by Chloe Turner
And then, well… it wasn’t surprising really, given how things fell apart. Somewhere along the line, he stopped listening to people in case they said something he didn’t like the sound of. Drove his teachers mad. And though he made one friend in junior school—Rob Cowbridge, scrawny little shrimp of a thing—Rob ended up going to the Grammar in town, and Ben had been bobbing about like a lost balloon ever since.
It would have to have been that Will, though, wouldn’t it? Not that it was the boy’s fault. He seemed a nice enough lad. But Julie’s boy. Of all the kids to make friends with, to pick the son of your Dad’s… well, I hardly knew what to call her now. He’d moved on from her too, I knew that much. She’d lost him just like I had, and with him had gone the smug grin she’d been wearing that day, sitting in the passenger seat while he threw a bagful of threads together and then walked out of our lives for good.
Down in the valley, I could see bonfire smoke coming up from the new-builds where the old factory used to be, though they’d only been lived in a couple of months, so who knew what they’d grown quick enough to burn. I wondered which one was hers. Handy being so near her mum, who still lived in the ’60s estate the other side of the stream. But they were tiny houses, those new ones. Close built. Poky, I dare say, if you were used to something much bigger.
He’d been building the place in Stroud for the four of us: Danny, me, Annie and Benet. Julie hadn’t been working long as the receptionist in his builder’s yard, but time enough to make a connection, it seemed. Then came the day when Annie was hit by a car on her way back from ballet, thrown in the ditch like something fly-tipped. Everything went dark that day, for all of us, and things between Danny and me were never the same after. I dare say Julie was a consoling shoulder, where mine was somehow found wanting.
I was getting close now—couldn’t avoid it—but I’d only covered half of the distance between the two of us when there was a great shout from the gorse hedge at the top of the field. Mrs Harris’s Lycra thighs emerged from the shrubbery like purple hams. Her neon rash vest and visor followed after, slipping through the gap in the hedge where the stile is.
‘Alright, ladies?’
Mrs Harris could out-honk a ship’s horn. She was marching down the slope towards us, and that’s when Julie—realising she was no longer alone—turned round and saw me.
‘They’re about five minutes off. You’ll not thank me for the state of them, mind, with this mud. Your Benet looks like he’s been surfing in the stuff.’
Neither of us replied. If Mrs Harris thought we were rude for ignoring her, she didn’t show it. She just kept on talking: about the state of the ground, about some stray dog, and about how she’d caught a couple of them—naming no names—having a crafty fag round the back of the scout hut halfway round. All the while Julie and I were looking at each other but not looking at each other, like a couple of feral cats.
Mrs Harris was still gabbing on, now about a deer heading off into the old hill fort, when I noticed that Julie hadn’t come alone, after all. There was a little girl in a yellow headband hiding round the back of her knees, tracing lines down her mum’s skinnies like she was drawing a helter-skelter. I’d forgotten she’d got another one. The girl looked about two years old, with blond curls like wood shavings. I wondered if she was his.
‘I’m off back up the track to check them in. You’d better be prepared to make some noise if you’re the whole of the welcome party.’
Mrs Harris stamped back up towards the break in the hedge. First time I’d felt like smiling all day, watching that socking great arse trying to hoick itself over the stile. Like a Thelwell pony in spandex.
‘You look happy. Can’t say I enjoy this much, waiting around knee deep in it.’ Julie was pulling at a tab on her quilted jacket while she spoke. I dare say you don’t, I thought. I bet you never used to have to do it, either. This would have been his job, supporting the boy that he swapped for mine.
I could look at her properly now she’d spoken to me. I’d seen her from a distance in the playground, of course. They’d all swarmed round her that first day, like they do when anyone new appears on the scene. She’d brought her mum along for moral support, and the PTA head was in ecstasies at the scent of new blood. That was before they all knew who she was. They might think me hippie and odd and not-their-sort, but the ranks close quickly when an outsider threatens one of their own. Everyone took my side, but even so I’d kept my distance, and we’d never been this close before.
