Bleak Water

A bare tree stood against the sky, and a figure hung from it, the head forced back into a fork between two branches so that the empty eye sockets gazed blankly up and the body arched away from the tree. A bolt or nail had been hammered through the two branches, forming a garrotte that held the figure to the tree. The arms were tied and pulled up behind the back so that they bent at an unnatural angle. The legs hung down, the whole figure stretched under its own weight. It was half decayed – almost skeletal, but not quite, not enough. Brueghel had imbued the figure with human suffering and a drear loneliness that had the capacity to haunt the mind of anyone who saw it.

Eliza thought about Ellie, the bright and beautiful child whose life had been cut brutally short. She thought about Maggie whose youth had come to such an abrupt end. She thought about the dark pit and the coffin being lowered into the grave, the earth falling on the lid with heavy thuds that grew fainter and fainter as the darkness closed in.

Madrid

As the darkness closed in on February in England, Eliza flew to Madrid. Spring came early to central Spain that year. As the plane crossed the Pyrenees the morning sun caught them, the night shadow falling behind as they passed above the browns and oranges of the central plateau, dropping gently down, down to the city that was reaching up to meet her.

Madrid was light and space. The sky was cloudless blue as the bus carried her towards the city, past the lines of trees and the apartment blocks, clean and bright, standing far back from the road.

The hostal was in the centre of the city, close to the Paseo del Prado, and even here, at the heart of this European capital, the sense of space stayed with her. The roads were so wide that Eliza, a first-time visitor, hung back at the crossings as the Madrileños surged through the traffic. The exact rules of the driver and pedestrian engagement, which were so clear to her in London, here seemed oddly ambiguous. A light would tell her she could cross the expanse of carriageway, but as she stepped out (her head automatically turning right) a car would bear down and skim past her, seeming to brush her skirt as she leapt for the safety of the kerb, its horn echoing in her ears.

The cafés spilled out on to the pavements, the parks filled the city with air and green spaces. And all around her, the city life, the street life of central Madrid buzzed and swirled. Within a week, it felt as though she had been there for a year. Within a fortnight, she wondered if she ever wanted to leave.

And in her memory, Madrid was always a city of space, even though she soon discovered the narrow streets of Old Madrid, the stifling Catholicism of the churches and the congestion of the relentless traffic. It was months before the city faded into familiarity and then into disillusionment. And even after a long weekend with Daniel in Seville, a trip they made to the coast to Barcelona, Madrid remained her first love in Spain.

‘Because of the light,’ she told Daniel when he shook his head at her stubborn insistence. ‘It’s because of the light.’

Eliza put the panel back against the wall. Something had distracted her. She listened. There was nothing but the silence of the gallery and the distant sound of the traffic. It was dark outside. She checked her watch. It was after seven. She needed a break. She turned the lights off and walked the length of the empty gallery. The room was long and high, the floors bare wood, the walls whitewashed, the ceiling supported by pillars that broke up the space. The only light came from the moon, shining through the windows behind her. Her shadow lay across the floor and danced on the wall as she moved. Silence. The double tap of her feet echoed as she walked, heel and toe, tap-tap, tap-tap, as she moved through the long room.

For a moment, she thought there was an echo. The sound of her feet seemed to go on for a second after she had stopped moving. She stood there, listening. She moved again, and her shoes made their light tap-tap on the floor. This time there was silence, then she heard it again, like an echo of her own movement, hush-hush, like soft shoes moving across the floor. Weird. That’s weird. It seemed to be coming from the downstairs gallery. She ran lightly down the stairs.

‘Hello?’ she said. The empty space gave her voice an echoing quality. The downstairs gallery was in darkness. She looked round. The main entrance was still locked, but the light for the alarm was out. Someone had switched it off. She felt herself relax. Jonathan. He must have come back for something. She didn’t bother turning the lights on, but went through the doors watching the interplay of shade and shadow, the window frame a lattice shape lying across the floor. He must be in his office.

As she moved past the pillars, something caught her attention. A sound? She looked round, but the gallery was empty behind her. Then she saw someone sitting in front of one of the windows, half concealed behind a pillar, hunched forward as though whoever it was, was watching intently something on the canal below. Her heart thumped, then slowed as she realized who it was. It was the young woman who lived in the flat next door to Eliza’s. ‘Cara?’

