Marie first became obsessed with digging things up the week they buried her dad. It started with the time capsule under the rock in the garden – a Tupperware box he’d helped her fill the year before. ‘2012,’ he’d said, ‘Year the world ends.’ She’d wanted to ask, ‘So who’re we burying it for, then?’ But she didn’t like it when he called her argumentative.
Unearthed, the clear plastic was dull and the top scratched where she’d caught it with the spade. Inside, the shiny flag and Olympic keyring were as garish as the day they’d buried them. Only the newspaper had changed, turning black and fungal with damp, reeking of something best left forgotten. She wondered if this was how her dad smelled inside his coffin.
The second thing Marie dug from the earth was the gerbil she’d had as a toddler. The wooden grave-marker had disintegrated into soft dark splinters in the grass, and the shoebox he’d been buried in was nothing more than a brief resistance in the soil. She misjudged the spot and put the spade straight through the middle of him, his small bones scattered among the earth like a jumble of bad omens. When she brought them into the house, cupped between her palms as an offering, her mum tightened around the mouth and said, ‘Marie, don’t be so morbid.’ Then she’d made Marie throw the gerbil bones in the rubbish bin, and locked the spade in the garden shed.
So Marie resorted to serving spoons or scrabbling with her hands. Whenever she did this, her mum shut herself in her bedroom and refused to look at her daughter’s findings (shards of crockery, daffodil bulbs, a long fat worm), till one afternoon, she drove Marie into town for what she called ‘proper help’. But when the therapist asked if she wanted to talk, Marie said ‘no, thank you’, then spent the session in silence, digging a hole in the armchair cushion with her fingernail.
‘It’s a coping mechanism,’ her teacher told her mum one evening, while Marie turned a rusty bottle-top between her finger and thumb, ‘It’s perfectly normal for children to channel their grief through obsessive behavior. She’ll grow out of it.’
But after Marie unearthed a dead robin from the leaf mulch at the back of the school field, and carried it around in her pinafore pocket, the teacher wrote on her report that she had ‘a death obsession’, and passed her over to the newly qualified Emotional Support Assistant – who told her it was ok to grieve, gave Marie a clean pinafore and a glass of juice, then sent her back out into the playground, where the other children kept their distance and whispered behind their hands.
But it wasn’t death that fascinated Marie; it was a kind of birth – digging something from the ground, bringing it up into the light. A revelation. During their assembly about the Easter story, when she listened to the part about the resurrection, she imagined the cave filled with earth, packed in around Jesus’ crucified body, filling his ears and nostrils and open mouth, so that when the stone was rolled away, he was brought forward not out of darkness, but out of soil, a new religion being born from the earth.
Instead of digging things up, she began to plant them.
She started with cuttings from fruit bushes in the garden. Relieved at the change, her mum gave her the scrub patch around the side of the shed and unlocked the spade from its prison. She showed her the best ways to propagate flowers and prune shrubs, and bought her bedding plants when they were on offer at the supermarket. But the flowers they birthed were gaudy and predictable, and Marie soon grew tired of them. Instead, she planted screws and crusts of bread, candle stubs and the small metal jingle bells from the school music cupboard. She planted a sparrow’s egg and it grew into a bird, which twittered from the branch of the apple tree. She planted a length of fish skin peeled from a salmon steak, and a freshwater stream bubbled from the earth to flow away under the fence.
Some things – small things, usually – grew quickly, birthing themselves from the ground in a matter of days. The cockles she watered in one evening in June flowered invisibly a week later, as the smell of brine and the crash of distant waves. The scattering of ring pulls blossomed into delicate twiggy plants with silver leaves that rattled in the wind.
Other plantings took longer. On the anniversary of her dad’s death, while her mum and auntie drank their way through two and a half bottles of wine and cried in the kitchen, Marie buried her dad’s wedding ring. She marked the spot with a wooden stake, and waited to see what would emerge, but the soil remained undisturbed. Nights after school, she sat cross-legged at the end of the path, telling the soil about her dad, as if she could call the new growth forward through memories: him leaving juice and biscuits outside her bedroom door; helping her learn to ride a bike and letting go of the bicycle – that first abandonment; in hospital, his skin like a paper bag, his hand already all bones.
