So the washing machine’s been broken for nearly a week now, I think maybe it’s the pipe, he said and then looked at me properly for the first time. There was snot on the front of my linen dress and something stuck to my shoe. You’re not here for the washing machine.

  No, I said. Sorry.

  Don’t be sorry. They didn’t come yesterday either. Did I offer you coffee?

  I held up my mug and started talking before I could stop myself:

  I knew your son. I met him on the canal but I haven’t seen him for a long time. I wondered if he came back here. I’m looking for my mother and I think he might know where she is.

  He was shaking his head before I’d finished. There was a slight tremor in his hands, like the warning before a quake. You’ve made a mistake. He swung the door of the kitchen open, gestured out into the sitting room. The children were bum cheek to bum cheek on the floor, the sickly glow of the screen on their upturned faces. All but the last one, who was rolling across the carpet with the dog in sniffing tow, nappy coming loose. The man pointed to him. His name’s Arthur, after my grandfather. The rest are all girls.

  You don’t have any more children? Any older children? He had a limp. I caught myself miming it and stopped. I had been certain. Never mind. I whistled for the dog but he didn’t seem to notice. Don’t worry, I said. You’re right. I must have made a mistake. I’ll leave you to it.

  I was almost at the door. There was a Russian word which meant to jump one after another. Povskakat. Even now I was jumping after you, mindlessly. I was at the door, twisting the handle, calling for the dog whose name I did not know. Dog, I called.

  A limp? the man said.

  I turned back. The children had gathered, hands clasped in front of them.

  Yes, I said. His left leg. It dragged.

  The man’s name was Roger and I knew he wanted me to stay until his wife – whose name he said was Laura – got back, by the way he kept the children ferrying things to me: glasses of water, pieces of buttered toast. I watched him as he moved, gathering up handfuls of washing, a dirty nappy, fallen toys. I tried to see the imprint of Marcus on him. Do you remember the way he looked? Taller than you with hunched shoulders, that dark bowl haircut and anxious eyes. You used to say that I had the same eyes as him, a bit heavy around the lids, lined before our time. One of the children spoke loudly at my elbow.

  What?

  What’s your dog called? said the girl. She had her hair in four or five bunches that stuck out from the top of her head. There was a picture of a confused-looking sheep on her dress.

  He doesn’t have a name, I said and tried to think desperately what a person might do to make conversation with a small child. What do you want to call him?

  She looked undone by the responsibility, couldn’t answer. The others proffered options, shouting over one another. Roger was at the window, looking out at the street. The hair at the nape of his neck was a little long. I had never been good with children and they always seemed to know it, pay me close attention. They had made what they described as a shortlist of possible dog names which was very long and mostly comprised of animals: Dodo, Kitty, Pig. I tried to shake them off, moving around the room. There were toys in all the places alcohol would normally be. There were child locks on all of the cupboards but nothing to hide. One of the children took my hand and held on with an iron grip while I subtly tried to shake her loose. Otter, she said, what about Otter?

  Do you need the bathroom? I asked her. She didn’t answer but we went up the stairs all the same, hand in hand. When I reached the top I had the sudden worrying thought that I’d misunderstood, got things all wrong. How many children must go missing, wander off, every year? There were signs of destruction, toys with no heads, holes in the walls, the handle to the bathroom pulled right off. The child took me into her room and picked things up, showed them to me. I went along the corridor and into the big bedroom at the end before I could stop myself. There were photos of the man and the woman who must be Laura. They were younger, colourfully clothed. I passed my hands through the hangers in their wardrobe. On the far wall there was another small photo in a green frame. I leaned in. The child in the photo had its head turned away, a hand thrust out towards the camera. Still it was clear. The slice of face, the edge of a nose and mouth, even the way he held his shoulders. It was Marcus. His hair curly and longer than it had been when we knew him.

  This is Mummy and Daddy’s bedroom, the child said from the doorway.

  I took a breath. I know that.

  We went back down the landing. She had decided – power of suggestion – she did need the bathroom and wouldn’t let me go downstairs until she had gone.

  You haven’t been here before, she said.

  I didn’t remember being so logical as a child. I remembered you telling me that I was a stone-cold liar and being shocked at the idea. It had never occurred to me that what I was doing was lying. Maybe your leaving was the same. Maybe it never occurred to you that what you were doing was abandonment.

  No.

  Are you going to be here tomorrow?

  Probably not.

  You could take us to school.

  I could if I were here.

  My name’s Violet. What’s your name? Are you Margot?

  I opened the cabinet above the sink. Who’s Margot?

  Silly, she said, swinging her dimpled knees back and forth from the seat, wriggling. Margot’s Mummy’s first baby. She is old and she is gone but she would have loved us. Do you love us?

  I turned and looked at her. She was staring at me sternly, elbows resting on her legs. I need to wipe now.

  Go on then. Have you met Margot before?

  Have you? she said.

  Yes, I think so.