The woman jumped, turning quickly, almost overbalancing. ‘I didn’t…I…’ Her eyes focused on Eliza standing behind her in the dark. ‘Eliza.’ She struggled to her feet, hampered by the sling in which she habitually carried her baby, Briony Rose. In the dim light, her eyes looked wide and startled.

She must have used the inside stairs that led to the gallery. There were plans to put in a separate entrance at the bottom of these stairs, but for the moment the occupants of the flats were only supposed to use them in an emergency. In practice, Eliza used them most of the time, and Cara had started following her example.

Eliza looked at Cara. ‘Did you turn the alarm off?’ she said.

Cara nodded. ‘I’ve seen Jonathan doing it, so I know how it works,’ she said. ‘I was going to switch it all back on again, honest. I’ve done it before. I love the gallery. It’s a lovely place to sit. I was going to go in a minute.’ She was talking rapidly, nervously, her eyes looking beyond Eliza into the gallery behind her. The baby gave a brief cry of complaint.

Eliza bit back the comment she had been about to make. She could deal with this later when the baby was settled. ‘I need to lock up,’ she said briskly. ‘Come on.’ She waited as Cara scrabbled round for her bag. ‘Here, let me carry that.’ She picked up the cloth carry-all that the other woman always toted around with her, and slung it over her shoulder. ‘Come on,’ she said again.

Cara followed her slowly, looking back over her shoulder at the window. A rendezvous? Was Cara in the habit of meeting a boyfriend on the canal towpath, or in the gallery? There didn’t seem much point when she had a perfectly good flat upstairs.

She headed up the stairs, stopping when she realized Cara wasn’t following. ‘Cara?’ she said.

‘I’m coming.’ Cara had stopped to look at the poster for Daniel’s exhibition, the reproduction Eliza had been looking at earlier, the hanging man. She gathered the baby closer to her. ‘It’s horrible,’ she said.

‘I suppose it is,’ Eliza said briskly. Cara still seemed reluctant to move. ‘Do you want some coffee?’ Eliza regretted the impulse almost as soon as she had spoken. She was cautious about socializing with Cara. Eliza felt sorry for her, but she didn’t want – she didn’t have time for – the demands a lonely teenager might make on her.

‘OK.’ Cara seemed to make a decision. She looked back at the gallery and then followed Eliza up the stairs. Eliza set the alarm and locked the doors behind her. She thought she heard the echo again as she and Cara walked towards the exit that led to the flats, but when she stopped and listened, everything was quiet. The alarm was sounding its single note, then dropped a tone and stopped. Eliza found herself listening, waiting for the alarm to go off in response to an intruder in the gallery, but nothing happened. She relaxed. ‘You really think it’s bad, that painting?’ Cara said as she followed Eliza up the stairs. She was talking about Daniel’s poster.

‘Not bad,’ Eliza said shortly. ‘Disturbing.’ Something was nagging at her and she wanted to pin it down, but Cara’s chatter was distracting her.

‘Why does Jonathan want to exhibit him?’ Cara went on. Her eyes were nervous, darting round the walls of the stairway and landings.

‘Who? Daniel Flynn? That reproduction is just a part…You need to see the exhibition as a whole.’ Eliza was trying to fit her key into her lock. She could never get it the right way up. If Cara had been upset by that small detail, then she would find the rest of it devastating.

‘I know. I thought…It’s creepy, that’s all.’ Cara followed Eliza through the door into the flat.

‘Good art is meant to disturb you. But it’s only here for a week.’ Eliza dumped her work bag and Cara’s carry-all, and switched on the lights.

‘Hey, nice!’ Cara looked round the loft space.

Eliza was pleased. The Trust had run out of money before the loft conversion was complete. Her loft had been renovated to the point of habitability, the roof and the walls repaired, plumbing installed, the floors fixed. She had moved in to bare bricks and raw timbers. She had needed accommodation urgently. There was no time – and no money – for carefully thought out schemes. She had painted everything white and black, had moved in with her bed, her chairs, her lights and her painting equipment. She’d arranged the room carefully to create living and sleeping and working spaces. Now, it looked spacious and inviting, the chairs made splashes of colour close to one of the arched windows overlooking the canal. At the far end of the room, Eliza had set up her easel, and her painting, her Madrid painting, glowed its Mediterranean warmth against the winter night. Behind her, the kitchen welcomed with red tiles and bright pots.

