Furnace Read online

  Luke tapped my shoulder and handed me a fresh rabbit’s foot. Hang it in the sun, he said, and don’t let it get wet. Wet’ll make it rot.

  I turned it over in my hand. Soft, like something for a baby.

  It’s a luck-charm, he said.

  I put it in the big front pocket of my waitressing apron. When I looked again, the walkers were gone.

  It was early afternoon when they came into the bar. I was clearing the dessert plates for old Pastor Williams and his sister. The two walkers dumped their rucksacks by the door and took a good look around. The shorter one, a fair-haired boy not much older than me, I guessed, was red in the face and sweating. His tall, darker friend looked easy with the heat, and calm. He walked to the bar while his friend took a seat in the shade. I put the dirty plates down on an empty table and hurried to get behind the bar before Mr Whitfield came through.

  The stranger smiled, but not enough to show his teeth. Two bottles from the fridge, he said, pointing. Beer, please.

  He sounded foreign and I felt my mouth go dry. Budweiser? I said.

  Anything, he said.

  In bottles we’ve got Budweiser or Heineken.

  Either.

  I could feel old Williams watching me but served the drinks anyway and took the money. When I went back for the dirty plates he said: Sarah fach, you leave that kind of work to Mr Whitfield, now. He looked from one stranger to the other, then back again to me.

  He’s not here, I said in Welsh, feeling my face burn.

  He carried on in English. There’s Luke back in the kitchen there, he said.

  The tall one was staring at Mr Williams now, but still smiling the same smile. Then Mr Whitfield came up from the cellar anyway and nothing else was said.

  I took the plates through to the kitchen and when I came back to the bar the younger stranger was looking at the blackboard near the door. It said ‘Today’s Special – Trout Fresh From The Lake’. I’d written it out neat that morning, in yellow chalk. They spoke quietly and the tall one went up to the bar.

  Thanking you sir, said Mr Whitfield after taking his order. Then he waved me over.

  Tell Luke he’s back on, he said under his breath, and tell him no pissing and moaning.

  I went out through the kitchen and started up the fire escape to Luke’s room. He must have heard me clunking up the metal steps because before I got to the top he was out on his little platform looking down. All he had on were white underpants. I stopped. The metal was burning in the sun and he hopped from foot to bare foot.

  No way, he said, before I could speak.

  He says you’ve got to. There’s two late customers.

  Ah! Ah! he said, still hopping. Tell him to kiss my arse. I laughed. Okay, I said, and turned to go down.

  My fucking feet! he yelled. I looked back but he’d disappeared.

  In the kitchen I took down the big pan, got the lettuce bowl and trout out of the cabinet fridge and arranged it all ready for him.

  Back in the bar Mr Whitfield was sitting with Mr and Mrs Williams, talking lambs in Welsh. It had been a terrible spring and dozens froze in the fields. Now, this early summer was the hottest anyone could remember.

  You can’t question, though, I heard Mr Williams say in his throaty old preaching voice.

  No, you can’t question, said his sister, wobbling her head.

  I noticed that the two strangers were watching them talk. They’d finished their first drinks and had two fresh bottles in front of them.

  I found a few things to do at the bar. I emptied the slop trays and shuffled some bottles. Now and again I looked over at the strangers, sideways on. The tall one caught me every time. There he was, smiling like he knew something. Soon I heard Luke clattering pans in the kitchen, which is what he does when he wants me through there to help him. I went through fast before he broke anything.

  Luke was still in his underpants. He’d put on shoes but that was all.

  That’s not hygienic, I said.

  They’re clean.

  They weren’t. I went over to the fridge and got out a mini-trifle. I found a spoon on the draining board and ate the trifle fast, watching Luke work.

  He picked up the trout from the chopping board. You can smell that shitty lake in these things, he said. You can taste it when you eat them. You can taste the silt. He laid the fish in a pan of hot butter and tossed some mushrooms and chopped bacon and sliced almonds in with it. Put out the salad, he said.

  I rinsed out the metal trifle dish, then got the salad ready. I threw in some extra green to use it up, all round the plate, then set it down next to Luke.

  Jesus, I said a salad, not a garden. He lifted the trout onto it, then scooped the mushrooms, bacon and a few greasy almond slivers over the top. He cut a wedge of lemon and rustled it into the lettuce and cress.

  It was quiet back in the bar but I could feel the bad atmosphere. Mr Whitfield was staring at the two walkers. The younger boy was looking down at his feet. Mr Williams shook his head, though I couldn’t tell why. I walked on over and put the plate in front of the tall one.

  It’s not for me, he said, and pushed it in front of the boy. Any vinegar? he asked.

  I went to fetch it from the bar and when I handed him the glass drizzler he took the stopper right out and splashed vinegar all over the boy’s fish, drenching it, washing the almonds off. I almost laughed with surprise, imagining what Luke would say, but the boy just watched, showing no emotion at all.

  Back in the kitchen there was no sign of Luke and Mr Whitfield stayed put in the bar, watching the strangers, probably. The kitchen was hotter than the bar and I had a terrible thirst. I ate another trifle and drank cold water from the tap before going in to clear their table.

  The bar was empty. I went to the window, quickly, and looked out onto the street. The air smelled of dust and tar. I leaned out and in the distance there was Mr Williams, stooping and slow, helping his sister up the road. Then a big heavy hand squeezed hard behind and in-between and I nearly jumped out into the street.

  Tidy up after them grubby hippies, there’s my girl, Mr Whitfield said.

  Get off me, I shouted, and slapped at his hand.

  He let go but I could still feel the throb where his big filthy fingers had been.

  Be grateful someone gives you a bit of attention, he said. Then he went back behind the bar and started going through the till.

  The boy had finished off almost all the fish, but he hadn’t touched the salad. The skeleton was left there, in the middle of it all. There was vinegar pooled all round the rim. I picked up the plate, careful not to spill, and carried it through.

  After washing up I hung my apron behind the door. There was a dark brown stain, just a spot, on the front pocket and I wondered for a second until I remembered the rabbit’s foot. I fished it out to see – there was a little black knob of blood crusted on the tip of the bone. I wrapped it in foil so Luke wouldn’t find it, then buried it down with the rubbish.

  Somehow I knew where I’d find the two walkers when I got out. I could feel it. I ran across the road and along to the wicket gate that gives onto the fields around the lake. Near the water the fields stop dead and drop just a foot or so down to stones and mud, like a step or a bench, and they were sitting on it, down along the shore in the distance. Thin milky clouds had come over and taken the glare from the sun, but that just made the hot air seem trapped and suffocating. I was breathing hard and trying not to swallow the tiny grey flies coming off the muddy shore like puffs of smoke. The further on I went the thicker the gnats seemed to swarm, sticking to my sweating face, tangling in my hair.

  Just a short way down from the strangers a man was fishing for trout. He’d waded in up to his waist and the two boys were watching him. The water was as still as I’d ever seen it. Even when the fisherman moved to cast the ripples seemed wrong – they started to flow out, but then just flattened back into the surface. As I got close I tried to look surprised, as if I’d chanced on them. The tall one smiled
and waved me over. It was a big smile this time, showing off his crooked teeth. I could smell dope in the air, and the younger boy’s eyes were nearly as glassy as the lake. I sat close to the tall one.

  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 clutt
er 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.

  SALMON

  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.