Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate 2018

Copyright © Lucy Wood 2018

Cover design by Jo Walker

Kind permission to reproduce an excerpt from A Glossary of Cornish Sea-Words by Robert Morton Nance (1963) granted by the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies.

Lucy Wood asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008193409

Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780008193423

Version: 2018-12-05

Dedication

For Ellie and Georgina

Epigraph

The sing of the shore:

the sound made by waves breaking, varying with the nature of the shore – sand, pebbles, boulders, scarped cliff, or reefs and ledges of rock – and thus giving the experienced fisherman an indication of his position when fog or darkness make land invisible

– From A Glossary of Cornish Sea-Words by Robert Morton Nance

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Home Scar

The Dishes

Dreckly

One Foot in Front of the Other

Way the Hell Out

Salthouse

Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan, Derelict

The Life of a Wave

Standing Water

A Year of Buryings

Cables

The Sing of the Shore

By-the-Wind Sailors

Acknowledgements

Also by Lucy Wood

About the Author

About the Publisher

Home Scar

The sea was what his father called a cowshitty sea – a brownish, algae green, that meant it would be good fishing, even though it sounded like it would be bad fishing. But when he said something was bullshit, like the landlord raising the rent, or not fixing the oven, or mentioning that he might put the flat up for sale, then that was definitely something bad. Except when he was in the pub, in a group, and then it could be said and the laughter would be low and raucous as seagulls. To Ivor, it was all in the same murky category as words like restive – Ivor is a very restive boy, his teacher would say into the phone, is everything alright? Apparently that didn’t mean that he was calm and easy.

The beach had been scraped and dragged by the winter storms. It was almost March now and where there had been sand there were stones, and where there had been stones there were channels that kept their water long after the tide had gone back out.

Crystal and Gull Gilbert were throwing stones at a limpet on a rock. The rock was covered in a rind of barnacles and there were anemones deep in the cracks; dark red and glistening like sweets.

Crystal picked up a handful of stones and threw them. One of them hit the limpet but it didn’t move. She went up and pressed her hand against it. The limpet grated a few millimetres across the rock. ‘That one up there looks empty,’ she said. She was pushing the limpet, but staring at a house on the cliff.

‘Let’s do something else,’ Ivor said. The week billowed and sagged around them, like a tent that might stay up, or might at any moment collapse. It was a school holiday. They’d already wrecked Crystal’s TV and been forced out of Gull Gilbert’s house by his brother, who had a girl hidden in his sour, dim bedroom. Ivor had seen her feet sticking out from under the bed.

He put his hand in one of the pools. Sea gooseberries rolled in the wind, scattering like a smashed chandelier. The ripples in the pool were dark and bright. Crystal’s hair was the same dark, dry colour as charcoal – you could rub your hand over it and get an electric shock. Sometimes it got tangled and clumps had to be cut off with scissors. She was the biggest person in their class, bigger even than Gull Gilbert, and could put a safety pin through the skin on her elbow. Last year she’d pushed over a teacher.

‘We’ve been in there already,’ Gull Gilbert said. He picked up a stone with two hands and swung it through the air. There were blotchy freckles on his wrists and neck. He never wore a coat. He picked up another stone. He was frowning like he always did when he was concentrating. He would throw for hours until he hit his target in exactly the way he wanted. When he was concentrating, you knew exactly what he was doing. When he wasn’t, anything could happen.

‘We haven’t,’ Crystal said.

‘Let’s go back into town,’ Ivor said. There was an indent in the rock, shallow and easy to miss at first, where the limpet had been before it moved. It was exactly the same size as the limpet’s shell and it had the same rough curves, the same fluted edge.

‘I want to go in that one.’ Crystal pushed her foot in the sand and turned a fast, lumbering pirouette.

Gull Gilbert put his stone down slowly.

Ivor closed his eyes and leaned into the wind. If he did it right, it was like falling without ever hitting the ground. The cold found its way through his jumper, puckering the folds of skin. Goosebumps, goose barnacles, sea gooseberries. There weren’t as many geese as there used to be, his father said. He had mended Ivor’s jumper with lumpy stitches.

They’d already tried most of the other empty houses. There was the white one with the blue door, which had a porcelain doll on the windowsill that stared at them with its cracked face. The ceilings were streaked with yellow and the whole place smelled like a stale tin of biscuits. They would prise up slates and scratch their names underneath, pick at the bare walls until the plaster flaked off like confetti, and lie on the stiff, damp beds. But this time all the lights were on and someone was standing in the kitchen.

The big house with the red roof had people in it as well – there were bags and suitcases by the door, and the sound of voices and laughing. Sometimes they would go in there, sit on the leather chairs and read the tourist leaflets, then open all the cupboards to see if anyone had forgotten to pack anything – they’d found watches, cigarettes, a silky dressing gown that they’d taken turns wearing. Once, the oven had been left on by accident and Gull Gilbert had turned it off, then, after a moment, turned it back on again.

And then, just as they were testing the door of the stone house, the cleaning man had driven up and shouted something. Crystal had run first, then Gull Gilbert, Ivor struggling behind, his armpits streaming, that shivery almost-laughing feeling in his throat and bladder.

The wind dropped and Ivor tipped forward. The sand creaked under his knees like polystyrene. He opened his eyes. The others had already gone. Their footprints crossed the beach, sloppy as leftover cereal. Water rose up and filled each print, stretching them until they disappeared.

They were circling the house when he got up there. Gull Gilbert was trying the front windows, which faced out to sea and were rimed with salt.

Ivor lifted the doormat and looked under. There was nothing there. Sometimes the keys would be in locked boxes on the wall and you had to know the right combination to get in. There were a thousand different combinations, maybe a million. You could try all day and never get it right. Sometimes people left back doors open. Sometimes you could slide old windows down. Or, if you watched long enough, you might see someone hiding a spare key – behind flowerpots, underneath paving slabs, pushed into the thumb of a glove.

He let the doormat drop back down. What they should do was go into town and get some of those coins out of the wishing well. Then they could sit in a café and order drinks and talk about things, even though he couldn’t imagine what drinks they would order, or what things they would talk about.

There was a grinding sound and Gull Gilbert swore. The grinding got louder, then, suddenly, Crystal was standing inside the house.

Ivor went round the back. One of the windows was open – the bottom pane had been forced up and there were splinters of paint and wood on the ground. A saucepan crashed onto the floor somewhere, something kept clicking, there was a drift of gas, then nothing.

He climbed in. The house was cold in that deep, quiet way that meant no one had been inside it for a long time. The window went into the bathroom, then the bathroom went out to a narrow hallway lined with pictures. The pictures showed the same three faces over and over – a man and a woman and a boy who was sometimes a baby, sometimes older.

Gull Gilbert was methodically checking each room. ‘There’s a load of crud in here,’ he said. ‘Shoes and shit.’ He disappeared into the bathroom, then came back out. ‘Where’s all those small, wrapped-up soaps?’

‘It’s not one of those places,’ Ivor told him.

‘What?’

‘Where different people come every week. It’s not one of those places,’ Ivor said. He kept looking at the pictures on the wall. The family were eating together round the table, they were walking outside on the cliffs, they were sitting on a rug on the beach.

‘There’s weird food they’ve left behind back here,’ Crystal shouted.

Gull Gilbert jerked round, almost skidded. ‘I’ll pay you to eat it.’

‘How much?’

