The Pier Falls: And Other Stories

THE WEIR

He pops the catch and lifts the rusty boot. Quivering with excitement the dogs burst from the back of the car, squirm under the lowest bar of the fence and bolt across the field in great arcing bounds. Leo and Fran, big chocolate-and-white pointers. He drops the chewed and ragged tennis ball into one jacket pocket, the coiled leather leads into the other, grabs the tatty, gripless tennis racket and slams the boot. He beeps the lock and climbs the stile.

Grass stretches into the distance. Twenty acres. There are no sheep this year so half a million buttercups hover just above the ground. He can smell the May blossom, the same chemicals in semen and corpses so he read the other day. Wytham Woods rise beyond the meadow to his left. Up there among the trees is the Singing Way, pilgrims breaking into song as they passed My Lady’s Seat and looked across the silver flood of Port Meadow to the inns and spires of the city. One of those spring days that seem warm and cold at the same time. Enough blue to make a pair of sailor’s trousers. Cirrus clouds overhead. Ice crystals at 16,000 feet. A pied wagtail lands briefly on the path in front of him then hops back into the air and is carried away.

Leo races towards him and skids to a halt with Fran in pursuit. He barks and half prostrates himself, forelegs flat on the ground, hindquarters in the air. Throw the ball throw the ball throw the ball. He lobs it into the air, whacks it hard and both dogs launch themselves backwards, twisting in mid-air so that they land on all fours then run like racehorses in old paintings, the ball still up there, sliding round that big curve.

To his right the river is full from last week’s downpour, the surface purling midstream as the water sorts itself out below the weir. A buzzard circles above the scrubby wasteland on the far side. He treads carefully over the twisty poles of the cattle grid and feels, as he always does at this precise point, that he has crossed an invisible boundary which marks the limit of the city’s reach.

It’s now seven weeks since Maria walked out and he’s pleased at how well he’s coping. The dogs help, dragging him out on long walks like this. Having the time of their lives, probably. Plus the house is never empty. Knowing they’re downstairs when he wakes in the night and finds himself alone. He’s learning to cook for himself after twenty-six years: macaroni cheese; shepherd’s pie…And reading his way through the tower of books which have been glaring at him from the shelf above the TV for God knows how long: John Grisham, Philip Pullman, the one set in Afghanistan the author of which he can never remember…

Fran returns with the ball in her mouth. They do a little dance of dodge and feint. She drops it, he picks it up and whacks it away again.

If there are rough patches, that’s to be expected. Change gets harder, just as the body becomes less flexible. Today for example. The nagging feeling that his marriage is only the latest thing which has slipped away. The world shifting too fast in ways he doesn’t understand, values he’d grown up with become vaguely comic: being a gentleman; respecting authority; privacy; stoicism; reticence. When did holding a door open for a woman become an insult? Teenagers watching pornography on their phones.

He wonders if it all comes down to Timothy, the friction which ended the marriage, this longing for things to be as they were. Or whether, when you have a ready-made answer like that, you use it lazily for every question. The fact that it might be malicious is what makes it hardest to handle, their son wanting them to suffer. Three years without a postcard, an email, a phone call. The anger he felt when Maria said it would be better if he were dead. Her own child. He has dreams of a blurred postmark. Lhasa? Marrakesh? Stepping off the plane into sauna shimmer. Hostels, cafés, a local police chief, feet on the desk under a lazy ceiling fan. The photograph in his pocket getting more dog-eared and less readable by the day, the hope that his son is somewhere nearby, a needle in his arm, maybe, some sign that this was not his choice.

Fran returns yet again with the tennis ball. Leo is busy chasing something. So long as he doesn’t bring it back bloody and struggling. He hits the ball into the air. The satisfying boink of the taut strings, the sheer distance of it.

She isn’t with someone else, thank God. Unless she’s hiding it. Which wouldn’t be hard, him being blind to so many things.

There is movement at the edge of his field of vision. Someone is making their way along the gantry of the weir that runs between the farmland and the island. The lock-keeper, presumably, or someone from the Environment Agency. But when they turn he sees a bright red rucksack. It is a woman. She must have lost her way because as far as he knows you can only reach the weir via the unmetalled track that descends from the hard shoulder of the ring road. Black leggings, denim skirt, big tartan shirt, long straight blonde hair. Twenty, maybe twenty-five. She seems unsure of her footing and is supporting herself by holding on to the metal uprights and the rusted valves. It is not a good place to be unsteady on your feet.

