Morag Joss - The Night Following

I turn over on my side and nestle down, but Arthur yanks me around furiously.

How can you be so calm about it! I want to know! I have a right to know! What about me?

He is leaning over me and his eyes are fierce. His mouth is clenched and lopsided, and his breath hisses from it and dots my face with spittle.

What about me ?

Shhh… now, dear. It’s all right. I’m here now. I’m here. Aren’t I? And we’re back here. At Overdale, together. Everything’s all right. You’re tired. Lie down and try to rest.

I have to speak in this way for several minutes, and eventually he grunts and sighs and settles back.

I won’t be able to sleep, he says, and starts to shiver and pick at the blankets with the fingers of one hand. Just as I think he’s falling asleep he starts up and bursts into tears and rocks from side to side, wailing and coughing.

I can’t sleep. I’m cold. I’ll never sleep. Not till I know, not till you tell me. You’ve got to tell me.

I talk to him some more, and then tuck the blankets close around him and snuggle in to still his body and warm him. I run my hand over and over his forehead and shush him like a baby.

I’m cold. You’ve got to tell me, he says. Promise you’ll tell me.

All right, I say. All right, I promise. I’ll tell you, but not now. This isn’t the time. Or the place.

Promise? When? When, Ruth?

Soon. I’ll tell you very soon if you promise to rest now. Go to sleep.

After a while he stops shivering and sleeps. I am almost warm enough. Inside the room the darkness grows dreamy; from outside comes again the sleek rustle of the trees around the house and the rattle of the metal fence, and from time to time the wind carries the faint creaking calls of water birds flocking somewhere not very far away.

There’s a grainy frost on the tarmac. Our footsteps grate as we walk across it in the dark towards the trickling and oozing of the stream. Behind us the lodge is a uniform black, before us the hills seem pulled upward by the moon. The moon pulls us along, too, casting our scissoring shadows ahead of us on the path and over the wet pebbles and shingle at the edge of the streambed, lighting the wavelets plashing over them with winking dots and ridges. A tree has fallen and blocks our way. I help Arthur clamber over it, then I return and break a length from a black, dead branch for him to use as a stick. We walk, and we walk. Some of the stones sit heavy and smooth and dun under their sheeting of water and some look bleached and jagged, like bits of tooth. We find lying half-submerged a white blade of animal bone, Arthur says most likely from a sheep. He cuts the air with it, sprinkling an arc of water drops into the moonlight. He has a notion to keep it but it turns ashy in his hands.

As we go higher the stream breaks into channels around bigger stones and small lodged boulders that split the runnelling water into angled, restless swords of silver and dark and silver and dark. We rest often, in places as far out of the wind as we can find. Here and there the bank of the stream bellies out where the water turns in a slow spin and collects in deep level pools, and falls almost silent, and turns viscous and as impenetrable as mercury, so that when we pause we might hear only a ghostly plocking and gulping from under the surface. Though we stare down trying to see something move on the bottom, even just reeds in the current, the black membrane of water gives back nothing but shivering fragments of reflected sky.

We tire. As we go further the stream breaks into smaller and smaller streamlets until it is a web of tangled strands across a field of stones and reeds stretching outward under the moon. We stop again and I pull Arthur’s hands from his pockets and rub them between mine, and draw them inside my jacket to warm them. They are freezing, his face is freezing, his mouth is locked with cold, and his mind is quite elsewhere. When I speak to him about gloves and tell him I’ve got blankets in the rucksack, he gives me a kindly look, but he is puzzled, as if I am butting foolishly into another conversation and steering it in some new direction that he finds eccentric and tangential.

Though he is cold and weary, he is the leader. We move on when he is ready, we pause when he chooses. Sometimes he stops and raises his walking stick, listening for a faint sound he thought he heard to be repeated, some cry from a bird or an animal, and I have to wait until he decides it wasn’t a living creature at all, just some indistinct whistle borne along on the sifting, chilly breath of the night itself.

We are deep in the hills now and although we are still able to make our way by its light, the moon has disappeared over a ridge. We are walking into a wretched wind and I start to feel afraid. I don’t know where we are going, or maybe I don’t want to know. I want to stop or turn back, but Arthur goes on doggedly, just ahead of me. Soon the path divides and he pauses, then points the way towards the lower fork that does not go to the top of the hill but cuts a gently downward slope around the curve of it, through a stand of scrubby trees. He tramps on and I follow close behind.

Within ten minutes we have rounded the side of the hill, and everything changes. We’re in the shelter of the summit now. We have to call above the roar of the wind but we do not feel it so much; it sweeps over the top of the hill above us. The moon has reappeared and shines directly on the reservoir a long way below. Arthur plants himself on the ground to gaze and I realize we’re not going any further.

I unpack the rucksack and try to get him warm; I hunker down next to him and wrap a blanket around us. But he doesn’t seem to feel the cold anymore. He’s got his arms pressed tight into his sides and he is staring down onto the surface of the water, crimped and silvered by the wind and moon. He starts to point out the old landmarks.

There’s the path through to Boar Clough, and if you go on over the top it levels out and another six miles takes you back to Hayfield. And this must be where the old sheep gate was, he suggests, gesturing vaguely down to a path far below us, and then he yawns and looks and considers again, shakes his head, and with a wide swing of his arm murmurs that it could have been anywhere. It doesn’t matter. He turns to me and pats my face and smiles.

I reach into the rucksack for the pack of food and a picnic knife. We ought to be drinking something hot and sweet, like cocoa, but all we’ve got is fatty cold meat and onions in chewy bread, and some water. I cut off pieces small enough for him to manage and hand them over, and I eat the lumps that are left. When we’ve finished I say, I wish we had a tent, but Arthur gets to his feet and pulls out all the bedding, fixes the rucksack expertly as a windbreak at our heads, unrolls the blankets, and spreads one out on the ground.

Lie down, Ruth, get comfortable.

I do as I’m told. The ground is bumpy and damp but at least we are lying on a mattressy layer of heather. He arranges himself beside me and wraps us up.

We’ll soon get warm, he says, and he takes me in his arms. He brings our last blanket over our heads like a giant hood, enclosing us in a stuffy sack that smells of the food we’ve been eating. It’s also prickly, but once my eyes are closed I’m able to feel only his arms and his neck, and then his hand inside my jacket and on my waist, moving over my skin and pushing up my clothes until my breasts are bare under his fingers. He is so thin now, his mouth is loose and bristly, but he curls in and presses against me and kisses and nuzzles and rests his lips on my nipples, and I stroke his head. I feel his hand reach for mine and he draws it down inside his clothes. He has the beginning of an erection. With no urgency and with no words, we find our way through the layers of blankets and clothing to each other’s bodies, and we make love. My body receives him, and that is enough.