This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You

If It Keeps On Raining

Susworth

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This is how his days begin. If you really want to know. Standing in his doorway in the cold, wet morning light and pissing on the stony ground. Waking up and getting out of bed and walking across the rough wooden floor. Opening the door and pulling down the front of his pyjamas and the weight of a whole night’s piss pouring out on to the stony ground and winding down to the river which flows out to the sea. The relief of it. The long, sighing relief of it. He has to hold on to the doorframe to keep his balance.

He looks at the swirl and churn of the river. Boats passing, driftwood and debris. A drowned animal turning slowly in the current. Sometimes the people in the boats wave, but he doesn’t wave back. He didn’t ask them to come sweeping past like that while he’s having his morning piss. In their shining white boats with the chrome guard-rails and the tinted windows and the little swim-decks on the stern. As if they’d ever swim in this river. They can come past if they like but they shouldn’t expect him to wave. Not when his hands are full.

Sometimes there’s a man fishing on the other side of the river. It’s too far to see his face, so it’s hard to tell whether the man can see what he’s doing. But if he could he wouldn’t be embarrassed. This is his house now, and there’s nothing to stop him pissing on his own ground when he wakes up each day.

The boats mainly come past in the summer months, but the fisherman is there all year round. He brings a lot of accessories with him. He’s got two or three different rods, and rests to set them in, and a big metal case that he sits on with all sorts of trays and drawers and compartments, and he keeps getting up to open all the drawers and trays. As if he’s looking for something. As if he hasn’t got any kind of an ordered storage system. He has this long net trailing in the water, with the open end pegged down on the bank. He uses it to keep the fish in once he’s caught them. It’s not clear why. Maybe he likes to count them. Or maybe he likes the way they look when he empties them back into the river, the silver flashes pouring through the air, the way they wriggle and flap for a second as though they were trying to fly. Or it could be for the company.

And he’s got this other net, a big square net on the end of a long pole. If he gets fed up with all the rods and reels and maggots and not being able to find what he’s looking for in those drawers, he could just sit on the edge of the bank and sweep it through the river until he comes up with something. Like a child at the seaside. Like a little boy with one of those coloured nets on the end of a bamboo cane.

Like a little boy whose dad was showing him how to use one of those nets, and lost it. At the seaside. When they were out on a jetty, and the boy’s dad was sweeping the net back and forth through the clear salt-water, and the boy was pulling at his arm to say: Let me try let me have a go, and the man dropped it in the water somehow. The little boy wanted him to jump in and get it, and his father had to say: I’m sorry I can’t. And the little boy wanted him to buy another one and the man had to say, again: I’m sorry I can’t. The boy started crying and there wasn’t much the man could do about it. He could have picked him up.

The way these things come into his head, sometimes. Standing there in the morning, looking at someone fishing, pissing on the stony ground that slopes down to the river, thinking about nothing much and then a man losing his little boy’s net pops into his head from years back. This really was some years back now. The way he couldn’t buy a new net to make it better. The little boy with his red hair.

He stands there each morning and he looks at the river, the fields, the sky. He tries to estimate what the weather will do for the rest of the day. He makes some decisions about the work he’s going to do on the treehouse or the raft. He thinks about making breakfast. He thinks about going to look for more wood.

It’s hard to understand why the people on the boats wave, sometimes. Perhaps they feel strange being out in the middle of the water like that. They feel vulnerable or lonely and it helps if they wave. Or they think it’s just what they’re supposed to do. Maybe they say ahoy! when they pass another boat. Who knows. The men on the commercial boats never wave. There’s one that goes by about once a week, a gravel-barge, and he’s never seen them waving the whole time he’s been here, not at him or the man fishing or at any of the other boats. When it goes upstream it sits high on the water, its tall panelled sides beaten like a steel drum. But coming back down, fully loaded, it looks like a different boat, sunk low in the water, steady and slow, a man in a flat blue cap walking the wave-lapped gunwales and washing them down with a long-handled mop. And he wonders, often, what would happen if the man fell in, if he would prove to be a good swimmer, if the driver of the boat would be able to stop and pull him back on board. Or if the man would drown and wash on to the shore where this small piece of stony ground slopes down to the water.

He’s not sure what he would do if that were to happen. If he would step down towards the man, and pick him up. Or at least drag him clear of the river. He’s not sure if he’d be able to do it. Physically. Mentally. Maybe the right thing would be to wait for the proper authorities. Maybe his part could be to walk out along the road to the phone-box by the yacht club and do the necessary informing. They might come along and say: Thank you sir, you did the right thing. It was the right thing not to touch the body, well done. And take photos: of the stony ground, the body, the feet still paddling in the edge of the river. And people with the appropriate experience and accessories would come and pick him up, out of the water, and take him away.

They’d need the right accessories.

The other man on the boat wouldn’t be able to help. It’s a really big boat, he couldn’t just steer it over to the bank and moor up and come running over shouting: Where is he, where is he, is he okay? It wouldn’t be like that. He would have to continue his passage, steer the boat on to the nearest available pontoon and moor the boat securely, single-handed, and then come back to this location. And it’s possible that by then the proper authorities would have been and gone, and taken his mop-dangling friend with them.

He imagines the skipper at the wheel of his heavy-laden barge, looking back at the spot in the river where his friend had slipped in. It would be difficult. Two men doing a job like that, every day, they could become very close. They could develop a close understanding of each other. Up and down the same stretch, loading and unloading, tying and untying, not saying much to each other because the noise of the engine would make it difficult to hear and because anyway what would there be to say. But understanding each other with a look and a nod, and a way of standing or a way of holding themselves, they could become very close, they would know each other better than perhaps they know anyone else. And then one of them slips from the wet gunwale into the water and his friend can only turn and look, the water closing over him as if nothing had happened and the long-handled mop floating down the river, out to sea.

He thinks about this a lot. But, who knows. It doesn’t seem worth dwelling on. It seems an unlikely thing to need to consider, the proper procedure in such an event. But it’s not an entirely unlikely occurrence. It happens. It has happened. People fall in the water, and they disappear, and they reappear drowned. It’s not impossible. It’s a thing that can happen.

Perhaps that’s why the men on the barges don’t wave. Because they’re concentrating. They know about the things that can happen. They take the river seriously.

He watches them, when they pass, the man in the flat blue cap with the mop and the man at the wheel, and he wonders if they see him. If they see the man fishing, when he’s there, which is quite often, or if they see anything besides the river and the current and the weather and each other.

He imagines they keep quite a close watch on the weather, the two of them. We’ve always got half an eye on it, they’d probably say, if someone asked them, if they came into the yacht club one evening and someone bought them a drink and talked to them about working that great boat up and down the river. It has quite an effect on our operation.

He keeps a close watch on the weather as well, from his place on the riverbank. It changes quite slowly. He can see it happening in the distance: a break in the clouds, a veil of rain rolling in across the fields. Sometimes he thinks it would be interesting to keep a chart of it. Windspeeds, temperatures, total rainfall, that type of thing. But it would need certain equipment, certain know-how and measuring equipment, and he’s not sure where someone would come by that type of thing. Probably it would mean going into town.

But sometimes it can really take his breath away, how different this place can look, with a change in the weather. He can stand in the doorway, first thing in the morning, and all the rain from the day before has vanished and there are no clouds and it looks like maybe there never were any clouds and there never will be again, the sky is that clear and clean and huge, and everything that was grey before is fresh and bright like newly sawn wood. And then other times he can stand here and see nothing, the thick mist lifting up off the river and nothing visible besides the trees around his house. The river just a muffled sound of water rushing over the stony banks. The opposite bank completely lost, and no clue as to whether the fisherman is there or not with his rods and his accessories. The fisherman doesn’t seem the sort to let a damp day put him off his fishing, but there’s no way of knowing.

