Empty Space (25 page)

She went out into the garden to have lunch and found that in her absence vegetation had filled the beds at the base of the summerhouse again. It was taller this time. Thick bright green
rubbery stems wove about in the sunshine, almost as if they were moving, ending in flowers like trumpets or Tiffany lampshades. At the base of the tangle sprouted those unearthly copper poppies;
and on the earth between their stems, gelid organs in rose and pastel blue such as the cat brought in nightly. Small birds flew out of the vegetation, all colours but all single-coloured –
birds from a child’s rag book, they peeped at Anna with their heads on one side. The summerhouse itself seemed to fall away upward in a distorted perspective, the parts of it leaning
together as if they had been propped there loosely and abandoned, dilapidated yellow lapboard like a drawing of itself, looming against a sky too blue. She dragged open the door like someone
determined to get to the bottom of things, but inside it was just a shed in anyone’s garden – dusty, hot, full of slowly bursting boxes, layered spiderwebs and a kind of
archaeological time. Gardening things. Unused things. Things of Tim’s or Marnie’s, markers of the fads and bad decisions of long ago: a rolled poster here, too brittle to unroll ever
again; there a small lay figure, its limbs arranged to represent a Degas dancer. Suddenly she was bloody sick of it. She could no more manage it than Marnie’s mystifying behaviour at
Carlucci’s. She took her lunch back to the house, binned it and went to the de Spencer Arms instead. There she came across the boy with the dogs, without his dogs. He was sitting at a table
as far away from the building itself as he could manage, his arms wrapped round one knee and his donkey jacket bundled up beside him.

‘If I buy you something,’ Anna said, ‘will you drink it this time?’

She carried the drinks out carefully.

‘This time I got us both Harvey’s. I enjoyed the last one. Where are your beautiful dogs? I was looking forward to seeing them again.’

‘They’re dead, those dogs.’

‘Dead?’

‘Wasted away,’ the boy said. ‘Some say it’s nature, but I’ll have none of that.’

‘You must be heartbroken!’

He seemed to consider this. Then he shrugged. ‘See over there? Over the Western Brow? Buzzard.’ He laughed shortly. ‘He’s out for something, that bugger,’ he
said. He drank half his beer in one long swallow. ‘Them down the fields say it’s my fault, but I’m having none of that.’

‘I don’t understand.’

The boy shrugged. ‘Why should you?’ he concluded. ‘But they ran well to the lamp, those dogs.’

Though Anna waited for more, that seemed to be the end of it. They sat in the sunshine, half-awkward, half-companionable, then she bought another drink. The Downs were gilded. Something about
the slow drift of afternoon to evening, the slow lengthening of shadows under Streat Hill, made objects seem closer than they were. Distant sounds seemed louder, too. Everything seemed more
present. Behind them, the car park began to fill with people down from London: single men squeezing their TVRs and Italian motorcycles in between the ill-parked SUVs; single-activity tourists
descending from the Downs in their cycling, walking or birdwatching outfits. Half a dozen women, one of whom wore two-tone breeches and brown suede boots with fringes, arrived together on
immaculately turned-out horses. Two of them went to get drinks. The boy watched the women. Anna watched the boy.

‘Tell me about lamping,’ she said.

He thought about that. ‘You want a good dark night,’ he said eventually.

She could see how hard he found it – how emotionally clouded it was for him. How do you describe something you know so well? His focus was too close. It was a struggle to distinguish
sensation from practice, to find sufficient distance without merging all the subtleties; and now his dogs were gone too. ‘And you want a good lamp, an old Lightforce or like that. You can
get that second hand. Another thing, get a battery with a flat discharge curve. Them down the fields know all that, they’re always talking about what lamps to get. It’s a million
candlepower this, a million candlepower that with them.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I don’t pay much attention to all that,’ he confessed, as if surprised by himself.
‘I like it when the dog runs down the light.’

‘You’re hunting the rabbits with your dogs?’ Anna said.

He looked at her as if she was mad, as if she had made some statement so simplistic he didn’t know how to refute it. At the same time it was a relief to him: it was somewhere to start.
‘Rabbits, foxes,’ he said. ‘Anything.’ He’d preferred hares until the last time he was out: now he couldn’t seem to care about them at all. ‘You want a
good dark night and a bit of a breeze.’

‘You find the animal with the light?’ she said. ‘Then you encourage the dogs to chase it? That seems cruel.’