Cara moved over to the window and hovered uncertainly, the baby sling distorting her outline like a misshapen pregnancy. Eliza shifted the papers that were set out on the chairs, photographs, slides, notes, some of her planning for the exhibition. ‘Why don’t you put it – I mean her, down?’ she said.

‘She might wake up,’ Cara said. ‘She cries a lot.’ She looked at the child, an expression of bafflement on her face, then went over to the chairs as Eliza went to make coffee, and began to unhook the sling. The baby stirred as Cara put it down, tucking a shawl round it. ‘I get so tired,’ she said. She slumped into the chair next to the one she had put the baby on. ‘It’s a lot, when there’s only you,’ she said.

‘It must be hard work,’ Eliza said. She wondered what Cara had expected. She poured out the coffee and put it on the table. She looked at the infant’s sleeping face. She didn’t know much about babies.

‘You know,’ Cara went on, ‘I thought that having a baby would be…you know, it would make me special. Now I’m just…I dunno.’ She shrugged.

Eliza looked at Cara, wondering how to respond to that. Cara was tucking the shawl around the baby as she spoke, and her eyes were shadowed with tiredness. Her face, under the dramatic make-up she favoured, looked thin and pinched.

‘Do you need a baby to make you special?’ Eliza said.

‘I don’t know.’ Cara frowned. She picked up her cup. ‘This is nice.’ She leant back in the chair. ‘I’d like to have my flat as nice as this. I used to think about it when I was carrying her.’ She nodded at the baby. ‘I was going to have my own place and make it really nice. I wanted those drape things over the windows, you know, like they have, and I thought all plants and that. And they had such lovely baby stuff, I wanted…’ Cara’s voice faded away as she contemplated the plans she had had. ‘I used to think that no one could say you were useless if you had a baby. You’ve got something to do then. They used to go on at me all the time: “You’ll never get anywhere, you’ve got to work if you’re going to pass any exams…”’

‘Didn’t you want to?’ Eliza had always been successful at school, had enjoyed shining in a system that had never struck her as too challenging. Her degree had taken her to London, and then to Italy and Spain. Education had opened up the world for her.

Cara shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I didn’t like school. I wasn’t clever and they were always on at me, you know…’

‘So you had a baby?’ Eliza said.

The rain drummed against the window. Cara looked out at the canal and sighed. ‘It wasn’t like that really.’ Eliza wondered if Cara had anyone to talk to. She was a solitary figure, drifting through the gallery, cuddling the baby against her in its sling. ‘But when I got pregnant I thought, well, it would be nice. To have a baby.’ She finished her coffee and smiled at Eliza. She looked round the room again. ‘This is nice.’ She was curled up in the large chair, and the tense, pinched look was leaving her face. She was as thin as a child.

Eliza finished her coffee. She could see that it was doing Cara good to have some company, but Eliza had things to do. She finished her coffee and stood up. ‘Well, I need to get on,’ she said. She saw a look of – what? Apprehension? – in Cara’s eyes. ‘We must do this again,’ she said. There was no harm in the odd half-hour spent talking to Cara.

Cara’s smile was rather strained as she nodded and gathered up the baby. ‘It’s been nice,’ she said.

Eliza saw her out of the flat, then pulled out the sheaf of notes she had made downstairs. If Daniel was coming tomorrow, she wanted to be ready for him. The rain spattered across the window. It was just the night, just the weather for a couple of hours with Brueghel’s macabre vision of the apocalypse.

TWO

The road from the cemetery had been dark and wet. Kerry had got lost, taken a wrong turn, and then she had been wandering along dark lanes, like the countryside, where the wet grass slapped at her ankles and green tendrils hung over walls and caught and tugged at her hair. She’d found her way back to the main road eventually, but it was dark now. She looked at her watch.

Lyn would be waiting for her at the café where they always met. She’d be mad if Kerry was late. Lyn was mad at Kerry anyway. They’d had a row about Kerry’s dad the last time they met. They always fought about Dad. But maybe Lyn was a bit sorry for what she’d said. Kerry’s phone was clutched in her hand and she looked at it again as she pressed the buttons. The saved message ran across the screen:…its abut yor dad meet u at the cafy 7 dont b 18… Lyn never said sorry, but Kerry could tell when she was.