Again Fran blocks the path in front of him, tail up, head down, panting, tennis ball between her paws.

“Not now.”

She whimpers. Please please. He picks it up, wallops it away and starts walking upriver towards the lock. Beneath the woman’s feet the whole river is being forced through a single open gate, a fat silver spout curving into the churn of surf. The roar could be a house on fire. She comes to a halt in the very centre of the weir. She is clearly in some kind of trouble. Sudden dizziness, maybe, or that phobia people get on bridges. He can imagine standing there and looking down and being spooked by that torrent. She needs help. He wants to call out to her, reassure her that he will be with her in a few minutes, but there is no way she will be able to hear him at this distance and over that noise. He starts to run. If he remembers correctly there is only a chain to stop pedestrians crossing the lock. Presumably there is some kind of path through the trees. It will take him, what, two or three minutes?

Then he turns and sees her let go of the supports. She stands facing downriver and he realises that she is planning to jump. Understands, too, why she was staggering, because why else would you wear a rucksack if you were planning to do something like that? He feels sick at the thought. “No!” He waves his arms, but she does not turn her head.

She pitches gently forward.

It is both more and less real than anything he has ever seen. Time really does slow down. Her blonde hair rises like a candle flame. She seems completely relaxed, more like someone sleeping than someone falling.

She vanishes into the foam.

Everything is suddenly back to normal, the dandelions, the clouds, the buzzard. For a few seconds he wonders if he really saw it. But Leo is standing on the bank beside him, barking at the water, and he thinks how the woman has a name and a family and is dying right now, somewhere out there, trapped in the stopper, perhaps, being tumbled and battered in that big drum of water. He takes his phone out of his trouser pocket but his hands are trembling too much to dial a number. Then he sees it in the water, the briefest flash of red.

The phone is back in his pocket and his shoes are off. He does not remember doing this. It frightens him because he is not a good swimmer. He removes his jacket.

Red again midstream. Both dogs at the bank now, barking.

He jumps into the shallows. This is a stupid thing to do. Weed and sucking mud. He throws himself forward in a clumsy half-dive and the silty bottom reluctantly lets him go. The water is so cold his chest seizes and he cannot breathe. He gathers his energy and shouts the way he would shout if he were lifting a big weight. His ribs loosen.

It is nothing like the sea, it is nothing like a pool. The water sweeps him sideways. He can no longer touch the bottom with his feet. He realises how big the river is now that he is inside it, how strong, how lost the woman must be and how slim his chances are of finding her. He ducks under the surface but the water is the cloudy green of Victorian bottle glass and he can see for no more than a couple of feet at most. He lifts his head out of the water and sees how swiftly he is being carried downriver. The banks are hidden now behind half-submerged bushes and trapped flotsam, the stream narrowing and picking up speed to squeeze under the bridge. Below the bridge is the weir stream for the next lock. He is suddenly very alone and very frightened, an idiot who has jumped into a swollen river. His sodden clothes are shockingly heavy and it is becoming increasingly hard to keep his head above water.

She looms out of the bubbling green and claws at his face.

Mostly he is angry that she should attack him when he is risking his life to save her. Memories of lifesaving classes at school, Mr. Schiller with his speech impediment, pyjama bottoms knotted at the ankles. He yanks her round so she’s facing away from him. Cup a hand under the chin, that was it. Her arms and legs are pedalling hard. Silver bubbles pour from her nose. He can’t keep her mouth above the surface. The rucksack. Christ. He’d forgotten. He doesn’t have the strength but the idea of giving up now is unbearable. He gulps as much air as he can then ducks under. They sink together, the big red ballast pulling them down. He turns her round and grabs the belt. Which sort of buckle is it? Sudden darkness overhead. The bridge. They’re moving fast. He needs a knife. He doesn’t have a knife. Yank, squeeze, twist. She is punching him and grabbing his hair but whether she is trying to get to the surface or stop him undoing the rucksack he cannot tell. His lungs are crying out for air. Don’t breathe. A vicious scrabbling panic. His thoughts are becoming blurred, the brain starting to shut down.

