“Seems like things are finally beginning to turn around for you.”
I started stacking plates in the dishwasher. From the dining room I could hear Zoë shrieking with laughter at something Callie had said. The splash of more wine being decanted between glasses.
I turned to face him. “I’m sorry I let you down.”
“Joel.” Speaking gently, he reached out to me, resting the heel of one hand against my collarbone. “We’ve done this.”
Over the years we worked together, Kieran turned out to be the kind of stabilizing influence I hadn’t fully realized I needed. Composed and tiller-steady, he was forever the firm eye over my most difficult clients and clinical decisions. When the hard work was done, we’d go out for a pint, games of pool. And I’d wait for the laughter lines that always shot to his eyes in the moments before he lost it. Because whenever they did, that was it: I’d be gone too.
There were lines on his face that came later as well. But they were furrows of frustration as he watched me move further and further away from the life I’d built. He never lost his cool with me, though. He just waited patiently, like he was watching for the current carrying me away to about-turn. For me to begin the long and painstaking swim back to shore.
I pulled out the top tray of the dishwasher, started upturning soup bowls into it. Kieran’s hand dropped away.
“It was one time, Joel.” Like he needed to say it.
One time too many.
“What happened wasn’t your fault.”
Some things you can be told a million times and never quite believe. Like when a bird flies from Alaska to New Zealand without once pausingfor breath. Or a loved one slips away in their sleep, while the whole time you’ve been sitting next to them, holding their hand.
For a few moments the room was silent as outer space.
“Hey, can you do me a favor?” Kieran said then. “It’s to do with Callie.”
A wry glance. “Don’t cock it up?”
Kieran shrugged. “Yeah. I like the way she looks at you. As if you’re the only person in the room. That’s a rare thing.”
I gripped the edge of the work surface then. Hoped Kieran wouldn’t notice. “Tell me how I can have that and not break it somehow.”
He noticed. “It’s actually pretty simple.”
“Enlighten me. Please.” Although he can’t, of course he can’t. Because he has no idea what drives my deepest fears.
“You just have to commit. Jump. Feet first, no holding back.”
We rejoined Zoë and Callie in the dining room after that. But for the rest of the night, all I could think was,How the hell do you commit to a relationship when you’re too scared to fall in love?
39.
Callie
By the end of my first fortnight at Waterfen, I feel a rekindling inside me.
I’ve never been so connected to my body. I marvel at the twitch and flex of long-dormant ligaments as my bloodstream fires, my lungs expand, and my muscles slowly wake. I am lifting logs and forking reed and wading through water, tasting all the while the coarse appeal of breathlessness. I laugh at the absurdity of subzero sweating, delight in the satisfaction of a scythe smoothly swung. And I begin to crave the opioid flood of exhaustion that comes at night, the swamp of analgesia as I sink into Joel’s sofa and he rubs out the knots in my back with his thumbs.
I think back to how Piers used to tease me when I struggled to open jam jars or twist the cork from a bottle of fizz.Just look at me now, I tell him in my mind, as I load up the trailer with twenty-kilo logs, feeling the burn in my back as I pull weeds from the dikes, tossing them aside to form lofty piles, new high-rise homes for the mice.
Every day the world is turning between my fingers, above my head, beneath my feet. I feel a terrestrial sense of homecoming.
•••
On Friday afternoon Fiona asks if I’m married. It’s hard to tell out here, I suppose, where nobody wears their wedding rings for fear of them entering the ecosystem.
We’re reed-cutting in the fen. I’m on forking duty with Fiona, following Liam and a couple of volunteers on the brush cutters. The wind today has teeth, and it’s angling the drizzle sideways, but the work’s so hot and heavy I’m already down to just a T-shirt.
How alive and on-fire I’ve been feeling of late is because of Joel too, of course. I’m wildly attracted to him in a way that’s utterly new to me. To feel his hands explore my body and his mouth against mine is like a daily dose of dynamite, deep inside.