Crystal was in the kitchen. The fridge was open and there was a pot of something on the table that smelled bitter and plasticky, like dentists’ gloves. She was chewing on a strand of her hair. Whenever she got it cut, there would be a smooth, pale strip of skin on the back of her neck. In the lunch queue, she’d slipped her hand up Ivor’s sleeve and held her palm against his shoulder blade. But that skin had been rough and almost scorching.

‘How much?’ Crystal said again.

Gull Gilbert went over and examined the food. ‘Twelve,’ he told her.

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘You won’t have it tomorrow.’

Gull Gilbert was pacing the room with long strides. ‘I’ll pay you every week. Over the summer.’

Crystal reached out towards the pot, then stopped. ‘I won’t be here in the summer.’

The sea sounded like gunshots through the house. ‘Again?’ Ivor said, too loudly.

The last time Crystal had gone away, it had been to Cyprus, and it had been for a whole year. Before that, it was somewhere he’d forgotten the name of, for six months. One day she was here, the next she wasn’t. It was because her parents worked at the Dishes. They had to go to places where there were other Dishes. She’d been born on an island called Ascension, which meant going up in the air and not coming back down.

‘How long for?’ he said, quieter this time.

‘I’ll pay you two pounds right now,’ Gull Gilbert said.

Crystal’s hand went back towards the pot. ‘Three,’ she said.

Ivor took a step backwards then turned and kept walking until he was out of the room and in the hallway. Something moved in the glass of one of the pictures and he glanced round quickly, then realised it was just himself. He went into the front room and stood by the window. The sea was rock-coloured and surging. There was the familiar feeling in his chest – tight and untethered at the same time, like a straining balloon. They said it was his asthma and gave him an inhaler to use. But asthma was what happened when you’d been running or fighting, it wasn’t what happened when you were standing still.

Along the window there were yoghurt pots crammed with sand and shells and bits of smooth blue glass. The bits of glass were so small; it would have taken a long time to find them all.

Gull Gilbert might leave too. Then he wouldn’t have to move up to the big school next year like everyone else. Any time he felt like it, he could wave goodbye to his grandparents and go and live with his father, who worked in a town with shops so huge you could walk around in them all day, and eat in them, and stay in them until it was night.

Ivor reached out and gently knocked each pot over, until the sand and the stones and the glass spilled down the wall and onto the floor.

He didn’t know how long he’d been standing there before he saw Crystal and Gull Gilbert outside. They were running towards the path, shouting back at him that it was boring, it was a bit bollocks. They were going back into town. What they wanted was helium, cheap biscuits from the out-of-date food shop, that sticky hairspray that smelled like the bottle of drink they’d found washed up on the beach last summer.

His father was kneeling in the grass by the front door. The road out the front was full of parked cars, cats sleeping against wheels, a skip loaded with rubble and cracked sinks and flowerpots. At the bottom of the street there was a wedge of sea, strung between the houses like a wrinkled sheet.

Ivor opened the gate and his father looked up and then back down again. There was a bike strewn in pieces around him – handlebars, wheels, a seat with a split like the skin of a tomato. His father picked up the chain and held it for a moment. There was a bottle of oil on the grass and oil on his hands.

Ivor pulled at an oily dandelion. ‘Why are you doing that?’ he said.

‘Fixing it.’ When his father was kneeling like that, the top of his head showed through his hair and there were bright blue veins, so thin they looked like they might break, behind his ears. But when he looked up there was the same face as ever – creased eyes from squinting into the sun, cheeks that scraped when they touched against Ivor’s, the bent top tooth like a door off its hinges. There was a hole in his eyebrow with a ring in it, which he’d got when he was sixteen, just before Ivor was born.

‘Why are you?’ Ivor said.

His father ran his hand down the back of his neck. ‘Dean’s brother asked if I could. He’s paying me.’

‘Can you?’

‘There’s loads of bikes when you think about it,’ his father said. ‘Think how many bikes there are that need fixing.’

Ivor ripped at the dandelion. ‘Can you?’

‘Almost everyone has a bike. They always need fixing, don’t they.’

The window in the flat above them opened and TV and laughing came out. A seagull lifted itself off the roof and circled the chimney, barking sharply.

Ivor leaned against the wall until the pebbles dug into his spine. His father was turning the bike wheel with his finger. Ivor took his inhaler out of his bag and puffed it. He moved his arm into the shape of a gun and aimed at the seagull, bang bang. He would never hurt a seagull. Bang. If his father could fix the bike then there would be a lot more bikes he could fix, almost everyone had a bike. But if he stopped turning the wheel, got up and went inside without saying anything, then he couldn’t fix the bike.

Then it would be like that time the hotel management changed and they could stick their longer shifts with no extra pay up their arses. And when the car park closed where his father gave out tickets and they played guess who would be fattest when they stepped out of their car. Or when everyone stopped coming on his walking tours because whenever he took people out onto the headland, where the cliff suddenly sloped and there was the beach for three miles and the rocks in horseshoes and waves galloping in and everything was silver, his father would just stand there shaking his head and say, fucking delectable, absolutely fucking delectable.

The bike wheel kept turning like it was a clock slowly being wound.

‘Did you ring Mev yet?’ Ivor said.

‘Did I do what?’

‘Did you ring Mev.’

Still the wheel kept turning, grating softly each time.

‘She said she needed to know,’ Ivor said.

‘What?’

‘About the restaurant. She said she needed to know.’ Before Mev moved away, she used to stay over, and in the mornings Ivor was allowed to get in their bed and keep sleeping. But that was last year, when he was a little kid.

‘I know,’ his father said. ‘I told you that.’

‘Why don’t we?’

‘What?’

‘Go and live with Mev and work in her restaurant.’

The church bells near the beach tolled five times. ‘That’s a hundred miles away, Ivor.’

It was almost dark. If his father could fix the bike, there would be potatoes frying in oil and tomatoes sliced with sugar on them. ‘So?’ Ivor said.

And for dessert they would shake up cans of cream and spray them straight into their mouths.

The bike wheel went round and round.

His father got up, put the screwdriver down carefully on the grass and went into the house without saying a word.

Ivor pushed the window up until his wrists burned. The frame shuddered and jammed, then finally opened.

Below him, the cliff was slumped and worn, the rock underneath pale as a shinbone. Green waves crumbled onto the beach, then pulled back against the stones like a rasping intake of breath. A surfer drifted in the darker water.

He climbed inside, checked the window wouldn’t fall shut behind him, then checked again. When he looked back out, the surfer had gone.

It was colder than before. The quiet was thick as dust. The floorboards creaked softly under his feet. That morning he’d put on his coat, found the shopping list and money his father had left next to the sink, and walked down the road into town. He’d got to the shop, picked up a basket, then put the basket down and kept walking until the road turned to the path along the cliffs, and then the house, and then the loose back window.

He moved slowly through each room, opening empty drawers and cupboards, running his fingers over a shelf of maps and books, a crackling bunch of dried flowers. There were patterned plates and glasses that looked like they’d hardly been used, and bowls that were too small for anything. There were leaflets heaped by the door and he picked some up, read something about window cleaning, something about gardening services, then he put them back down where he’d found them.

