Mary George of Allnorthover. Lavinia Greenlaw
where the party had been. The boy might have woken. They had been sitting together on the floor talking. Each time their eyes met it was harder and for longer, and then there had been a few vague kisses during which his hand moved to stroke her cheek, then dropped to her thigh and they had both stopped and looked down. He stared, as if the hand on this strange girl’s skirt were nothing to do with him. Mary stared too, wondering if she should move it, and if so where to? By the time she had got up the courage to hold his hand, he had fallen asleep and she stared at their hands until her eyes closed too.
There was a row of allotments on the embankment through which Mary could reach the railway track and then the station. She climbed over the gate and collected peas and raspberries, stuffing some in her mouth and some in her pockets. They tasted like steel wool. She wandered along the narrow mown strips that separated each plot. Clipped borders, raked earth, intricate constructions of bamboo, netting and tags were maintained by gardeners unwilling to alter their routine according to the failure of their enterprise – blown courgette plants, yellow lettuces, tightly curled buds that had been scorched before they could open. Mary caught her leg on a tap hidden in a clump of grass. She rinsed off the blood, cupped her hands under the trickle of water and drank. It was tepid and tasted of lead, as if it had been tinned years ago.
At the track, assuming there had to be a live rail, Mary put on her glasses. Nothing suggested electricity. At least seeing made her feel she could hear, so she would know if a fast train was going to swoop round the bend, blaring out of silence without warning, to catch her as it had caught the child whose bicycle had got stuck or the boy who had fallen while spraypainting a bridge or the woman who had just lain down. But who were they? No one she’d met had ever known them. They were just good stories. Mary crept over the lines.
The ticket office was closed. The guards’ room and toilets had been padlocked and abandoned. There was a waiting room with a door jammed only just open. Its one high window was locked, broken and brown, as if someone had taken the stale chocolate from the vending machine and smeared it all over the glass. There were timetables but it was too dim to read them and there was no bulb in the fitting that dangled from the ceiling.
A goods train came through with two passenger carriages attached. Three people got out, the heavy doors slamming behind them with a lethargic clunk. Mary climbed on board. The luggage rack above her sagged like an old string vest, the walls of the carriage were waxy and peeling, and the seat smelt of cardboard and milk. This is like travelling in the back of a cupboard, she thought. She tugged at the window till it gave an inch, then fell asleep.
The train turned back on itself, inland along the estuary with its cargo from the industrial estate of Crouchness: bundles of angling magazines, promotional packs for a new car, dog biscuits, gift jars of sea salt and printed t-shirts. All this had been brought to the town as paper, ink, bonemeal, cotton, minerals, bottles and labels. It came with instructions, was put together and sent back again; nothing was made or remained in Crouchness, let alone thought of there. This was the milk train but it carried no milk, which was delivered by tanker. Sacks of post were still thrown on and off at stations near main sorting offices but most of that, too, now travelled by road. So there were fewer trains each year and the rolling stock was left to seize up on the sidings, to struggle through these slow, pernickety journeys, stopping at empty platforms and once in a while, at dawn on a Saturday morning, bringing a girl like Mary nearer to home.
Once out of the marshes, the train continued its stop-and-start journey through the inland towns. The flatness of this country was suited to the new large-scale arable farming. Trees had been felled, hedgerows pulled up, ditches filled, footpaths shaved away. A single field could be all there was in sight. The only interruptions were those forced by the twisting lanes, the untidy hamlets and scattered woods. Around here, things had always been small-scale, local, instinctive. To the north, the land was even flatter. There were long stretches of Roman road, few trees and even fewer houses. The farming was better there.
As the land had been opened and pared away, the old buildings of the landowners once again dominated the view: extravagant brick chimneys and wooden belfreys embellished manor houses, farms and churches that had been poised to be seen and to be able to see for miles. In a place like this, though, distance was more vertical than horizontal. Nothing could look important under such huge skies.
The guard made his way down the train. He was sure that someone had got on and that they would not have a ticket. He opened the sliding door, sauntered through and stood in front of the sleeping girl, rocking on his heels like a policeman savouring a trivial caution. He paused for a moment, wondering which excuse she would try: the dropped ticket, the lost purse, passing herself off as foreign or dumb. Or asleep? Was that it? Those ones usually overdid it though, giving themselves away with little touches like snoring or a dropped book. This girl was hunched in the corner of her seat, her head propped on her knees, her hands in fists clenched in her skirt. She looked like someone waiting for a bomb to drop; so much unlike anyone sleeping that the guard was inclined to believe she really was. He shook his head at this small, bony creature dressed up in clothes that were too big and too tatty, and those ridiculous boots. She would trip over everything. She had a slapdash boy’s haircut and a furious face. He was about to laugh, cough and wake her up, but had left it too long. He could not think what to do, so turned round and crept away.
Mary woke up as the train pulled into Ingfield, from where she could walk the three miles home. She followed a string of pylons to the reservoir, along unsigned footpaths shaved to ridges. Withered stalks scratched at her legs. The earth was going to be changed by this drought for ever. The deep clay that had sealed these parts in the wake of a glacier thousands of years ago, was now brittle and fractured. Powdery top soil lay across the surface like dust. When the weather finally broke, it would be blown or washed away.
There was a point where this landscape buckled on a chalk seam and rose and fell in a ridge. Mary climbed and found herself looking down onto the conifers that shielded the water. From up here, she could see the bleached concrete rim that ran along that side of the reservoir’s basin. The water was hard to get to. A chain-link fence ran around most of the perimeter and there were just two gates – one for those with fishing or sailing permits and one for the Water Board. At the point closest to the road, there was a path leading to a viewing platform. The noticeboard on the platform offered a key to the birds that could be seen there: cormorants, herring gulls, herons and Canada geese – sea birds, migratory birds, making do. There was a list of statistics, too, that explained how many cubic metres of water served how many businesses and homes, how much earth had been moved and concrete poured, and how many trees had been planted.
Mary remembered her father coming on a visit when she was ten. It was March, around her birthday. Her mother, Stella, had taken her to Ingfield to meet him. Matthew had arrived with a thermos and a pair of binoculars, and reminded her that a year earlier she had declared herself interested in birds. He drove her out to the reservoir where they stood in silence on the viewing platform in the searing wind, fumbling the binoculars between them with deadened fingers. To break the silence, Matthew pretended to have seen a heron. When this didn’t excite Mary, he spotted a kingfisher, then a hummingbird. ‘Look! Look!’ he had implored but she wouldn’t join in, wouldn’t pretend and had refused to take the binoculars from him.
Tom Hepple held his breath but still his heart would not slow. He tried not to gulp air as his arms curled and his hands went dead. He leant hard back against the tree, wanting to feel his spine, to know he had bones and could stay standing and would not break. His heart was beating so fast it had to burst, it would be a relief if it burst. When it seemed it might, there was a hollow pause followed by erratic threes and fours, not a light palpitating skitter now but slow hard thumps, like bubbles rising in something solid, a knot surfacing in a piece of wood. This was worse than anything.
He had known about the water and had come back knowing what he would see: no Goose Farm, no Easter Bank, no home. Tom knew, too, that there would be concrete, fences, fir trees and a bowl of water that stopped the eye in its tracks. These were places where you traced a slope up and over but not down because a bowl of water stopped you, cut across your vision, and even when there was no reflection, turned you hard back on yourself. Reservoirs never became part of things. The eye told you first and then the land. You could walk, as Tom had just