Furnace (7 page)

I remember your name, he said.

It seemed like a funny thing to say. I laughed a bit, to cover up my nerves. He was staring at me. What was he? I wondered. Some kind of European. His skin was olive and his long hair was
straight and very black. Maybe a gypsy, I thought.

We just skinned up, he said. Stay if you want.

I nodded and looked over at the fisherman. I wondered if I knew him, and if he knew me. I couldn’t tell from where I was sitting. He had a straw hat on and sunglasses. Anyway, I thought,
he isn’t watching.

I’d smoked dope once before, in Luke’s room, and I’d lain there and watched Luke himself smoking plenty of times so I wasn’t too nervous. I didn’t want to cough
though, so I just took a gentle nip when he offered it to me, then drew it down really careful and passed it on to the boy. He took it and really sucked at it, heaving the smoke right down. The
tall one and me both laughed. When I got hold of it again I took a better draw and coughed a bit, but that was okay now.

I didn’t notice the fisherman going. I just looked up at some point and he was gone and there was the lake, huge and still and empty from end to end.

What do you do at night? I asked. I was hoping he’d want me to find them a place to stay. I was thinking I could get them into Gran’s by the back door and then up to my room. Gran
was bedridden downstairs and was going deaf and had the radio going loud till all hours so I doubted she’d hear them.

He shrugged.

Do you need somewhere? I looked at him and tried to smile.

We know where we’re sleeping tonight, he said. Then he lay back, his long legs still hanging over the edge of the field. He closed his eyes.

The younger boy was finishing off the joint, staring out across the lake.

I looked back down at the other’s face. There was a cloud of flies over it – big, long-bodied black ones now, not the little grey gnats I’d walked through. Some had landed and
one was walking slowly along his bottom lip, like it was looking for an opening. He didn’t seem to feel them, or he didn’t mind. It gave me a strange, light-headed feeling. I waved them
off, then got up and walked down to the water. All along the margin there was a rim of green slime. I poked around at it with the toe of my shoe and a smell of rot and sewage started to come up off
it, so I stopped. Just out from the shore, a few inches underwater, lay a dead perch. It was half in and half out of the soft grey silt that’s under all the lake. The perch’s mouth was
open and the mud had washed right in. It looked like all the foul mud in the lake had spilled out from its mouth. I remembered what Luke had said about tasting silt in the trout.

I looked round at the two strangers. They were both lying flat out now. I started off back along the shore. I turned a few times, but they didn’t see me go.

I worked the bar with Mr Whitfield that evening because Gwen, his regular, was off on holiday. It was quiet but Mr Whitfield kept his hands to himself for once. He reckoned he
had a migraine and was sickening for something. I got out late, around twelve, because Mr Whitfield couldn’t help with clearing up. He started doing the Gents and threw up twice into the
washbasin. After that he sat by an open window and let me get on with it. He even let me do the till.

By the time I was leaving he said he felt better, though his face was frightening: much older seeming; waxy and grey. I stayed on the pavement and listened to him lock up inside, then watched
for the lights going off downstairs and going on in his flat above. Then I went round the side and looked up the fire escape at Luke’s place, but everything was dark. I started off for home,
wondering if Gran would be awake and fussing.

It was much cooler now and I knew the weather was turning. A wind was picking up and blowing in off the lake. I could hear sheep-calls from the fields near the water, carried in on the breeze.
They were calling from all around the lake. There were distant ones, coming in faint from the far shore. It seemed to get under my skin and make me restless too, wide awake and waiting for
something. I felt like I needed to keep walking, like I could walk forever through the night, never sleeping, listening and smelling the air like an animal.

I came to the statue where the road forks and that was where I heard their voices. At first I just stood still, straining to listen. They were somewhere on the triangle of grass behind the
monument. There were hedges all round the lawn, hiding them. I stepped out onto the road and squeezed through where the hedge butts up against the statue. Rubbing against the cold stone plinth and
seeing the lifted bronze arm and book up above me I suddenly got scared, and was just about to sneak back to the road when the tall one called my name. Sarah, he said, and I saw them, laid out side
by side on the grass.

Who’s the statue of? he asked.

