Diving Belles (10 page)

‘What have you done?’ she asked the wrecker.

The wrecker paced and paced. ‘There’s a whole town underwater,’ he said.

‘My things,’ Maddy said. ‘Everything.’

He sat down. Water sloshed over the tops of his boots. ‘There was a flood. No one knew it was going to happen. Houses and trees underwater.’

Maddy knelt down and scooped sand out of the boxes. There was too much of it and eventually she gave up, let it trickle over her feet.

‘It’s not worth anything,’ the wrecker told her, staring out of the window.

Maddy opened the front door and stepped out on to the street. The light hurt her eyes and she blinked, once, twice. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been out. Her key felt strange in her hand. The front steps were overgrown with wilted yellow flowers; the grass had turned brown and dry. There was a strange hush, as if things had been paused, suspended.

Her car was coated in dust and pollen. Inside, plastic on the dashboard had melted and solidified in small ripples. She drove out of town. A breeze came in through the window, cooler perhaps, thinner. It picked up as she got nearer the sea and the roads opened out. ‘Beware crosswinds,’ a sign said. Her mother used to think they’d be pushed right off the cliff. She used to lean her body the other way, against the wind, as if to balance them out.

It was early evening when she got there. The moon was already out. She saw the chimney of the house first, rising up from behind the hill, and then she turned a corner and there was the sea, laid out flat in front of her. Everything was so familiar that she seemed to see the chimney, the sea, a moment before they actually appeared – and so as she drove, the landscape echoed, repeated itself, like somebody who was old or lonely.

She turned down the lane that led to the house, the car bumping and sinking into potholes. She stopped in front of the gate. She had expected the house to be ramshackle by now, half wild. She thought the wind would have found its way into it, making the holes and cracks wider, buckling the roof. She had imagined the magnolia pushing its way through the windows. But the house was newly painted, reinforced, the roof had been fixed and there were different tiles on it. It looked strong, storm-proof. She got out of the car, a few goosebumps on her arms. The wrecker’s voice clamoured for attention in her ear but she pushed it aside and it became nothing more than a seagull cawing above her.

There was a child swinging on the gate. She stared at Maddy. She had a sequined evening dress on, so big it slipped down over her chest. She clutched the gate with bare sandy feet. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

‘There used to be a magnolia,’ Maddy said. ‘By that window.’

‘You mean the lantern tree? It got cut down. I cried, although Dad said I shouldn’t.’

‘Cut down.’

‘He said it creaked too much. He said it would keep me awake. He’s scared of storms, I think. Why’s there pollen all over your car?’ She kicked at the wood, wiped sand off her cheek.

‘I used to live here,’ Maddy told her.

The girl narrowed her eyes to stones. She swung harder, looked back at the house. ‘I’m late for my party,’ she said, although she didn’t climb down off the gate.

Maddy stood in the street, looking up. There was no light in her kitchen window. No flame flickered out through the glass. A cool breeze caught her hair and moved on. The house was dark. There were pebbles scattered over the pavement and in the front garden. She felt like she was returning from a long way away. She could hear the phone ringing from inside. ‘Where have you been?’ Russell would ask her when they spoke, his voice fragile and graceful as a bird. The house was dark and quiet. She would lean into the phone, hold it as close as she could to her ear, the connection brief and distant, but she would grasp it as she would a hand reaching down through water.

The street was hushed. Someone had tied a balloon to their front door and it strained against its string, trying, always, to lift away.

The phone rang again. She walked into the dark house.

Magpies

I was driving home. The sky was dark blue and the trees along the road, all bent in one direction, looked like the silhouettes of fishermen leaning over water. I was taking the longer route back. The road wound up high and everything around it was bare and wind-battered. Whatever the weather was, you knew about it up there, and it could change quickly, too. You could be driving along and suddenly there would be clouds and then rain when there hadn’t been any clouds before. Sleet could roll in. I swear that I once saw forked lightning on a still, blue day. Each flash was so bright I saw them for hours after, stamped on the kitchen walls and in the bathroom mirror.