There were three pairs of sandals by the front door, three raincoats, three wetsuits folded over hangers. Ivor looked them over one by one. Nothing had sand on it, or mud, or crusts of salty rain. There was no torn and snapped umbrella, no piles of old newspaper, no takeaway pots flattened and ready for the outside bin. There were no tangled keys, no stacks of bills hidden behind the microwave. He looked under every bed but there were no cardboard boxes, reinforced with gaffer tape, waiting.

Nothing moved except Ivor. No clocks ticked. There were three yellow chairs round one of the windows and he sat in each one, then got up and watched the dents he’d made spring slowly back to smoothness. He opened and closed the curtains. He turned on the lamp. His trainers left faint treads of sand. There were some clothes in the small bedroom – not many, just a few shirts and a jumper – and he unfolded each one, studied them carefully, then folded them back up, matching the creases exactly.

In the bathroom, he opened the cabinet above the sink and took out the bottles and jars. He opened the lids one by one and dipped his fingers into the creams, then scooped up talcum powder, leaving behind shallow indents and the half-moon shapes of his nails. He tipped up a bottle and white tablets fell onto his palm. When he tipped them back in, one tablet stuck to his skin. It was small and perfectly round. He thought about swallowing it, then shook his head and lifted his hand to drop it back in. But now that the thought had appeared, there was nothing else he could do. It was like locking and unlocking the door three times, or touching the wing mirrors of every red car.

His breath fogged up the mirror and he wiped it away with his sleeve, but it stayed on there for a long time after he’d left.

Every day his father would go fishing. His lines and nets were always by the door. He would leave early, depending on the tide, and there would be the sound of him in the kitchen, packing his kit, the thump of the car boot. He would hum that song he liked where the tune went so low it was as if his chest was vibrating.

When he came in to say goodbye he would put his hand on the top of Ivor’s head and it would be warm and smell like bait. Ivor would pretend to be asleep. When he went downstairs, his breakfast would be on the table: milkshake, cereal that had soaked up everything, a plate of crackers to dip in. His father always said he’d only be gone a few hours, but he was never only gone for a few hours.

Ivor came down off the cliffs and glanced back once more in the direction of the house. There were bits of chipped paint on his hands from the window, and bits of talcum powder under his nails. He rubbed them off and crossed the beach towards the road. His father was down at the edge of the water. His silhouette was like a hawthorn bending. His line was arched over the sea and there were a couple of cans by his feet.

‘Did you get the shopping?’ his father said. Cold radiated off him, and he pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up against it.

Ivor stood as close as he could without knocking anything. The sky over the sea had turned dark yellow, like a very old piece of paper.

The line tensed and began to buckle, and his father gave his can to Ivor and put his hand on the reel.

‘I forgot,’ Ivor told him. He took his father’s other hand and blew on each stiff knuckle.

His father played out the line. The bones in his fingers made popping noises under Ivor’s mouth. ‘Remember when your breath smelled like those onion crisps for a week?’ his father said. ‘I almost took you to the doctor.’

‘Remember when you ate that whole sweetcorn and your beard smelled like butter?’

The line tensed some more, and it was important to watch it, and bring it in slowly. Now his father needed both hands.

The line went tighter and tighter, then slackened. His father took the can back and sipped it. ‘I’ll catch us something,’ he said. He still held the record for catching the biggest fish in town.

The dark yellow turned to dark blue. A ship flashed on the horizon. Somewhere the oystercatchers whistled and scolded like boiling kettles.

‘How about this then,’ his father said.

Sometimes Ivor didn’t think his father really even minded if he caught a fish or not, because then he could just stand out there all day, all night even, and sip his beer and listen to the sea, until the mist came in and rose up around his feet, and everyone else had gone home a long time ago, and their lights would be on along the streets, and their curtains would start to close, and cooking smells would come out, and it would just be him and Ivor left on the beach, waiting and watching the line.

Crystal ate chips like a seagull – she held one up in her mouth, then dropped it straight down her throat. She sat cross-legged by the swings, the beach sloping down in front of them. Ivor dug in the sandy grass with his fingers.

‘We should be sitting on a rug,’ he said.

‘A what?’

‘A rug. We should probably be sitting on one.’

The tide was just going out and the stones were still wet – they looked like they were splashed with blue paint. A dog ran up, soaked and quivering, holding a crushed barbecue as if it was a stick to throw. Behind them, Gull Gilbert swung standing up, the bent chains clanking.

‘Why?’ Crystal said.

Ivor dug his fingers in deeper. ‘I don’t know.’

Crystal held her chips against her chest until the dog went away. ‘You’d have to know you were going to sit on it, then carry it down especially.’

‘I suppose.’

‘How would you know?’

‘What?’

‘If you were definitely going to sit on it,’ Crystal said. Her weird lacy skirt was rucked and there was sand high up on her legs.

The swing behind them thumped as Gull Gilbert rode it like a bull at a rodeo.

‘I don’t know,’ Ivor said. His chest started to tighten. ‘Maybe you’re just supposed to know.’

Crystal ate another chip. Sometimes she would pass one to Ivor, sometimes she wouldn’t. This round he missed out.

‘They’ve probably got them at that house,’ he said.

‘What house?’

‘The one on the cliff.’ His fingers hit against a stone and he started digging around it, working it loose. ‘We could go there.’

‘I’m not walking any more.’

‘Tomorrow,’ Ivor said. The stone was almost loose; he could nearly get his finger under it. ‘All of us.’ He thought about the lamps, the three yellow armchairs. He’d gone there again that morning and stood by the kitchen table in the strange, cool quiet, and thought something that wouldn’t go away. ‘We could stay there.’

Gull Gilbert jumped off the swing and staggered up behind them, his cheeks mottled almost purple. His tracksuit snapped like a flag in the wind. ‘That dog’s got itself a dead fish,’ he said. He dipped his hand in the bag of chips, then skipped away from Crystal’s fist. She was known for conjuring the blackest bruises. ‘Stay where?’ he said.

Ivor’s heart raced under his coat. ‘At that house.’ A hot feeling pushed at the backs of his eyes. If anyone asked why, he didn’t know what he would do.

Crystal finished eating, put her arms behind her head and lifted her hips until she was doing the bridge. ‘Like, living?’ she said. Her hair swung against the ground.

Gull Gilbert scanned the tideline, watching the dog’s owner chasing it over the seaweed. ‘Do you reckon that dog’ll eat that fish?’ he said. His eyes looked glassy and far away. Who knew what thoughts were teeming.

Ivor prised the stone out and clenched it in his muddy hand.

The dog started to eat the fish.

Gull Gilbert leaned forward, spat on his palm, said he was in, and shook on it, which was as binding as a triple-signed contract, amen.

When Ivor got home the light was on but his father’s shoes weren’t on the mat. That meant he was still wearing them, which meant he’d gone straight onto the kitchen sofa. Ivor went in quietly. His father was asleep under the scratchy blanket. Ivor had saved up for that blanket from the gift shop. It didn’t seem right that people could sell a blanket that was scratchy, to tourists, or to anyone.

His father murmured something and his cheek twitched. There was a scar under there from when Ivor was three and had bit him. ‘Is it right?’ his father said. ‘Is it right?’ He sat up suddenly, opened his eyes and rubbed his hand over his face. ‘Christ, Ivor, how long have you been standing there?’

He reached out and pulled him down onto the sofa. It was soft and dusty, and Ivor sneezed, then sneezed again.

The fridge hummed next to his ear. Ivor picked at the fraying cushion threads. ‘Did you ring Mev yet?’ he said.

