Sarah Hall - The Wolf Border

They’re bonding, she says. I’m hopeful they’ll mate in the winter.

In fact, all the signs in the run-up to the release are good. The health reports are reassuring. The implants have proved negligible. They have been vaccinated. They are acclimated to the terrain, its hard carapaces and grasslands, via the microcosm of their acre. All that remains is for their human aversion to prevail.

And how are you, Rachel? Thomas asks. Not long to go now. We’re all very excited about our other new addition to Annerdale.

She has no wish to discuss the details of the pregnancy with him, especially in front of the group. But the tenor of estate membership is such that almost familial interest is taken in the workers’ lives, like a factory town, or Ford’s empire. The baby is being regarded as part of the fabric, part of the community — she knows, an idea both securing and suffocating.

I’m fine, thanks. Everything’s fine.

Wonderful. Anything you need, please just ask. Right, I better go. I’ve a tedious meeting across the border.

The Scottish referendum is in a few weeks and the Earl is part of the monetary committee. Rachel has heard him on the radio a few times; his position on independence withheld, talking about the cost of setting up new nations. Everything has overheated, politically; most days the news features fresh accusations and tactics, business leaders switching sides, spokespeople from the military, the judiciary, European representatives speculating on continued EU membership. Thomas leans down to kiss his daughter.

See you in Edinburgh, darling.

In the days that follow, the heat of summer lifts, and the sun becomes less concentrated. September. Rachel walks in the cool early mornings. Sometimes there is a text from Alexander first thing — he seems oblivious to any withholding on her part. They have spent a few more nights together — the arrangement practical, but affectionate and enjoyable. The trees fluoresce, as if in a final bid to stay green. There is already a tint of autumn about the roads, leaves beginning to gather and flutter along the verges, field-stumps rotting in the drizzle after haying. In the sky, a more complicated portfolio of colours: lilacs, yellows, like a warning — bad weather brewing in the Atlantic. In the hedges hang early sloes, unripened black drupes pinned to the spiny trees. She remembers Binny making gin with them; her mother could turn any berry into lethal poteen. The parties in the post office cottage were torrid, involved villagers with only the strongest constitutions, the pub diehards, the dancers. Binny would have gone down well at the Reservation parties, she had entirely the right constitution.

In Seldom Seen’s garden, the quince fruit is also immature, grey-white; the birds check on it regularly, covetously. Rachel begins to feel more like staying home, holing up, nesting , though she is unwilling to admit that’s what it is. She can feel little jointed limbs flailing under the skin of her belly, elbows, feet, the odd somersault as the baby spins. It’s extraordinary — the feeling of a life force breeching, trying to break the surface.

A different kind of weariness arrives, broken sleep, she has to sit up fully to turn over, and her pelvic bone aches, her hips go numb if she lies on either one too long. She manages two or three hours at most, a deathly unconsciousness when it finally arrives. Her dreams are incredibly vivid. Of Lawrence, lost on the moors: searchers looking for him on horseback, and she is one of them. She rides between the gorse bushes, calling his name. She has talked to Lawrence a few times since Emily’s visit, but the true nature of the incident is no clearer. The background static of anxiety remains; she is unused to worrying about her brother and does not know what to do. She dreams of her son, sometimes her daughter, in jeopardy, falling from branches, afloat on the lake like a burr of weed, or simply there, naked and kicking, in need of care. In one dream she gives the baby to a madman to mind while she goes to work, some cannibal from a ludicrous horror film. Then the madman becomes Nigh, who wears a wolf head and is in a wheelchair, IV tubing on a rack next to him. It will be OK, she tells herself, nothing terrible will befall the baby. She wakes breathless and furious with herself. The absurdity of it. But the good dreams of Binny persist, too, of a younger, helpful mother who never really existed. Is it forgiveness, or reconciliation of some kind? The dreams, so full of people. Perhaps the cottage is too lonely, she thinks. She has not made friends with any of the other expectant mothers in the district, has in fact only attended one antenatal class and missed the following two. She thinks about getting a dog, decides against it.

She likes it when Alexander stays. The sex is good, becomes gentler as she grows bigger; they find comfortable ways, her on all fours, or sitting at the edge of the bed. She is afraid to climax, the sensation is huge, her whole abdomen seizes. He is not offended by her, she realises, he has an autistic’s practicality about their relationship, or is intuitively straightforward. If she does not call and he wants to talk to her, he calls; if she cancels a date, he rearranges. He arrives after work and cooks for her, hot meals with chilli and garlic and ginger — a man’s understanding of flavour. He asks very little of her, and yet, by virtue of his presence, he is involved in her life, and the baby’s. Among the groceries he brings antacid, laxative, Marmite — she cannot seem to get enough salt. He tries to get her to take vitamins. She is occasionally moody, takes the discomfort out on him, but he is thick-skinned. She apologises one night, for accidentally kicking him in bed, hard, on the shin. Another lurid thrashing dream.

I’ve bruised you, she says.

I’ve been hoofed by bigger and worse, he replies.

He shows her a crescent-shaped scar on his leg, from a shod horse rearing and landing on him, the flesh ravelled down to the bone. He admires the scar on her back, its puckered stitching. She tries not to think about where it is all heading, what it all means, even when he puts his hand on her belly to feel the gristly little heels pushing out, the rhythmic hiccups like firework pops inside, as a father might. She is more worried, she supposes, about the prospect of motherhood. She’s never changed a nappy in her life. The plastic doll in the antenatal class she attended was so ludicrously false she set it down, made an excuse to go to the bathroom. Her mother used to tell a story about how Rachel had floated her only childhood doll off down the river. So she could go exploring, Amazon-style.

She confesses the antenatal incident to Jan.

Doesn’t matter, Jan says. That’s just entry-level stuff. You won’t know anything until you actually have to do it. No one does.

What if I’m not cut out?

Oh, hell, who is? But I think you might be surprised, luvvie. When I hand the little one to you, something’ll kick in.

As for the rest, what else is there to do but continue on as before? She carries wood in from the garden, lesser loads. She manages the project. Her wage is very generous — for the first time in her life she has decent savings — and will not stop during maternity leave, though she does not really intend to take official maternity leave. She orders newborn supplies online: nappies, a supply of clothes and various pieces of sterilising apparatus. A Moses basket. A book about animals. She gratefully accepts the Marmite jars Alexander brings, eats it spread thickly on toast, or heaped on a spoon like some kind of gory Victorian medicine.

Depraved, Alexander says, shaking his head. You’re as bad as Chloe.

He sticks his finger in the jar, licks it, grimaces. He makes her laugh, talking unromantically about peridurals and prolapses. He suggests ridiculous names for the child — Algernon, Ignatius, Veronica. The whole thing seems uncomplicated, workable, though often she feels surely she must end it. She thinks of Kyle — they have not spoken since early summer, though she receives the weekly newsletter from Chief Joseph. The baby will no doubt be dark, a quarter Indian, Nimíipuu. What of that stolen heritage, the disqualification? There are formal tribal regulations for classification, she knows, proportions of blood measured. She remembers the solitude of her own childhood, mountain-bred, a condition aggravated by decades of remote locations in the northern hemisphere. Seldom Seen is lost in the woods — is she recreating such a world for the baby? She does not feel solitary now, but that is not Alexander’s doing. She feels joined with something, viviparously, even if the physical tethers are temporary. Sometimes she speaks to whoever is inside her, after a series of insistent kicks. Hello, baby. What are you doing? They will have each other, she supposes.