‘Once,’ she told the bare soil, ‘I had a mouse in my bedroom. It lived behind the wardrobe and when I tried to sleep I could hear it scurrying through my stuff, and I used to sleep curled up in the middle of the bed and I wouldn’t put my feet down in case it crawled over my toes. Dad got it for me. He caught it and I watched him kill it, and he gave me its little dead mouse body so I’d know for sure it was gone, then we threw it in the bin together.’
Once, when her mum was out, she cut the tape on the little brown box in the sideboard, slit open the clear plastic bag inside, and scattered a pinch of his ashes over the spot.
Nothing.
She planted other things around it. Pegs which grew into laundry billowing in the breeze. Bank statements that gave her a deep longing for money. A lock of her own hair.
A few years later, she buried her first tampon. It lay, soft and bloody in the hole she’d dug for it, till she smothered it with earth. She wondered whether she was holding herself more tightly, whether her blazer clung differently to her body, now she had buried something from inside herself. She wondered whether her mum would notice anything, and whether or not she wanted her to. But her mum had come home late from Keith’s, and stared dreamily at her toast.
◆
When she’d first started seeing Keith, Marie’s mum had asked her what she thought about him. Marie had shrugged and carried on scrolling through her phone.
‘But you like him, right?’
‘No.’
Her mum had stopped in the middle of drying the dishes, tea towel dangling loosely from one hand, the wine glass trembling in the other. ‘What don’t you like about him?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Oh, come on. You can’t just drop a bombshell.’
‘No, I mean …’ Marie had pressed a crescent into the pine table with her fingernail. ‘I mean, there’s nothing I don’t like. I don’t like him. I don’t not like him.’ She’d shrugged again, and gone back to her phone. ‘He’s just Keith.’
‘Right.’ Her mum had carried on drying the dishes. ‘Right. Good.’
After that, Keith had become part of their lives. Sometimes he stayed over. Sometimes her mum spent the night at his. With Marie he was always polite, distant. He made them all toast in the mornings before school. He fixed the dodgy toilet flush, and filled the gap around Marie’s bedroom window with silicone. After he’d had a couple of beers, he would tell jokes that skirted the borders of crude, make puns that set her mum groaning with tender exasperation. Marie never laughed, but she grew used to him in the house, the way she had grown used to her draughty bedroom till he’d come and sealed it up.
And still the soil around the marker stake remained bare. Once, impatient after years of waiting, she dug the ring up to check on its progress. She considered returning it to the box on her mum’s bedside table, pretending it had been there all along. But as she weighed it in her palm, she thought it might be heavier than before, duller, the gold shine drawn in on itself as though conserving energy. It was warm against her skin, and she could feel a faint pulse beating within the metal, like something hibernating. Something waiting for the right time.
◆
Marie first noticed the stake was missing on the night before the lockdown started. She searched the earth patch all around the shed, searched through the jumbled stones at the bottom of the wall. When she placed her palm, flat, millimeters from the soil, she could feel the unseasonal spring heat rising from it, like the warmth from a sleeping body.
Inside, her mum and Keith were sitting forward on the sofa, leaning in closer to the television to catch the prime minister’s broadcast.
‘Mum -.’
‘Shh.’
She flopped into the armchair. Her mum’s fingers twisted in her lap and Keith jiggled his leg as they stared at the screen. …devastating impact … halt the growth of this virus … the moment of real danger… Marie’s mind was still outside, a hand-span under the soil as she pictured the wedding ring, as she tried to conjure what it was might grow into: a small gold nugget – multiplying, burgeoning. …obliged to join together … stay at home…
Keith’s jaw was slack as he looked at Marie’s mum. ‘Three weeks.’
‘At least that.’
‘Too long.’
She glanced sideways at Marie, then back at Keith. ‘Mind if I chat with Marie quickly?’
‘Course,’ said Keith. He started to stand, but Marie spoke first: ‘Whatever, stay if mum wants you to.’
Her mum sat even further forward, so the cushions started to tip. ‘You sure? You don’t mind?’
‘It’s fine.’ Without undoing the laces, Marie squeezed off her trainers and pulled up her feet to sit cross-legged. ‘Did you move the plant stake from the side of the shed?’
