Jon McGregor: Reservoir 13

In the parlour at Thompson’s farm, the last cows of the day came in to be milked. The men were tiring. What little conversation there’d been had faltered, and for the last ten minutes there was only the rhythmic slurp and click of the machinery, the occasional snort or stamp of the cows. At the reservoir a heron speared suddenly towards the water and stopped just before its beak broke the surface, carefully straightening and holding itself still once more. In the beech wood the foxes were loud. Mating season was approaching and claims were being made. There were barks and screams and at night the sounds carried the old dread. There was scent-marking and fighting until pairs were established. There were springtails in the soil of the cricket ground, a million or more, moulting and feeding and moving up to the light, and amongst them a female springtail laid the last eggs of her life. The goldcrests fed busily deep in the branches of the churchyard yew. Richard and Cathy were seen up on the moor with Mr Wilson’s dog, walking much further than Nelson was used to. He didn’t seem to mind. Richard was explaining to Cathy why it wasn’t such a bad idea for them to try and make a go of a relationship. They were financially independent; they’d been together before and there was something then that had worked and something they still had now; they were both from the village, and belonged here, and they had an understanding of the place they could share. He’d actually numbered these points, and was counting them off on his fingers. He seemed to have been talking for a while. She stopped him. Richard, she said. This isn’t like putting in a tender for a contract. You do know that, don’t you? He started to laugh and then realised she wasn’t joking and he didn’t know where to look. He was still bending back his little finger to indicate the fifth point. It was starting to hurt but he couldn’t let go.

At midnight there were fireworks in the next valley and tension in the village and no fires were set. It wasn’t until the next day that the old water-board buildings by Reservoir no. 7 were found smoking and charred. On the television there were pictures of a public search for another missing teenage girl, the volunteers strung out in a line across a hillside, their heads bowed. The pantomime was Cinderella . It was known that rehearsals had been late and under-attended, and that Susanna had needed to bring new people in at the last minute, and there was as much anxiety in the audience as there was amongst the cast. When Olivia Hunter stepped forward to begin the narration the main lights were left on and there was still furniture being shifted around. She had to be prompted twice in the first few minutes, but was so sprightly with the pleasure of being on stage that no one seemed to mind. Be careful, she announced, bursting with anticipation, here comes the Wicked Stepmother now! There was a long pause and then Les Thompson shuffled on to the stage, stubbled and made-up and minus his false teeth, unable even to remember his first line. The audience took a long time to settle enough for the prompt to be heard. No one had known he would be in the role, and his enjoyment of playing it, wandering in and out of scenes with no concession to the script, made everyone’s night. Ruth Fowler and Susanna, who had stepped late into the roles of the Ugly Sisters and worked a long time on their bawdy repartee, were entirely upstaged, and at the end of the show Les was surrounded by people wanting their picture taken with him. At the party afterwards Gordon Jackson got talking to Olivia, and congratulated her for keeping calm amongst all the chaos. He told her it took a lot of maturity to hold it together like that. He reached out without thinking and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

At the allotments there was little to harvest besides some hardened winter greens: thick-veined spinach leaves, small handfuls of mustard, a yellowing mulch of kale. The frosts had been hard. In the beech wood the foxes were quiet. The earths had been prepared and were warm and well lined, and the vixens stayed down there in the dark. The old Tucker house was refurbished as a holiday cottage, rewired and replastered, the woodwork painted a pale grey-green. The front garden was landscaped for low maintenance. There were planters with gravel and mixed grasses, and a picnic bench with a patio heater. In the beech wood the trees were traced with snow, the sunlight filtering through and shaking it loose. The river wedged branches beneath the packhorse bridge and poured fiercely over the weir. The missing girl’s father was questioned about the fires again, and arrested. At the heronry the nests were rebuilt. On Shrove Tuesday Mr Wilson asked Cathy to come round for pancakes. She had to help him lift the cast-iron frying pan on to the hob, but after that he insisted she sit at the table and be served. The first pancake caught and was thrown on the floor for Nelson. The second one was fine, but Nelson made such a fuss that Mr Wilson put that one on the floor as well. You must think me a soft touch, he said, and she didn’t deny it. She quartered the lemons on the chopping board while Mr Wilson made a stack of pancakes and kept them warm in the oven, and when he was done they sat and ate them together. Jean made a very good pancake, he said. Frilly at the edges. You know the way? Cathy nodded, and Nelson came and rested his head in her lap, and she said she’d never known how to get them like that. When they’d eaten they walked up together towards the village with Nelson. For a change they stayed on the main street and headed towards the allotments and the beech wood. At the square Mr Wilson said he’d stop for a drink at the Gladstone and catch them on their way back, and Cathy asked if his hip was feeling okay. He told her it wasn’t too bad but he felt entitled not to go traipsing up the moors at this point in his life. As she laughed and turned to go he stooped slightly towards her and made a gesture which must once have been called doffing one’s cap. She waved in reply, and let Nelson pull on the lead towards the path through the beech wood and the visitor centre and the high breathless hills.

Cooper was seen outside the old butcher’s shop, half-kneeling, with his fist clenched against his chest. By the time Su got to the hospital he was already sitting up in bed. Just a scare, he said, hoarsely, and she told him very quietly that she’d give him an actual bloody scare if he ever did something like that again. The nettles grew up around the dead oak in Thompson’s yard, the timber stained white in the sun. A flock of fieldfares lifted from the elder trees on the bank behind the school, climbing out of the valley and heading north-east towards the reservoirs, the hills, the North Sea, Norway. Sally Fletcher persuaded Brian to let her keep hens in the old orchard, and asked Will Jackson to build her a coop. Will told her the hens would scratch up everywhere so to make sure the ground was safe, and she paid the Cooper twins to pick up what was left of the caravan. They filled six sacks with lumps of plastic and the cottony shreds of old cigarette butts. Martin saw Les Thompson at the new supermarket in town, standing at the checkouts with a basket of shopping. He hadn’t seen him there before. When Les noticed the price on a litre of milk he asked the young woman to tell him out loud. He looked at her for a long moment and then put his wallet back in his pocket and walked away, leaving his shopping half-packed and the young woman confused. A pale light moved slowly across the moor, catching in the flooded cloughs and ditches and sharpening for a moment before the clouds slid closed overhead.

In April the first swallows were seen, sweeping low over the pastures in the early evening and taking the insects which rose with the dew. And still the sound of a helicopter clattering by was never just the sound of a helicopter but everything that sound had one night meant. Gordon took on some timber work up at the Hunter place, and was seen by his van talking to Olivia on his breaks. Survey stakes went up along the edge of the woodland by the Stone Sisters, and Cooper found a new planning application from a quarry firm. Richard’s mother’s house went on the market and was sold within a month, and Richard took a weekend to clear it out before dropping the keys at the solicitor’s. He thought about calling in to see Cathy on his way to town, but in the end he drove straight past the end of her lane and down towards the quarry and the woods and the bend in the river by the main road. The new bracken shoots were curled tight, waiting for the lengthening days. Mr Wilson died, after a short illness, and Jane Hughes was invited back to conduct the funeral. Cathy took Nelson in to live with her.