Jon McGregor - Reservoir 13

On Boxing Day James and Rohan met at the Gladstone and compared notes on university. They saw Liam for the first time in years, and had bought him a drink before it became clear how little they had to talk about. He’d taken on the stone work with his father. His hands were swollen with bruises and pinched little cuts. There’s years of learning in it yet, he said, but it’s a good trade. We’re working on a demonstration wall at the visitor centre if you want to look? Rohan said probably they would. James was texting Sophie to get her and Lynsey to come down. A storm came and blew snow sideways across the valley, and when it had passed the trees were edged with white. The Jacksons had losses in the hills. Richard Clark came home just before New Year. His sisters had given their mother a mobile phone for Christmas, and when he got there it was still in its box. Rachel told me it would make it easier to keep in touch, she said, waving at the thing. Richard asked if she wanted him to show her how to use it. I’ve a perfectly good telephone right there. She can leave me a message if I’m out when she calls. Says she’s too busy for chatting on the phone, but it only takes five minutes. Richard gave her a look. Five or ten, she said. Ten at the most. She gave him a look in return which meant not to push it any further. Richard was fiddling with his own phone even as they spoke. I think the thing is, Mum, Rachel thought it could be useful in an emergency. What kind of emergency? Just, if you were out somewhere, if you needed to call for help. Or even if you were upstairs and couldn’t get to the landline. Landline? This wasn’t going well. He resented that he was the one having to do this, when it had been Rachel’s idea. Just let me get it charged up and turned on for you, he said. You can send the grandchildren texts, that would be nice, wouldn’t it? She picked up the box. It was awfully big and heavy. It didn’t seem very mobile at all. On New Year’s Eve there was another hard snowfall and drifts on the roadside by evening. A pale light moved slowly across the moor. The weather stayed cold and there was snow on the ground for another week.

At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks on the big screen in the village hall and the sound of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ along the street. The Cooper twins were out for their first New Year, watching the fireworks from the Hunter place, their mother hurrying them back to bed as soon as the last rocket fell to earth. In the morning the snow was ankle-deep but by noon a hard rain had washed it away. The change came quickly, thick piles of snow falling in on themselves and hurtling away down drains and run-offs to the river, the river bright and loud with it and the streets left scrubbed and darkly gleaming and everywhere the first green tips of snowdrops nosing out of the soil. After the rain there was a quiet, and the melting of roof-snow down drainpipes, and the calling of birds on thawing ground, and the whine of a chainsaw up in Hunter’s wood. On the television there were pictures of an overturned ship, helicopters hovering, life jackets floating in the water. In the fields south of the church there were wild pheasants feeding, their dashed brown feathers muddled in amongst the tall dead grass. A line of parsnips were lifted at the allotments, the creamy heft of them shrugging free of the frost-black soil. At night there were foxes shrieking in the woods, and everyone who had stock on the hills sat up and bristled, listening. When the doctor came for Jackson’s check-up, Maisie admitted how little he’d been getting out of bed at all. She said she was worried there could be something affecting his energy levels, but that the physio hadn’t thought there was anything to worry about. The doctor examined him, and afterwards she told Maisie that she thought Jackson was depressed. Maisie laughed and said she didn’t think so. Jacksons don’t get depressed, she said. We don’t have the time. She’d heard it said so often that it just came out without thinking. She stopped and the doctor smiled gently. I think time might be his problem, she said. But there are steps we can take. He’ll not take happy pills, Maisie said. Well, that needn’t be our starting point. But we should look at something. A late-afternoon fog came in before dusk, and when the bus dropped off the secondary-school children their voices along the high street were muffled and lost.

