Neither of them answered. They were already moving.
Natalie found her boots by the door, the ones that only existed in Kilvolan. She braced a hand against the wall, forcing her foot into the stiff, damp-smelling leather. They’d never see a studio lot; they belonged here, with the rain jacket and the wool jumper, and every July she stepped back into them, back into a version of herself she’d left behind.
Outside, the heap was substantial. The sods were piled against the shed in a dark, irregular mound, each one roughly the size of a brick but lighter, fibrous, the compressed memory of ten thousand years of bog. The smell hit her immediately. Not unpleasant. Rich, peaty, ancient. Like the earth itself had been opened and its breath released. Under the July sun the heap radiated a warmth that was different from the air around it, a slow interior heat that belonged to a deeper season.
Emma had already gone to the side of the shed and come back wheeling the barrow, its tire half-flat the way it always was. She parked it beside the heap and looked at Natalie and something passed between them that wasn’t a word. A calibration. The quick, unconscious agreement of two people who had figured out the choreography years ago and didn’t need to rehearse.
Natalie went straight to the heap. Emma was already wheeling the barrow into position, its half-flat tyre groaning onthe gravel. They didn’t need to discuss it. The first year they’d tried it the other way around, but Emma’s lines were straighter and Natalie was faster at building the load. The switch happened without a word and settled into muscle memory.
She grabbed the first two sods, their coarse texture rough against her palms. The satisfaction of it was immediate. Her shoulders engaged, her lower back found the work, and the sun pressed against the nape of her neck.
In Los Angeles she paid someone to clean her house, to tend the strip of native garden along the driveway, to maintain the pool she swam in three times a week for the precise purpose of maintaining the body that her career required. Here, there was no intermediary between her and the task. Just her hands and the turf and the accumulating blackness in the creases of her knuckles and the sound of Emma’s barrow wheels crunching over the gravel path.
Emma returned empty and Natalie loaded again. The barrow went. Came back. Went again. They fell into the tempo of it without speaking, the grunt and thud and creak of the wheel forming its own low music against the backdrop of the garden and the fields beyond.
Inside the shed, the stacking was close work. When Emma was in there arranging the sods against the back wall and Natalie was passing armfuls through the doorway, they occupied the same narrow strip of shadow and their elbows found proximity that the rest of Natalie’s life would have called intimate. Here it was just logistics. The shed was six feet wide and they were two grown women and the turf had to go somewhere. Emma’s shoulder brushed hers as she turned to take the next load. Neither of them flinched or adjusted. The space between them was just space, the contact just a consequence of the work.
But Natalie was aware of the charge in it, the same way she was aware of the shed’s low ceiling—a physical fact she hadto accommodate without examining. When Emma reached past her, their forearms aligned for a half-second, the fine hairs on Emma’s arm catching the light. Natalie handed over the turf and stepped back, loading the next armful as if it were nothing.
Twenty minutes in and the sun was already hot. A proper July day, the kind that happened maybe six times a summer in the west of Ireland and that the locals discussed with the same reverent disbelief they reserved for miracles and football results. The sky was a washed blue, cloudless from horizon to horizon, and the heat sat on the garden like a hand pressed flat. Natalie could feel it across her shoulders, gathering at the base of her spine where her shirt had started to stick. A bead of sweat traced the line of her jaw and she wiped it with the back of her wrist, leaving a smear of dark peat dust along her cheekbone that she didn’t notice and wouldn’t have cared about if she had.
This was the version of physical effort that her body understood. Not the gym, not the choreographed discipline of maintaining herself for a camera. This was older than that. Her forearms burned with the good ache of repetitive lifting, the kind of tired that lived in the muscles rather than the mind, and she wanted more of it. She wanted to be wrung out by it. Every sod she lifted was a small subtraction from the heap and a small addition to the wall Emma was building inside the shed, and the arithmetic of it pleased her in a way that was almost embarrassing in its simplicity. Task. Progress. Completion.
