FOUR

“It’s getting bigger” Anne said, staring out of the kitchen window to the crabby patch of lawn, and the hole that was growing there.

“What?”

“I said, it’s growing.”

“Growing?” George, asked.

“Yes, that’s what I said.”

A flicker of doubt across George’s face. “Holes don’t grow dear. The expand, they get bigger. They don’t grow.”

Anne bit down against a bitter reply.

She did not hate her husband. No, it was more subtle than that. There were still his flashes of humour and wit and the (now far too infrequent) looks of passion that got her all stirred up. She could not have stayed with him otherwise. And there was little Alan to consider as well, and he was no small measure when she came to weigh up her decisions. But a lot of the time, most of the time even, she felt nothing for George but a sense of careworn fellowship. They were middle-aged now, and they had shared so much, and the little tendernesses they gave each other were just about enough to keep them going.

But in the garden a dark mouth was opening.

Anne had seen the hole first, had thought it a rat-hole, a nasty little place for a nasty little creature, and she had forbidden Alan, who was only six and stuffed to the seams with boyish curiosity, to go near it. He might put his hands down there and get – ugh – bitten. She had instructed Georg to fill it in. Just as she had instructed him to re-seed the lawn and fix the hinge on the shed door, like she’d instructed him to change the lightbulb in the small bathroom and to keep his work boots of the coffee table. And then something had changed. She’d been hanging out the washing under a leaden sky that warned of rain before lunchtime, and she had almost stepped into the hole. In the moments after, she had been thrust back in memory to her uncle’s farm in Tiverton, in the back-field, a bastardly place of scrub and sharp stones. Only Flock, an old grey with a whiskered muzzle and low-slung back, could graze there, on account of his hardy stomach and pedestrian pace. His long eyelashes had turned white the previous winter, and now his tail was turning too. Flock had been grazing and maybe he was startled by something, a mouse, perhaps a fox, and he must have picked up some speed because he’d been canting, coming close to a gallop and suddenly his whole front angled towards the ground and he collapsed, screaming high womanish screams. His front leg had plunged into a sneaky patch of earth that gave way to a hole fully three-feet deep. His leg had snapped. Anne could see it splintering through his skin, and the vivid blood that hit the earth and turned black. Flock’s back legs scrabbled around in the dirt and his wild eye could find no focus; it settled briefly on her face and then wheeled to the sky as if searching for the god that had struck him down. His breath came in heavy bellows and he squirted urine everywhere and Anne could smell the panic in it. And then her uncle had come, and put his hands over her eyes and had led her back to the house. His hands had smelled of orange soap. Then he’d gone somewhere else, most likely the big shed in the yard out front, because when he walked back around the house where Anne could see him through the kitchen window, he was holding a rifle slung over his forearm. Anne hastily ran a glass of water and took a sip, more for something to do with her hands than for anything else. It was cold, but gave her no refreshment. Her uncle had stiffly cocked his rifle and was now standing over Flock. He raised the gun and fired. Thunder rolled towards her and she closed her eyes, and even so, the water in Anne’s glass didn’t even tremble.

And now this hole.

In her garden.

Growing.