Page 32 of We Live Here Now
“I know it’s not going to be cheap, but if you send me a quote I’m sure we can figure it out. If it’s too much, I guess some bits will have to wait.”
“I’ll get some designs over to you, then we can decide the level of cost for the materials. Don’t worry.” She smiles, her head already in the project. “We’ll get this space looking amazing.”
“I’ll get that septic tank emptied out first,” Pete says. “Fill it in and level the ground. Then dig out the paths. But leaving the two buildings aside, I reckon we could bring it in at around twenty-five grand. Going with middle price options for paving slabs and decking. I’d go composite. It looks as good and you won’t slip. A lot of places I end up laying new lawn but yours just needs some refreshing.”
“Sounds great. Will we have to wait long?” Even in the bitter cold with my toes going numb I’m feeling fired up about the changes. We can redecorate inside too. Get rid of the suffocating flock wallpaper. I might even try to get up to the third floor this week. Take some air fresheners and dispel my fears. Face them at least. If I can get through a few more days without any strangeness, then maybe I’ll fully relax. I’m already looking forward to Pete and Merrily starting work. I won’t be alone here.
“A week or so? Depending when Merrily gets you a quote you’re happy with.”
“I’ll send that over to you tomorrow. Doesn’t take me long.”
“Great. And how do you work? Upfront or…”
“No, weekly. You pay at the end of each week’s work. It’s a small town. We rely on trust.”
Before they leave, Pete brings in a stack of logs and Merrily builds a fire in the sitting room to make sure I’m cozy even though I’m capable of doing it myself, and it’s not only the flames that are glowing. As I wave them off, I am too. I check the study, a frisson of nerves in the pit of my stomach, but the books are onthe shelves apart from the four I threw away, and everything is normal.
A warm, normal, beautiful house. That’s all it is.
Still, I hope Freddie hurries back.
40
He leaves for longer in the days now, takes to the skies and cries out to the heavens as he races across the moors, scavenging among the dead things hidden in the frozen gorse and moss between the craggy rocks. Sometimes he sees another raven watching him. She pecks at a lifeless rabbit, lying half in and half out of a stretch of bog, and then perches on a stone several feet away, giving him space to approach.
When he strips the dregs of meat from the carcass, she lets him be. Her feathers shine. There is no broken wing. They dance like this around each other for hours, and then as the bright canopy becomes a blanket of night, she heads back to where the others all roost, warmth and comfort in numbers. She caws back to him, and although he wants to follow, he finds he turns and his wings take him back to the strange house on the hill where his dead mate waits.
Her dark, dead eye is full of venom.You can’t leave me. You left me alone. You fled and left me to die. You murdered me.
He shuffles in closer and drops a morsel of rotting mouse in front of her that he knows she won’t eat. She can’t eat it. His mate is dead. He knows this. He settles down beside her to sleep.
But this night he dreams of earlier long, hot days, many cycles gone past, when they were young, before her wing was damaged, before she pecked at him, before hechoseto leave her in the chimney, before he fled up and away not only from the danger but from her—You left me to die. You murdered me—when they existed only in the joy of each other. Before, before, before.
And nevermore.
In the morning, the new raven, Bright Wing, as he thinks of her, alive and vibrant, not like Broken Wing beside him, is on the wall. Waiting patiently, beady eyes alert and sparkling. He doesn’t look at his old mate as he flies off, letting out a caw that comes from deep inside him and speaks to freedom and imprisonment and wanting what cannot be had.
As the wind cuts cold across his beak and Bright Wing comes alongside him, and they circle and dash like he has before, he can’t help but think—before, before, before.
Maybe not nevermore.
41
Freddie
Emily’s accident replays in my sleep, the nightmare a vivid attack on my senses. The heat of Ibiza on my back. The salt in the dry air. I follow her on the stony track and wonder why she’s been so shitty all holiday, not letting me touch her. It’s me who’s got the problems. She’s got her dream promotion when we were supposed to be concentrating on my career, and she’s still bitching at me. She’s hiding something, I know it. I guess that makes two of us. I’m sure she’s walking slowly on purpose. Why can’t she speed up? Get this stupid hike over with.
When it really happened, I got up close, irritatingly close, filled with an urge to have a really big fight, the kind that makes you honest, no matter what the consequence. I wanted to shove her, I really did, and maybe I was too close, and maybe I brushed her, but I didn’t push her. But in the dream it’s different. In the dream I push hard and watch with glee as she turns toward me, ugly with irritation, before her ankle twists and that anger turns to surprise. This time when I see that awful dread on her face I grin so hard my face is in danger of tearing in two, and as she falls and her hand reaches out for me, my smile turns to laughter. When her body breaks on the rocks below, I laugh harder.
I’m free, I think, standing there on the rocks. I don’t have to stop at all. But then the sky clouds over, suddenly cold and heavy with rain, and in the distance I hear sirens, and I know I’m not free and I’m going to prison and suddenly I’m thinking of all the things I’ll never have again, like a cold beer on a sunny day and a Sunday roast with good red wine and watching movies on a whim, and this is all her fault and god, why did I kill her? And then, just as the panic overwhelms me, I wake up.
I stare at her in the darkness, a lumpen shape asleep beside me, and my heart jackhammers as I swallow hard.She’s alive. I’m not going to prison.I take a deep breath to calm down. Fuck, what a dream.
My feet are almost numb with cold and my bladder’s contracted, leaving me with a fierce need to pee. This bloody freezing house. My good mood from a great day at work was ruined when I got home and felt that draft again and then Emily told me how much the garden work was likely to cost. I told her that the money from the flat was tied up in investment accounts and rather than lose the interest, maybe she could pay for it from her insurance salary. She’s got a chunk that has accrued during the months she was in the hospital. She agreed, which was good. And of course Cat, Russell, Iso, and Mark have already said yes to the party. The thought of Mark back here makes my stomach clench. But if heknewanything, he’d have told Emily and confronted me directly.
I get out of bed, my toes painful with the cold, and hobble to the bathroom. The landing window is open again, the net curtain blowing with the night breeze, and the temperature is a few degrees below freezing out there. I close it angrily. Why does she keep opening it? She knows I’m really feeling the cold here. She’ll deny doing it again, but it’s not me, so it has to be her.
I hear a faint creak and look up into the somber void where the third floor is an ocean of darkness. Somewhere up there a door clicks shut. I shiver and make a mental note to order a bunch of draft excluders from Amazon. Of course we probably wouldn’t need them if my wife didn’t keep opening windows at night. My irritation blisters some more.