It’s frustrating, not being able to know. He’s a man who likes to know these things. What’s happening in his immediate surroundings. The lie of the land. Sometimes he’s even thought about walking round to the man’s spot to find out, to make sure. But it’s a long walk, and there are things he has to do with his time. It would be about six miles altogether, out along the road past the yacht club, into the village, past the post office, out by the farm to the new road bridge and then all the way back along the other bank.

And what would he say to him when he got there anyway. It would be awkward.

People call it the new road bridge, but it must be twenty or thirty years old.

It’s not just the weather that changes. It’s surprising, how new a day can look, how different the view can be when he stands there each morning having a piss on the stony ground. The height of the water, the colour of the sky, the feel of the air against his skin, the direction of the smoke drifting out from the cooling towers along the horizon, the number of leaves on the trees, the footprints of birds and small animals in the soft mud at the water’s edge, the colour of the river running by.

The speed of the water changes, that’s something else, with the height of the river. If it’s been raining a lot. The river draws itself up, the water churning brown with all the mud washed in off the fields, and the river rises up and races towards the sea, sweeping round bends and rushing over rocks or trees or sunken boats that sit and rest in its way, anything that thinks it can just rest where it is, the river rushes over and picks it up and carries it along, like loose soil and stones on the banks of outside bends, or trees with fragile roots, or a stack of pallets left too close to the water’s edge, it all gets swept along, like people in a crowd, like what happens in a football ground if there are too many people in not enough space and something happens to make everyone rush, if they all start to run and then no one person can stop or avoid it, they all move together and then what can anyone expect if there’s a dam been put up against all that momentum, if there’s a fence and someone saying stand back don’t run there’s enough room for everyone if you could spread out and stand back and just stop pushing.

When there’s not enough room. When there’s too many of them and someone puts up a fence and says stop pushing.

That’s what it’s like. The river. When it’s been raining too much. The momentum of it is huge and dangerous: it makes him think of a crowd of people being swept along and none of them can stop it and they get to a fence and someone says stop pushing. In a football ground. Everybody rushing into one space and there’s not enough room and no one can stop moving. And there’s a fence and someone standing behind the fence says: Stop pushing will you all please stop pushing.

It’s what comes to mind, when he sees the river like that.

And other times the river is quiet. After the rain has stopped. After a few days of the river raging past, all choked with mud and fury, it drops back down again; slows, slips away from the high carved banks and comes to what looks like a standstill. The sun in broken shards across its surface, like scraps of tinfoil thrown from a bridge by some children further upstream. It looks good enough to swim in, then. Not that he ever has. He’s never seen anyone swimming here. It doesn’t seem like a good idea.

*

So. This is how his days begin. If you really want to know. The morning creeps through the cracked windows of his house. He stands in the doorway, pissing on the stony ground, and he thinks about all these things. He looks at the river, and the sky, and the weather, and he thinks about his work for the day. He tries to allocate his priorities. The treehouse is almost finished, apart from the roof, but the raft is still a long way from being done.

The roof will be important.

He thinks about the people on the boats, and the man fishing, and children further upstream throwing things into the water. Throwing sticks and model boats, pieces of paper jammed into plastic bottles with screw-top lids. He imagines the bottles washing up on to his piece of land by chance, and he imagines unscrewing the lids and unrolling the pieces of paper. He thinks about the children, on the bridge, watching the model boats and the plastic bottles turning in the current. He imagines them shielding their eyes to catch a last glimpse. Two of them, a boy and a girl, the girl almost eleven now, the boy eight and a half. Red-haired, like their father. He imagines the girl turning away and saying: Come on, we should catch up with Mum now, and the boy saying: But I can still see mine, I can. Holding his small hands up to his eyes like binoculars.

And what would be written, on these pieces of paper?

The sky looks clear right across to the far field, a faint early sun shining off the river. But there’s a cold wind, and rain on the way.

Yellowed willow leaves blow across the stony ground and into the river, floating away like tiny boats heading out to sea.

And when it starts they won’t understand. They’ll put on coats and go outside, brandishing umbrellas against the violence of the sky. They’ll check the forecast and wait for the rain to stop so they can hang the washing outside. But it won’t stop. They should understand, but they won’t.

The treehouse is almost done. It was slow when he started; he didn’t really know what he was doing. He had to try a few different techniques before he could progress. There was less urgency then. There’s more now. It’s sort of imperative that he gets it finished soon. He’s used pallets mostly. They’re easy to get hold of, and if it looks a bit untidy then so what. At least it does the job.

Some of the others in the yacht club have noticed. They must have seen it from the road when they were driving past. They were laughing about it last time he went in. One of them asked if his name was Robinson and where was the rest of the Swiss family, and he almost did something then, like swinging a big glass ashtray into the side of his head or pushing him off his stool. But he didn’t. He’s more careful now. Accidents and things like that happen very easily, if he’s not careful. So he didn’t say a thing. They asked him lots of questions, like what was he building it for and why was it so high and what was he going to do when the winds picked up. He just said he had some wood lying around and he thought he’d give it a go, and when someone beat their chest and made a noise like Tarzan he got up and left. He didn’t even slam the door, and he didn’t go back when he heard them laugh.

Who knows why they call it the yacht club. None of them have got yachts.

The way they laughed. Some people deserve it, what will come.

It might not be the finest treehouse ever built, but it does what it needs to do. It’s difficult to get the details exactly right when you’re fifty foot up in the air. It’s hard enough getting all the wood up there in the first place. It would be easier with two people. Or quicker, at least. But it’s just him, now, so it takes some careful planning. Some forethought. And hard work.

He needs some roofing felt. Or an old tarpaulin, if he can’t find any felt. The roof will be important. He’ll need to take his time over the roof. And then there’s the raft, of course: he’s got the basic structure, the barrels and the pallets, but it needs more work on the lashings. It’s the structural integrity which will count, in the long run. It might need some kind of shelter as well, a little cabin or a frame for a tarpaulin. If it can take the weight.

The weather, when it changes, generally comes rolling in from the east. He can stand here and watch the clouds gathering, like an army forming up in the distance and preparing to march. Only when it comes in it’s more of a charge than a march, crashing into the river, with a noise like boxes of nails spilling on to a wooden floor. When it comes like that, furious and sudden, it usually passes by again soon enough, the air beaten clean in its wake.

But there will come a time when it doesn’t pass. When the clouds gather and don’t pass away, and rain pours endlessly upon the earth. And some will be prepared, and some will not.

He wonders what the man on the other side of the river does, when he’s not here. When he’s not fishing. Probably he’s retired and that’s why he can manage to be here so often. But he doesn’t look old enough to be retired, the way he walks, the weight he carries. Maybe he got grounds of ill health out of someone, out of whoever he was working for. The police, maybe, it’s quite possible to get grounds of ill health with the police, like mental distress for example, like if something were to happen, there are things that can happen if you work in the police, there are things that can give you stress or mental distress. For example things you might witness or be a part of.

Like being in front of a crowd, and saying: Stop pushing there’s enough room for everyone there’s no need to push. Like being the other side of a fence and saying: Get back stop pushing. And then later you see the rails, steel rails, bent and broken as easily as reeds.

It could be difficult for someone to do their job after something like that, to carry that with them and not be affected by the mental distress. Fishing might be an ideal respite: the order of it, the quietness, the solitude. No one shouting or pushing. No one asking for explanations. Just the river, easing on past. The sky, the changing light, the flash of silver from the emptying net when the fish pour safely back into the river.

It might not be that, of course. That would just be speculation. It might be nothing like that at all.

When it comes it will come suddenly, rushing across the earth like a vengeful crowd, an unturnable tide of seething fury. They will stand and watch, in bus shelters, in shop doorways, from the apparent safety of locked cars, and they will tut to themselves and say: Oh, isn’t the weather awful, and they will not know what they say.

