, in fact. He was looking away to one side, uncertain he’d come to the right place. I thought he was after the job. Brian had advertised. So here he was, at the wrong lodge.
‘You after the job?’
It was then that he turned full face and I saw the eye patch. After that. Well. Adrenalin glands emptying. Fuelling my memory so that as long as I live I will never forget the moment Arthur looked round at me with his one eye. Green. Chocolate brown. Gold. I didn’t get to see the gold until much later. To see the gold you have to be up close.
Which is a motto really isn’t it?
His clothes. Green. Earth brown. All the colours of the forest so that if you turned your head he could disappear back into the trees, into the landscape. Belong. Have I ever looked like that? I’ve spent my whole life feeling like the sore thumb. His boots, muddy and well used but well cared for.
‘Yes. I’m after the job,’ he replied. Soft voice. Eye very direct, looking right at you and searching. Having a bloody good look at me. That is how he is, though. Arthur can tell more about you from the curve of your eyebrow, the lick of your lips.
What is the difference between warning and advice? She had told me he would come and now here he was. This was new.
This was more scary. A message for me. Hard to imagine anything more scary than my life had been already. Arthur and his one eye. I had the message from Gran but I couldn’t blurt it out then. He didn’t look like he would believe me. He didn’t look the type. He wasn’t needy or asking. He just turned up.
She woke me up that night. Cross.
‘He’s here and you didn’t tell him. Get on with it. You need to do this.’
I was awake now. No going back to sleep.
‘How many years have you been doing this, lovey? I thought you were an old hand.’
‘Too many years. Very old hand. That’s why I didn’t tell him.’
‘Get on with it. Never mind editing the highlights.’
As she turned to go there was a gentleman standing there in a chocolate brown frock coat. She took him by the elbow as she moved away. Bustled him along with her. ‘You can forget it, lovey. She needs her kip.’
The room was quiet after that. And I did go back to sleep.
Arthur. We existed for a while in the closed world of the park. Arthur learned fast. Every evening Brian came in with some tale about what they’ve been doing, how Arthur is up on every bird and beetle. Arthur doesn’t see a bird. He sees a wren. A greenfinch. Arthur looks in a hedgerow and sees the wild-life. This is all Brian requires of anyone. That they don’t see the wood, or even the trees. That they see the oak gall and the hawkmoth.
I just listened in as Brian talked with Atalanta. Brian knew he had found his heir to the kingdom, the land of the Giant. That’s how I came to know Arthur at first. I picked up the fairy stories.
After that, it was as simple as being in the same room together. He didn’t say, I didn’t say, and that said everything. We had never met and yet there was some spark of recognition when our eyes met. One day, I found some courage, rolled into a linty ball in my apron pocket.
‘What colour was your other eye?’ I asked, for a dare, as I brought his extra-hot water and the milk jug.
‘Sky blue pink with a yellow border,’ he growled deadpan and I dropped the milk jug because that’s something My Mother used to say.
I realised very slowly that he’s the man with the spotted handkerchief and the bit of cheese. The woodcutter who comes at last to save Red Riding Hood.
He had a habit of sitting quietly at the back with a plate of mixed scones and a pot of tea. There was no one else in that day. It had been raining hard through the night and just kept going. Arthur’s hair was slicked back off his face and he gave off a niff of damp dog. I liked to be near him so to keep him there I brought, unbidden, a pot of hot water to freshen the tea. That’s when I saw her. His gran. She wasn’t knitting this time, unless you count her brow. Her lips were pursed and prune-like, disapproving.
‘If you want it doing, do it your bloody self,’ is all she said to me before she leeched into me and I was pins and needles all over. Arthur was in the middle of splitting a sultana scone and putting jam on it as her voice came out of me.
‘Arthur. Listen to me, this is her, she’s the one, make no bones about it. Stop fannying about the pair of you.’ And she was gone. I tumbled like a felled tree, knocking the table behind me over. Unconscious, wearing a jammed scone like a dainty hat.