‘What?’ Then, to Keith: ‘What about clothes?’
He jumped up, his eyes reflecting little square screens from the television. ‘Better nip home for more stuff.’ With a guilty look at Marie, he gave her mum a quick peck on the lips, then hurried out of the door. Her mum muted the broadcast, and they heard Keith’s car start in the drive, then rev off up the lane.
‘What were you saying, love?’
Now Marie sat forward, the way her mum and Keith had. ‘The stake in the garden. Did you move it?’
‘What stake? You’re sure you don’t mind? About Keith?’
‘It was in my bit. By the shed – a wooden stake.’
‘Course not. Why would I move it?’
‘Maybe it grew into something.’ Marie glanced out of the window, to where her mum’s solar lights were already flashing along the garden fence, and the daffodils nodded their vapid heads in appreciation.
‘You’re a good girl, you know that?’ Her mum smiled at her from across the room, a troubled watery smile. ‘Thanks for this.’
Keith returned lugging a suitcase of clean underwear and a bag of odds and ends from his kitchen cupboards, which spilled out across the countertop. That night, Marie lay in bed listening to his low murmur through the wall, felt the house shift and settle around her as it swallowed him into its workings.
◆
The next morning, Marie found a dead vole on the back step. It was stretched out to its full length, a furry nugget with its tail stuck out straight behind it, skeletal grey hands curled in on themselves. Its long whiskers fanned out in god-rays from a snubbed snout, as though they, at least, still pushed towards life. It was soft in her hand, still an echo of warmth, and so light she worried she might drop it without noticing. She planted it, watered it carefully at dusk, but nothing sprouted from the hard soil.
The next week, she found a fledgling: globe-eyed, soft-beaked and semi-transparent. A few days later, a thin-nosed shrew, then a goldfinch with its bright feathers like slashes of paint. She buried each of them, waited for something to emerge – but the patch of earth swallowed them all the way it had swallowed the wooden stake, the way it had swallowed her dad’s wedding ring.
It wasn’t till the third week that the gift-giver appeared, slinking between the stakes her mum had stuck in the ground for the peas: a thin and ash-grey cat, his shoulders rolling as he stalked towards her.
Animals tended to avoid Marie, but she squatted and held out her hand all the same. The cat sniffed once at her fingers, then rubbed his face against them. Purrs rumbling from his chest. When she stroked his back, her fingertips left streaks raked into his soft grey fur. She scratched the top of his head, and he leaned into it, his tail curled over her knee like a brandished rope.
That night, Marie dreamed her dad’s hand had sprouted from the soil, ashen and lean, his fingernails longer than they’d been in real life, like delicate shoots. She snipped his fingers off at the base and arranged them in a jam jar at the back of the sink. When she woke up, her throat was dry and sore, and she stumbled to the bathroom for water.
At breakfast, her mum said, ‘I dream about him sometimes, too.’
‘About cutting off his fingers?’
The cereal bowl slipped. A couple of cornflakes tumbled to the flag floor where they shone like coins buying wishes from a fountain. Her mum squared her shoulders towards the window and said, ‘Sometimes I’m holding his hand. Then I wake up and I can still feel it.’
Marie said, ‘Does Keith know?’
‘It’s not a secret, love.’
But it felt like one to Marie, who buried it with the vole and the fledgling and the goldfinch at the back of the shed.
After that, the dead arrived daily: more fledglings, mice, and once, a fat toad with its belly clawed open. Marie planted them all. She watered them dutifully, but still no shoots appeared. Meanwhile the cat rubbed figures-of-eight around her ankles and mewed for her attention.
Her mum frowned at this. ‘You shouldn’t touch him. You know they can carry the virus?’
‘What, from the other end of the garden?’
‘From wherever he comes from.’
‘He’s got no collar – who says he comes from anywhere?’
Every morning he emerged from the bushes as though the plants had grown him, pale and grey in the bright spring sun. At dusk, he appeared again. He rolled in the dry earth of the vegetable patch or curled on the warm stones of the patio, almost invisible in the half-light. She called him Ghost. Once or twice, she left the back door ajar, and he squeezed through, released some small creature which her mum had to rescue from under the piano, or which made Keith shriek when he found one in his shoe.