Some fierce animal hunger for life wipes the woman from his mind. He kicks upwards—hang on, hang on—and bursts into sunlight. He heaves down a lungful of air and dirty water, chokes and coughs it out then sucks down another lungful, then a third. She is down there somewhere, dead, dying. He can hear the dogs barking nearby.

She surfaces suddenly beside him, head above the water now. No rucksack. He must have got it off. Her eyes are closed and she’s not moving. He grabs her hair this time. No time for niceties. She doesn’t respond. Maybe he is dragging a corpse. He swims with one arm and breaststroke legs. Way past the bridge now. Thirty metres until the weir stream peels off and sucks them in. He swims hard in the opposite direction. He grabs the end of a thorny branch. It snaps. He grabs another. It holds. They swing towards the bank and slow down as they move out of the main current. The bottom, he can feel it, thank God. Sludge and roots. He heaves her shoulders upright so she’s sitting in the shallow water. A reedy foot of bank between two brambles. The dogs stand side by side watching them. Is she breathing? He can’t tell.

One last effort. He gets a firmer purchase under his feet and hoists her onto the grass. So heavy for such a tiny thing. He climbs out over her and drags her away from the edge. Her flopping head smacks the ground as he rolls her onto her front. Recovery position, left knee up, left elbow up.

He collapses onto all fours beside her, breathing hard. He is seeing stars, pinpricks of light swarming across his picture of the world. Absurd quiet all around. Two red admirals. An ant walks over his finger.

Her skin is grey-blue. Her earrings are little chains of turquoise beads with silver spacers, hippyish, the kind he hasn’t seen in a long time. An image of her looking into a lacquer box on the bedside table, choosing what to wear on her last day. Would you think about that kind of thing? Her leggings have been ripped and there is a bloody gash down her thigh. His own hand is bleeding. Those thorns? He can’t see her chest moving. He takes hold of her wrist to check her pulse and it’s like pressing a button. She vomits up a pint of river water and something that looks like breakfast cereal. She coughs violently, brings up more sick then rolls onto her back. Her eyes are still closed, her hair matted and tangled.

He takes his phone out. A single air bubble is trapped under the waterlogged screen like a ball bearing in a child’s puzzle. Damn. The car is sixty metres away, his shoes and jacket three hundred. He can’t leave her alone. The keys are in his pocket, though. “Come on.” He squats and slips his hands under her armpits. Fireman’s lift. He carries her towards the car. Thistles and sheep shit under his socks. Desperate to have the place to himself most days but today there is no one. Sod’s Law. He’s freezing. And, unlike her, he’s got a decent layer of fat on him. Hope to goodness the dogs haven’t gone under a van trying to cross the road. Up the steps and through the kissing gate which clangs shut behind them. Fran and Leo are standing by the car, waiting patiently, eerily human. He shifts her centre of gravity so he can extract the key from his sodden pocket. He beeps the lock and whisks the rug out with one hand before the dogs leap on top of it.

He props her against the car and wraps the rug around her. Mud and hair and dog stink. Her whole body is shivering. He opens the passenger door and lowers her in, banging her head a second time. “Let’s get you to a hospital.” She makes a noise which might or might not be a word. Seat belt. Don’t want to save her from drowning then break her neck in an accident.

He starts the ignition and twists the heater to max. A burst of Garth Brooks till he hits the off button. The air still warm from the journey down, thankfully. Something almost fun about it now, dripping wet, driving in his socks, the glow of post-heroics.

Coming back down the Woodstock Road she says something.

“I didn’t catch that.”

Slurred words, head lolling. “Not the hospital.”

“Well, I’m not going to leave you by the side of the road.”

She reaches out and puts her hand on his forearm and it is the first time anyone has touched him with anything approaching tenderness in years. It is this moment which will come back later when he asks himself why he did something so stupid.

“Please.”

It’s like the shoes. He doesn’t turn along the Marston Ferry Road towards the hospital. He is taking her home. The decision has already been taken. Or is he just looking for an excuse?