I wound the window down, let in the cool air. I was thinking about these dreams my wife had been having. It had got to the point where every night she would dream about the last thing I’d talked about. So I mention the crack in the stairs and she dreams of me walking up a staircase and out through the roof. I mention the rust on my bike wheel and she dreams of fairgrounds, the smell of them, the clank of metal and lights in the distance. It was getting to me but I didn’t know why. I kept thinking about it and I kept thinking I wouldn’t say anything that she could possibly dream about, but then she’d ask me questions, get me talking about something or other, and straight away I’d forget.

I’d just been to see Mae. She was back in town for a few days and we’d met at Herb’s, the roadside café we always used to go to. I still go there a lot, sometimes with a couple of guys after work, sometimes by myself. There’s usually someone you can get talking to – Herb, people travelling on business, long-haul drivers.

I sat at a table in the corner and waited. There was the usual smell of vinegar and coffee and frying. Herb’s classical music playing in the kitchen. Pictures of horse-racing and framed newspaper clippings about local disasters. I loved the place. It felt like things could happen there, anyone could be passing through. It was pretty empty that evening, just one other guy by the door, a motorbike helmet on the table next to him. He reminded me of the time I’d seen what I thought was a horrific motorbike crash. I’d pulled over, shaking, gone up to the pieces of metal and helmet strewn across the road, but it was all brand new, with warehouse labels stuck on from where they’d fallen off the back of a lorry.

I changed gear and thought about what Mae had said about it being four years since she’d last seen me. I was sure it was only two – I didn’t realise time had gone that fast. I opened the window a little wider; there was a good breeze. My skin felt warm and clammy. Time must be going faster than I thought. I was thinking about that, trying to recollect what I’d done in the last few years, when something banged hard into the car.

‘What the devil?’ I said, which is what I always say when something surprises me. I’d rather swear like anybody else but I can’t shift it – my granddad says it and the words have stuck to me like burrs. I pulled over but I didn’t really think I’d hit anything. Maybe I saw a flash at the last minute, something black, some kind of movement, but I thought it was a stone at most. I turned the engine off, got out, and looked under the wheels. There were other tyre marks, a few stones, but nothing else. Something pale caught my eye but it was just sheep’s wool tangled in the hedge.

I was about to get back in the car when I heard rustling further up the road. I hesitated for a second, then craned forwards, but the light coming from inside the car made everything else too dark. I closed the door and the light went out. There was a black and white feather in the road. It had a sheen to it, blue, maybe some purple. Further along, at the bottom of the low hedge, there were more feathers, a heap of feathers, which turned out to be a magpie that I’d hit with the wing mirror.

I stood still. I didn’t go any closer. A car went past, its lights picking out the road, a tree, and then making everything seem darker and closer again.

The bird shifted and raised its head up. One of its wings was hanging like a broken umbrella. I didn’t go any closer but I couldn’t stop looking at its wing. The magpie lifted it up then let it fall back on to the road. I heard the feathers brush against the tarmac; I thought I heard a faint snap, as if someone had stepped on a branch in a wood.

After a while, the magpie heaved itself up so it was standing. It looked ragged and unsteady. I wanted to say something to it, that I was sorry, I guess, that I was really sorry. ‘Birds don’t fly in the dark,’ I said instead. I hadn’t paid much attention at school but I knew most birds didn’t fly around once it got dark. ‘Birds aren’t meant to fly in the dark,’ I told the magpie. It came out sounding like an accusation. But what was it doing flying around in the dark?

The magpie’s eyes shifted but I couldn’t tell where it was looking. I looked away. I did that thing where you go ‘brrr’ and skip around on the ground if you get cold, hands clasped like you’re praying and running at the same time. It wasn’t even that cold, just a chill in the air that meant autumn was coming. I glanced back at the car, thought I heard another engine, but there was nothing. I heard something else.