You’ll forgive my first reaction, I hope: noticing that time had not been kind to Julie. It gave me a flutter of pleasure to see that those cheekbones had sagged like the melting rim of a church candle. I wasn’t unhappy to note that that pretty scattering of freckles across her forehead had now merged into a tea stain of brown. From the way she was thrusting out her chin, it struck me she was trying to hide a fold or two, though God knows we’ve all got them. But then, and I could have kicked myself for feeling it, there’s that sadness in seeing a beautiful woman who’s faded, even if you wished all kinds of bad things on them once. I found myself wondering why she wore her hair like that, so that the bare patches at her temples were on show, and why no one had told her about the tidemark of foundation that ran along her jaw.
‘They shouldn’t be long, now.’ My mouth was all wobbly while I was saying it. Malleable, like I couldn’t rely on it to do what it was supposed to do. ‘I expect we’ll hear them coming.’
The little girl was pulling on Julie’s coat, and I noticed she had a big plastic ring on her finger. See-through and candy pink, like the one Danny gave me when we had our first wedding: the one in the Juniors’ playground at St Peter and St Paul’s. So sodding long ago. It must have been springtime because I remember the girls throwing cherry blossom over us before we’d even got started. And Phil Simmons acting the vicar, though he had to go in for his sandwiches before he’d got to the ‘man and wife’ bit, so perhaps the marriage was on shaky ground from the start.
The little girl had started to come towards me now, and Julie cried out as if she was walking towards a fire.
‘Hannah!’
Danny’s mother’s name. So that answered that one.
‘It’s okay. I expect she’s interested in the dog.’ Arial was sitting on the toes of my boots, his tail thumping the wet grass. His eyes were on a rook sat up in a pine tree. ‘He’s friendly if you want to say hello. He’s just watching that bird.’
A great big sigh shuddered up through me. I felt like lying down and rolling away over the turf towards home. What would Julie think of that? Danny’s mad wife tumbling face first in the mud like an out-of-control toddler. I expect they used to laugh at me often enough. What was Julie thinking that day, drumming painted fingernails on the steering wheel of her Golf, waiting to take my husband away?
A few more parents were drifting up the path now, some hovering close to us, some hanging back by the fossil pit. The woman with the triplets in year three, who never smiles. Mrs Palmer, Benet’s class teacher, with her red setter, Raggie. Mike Hows—such an angry man—was stamping down the remains of a thistle stand as if it’d done him some wrong. And Jackie Fell and Lorna Vaughan were fiddling with their phones while they chatted, never lifting their eyes to each other. There were plenty of glances directed at me and Julie, though. Kay Wellon gave me a look, but I just nodded and turned back to the little girl.
There was nothing of Danny in her face, but there was no mistaking those curls, and when Hannah smiled at Arial, I saw something there. A memory. Of Annie, strangely enough, which was harder to take. Annie’s big lopsided grin when she knew she’d done something right. Lighting the cake candles with a match, like a big girl. Blowing them out for nine, ten, eleven… and then no more.
‘He’s called Arial, but my son calls him Biscuit. Because he’s always trying to eat them. I expect you like biscuits too.’ She didn’t answer, but she knelt next to him. Arial let her pat his long black ears, never taking his eyes off the distant
bird. I could feel Julie’s eyes on me, but I wasn’t ready for that yet. I looked at the girl, and I looked at Arial. Then I looked over and down the valley, just as a green woodpecker burst from the shaggy depths of a box tree, trailing its rough laugh as it disappeared out of sight down the hillside.
‘Tally ho!’ Mrs Harris again, from the far side of the hedge. Then a shout, further away. Laughing, and the crunch of trainers on the rotting maize stalks in the field. Flashes of blue and white where the hedge was thinning. They were on their way.
Mrs Palmer had told me that they did everything together, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that our boys vaulted the stile in quick succession and then ran down the slope towards us arm in arm. Will was kicking something ahead of him: a browning maize cob, trailing what remained of its husk. As they got near, he hoofed it over our heads, and I brushed a strand of rotting silk from my hair.