◆
The lockdown rolled out from three weeks into six, and then more, gathering momentum as people spilled from its edges, only to be pulled back in. Sometimes, Marie lay awake with the full terror of the virus clawing against the house, pressing its face to the window, rubbing its hackles along the garden fence. Other times, the virus only existed elsewhere, with her trapped on her screen, desperate to smash through and shock herself into existence. Whenever she felt like this, she would carefully place whatever she was holding on the nearest surface and go to sit by her patch in the garden, nipping and pinching at her flesh till there were bruises: dull foxglove bells into which she could press the tip of a finger, feel her skin transforming into small and accurate pain.
In the evenings, they gathered in the front room to watch the government briefings. Keith’s foot tapped arrhythmic heartbeats on the carpet while her mum googled the daily death toll. Afterwards, they went for a walk: Keith and her mum in front, Marie twenty minutes later.
‘Why don’t you just come with us?’ her mum had asked at the end of the first week. ‘Is it Keith?’
‘I’m social distancing.’
‘But we live together.’
But Marie craved the twenty minutes alone in the house, full of creaks and sighs and nobody to disturb them. She craved the act of walking by herself, of feeling like she was the only person at the center of her wide yellow-green land. She walked more slowly than her mum and Keith, so she could watch the skylarks hovering from reed to reed, or the heron’s lazy flight downriver. For the first few weeks, tire-flattened frogs littered the road, little crucifixions that dried like leather in the unseasonal sun. During her walks, Marie tried to count them, but she was always distracted by the fell ponies or by the sudden golden jinking of a hare.
By the time the frogs had gone, the sheep had been let back out onto the common land beyond the cattle grid. Long-eared lambs bounded and frisked between the tufts of grass, then fled to their mothers at her approach, tails waggling furiously as they suckled. The cottongrass flowered again, and the last sickles of snow melted from the peaks. From the top of the service road, Marie could see the rolling backs of the Howgills like cardboard cut-outs in the new evening light, while in the other direction, the radar station on top of Great Dun Fell shone like a warning beacon. Sometimes, Marie stopped altogether. She stood in the middle of the potholed concrete, watching the smoke rise from the steel works across the valley as a train passed beneath it like a string of silver beads. The land had reinvented itself after the grey months, had pulled itself up out of the earth as spring. While the whole world was looking forward – to the summer, to the end of the lockdown – she felt something pulling her back. It dragged and drained around the bottom of her lungs. There was a steep hill inside her, and she could not pull her own weight to the top. She wondered whether it had grown from something she had planted, or whether it had been there all along, and she just hadn’t noticed it till now.
◆
As the fell came back to life and the village gardens erupted from brown into green into riotous color, Ghost’s prey got larger. A plush black mole. A collared dove. A series of limp grey rabbits. Marie planted all of them, but still nothing showed above the surface. However much she buried, the little plot of earth never seemed to fill – a grieving cavity into which she could hurl all her losses, and still the earth would yawn. Once or twice, she wondered if all Ghost’s hunts were growing together, coalescing with the wooden stake and her dad’s wedding ring, to forge one huge entity that was waiting to be born from the soil.
He brought her a red squirrel, which she buried with its tail wrapped around it while Keith raged about endangered species and her mum phoned the local ranger. He brought her a fox cub, white-snouted and tufty-eared. He brought her an owl with wide black eyes. One evening, in the second month of the lockdown, while her mum and Keith were out on their daily walk, he dragged the corpse of a collared tabby cat over the back wall, and Marie buried it before anyone could see.
Some nights, as she lay awake, all Ghost’s catches skittered through her brain on sharp claws. When she did sleep, more and more, her dreams had pulses, fused into a monstrous creature that beat, red and desperate inside her.
She always woke up sore and tingling, with an itch of blood under her nails, as though the creature belonged not to her mind, but to the monster of her own body. She tugged the duvet tighter, the way her dad had always told her to do after a nightmare, and tried to squeeze the wildness out through her tight-shut eyes.
◆
Meanwhile, her mum was scouring decades of detritus from the house, grimly attended by Keith as polythene bags marked for the charity shop piled up in the hall, a bulging rustling mass on the way to the front door. ‘It’s the perfect opportunity,’ she kept saying. ‘Got to make space.’ She never said what she was making space for, but whenever she mentioned it, Keith would glance guiltily at Marie, who would respond with her most ostentatious shrug.