And those two children on the bridge, throwing scraps of paper into the water, watching the water rise higher, perhaps they will have the sense to know what is happening, perhaps they will climb a tree and scan the horizon for a place of safety. Or perhaps in desperation they will take their umbrellas and turn them into boats, drop them into the river and ride them wherever the current goes. Or perhaps they’re too big for that now.

And whenever it looks as though the rain will stop, people will come out of their houses and peer up at the sky. They will lift their faces and let themselves be soaked while they stare at the thinning clouds, retreating to the safety of their houses, their upstairs bedrooms, their rooftops.

This will be in the first few weeks. Before they realise.

When it happens there will be people rushing by, the torrential current of the new river sweeping them quickly and terribly past. And he won’t be able to help them. But he’ll look, and if he sees two little ones hurtling along, two red-haired, wide-eyed little ones, he’ll reach out with a big net on the end of a long pole he’s got there ready, and he’ll pull them in, dry them off and wrap them up warm and cook them supper. And they can all stay together in the treehouse for as long as it takes, and if the children get bored there will be paper and crayons for them to draw with, write messages on, make little model boats from. And if they need to leave they’ll have the raft. They’ll be ready.

The sky is clear now, but the rain is coming. He can smell it.

Sometimes when he wakes it’s still only just getting light. It’s good, to stand there and watch the morning creep up on the world, the river a shadow in front of him, the cold air against his skin. It’s a privilege. Sometimes he can just stand there for a whole hour, watching the shapes and colours taking form out of the darkness. The streams and ditches all glinting like silver threads.

It is sometimes a very beautiful world. It’s a shame, what will happen.

It’s rare, though, to spend an hour watching the morning arrive like that. People don’t. It’s rare for people to even spend a moment enjoying their first piss of the day, the way he does. People are so busy. They’ll brush their teeth sitting on the toilet to save a few minutes. Eat breakfast standing up. They don’t have the time to watch the colour bleed into the world each day. They have meetings, schedules, documents. They don’t have time to listen to each other, to be patient with the difficulties of expression. They haven’t got the time to stand and watch a man say nothing except: I can’t explain, or: I don’t know how to say it. There are important things to be done, and a man who will spend a day standing at a window is not a man who can fit into such functional and fulfilling lives.

These are not people with ears to hear or eyes to see. These are not people who will understand, when it comes.

They will say they understand. They will say they know it might take a while to come to terms. But one day there will be shouting, there will be a cracked voice saying: I don’t have time to deal with all this. There will be the banging of objects against hard surfaces, a waving of arms, children standing and crying.

They don’t have time. They have busy and important things to do. They need somebody who can be there for them. They need somebody who can go back to work, even after that. Silence and stillness and contemplation aren’t going to pay the bills.

This is how his days begin, now. He asked me to tell you. He wakes up, he walks across the rough wooden floor, he holds on to the doorframe and he pisses on to the stony ground.

He looks at the height of the river and the colour of the sky. He looks up at the half-built treehouse, and the raft, and he plans his work for the day.

Soon it will rain. And people won’t understand. They’ll just put on their hats and coats, open their umbrellas, and rush out into the middle of whatever it is they need to do. Their busy days. Their successful and important lives.

He thought you should know.

Fleeing Complexity

Irby in the Marsh

The fire spread quicker than the little bastard was expecting.

Vessel

Halton Holegate

She took the tulips from his hands. Let me find something to put those in, she said. His hands were cold. She was surprised that he’d come and she wanted to cover her surprise. She laid the tulips on the kitchen counter and looked around for a pair of scissors. The flower-heads were still tightly closed. The petals were red, with a rim of yellow at the lips. The stems arched, the way that tulip stems always did. She would need a vase tall enough to bear their weight. She picked them up and put them down. She didn’t know where the scissors were. She opened a drawer. She stopped; she’d forgotten to invite him in. He must still be standing on the doorstep, in the snow. She felt the cold air blowing through from the hallway. By the time she got back to him he’d stepped forward as far as the runner and was standing with the door half-closed behind him. Oh come in, of course, come in, she said. You weren’t waiting to be asked were you? He smiled, and shrugged, and snow fell from his shoulders as he crooked up a leg to wrestle off a shoe. She watched. She wanted to brush the snow from him and take his coat, put a hand against his cold cheek. She waited.

She lit the burner and put the kettle on. She wondered what he was doing here. They had a conversation, of sorts, standing there in the kitchen.

‘You didn’t walk, in this weather?’

‘I got the bus. I walked from the end of the village. Where the bus turns.’

‘I’m surprised the bus was running.’

‘I wasn’t sure it would.’

‘And you didn’t think of calling first, to check I’d be here?’

‘I felt like taking a chance. I had the afternoon free.’

‘Well. It is nice to see you. It’s a nice surprise. Tea?’

‘Please. Milk, if you have any.’

She poured the boiling water into a pot and the milk into a jug. She put them on a tray with cups and saucers and the sugar bowl. She carried the tray through to the front room and they sat across from each other while the snow fell past the bright window and the tea steeped and swirled inside the pot.

‘These are nice cups.’

‘Aren’t they? We’ve had them a long time. They were a wedding present.’

‘Really? I don’t remember seeing them before.’

‘Well, no. James never really liked them.’

‘Ah.’

‘So they were put away.’

‘Yes.’

‘But now, I thought, I mean. You know.’

‘Are they French?’

‘Flemish, I think.’

‘They’re very nice.’

‘Yes.’

‘They sit well in your hand, don’t they? They have a nice weight.’

‘Yes. I suppose they do.’

‘I’m sorry. About James.’

‘Yes.’

‘You got my card?’

‘Oh. I don’t think so. No.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. The post hasn’t been what it was, has it?’

‘No, it really hasn’t. Excuse me.’

She’d forgotten to put the tulips in something. She hadn’t even got as far as cutting the stems. She wondered why he’d come today; what was different about today. She opened a drawer. She found the scissors on the side, by the draining board. She cut the twine and the tulips rolled out across the worktop. She looked for the little sachet of plant-food, but of course there wasn’t one. It was just like him, not to have said he was coming. James would never have done such a thing. But neither would James have thought to bring flowers. She cut the ends off the tulip stems, scooping them up and dropping them in the compost-bin. She remembered where the vases were, and that she couldn’t reach them. She didn’t want to clamber up on a stool to fetch one down. She asked him if he minded and he said not at all. Of course, he could reach the top cupboard without even stretching up on his toes. James would have needed to stretch, at least. It was a nice vase he chose. It was the right one: tall enough to support the arching stems, narrow enough to hold them closely, subtle enough not to detract from their colour.

‘Wherever did you find flowers, anyway?’

‘Oh, you know. You can still find these things, if you look.’

‘It’s a long time since I’ve seen cut flowers.’

‘You just have to know the right people, that’s all.’

‘And you do.’

‘I manage. You’re still getting milk?’

‘Straight from the farm.’

‘There hasn’t been any in town for a time.’

‘You don’t know the right people for milk, then?’

‘I didn’t. But I’ve got you now, haven’t I?’

She didn’t know about that. She didn’t know about that at all. It seemed somehow presumptuous. He must know there was a limited supply. She didn’t say anything, and he seemed to realise that he’d overstepped the mark because he moved towards the window and started talking about the garden, about how difficult it was to start things off with the snows getting later and later like this. She looked at the back of him while he spoke. How very upright he was, even at his age. He’d always been one of the standing-up-straight sort. Proper. It was certainly nice to see him again. But she didn’t know what he thought he was doing here. She carried the vase of tulips into the front room and set them on the coffee table, where they would best hold the light. He followed her through, slightly unexpectedly, and, standing a little too close, asked whether she’d ever considered taking in paying guests. She told him she didn’t really know about that.

‘You have the space though.’

‘Well, perhaps.’

‘I just rather wondered whether you couldn’t use the extra hands about the place. You know. I realise money’s not quite the thing at the moment, but there could be other forms of payment. Help, you know. Connections.’

‘I’m not sure, really.’