‘I don’t know about cruel,’ he said.

‘But it’s killed?’ Anna said. ‘They kill the animal?’

It seemed cruel to her. For the boy, though, the light was the thing, the light and the chase: nothing was like slipping a dog then watching it run down the light. ‘It’s only the
most exciting thing in the world!’ he said. He wasn’t even particular if he caught anything. Any rabbit could make a yard or two on the dog, parley it into an escape.
‘They’re in the hedge before you know it.’ He could show her if she wanted. ‘I’ve took videos of those dogs before they died.’ He gestured vaguely towards
Wyndlesham. ‘I keep them over there.’ He kept the videos of his dogs over there, the other side of Ampney, in the bothy where he lived. It wasn’t far. ‘I could show
you!’ he said.

Both of them were surprised by this. They stared at each other, puzzled by so much contact. The boy turned away.

‘If you wanted,’ he said, in a different voice.

Half past five: in an hour the de Spencer Arms would be rammed again. The sloping back garden would fill with people, shoulder to shoulder in the warm dark. There would be a run on nervous
laughter and narcissistic shouting. By closing time the Downs would have bulked up black against the stars. They would absorb it all and provide no echo. Anna raised her glass, considered the
inch of beer left at the bottom of it.

‘All right,’ she said.

The bothy, a long single-storey wooden structure which had once housed the unmarried male servants of the local fox hunt (an institution known in its heyday as ‘the
Ampney’), stood in the middle of a field next to a few courses of brick and an overgrown cobbled yard. It was a shed, really, already cold in the afternoon, its untreated cement floors
polished by decades of use. There was a kitchen at one end, a storage unit full of rusting bed frames and plastic-wrapped supermarket pallets of dog-food at the other. Between them, five or six
empty rooms opened off a narrow windowless passage lighted by a single twenty-watt bulb. To the extent that he had any, the boy had moved his belongings into the kitchen, where it was relatively
warm. Two shelves held packets of cereal, tins of baked beans and 8 per cent-proof lager. A single bed was pushed up against the wall in one corner. ‘I don’t need much,’ he
said. ‘I was never much for things.’ There was a paraffin heater but no kettle. He made tea using lukewarm water straight from an ancient Creda heater mounted on the wall above the
sink and paid his rent directly to ‘them down the fields’, who had acquired the bothy in some cash-free transaction he didn’t understand, and who sometimes dragged a bed into
one of the other rooms for weekend use.

‘It’s cheap enough,’ he said.

The only contemporary thing in the kitchen was a reconditioned laptop from the early 2000s, wired into the overhead light socket through a brownout-protector. ‘It’s all in
here,’ he said, with a kind of shy irony: ‘My life.’ He showed as much pride in the machine as in his uploads to YouTube. These unsteady, ill-lit glimpses, caught on a pocket
camcorder, didn’t even seem cruel, only difficult to interpret. Jittery ellipses and smears of whitish light appeared and disappeared suddenly in a black rectangle. They picked out a hedge,
a patch of long grass in a field, a fence post at an odd angle. Something zigzagged into the light and out of it again. Something else turned and turned and vanished suddenly into a hedge. At the
end of each clip there was the boy, an ethereal smile on his face, holding up dead rabbits by their ears. Once, the dogs put up a deer, which stared at them then walked slowly out of camera. He
had set some of the videos to contemporary pastoral music, others to thirty-year-old Death Metal. Watching them galvanised him all over again, the way a passing scent had once galvanised his
dogs. He sat on the bed next to Anna. There was nowhere else to sit. She could feel him trembling with excitement. ‘What do you think?’ he asked her. ‘What do you think of
that!’

Once she had got over her distaste, Anna felt bored. She was glad when he turned off the computer and with a smile half diffident, half sly, pushed her down. ‘Let me get these jeans off
you,’ she said. She laughed. ‘They could do with a wash.’ And later: ‘You’re hurting me a little bit.’ He went on without seeming to hear and soon she had
forgotten, the way you forget the creak and bang of the bed or the people coming and going in the corridor outside a hotel room. To fuck at all is a blessing. He wasn’t Tim Waterman, but he
wasn’t Michael Kearney either, and he got hard again as quickly as most boys.

