Jon McGregor - Reservoir 13

On Bonfire Night Irene and Winnie put together a group from the Women’s Institute and opened up the cricket pavilion to serve food. There were baked potatoes and chilli and some of the children poked marshmallows on very long sticks into the blaze. It was a dry night, and at one point the fire burned almost as high as the horse chestnut tree. Away from the crowd, Lynsey and Sophie were sharing a bottle of wine and being sarcastic about the fireworks. Sophie asked what had actually gone wrong with the whole Rohan thing, and Lynsey said it was hard to explain. She wasn’t sure who had ended it, she said. There were arguments and then they just didn’t see each other. But you liked him, Sophie said. Lynsey said yes, she liked him a lot, it was just that he got a bit. She trailed off. In the firelight Lynsey looked at her expectantly. You know, she said. Attentive. He was always doing things for me. Like, always. It was nice at first. It made a change from the way things are at home. But it was like he thought I needed protecting from everything. He was always asking what I was doing. He always looked so fucking concerned , you know? She made a frowning face of concern at Sophie, and Sophie laughed. You can go off a wrinkly forehead, Lynsey said. Sophie asked if she’d basically dumped him for having a wrinkly forehead, and she said she hadn’t dumped him. She’d tried talking to him but he just hadn’t got it. They had these arguments where he wouldn’t argue back. But anyway it was done now. It was over. Sophie asked if he was all right about it and Lynsey said she thought so, she wasn’t sure. Sophie asked whether he might be in need of consoling and Lynsey looked shocked. Don’t do that, she said, come on. He’s cute though, Sophie said. She finished the wine. He’s got a lovely forehead. The two of them were heard shrieking as they walked away towards the road. The bonfire was starting to die down and the crowd was thinning out. The clouds were high and the night was cold and the embers were still smoking in the morning. On the eleventh a wreath of poppies was carried up to the airmen’s memorial, and words said. There were few in the village now who could remember the heavy bomber thudding into the moor, the roar of it carrying across the valley and the awful explosions that followed and the smell of the peat burning for days. The ribs of the fuselage shone silver in the heather, picked as clean as sheep bones by the wind and rain.

Jane Hughes had started calling in to see the Jacksons regularly, talking mostly with Maisie about the farming and her family and then putting her head round the door to say hello to Jackson. She’d never so much as tried to bring a bible into the house, Maisie told Irene. I think she just likes passing the time of day. Jackson’s even started asking after her, though he doesn’t say much when she’s here. But she needn’t think we’re going to start watching Songs of Praise . She didn’t tell Irene that last time Jane had been there Maisie thought she’d seen her place hands on Jackson’s forehead and say some kind of prayer, and that Jackson’s eyes had closed in what looked like appreciation, and that she’d wondered about all the things she didn’t know were going on inside of that man’s head. At the allotments there was little left to harvest, save the first tender buds of Brussels sprouts. The badger sett in the beech wood was quiet. In the deep sleeping chambers the badgers were keeping still, waiting for the winter to pass. There was low cloud and rain, the sodden fields churned up with the force of it and the sky staying dark for days. The river pushed under the packhorse bridge and carried its rising force to the weir. The reservoirs were high and the water poured over the rim of the spillways, cascading down the steps to the culverts which fed through the base of the dam. The missing girl’s father hadn’t been seen all year. There were reports in the newspapers that he’d been reunited with the girl’s mother. It couldn’t be said that his brooding presence was missed. Late in the month there was snow and the Jacksons went out on the hills looking for ewes. They carried sacks of feed on the back of the quad bikes and brought the flocks down to the lower fields. There were no losses yet but if this weather kept up it was likely. There was carol singing at the school on the last day of term, the hall hung with decorations and the words on a screen and the parents perching on tiny chairs to join in as the sky darkened outside and the weather closed in again. While shepherds watched their flocks by night , they sang, glancing up at the moors; all seated on the ground .