‘I do have a strong back, even now. There’s lots I could do.’

‘I have people who come and help, thank you. I manage.’

‘It’s just that, you know how it is. Things are rather difficult. In town. I thought we might be able to help each other out. At a difficult moment. For old times’ sake. A mutually beneficial arrangement, you know.’

‘I don’t think it’s very practical, actually.’

‘It’s completely practical!’

‘Excuse me.’

‘Oh, now.’

‘I think the bus may be leaving soon.’

‘Look, sorry.’

‘I wouldn’t want you to miss it.’

‘Will you think about it though? Will you be in touch?’

‘I think you’d better get on. If you’re to catch that bus.’

‘Mary, will you think about it?’

‘Thank you very much for the flowers. They really are lovely. I do appreciate the trouble you must have gone to in finding them.’

‘Mary, please.’

She moved into the hallway and held out his coat, waiting for him to put his shoes back on. She held it out between them, as though to forestall him. She couldn’t bear a scene. He opened the door and took his coat and ducked his head beneath the falling snow. He didn’t look at her as he left. She closed the door to keep the heat in. She watched him through the spyhole. The lens made him appear warped, smaller than he really was.

Which Reminded Her, Later

Grantham

And then there was the American woman he’d offered the spare room to that time, without question or thought or apparent consideration of the fact that Catherine might at least like to have been told. The first she’d known about it had been when she’d got home from work and found the woman standing there in the hallway, looking not at all surprised or uncomfortable, eating natural yoghurt straight from the pot and waiting for whatever it was that Catherine was going to say. Which had of course been nothing more than a faintly quizzical hello? Holding the front door open behind her, the rain blowing in from the garden and something like smugness or amusement lingering on the American woman’s face for just a moment before she finally acknowledged Catherine with a quietly unconcerned hello of her own. And carried on eating the yoghurt. And made no attempt to explain herself.

A strange-looking woman, she remembered. Very slim, and very pale, with rubbed-red eyes and mismatched layers of clothing; a long cotton dress, a man’s checked shirt, a college scarf, a beige raincoat. Sandals. No make-up. She looked at first as though she might be in her sixties, but Michael said later that he’d thought she was closer to forty-five. Which was their own age at the time, in fact.

‘Can I help you?’ Catherine had asked, only slightly more pointedly — strange, this reluctance to be more direct, to say who the hell are you and do you mind getting out of my house — and the woman had shaken her head, and smiled graciously, and said, ‘Oh, no, thank you, your husband’s been very kind already.’ Holding up the yoghurt spoon to demonstrate what kindness she’d been shown. At which point Michael had appeared, loitering purposefully in the study doorway, and Catherine had understood the situation, had gone straight through to the kitchen without another word to take off her wet coat and sit at the table and wait for something like an explanation while the woman drifted away upstairs.

The woman had been in a bit of a situation, apparently. That was what she’d told Michael, and that was what he told Catherine when he followed her through to the kitchen and sat at the table to explain. She wasn’t someone who went about asking like this, she’d told him, but she wasn’t sure what else she could do. She’d come over for some medical treatment, she’d heard that the hospital here was a world-renowned centre for people with her condition, and of course she hadn’t thought she’d need worry about accommodation, it being a hospital and everything, only now there’d been some difficulty about being admitted, a difficulty she was never very clear about but which seemed to involve documents she didn’t have, and she should have foreseen that, of course, she knew she should, but people with her condition tended to grab at possibilities and this is a world-renowned centre we’re talking about at the hospital here and logistics came second to hope sometimes, Michael understood that, didn’t he? But the thing was she’d spent all her money getting here and so just for now she was in this sort of, well, this situation. If he knew what she was saying.

That first conversation had taken place at the church. People often went there looking for help, and Michael almost always gave them something: food, or money, or the address of somewhere else they could go. Sometimes it was enough that he didn’t just shut the door in their faces, that he listened to their long explanations of funerals to be attended, school trips to be paid for, faulty gas meters and lost cheques and misunderstandings over benefit forms. He wasn’t naive; he knew when to say no. It was just that he didn’t always think being spun a yarn was a good enough reason for not doing what he could to help. It’s the desperate ones who come up with the best stories, he used to say, and Catherine had admired him for this, once, for his refusal to let cynicism accumulate with each knock at the church office door. She wasn’t capable of such a refusal, she knew. She’d grown cynical in her own job a long time ago, listening to students mumble excuses about late and inadequate coursework, attending departmental meetings where people used phrases like rebranding the undergraduate experience. And then coming home from one of those meetings to find a strange American woman eating yoghurt in her hallway.

They’d had people staying before, of course. That wasn’t new. Lodgers, friends of friends, people like this woman who just turned up at the church needing somewhere to stay. Catherine didn’t usually mind. Vicarages were big houses, and they had plenty of spare rooms. Michael seemed to consider it as much a part of his job as the visiting, the preaching, the offering of communion; or not even as part of his job so much as part of his life. What does our faith mean, if we don’t do these things for even the least among us? She’d heard him say that in his sermons, many times, and she’d been thrilled by how sincerely he’d seemed to mean it, once.

She’d asked him how long the American woman was going to stay and he’d said not long. A couple of nights, three at most. Maybe four. She’d asked him why he hadn’t talked to her first, and he’d said he hadn’t really had the chance and didn’t she trust his judgment? She’d asked what sort of condition the woman had that would bring her all this way to find treatment, and he’d said that he wasn’t sure, that the woman hadn’t been specific but that he’d got the impression it was some kind of bone disease. Something quite rare, he’d said, and she’d raised her eyebrows, and made a disbelieving face, and said that he wasn’t making any sense, the story didn’t make any sense. Which he’d pretended to ignore, and so when they’d made dinner then it had been in a bristling near-silence. Catherine boiling and draining and mashing the potatoes, adding butter and milk and salt. Michael turning the sausages under the grill, setting the table, stirring the gravy, disappearing upstairs to ask the woman to join them, coming back to report that she’d said she wasn’t hungry and she didn’t want to put them out. Moving around each other with a practised ease, passing forks and spoons and stock cubes from hand to hand without needing to be asked, and by the time they were sitting at the table and giving thanks her irritation had faded enough for her to be able to check what the woman’s name was. Michael said he didn’t know. He hadn’t asked, or she hadn’t said, and the whole time she was there they only ever referred to her as this woman or the American woman or most of the time just a shorthanded her or she. When are you going to talk to her. What’s she doing here. How much longer is she going to stay.

The whole business should have been the final straw, Catherine thought.

The day after she arrived, the American woman went back to the hospital — they knew this because she left a note in the hallway which said gone to hospital in thick capital letters — and when she came back, early in the afternoon, she went straight up to the spare room without telling Michael what the result of her visit had been. The same thing happened, complete with a second note — gone to hospital, again — the day after that. On Sunday the woman stayed in her room all day, and when Catherine knocked on her door around suppertime she was met with a sudden taut silence, as if the woman had been pacing around and had now stopped, her breath held, listening. Catherine knocked again.

‘Who is it?’ the woman said. ‘Who’s there?’ This said suspiciously, almost aggressively. Catherine hesitated.

‘It’s Catherine,’ she said. She half thought, since they hadn’t been properly introduced, that she should add something like Michael’s wife, or possibly even the vicar’s wife, for clarification. But she didn’t. The American woman jerked the door open and stepped forwards, standing a little closer than Catherine would have liked, wearing the same mismatch of clothes she’d been wearing when she arrived. She didn’t say anything. She seemed to be waiting for Catherine to speak. It was infuriating, this misplaced sense of — what was it, self-assurance? Self-possession?

‘We were just wondering if everything was okay,’ Catherine said. Speaking calmly, she hoped. ‘We were wondering if you needed anything,’ she added. The woman seemed to relax slightly.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Thank you for asking.’

‘Have you had any luck at the hospital?’ Catherine asked. ‘With your documents and everything?’ The woman smiled.