So far, as they’d purged kitchen cupboards and upended all the contents of the spare bedroom, Marie had managed to avoid getting involved. But as she lay starfished on her bed, sheltering from the sun, she heard her mum calling her name, half way between a choke and a sob. She hurried through. Her mum’s bedroom was an explosion of bags and boxes, old shoes and crumpled clothes flung into vague piles. This was Marie’s method, too: create chaos, so there was something to claw back into order. Keith hovered uncertainly to one side, half perched on a cabinet with all its drawers aghast. They’d pulled down the slatted blinds against the sun, so the whole mess looked like a strobe-lit scene in a bad horror film, and in the middle of it all knelt her mum, holding a large battered packing box bound up with parcel tape. She looked at Marie, reluctant in the doorway. ‘It was your dad’s.’
Keith scratched his nose and busied himself peering through the blind slats.
‘What is it?’
‘Just stuff.’ Her mum looked at the box as though it was a body, a thing to be adored and clung to and feared. ‘He boxed it up before… I’ve just left it. I never knew what to do.’ She took a deep breath. ‘You’ll have it?’
There was a soft noise from downstairs, like a tea towel falling off its hook.
‘Ok.’
‘Sort through it, decide what you want – I just… I want rid.’ Her mum closed her eyes and held the box away from her body. When Marie took it, she was surprised at how light it was, how inconsequential her dad’s life.
Something sharp scraped the back of her calf: Ghost, appearing out of the darkness of the landing, his bright eyes on the box in Marie’s hands. In his mouth, he carried a jackdaw, its feathers sleek as a bin bag, its head catching blue and silver in the slatted light. At Keith’s ‘For god’s sake,’ the broad wings flapped and struggled, beating hard against captivity. As Marie made to free it from Ghost’s jaw, the jackdaw panicked, twisted further into the cat’s grip, and went limp. She held it in her arms like a child, the body still pulsing, its breath coming still and shallow. The ringed eye pleaded up at her, a pained brightness – till she twisted the neck, and with a crack, the bird went still. Her mum screamed and Keith swore loudly.
Marie dumped the jackdaw like a feathered rag on top of the box and carried it to her room. It had been easier than she’d expected. When she turned to Ghost – to thank or admonish him, she wasn’t sure – the cat had vanished.
◆
The box was impeccably ordered, the way her dad had done everything: all its contents packed in so neatly they fitted together like a single whole. One by one, she pulled them out, scattered them across the duvet. An old school jumper with holes bitten in the cuffs. A stack of Scout badges. Wrapped in tissue paper, the dried corsage from his wedding suit. A couple of glossy programs from rugby matches. The painted salt dough ornament Marie had made him for Fathers’ Day, now molding around the edges. At the bottom of the box, a stack of photos.
She recognized the top one from a family holiday to Italy while she was still in primary school, the unearthed city of Pompei sprawled out behind them as she scowled and her parents grinned at the camera. Next, there came birthdays – her and her mum puff-cheeked as they blew out candles – and more holidays. There were black and white photos of her grandparents as children and as newly-weds, smooth-skinned and in love. At the bottom of the stack: the photos of women.
There were eight of them in total, all seductive, all grainy with age. One was a plump blonde, her face turned towards a whited-out window, the skin around her breasts blue in the sunlight. The second was darker, slight and angular, standing sideways to the camera in her underwear, one finger slipped into the elastic of her knickers, another tucked under her bra strap. The other six she was certain were her mum.
She was young in all these photos – Marie guessed around twenty. She knew her parents had lived apart during her mum’s final year of college, and wondered whether they’d been taken then. Her mum certainly looked hopeful – a shy confidence, a blaze in her eyes that suggested she believed in her own future. Like Marie’s, her face was slightly flattened, and her bare shoulders had the same bullish squareness. In all of them, she wore only her swimsuit or underwear, as she knelt in the middle of a bedroom, or sunbathed on some unknown lawn. All except one. Marie was sure her dad must have taken this one himself: her mum lying on an unmade single bed in what looked like a student bedroom, a stack of books and a half-drunk bottle of wine on the bedside table. She lay on her side like an art gallery nude, arm draped across the slight bulge of her belly. Marie traced her body’s horizon, from squared-off clavicle, down the slope of her ribs to the dip of her waist, then up the steep pass across her hips.