The missing girl’s name was Rebecca, or Becky, or Bex. She would be seventeen by now, and the police published a computer-generated image of how she might look. There was something about this approximate-Becky that seemed too smooth. As though the Becky in the picture had been kept in a sterile room and was only now coming out, blinking, unsteady on her feet and with no more sense of the world than the thirteen-year-old child who had gone in. The police said they hoped the increased publicity surrounding the image’s release would encourage people to rethink their movements at the time of the girl’s disappearance. There were dreams about her appearing on television again, gazing at the cameras as she was hurried from a car to a house in a London street, unable to talk about where she’d been. There were dreams about her crawling through the caves, her clothes smeared with mud and tar in the dark. There were dreams about her held captive, in basements and isolated barns, always with something across her mouth or her eyes. There never seemed any way to stop it. She had been looked for, everywhere, and she hadn’t been found. She’d been looked for in every shed and greenhouse on the allotment, doors kicked in if the owners were away, old rolls of carpet and plastic matting lifted, torches shone in behind armchairs and stacks of peat and coils of hose. It wasn’t known what more could have been done. The allotments were cold and bare, exposed on the high ground to the wind which came scouring up the valley. In his greenhouse Clive was laying out seed potatoes, half-listening to Susanna Wright, who was leaning in the doorway with a seed catalogue. She was telling him about the heritage varieties she was planning to order. It sounded quite the quantity. Her voice kept going up as though these were questions, but he didn’t think she was asking advice. He wasn’t going to offer if it wasn’t called for. He did know that no one had successfully grown globe artichokes on this site yet. Through the iced greenhouse glass he could see the tops of the beech trees bending in the wind. There was Jones leaning over his spade, digging over his entire plot once again. The man had a love of bare soil that was hard to fathom. Jones was keeping his eye on the old Tucker place. He cut the ivy back from the windows and went up a ladder to clear the gutter. It would do no one any favours if the place went to ruin. His sister wanted to know where the Tuckers had gone and who would move in next. He said he didn’t always have the answers. He asked her not to ask so many bloody questions, and when the tears came he said he was sorry. It went on like this. This was how it went on.

At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks on the television in the pub and dancing in the street outside. The evening was mild and dry. The village hall had emptied out and when the bells were rung there was cheering for the first time in years. Richard Clark came home on New Year’s Day, and when his mother opened the door he could see all her bedroom furniture crammed into the front room. Jackson’s boys came and moved it for me, she said, as though that were an explanation. It was a shock, he told Cathy later, as they walked by the river with Mr Wilson’s dog. He hadn’t known how reduced his mother’s mobility had become. His sisters had told him nothing. He wondered if they even knew how long it was taking her to get up out of her chair, to walk through to the kitchen and put the kettle on. He wondered how she was managing to get to the shops. There were people who helped, presumably. Neighbours. Irene. Cathy didn’t like to admit that she’d had no idea. She rested her hand on the wall as she squeezed through the gapstone stile, and stooped to let Nelson off the lead. She watched Richard squeeze through the gap. He thought there was something in the way she looked at him but it was probably nothing. That was all a long time ago. They’d both moved on. He understood that. They were different people now. He remembered how restless he’d been then, when they were seventeen and imagined they were in love. He’d been impatient for everything, and all they’d seemed to talk about was getting away from the village; going to university, travelling the world. He’d never disliked the place, or the people. It had just seemed natural to want to leave, and natural to want to talk about it even while they were undressing each other and learning what was possible with the scratch and yield of the heather beneath them. He wondered now whether Cathy really had talked about it in the same way, or whether she’d just let him rattle on. Patrick had never mentioned leaving. Richard remembered that much. He’d never talked about the future at all. There was no need. He just kept working in his father’s timber yard after school, while his shoulders got broader, his hands rougher, his wallet fatter. Everyone knew he would inherit the yard once his father retired. It was the sort of certainty, Richard had realised later, that some people found attractive. He looked at Cathy now, walking on ahead, her stride long and effortless between the trees. He wondered if she was thinking about any of this. It seemed unlikely. She looked back at him, slowing for a moment as she told him to keep up.