He parks outside the house and leaves the engine running and there is a moment of balance when the day could roll either way, but when he imagines walking her into A&E and handing her to a nurse and watching her vanish through those automated doors he feels something painful for which he doesn’t have a name. He twists the key and takes it out of the ignition. He lets the dogs out, unclips her seat belt, lifts her onto her feet then into his arms.

“I don’t want…”

“It’s not the hospital.” He kicks the door shut.

Having juggled her sideways down the hall he lays her on the sofa where she curls up like a dormouse. The shivering has become shaking. He drags the old bar fire from the bottom of the coat cupboard. Central heating on, thermostat to 22. He realises, only now, that he will need to undress her if he is going to get her warm and dry. Maria’s voice in his head. How did this not occur to you? Fran is in the spare armchair. He can hear Leo eating biscuits from the clangy metal bowl in the kitchen. He goes upstairs. Tracksuit bottoms, sweatshirt, woolly socks, towel.

“I’m getting you into dry clothes.” She does not respond. He unlaces her black boots. The smell of burning dust as the elements heat up and turn orange. A flash of Timothy when he was tiny. Buckles and poppers and Velcro. Socks off.

He unbuttons her denim skirt, puts a hand under her hips, lifts her an inch or two off the rug, pulls it out then rolls down her torn black leggings. His hand briefly pressed to her flesh, the weight of her. Scrawny thighs and damp white knickers with pink roses on. A tiny rose of pink ribbon on the waistband. A little curl of pubic hair coming out from under the hem. That long bloody cut on goose-pimpled skin. Memories of being this close to other young bodies. Maria, Jane Taylor, Mona Kerr, Jamila, a woman at a party in Dalston whose name went long ago but whose laugh and whose perfect plump stomach come back to him in dreams every now and then. The thrill of unwrapping someone for the first time.

He starts to take her sodden knickers off but it frightens him, what he might feel, what she might think. He leaves them on and pats her dry as best he can. Blood on the towel. He pushes the bar fire back a little and slips the tracksuit trousers on, one leg at a time. They are ridiculously baggy. He sits her up and slips his socks over her tiny feet.

“Where am I?”

He slides her tartan shirt off and shows her the sweatshirt. “You need to put this on.”

She’s gone again, fuzzy, uncompliant. Bloody hell. He lifts her T-shirt. No bra. The fear that someone is going to materialise at the window or walk through the door. Skinny ribs and small breasts. Such pale skin. He leans forward to pull the T-shirt over her head and down her arms, trying to touch her as little as possible. He sits back and can’t stop himself. He looks at her, naked from the waist up, for thirty seconds maybe, unable to take his eyes away. To his surprise he is on the verge of tears. So many lost things. He cloaks her with the towel, gently rubbing her arms and back and shoulders. Like Timothy after a bath. More gently still he presses the towel to her chest and stomach. The soft give of her breasts under his hand. He puts the towel aside and slips the sweatshirt over her head. Right arm, left arm. He lifts her briefly to remove the dog rug and flip the wet cushions over.

Leo comes into the room and stands watching them, unsettled, on guard, never quite relaxed with new people.

He moves behind the sofa so he can dry her hair while holding her head steady against his stomach. Timothy again. Feelings that shouldn’t be sharing the same space in his head. He has never felt so old. He puts the towel down. “I’ll get you a hot drink.” She flops sideways and curls up again. She’s shaking less. Or is that wishful thinking?

Only when he tries to put the kettle on does he become aware of how bone-cold he is himself. A slab of ice is stacked against his spine. He feels feverish. It’s a relief to have this single, simple sensation consume him. He has to hold on to the banister on the way upstairs. He drops his clothes on the bathroom floor. He should have a hot shower but he can’t leave her on her own down there. He dries himself with a new towel from the airing cupboard and pulls on his jeans, a shirt, the big jumper Maria bought for him in Oslo. Walking socks then a scarf from the newel post. That cold slab still sitting at his core.

The kettle rumbles to a climax and clicks off. Instant coffee for speed, with a spoonful of sugar. He sits her up and she helps a little this time. “Hold this.” She puts her hands around the mug at least and balances it on her knees.