There was a bus stop ahead, and she limped up to it, sinking down gratefully on to the wall. She eased her feet out of her shoes – her best ones – and rubbed her toes. Her feet were wet and splashed with mud. She looked up the road, squinting through the rain that distorted the lights and dripped into her eyes. And there was the bus, pulling away from the lights.

She scrambled on board, grateful for the warmth. The driver was friendly and smiled at her. ‘You’re a bit wet, love,’ he said cheerfully. It was almost empty. Kerry pressed her face against the steamed-up window. The bus jolted and rattled, bumping her head against the glass.

She looked at her watch. She should be there by now. She keyed in Lyn’s number, but she got the answering service. She keyed in another message: pls w8. Please wait. Please, please wait!

Lyn never did anything she didn’t want to. She used to try and teach Kerry that as well. ‘You don’t have to do what he says,’ she’d say, when Dad had told Kerry to go to bed, or tidy her room, or do her homework. But Dad wasn’t Lyn’s dad. Lyn’s dad had left. ‘She’s jealous, Kizz,’ Dad used to say. ‘She’ll get over it.’ And he’d tried to be friends with Lyn, but Lyn didn’t want to know. It drove Kerry mad sometimes. Dad would read her a bedtime story, and Lyn would come in and pretend to be looking for something. ‘You’re too old for stories,’ she’d say. Dad would promise to take Kerry swimming. ‘I’ll take her,’ Lyn would say. ‘She’s my sister.’ But then she usually forgot so Kerry never got to go swimming.

And then Lyn had gone.

She pressed her face against the window. They were nearly there. She stood at the door fidgeting with impatience. ‘Can’t let you out here, love,’ the driver said. ‘Got to wait till we’re in the stand.’

And then the doors were open and Kerry was out of the bus and running as the driver’s ‘Take care, love,’ echoed after her. It had stopped raining, but her clothes were wet and her feet were hurting. She ran up the ramp that led to the tram tracks and across the bridge high over the road. That way to the tram and Meadowhall. That way was the old market.

The steps took you to an empty road and a car park, and they smelled of pee. She used to run down those steps with Ellie, both of them holding their noses and laughing, pushing past slower people, excited about the shops and the lights and the people. And Dad used to follow behind laughing at them too, and saying things like, ‘Careful, Kizzy, slow down, remember you’ve got an old man here.’ And he’d get them a burger – Ellie’s mum didn’t like Ellie eating burgers, so it was a secret. Kerry and her dad liked secrets – and…Kerry didn’t want to think about that.

She tried not to think about the afternoon either, about the way the mist made it hard to see as she walked along the path, about the black rectangle of earth, and all the flowers piled up, dead, like the people in the graves. And the names. They were only names, they didn’t mean people, until she saw the stone with the gold letters. Ellie… Ellie and Kerry.

No Ellie now. She remembered the kids walking past her house that last morning, the day after the police had come and taken Kerry’s dad away. They had to walk past that way, there was no other way for them to go, and she waited for them to call out, ‘Hey, Kizz, you coming?’, waited, didn’t run out like she usually did to join the arm-linking huddle on the walk to school, but no one called, and no one looked, not really, just glances that Kerry could see from behind the nets where she was watching, and their faces were tight and frightened, and they said things to each other as they passed and they cast their eyes over the house again, and then they ran off up the road.

And she’d gone to see Maggie. Maggie used to talk to Kerry when Mum was ill. ‘You’re fine, Kerry,’ she’d say. ‘You’re a great kid.’ And she meant it. Or Kerry had thought that she meant it. But Kerry had gone to Maggie and Maggie’s face had been all twisted and blotchy, like Mum’s was, and she’d looked at Kerry as though she hated her. ‘Get away from me,’ she’d said, and she hadn’t shouted it, she’d said it in a cold, dead sort of way. ‘Get away from me, you…’ And someone had come to the door and pulled Maggie inside, and had looked at Kerry in the same way as she pushed the door shut. And all Kerry could hear was the crying.