His father moved the cushion away. ‘You’ll tear it.’

‘Did you?’ Ivor said again.

‘These aren’t our cushions. If you tear them I’ll have to try and buy new ones exactly the same.’

The clock on the oven glowed red – you could see the shapes of all the other numbers behind the lit-up parts.

‘Don’t you want to be here?’ his father said.

Ivor looked around. There was the kitchen, the dark outside the window. ‘Here?’ he said.

Once, in town, his father had passed someone he used to know from school. His father had recognised the man, Jody, straight away, but it had taken Jody a moment to come up with Ivor’s father’s name. Jody had been down visiting his parents and now he wanted to go – he kept looking towards his car and nodding in all the wrong places.

Ivor had pulled on his father’s hand but his father had kept talking. About the state of the tides, what was biting, the blue shark, the development out the back of town. Remember that party out at the Jennings’ place? he said. Remember the ambulance?

Ivor had pulled again at his father’s hand, until his father let go. And still Jody kept glancing round and checking his watch, and nodding, until finally he said, I have to get back.

His father had run his hand down his neck and watched him walk away. ‘Back,’ he said. Then he’d shrugged and walked into the pub. A beer for him and a Coke for Ivor, and those chewy scratchings that were so tough and salty they made your teeth ache.

His father’s eyes were closing again.

His phone started to ring in the front room. It rang and rang but he didn’t get up to answer it.

‘The warehouse might be hiring next week,’ he said.

Over went the blanket with its smoky, ketchupy smells. Ivor leaned in and his teeth were against his father’s cheek, and his father’s hand came up and smoothed and smoothed, like he did with the fish he caught when they were thrashing and gleaming.

Ivor got to the house first. It was late afternoon and the sky was dark, the cliffs silhouetted like breaching whales. He’d told his father he was staying at Gull’s and would be back in the morning. The town glinted in the distance, supermarket floodlights bright as haloes.

It was raining and he put his bags down and pushed at the window. It didn’t move. He leaned forward and pushed harder. The frame was wet and heavy. It shook but didn’t budge.

He ran round the side of the house, tried the other windows, then rattled the front door. The rain came down in sharp pieces. He looked towards the town, then back at the house. He shoved the door, then leaned all his weight against it. Something gave and he shoved again. A gap appeared and he forced it with his shoulder. The door jolted open. The wood around the lock was spongy and on his way in he pushed the screws of the metal plate until they nestled back in place.

When the others arrived he met them at the front. Crystal was carrying a rucksack. Gull Gilbert had brought nothing.

They stood inside, too close, Crystal’s arm pressed against Ivor’s. She smelled like apples and petrol and she was wearing lace-up boots that reached almost to her knees, and a pyjama jacket with clouds on it. Gull Gilbert had slicked down the sides of his hair.

Ivor’s cheeks were hot. Everyone was just standing in the open doorway, waiting.

Gull Gilbert prodded Ivor’s bags with his foot. ‘What’s in these?’

‘Nothing,’ Ivor said. It was just the food he’d brought. There was a packet of crackers, cheese he’d cut off a bigger piece, half a carton of orange juice, a tin of soup, eggs although he had no idea what to do with eggs. Also three cans of beer he’d found lurking at the back of the fridge.

When he’d packed it, he’d thought there was too much – he’d almost taken out the cheese – but now everything looked small and awful. Any moment now, Gull Gilbert’s lip would twist and everything would crumble.

A handful of rain flung itself across the wall. Gull Gilbert reached out and closed the door. ‘We should get all that in the fridge,’ he said.

They went into the kitchen. Ivor put the eggs in the cupboard, then took them out and put them in the fridge. He thought the orange juice should go in the fridge door, the soup on a shelf. He spent a long time deciding, even though he knew he’d be getting it all out again in a minute.

Crystal went to the sink and ran the tap. She opened all the cupboards and looked inside, got out plates and slammed them down on the table. Then she picked them up and placed them gently. Then she pursed her lips, crossed her arms over her chest and pretended to smoke. Finally she slumped down over the table with her head in her hands. ‘What are we supposed to do?’ she said.

Gull Gilbert pulled out a chair, sat down, and got up again. The chair screeched against the floor and made everyone flinch. He opened the fridge. ‘We should have a drink,’ he said.

‘Now?’ Ivor said.

‘It’s Friday, isn’t it?’

The cans opened with a hiss. When Ivor drank, all he felt was very cold. He realised that the lights were off. He clicked them on and the kitchen turned orange. The room appeared in the black window, three faces staring back in.

He went out into the hall and looked at the pictures. In one of them, the table was laid with all the different types of cutlery, and the food was on mats in the middle. He went back into the kitchen and started laying out knives and forks and spoons, then he opened the soup and glooped it into a pan.

Gull Gilbert had one leg up on the table. His fingers drummed. ‘We need to turn the lights off,’ he said. He tipped his can and drained it to the dregs. His voice sounded huskier, as if his throat was very dry.

‘I want the lights on,’ Ivor said. He tipped his can up until the bubbles burned his throat. The taste was getting better, or maybe his mouth was going numb.

‘Someone will see us,’ Gull Gilbert said. He got up and clicked off the lights. The kitchen plunged into gloom. He sat back down and up went his leg. He stared at Crystal’s beer. ‘Are you going to finish that?’ he said.

Ivor got up and drew the curtains, glanced at Gull Gilbert, then turned on the lamp in the corner. He took another long drink, then clicked the burner under the pan of soup. Nothing happened. He clicked it again.

‘The gas is broken,’ Crystal said. ‘I tried it before.’

‘Shitting frick,’ Ivor said.

‘You have to hit something when you say that,’ Crystal told him. ‘Then you have to go and lock yourself in the bathroom.’

Ivor drank some more beer, then spooned the soup into bowls. There were only a few cold spoonfuls in each one but he laid them out anyway, then the cheese. ‘Someone else could help,’ he said.

Gull Gilbert got up and brought over the crackers and spread them across a plate. He took out the eggs and looked at them, then put one down in front of each of them. ‘I’m not hungry yet,’ he said.

Ivor looked at his watch. ‘I think this is the time we’re supposed to eat.’ He cut the cheese into slices and gave them out. The rain hit the windows with clinking sounds. ‘We should have a conversation,’ he said.

‘Us?’ Crystal said. She had taken more than her share of the crackers.

‘Say something,’ Ivor said.

Gull Gilbert was pushing his spoon around his bowl. ‘Did you make this soup yourself, Ivor?’

Crystal snorted into her bowl. ‘Why are you talking in that voice?’

Gull Gilbert’s spoon clattered down. ‘He said we had to have a conversation.’ His leg wouldn’t stop drumming.

Ivor poured out the orange juice, which looked too thick. He couldn’t remember how long it had been open. ‘Don’t actually drink this,’ he said as he passed it round.

Crystal took hers and started drinking.

‘I said don’t drink it.’ Ivor tried to slow his breathing. There was sand everywhere. He should have got everyone to take their shoes off. He crouched down and started scooping it up into his hand.

‘Where are we going to sleep?’ Crystal said.

Gull Gilbert leaned back in his chair. ‘Depends,’ he said. ‘Do you snore?’

‘How would I know?’

Ivor crawled under the table. The sand was everywhere. The grains he’d already picked up kept scattering out of his hand. ‘I think we should take our shoes off,’ he said. He followed the gritty trail out into the middle of the kitchen.