Marie planted the photos of her mum next to her dad’s wedding ring, like onions in a neatly spaced row. After a few moments’ thought, she planted the other two women as well.
◆
It was just a few days later that, coming upon her mum at the garden table, Marie asked, ‘Can you smell cigarettes?’
Her mum sucked the end of her pen and scanned her sudoku. The daffodils, which had been so bright and joyful at the start of the lockdown, were long since past; her mum still had slivers of green under her fingernails from where she’d spent the morning deadheading them, straightening up after each clump to puff and wipe her brow.
‘Mum?’
‘Probably next door. God, I feel rough.’
‘They’re not smokers.’ Marie watched a robin tug a long worm from the loose soil in the vegetable patch, a magician hauling a magic string of handkerchiefs from a dark coat pocket. Then the robin released it, let it begin its panicked descent to safety, before hoiking it back to the surface. She watched it do this again and again before it finally chirruped once, then gulped it down. She said, ‘They smell like dad’s.’
‘Your dad didn’t smoke, not when you knew him. Only when he’d been to the pub.’
‘They do though.’
Her mum sniffed. ‘Maybe.’ Then she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. ‘He used to leave a packet on the lintel over the front door. Pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Never realized I knew about them – always thought I’d be too short to find them.’
The smell of cigarettes curled around them both like a binding, like a pledge. Then her mum said, ‘I think it smells more like burnt hair,’ and went inside. Later, on her tiptoes, Marie ran her fingers along the lintel, but they came back with nothing but a thick grey layer of dust.
On the morning the lockdown rules started to relax, Marie woke to the sound of Keith swearing in the garden, and she ran downstairs still in her pyjama shorts.
‘D’you think it blundered in to die, or did someone dump it here already dead?’
Her mum hugged her mug of peppermint tea. ‘Gate’s still shut.’
‘Dumped, then.’ Keith scratched at the patchy grey stubble under his ear. ‘Bastards.’
Across the path, there lay a ewe, head lolling in the leaves of the hostas. Marie had seen dead sheep before, fly-ridden on the fell or with ribcages showing like piano keys through their thinned wool. Once, on the service road, a roadkill lamb had been draped across the stone column at the end of the bridge like a sculpture on a plinth, its head over the side and a liquid glob of brain dangling from its half-open mouth. For weeks, Marie had charted its progress on the way home from school: the bubble of brain expanding, the wool growing dirtier, more matted, until someone had finally taken it away.
This sheep was different. Apart from the angle of its neck, it could have been sleeping. Marie wanted to touch it, to see whether she could feel its life-warmth cooling below the wool, but something in her mum’s hard eyes – in the careful way she tried to make her body slouch and her shoulders relax – made her stop. Instead, she bit at her thumbnail where it joined to the quick, till pricks of new blood squeezed out to join the dry.
The farmer called by that afternoon, smelling of mud and fields and lanolin. He slung the ewe over the back of his quad bike and told Keith to quit apologizing. ‘Just one of them things – not like you killed her.’
Crouching at the side of the shed, Marie felt something soft brush against the back of her calf, and she looked down at Ghost, winding his long tail around her calves, his eyes fixed on the dead ewe. She ran her fingers through his sleek grey fur, and for the first time noticed the strands of whiter grey that flecked the top of his head, accidental brushstrokes painting him older.
The farmer revved his engine and nodded to them. ‘Nice cat. He a good mouser?’
Marie nodded, one hand stroking Ghost, her other palm flat to the earth. Under the surface, something was moving. She could feel its becoming, a sort of breath, turbulent and keen, like a lamb still struggling for birth inside a dead mother. She warmed her palm against the heat of it, ready to snatch back in case it burned.
Keith said, ‘You’ve no idea.’
◆
That Saturday was another hot one, and the easing lockdown restrictions meant a parade of walkers and cars and campervans trundling through the village in search of the fells beyond. Families drove up from the city to the end of the stone cottages, where the road crossed the cattle grid and opened into fell country. They picnicked along the river bank, netted the tiny fish to tip into brightly colored buckets. Walkers parked up along the edge of the service road and disappeared off up tracks, emerging hours later, sunburned and sore, their legs scratched by spike-rush. It was only as the day dropped into evening and the bugs began to swarm in phantom clouds, that the village grew quiet. Marie paddled out into the river, stirring up the grains.