  She pulled enough paper off the roll for three large children. It struck me that maybe she hadn’t learned how to do it by herself yet and I was doing her parents an unasked-for favour.

  We have never met her because she is gone, she said.

  Dead?

  She hopped off the toilet and wrangled her twisted underwear back up. What, she said looking at me, is dead?

  I pretended I hadn’t heard her. Downstairs I stood next to Roger at the counter and we watched the fish fingers he’d made for the children’s dinner vanish under the table where the dog was waiting.

  Otter, Violet kept saying, Otter do you want a finger? Otter, Otter, Otter.

  I knelt down next to the dog. How about it, Otto? I said and he looked up and then turned away as if he wasn’t certain. Roger was clear-eyed and the red had withdrawn a touch from his cheeks. I watched his hands shaking and wondered if you and he would understand one another. The way two people refusing drinks at a pub understand one another.

  Margot is Marcus? I said.

  He didn’t seem surprised that I knew. In that house information must never stay secret very long. I could see Violet keeping an eye on me as she ate her peas. She thought we had become, I realised, allies of a sort. I don’t know, he said. Maybe. She had a limp. Had it from the beginning. Had it when we found her.

  What do you mean found her?

  He closed his eyes very carefully and kept them shut. There was the sound of the front door opening. The children broke like a rugby team and Otto ran with them barking. I could hear the voice of a woman asking whose dog it was. I watched Roger’s face changing, loosening a little. We went into the sitting room. The woman put her bag down on the floor and looked me up and down. What’s going on? The children were gathered around, balancing on the sofa arms.

  She’s here about Margot, he said. She knew her.

  Margot, one of the children yelled and the others took up the call. The woman raised her hands in the air. Everyone, she shouted, to bed.

  I was downstairs on my own for almost an hour. I took Otto out into the garden, lay in one of the deckchairs and listened to the quiet noises from the house. I’d always felt that our lives could have gone in multiple directions, that the choices you made forced them into turning out the way they did. But maybe there were no choices; maybe there were no other possible outcomes. I couldn’t anyway imagine you and me somewhere like this, though maybe it had, at times, crossed your mind. A house by the railway, a garden, you waiting for me there after school. For a moment I thought I saw lights in the windows of the shed at the end of the garden but then they were gone and I decided it must only have been reflections from the house.

  Laura came out and stood next to the deckchair. Looking up at her I realised that she was older than I’d originally thought, over the hill of fifty, too old for children as young as she had.

  I wondered if someone would come, she said. Tell me something I didn’t want to know. You know that feeling of running on a single rail?

  I wanted to tell her she wouldn’t believe how much I knew it but instead I said, I think so.

  It was never over. That’s why we told the children about her. Because we were thinking about her all the time.

  She wasn’t a she when I met her, I said.

  She shook her head. Well, she had a limp? Dragged her leg?

  Yes.

  And she was a bit awkward, not quick to talk?

  Yes.

  She studied me. You’re younger than her.

  I was only a child, thirteen if I’ve calculated right. I lived with my mother on a boat. Marcus, Margot, was there for a month one winter.

  It was her.

  Maybe, I said.

  There was a silence, longer than comfortable. The dog scrabbled away, hunting through the dim bushes.

  You have lots of children, I said and wished I hadn’t spoken.

  She sat on the edge of the deckchair. She was very close, her hands folded in her lap. We tried after Margot was gone to have some of our own, but it was too late or we couldn’t to begin with. We weren’t any good without them. It took us a long time to realise that. So we adopted. I used to think – less so now but often – that one day Margot would come back and see how we’d replaced her.

  She stood up and whistled Otto to a spot of dirt in one of the flowerbeds, kicked at it with her boot until he began to dig. She put her hands in her pockets, stood watching him. I thought about Marcus and the time spent with him on the river and she must have been thinking about him too because she said:

  What happened to her?

  I took a deep breath and tried to think of something better to say, something – at least – sufficient, a form of comfort. I could think of nothing. I don’t know, I said.

  The River

  In the morning Margot and Charlie sat out on the towpath and ate flat, thick pancakes with so much chilli the batter was red and Margot’s eyes watered for an hour afterwards. Mostly he talked and she listened. He told her about being younger and driving the canals, up to the Birmingham fleet of locks; across to the Severn estuary crossing, down south as far as a person could go, up north as far as a person could get. More often though he’d stayed around that part of the country, driven back and forth the old routes.

  His sight had seeped away slowly. First, he said, there was a splotch of fog near the bottom corner of his right eye. For a while, a week perhaps, he’d thought it was something following him out on the water, cruising along, a smudge on the landscape that kept pace with him. Except then the same thing happened to the other eye. The fog grew, so that once he was so distracted he drove straight rather than taking a turn, ploughed into another boat. Knew then he only had so long. Fixed the lantern on to the front of the boat and drove through the dark, through every day. It was what he knew. He would do it until the last inch of vision was gone.

  One morning he woke blind and could not drive again.