In the pub before opening hours Irene was cleaning the floor. She was quick but she was thorough. Tony was talking about his plans for expanding the food offer, and she could have done without the distraction. He was talking about a pizza oven. She didn’t have an opinion. It wasn’t her money. On the television they said something about a missing girl in the south of England. Tony came around the bar to turn the sound up and Irene told him sharply to mind her wet floors. He stepped back and they both looked up at the screen. The news reporter said there would be a reconstruction. Irene carried the mop bucket through to the kitchen and told Tony to keep off until it was dry. A thirteen-year-old girl had been taken from a holiday cottage, and for a time it seemed there might be a connection with the disappearance of Becky Shaw. But her body was discovered, and a suspect arrested, and he was found to have been out of the country when Becky had disappeared. These things just kept happening, it seemed. The Tucker place was rewired and replastered and a new damp-proof course put in. There was talk the man who’d bought it was from Birmingham way and recently widowed. There were no signs of him moving in. Tony put a pancake dinner on at the Gladstone, and made the mistake of calling it All-You-Can-Eat. People could eat a lot of pancakes, as it turned out. The kitchen ran out of batter, and not everyone was understanding. On the bank at the far end of the beech wood the badger sett was quiet. Twenty feet in from the entrance, past dead-ends and leaf-lined sleeping nooks, the first cubs of the year were being born, spilling blind into a dark world of grassy warmth and milk. The days started with a cold mist that didn’t lift until lunchtime and then only seemed to get snagged in the tops of the trees. The butcher’s shop was empty. The chopping block had been left behind the counter, the bowled wood darkening with the years. There were fat spoony leaves of corn salad for those who knew where to look, under hedgerows and around the edges of the old quarries. At the school on the weekend Jones came in to buff the floors, the polishing machine humming softly as he pushed it back and forth. It took two hours to get all the way round, and he stacked the chairs and turned off the lights as he went. In Miss Dale’s class the socket for the machine was by the display of children’s artwork. There was a game he had of guessing whose names would be on which pictures. He was good at it. This was something people would be surprised about. He plugged the machine in and buffed the floor until it shone. He would have to be getting back. His sister would be restless. It couldn’t always be helped.

Richard was back in the village to see to his mother, and on a quiet afternoon he and Cathy went for a walk on the moor. They’d found they could talk again about almost anything, and they talked a lot. As they came down the far side of the hill, dropping towards Reservoir no. 7, he asked if she’d been seeing anyone since Patrick’s death, and she asked about his relationships, and a conversation he’d been hoping would tilt towards a particular possibility became instead a kind of confessional. It felt like a mistake but there seemed no way of stopping it. In particular, having listened to Richard’s list of short-lived pairings, Cathy made the mistake of telling him about Gordon Jackson, years back. Richard was surprised, but he tried to sound understanding. Grief does things to a person, he said, and Cathy held herself back from asking how he would know. She told him that in fact it had happened before Patrick’s death. About six months before, she said. And regularly, for a time. I was with him when they called me to the hospital. It stopped after that. I could have carried on, but Gordon didn’t want to. She could see Richard was shocked now, although he claimed not to be, and she told him that relationships were more complicated than perhaps he realised; more complicated than it sounded like he wanted them to be. She felt something like irritation or resentment as she said this, and wasn’t sure why. He said that perhaps she was right but he was willing to learn. They followed the access track around the reservoir. The ground was dry. There’d been no rain and the water levels were low. They headed back towards the village. Afterwards it felt as though they’d had an argument. When she thought about Gordon, as she allowed herself to do once she got back home, it was only with a quiet relief that it had happened at all, long past the point of thinking she should be allowed those kinds of joys again. The first time had been rough and shambolic, and the only time risks were taken, but after that there were careful arrangements and they made sure not to hurry. They were such straightforward pleasures; lasting satisfactions that she carried around with her for days afterwards and couldn’t shake off. One of the many surprises was how soft Gordon’s skin had been; even his hands, which by rights should have been more weathered. How gentle he also was, and how strongly felt his need. When she saw him in the village now she sometimes wondered about the softness of his skin. She thought about Richard and smiled at the timidity he hadn’t been able to grow out of. She had never decided whether it was something she found attractive. She heard Nelson barking, and went to knock on Mr Wilson’s door. Jackson’s boys were busy with lambing. There were some early losses but on the whole it went well. The nights were long and they took turns sleeping a few hours each. In his studio Geoff Simmons worked on handles, pulling each one down from a fist of clay, thinning it through his finger and thumb before slicing it off and laying it out to dry with the others. The whippet walked slow circles around him, waiting. In the beech wood the first fox cubs were seen above ground.