And Dad had gone to prison. He wrote to Kerry. Once a week, the letters came, and Kerry wrote back. But they couldn’t say anything real to each other. Kerry couldn’t write about what it was like at home with Mum, or what had happened at her last school and the place they’d last lived. She could still remember the voices in the night, Paedo! Paedo! And the sound of breaking glass as a brick shattered the front window. She couldn’t tell Dad about that. And he wasn’t telling Kerry anything. He said things like It’s not so bad once you get used to it and Don’t worry, I’ll be home soon. Only he didn’t say that so much now. In his last letter, he’d said, Prison changes people, Kizz…

She didn’t watch the TV news, she didn’t read the papers. The teachers said they all should. But Kerry didn’t want to read what they said about her dad: Pervert. Monster. Evil.

She was there – Victoria Quays, the entrance to the canal basin. The water was black, reflecting the white of the moon. She hurried across the cobbles, her feet turning on the uneven footing, towards the café.

She pressed her nose against the window. Lyn? The café door opened, and some people came out. Kerry bit her fingernail. She could see through the steamed-up windows. There were only a few people, and she was sure…She kept looking. Lyn wasn’t there.

She tried Lyn’s number but got the answering service again. ‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘I got it.’ I got the message. That was a daft thing to say. Of course she’d got the message. Lyn knew that. It was so late, she’d got fed up and gone.

She didn’t want to give up yet. She could walk along the towpath, walk to the gallery. Maybe Lyn was there. She could see the faint gleam of the water ahead of her. The city lights made an orange glow against the sky but the path itself was in darkness. She hesitated a moment, then stepped out of the light into the shadow of the first bridge. The air was cold and damp and the ground felt soft and slippery under her feet.

She could see a faint gleam beyond the tunnel mouth and the dank smell of the water closed round her. Now she was feeling her way, her hands pressed against the curving stone wall that came down low, almost to her head. The water lapped against the brick in a sudden flurry of ripples as though something had disturbed it.

As she came out of the tunnel, a shape formed itself in the water, a moored boat, dark and featureless, half concealed in the shadow of the bridge. The boards of the deck were grey and uneven. The path seemed to be petering out now, the buildings coming right to the water’s edge. She was faced with a blank brick wall. She was on the wrong side of the canal. She needed to go back to the canal basin.

The moon came out and the reflection of the canal side appeared in the water. The water was still now, and she could see the walls that lined the path, the bushes and the path framed in the mirror of the canal. She turned back, and the darkness faced her, the black mouth of the tunnel, the smell of the canal that had rippled as though something was moving through the dark water. She didn’t want to go back that way.

Her throat felt tight. She turned round again, and the boat was low in the water beside her, and a brick wall in front of her. She looked back, but the tunnel waited, trapping Kerry between the canal and the wall.

Eliza couldn’t sleep. The sheet kept twisting up as she tried to find a comfortable place to lie, and she felt too hot, then she felt too cold. It was raining again, and the steady beat on the window became an irregular rattle as the wind blew the rain across in a flurry. The roof creaked. She turned over and punched the pillow into shape again. She settled down and curled her arm round her head. Deep, slow breathing, relax into the bed, just let go and melt away…There was a clatter from the other side of the wall, like the sound of something dropped on to a bare floor, rolling to stillness. She was awake again.

She was thinking about Maggie, and about Ellie. Seeing Cara’s baby tonight had reminded her of the first time she’d seen Ellie, a tiny bundle in Maggie’s arm. Eliza had been more engaged by the older Ellie, the bright girl with her mother’s talent for art and a delight in words that seemed to be her own. Raed Azile…

Images from the exhibition began to form in her mind. She didn’t want them there, not now. Suddenly, she wanted no part of that medieval dance of death. She turned over again, disturbing the quilt. A cold draught blew round her. She looked at the clock. One a.m. Tomorrow was going to be difficult. She needed to get some sleep. She could feel the draught again. She knew what it was – it had happened before. Cara must have come in up the outside staircase earlier and not shut the door properly, so it had blown open.

She braced herself and got out of bed. It was freezing. She pulled her dressing gown round her, shivering with cold, and looked out of her door. The passage was in darkness, but the door was open and banging in the wind. There was water on the floor where the rain had blown in. She pulled it shut, banging it hard to make sure it locked, half hoping that Cara would hear it and realize what had happened.