He says, “You’re all right now,” which sounds ridiculous as soon as he says it, because it might be a disaster, finding yourself alive after putting yourself through all that. A memory of the water, the sheer mass and speed of it. How close he came.

She leans her head back, eyes closed, and breathes out. She’s ugly almost. The blonde hair had fooled him. Big features, wonky nose. “Fuck,” she says. “Fucking fuck.”

He’s never been comfortable with people swearing. “My name’s Ian.”

She doesn’t offer her own.

“Why didn’t you want to go to hospital?”

She lifts her head and opens her eyes and looks at the tracksuit trousers, the sweatshirt, the socks. “What did you do to me?”

“I put you into dry clothes.”

“Did you rape me?”

He is too surprised to think of an answer.

“You took my clothes off.” She’s panicking. “Where are my clothes?”

A rush of terror. The thoughts that came into his head undressing her. Was she just pretending to be unconscious? “You jumped into the river.”

She is suddenly calm again. “Yeh. I do that kind of thing.” She laughs a humourless laugh.

His heart is hammering. “But you’re alive.”

“They stick needles into you.” She sounds drunk. He wonders if she took pills before going to the river. Belt and braces. “They cover you in wires, like a monkey in a lab. They find out what you’re thinking.”

“Your clothes are in the kitchen.” The adrenaline is ebbing a little. “I’ll dry them for you.”

“The small print on that form no one reads?” She drinks the sugary coffee. “They can do anything.”

Were they really in the Thames less than half an hour ago?

“I fuck everything up. It’s my thing.”

The sour self-pity in her voice, daring him to reach out and have his hand slapped away. He’s disappointed to realise that he doesn’t like her very much. “Sorry I saved you.” It’s meant to sound wry and funny, but he’s shocked by how close it comes to what he’s feeling.

“I’m so fucking cold.”

He fetches her a scarf left years ago by some forgetful dinner guest. “Why did you do it?”

“Like you’d understand.”

“Try me.”

“You’re just being nice.” She does quote marks with her fingers, like she’s fifteen. “No one actually cares.”

He bites his lip. He’s surprised at how angry he is. Then he can’t stop himself. “You don’t throw a life away.” It’s Timothy he’s thinking about, of course, the nights when he never came home, those God-awful, semi-homeless friends, the smell of them. “Someone cares. Your parents, your brother, your sister, your friends, your neighbours, your doctor, the teachers you had at school, at college, even if it’s only the poor bastard who has to pull your body out of the river…” He’s choking up a little. He’s never thought of it this way, that lives are held in common, that we lose a little something of ourselves with every death. Or is it just the desperate hope that some frail strand still connects him to his son, the tiny tug of which might one day bring him home?

“Whoa there.” She holds up her hand in a comedy stop gesture but without smiling. “I don’t need a sermon.”

“I nearly died.” He wants very much to have the house to himself again. “I’m not asking you for thanks, but the least you can do is to take this seriously.”

She crumples and starts to cry. Are they real tears? He’s not sure.

“I should take you to hospital. Someone needs to sort out that cut on your leg.”

“I told you. I’m really, really frightened of hospitals.” This feels like the truth.

“Because…?”

“I told you. They get inside your mind.” She puts her hand against her head as if her thoughts are precious or painful. She is still shivering.

It seems obvious now, the possibility that she’s mentally ill. He feels like an idiot for not having thought about it before. She was trying to kill herself. It’s not like the signs were hidden. He has no idea what to say. He has never known anyone who is mentally ill.

She says, very quietly, as if she might be overheard, “Everything talks.” She sounds younger now. Twelve? Ten? Eight years old?

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

“Trees, walls, that clock, this wood.” She touches the table and for a second she really does look as if she’s listening. “Your dogs.”

She’s so sure of herself that he very nearly asks her what the dogs are saying.

“Stones just repeat themselves,” she says, “over and over. I’m a stone, I’m a stone…It’s raining, it’s raining…Walls gossip all the time. The stuff they’ve had to listen to over the years. If you go into a graveyard you can hear the dead talking to one another underground.”

She’s crazy, obviously, but she doesn’t sound crazy. She sounds like a sane person who lives in a different world to this one.