He was so still that the jam slid off the knife onto his hand.
Onto that fleshy bit at the bottom of his thumb. Looked like blood. He didn’t wipe it off as he knelt beside me, picked me up. We were jam everywhere, making us stick together. Hello, message anyone? Yoo-hoo.
He revived me with tea. Sat me in one of the bentwood chairs while he finished the washing up. Then he stood beside me. I looked into his face, the few greys in the slick of his hair, the one eye, the slightly grubby look of his skin and I knew. His one eye just looked at me. Reeled me in. Hypnotic. Cycloptic.
‘Ready?’ he said.
I was ready for anything.
He was living in one of the bird hides at the edge of the lake. Brian suspected, but a man who has spent a few years of his life being the Man Fox has a deeper understanding. We walked through the late afternoon, on into the wood. I wondered which of us would speak first. In the end he just held out his hand. Doesn’t get much simpler than that. Not that I took his hand. I looked at it. Walked past it along the path towards the bird hide. As if it was just a sign post. This Way.
At the bird hide we didn’t talk. We watched a heron at the lakeside. Watched him for what seemed like seconds but must have been hours. It grew dark. Dark so that we couldn’t see the heron anymore. Couldn’t see each other.
In the dark he leaned to me, his lips moving against my cheek as he whispered, ‘This is her. She’s the One.’
It was cool and damp in the morning at the bird hide. We had breakfast at The Glade. Arthur helping me with a batch of early-morning scones. A skill acquired from Gran. We ate them hotly buttered. Not saying anything much. I didn’t know what I felt. Slightly crumpled from our night of love in the bird hide. Earthen.
Then it struck me, as wild and painful and illuminating as lightning. We were in the middle of an understanding silence. Which is when I started to cry, tears hotter than the scone, more meltingly salty than the butter.
He didn’t look away. He smoothed at them with his thumb. Licked the thumb. I sobbed my heart into his green jacket. Not once did he utter a cliché or a hackneyed ‘it’s all right’. Not even a ‘there, there’. Just the tight, safe, circle of his arms and the steady rhythm of his breathing.
My premium bonds. Bought with the money from Aunt Mag’s Thursdays. One came up. A million pounds prize money looked mythical and small, the solitary ‘1’ and the empty row of ‘0’s when I got the cheque. A flimsy bit of paper. Until I bought Goatmill Park with Brian and his life savings. No dolly houses here. Instead we’re building Scandinavian lodges. Just a few, for those, like me, who like to live in their shed. We have the keys to our kingdom. We can lock the gates.
Arthur is building our lodge. He thinks there’s a defensive magic in doing that, in putting his sweat, his hairs, his skin into the log walls. I think of Mrs Berry.
He isn’t scared of me. Not even after his gran and our first night in the bird hide when they woke me, the first, male voice, urgent, whispering over and over. Pitch bloody black in that bird hide.
‘Annie,’ he said, ‘Annie,’ and I couldn’t answer. I was piled under them. He reached for me. Even with one eye he could see I was the one speaking, that the voices were coming out of me.
It was a bad night. They come in the daytime, bad time, all the time b
ut that first night my defences were down. As soon as I let that happen they bustle in like it’s the January sale.
They washed in and over, wave on wave of voices. Like a radio tuning in. Like white noise. I could see him but I couldn’t reach out. I waited for him to turn tail, to scream or run or drop dead, but he didn’t do any of that. He moved over so we were spooned together, his big callused hand on my hip as they raged and poured into the dark.
I fit so neatly into the arch of his body, it’s like he is my carapace. He listens for a moment, to what they have to say and then he whispers, like a low breeze into my ear. ‘On your way. You’re not going anywhere sunshine and she needs her kip.’
Someone at the back, the plummeting man with the mutton-chop whiskers says, ‘What?’ but they fall almost silent, talking amongst themselves. ‘What did he say?’ ‘How rude.’ ‘Sssshhhhh.’
Arthur. He wrestles their door shut for now, and I sleep.