‘Oh, you know what these places are like,’ she said, waving her hand dismissively; ‘it’s all forms to fill out and papers to sign and documents to produce, it’s all just bureaucracy, isn’t it?’

Catherine looked at the woman, and noticed again how thin and pale she was. A little powder would have helped, a spot of colour, something around the eyes. She looked so drained. But she was probably the sort of woman who would disapprove of make-up.

‘Do you mind if I ask what your condition is exactly?’ Catherine said, speaking more abruptly than she’d intended. The woman looked at her a moment, blinking fiercely, as if she had something in her eye.

‘I’ll be going back there in the morning,’ she said, ignoring the question. ‘Maybe I can resolve the matter then and be out of your way.’

‘Oh?’ said Catherine. ‘Do you know how long you’ll be? Because Michael and I will both be out until quite late.’ The woman smiled, and started to close the door.

‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘it’s okay. I can let myself in, thank you.’

Catherine found Michael downstairs, sleeping in the armchair, and asked him if he’d given the woman a key. He stirred slightly, and sections of the weekend paper slipped from his lap to the floor. Catherine repeated the question, and he opened one eye to look at her. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time,’ he said.

Which had reminded her, later, of the morning after the first night they’d spent together, and of him lying in bed with one eye open just like that, watching her dress. Because he’d thought he was dreaming and didn’t want to wake up, he’d said. It hadn’t looked like that, she’d told him, buttoning her blouse and looking around the room for her stockings; it had looked more like he was spying on her. She’d loved him watching her like that, then. And you a man of the cloth as well. This said when the idea of him as a vicar was some kind of joke still, before he was ordained; before they were married even, although there’d been some prevarication around that before, around whether they hadn’t better wait, which they’d settled by deciding that engagement was a commitment in itself and they were as good as married in God’s eyes. She remembered their haste over dinner that night, once the decision had been made; barely tasting the food, barely even speaking, catching a bus back to his friend’s flat while most people were only just heading out for the night. And then the heat and hurry of first sex, collapsing all too soon under the weight of expectation. The realisation that this, after all, was something else which would have to be learnt, considered, practised.

And what were they then, twenty-one, twenty-two? More than half a life ago now. Graduates, just, and already moving on to the next thing. Michael at theological college, preparing for ministry, talking about curacies and parishes and the discernment of vocation; Catherine less certain, knowing only that she wanted to carry on studying English, that she didn’t want to fall into teaching the way so many of her friends had done. No more than two years since they’d met, volunteering at the chaplaincy’s soup run — Michael overflowing with the thrill of new belief, Catherine looking for some way to rekindle a childhood faith which had been more inheritance than choice — and already the thought of them not being together had seemed puzzling and unreal. As if they had been brought inevitably to one another. Which she’d believed, then. Their life together had been so filled with purpose that it had felt like something more than chance: the soup-run project, and the Christmas night shelter they’d helped set up; the prayer vigils they’d organised, the 24-hour fasts; and that summer in Europe, sleeping in train stations and parks, going to free concerts in bombed-out churches, sharing open-air communion with Germans and Italians and Norwegians and thinking that this was how life would be for them now, that this endless sense of possibility was what her faith could finally come to mean.

And then there was marriage, ordination, a first curacy, a flat. A master’s degree, a PhD proposal, a funding problem, and falling into teaching term by term. All these things decided, settled, while they were still too young to know any better. You can go back to the research later though, Michael had told her, when the PhD fell through and she found herself accepting teaching work after all; there wasn’t any rush. Trying to reassure her. Keeping one eye on what she was doing.

On Monday morning they found the yoghurt spoon outside the American woman’s room, with a note. THANK YOU FOR THE SPOON, it said. Catherine knocked at the door, and waited a moment before peering inside. The bed was made, and the holdall the woman had brought with her was gone. But there were still clothes in the wardrobe, and a scarf hanging on the back of the door.

‘She hasn’t left then,’ Catherine said.

‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Michael said, already turning away.

‘She might have just forgotten to pack everything.’

‘Maybe,’ he said, in a tone which suggested it was unlikely, and went downstairs. She closed the door and followed him, picking up the post and dropping it on the kitchen table while Michael put the kettle on to boil. She cut two slices of bread and put them in the toaster, and Michael fetched plates and knives and butter and honey from the cupboard. Unthinking, this routine. Unbreakable, almost.

‘I don’t like her,’ Catherine announced. Michael looked at her strangely.

‘Like her?’ he said. ‘You don’t even know her. Why would you like her or not like her?’ The toaster popped up before the toast was ready, as it always did. Something was wrong with the timer, apparently. Nothing which couldn’t be fixed. Catherine reached over and put it down again.

‘There’s something about her,’ she said. ‘She makes me uncomfortable. The way she looks at me. The way she seems to be taking us for granted.’ Michael filled the teapot, put it on the table, and sat down.

‘The way she looks at you?’ he repeated. He seemed amused. The toaster popped up, and she put it down again.

‘And the way she won’t answer my questions,’ she added. Michael made a noise in the back of his throat, something like a snort or a stopped chuckle. A harrumph, people would once have called it. She’d married a man who harrumphed at her across the breakfast table. The toaster popped up a third time. She brought the toast to the table and passed it over to him. ‘What’s she doing here, Michael?’ she asked, sharply. ‘What’s she doing in our house? She could be anyone. We don’t even know her name.’ He finished buttering his toast before replying, and she saw, in his expression, that same infuriating self-assurance which the American woman had shown her.

‘First,’ he said, ‘it’s not our house. It’s a vicarage. It belongs to the church, and we’re guests here just as much as she is.’ Catherine tried to cut in, but he held up a finger to stop her. Actually held up a finger. When had he started doing this? Why had she never said anything?

‘Second,’ he continued, ‘this woman came to me asking for help, and regardless of whether she’s odd or evasive or whether she’s even telling the truth I don’t see that any harm can come of offering her a room for a few nights. It’s not as if we need it.’ He poured the tea, sliding hers across the table and reaching for the pile of post. ‘But if you think I’ve made a mistake,’ he said, ‘you’re welcome to ask her to leave.’

There was a word for this, for the way he was being about this whole thing — superior? Supercilious? And there was a word for women like her who put up with this kind of behaviour for as long as she had — a word like, what, weak? Not weak exactly, it was more complicated than that, but not decisive, not assertive. Not when it mattered. She stood up, leaving the tea on the table and her toast uneaten. She’d given up slamming doors a long time ago, so instead she just left it gaping open and went upstairs to get ready for work.

Work was a lecturing post in the English department at the new university. She hadn’t ever got back to the research. There weren’t all that many research positions available in the English departments of new universities. She wrote the odd paper here and there, did her bit to keep the research assessment scores at a respectable level, but mostly she concentrated on shepherding her students through the set texts and critical literature; giving lectures and seminars, setting essays and marking essays and trying to keep up with all the paperwork which had lately crept into the job.

It was a good job though. She liked it. She couldn’t remember, now, why she had once been so determined to avoid teaching. She enjoyed standing in front of a group of students and helping them work their way towards an understanding of what literature could do, what it did do. Developing the analytical tools, it was called these days, although she preferred her first departmental head’s description of it as turning the lights on in there.

She liked being in an environment where people enjoyed what they were doing, valued it, even if they tried to pretend they didn’t. She liked having colleagues at all — she’d seen how Michael’s solitary, self-directed work had isolated him at times, turned him in on himself — and she enjoyed just sitting in the staffroom with them, drinking coffee, talking, listening to gossip. Of which there seemed only to be more the older they got; some of her colleagues were divorced already, one more than once, and over the years there’d been regular talk of goings on behind marital backs. She’d even, once, found herself in a situation where it had been made clear that something like that had been an option for her. But the idea had seemed absurd, a caricature of any discontent she might have been feeling, and she’d declined. She wondered if that had ever been gossiped about around the coffee table there, with the curled-corner posters of fat new novels stuck to the walls and the ring-binders stacked in the corner behind the door. It seemed unlikely.

