“No, I know, I just...”
“So they were...”
“Trying. Before Grace died. But then they stopped.”
“Death does that, I guess. Makes you take stock. Press pause.”
My smile feels weak as water. “As long as you remember to press play again at some point.”
We both stand still for a second, listening to the anguish of American blues mewl down through the floorboards, before Joel leans across and kisses me. It feels sublime being down here together, tucked away in the warm belly of the house, like marsupials safe from the outside world.
“I smudged you,” he says, when we part momentarily.
His lips are smeared red from mine. “Ditto.” And then I lean forward and kiss him again. Insistent and impassioned, our bodies are soon tight, our mouths wet and hot. We become each other’s pulse right there in the open palm of the kitchen, warmed by the breath of the Aga and sheltered by the creaking, gently steepling walls of the room.
36.
Joel
Callie’s dozed off next to me in bed, all rumpled clothing and ruffled hair. We took our kiss from Esther’s kitchen earlier straight back home. To the front step while I grappled with the key, then into the hallway. Then through the door to my flat and half onto my sofa, before finally we made it to the bedroom. Together we fell against the mattress, mapping each other out with fevered hands. Heartbeats hammering, skin dampening. At one point I knocked the lamp from my nightstand with my foot (how were wethatway up?), plunging us deliciously into darkness. I felt her pelvis twitch as she laughed, making me frenzied with desire.
It’s been a week since we first kissed and I’m falling for her, hard. But I want to do this properly. Go slow. Take our time. She means so much to me already that not rushing things just seems to make sense.
Which is how she’s ended up curled against my hip like a cat while I watch a TED Talk about human stampedes, headphones firmly on.
Maybe I feel like this because of Melissa. Because my brain’s trying to draw a line between her and Callie, somehow. Or perhaps I need to believe I won’t mess this up before we do much more than kiss.
Anyway. We’d cut a strange picture, I think, if you were looking down on us from above. Me in my own little world. Callie asleep by my side, fully clothed.
37.
Callie
The sun is an oily flare, high in the sky of a tart early-December morning. It’s my first day at Waterfen and I’m in the middle of marshland, jolting along in the cab of a tractor that, strangely, I appear to be driving. My new boss, Fiona, is on the fold-out seat next to me, a trailer full of fence posts rolling along behind us as a small battalion of other staff members and volunteers track the deep rents of our tire marks on foot.
I clench and unclench the steering wheel a few times, just to check that this is really happening and I haven’t wandered off-piste from my sleep into one of Joel’s dreams.
It’s hard not to be distracted by my surroundings as we drive. The landscape glints with winter, sunlight sparking off crystallized ground. Twice we catch the tawny dart of a deer fleeing through undergrowth, as a hen harrier loops-the-loop against the sky’s flawless easel.
“It’s not possible to get tractors stuck, is it?” We’re approaching a patch of bright wet ground that bears an unnerving resemblance to bog.
“Oh, yes—it is,” Fiona says cheerfully. Dark-haired and ruddy-cheeked, she has the no-nonsense disposition of a midwife.
“So what do you do if you get stuck?”
“Oh, you don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Get stuck,” she says, with a smile. “Do that and you really are screwed.”
I keep my eyes on the quagmire ahead. “Right. Got it.”
She laughs. “Relax. It’s just like driving a car. You’ll feel if you start to lose traction.” I sense her glancing at me. “You do drive a car, don’t you? Forgot to check your license back there.”
I grin and confirm that, yes, I am in fact qualified to drive. After nearly two years of working in the café, where the smallest spill of coffee felt like a TripAdvisor slating waiting to happen, Fiona’s relaxed approach is like permission to breathe. I can already feel my brain switching lanes, a changing-down of gears in my mind. Perhaps I’d even be getting emotional about it, if I weren’t in charge of agricultural machinery and trying to avoid a headfirst plunge into the nearest ditch.
I’ll come to love this tractor in time, Fiona assures me. She describes hypnotic sun-swamped summers of topping and weed-wiping, long meditative afternoons spent circling meadows in the fen, the air mottled with sunlight and sprinkled with butterflies. She tells me I’ve arrived at the worst possible time of year. “Which is actually a good thing,” she adds, “because the way I look at it, the weather can only get better from here on in.”