She cocks her head slightly, the way Leo and Fran do when they catch an interesting smell. She says, “This house is not happy,” which unnerves him more than it should. “I used to think everyone could hear these things. Then I realised that it was only me.” She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. “Some days the only thing I want is silence.”

He asks if she has any family. He needs to find someone else who can be responsible, someone who can take her off his hands.

“My brother fucked off to Wales. My dad’s got emphysema.”

“Your mum?”

“She’s got a shitload of her own stuff to deal with.”

“You haven’t got a boyfriend, a husband…?”

“Yeh, right.” Another humourless laugh.

He thinks what hard work she must be, and wonders how many times she’s tried something like this.

“I don’t want to be here.” She’s crying again.

He assumes at first that she is referring to his house and he’s relieved. Then he realises what she means and he’s scared of what she might do. Fran is out of the armchair, both dogs pacing now, the way they do during storms. He says, “I need a hot drink,” and leaves the room, to give himself space to think.

He puts the kettle on and leans against the sink. The garden is a mess. A plank is missing from the fence that separates him from the angry Turkish couple next door. Three footballs of unknown provenance are dying slowly in the spring grass which is already too long to mow. He should gravel the whole thing over, get a couple of hardy plants in big tubs, but he hasn’t got round to it, the way he hasn’t got round to so many things.

“Why are we still married?” Maria had asked.

Companionship? The comfort of sharing your life with someone who knew you better than anyone else in the world?

“I’m afraid of being alone,” she’d said. “Isn’t that a terrible reason for staying with someone?”

It seemed like a pretty good reason to him.

He’s still freezing on the inside. He squats with his back against the radiator. Now he is out of her presence he can see things more clearly. He should have listened to the voice of reason and taken her straight to hospital. He quietly retrieves the cordless from the hall table, closes the kitchen door and dials 999. Ten minutes, the woman says. He feels warmer suddenly. In a quarter of an hour he can put something in the microwave, bring the duvet down, dig out a box set.

He makes the coffee and returns to the living room. She’s hugging the green seashell cushion. “You were a long time.”

“Sorry.”

She looks at him, hard. “Did you ring someone?”

Does he answer too quickly or too slowly?

“Fucking hell. Who did you ring?”

“Look…” He puts the coffee down and sits on the arm of Fran’s chair.

“You rang for a fucking ambulance, didn’t you? You rang for a fucking ambulance. Jesus. All that being-interested bollocks. Fuck you.”

He grabs her arm as she pushes past. “Get your fucking hands off me.”

She’s in the hall.

“Wait. You need shoes.”

She fumbles with the lock, the door opens and she runs out. He sees the car before she does. The driver hits the brakes hard, the bonnet goes down and the tail rises. A squeal of hard rubber on gritty tarmac that will leave two black marks for weeks afterwards. She turns towards the car, holding up her hands like Moses parting the Red Sea, and it comes to a halt only inches from her legs, aslant, tyres smoking, like she’s a superhero and this is her power. Then she’s gone, down Asham Way in his socks.

The driver gets out. “What the fuck are you playing at? What did you do to her?”

The man doesn’t seem real enough to warrant a reply. Nothing seems real. He goes back inside where the dogs are waiting for him and reaches the sofa just before his knees go weak with the shock and he is forced to sit down. Both coffees have been knocked over and are soaking into the carpet. The heat from the bar fire stings his lower legs. Leo slides his drooly jaw over the arm of the chair and he lays his hand flat along the dog’s warm flank to calm himself.

He stares at the tatty rainbow of VCR cases, the twelve-year-old Banbury half-marathon medal, the framed photo of Timothy at Wicksteed Park, his rare smile making up for the sun flare bleaching the right-hand side of the picture. A row of dog-eared postcards stand along the mantelpiece — the beach at Barmouth, King Kong on the Empire State Building, the Bruegel painting with the hunters. There is still a gap where Maria’s porcelain chimney sweep used to sit.

He forgets about the ambulance. The male paramedic seems vaguely pissed off by the wasted journey and not quite convinced by his story. He shows them the pile of wet clothes on the kitchen floor. “I saved someone’s life.”

“Hey, buddy, we’re all having a tough day.” The man looks not much older than a student.

The woman gives him a tight little smile which might or might not be an embarrassed apology on her sour colleague’s behalf. She is plump and ginger, her eyebrows almost white.