“So how was your last movie? That legal thriller?”
Emma’s voice came from inside the shed, muffled slightly by the walls and the growing stacks of turf. Natalie loaded three more sods into her arms and carried them to the doorway. Emma was crouched against the far wall, fitting sods into the top of a row with the precision of someone laying bricks, her tank top dark between her shoulder blades where the sweat had soaked through.
“It was good. Intense, but good.” Natalie set the sods down beside Emma’s knee and straightened. “I played a prosecutor who discovers her mentor faked evidence thirty years ago. Lots of courtroom scenes. Lots of standing very still looking devastated.”
“So your specialty.”
Natalie laughed—a short, unguarded thing that escaped before she’d thought to moderate it. It had a looseness to it that felt borrowed from a younger version of herself, the laugh of a woman who hadn’t spent eleven months calibrating which emotions were safe to display. “I’m going to choose to take that as a compliment.”
“It was.” Emma glanced up, and the shed’s dim light caught the green in her eyes, the hazel shifting the way it always did when the light changed. A strand of hair had escaped her ponytail and was stuck to her temple. “You do a good job of looking like your world is ending.”
Something in Natalie’s chest turned over, a quiet rotation like a lock finding its tumbler. She went back to the heap.
The pile was shrinking now, the visible ground around it expanding, and she could measure their progress by the growing patch of dry gravel where the sods had been. The barrow had been abandoned somewhere in the last fifteen minutes. They’d stopped using it once the shed wall got high enough that stacking required passing sods hand to hand rather than wheeling them in bulk. A more efficient system for the final stretch. She hadn’t suggested it. Neither had Emma. They’d just shifted, the way water finds a new channel when the old one fills.
Her hair had given up entirely. The knot at the back of her head had loosened in stages, first a slow sag, then a sideways drift, and finally a quiet collapse that left waves falling around her face and sticking to her neck. She didn’t fix it. In Los Angeles she would have fixed it, or someone would have fixed it for her,because loose hair was a thing that happened in private and she was never in private. Here there was no one to see except Emma and the jackdaws on the shed roof and Gran in her window chair, and none of them required her to be assembled.
She hoisted another armload and turned for the shed and her boot caught the edge of a sod at the bottom of the pile and the whole base shifted. Not dramatically. Just enough. The sods beneath her feet rolled like loose cobblestones and her weight went sideways and she sat down hard in the remains of the heap, turf cascading around her thighs in a small dark avalanche.
She sat there for a moment, legs out, palms flat in the peat dust, and then the laugh came up from somewhere deep in her diaphragm and she couldn’t stop it. A full, stupid, graceless laugh that shook her shoulders and made her eyes water. She looked absurd. She could feel the absurdity of it in her bones, the turf dust in her hair, the black prints her hands had left on her jeans, the indignity of a forty-year-old woman sitting on her arse in a pile of bog fuel on a Tuesday afternoon in July, and it was the best she’d felt in months.
Emma appeared in the shed doorway, framed by the rectangle of light behind Natalie. She looked down at the scene with an expression of such studied composure that it was clearly costing her something.
Then her phone was out. One smooth motion from her back pocket to her hand, and the shutter sound was so quick Natalie almost missed it.
“I wonder how much a photo like that would get me.”
Something tightened across Natalie’s shoulders, a flinch that hadn’t quite reached her face—the old reflex, the one she’d spent years training inward so no camera could catch it. Photographs. Publication.
Emma must have seen it. Something in Natalie’s expression or her posture, some shift so small that anyone else would havemissed it, but Emma read bodies the way other people read weather.
“I’m joking, Natalie. Jesus.”
The words were easy. Unbothered. But underneath them was something careful, a gentleness that didn’t call attention to itself. Emma slid the phone back into her pocket and leaned against the door frame, one ankle crossed over the other, and the casualness was so deliberate it was practically something she’d done for Natalie’s benefit.