When she got home that afternoon, Michael showed her a note he’d found on the desk in his study. WOULD APPRECIATE FEWER QUESTIONS, it said; MY CONDITION DOES NOT RESPOND WELL TO STRESS.

‘You have to ask her to leave,’ Catherine said. Michael made a non-committal sound, an mm or an umm, and Catherine waited for something more.

‘It’s quite a statement though, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘What did you say to the woman?’

‘Michael, please. I’m just not comfortable with her being in the house,’ Catherine said.

‘Do you think she’s on some kind of fast?’ Michael asked. Catherine took the note from his hand and looked at it again.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Do you think she’s fasting?’ he repeated.

‘I don’t know, Michael,’ she said, ‘I really don’t know.’ She was suddenly very tired.

‘Because as far as I can see she’s only eating yoghurt,’ he said. ‘Have you noticed her eating anything else? She hasn’t asked to use the kitchen. She’s never joined us for dinner, she keeps insisting on not being hungry. Haven’t you noticed?’ He seemed fascinated by the idea.

‘Michael,’ Catherine said. He looked up. ‘She can’t stay.’

The woman came back late. They heard her letting herself in while they were clearing away the dinner things, and by the time Catherine had got out to the hallway she was halfway up the stairs.

‘Hello again,’ Catherine said. The woman turned round, the holdall in one hand and a carrier bag filled with pots of yoghurt in the other.

‘Hey,’ she said. Her hair was hanging limply around her face, and her skin was even paler than it had been before. She looked exhausted, ill.

‘No luck at the hospital?’ Catherine asked. The woman stared at her.

‘Does it look like it?’ she said, turning away. She was almost at the top of the stairs before Catherine could take a breath and respond.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, raising her voice a little. ‘Sorry?’ The woman stopped, but didn’t turn round. ‘Sorry,’ Catherine said again, trying to soften her voice with a laugh; ‘but I was just wondering. I mean, we don’t actually know each other’s names, do we?’ Waiting for the woman to turn round, feeling her fists almost clenching when she didn’t. ‘My name’s Catherine,’ she called up.

‘Hello, Catherine,’ the woman said, flatly, and continued on up the stairs to her room.

Catherine stood in the hallway, waiting for something, unwilling to go straight back to the kitchen and have Michael ask about her day and what they might watch on the television as if nothing untoward was going on. As if the woman wasn’t staying longer than he’d said she would. As if the woman had been open and straightforward with them and given them no cause for concern.

She prayed about it later that evening, sitting in the front room with a lit candle and a Bible on the coffee table, a confused prayer in which she asked that they all be kept safe, that her fears about the woman prove unfounded, that the woman find what she was looking for at the hospital, that Michael or herself might find some way of resolving the situation, that she could be less suspicious and more trusting of the world and the people who came her way, that God might grant her more love and faith and empathy in situations like this, that Michael might listen to her a little more, take her fears more seriously, that God might watch over them all in this situation.

She opened her eyes, and saw the woman standing in the doorway, still wearing the long beige raincoat and holding another spoon. Smiling.

‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said. ‘I didn’t mean to intrude. I just thought I heard something.’

‘Well,’ Catherine said. ‘Only me.’ She felt as if she’d been caught out, exposed somehow. The woman smiled, and that self-assurance, self-contentment, self-whatever-it-was, was there again.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Only you.’ She noticed Catherine looking at the spoon. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I hope you don’t mind. I helped myself to a spoon, for the yoghurt.’ Pronouncing yoghurt with a long oh, which in Catherine’s irritable state felt like yet another trespass.

‘Oh no,’ Catherine replied, lifting her hands in an attempt at nonchalance, letting them clap down on her thighs; ‘that’s fine. It’s only a spoon.’ A weak smile, met with a shrug. The woman glanced down at the Bible, the candle.

‘Were you praying?’ she asked. Catherine nodded, and the woman looked puzzled, tilting her head as if she was about to ask something. ‘Well,’ she said, finally, ‘I won’t keep you. It sounds like your husband’s gone to bed already.’

‘Goodnight,’ Catherine said. The woman left, closing the door behind her, and Catherine watched as the candle flame flapped and fluttered and eventually stilled.

She shouldn’t be angry though. It wasn’t fair. She shouldn’t have been angry at the time, and she should have learnt not to be still angry about these things now. He was dedicated to his job. He cared about the church, about the redevelopment, about the new community services he wanted to offer, about enthusing the congregation with a sense of mission. These were all good things to care about, to spend every waking moment worrying about. But she was tired of it now. She was tired of being towed along while he did these things.

At least people didn’t come calling to the house, generally. That was one thing. It happened to other vicars — it had happened in previous parishes — but it hadn’t happened here. The vicarage was too far from the church, too anonymous-looking, and so they hadn’t had people banging on the door at all hours asking for money as they had elsewhere. People went to the church, and Michael dealt with them there. Which was good. It gave them some separation, mostly. It meant Michael could relax a little once he was home, and it meant Catherine had to worry a little less about always being The Vicar’s Wife. There were still the phone calls of course, and the members of the congregation who knew where they lived and would insist on calling round with messages, paperwork, problems, and would talk to her when Michael was out as if she was his secretary. She’d minded it more in the early days, before she’d felt established in her career. She’d resented the idea that her role in the world might amount to no more than being The Vicar’s Wife. I married you, she’d snapped at him once; I didn’t marry your job. I didn’t marry the Church.

That had been their first crisis. There had been others: his muted, slow-burning reaction to his mother’s death, when he’d shut her out so completely that she’d almost walked away; the string of burglaries in the last parish; the incident which never was with her colleague in the English department. And there was the business of children, of course, but they’d stopped talking about that eventually, once it had become more or less academic.

And then there was the American woman he’d offered the spare room to that time, six years ago now and she couldn’t help thinking it was too long ago for her to be still thinking about it like this. It wasn’t as if they’d ever seen her again.

That Saturday, when the woman had been in their house for more than a week and was showing no sign of being about to leave, Catherine had been woken by the sound of Michael making his breakfast. She usually tried to have a lie-in on Saturdays, and was usually woken like this, by the clatter of knives and plates and mugs, reflecting each time that for such a big house sounds did seem to carry awfully well, that the two of them seemed to rattle around in there. She heard the toaster popping up, and Michael putting it down again, and she turned over to go back to sleep.

In the kitchen, Michael was taking the butter and the honey down from the cupboard and waiting for the kettle to boil. The American woman appeared in the doorway — this was Michael’s account of it, later — and said she hoped she wasn’t interrupting but could she ask him something? Michael said yes, certainly, and she came into the room and sat down. Her situation was more complicated than she’d expected, she told him. It seemed she would have to go back to New York to get copies of her medical records, a referral from her doctor, her insurance documents. Which was a problem because she didn’t have the money to go home and come back again. Michael asked if there wasn’t someone she could get to send the documents. The woman looked at him, and ignored his interruption, telling him again that she didn’t have that kind of money, not to go home and come back again. She didn’t even have the money to get down to Heathrow, ha ha — this said as if it was all a big joke, according to Michael, or rather as if she wanted him to think that she was bravely trying to make it all into a big joke — and so she knew it was a lot to ask after all the kindness they’d already shown her but did Michael think there was any chance he could help out at all? Financially?

Michael told her he was sorry but he didn’t think he could do that. Which seemed to surprise her, he said. Seemed to nudge her off-balance. Something in her expression changed, was the way he described it. But all she said was that she was sorry to have troubled him. And then, as they were both moving into the hallway, asking if she could ask him something else. A nod or a shrug from Michael, and she said that she’d noticed something was wrong, that she wondered if there were maybe some problems between him and his wife. And the answer heard by Catherine, as she stood in their bedroom doorway at the top of the stairs, was that he didn’t think that was an appropriate question actually, ha ha; whereas the answer in the account he gave her later was a far less equivocal no.