In the still water near the edge, she stood till the ripples died and the silt settled over her toes. Her feet through the water looked mottled, like something recently dead, and a mass of tadpoles wriggled around her ankles, fat and black, halfway between tadpole and frog, the small beginnings of legs spiking from their bodies. A shoal of brown tiddlers flickered over her feet, and the dull armored body of a dragonfly nymph crawled between the reeds. A flash of brilliant blue darted over the surface like an electric hyphen.
The intense heat had started to leech from the day. Marie felt it drain from the soles of her feet, back into the earth. In the low-hanging sun, the ragged sheep and fell ponies looked like cutouts against the grass. She had just decided it was time to walk home, to sit on the low wall near the back door and wait for Ghost’s evening visit, when she saw him across the grass, stalking low to the ground along the edge of the road. She stood as still as she could. For all his gifts to her, she had never watched him hunt, had never seen him make a kill. Her eyes raked the long grass for something small and scurrying, but nothing twitched or rustled the plant life. There was only Ghost, his bony shoulders rolling and his eyes low to the ground.
A girl with a long blonde ponytail crossed the cattle grid from the village. She had thin legs, and her shadow stretched out four times her length away from her. Marie recognized her, vaguely, though she didn’t know her name. She lived in the village, in one of the big new builds, and Marie thought she might be in the year above at school.
The girl bent down and held out her fingers to Ghost. Marie held her breath, waiting for Ghost to raise his tail and turn away, or else to rend her outstretched hand with his claws. Instead he rubbed his face against the girl’s knuckles, twined his rope-like tail over her wrist.
‘Hey!’
At Marie’s shout, the girl and the cat looked up. She sloshed towards the bank and scooped up her flip flops from the grass. The girl straightened up, half raised a hand in greeting, and Marie thought she heard a faint mew from Ghost.
When she reached them, she bent down in imitation of the girl. For a moment, Ghost nosed at her outstretched hand. His eyes burned gold with the evening light, his grey fur soft and tender, before he turned back to the other girl.
‘Hi.’ The other girl smiled, and there was something cloying and breathless about the way she spoke. ‘You live over in the barn conversion.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Marie, right?’
Marie stood up and nodded. She watched Ghost twine his figures of eight around the girl’s ankles. ‘Guess he likes you.’
‘He’s always been like that.’
‘What?’
‘Cute, you know. Needy. Ever since we got him.’
Ghost turned his face towards Marie. She felt something wide and bottomless open up inside her, and everything she was tumble into it. She wanted to say ‘No,’ but the word had buried itself. It was as though something had been ripped from her – the small comfort of dead animals delivered to a doorstep – as though whatever had been coalescing under the soil behind the shed, growing and building with every planted gift, was broken apart, had become nothing more than a bundle of corpses rotting in the earth. She dug her nails into the heels of her hands, pressed so hard she thought she might break the skin.
The girl said, ‘He was a rescue-.’
‘He brings me things.’
‘What?’
‘Mice and voles and things.’ Another cat. A ewe. ‘He leaves them by the back door.’
‘Does he?’ The girl laughed. ‘He doesn’t do that with me. Maybe he thinks I can catch my own food.’
Ghost gave a soft mew from between the girl’s ankles.
‘Been mad here today, hasn’t it?’
Marie could feel her pulse in her hand, now, in her dug-in fingernails, and a bloody metallic taste rose from the back of her throat. The fells stretched away gold, swept with wide silver brushstrokes of cotton-grass up towards Kidsty Pike and the pale blue edge of sky. A trio of black-headed gulls flapped away along the river, and the heron watched them from across the dub, blue and wary in the shallows beneath the tree. Marie shivered.
‘Well. See you.’ The girl turned away towards the new houses at the end of the village. Ghost turned away, too, but he didn’t follow the girl. He balanced like a tightrope walker along the edge of the cattle grid, then paused on the other side, his head turned back towards them both. The girl called him to her, but he just stood.