Gull Gilbert was staring at Crystal. ‘You’ll have to sleep in my room.’

Crystal stared back, harder. ‘Why?’

Gull Gilbert’s eyes shifted away, he put his leg down from the table, got up and started pacing. He pointed to her beer. ‘Are you going to finish that?’

‘I already did.’

He reached out and shook it to check, then crushed the empty can in his fist.

Ivor tipped the sand in the bin then sat back down. No one had finished their soup. Gull Gilbert was circling the edges of the room, wall to wall to wall.

Ivor took a spoonful and raised it to his mouth, but he couldn’t do it. He pushed his bowl away. His spoon had rust on the handle. His stomach made a thin, hollow noise. ‘Soon we have to go and sit in the armchairs,’ he said.

Crystal was moving her chair closer. Ivor sat very still. What he was probably meant to do was lean in to her and smell her hair, like his father used to do to Mev.

His breathing was so fast and shallow it was as if he couldn’t catch up with it.

‘You took too many crackers,’ Ivor told her.

Crystal stopped moving for a moment, then tipped her chair back and swung on its spindly legs. She started humming something fast and looping.

Gull Gilbert turned on the TV. There was someone on there doing a magic trick with cards, but you could see where she’d tucked the spare ones in her pocket. He picked up the remote and changed the channel. A zebra was running through a wide river. He changed the channel again and there was a crowd of people. He flicked it again and again.

The room was cold and dark. The blue from the TV and the orange from the lamp cast a strange, underwater light. Crystal’s chair was almost at the point where it would snap. Gull Gilbert was staring at the screen with unfocused eyes. His hair had sprung up slowly from under its layer of gel. He kept moving from channel to channel without stopping, one image blurred into the next; there was a voice, then music, then more voices. The zebra was still in the river, the crowd of people was getting bigger. The magician’s hidden cards fell on the ground like leaves from a wilting plant.

Ivor pushed his plate off the table. It slid across the shiny wood and kept sliding, then seemed to pause for a moment before it hit the floor and shattered.

Crystal stopped tipping. Gull Gilbert blinked and looked around.

Ivor picked up his glass. It glinted in the TV’s light. He held it out over the floor, then he dropped it.

Slowly, Gull Gilbert’s elbow moved towards his plate. It teetered on the edge of the table, then broke with a hard clunking sound across his shoes.

Crystal picked up her plate, licked off the last crumbs, and dropped it. She got up and kicked her chair over behind her.

Then they all picked up their stupid eggs, raised them in the air, and smashed them into a million glorious pieces.

Ivor finally caught up with his own breath. His hand touched against Crystal’s hand and he tried to make it mean that he would miss her when she wasn’t there. Even though he didn’t know if you could say that just with hands.

The sea paced with its heavy boots through the house. If you listened closely, you could tell how high the tide was, and what kind of waves were breaking. Ivor’s father could walk out the front door and know that the waves were mushy, or that it was low tide and the waves were clean as a damn whistle.

Ivor picked up his can and rubbed the back of his neck. Later, but not now, he would clean up the house, and whoever came in next, whenever they came in next, would find, what? Not anything worth mentioning really: a scatter of crumbs, a few missing plates, a lamp that had been left on by mistake, sand in the floorboards, a smudge of breath on the bathroom mirror that could have been anyone’s.

The Dishes

The baby was teetering on the edge of speech. Bru, she would say. Da Da Da. She had a way of looking at him as if she knew. Her forehead would furrow and her eyes would go dark as oil. Then he would pick her up and carouse around the room, giddy up, giddy up horsey, while the mist pressed against the windows from the sea, wet and dripping like bedding on a line.

They were there for three months. His wife, Lorna, had a temporary posting and they’d been given the use of a small, brick house in a terraced row. Theirs was on the end and it backed onto rough ground: tussocks, bracken, horned sheep sprayed blue and red, as if they were going into battle. Beyond that were fields, hedges tangled like wires, a few lonely farmhouses. The beaches were stony. The trees were not in leaf. In front of the house there was a road that hardly anyone drove along, then a barbed-wire fence with No Entry signs and cameras that pointed in all directions. Behind the fence were the dishes, where his wife went to work every morning and came back later and later into the evening. Sometimes she would have a shift in the middle of the night, and when Jay turned over in bed to hold her, she would be gone.

The dishes were on the edge of the cliff and could be seen for miles – hard white shapes that looked like a chess set waiting to be played. They were data gatherers, listening stations, bigger than the house and smooth and silent. Some were full spheres, some were hexagonal, others hollowed like the dip in an ear. At the centre of each tilted dish there was an antenna that reached upwards, and, sometimes, if Jay watched carefully, he would see them slowly turn, like a flower might, or someone following a voice that no one else could hear.

It was early morning and Lorna had already left. Jay was in the kitchen clearing away the breakfast things. It was cold outside. Rain blew across the road in thin lines. He turned the heating up higher.

The baby was strapped in her chair. He wiped her face with a warm cloth. Her skin was so soft, almost translucent, except for all the dried food stuck to it – it was on her cheeks and on the floor. Some was in her wispy hair. She laughed and squirmed while he wiped around her mouth, then puckered her lips and blew a bubble. Jay crouched down and tried to blow one too but it didn’t work and he ended up drooling down one corner of his mouth. The baby laughed and blew another one.

‘How are you doing that?’ he said.

‘Hamna fla,’ the baby told him.

‘Oh, OK,’ Jay said. ‘I thought you were doing it a different way.’

He picked up the plates and put them in the sink, then ran the hot water until the washing liquid foamed up. He plunged his hands in and his wrists went red.

‘What do you want to do today?’ he said.

The baby banged her hands against her tray.

‘Do you want to go out anywhere?’

She banged again.

‘Or we could play that xylophone game you seem to like so much.’

She kept banging.

‘Bang your hands if you’ve got food in your hair.’

She kept banging.

‘Bang your hands if you woke me up five times last night.’

She banged again.

‘Bang your hands if you think I’m the best.’

She stopped banging.

Jay ran more hot water and swiped plate after plate with the cloth, until they were all stacked on the draining board. He liked washing up now – the hot water, the steam, how, when he rinsed out a tin of tomatoes, he pretended there’d been a shark attack. He liked the way the bubbles had bits of colour in them. He would blow them off his hands so that the baby could watch them floating. He hardly ever felt like smashing it all against the wall any more.

He dried his hands and lifted the baby out of the chair and onto her mat. There was an arched bar over it with bells hanging down. They made a dull, jangling noise when she grabbed at them. They sounded like a doorbell and he wished he’d packed her other mat – the one without any bells. They hadn’t brought much from home – just a suitcase for him and Lorna and a few boxes of the baby’s things. He liked it that this house was small and empty. He could walk around each room seeing nothing that reminded him; just a table, a couple of chairs, a sofa, a wilting pot plant on top of the fridge that he watered every day.

He sat down next to the baby, then got up again. If he sat down he would fall asleep. He had that heavy, dull feeling behind his eyes which pushed down towards his jaw. It had been five times last night; the night before he’d lost count after seven. He straightened the curtains, the chairs, then picked up the cloth and wiped at another weird stain on the floor.

‘Was this you?’ he said to the baby.

She looked at him, frowning, like it was inappropriate to even ask.

It wasn’t even nine o’ clock yet.

