Fen (14 page)

AT THE WAKE
people talked without reserve. Nobody much believed Marco. Some said it was an accident, Arch slipping and falling; Marco making up a story out of grief or madness. Others disagreed. Everybody had seen them as children, out wrestling in the road, ignoring the cars. And older, bleeding before they'd barely begun, fighting with a sort of joy. A play-fight out of control, someone said.

It was the foxes, she heard Marco saying loudly into a room talking mostly on him. I told you all. It was the foxes. There was a silence. Everybody had a plate with food on, salad and spring rolls and a quiche one of the teachers at the school had made. A lot of Arch's friends were there, ones she'd known from the place under the copses, and they were drunk.

Later, when she went up to the bedroom, Marco was there, on the bed, both hands under his head, muddy boots on the duvet.

What are you doing in here?

He shrugged.

Mattie. Mattie, he said, as if he'd only just realised on her being a living thing at all.

She waited for him to tell her the truth. To say they'd worked it all out; they'd decided on a good, last fight and there it was. Arch wanted it this way.

One of them took him, Marco said after a moment. One of the foxes. I reckon one of them is carrying his
soul or whatever around inside it at the moment. You believe in that?

He didn't wait for her to answer.

I never did. Always thought he was talking bollocks. All those stories about them.

She wanted to take a hold of him. By the shoulders or by the ruff of his hair. Shake him and shake him. Tell him he didn't need to lie to her, he shouldn't lie to her.

He looked at her as if he knew all the things she was thinking. You believe me, don't you?

She'd been sleeping in Arch's room since he'd died. Sometimes she woke in the night and the smell of him was so thick, so cloying and heavy on her face that she was certain he'd come back all on his own. He would be standing at the foot of the bed, one hand holding up the rim of his T-shirt so she could see the marks the foxes had made on his belly and chest. He would show them with a proudness as if to say that all the other fights had only been leading up to this one. Sometimes she woke to the dull thrum of all the words he'd ever said beating a new sort of pulse through her head. Sometimes she woke with the feel of his tongue pushing against the roof of her mouth and thought – if only he pushed hard enough – he could give her the words.

That night she lay and thought about when they were younger. Out playing in the garden, they would see one on the field. The flush of it, paused at the hedge line or
nose down, hunting in the ruts. Marco would shrug, go back to digging. Arch would run to the fence, duck under, go streaking across the field in pursuit. Come back ruddy-cheeked, sheepish.

We saw a fox, he'd tell their mother as soon as he could. Spend the rest of the day talking about it until Marco got bored enough to rile him into fighting.

Later, older, coming up her drainpipe, the stories he told were always threaded through with that slim shape. As if they'd climbed into his gullet, infected his words. But the stories had changed: fen foxes who'd been people once and grown out of themselves easy as taking off one jumper and putting on another. Foxes that carried the dead inside them. Foxes who would speak if only you could make them.

The next day she went looking for the fox that had him.

It was early, dark. She went straight across the field out the back of the house, slipping in and out of the damp, tractor-cut furrows. It did not feel the way it was supposed to. It felt only that her brother was dead and she was out walking in the early morning.

She walked hard, fast, tripping forward. A little light grew on the straight line in front of her. She heard the pylons before she saw them, their low, tuning-fork buzz. In the distance there were cars passing. This land was deceptive: they were miles away. She kept on.

Later there was that laughing bark in the distance. She turned to listen. Started in that direction. Then the sound
cut from behind her. She turned and turned. Settled on the same way as before. Kicking at the high grass at the edge of the field. It would be light soon anyway and then it would be no good.

She had reached, without realising, the copse with the fire pit and the soil skateboard ramps. She went into the black beneath the thin wind-breaker trees, waded into the fire pit to search for half-burnt beer cans with the toe of her wellington. Went to the river and bent down to squint for any left behind, bobbing in the water.

There was something under the trees, just before the slope that ran up to the field. A fox caught by the foreleg in a trap. It took her half an hour to get the trap open. The fox panted and made a high sound she had not heard from the ones who used to mate or hunt rabbits out the back of the house. Its leg was caught good. She wrenched and forced. It snapped its jaw at her, lunging open-mouthed as far as the trap would allow.

When it was done the fox started up the bank and she gave a gentle tug on the leash she'd attached around its neck and it fell back and looked at her with an astonishment that almost made her let it go then and there. Her hands were bleeding.

She dragged the fox on. The lights of a car came over the rough, holed concrete road. The pylons went on and on in the sheer beam of it. She wrestled the fox hedgeways, out of the road, but it got its mouth pretty sharpish round her wrist and bit down. The car rolled on and then
stopped. She could see nothing of the driver but their gloved hands on the wheel. She could smell the fresh rage of the fox, the pissed-off stench of it. The car got moving again, flashing its red tail lights in farewell, and she thinking there can't have been many other places where people would mind their business the way they did in the fen.