‘We were first. We won!’ Benet’s navy cotton shorts were lifting above his mud-slicked thighs on each side in turn, baring a white triangle of flesh. His hair was crumpled and damp. His face was flushed, smudged. He still looked like a boy. Julie’s Will was taller, his hair shorter, the armband with his race number was tight across his bicep. His lower legs were covered with hair, not the fine down that still dusted Benet’s calves. ‘Can Will come back to ours?’ Ben said, skidding to stop.
‘Willy,’ the little girl interrupted, saving me from answering as she ran towards her brother. He straightened as if treading water, trying to break his momentum so that she wouldn’t be tangled in his long legs.
‘Hannah, wait!’ Julie snatched her up. And then: ‘He could, if you wanted…’
There was a pause, and I thought about that first night after Danny left, when I’d pulled the clothes from every drawer. Buried my face in the rough cable of his Aran sweater until the loose fibres caught the back of my throat. Tipped the chicken pie I’d made for tea—his favourite, for his birthday—into the back pen for the pig.
‘Thanks. We have something to do.’ ‘Fine, just a thought.’
She looked at me then. Her eyes were pink round the lower lids, and there were two short furrows between her brows. I could see her jaw working under the slack skin of her cheek. I thought about my Ben, and how he’d cope if he were on his own again.
‘Another time, perhaps,’ I said. And she smiled at me so that a delta of lines fanned from the corner of her eyes.
The boys bumped and punched each other as they separated, and then Julie left with her half-grown man and her little girl. The other parents drifted away. Mrs Harris raised her hand as she left with an armful of marker flags. Benet was jumpy and high, but I made him wait, hang back until they were all far down the hill. To distract him, I pointed out the tree where I’d seen the woodpecker. As we stood there, it came back across the hillside—arrow straight between wingbeats, a bolt of green across the valley.
Eventually, I couldn’t hold them back any longer, and we set off, Arial sniffing at every stile post, and barking at the poor pony with its sodden coat. I looked at the sloes and reminded myself to return when the first frost had been. Where the path meets the road at the bottom, Benet helped me lift the pumpkin’s rotten carcass from the post. We carried it, with its smirking face, to the paddock below the house, and Benet stood on the wall and drop-kicked it across the field. Something changed that day, something eased. When that thing splintered into a hundred coppery pieces across the plough-carved mud, we got free of something. From that day, we started to move forward.
The Day You Asked Me
It was late springtime when you asked me for the first time. The sun was young in the sky, untroubled by cloud, and there were jellyfish everywhere, shrugging and sagging their way through the pea green. My mother barely glanced up from her novel to wave me goodbye, and my father didn’t even stir, slumped against the sea wall, black socks snared with sand.
You helped me in from the slatted rocks, handed me a lifejacket, brushed a string of dried petal weed from its industrial zip. Then we sped out to sea, bumping over the breakers at the mouth of the bay, crossing the line of calm where the tides met and dissolved. To where a tumbled mass of slipped shale formed one wall of a tunnel with the cliff-face, just wide enough to embrace a boat in its shade.
In the cool of that cavern, I trailed my hand in the black water, imagining the movement of scale against scale, hide against hide, below us. Of scuttling, of sand flaring up at the touch of a fin. Of anemones pulsing in the dark. The waves swelled and sucked against the rocks, and the boat tipped gently with them. A gull called above us, a rough, hacking caw from somewhere on the cliffs, but then it fell silent, and across the opening we watched its fine-tipped wings roll and arc, and then turn out to sea. It was quiet then, in that hidden place. I watched you, your hands with their bitten nails on the tiller, flecks of peeling skin where the sun had caught the muscles of your arms. Watched you, watching me. We smiled at each other in the dark. I dried my hand on my skirt, reached across to hold yours, tightly. Your lips were paper soft when they touched on mine.
