sure that he’d been muttering, talking. What had he been saying? What if Lorna had woken up and heard him saying something?
It was only once, it had only happened once. The doorbell had rung and he’d opened it and Lorna had been working, she was always working, and he’d been on his own for such a long time.
The baby had been in the other room. He’d put music on, and afterwards he’d checked and she was deep in sleep, her arms and legs flung outwards, her hand clutching her rabbit, and that warm, sour, milky smell clinging to her which reminded him of the corridors of school many years before; how he used to get lost in the twisting maze of them.
He pressed his ear closer to the kitchen wall. The van had arrived at midday, while Jay was changing the baby. There’d been no sound from next door all morning, and he’d started to think that the van was probably there to do repairs to one of the houses further along the row. Now and again, drilling and hammering would reverberate down the terrace like a heartbeat.
But then someone had run up the stairs. The banister had creaked. A door somewhere further back seemed to shut softly.
He turned away from the wall and back to the baby, who was tipping herself backwards in her chair, trying to get out. She’d been restless all morning – crying whenever he went out of the room and throwing down toys, but if he picked her up she would go rigid and try to twist out of his arms. Her cheeks were hot and she kept scratching at her belly, and when he rubbed it for her, she just cried again. He offered up her favourite toys – the rabbit, the jangly ball – but she batted them away.
He looked around; saw only the road, the mist, the cliffs, the dishes.
He slumped down in a chair and rested his head on the table. It had not been possible, before, to know that this kind of tiredness existed. He could hardly even lift his head. When he did manage to look up, the baby had slumped down too, in her chair, and she was watching him with her head cocked sideways.
He sat up, then covered his eyes with his hands.
The baby did the same.
He waved his hands, and the baby waved her hands.
She watched him, without blinking, to see what he would do next.
Then someone said ‘Ssshhhh’ suddenly and loudly from behind the wall.
The baby opened her eyes wide. ‘Ssshhh,’ she said.
‘Ssshhh,’ the voice came again from behind the wall.
The baby looked around the room, then back at Jay. ‘Ssshhhhh,’ she said.
Jay shook his head. ‘You don’t need to do that,’ he told her.
‘Ssshhhh,’ the baby said again.
Jay got up and went over to her. ‘Don’t do that.’
She looked at him with her wide, dark eyes.
The sound came again from the wall.
Jay went over and knocked on it, once, twice, loud and hard.
Above him, on the roof, a tile slipped and grated in the wind.
‘Sshhhh,’ the baby said, quieter this time.
There was a swing tied to a branch of a tree at the back of the house. It was small and sturdy, with high sides for a child. Jay had tested it, and tested again, pulling down with all his strength to see if anything gave.
He put the baby in her coat and opened the back door. The misty rain had finally stopped. It was good to feel the wind against his face.
He put the baby in the swing and pushed gently. The chains creaked as they moved against the tree. He pushed and pushed and it was cold and quiet and he thought of nothing except pushing the swing and the wet, salty smell of the fields behind him.
When he looked up at the house, there was someone standing in the window.
He fumbled with the swing, missed the middle of it, and ended up pushing the baby sideways. The swing lurched outwards, rocked, then righted itself.
Jay steadied the chains. It was just his wife, wearing her coat and carrying her bag ready to leave for work. He didn’t know how long she’d been standing there; he thought she’d already gone. She was wearing the green scarf he’d bought for her just after they’d first met. He hadn’t seen her wearing it for a long time. He raised his hand and waved. Lorna’s mouth moved but he couldn’t tell what she was saying.
He realised he’d been pushing the swing quite high, and probably harder than he should. The baby was laughing and kicking her legs with each push but now he slowed it down, keeping it low, feeling himself making a show of how careful he was being.
The baby screamed indignantly, but he kept pushing the swing very gently. The next time he looked up, the window was empty, except for the blurred reflection of the swing moving backwards and forwards slowly across the glass.
A phone rang next door. It rang, then cut out, then rang again. No one answered it.
Jay strapped the baby in the pram and pushed her hat further down over her head. She looked up at him and her face creased. Her eyes were exactly the same as Lorna’s – sometimes it seemed like she was right there, staring out at him. When Lorna and the baby looked at each other, it was as if something secret passed between them, something that he wasn’t allowed to know.
‘Ha fa ma?’ she asked. Her cheeks were already red in the cold.
‘We need to get out of the house,’ Jay told her.
‘Bada shlam.’
‘Yeah, I know. It’s bloody cold, but we need to get out of the house.’
He put another blanket over her. She stared out sternly from under all the layers. He tucked the blanket in, then started walking down the road. The pram’s wheels sent up spray from the wet tarmac. The road was steep and narrow, with high hedges on both sides. If a car came, there would be nowhere to go. They would have to turn and walk all the way back. But he needed to get out of the house. It had rained for three days in a row – heavy showers that didn’t stop. The gutters had spilled over and poured down the windows. They’d stayed in and turned the heaters up high. Small noises had come through the wall: murmurs, footsteps, low laughter. Sometimes he was sure it was just the pipes, or the rain.
There was a thin, raw mist, as if the ground couldn’t absorb any more water so the wetness had moved into the air itself. Soon his nose was numb and dripping and his fingers were stiff against the handle of the pram. The road sloped down and small trees twisted on either side, their trunks bright with moss.
It got colder the lower he went into the valley. He could hear the sea somewhere in the distance. Water ran down the road and splashed up his legs. It looked orange, like it was leaking through rusty iron.
The mist thickened into drizzle and he shivered. He crouched down and tucked the baby in tighter. She was making cooing sounds at the gorse, trying to reach out and grab it. He showed her the prickles but she grabbed at it anyway. There was gorse everywhere, like lamps in the hedges. It gave out a sweet, heavy smell.
The drizzle came in waves, sweeping across the tops of the trees, and hanging there like curtains. The road narrowed again. Something moved in the dead leaves under a tree. He walked slowly, checking every bend before carrying on. He came to the bottom of the road and it forked: one way turned into a track that followed a stream, the other seemed to bend inland. He took that one and kept going. There were no road signs, just hedges and fields and the valley below