After a while he noticed the sound of low voices coming through the kitchen wall. He stopped wiping the floor. There it was again: a low murmur of voices.

The wall was thin and connected with next door, but he didn’t think there was anyone living there. When they’d arrived there weren’t any lights on, and there were no cars parked at the front. The curtains were half-drawn and there was a pile of rubble by the steps – bricks and plaster – that looked as if a room had recently been knocked through.

He couldn’t hear what they were saying. He stayed kneeling on the floor. Water dripped off the cloth and pooled next to his leg. The voices rose and fell and then they stopped. The baby let out a cry and he turned to her quickly, thought he heard a door open and close somewhere. The baby cried out again and he picked her up and cupped her warm head with his wet hands.

The front door of the house next door opened then shut with a bang. Jay sat upright in the kitchen chair, where he’d been slumped over a cup of coffee, on the edge of sleep. It was mid-morning the next day. He glanced over at the window. There was a man crossing the road further up, heading towards the dishes. Jay glimpsed the back of his coat before he disappeared through the gates.

An hour later there were footsteps behind the wall, someone ran up the stairs and there was a strange rattling, which might have been curtains closing across their runners.

It was misty again, and too cold to go out. He brought the baby into the living room and turned on the electric fire. Soon the room was warm and fuggy and smelled like burned dust. He brought out a box of toys and emptied it onto the floor. He put the rattle and the fraying bear in front of the baby, then found the spinning top, spun it up, and let it go. It whirled and clinked out tinny music. He spun it up again.

When he got bored he styled the baby’s hair into a Mohican.

At lunchtime, someone drove up near the house. The engine revved, idled for a moment, then finally stopped. Jay glanced out. There was a dark blue van parked by the side of the road, in the lay-by in front of the terrace.

He strapped the baby in her chair and put her food in a pan to warm up. ‘Mashed peas and potato,’ he told her. ‘A classic choice.’

‘Forofoo,’ the baby said. She’d twisted her bib up into her mouth and she was chewing on it.

‘It’ll be ready in a minute,’ Jay told her. ‘I just want to make sure it’s warm.’

He went over to the sink to wash his hands. He washed them twice, then scrubbed under his nails. He’d read something somewhere about how easy it was to contaminate a baby’s food and since then he’d started washing his hands more and more every day. The skin around his nails was sore to the touch.

He dried his hands and filled the baby’s bowl with food. He sat down next to her and blew on it to cool it down. ‘I just heated this up, now we have to wait for it to cool down,’ he said.

‘Forofoo,’ the baby said, trying to grab the spoon. She took a handful of food and aimed at her mouth, but most of it ran down her wrist and back into the bowl.

After a while the voices started up behind the wall. They were louder this time, closer, although he couldn’t make out any actual words. One was deep, the other sounded like a woman’s voice. There was a lot of low, drawn-out laughter.

Jay spooned the food into the baby’s mouth. He wiped around her lips, then hooked his finger gently inside her cheek to make sure she wasn’t storing any of it in there. She’d gone through a stage of doing that – he would find bits of food that she’d kept hidden all night.

She squirmed and sucked at his finger.

‘I’m only checking,’ he said. ‘You have previous, remember?’

The voices came again through the wall. He got up and went over to the window. The van was still there. ‘I’ll be back in a second,’ he said.

He went outside and knocked at next door. He waited, checking his hands for mashed-up peas. What would he say? He didn’t know. All he wanted was to speak to someone and not have them say forofoo, or whatever the hell it was, back. But there was no sound from inside. Nothing moved. There were no lights on. Upstairs, the curtains were all drawn. Downstairs, there were net curtains that were frayed and yellowing. He would have to go right up and stare in to see past them. He turned round and looked at the road. The mist had almost covered the dishes. He could only see the one closest to the fence. The metal was dripping. The antenna was tilted towards the road. It almost looked like it was pointing at him. Was it pointing at him? He took a step towards it, then stopped and shook his head. It was pointing upwards, above the houses, like it always did.

He knocked once more, then turned and went back into his own house.

He sat down at the table, spooned up the last bit of the baby’s food and put it in her mouth.

The voices started up again, and someone laughed.

He got up so quickly that his chair tipped over. He went back outside and stood there, looking around. There was no one. The van was still parked by the side of the road. It was dusty and there was sand on the tyres.

When he looked out again later, the van had gone.

At night, he watched his wife sleeping. She slept straight away, as soon as she’d checked the baby and got into bed. There were dark smudges under her eyes, as if soot had gathered in a fireplace.

Sometimes she murmured and rolled away from him to the other side of the bed. Sometimes she rolled onto his chest and buried her face in his ribs. She mumbled things he couldn’t really hear. ‘What?’ he would ask her. ‘What?’ He smoothed back her hair and rubbed her shoulder blades to settle her back into sleep.

‘What do you do over there all day?’ he asked, but he knew she wasn’t allowed to answer.

Often, the pillow would have creased the side of her cheek, and the creases would run into the fine lines that had started to gather around her eyes. When her nightdress rode up, there were lines across her stomach and the tops of her legs, the skin puckering like clay. He couldn’t take his eyes off them.

Finally he would fall asleep, but after a few moments he would jolt awake and freeze, sure that he’d been muttering, talking. What had he been saying? What if Lorna had woken up and heard him saying something?

It was only once, it had only happened once. The doorbell had rung and he’d opened it and Lorna had been working, she was always working, and he’d been on his own for such a long time.

The baby had been in the other room. He’d put music on, and afterwards he’d checked and she was deep in sleep, her arms and legs flung outwards, her hand clutching her rabbit, and that warm, sour, milky smell clinging to her which reminded him of the corridors of school many years before; how he used to get lost in the twisting maze of them.

He pressed his ear closer to the kitchen wall. The van had arrived at midday, while Jay was changing the baby. There’d been no sound from next door all morning, and he’d started to think that the van was probably there to do repairs to one of the houses further along the row. Now and again, drilling and hammering would reverberate down the terrace like a heartbeat.

But then someone had run up the stairs. The banister had creaked. A door somewhere further back seemed to shut softly.

He turned away from the wall and back to the baby, who was tipping herself backwards in her chair, trying to get out. She’d been restless all morning – crying whenever he went out of the room and throwing down toys, but if he picked her up she would go rigid and try to twist out of his arms. Her cheeks were hot and she kept scratching at her belly, and when he rubbed it for her, she just cried again. He offered up her favourite toys – the rabbit, the jangly ball – but she batted them away.

He looked around; saw only the road, the mist, the cliffs, the dishes.

He slumped down in a chair and rested his head on the table. It had not been possible, before, to know that this kind of tiredness existed. He could hardly even lift his head. When he did manage to look up, the baby had slumped down too, in her chair, and she was watching him with her head cocked sideways.

He sat up, then covered his eyes with his hands.

The baby did the same.

He waved his hands, and the baby waved her hands.

She watched him, without blinking, to see what he would do next.

Then someone said ‘Ssshhhh’ suddenly and loudly from behind the wall.

The baby opened her eyes wide. ‘Ssshhh,’ she said.

‘Ssshhh,’ the voice came again from behind the wall.

The baby looked around the room, then back at Jay. ‘Ssshhhhh,’ she said.

Jay shook his head. ‘You don’t need to do that,’ he told her.

‘Ssshhhh,’ the baby said again.

Jay got up and went over to her. ‘Don’t do that.’

She looked at him with her wide, dark eyes.