He’d left for a meeting at the church then, and the American woman had gone back to her room, and she must have already started packing because by the time Catherine had been to the bathroom and washed her hair the woman had disappeared: the room empty, the sheets stripped, the front door key left on the bare mattress with a note.

She stood in the empty room for a few moments, feeling the blessed silence settle around her, and then she went downstairs to set the table for lunch. She scrubbed and pierced two jacket potatoes and put them in the oven. She washed and drained and mixed a salad, and made a dressing. She looked in the kitchen drawer where they kept their bank cards and passports and housekeeping money, and made sure everything was there. She checked that Michael’s new laptop computer was still in the study. She ran the vacuum cleaner around the spare room, emptied the wastepaper basket of yoghurt pots, straightened the rug. She took the crumpled sheets downstairs and put them in the washing machine, and when she went back upstairs she checked through her jewellery box.

It wasn’t that she’d thought the woman would turn out to be a thief. Not really. She just wanted some rational explanation for the way she’d felt about her, the suspicion and unease which she couldn’t bring herself to admit might have been unfounded.

It felt like a long time before Michael got home. He started telling her about the meeting almost before he’d opened the door, tugging off his shoes in the hallway and rattling on about misplaced funding priorities and a dean who cared more about church buildings than putting the gospel into practice. She waited for him to finish talking before telling him that the woman was gone, by which time they were sitting at the table with a dressed salad and two steaming baked potatoes between them. She showed him the note the woman had left, unfolding it from her cardigan pocket and smoothing it out on the table. THANK YOU, it said, SEE YOU AGAIN SOON. He smiled, and nodded, and draped a napkin across his lap.

‘What do you think she means?’ Catherine asked. ‘See you again soon?’

‘Oh, I’m sure it’s nothing. Just a figure of speech.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’ He straightened the napkin on his lap, and fiddled with his knife and fork. ‘Crisis over,’ he said. He poured out two glasses of water. ‘Did she take anything?’

‘No. I looked, but I don’t think anything’s missing.’

‘Did she say anything when she left, besides the note?’

‘No, nothing.’

They shut their eyes and said a prayer of thanks and cut open their potatoes, the steam rushing out into the room and filling the space between them for a moment while they each waited for the other to reach for the butter and the salt.

‘Well,’ he said. He was almost smiling. He felt vindicated, she supposed. ‘I imagine that’s that then.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I imagine you do.’

The Chicken And The Egg

Stickford

It’s not really something he likes talking about, to be fair. It is, in actual fact, quite a difficult thing to discuss. But it’s becoming more of an issue. It’s having knock-on effects. What it is, he has this fear of breaking open eggs. It’s a type of phobia. There doesn’t seem to be a Latin name for it. He’s checked. But essentially he has this fear that he’ll one day break open an egg and find a little baby chicken foetus curled up inside. Dead. Occasionally he imagines it being just about alive — limply flopping is the phrase which comes to mind — but he’s pretty sure that’s just him being irrational.

He is in actual fact quite sure the whole thing’s irrational but he can’t get the idea out of his head. He knows something about poultry-farming methods; he’s been looking into it, and he knows that the chances of a fertilised and developed egg making its way into the retail chain are just about impossible. For starters if it was an egg from a battery-cage site then it stands to reason it wouldn’t be fertilised. Due to the cages, that would be. And even on the organic or free-range sites they do have these incredibly strict inspection regimes. It would be a failure of what he’s been reliably informed are very robust systems. Millions and millions of eggs are produced every single day.

It would only take one.

It started when he overheard a man in a café describing it actually happening to him. The man was the owner of the café. He was talking to a woman at the counter who was ordering breakfast. He told her that some years previously, when he was working in the kitchen, he’d broken an egg and found a baby chicken inside. He described it in quite some detail, was the thing: how perfectly formed the foetus had been, with feathers and everything, how there was mostly blood and membrane where the yolk should have been. He told the woman it had quite shaken him up and he’d been unable to cook with eggs from then on. The woman changed her mind about what she was ordering. It’s a conversation he can remember very clearly. There were certain shapes the man made with his hands while he was describing it all.

But when he knew it had got really bad was this one time when he was staying with his wife at a B&B. It was out in the country somewhere and the landlady kept chickens in the garden. His wife had liked that. She’d thought it was very authentic. Only he’d noticed that there was a rooster in with the hens, and then at breakfast he’d found these dark-red specks in the yolks of their fried eggs. Tiny specks, to be fair, about the size of a pencil mark made with a very sharp pencil. But he’d understood what they were. And the trouble was, he hadn’t wanted to say anything to his wife, and he hadn’t wanted to offend the landlady, and so he’d gone ahead and eaten the bloody things. And then what was awful was that they were absolutely delicious: they were literally the freshest eggs he’d ever eaten and they really were very good. Creamy and soft. Light. But at the same time he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the tiny dark-red specks. It was as if his imagination was a microscope, was the way he thought of it. And after that the whole trouble with eggs got serious, was what happened, was how he recalls it happening.

It’s the anticipation which gets him. Even just thinking about it. Even nowhere near a cooking situation or an eating situation, just thinking about it at some other moment. The anticipation is what really does the damage. If he does happen to find himself in an unavoidable egg-breaking scenario, the tension is almost literally palpable. His stomach clenches, and his face more or less prepares to express disgust. He’ll stand there with the egg held out at arm’s length, like what it might do is explode. He’ll close his eyes, and brace himself, and crack it into the bowl or the pan, and then once his eyes are shut what he has to do is brace himself all over again to open his eyes and look.

If it could just happen, is what he’s started to think. If he could get it over and done with. Then he wouldn’t be all worked up with the anticipation. The reality of it might not even be all that bad, considering. Considering all the things he’s imagined.

Sometimes he’s imagined it happening with a hard-boiled egg. Picking off the shell, getting the salt and pepper ready, and then cutting through the firm white of the egg and making the discovery. On a picnic. On a train. At a business meeting. Or even worse, having served the hard-boiled eggs to a guest. In a salad, such as perhaps a salad of cos lettuce and rocket, with a dusting of paprika across the eggs, some quarters of very ripe tomato, parmesan shavings, an olive-oil dressing. The eggs still just warm enough to release the fragrance of the olive oil. The guest being the first to cut into the egg.

Or also he’s imagined it happening whilst preparing a fried-egg sandwich. The oil heating in the cast-iron pan. The thick slices of white bread lightly toasted, buttered, and dressed with tomato ketchup. The tea brewing in the pot. Breaking the egg into the pan, looking away for one moment to grab the salt and pepper and then turning back to find it there just as the white begins crackling at the edges. And what would happen then would be the heat having the effect of making the foetal chicken turn over in the pan, or just twitch slightly. It would create an illusion, is what he thinks.

And, yes, he understands there are effective treatments available for phobias. He has made some discreet enquiries, is how he knows this, and how he knows these treatments to be mostly based around a programme of gradually increasing exposure and reassurance. But then what it comes down to is he can’t imagine how this would be any help at all. In his particular situation. Which isn’t something he likes to discuss, to be fair. He has cracked open plenty of eggs in the course of his life, so whatever it is he needs to do it’s not increasing his exposure, gradually or otherwise. Reassurance would be another thing. All these eggs he’s cracked over the years and if anything the phobia is only getting worse. What he thinks is this is only logical. If the odds of it actually happening are one-in-a-million or one-in-a-billion or however high they are, then what follows is that with every egg he safely cracks open the probability actually increases. He’s not sure if the statistical reasoning of this is entirely sound. But he still can’t help feeling that every egg brings him closer to the thing he dreads.