All I could make out were their two dark sleeping bags, big and coffin-shaped. I could hardly speak. I don’t know, I said. I did know, but that was
what I said.

He sat up and I heard the flint on his lighter scrape, but it didn’t catch. He tried again and suddenly I could see his face behind the little blue flame. He lit a long thin joint. Have a
smoke, he said, so I sat between them and took a draw each time I was offered it.

I don’t know how long I sat there smoking. When the first joint ended he rolled up another, and another after that. For a long while they hardly said a word, then they started talking,
softly, as if I wasn’t there, about where they’d been, where they planned to go. I had the last of a joint to myself by then and it was making me strange, and while they talked I had
the feeling of having known all the place-names they were murmuring, even places I’d never heard of, and I missed them, like I was homesick for everywhere. I had a picture in my mind then of
Luke’s room, of this pair of baby-shoes he had nailed over his bed with
Go Faster!
written under them, and the fossil he kept on his bedside table, a big stone sea-shell he found high
up on the mountain.

I must have fallen into a dream soon after because the next thing I remember is realising that the tall one was asleep and the boy was sat up, turned to me, quiet as death. I was cold, and the
wind was getting stronger, shaking the high privet hedge round about us. The wind was carrying the silt-smell off the lake. I remembered the dead perch and thought about the waves slapping on the
shore now, stirring it all up, all the rotted things that were settled there. The waves are like mouths, I thought, eating up everything in the end, eating up the land. I remembered again about
Luke and the tiny shoes over his bed, and the fossil. I knew it was all connected, but didn’t know how, except that everything was silt, or if it wasn’t it would be, and everywhere was
water once, and would be again.

I touched the tall one’s face and it was hot and smooth and dry. His eyes flicked open.

Let me in, I said.

He was nude under the covering, and really there wasn’t room for us both, but I kept my hands from touching him. My father’s gone and my mother’s dead, I told him, and he
nodded, like he’d always known.

We lay still for a while, pressed together but flat on our backs. The wind had cleared the sky again and all the starfields were bright and deep. He pointed up to one of the clusters. See there?
he said. The Great Bear.

I looked along the line of his arm and finger. I don’t see it, I said. Nothing looks like a bear.

There, he said, tracing a shape. There’s the tail, high up, and his head down low. See it now? It points that way in summer, like he’s sniffing his way down.

I laughed. None of it looks like anything, I said, and remembered something Luke told me once when he was very drunk, before we’d ever done anything together. He’d told me that when
he was a boy he used to sneak into the garden at night and pray to the brightest stars, imagining they were spaceships and their captains could read his thoughts. What did you ask for? I’d
wanted to know, but then we both just fell about laughing and he never talked about it again. Now, I pictured all the clutter in his room, fossils, driftwood and bones, all the random things he
found meanings in, and I pictured the rabbit’s foot, as if I’d kept it, hung on a wire in the sun.

The stranger turned to face me and rested a burning hand on my leg. I forced the tight band of my work skirt over my hips and when it reached his fingers he helped me push it right off. He
waited, watching my face, then touched me through my pants, making me gasp. I lifted myself and he rolled them down to my feet. Then he waited again, brushing my forehead with smooth, papery lips.
They were parted, but I couldn’t feel his breath. Behind us, the boy sniffed quietly like a dog, and I thought of Luke again, kneeling in the dark.

Come inside me, I said. And for a while, the boy watching us without a word, the stranger set himself on top of me, heavy and hot, and filled me so full I couldn’t speak, could hardly
breathe, and couldn’t stop crying.

Hush, he whispered as he pushed, hush.

Afterwards, he rolled away and seemed to sleep again. I lay there a long time, close against him, my head to the ground, listening, feeling his liquid come back out of me, warm but soon cold
like any other kind of water. It seemed like the whole world was sleeping and in the silence under the stars, under the Great Bear creeping down, I could hear everything, even the quietest things.
I can hear the worms, I said. I can hear the worms moving through the earth.