‘Sorry – he’s probably headed to mine.’ Again, Ghost let out his soft, beckoning mew. Marie shrugged. ‘Bye then.’
With his tail held high, Ghost paraded along the tarmac. Marie rubbed her feet dry on the grass, slipped on her flip flops and followed, leaving the girl hesitant behind them. As she balanced across the cattle grid, she tried to find that same deliberate balance in herself that she had seen in Ghost. The low stalking. The hunt. The evening was lit like a film set and she poised herself, an actor on the verge of breaking into a new role.
A flight of swallows skimmed from under the eaves, swooping and dive-bombing, unzipping the dusk. Ghost slipped between the slats at the bottom of the garden gate, making himself slim and low to the ground. He perched on the high stone wall by the side of the shed, his front paw stretched, claws splayed in satisfied uncurling. He let her disturb the thin fur on top of his head, behind his ears, under his chin.
The metallic taste in her mouth was stronger now. It clung to her gums and sang into the gaps between her teeth. She thought of her dream – the hard red creature growing like a furious heart inside her – and felt it stir. She pressed her fingers around Ghost’s rumbling throat.
The house behind her was dark, and Marie’s mum’s bedroom blinds were pulled down. There was nobody to see. From the end of the gutter, a blackbird called out a warning.
◆
Later that week, the weather finally broke. The sky hung grey-blue and belly-full and the breeze off the fell hurried away the bright summer evenings she’d grown used to. The grey cobblestone path and variegated leaves were muted, but the honeysuckle stood out against the fence like stab wounds. Her mum stuck her head out of the back door. ‘Tea’s nearly ready.’
Marie continued to sit cross-legged on the edge of the patio by the side of the shed.
‘He won’t come if it’s raining.’
‘He won’t come either way.’ She laid a hand flat on the freshly dug earth.
Stroked it.
Her mum hung on the door. ‘Don’t be too long. There’s – me and Keith – we’ve got some news.’ She waited a moment, then said, ‘Ok then,’ and went back inside. Marie continued to sit. For a second, she thought she could smell her dad’s cigarettes again – then it was gone.
Marie always thought there was something horrific about the moment a shoot emerged from the soil – how it could be absent one moment, then alive and drinking the air the next – though she had never managed to witness the exact second of emergence. She felt the earth, but it was cold now, an empty ultrasound. She dug into it with her hands, the dry soil stinging under her nails, her fingertips sore and earth-scraped. She dug for bones or feathers or the familiar grey softness of fur.
Nothing. Everything she had hidden in the earth was gone. Coalescing into some singular growth, perhaps – or else transplanted all those small kills taking root elsewhere, leaving the soil hard and heartless.
Marie rubbed at her sternum. It nagged at her, like indigestion, and there was a lump in her throat as though she was going to cry. She wasn’t going to cry. After Ghost, there was nobody left to cry for.
She sat back on her heels and looked towards the house. Through the slatted blinds, she could just see the outlines of her mum and Keith, two shadows moving ahead of whatever cast them, or else backlit against the television, casting her.
It started to rain. A single drop on the nub of her ankle, then another on her forehead. She breathed deeply, and tried to remember the word for it: the smell of earth and stone after rainfall. Her dad would have known. He kept hold of all those sorts of words, the sorts her mum called highfalutin when she was feeling generous, and up-their-own arse when she wasn’t – each so specific in what they conjured that Marie always thought of them as spells.
For the first time since she was a child, she thought about excavation: exhuming something without quite knowing what she was going to find.
She reached into her mouth, right down to the gagging part behind her tonsils, where the taste of metal clung to the walls of her throat, and pulled out a ring – a plain gold band, improbably shiny, like bullion brought up from a wreck. She held it up to the light. She brought it back towards her mouth. It smelled of her breath, the rotting carcasses of a hundred tiny creatures, the deep stench of betrayal. Behind it, somewhere deep under her breastbone, she felt a new hardness inside her. A small green aberration, pushing through out of the dark.
Petrichor, that was it: the smell of the ground after rain. She cast the word aloud. ‘Petrichor.’ The breaking down of plant life into something primal, microbial. The garden giving up control in search of a richer chaos. Water planting itself, and the soil twisting it back into the sky as scent.