The sound came again from the wall.

Jay went over and knocked on it, once, twice, loud and hard.

Above him, on the roof, a tile slipped and grated in the wind.

‘Sshhhh,’ the baby said, quieter this time.

There was a swing tied to a branch of a tree at the back of the house. It was small and sturdy, with high sides for a child. Jay had tested it, and tested again, pulling down with all his strength to see if anything gave.

He put the baby in her coat and opened the back door. The misty rain had finally stopped. It was good to feel the wind against his face.

He put the baby in the swing and pushed gently. The chains creaked as they moved against the tree. He pushed and pushed and it was cold and quiet and he thought of nothing except pushing the swing and the wet, salty smell of the fields behind him.

When he looked up at the house, there was someone standing in the window.

He fumbled with the swing, missed the middle of it, and ended up pushing the baby sideways. The swing lurched outwards, rocked, then righted itself.

Jay steadied the chains. It was just his wife, wearing her coat and carrying her bag ready to leave for work. He didn’t know how long she’d been standing there; he thought she’d already gone. She was wearing the green scarf he’d bought for her just after they’d first met. He hadn’t seen her wearing it for a long time. He raised his hand and waved. Lorna’s mouth moved but he couldn’t tell what she was saying.

He realised he’d been pushing the swing quite high, and probably harder than he should. The baby was laughing and kicking her legs with each push but now he slowed it down, keeping it low, feeling himself making a show of how careful he was being.

The baby screamed indignantly, but he kept pushing the swing very gently. The next time he looked up, the window was empty, except for the blurred reflection of the swing moving backwards and forwards slowly across the glass.

A phone rang next door. It rang, then cut out, then rang again. No one answered it.

Jay strapped the baby in the pram and pushed her hat further down over her head. She looked up at him and her face creased. Her eyes were exactly the same as Lorna’s – sometimes it seemed like she was right there, staring out at him. When Lorna and the baby looked at each other, it was as if something secret passed between them, something that he wasn’t allowed to know.

‘Ha fa ma?’ she asked. Her cheeks were already red in the cold.

‘We need to get out of the house,’ Jay told her.

‘Bada shlam.’

‘Yeah, I know. It’s bloody cold, but we need to get out of the house.’

He put another blanket over her. She stared out sternly from under all the layers. He tucked the blanket in, then started walking down the road. The pram’s wheels sent up spray from the wet tarmac. The road was steep and narrow, with high hedges on both sides. If a car came, there would be nowhere to go. They would have to turn and walk all the way back. But he needed to get out of the house. It had rained for three days in a row – heavy showers that didn’t stop. The gutters had spilled over and poured down the windows. They’d stayed in and turned the heaters up high. Small noises had come through the wall: murmurs, footsteps, low laughter. Sometimes he was sure it was just the pipes, or the rain.

There was a thin, raw mist, as if the ground couldn’t absorb any more water so the wetness had moved into the air itself. Soon his nose was numb and dripping and his fingers were stiff against the handle of the pram. The road sloped down and small trees twisted on either side, their trunks bright with moss.

It got colder the lower he went into the valley. He could hear the sea somewhere in the distance. Water ran down the road and splashed up his legs. It looked orange, like it was leaking through rusty iron.

The mist thickened into drizzle and he shivered. He crouched down and tucked the baby in tighter. She was making cooing sounds at the gorse, trying to reach out and grab it. He showed her the prickles but she grabbed at it anyway. There was gorse everywhere, like lamps in the hedges. It gave out a sweet, heavy smell.

The drizzle came in waves, sweeping across the tops of the trees, and hanging there like curtains. The road narrowed again. Something moved in the dead leaves under a tree. He walked slowly, checking every bend before carrying on. He came to the bottom of the road and it forked: one way turned into a track that followed a stream, the other seemed to bend inland. He took that one and kept going. There were no road signs, just hedges and fields and the valley below him: the trees huddled like a herd of animals escaping the weather.

‘Sa?’ the baby asked.

He stroked her damp cheek with his finger.

There was the sound of a motor in the distance, coming closer, and he walked forward to find a wider bit of road. Whatever it was, it was moving fast, the engine revving. He smelled the petrol before he saw it. There was no wider bit of road. He walked back quickly, away from the bend. He crammed the pram in sideways against the hedge, mounting the wheels up on the bank and pressing it in as far as it would go.

It was a dark blue van. It came careening round the corner of the lane and revved past him before he could see who was in it. The wing mirror brushed against him as it went.

Jay jumped out and shook his fist at the back of the van. ‘You arsehole,’ he shouted. ‘You irresponsible son-of-a-bitch arsehole.’

He got the pram out of the hedge. The baby had a handful of dried leaves in each fist and was chewing on a stick. He took the stick out of her mouth and crouched down to check she was OK.

‘Don’t ever repeat what I just said,’ he told her.

The baby looked at him, then back down at the leaves she was holding.

He stood in the middle of the road. No one else went past. He saw no one except a farmer, small and faint, walking through a field in the distance. The baby went to sleep. Her hand slackened and the leaves fell out. He turned and started walking back. Soon the dishes rose up in front of him. One of them was pointing down at the valley. It stayed like that all night.

His wife hummed low, monotonous tunes in the shower. She used to sing pop songs, ballads, those deep, soulful ones where she used the showerhead as a microphone, but now she just hummed the same thing over and over, quietly and without stopping, like static on an old radio.

While she was in the shower, music started up behind the wall. It was slow but with a heavy beat that thrummed through the floor. It was coming from somewhere near the kitchen, then it faded and seemed to move into the living room, then down the hall, as if it was in the pipes or the wires.

Jay’s heart gave a strange lurch. He banged on the wall. ‘Stop it,’ he said. He banged again. ‘Stop it.’

The music didn’t stop. He followed it through the house. It was louder near the bathroom. When he went in, it sounded like it was in the room, low and slow and echoing off the tiles.

He could see Lorna through the steam. She was washing her hair and there was soap and bubbles all over her head. She was humming and her eyes were closed.

There was a thump near the door, and then the sound of breathing only a few inches from where Jay was standing. A cold draught came under the door. Any moment now Lorna would rinse off the soap and take her hands away from her ears and then she would hear.

The breathing got louder. The music surged. Lorna ducked her head under the water and shampoo ran down her neck and onto her shoulders.

He stood in the middle of the room, clenching his hands. His nails dug into his palms. He could tell, even behind the music, the particular way the body would be pressing against the wall.

Stop, he said silently. Stop it.

Lorna shook her wet hair and turned off the shower.

The music stopped.

She opened her eyes and when she saw Jay she let out a faint cry and put her hand on her chest, looking at him for a moment as if she didn’t recognise him at all.

The phone rang from behind the wall. It rang and then it cut out, then it rang again. Still no one answered it.

It was lunchtime and Jay was cleaning up. The baby had woken him every few hours in the night and he kept knocking things onto the floor – cups, bits of food. The baby would lean down out of her chair and try to help him pick them up, then almost topple out, so he would straighten her, and then she would do it again, clapping her sticky hands.

Soon Lorna would be home and he would start cooking something for dinner.

He ran the sink full of hot water. It was cold in the house, his hands were cold and he was looking forward to dipping them in.

An engine revved suddenly and he looked up just in time to see the van speed away past the window. The tyres left a burning smell on the air.