‘What did you say?’ My voice was loud and sudden, disturbing the emptiness and the quiet. But the magpie had said something, I was sure. It tilted its head. The hedge was full of broom and the grey pods, like cocoons, kept swaying and shivering. I took a step closer. An image came into my head of the china clay tips I had to drive past on the way to work. They looked so desolate. They looked like mountains covered in snow but they weren’t mountains. I had always felt it was some kind of trick, the fact that they looked so much like mountains when, really, I was on the same flat ground as always.

‘What did you say?’ I asked.

It had sounded like, ‘This old place.’ I could hardly catch it. Maybe it hadn’t said anything, maybe it was just its feathers brushing against the road.

‘This old place again.’ Those were the first words Mae said when she walked into Herb’s and sat down opposite me. She looked the same, except that she’d cut off all her long hair, which made her face seem thinner, more severe, older than twenty-six. Her eyes were different colours: one blue, one grey – I’d actually forgotten about that, forgotten that she used to say things like, ‘I’m indecisive, can’t you tell?’ and point at them.

She ordered coffee and glanced around the café. ‘I can’t believe we used to come here all the time,’ she said. ‘Why did we?’

I shrugged. ‘We liked it.’

‘I remember it being bigger. I don’t remember it like this.’

The lights in there were dim and one flickered on and off. The plastic tables were stained and buckled; there was a crack down one window. From the kitchen, Herb bellowed along to a violin, his voice rich and scratchy.

‘Mum’s turned my bedroom into a study since I last visited,’ Mae said. ‘I have to sleep on the sofa.’ Her foot danced up and down with the music; I knew that she was already desperate to leave town, already thinking of the journey back.

‘My room’s exactly the same,’ I told her. ‘I went round there the other day and found all those badges I used to collect. They were piled up in a drawer.’

‘You gave me one,’ Mae said. ‘It had a clown on or something.’

‘Have you still got it?’ I asked her.

The guy with the motorbike helmet stood up and walked to the bathroom, knocking into chairs on his way. ‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ he kept saying to the chairs.

Mae watched him, sighed. ‘We should have gone somewhere else,’ she said. She sipped her coffee without really drinking any. We used to like Herb’s cheap, bitter coffee.

I put a sugar cube in for her and stirred it.

Silence on the road. An offshore wind picked up and swept in some clouds. I wanted to know what the magpie had said. I waited, but it didn’t speak again. Instead, it started to move along the verge, slowly, very slow. It tried to lift itself into the air, then it fell back on to the road, sideways. It dragged itself up and half stumbled, half hopped two steps forward. Then it tried to lift itself into the air again and the whole thing started from the beginning. It looked like a dead leaf skidding along the road. I didn’t want to watch the magpie struggling to move like that, but I did watch it.

After a few metres, it turned to the left and disappeared. The hedge was low and sharp. I didn’t hear the magpie pushing through it. I waited awhile. I watched the empty space where the magpie had been. Another car went past behind me but I didn’t turn round. The magpie’s words edged and circled in my mind.

I went up to the hedge and saw that there was a small metal gate. The magpie had squeezed under it. It was the sort of gate you would hardly notice; in fact, I’ve driven that road since and I manage to miss it every time. Beyond the gate there was a flat scrubby field with nothing in it except a few dark trees at the end. The magpie started to move across the grass.

I should have been home by now. I wanted to be home. Right then, my wife would have been sitting at the kitchen table reading, a mug of lemon tea in front of her, her hair damp and frizzy from the bath she’d just had. I could smell the lemon, her damp hair. I could picture the light from our kitchen window, how it would look from outside as I paused just before the door, wisteria climbing all over the walls.

I climbed over the gate. The metal hummed when I jumped off it. I followed the magpie. Now and then, I would pass small white feathers that curled up like burnt paper. I could hardly see the magpie itself, so I just followed those white feathers.