The dog appeared just as the last of the voices faded away – a black, hungry-looking lurcher. It stood motionless at the lip of the tall riverbank, staring down across
the cold quick water at him. A faint call came from someone in the family of walkers he’d heard tramping and chattering somewhere out of sight, above him on the opposite side. The dog
quivered, yelped, then twisted away and back into the hidden fields of rough pasture behind it. He shrugged his pack higher on his shoulders and strode on. After just a few steps the dog burst back
into view again, scraping to a halt just inches from the high, undercut brink. This time it ignored the distant calls and whistles, staying to watch him labouring under his pack and fishing tackle
until he had long passed it and was out of sight around the wide sweep of the river bend.

He finally made the road bridge at noon, sweating and fly-ridden. He clambered wearily up to it from the river’s edge and was glad to rest there. The sun was punishing on his bare neck and
head and inside his boots his hot feet were soft and swollen, soaked with sweat and blister-water. He rested his rod against the stone parapet of the bridge, struggled out of his pack and creel and
leaned back on the low stone wall, his arms splayed to support him. After a while he stooped down and worked a plastic water bottle out of a side pocket of his pack, drank from it and then poured
some of the water over his head. It felt warm, like the fluid in his boots, he imagined, and the smell of hot tarmac from the road mingled queasily in his nose and throat with the plastic scent of
the water from the bottle. He twisted the top back on and re-packed it.

Turning away from the road, he leaned to look over the parapet into the river. He knew the bigger trout would be aligned just under the arch, out of sight, behind the shadow-line, but he could
see the occasional glint upstream of the younger, smaller fish as they turned to take food under the rippled surface, then as they turned again to find their lies in the open river, out in the full
glare of the sun. He wished he’d had the sense to stay near the bridge to fish, pitching the tent after dark maybe, instead of walking so far upriver to the quieter stretches. He would have
had plenty of chances under the bridge, even in this weather.

There was still another half-hour or so of walking before reaching the town, he guessed. He hoisted the rucksack up onto the lip of the parapet, tilting its weight from there onto his shoulders,
then hooking his arms through its straps and moving forward to take the strain. The fishing rod and creel he carried first in one hand, then the other, using the tip of the cotton rod-bag to flick
the sweat and flies away from his eyes and lips.

As he walked through the main street the little town seemed deserted. For a while he didn’t even see any traffic, then a loud, battered dirt-bike raced past him from
behind, turned at the head of the street and passed him again. The skinny, T-shirted boy riding it stared full into his face as he sped past.

At the empty bus-stop he set down his fishing gear and slid the pack from his shoulders. The long street, sweeping in a gentle curve down and away from him, seemed to channel a faint breeze and
he turned his back to it, letting it cool the aching wetness along his spine. At last a few cars sped past, and a small white camper slowed and parked outside the post office some fifty yards down
the street. A cafe was open just a few doors along from the bus-stop and leaving his gear he walked stiffly down to it.

The cafe was surprisingly cool inside. A girl in a dirty blue apron was wiping down a big steel tea-urn behind the counter.

Have you got any cold Coke? he asked.

In the fridge, there.

He looked around for the fridge, finding it just behind his back, half hidden by the open door of the cafe. The girl finished cleaning the urn before serving him, then took the money in a hand
still damp from the rag she’d been using.

Back outside he saw that a small, ferrety-looking man had taken a seat at the bus-stop and was eyeing the fishing gear. The fisherman watched him from the door of the cafe, drinking his Coke in
the shade, taking big, painful gulps that were hard to keep down. He drained the can quickly, then dropped it into a mesh waste-basket at the side of the café door. He belched, and a little
Coke welled up, still cold.

As he approached, the new arrival looked up from examining the pack and fishing tackle and nodded. The fisherman nodded back.

Yours then, aye? Nice to find a bit of time for the fishing, like. He peeled the cardboard lid off from a small tub of ice-cream and licked the inside of it clean. He twitched his narrow head,
glanced around and then went on talking, nervily. Eh, Jesus, I’ll be glad to get on home, meself. Been working from three this morning, me. He had a reedy, Geordie voice and nodded his head
continuously down to one side, deferentially, as he spoke. The sharp chin and jaw lines of his boyish face were peppered with a gingery stubble. The stubble didn’t match his thinning hair,
which was watery brown, like his eyes. He grinned shyly at the fisherman.