He picked up a plate and put it in the sink. He washed it and stacked it on the draining board. Bubbles ran down and pooled in the grooves. He started on another plate.

A door slammed and someone shouted from behind the wall.

He fumbled with the plate, dropped it in the sink, and hot water splashed over his feet.

There was a bang, then voices. ‘Why did you?’ someone said. ‘Why did you do it?’ There was another bang, and a long silence.

Jay picked up the plate. It had cracked down the middle. He stroked the baby’s cheeks. She seemed fine; she was pushing a bit of cracker around her tray, jabbing at it until it was wet and crumbly.

‘Ham nu for,’ she said, pointing to it.

‘It’s OK,’ Jay told her. ‘It’s OK.’

He dried his hands, sat down, then got up and opened the door. He went outside and paced around the front of the houses. There were no cars; the house next door looked empty. In another house, further up the row, washing billowed on the line; trousers and shirts straining against their pegs as if they were trying to get away.

Something moved behind next door’s window. Jay ran to the door and raised his hand to knock, his hand was in a fist, it was almost on the door, then he stopped and brought his hand down. He stood on the step for a long time.

The baby watched him. ‘Wayha do int?’ she said one morning. She looked at him carefully, as if she was waiting for an answer.

His wife got home late and they sat, almost asleep, on the sofa in front of the TV. Jay flicked through the channels – there were old programmes on that they used to watch, repeats that seemed half-familiar, the jokes coming in slightly different places than he remembered.

He put his arm round Lorna and she leaned her head back against him. He could see the freckle behind her ear. It was tiny, hardly more than a dot. He used to kiss her there.

She yawned and leaned in closer. Her hair was kinked from wearing headphones at work most of the day. Her eyes were dry and flecked with red.

The audience on the TV laughed raucously at something and he found the remote and turned it down.

He could hear her watch ticking. There was a phrase they used to say to each other when they’d first met – something about clocks or time, because she always used to be late, and he was about to say it to her, it used to make her laugh. But he couldn’t remember it.

He’d seen her earlier on his phone and he’d grabbed it, almost yanked it out of her hands, but she was just checking a friend’s number. His hand had been shaking and he’d gone upstairs so that she wouldn’t notice.

He turned the volume up on the TV again and Lorna sighed and shifted her head so that it was against the cushion instead of his chest, and her hips moved, just slightly, away from his. His hand started to shake again, but it was nothing, he’d deleted everything, there had been no more phone calls. Any moment now she would turn back and lean against him again.

He was putting away the washing up – the cups and plates and glasses – in the cupboards and drawers. Everything was clean. Dinner was cooking. He was ahead for once. He lined the cups up carefully, and stacked the plates on top of each other. The glasses caught the light and gleamed.

A glass fell and smashed against the floor.

He reached up automatically to the shelf to stop any more falling but nothing had fallen, there was no broken glass anywhere.

There was another loud smash from behind the wall.

He put his hands over his ears and waited for it to stop.

The dishes were moving. If he hadn’t been watching them every day, he might not have noticed, but he did watch them every day, and he saw them move. Soon they would be pointing straight in at the kitchen window.

The van was there again. He hadn’t heard it drive up, or any doors opening and closing. But it was there. Jay watched it out of the window. He checked on the baby. He went back to the window, waited a moment, then went outside. He walked over to the van and looked in. There was an empty plastic bottle under the seat, and a newspaper on the dashboard from a week earlier.

He circled the van twice in the drizzle, then thought about the number plate. What he should do was write down the number plate. He ran inside and found a pen, then crouched down next to the van to write. The number plate was covered in mud and he rubbed at it, saw an X and a 7, then rubbed again but the mud was too thick and wouldn’t come off.

When he looked up, there was a light in one of next door’s windows. It flicked on, then off. The curtains upstairs moved.

He walked over to the house. He glanced back at the road, then went closer, right up to the window. The rooms downstairs were dark. He pressed his ear against the glass but couldn’t hear anything. Something moved further back in the house – maybe it was an arm, or someone’s back, he just glimpsed something crossing into another room.

He ran round the side of his house, down the alley and through the long grass on the bank. He scrabbled over the brambles, dropped the pen, and scratched his hand on a broken bit of fence. There was a low wall behind the house next door. He jumped down softly. The back door was padlocked. The windows were shut and dark.

He stayed crouched against the concrete. The net curtains swayed against the glass.

Something rustled in the bank above him. The rustling got louder, and then a blackbird ran out towards him, scolding loudly.

He moved closer to the windows. They were smeared and dusty but he was sure there was something back there, in the darkness. He went closer. A voice murmured and someone laughed.

There was a shout behind him. He turned quickly. It was the farmer he’d seen in the field. She was walking towards him, calling out, asking what he was doing. He looked at her, then back at the window. He realised his hand was on the latch. His fingers were rigid and scratched, the nails bitten right down. It didn’t look like his hand. He turned and ran, disappearing into his own house.

He jumped at small noises. When the baby broke her bowl he brushed up every single piece with the dustpan. He picked out the tiny shards from the cracks between the tiles.

It turned very cold. He stayed up late into the night with his ear to the kitchen wall, just the blue light from the fridge, and the white security lights coming in through the thin curtains. He paced the kitchen. When the baby cried he went straight to her and lifted her out of her cot and held her while he paced. She shaped her mouth into a sound and then gave up and blew a sticky bubble instead, and sighed.

‘It’s OK,’ he told her. ‘It’s OK.’

Then he went back to the wall and listened. He pressed so hard that bits of paint flaked off onto the floor.

He left Lorna sleeping in bed and came downstairs and listened all night.

He heard the music again, faintly this time, somewhere towards the back of the house.

Another time there was a hushed, crying sound, like someone had left a tap slowly running.

‘I no, I no,’ the baby said. She opened her eyes wide. ‘Sshhh,’ she said.

The phone next door rang, cut out, then rang again. Jay stopped turning his phone on. He put it under a box in the wardrobe, then in a drawer. After a few days he took it out and threw it into the brambles behind the back window.

Someone was leaving. He heard it clearly and distinctly.

The baby looked at him, her head to one side. ‘Wha?’ she said. She frowned.

A very cold feeling washed over Jay – it went from his neck down to his feet, almost rooting him to the floor.

The voice came again through the wall. It was a man’s voice, but not as deep as the one he usually heard. ‘Going,’ it said. ‘The only thing to …’ A cupboard opened, then drawers opened, and something heavy was dragged across the floor. A zip crunched.

Jay picked up the baby and held her to his chest. He stood by the front door. Footsteps thudded through the wall, more cupboards creaked open.

He put the baby in her coat, then went outside. He crossed the front yard. The van wasn’t there. It was cold and the dishes seemed poised, tensed. They were pointing straight at him.

His breathing was fast and shallow. He held the baby tight and she pressed into his neck. ‘Da?’ she said.

There was no sound except for a rook cawing from a wet branch.

The house next door was in front of him. The door was half-open. Jay walked over to it slowly. He went up the step.

The rubble was still there. It was wet and bits of plaster had spread over the ground like snow. He pushed the door slowly and it swung inwards. It was quiet in there. There were no shoes by the door, no coats on the hooks. The hallway was long and dark. He turned and looked back towards where Lorna would be working. He imagined her at a desk, by a computer, listening.

He thought of how he would tell her.

He suddenly remembered the phrase they used to say to each other.

The phone rang. He held the baby tight. He took a deep breath and stepped inside.

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