The man radios in a description of the woman. “Nope. Nothing as helpful as a name.”

Perhaps he’s asking too much. They save lives every day. How often does anyone thank them?

They leave and he returns to the sofa. His body does not feel cold as such, just restless and wrong and unwell. He picks up the seashell cushion and hugs it. He can hear the deep, dull sluice of his blood in his ears and behind it, far away, that faint high whine, not really a noise at all, the background radiation of the mind.

You have to let him find his own way. When he hits the buffers he’ll know where to come.

Or maybe he’ll just break into a hundred pieces.

He sits and listens.

I’m a stone, I’m a stone, I’m a stone.

He pictures her heading straight back to the river. He checks the newspapers, wanting reassurance that his failure wasn’t catastrophic. He looks forward to being congratulated at the office for his heroics then realises that it will work only if someone else tells the story and he downplays his involvement. Anyone would have done the same thing. In any case, the heroics aren’t important. Something else happened which he can’t articulate, and which he might not risk sharing if he could.

Maria comes round to remove more of her belongings. He doesn’t tell her about the incident. She is buoyant, or acts buoyancy with complete conviction. She says, “I’m worried about you,” though how — or even whether — this is meant to help he’s not sure.

It’s true that the house is getting messier and dirtier but he can’t be bothered to hoover and sweep and sponge and tidy. Who, in any case, does he need to impress? He senses the beginning of a slippery slope beneath his feet but the tingle of fear is not enough to goad him into action.

It becomes obvious not just that he is depressed but that he has been depressed for a long time, his low mood so constant that it remained invisible, like a lobster in a boiling pot, claws scrabbling at the metal rim.

He wakes in the middle of the night gasping for air. That cloudy green water. Sometimes it is the woman sinking into the darkness below him, sometimes it is Timothy. Sometimes he is crossing the gantry himself with a rucksack full of stones when he trips and falls into the foam while Maria stands on the bank with the dogs and does nothing. Occasionally he lets himself fall willingly and feels a moment of easeful bliss mid-air before he realises what is going to happen to him under the water, and this is the most frightening dream of all.

She turns up at the front door on a Saturday afternoon three weeks later. He doesn’t realise who she is at first. She’s dressed for the office. Cream blouse, charcoal jacket and trousers, hair scraped back.

“I came to get my clothes.” It is the surliness he recognises first. “If you’ve still got them.”

He can’t conceal his joy. “I’m glad you’re OK.”

She nods carefully as if she can think of no reason why she shouldn’t be OK. Maybe trying to take your own life is not something you want reminding of. She waits outside the door while he fetches the bag.

“You washed them. Wow.”

“As opposed to leaving them wet all this time.”

“I guess.” There is no mention of his own sweatshirt and tracksuit trousers and socks. “Cheers anyway.”

“You never told me your name.” He doesn’t want her to leave, not yet.

She pauses and says, “Kelly,” with just enough wariness for him to wonder whether she has pulled it out of thin air.

He had forgotten about the voices. “Do you want a cup of coffee?”

“That’s kind of weird.”

“Not here. In a café, maybe.” As if she really would be at risk coming into the house.

“I’ve got to get going.”

“I have a son.” He doesn’t talk about Timothy to anyone. “I haven’t heard from him for three years. I haven’t seen him for seven.”

“And…?” Her expression doesn’t change.

“I don’t know if he’s alive or dead.”

She clearly has a silent discussion with herself for a few seconds then nods. “Ten minutes, all right? But don’t go all strange on me.”

She is prickly company on the walk to Starbucks and not much easier over a cup of tea and a Danish pastry. He tells her about Maria leaving. She tells him how she works for the Parking and Permits Office at the council. He tells her about Timothy. She tells him about her father going into the John Radcliffe. Neither of them mentions what happened in the river. Ten minutes becomes half an hour. Reluctantly she gives him her mobile number before she leaves but, to his surprise, it is she who sends him a text the following week saying, “I suppose you want a coffee.”

“Friends” is the wrong word. She’s twenty-four, he’s fifty-three. Maybe there isn’t a right word. On a couple of occasions they are seen by acquaintances or colleagues who look away as if he is engaged in some kind of moral turpitude. She finds it funny so he decides to find it funny.