Anna fell asleep. When she woke the bothy was cold and the boy was standing naked by the window gazing out across the fields towards the village. The light had begun to fade. Wisps of mist
were already coming up over the river. He’d had enough for the moment, she could see. His back, whiter and thinner than she had expected, seemed vulnerable, illuminated from within. Anna
watched him a minute or two, then gathered her clothes and began to get dressed. When she thought the time was right, she said:

‘I’ve got some work I need doing.’

The boy made a movement with one shoulder, a shrug or perhaps a wince. He wasn’t looking for work, he said. He had enough work.

‘What kind of work is it?’ he asked.

It wasn’t much, she said. It was just some painting.

He had enough of that kind of work, the boy said.

‘I need someone to look at my bathroom,’ Anna said. ‘I don’t live far. If you called later in the week, you could do the work I need.’

He moved his shoulder again and kept looking out of the window. ‘Those dogs of mine were company ’til the grey hare got across them.’ Anna, receiving this as ‘grey
hair’, had no idea what he meant. ‘That spoiled everything. I could talk to them until then.’ As she was leaving he turned round and said, ‘I’ll come and see you
though? I’ll be coming to see you?’

Anna touched his arm and smiled. ‘Put your clothes on,’ she said. ‘It’s cold in here.’

The lane outside had filled with mist, yet if you looked directly upward you could see the stars. Anna turned towards Wyndlesham, walking as briskly as she could. Once or twice she raised her
arms in the air or smiled for no reason. She wondered what had really happened to the dogs. Those lovely, lovely animals. Perhaps he’d sold them. Perhaps he’d just grown tired of
them. I can’t imagine what Marnie will make of him, she thought: although it’s none of her business. She looked for her phone, couldn’t find it; stopped suddenly, brought both
hands to her mouth and laughed. I can’t believe myself, she thought. When she looked back, the bothy seemed to hang without support in the gathering dusk. Everything it represented was
history. Since the banking meltdown of 2007, the stable-block itself – built by John Ampney in the late 18th century from locally-sourced brick and pantile and not then intended to house
the hunt – had tracked closely the declining economic curve: redevelopment, first as prestige office space, then as a paintball ‘shoot house’; a decade of squatting and
abandonment; finally, annexation by the local authority as Kent and Sussex struggled to contain thousands of Chinese economic refugees washing up in the old Cinque Ports; after which it had been
allowed to fall down.

At home there were several messages from Marnie – ‘Mum, I‘m trying to call but your mobile is off again. Mum? Mum, please pick up.’ – and one
from Helen Alpert reminding Anna of her appointment the next morning. Anna, starving, made baked beans on toast. While the beans were heating up, she walked to and fro eating slices of quince
cheese with some cold lentils she had found at the back of the fridge. She swept the old cat up in her arms and squeezed him in a way he had never liked. ‘James, James, oh James,’ she
said: ‘What
have
you been up to?’ She awarded herself half a bottle of Calvet Prestige Rouge, which caused her to fall asleep in front of the TV.

When she woke, it was late. The cat was out again. She drank a glass of water and went to the garden window. The summerhouse seemed quiet. And yet the dreams she had had! She went out and,
standing barefoot on the lawn, worked her toes into the damp turf to wake herself up. ‘James!’ she called. A great beam of off-white light struck out from somewhere behind the house
– like the sweep of headlights as a car turns in off the road into your drive, but silent, frozen and prolonged. Or like a huge door opened: light squared-off somehow, sharp-edged, looking
for something to reveal, in this case the thousands of cats boiling across the water meadow towards Anna’s home in an alert, silent rush. Every one of them was either black or white. They
poured into the garden, parting around the summerhouse, and up towards Anna, of whom they took no more notice than the garden furniture. On and on they came like a problem in statistical
mechanics, without any apparent slackening or falling away of numbers, pouring out of the meadow, pouring away behind the house. Anna, deep in explicatory failure, had no way of placing herself
with regard to this event: she did not in any sense know what she felt about it. Now she winced away and tried to climb the garden fence. Now she waded directly into the stream of cats, and stood
with tears of pure delight streaming down her face, feeling them flow around her, bringing with them the warmth of their bodies, also a close, dusty but not unpleasant smell – until
suddenly the light turned itself off and the garden was empty again. She stood for a moment wiping her eyes and laughing. Then she went back into the house and left a message with Dr
Alpert’s answering service: ‘Helen, I don’t feel I want to carry on with our conversations. I feel as if I would rather take charge of myself again.’