*
Much later, on the day you stood before the altar, summer was closing in, and the church was full of bronzed chrysanthemums, and berries, and sweet-smelling apples in baskets. Your sea-bleached curls had been clipped, but you looked handsome in your thin grey suit, with a pale blue cravat to match your eyes. She wore a veil, studded with tiny lace flowers. Through it, you could see her teeth and the perfect wave of her hair.
I hadn’t seen you for years, had been in two minds whether to come at all. Thinking of it simply as a chance to catch up with old friends, I hadn’t realised how much it would hurt to see your eyes on hers. Ten years since we’d made promises to each other on the beach before I left for college in the city. I couldn’t remember who’d tolled the final bell, but time and space had inserted themselves between us. Taken us too far from the sea.
Now, as the last burn of summer streaked across the dusty air of the church to my pew, I sweated as you swore to hold her till death would you part. I thought about the boy in bare feet in his boat with its crackled red paint and wondered how this had come to be. And at the reception—full of jokes and hard laughter, Congratulations in glitter and sequins, little bottles of port with your name and hers handwritten in gold—I crept out the back, past groaning fridges and pallets and trays of cheesecake and meringues. Blessed the indifference of the motorway to hide my indignant tears.
*
It was autumn when I set eyes on you again, but many years had passed. A cold November day when the fog hung slack across the Severn Vale, loath to lift and let in the weakened sun. The haws were dark in the hedgerows, overripe, and the brambles had turned to a dull, black sludge on their spined stems.
It was the first match for the Under 7s, a festival of sorts. There were boys in mismatched kit from all over, stumbling and rolling for tags, in the shadow of the decommissioned reactor. Saplings tinged with amber and fire ran the length of the razor wire fence, and in front of it the boys—yours and mine amongst them—slithered in the mud and laughed.
You didn’t see me, but I knew you from afar. I watched you watch your boy: small, but a good runner. Not afraid to snatch a tag from the bigger boys. I saw you wrap him in your fleeced embrace when he came off in tears of tiredness. Saw you push the blond curls from his eyes, kiss his forehead where the skull cap left it bare. Watched you turn away from me and walk towards your car. I could have called you back, but I let you go again.
*
It was my mother who told me she’d left you. Many more years had gone by. We were by my daughter’s bedside, in her tiny cottage, holding her hand while she twisted and cried through the pain of birthing her first child. There were fans of frost on the window panes. Pear-tree logs from the old faithful which had lost its battle with the winds off the moor were spitting in the burner. Two widows, drinking leftover Christmas Scotch, waiting to welcome the next generation into the world.
My daughter wo
uld go quiet for a time now and then, as the baby drew breath. My mother, so old now that her hand in mine was a rigid claw, would fill the gap with gossip: of people I’d forgotten; of people I never knew; of people who had died long ago; and then you.
But it was months, years even, before I thought of it again though, as we lived through my mother’s passing. She handed on the baton, but to a new-born who was reluctant to take it. To stay. To live. One hour of staring at a wooden box, then months of staring at a plastic one, willing the little girl in the isolette to hold on. Then those early years of fear, when any sniffle could have us back at the hospital, an oxygen tank looming over her tiny frame. A brave little girl, given her grandmother’s name, who will go on to do great things.
*
It is springtime. Dog violets line the stream’s mossy path down to the sea. The first of the thrift is dusted along the cliff walk, pale pink splashes amongst the green and grey, and fate has brought us together again. Nursing a cooling cup of tea outside the café on the curve of the sea wall, your brazen terrier runs between my legs, tickling the shin of my good one. I look up to find your eyes on mine.
You wear glasses now, little gold spectacles which frame that same watery blue. Your stick has a fish carved in its walnut head. It reminds me of the weathervane of that church, the ruined one, as it stood at the head of the bay that first day. And you ask me again, though you have no boat now. But you tell me of your son’s, just a few yards away. I point to the cast which holds together my crumbling knee. I say a reluctant no.
It’s too late.
We left it too long. Our time is gone.