She never does thank him for saving her, and slowly he realises that thanks is not what he wants or needs. She tells him about her family, for which her own description, “fucked up,” is something of an understatement, her antagonistic relationship with the medical profession, her patchy employment record, the law degree she never finished, the crappy boyfriends she chose because their low opinion of her chimed with her own opinion of herself, the kind boyfriends whose sympathy and patience made them insufferable. She talks about the voices and the changing drug regimes which keep them at bay for a while. She tells him how they torment her but how flat the world seems when she can’t hear them.

Twelve years. Once a fortnight or thereabouts. He tells her about the divorce and Maria’s remarriage to a man nine years her junior, about a series of internet dates which range from the bizarre to the slightly sordid to the very nearly but not quite right. He tells her about the melanoma on his back which he discovers late and which scares the living daylights out of him for the best part of six months.

She never passes judgement or tries to cheer him up. It irritates him at first but he begins to understand that both of these things are ways of steering someone away from the stuff you don’t want to hear. She listens better than anyone he knows. Or maybe it’s just that she doesn’t interrupt. And maybe that’s enough.

She rotates between Danish pastry, almond croissant and millionaire’s shortbread. The tea is a constant. Him paying ditto. For a couple of months they have to relocate to the café at the Warneford Hospital when she’s going through what she refers to as “a particularly shitty patch.” Sometimes she is unforthcoming and ill-tempered. Sometimes they simply sit in one another’s company like an old married couple or two cows in a pasture. Companionship, though not in a way he’d pictured it. There are periods when she feels suicidal, though she seems calmer for having discussed her plans in gruesome detail and she always gets back in touch after a week or two.

He still wonders sometimes if Kelly is her real name.

Four years after he fishes her from the river Timothy comes home, older and thinner and bearded, with everything he owns squeezed into a single kitbag. His relief rapidly gives way to the disappointed realisation that his son is not greatly different from the young man who went away all those years ago, and he has returned not to heal wounds and build bridges but because there has been a fire at a house he was sitting over the winter for a wealthy couple in Majorca, the details of which are clearly more complicated than his version of the story suggests. He is alternately distant and manipulative and, unexpectedly, it is Maria who suffers most, feeding him and buying him new clothes and letting him stay in their spare room until her new husband delivers the inevitable ultimatum. She loans him a thousand pounds for a deposit on a flat and the first month’s rent and three days later he’s gone.

“Wow,” says Kelly.

“All those years, I imagined this Hollywood homecoming. Him being sorry, us being overjoyed. And now I know it’s never going to happen.”

“And that feels…?”

“Like being kicked in the stomach every time I think about it.”

They sit quietly.

He says, “I’m going to do the garden. I’m sick of looking out onto a piece of wasteland.”

He does the garden. He cuts the grass. He lays gravel over black plastic. Tubs, a couple of New Zealand ferns, a bench. He mends the fence and creosotes it. He buys a bird table and puts out seeds and crusts and little chunks of fat. And when he thinks about Timothy it doesn’t hurt so much.

Leo dies. He is fifteen. Fran takes to her basket and is dead within the month. She, too, is fifteen. Liver cancer, the vet says, though he knows it’s heartbreak. They’ve had good, long lives. And in any case he has arthritis in both hips and walking them had become increasingly difficult.

He says, “I feel lonely.”

“Yeh?” She sips her tea.

He says, “I’m getting old.”

She says, “I guess you are.”

He says, “I’m frightened of dying,” though just saying it out loud like that takes some of the sting out of it.

She says, “I’ll come to your funeral.”

He says, “They’ll wonder who you are.”

She says, “I’m sure they will.”

He pictures her among the trees, twenty yards back from the mourners, his solid little recording angel.

He still dreams of the river, the thunder of the weir, the currents unfurling downstream. May blossom and cirrus clouds. He is no longer drowning. No one is drowning. Though they will all go down into the dark eventually. Him, Maria, Kelly, Timothy…And the last few minutes will be horrible but that’s OK, it really is, because nothing is wasted and the river will keep on flowing and there will be dandelions in spring and the buzzard will still be circling above the wasteland.