  He wrapped his hand around his wrist, showed her how thin it was; talked once more about the lure he was making. He told her that he missed driving.

  Why? she said.

  Why what?

  Why did you drive so much?

  She thought perhaps he wouldn’t answer and felt embarrassed for asking.

  I was looking for someone, he said eventually. I was looking for someone for years and years. He wouldn’t say more. Grumbled something beneath his breath and turned away.

  You got a cold? he said when she sniffed.

  Yes.

  Blow it out onto the bank.

  She did as she was told, leaning over the muddy path and pressing one side of her nose.

  What colour is it? he said.

  Green.

  You’ve got an infection. Come onto the boat.

  He went down without waiting for her to follow. She was not afraid of him any more. Something about his blindness or the sadness of what he’d said about looking and looking for someone for years without finding them. The boat was very tidy, everything in its place. There were four frying pans hung from the wall, cups of spoons and forks. It was a relief to be on the boat. The canal thief lived in the water and walked on the land, but she did not think it would come onto that boat. She did as he instructed her, boiled the kettle over the gas flame, filled a bowl and then held her head over it.

  Afterwards he cooked while she sat watching. He cooked spices in oil and they were so hot the boat was filled with a heat shimmer and both of them coughing and spluttering, retreating to the deck for air. He said it was pork belly and showed her the line of fat. He called her son or lad and she understood he did not know she was a girl. Once, when she was younger, Roger – her father – had put a bowl on her head rather than taking her to the hairdresser’s and cut a straight line. For weeks afterwards – catching anxious sight of herself in reflections – she’d been surprised. She looked quite like the boy who lived next door and it had taken so little to achieve it.

  They sat out on the deck and drank tea that she made for them.

  I’m looking for my child, he said halfway through a sentence on some other matter. She sat very still. He seemed intent on what he had said, rocking a little so that the boat rocked with him, as if he and it were tied together. I’ve been looking for her for ten years. Maybe it’s longer. She got taken. She was small, never lied. Her mother took her away.

  He emptied out the rest of his tea into the water. There were constellations in the sky. Laura – her mother – had tried to teach her their names once but she had not kept them well, retained only fragments: bear, dog, solitary. She missed her parents. She felt the missing in the bones of her wrists and ankles, on the back of her tongue. She barely heard him when he spoke.

  What?

  I said: where are you going?

  The sky rocked back towards her. She did not want to tell him what she had been told; what she would have done if she’d stayed with her parents. Still it was impossible not to offer him something in return.

  Do you believe, she said, that if you knew what was going to happen you would be able to not do it?

  What do you mean by that?

  The thought was cluttered in her head. She did not know how to say it out loud. She did not think she would ever do that – speak it out. Did speaking something make it exist in a way that it only partly had before?

  Do you think that life is a straight line?

  A line? He seemed to think about it. No. Not a line.

  Could you, she said and wondered if she shouldn’t, have changed it if you’d known your daughter would be taken? If someone had told you what was going to happen.

  I would have, he said. I would have stopped her.

  She could see his breath in the air between them. The bone in her bad leg picked up the cold and sang with it.

  The way I see it, he said, life is a sort of a spinning thing. Like a planet or a moon going round a planet. Do you understand?

  Yes, she said though she wasn’t sure she did.

  Life is like that. Sometimes it’s facing one direction but only for a second and then it’s spinning and spinning, revolving on its base so fast it’s impossible to really see. Except sometimes you catch a glimpse and you sit there and you know that’s what it would have been like if things had gone differently, that is the way it could have been.

  They sat. It was not quiet but filled with river noise, the chuck of some bird she did not know a little way down, the sound of people in other moored boats. She could see the factories set against the darkening sky, the outskirts of the city.

  What is it that you were going to do? he said.

  She held the thought carefully in her head. The words were spiked with barbs, unsettling as hot coals. Someone said I’d do something to my parents if I didn’t leave, she said.

  He sat and seemed to muse on this for a moment and then spat a glob from the side of his mouth into the water.

  The river followed the same route as the train and she was woken in the tent by the sound of its passing. It was harder – lying awake, the chill through the blankets – not to think about the reason she had left. She got up, unzipped the tent enough to see the almost-starred sky above her, cut through with light pollution from some nearby place, the path black as the water.

  She would leave without saying anything, go back to the house on the river, the end of the garden sloping down like a lathe to the canal. What had been said was not a truth only a suggestion of one way it might go. And if she knew what was coming she was certain she could avoid it. Like a car crash.

  Another train went past, close enough she felt the breath of it. The rooms of white-lit train carriages, the faces looking out.

  She zipped up the tent. Pulled the blankets over her head. She had always believed that some people knew more than others and one of those people had told her what she would do. If Margot went back she would kill her father. If she went back she would … She could not yet think of the second. It was not in a language that could fit in the hollows of her cheeks. It tasted like dust, like gone-off yogurt or burnt toast.

  The Hunt

 

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