So he did tell his wife about all this, eventually. He had to tell someone, was the conclusion he came to. It didn’t help matters, as it turned out. She was what he would call notably unsympathetic. It could be said to have brought things to a head between them. There was some mockery. There was a poorly executed hoax involving a child’s toy. Also, a man with whom he was vaguely acquainted at work, a man who was later identified as a co-respondent in the subsequent divorce proceedings, made a barely audible clucking noise as they stood together in the canteen line.

He hasn’t actually discussed it with anyone else since then, to be fair. He’s not at all sure it would help.

New York

New York

Okay. So there are these guys, these two guys, and they’re standing by the side of the road, waiting for something. What are they waiting for? We don’t know what they’re waiting for. Not yet. That’s part of the suspense, okay? Okay. So they’re standing there, they’re looking kinda tired, kinda downbeat, y’know? Yeah. Regular-looking, I guess. The one guy, he’s older, he’s sorta late-forties, early-fifties, getting a little thin on top. Big mustache. No, forget the mustache. But he hasn’t had, like, a shave, not in a while. Okay. And the other guy, he’s a bit younger, he’s in his twenties, he’s kinda good-looking but rough around the edges with it, y’know? Also, they’ve both got this kinda old European look about them, nothing obvious, not the mustache or anything but just enough that when they start talking we ain’t surprised to hear they got these sorta like thick Polish accents, y’know? You with me? Right. Only they can’t both have the Polish accents, otherwise how come they’d be talking in English at all, right? So let’s say the younger guy it’s more of a Slovak accent or something. I don’t know. They got to have different enough accents that we accept them talking English when it’s obvious they don’t talk all that much English, y’know what I’m saying?

I told you already, New York. It’s set in New York. Right.

So these two guys, they’re standing by the side of the road and they’re waiting for something. We don’t know what they’re waiting for but they’re waiting. That’s the fucken suspense right there. They both got bags with them, these little plastic dime-store bags, with like a lunch-sack and a flask of coffee and maybe some work-clothes in them. So they look like working men, okay? They look like they’ve been working all day. So we think maybe they’ve finished work and they’re waiting for a ride home. And the camera pulls back a bit and we see a bunch of people waiting with them, same type of people, same clothes, bags, whatever, so we get a little context. But it’s clear that these two guys are, y’know, the guys. And it’s clear they’ve been waiting a while, because as the camera pulls back a bit more and we see the fields and farmhouses in the background we can see it’s getting near that kinda summertime dusk that comes real late in the evening, like nine or ten in the evening. Five to ten, whatever. Fucken magic hour.

Fields and farmhouses, right. Yeah, like I said already: New York, Lincolnshire. Right. Lincolnshire, England. They got the original New York right there. Little two-bit place. Coupla houses and a shop and a long straight road that goes all the way through to Boston. Right, Boston, Lincolnshire. I told you this already. Flat fields. Bitter wind. Crows and shit in the trees. The works.

So. Anyway. We got these establishing shots: our two guys, the wider group, the empty fields, the skies and all that, right? So then we give it some of that testing-the-audience’s-patience European-style time-passing, y’know what I mean, all that with the first he scratches his eyebrow, then he sniffs, then a tractor goes past real slow. All that. To establish the mood! To make sure the audience knows these guys are tired as all shit, and get them wondering what’s with the waiting. Okay? And then we’re into the dialogue. This piece is all about the dialogue, you with me? So first up the one guy goes, ‘It’s cold.’ Right? And we just had a location caption saying, ‘New York,’ so we’re kinda making the connection ourselves and hearing it as ‘New York, it’s cold.’ Right. You with me? That ring any bells for you? Okay, so then they talk about the weather a little bit, and what time it is, and then they start bitching about how the supervisor or whoever is taking so long coming back with the mini-van to pick them all up and take them back to their place of residence. And the one guy says something about him never being early. And the other guy says how he’s always late. You getting this yet? No? They’re waiting for their van, right? Van, man, whatever. We get right into the dialogue and they’re all talking about how hard the day’s been, like picking whatever it is they’ve been picking in the field all day long, like cabbages or something, I don’t know, onions and celery and all that, some real back-breaking dawn-till-dusk shit and now the supervisor has left them stranded while he’s all off down in the village or whatever. The village. Right. Exactly. You’re with me now. So they’re talking about how they’re sick of it, the working conditions, the money, all that. And the audience get to wondering about the dialogue, like how come it sounds so awkward and disjointed, and like, all right already so these guys are foreign but that don’t really explain it, there’s something else going on, something kinda funny, and some of these lines sound kinda familiar. All right. So the younger guy’s doing most of the bitching, but the older guy, he’s the wise one, he’s giving it all that you-do-what-you-gotta-do, and the younger guy’s not having it so he gets to saying that’s it, that’s enough already, he’s out of there, he’s leaving today. And then the audience are like, right, now we get it. Okay? You with me? They don’t got no words of their own, they’re just saying all this second-hand shit they heard on the radio, and they’re making us think of the new New York, the one we all know about, the one which is, like, built on immigration and exploitation and the hard fucken labour of the huddled masses like our two friends right here.

Fucken I don’t know, Wiktor and Andrej. Whatever. Right.

So they keep talking, and we’re still with the Euro-style fucken longueurs and like meaningful glances and shit. Y’know. Old man rides past on a bike, real slow. Birds rise up from the trees and circle round and settle back in the trees. All these long pauses, like, signifying the passing of time. Because they’re waiting for this ride back to their residence, right? And the one guy, he’s still talking about how he’s sick of this work and the money and everything and he’d rather be back home, and the older guy’s all, like: there’s no work back home! What would you do? You’d be walking the streets drinking knock-off vodka and getting ripped off by the cops! Y’know, basically the same shit migrant workers have always talked about. But still, everything they’re saying is like lines we’ve heard before, y’know? One of them says he’s going if he has to walk, the other one says something about it not being that far, the one of them goes he came looking for a job. All that. And we’re taking it like a game now, this is we the audience I mean, like trying to recognise shit. But then we’re thinking, well, hold up now, this don’t make no sense. How come these guys don’t got their own words for these things? How come they’re talking all this borrowed shit? Right? So then we get to thinking, wait a minute now, so maybe the joke’s on us. Maybe we’re hearing all this second-hand clichéd stuff because we can’t really hear what these guys are saying. We see them standing at the side of the road and we’re like, right, yeah, we know this one, migrant labourers, tired and weary, getting paid shit, getting ripped off, taking it in turns to sleep in the same bed, sending money home, the engine room of the modern economy, all that headline crap. But we don’t know shit. We really don’t know. So if we were to stop and listen to them talking for a minute, we wouldn’t even hear what they were saying anyhow. This is the fucken point which is being elaborated before the audience’s very eyes, y’know?

I mean, talk to me about appropriation, right? The city don’t even got its own name! And here are these two guys standing in the original New York! Y’know?

Right. Anyway. So. Meanwhile it’s pretty much dark, and our two guys are still standing there. They smoke a cigarette, they drink a bit of coffee from the flask, some kids drive past and shout some kinda nasty shit at them. All that. And while we’re getting the hang of all this the-joke’s-on-us kinda stuff, we don’t hardly notice that they’ve started talking about some friend of theirs, this other migrant guy who’s died in a like tragic fire at some other place of residence, and how are they going to get to the funeral, and what clothes can they wear, and does anyone even know how to get word to his family. Right? And by the time we do notice, they’ve quit talking about it anyway. So that’s another twist for the audience right there: how is it we were too busy thinking about the meaning of what’s going on with the dialogue to even notice that these two guys were having some individualistic shitty fucken narrative in their own lives? Which just goes to prove the point, right? Well, it do, don’t it?

So. Anyway, that’s about it right there. Yeah. Their ride never shows up. They pour out some more coffee and the one guy spits it out and goes, ‘Is cold.’ That being the first line of dialogue we heard, meaning they’re trapped in some kinda Beckettian loop or whatever. Yeah. We fade out and roll credits or whatever.

Of course it’s fucken conceptual. What do I look like to you?