It was almost morning, a thin wash of colour. She could see the lights on in some of the houses they passed, could hear raised voices. They were almost there when the fox sat down and would not move. She strained at the leash, it tightened its neck, stretched its head away. Its leg left patterned red on the road. It panted evenly, looked away from her at the whitening stretch of land. She came at it with both arms out, upped it onto her hip, held its snout closed tight. Stumbled on.

In the sitting room she could see the back of Marco's head over the top of the sofa, could smell the cigarette he was drawing on.

Where you been, Mattie? he called out into the hall.

She almost told him. I think this is the fox that has Arch. I think this fox is Arch. She was uncertain how she would say it, only that she was certain.

Just out walking.

There was an inconvenience to keeping a fox het up where it didn't want to be. Her feet were black with scat and piss. She had bandaged its leg up the best she could but
it needed changing every day. It had taken her pillows apart with its teeth and was working on the duvet. It yipped and growled and stank.

Food was a problem. Sometimes she caught her mother in front of the fridge; face lit yellow, looking in at the emptiness. Marco, staying on to keep them company, sat on the sofa and ate pot noodles.

She tried it on cat food. It would have none of that. Ignored, too, the leftovers she smuggled up. There was a flow of dinners deposited on their doorstep. Nobody ever knocked. This was a place where people understood the possibility of bad luck being passed on and kept clear. Still. There was a lasagne most days and often a shepherd's pie. Without it there would have been no food at all. Marco ate a lot, great platefuls, seconds. Her mother none at all. Matilda brought up what was left in the dish it had been cooked in, slid it across the floor. The fox did not even put its nose down to smell, only looked at her over its disdainful narrow snout.

She waited for her mother or Marco to come bursting in. At night she heard one or the other of them pacing the front of the house. She met her mother in corridors, coming out of the bathroom, at the foot of the stairs. When Matilda spoke she looked at her the way people did at parties, failing to remember a name.

She tried the fox on cuts from the butcher's. The cheap bits of chicken, chunks of stewing beef. The fox watched her drop her offerings on the floor, stepped back a couple
of paces. Then leapt onto the windowsill, where it was most of the time – looking out. She was sure she could see, through the dulling-out pelt, the scaffolding of its ribcage. The room started to smell: her mother had the heating on high all the time now.

One of the little Farrow sisters had put the male hamster into the female hamster's cage and now was out on the roadside as penance, selling the small, furry creatures by the handful. She carried five of them back in the box. Let them free into the room. Did not stay to watch. There was not much noise. Only the sound of the fox padding down from the windowsill.

Later she brought in, hopefully, the leftover roast chicken someone had dropped off. It did not even lift its nose up. Did not even open its eyes. She knew now there was no use in feeding it anything dead.

So the next morning she went walking up to one of the farms, bartered a chicken from a tired-looking woman in jeans. Smuggled it into the house. The fox was waiting, shifting back and forth as if it were dancing something new for her. She held the chicken up by its legs. The chicken was very still. The three of them watched each other.

You can have it if you speak.

The fox's eyes came onto her face, mouth panting open.

You remember the stories?

SHE GAVE HER
name at the door. The table was in the middle of the room, beneath one of the vent lights. Emma stood until they moved her to a new one in the corner. Handed back the wine list without looking. Ordered a glass of Kalyra, bent to push off her tight shoes.

She was early and she thought (his syllables on the phone, the placing of his punctuation in the message when they organised the date) that he was the late sort. It did not matter any. Sometimes nobody turned up and she ate anyway and did it at her own speed like it was what she meant to do all along. Sometimes she wondered, holding the prongs of the fork against her tongue, if they'd come into the restaurant and seen her. Maybe the light was falling wrong onto her face, or she was turned to a bad angle, or her make-up was day-worn and they'd changed their minds and left. She would eat her pearl-barley risotto
or polenta and squash until it was gone. Order a glass of dessert wine or coffee and sit until that was too.

A couple came and sat at a nearby table. They looked like an advert; he older, tight inside his shirt; her thin arms and boned shoulders, hair pushed up at the front of her head. He took the wine menu and looked at it.

The photo on the website showed the man she was going to see tonight standing on a canal boat somewhere. Tanned, elbows pistoning out from his body like a boxer. Stood like a boy on a road trip posing with his friends. He had the look of one of those university men whose hair shuttered away to white when they were twenty-four and who wore it well. He reminded her of a badger. He was loosening a little around the hips and ribs. The first time they spoke on the phone he told her the name of the boat like it was a code word.

He was late now, not by much but there it was. He worked in the city somewhere. On the phone he'd talked, flirting, about a wine bar he thought she would like. They could sit outside under the burners and drink Kir and afterwards he would put her on the train. Or he would not. There was a gap behind everything with him that she enjoyed. Always the sense that if she pushed down she would come upon a meaning, waiting.

I can show you where I work, he'd said.

There had been reasons she'd given for not wanting to go to the city. Something about an early shift. She'd talked about the restaurant she wanted to take him to.
The food was good there. They drove the fish in every morning. They served crab. He said she sounded like she'd taken other men there. She thought about it. Decided she liked the undertone of jealousy.