‘I left them.’
‘It was the only thing to do, Daniel.’
‘Cathy told me to.’
‘She was right to.’
The reservoir appeared to lilt from side to side. I stared instead at a sickening ash tree on its far bank. It was too brittle to sway with the wind.
After a while, she said: ‘You could come home with me.’
This time I looked up at her. It was a kind offer. ‘Thank you, but I have got my own family.’
We stood for a moment: Vivien, the horse, and a lanky lad, barely fifteen.
‘Which way did she go?’
‘Daniel, I don’t know. The figure I thought I saw, I thought it moved towards the tracks. I ran soon after, back to mine to get Daisy, to come and find you. I saw nothing clearly.’
‘Towards the tracks?’
‘Yes?’
‘Then where?’
‘I didn’t see.’
I nodded. I looked about me, to see if I had left anything on the ground. There was nothing, just an indentation where I had lain. I had brought nothing with me. I had nothing to bring. For no reason at all, I scuffed the marks in the sand with my foot. I would leave no trace, no tracks. No hunter would find me.
‘I’ll be going then,’ I said to Vivien, and, in part, to Daisy.
Daisy blinked feather lashes. Vivien let out an agitated sigh.
‘Remember what I said, Daniel.’
I walked away from the reservoir, and away from the woman and her horse, following approximately the route I must have taken the night before.
Needless to say, the idea of returning to our house on the hill was suffocating. I watched my feet take each step, one then another. Their tilt, the way they slapped the earth, the way the toes bent.
I did not look back, though a couple of times I heard the horse’s hooves stamp and drag, as Vivien kept there to watch me go.
After around half a mile, I came to a wooden, slatted bridge, barely more than four planks thrust together and stitched with rusted, hooked nails that led across a thin dike. The furrow carried excess water after heavy rain. These parts flooded regularly. In winter, and after summer storms, great torrents rushed from the nearby hills to the flat lands.
There had been rain last night, I remembered. It had rained as I had walked, though I had hardly noticed. It had been all around. I remembered suddenly: fattened, matured plugs of rain had cascaded past me and bounced at my feet. A summer storm. I had walked in it then slept in it. My clothes were still damp. And the reservoir had been high, too. High enough to slap my face, though I had rested on an upper bank.
I quickened my pace. I had to run. The whole landscape was wet.
The figure Vivien had seen. There was more than a chance it was Cathy, saved miraculously from the fire by storm to walk through the smoke to the only remaining landmark she could find in the gloom: the railway track.
I ran and ran. A cloud of smoke, soot and heavy steam rested on the hill. It filled the void where the house had been. I was thankful that I was spared the sight of the absence where, for a blissful year, there had been a home.
As I got closer, I saw baked ribs, the empty structure’s blackened frame. I saw cinders that stood precariously from the ground to the branches of charred trees, burning wood on a scale I had never witnessed. I saw a kind of black that was new to me, condensed, compacted, opaque.
I walked on. I had no desire to inspect the remains: there was no telling what I would find. Besides, the railway track, and the possibility of my sister, lay ahead. But as I walked on past the burnt house, past the burnt chicken coop, past the slim charred vegetable patch, past the ashen copse, I was harried by glinting sparks, the biting revenants of a shredded inferno. They swept and swirled about me like gulls at a trawler. I was their last scrap, their last taste of living tissue and hope of supper before they fell like those before them to the damp earth. I walked on, and they fell.
I came to the tracks. Two sets. Four cords of iron, running as straight as rainwater falls, from north to south. Iron stretched between magnetic poles. The wooden sleepers were dark with damp. The stone ballast was slick. I climbed the embankment, though the grass was slippery, and stood upon the cess. I looked to my left and I looked to my right. I saw no one. But if Cathy had fled the house and come to the tracks she would have continued, and she could be a long way off by now. I looked left and I looked right. North to Edinburgh or south to London. I made my choice and walked.
VI
The man drives off in his jittering hulk and I do not think on him again. I am waiting for someone.
I wait out by the station. Not the building itself but the web of tracks that bring passengers and freight to this city from every point of the compass. I watch people come and go and see that there are others like me sitting out by the tracks and sleeping in the undergrowth and in outhouses and sheds. I build small fires and cook what food I find and catch.
But I know that my time here is temporary. I am waiting for someone.
When I am not waiting I roam the city. The stone here is darker. The buildings are built from rock hued from a different quarry. I had not known that towns and cities had their own characters. For me there was only ever blanched limestone and red brick. From a distance I see tall women with dark hair and I follow them until I am close enough to see their faces and discern that they are not her. This is how I pass my time.
Some of the people out by the tracks speak to me and ask questions. The curiosity of strangers.
Midges dance among horseflies among thrips. They coalesce to a swirling throng and circle an invisible centre like electrons around a nucleus. A lone bee surfs beneath them and pauses from its journey to be shaded by docks. Pale moths hang loosely in the haze, their wings luminous, then dim, then luminous, as they beat against an inevitable descent.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to all those at Artellus Ltd., and particularly to Leslie Gardner and Darryl Samaraweera. Thank you to Becky Walsh for her patience, meticulousness and risk-taking, and for seeing the potential in my early manuscript. Thank you to the rest of the team at John Murray, including Tom Duxbury, and especially to Yassine Belkacemi, for his enthusiasm for the project.
Thank you to my early readers: Alastair Bealby, Sophie Howard, Carla Suthren and Lisa Girdwood.
Thanks and love to Caroline Mozley, Harold Mozley, Olivia Mozley and Neil Johnson.
Thank you most of all to Megan Girdwood, without whom I could never have finished this novel, let alone had the courage to seek its publication.