Pudding
At half past five on the Saturday morning, the last morning, I was going backward into my witch's scullery floor, and I had not said a word.
Mo's little car had come down the drove at four, at the pace of a hearse, and stopped at the gate, and its engine had stopped, and nobody had got out. I knew the habit. The blood had done it on the first night, with the light on her roof. I lay on the tiles where the floor had left me and listened to her not getting out, and I did not go to her.
At five the pump man's van came rattling down the drove and stopped next door, and a door went, and Mo's voice said, "Thank you, love, you're a saint, you'll come in for your wash after," and the van turned in the field gateway and went back up toward the pumps. Mo's door shut. I heard her start crying behind it.
At half past five the floor came.
I will not give it to you again. The tiles in front of the drain took me hind legs first, as a spoon goes into a trifle, and closed round my haunches, and I hung there by my front claws from the grout.
The front door opened. A boot. Another boot. A sneeze that rattled the plates on the dresser.
"Fleabag," said the blood. "Out."
Her hand came down into my scruff, all of it, and she did not count. She put her other hand flat on the tiles by the drain and pulled once, and the floor let go of me with the noise a boot makes leaving mud, and I came up into the air with my legs hanging. She held me out at arm's length, as one holds a coat that has been in a ditch, and looked at me with the eye that opened.
"What did you eat," she said.
"I have told you. A sardine. In oil."
"On the wall."
"On the wall."
"Mo's?"
"Mo's are always tomato," I said, and she put me down on the table and was out of the door before I had my legs under me.
I went after her. By the time I was on the wall she was on Mo's step, hammering on the door with the side of her fist, in the grey before the dawn, with the drove behind her and the dyke up to the ruts.
The door opened. Mo stood in it in the white nightdress with the frill, with her coat on over it, and the face of a woman who has spent the night on a pew.
"Oh, love, you're back, oh, thank God, I said to Ned, I said she'll be back—"
"You were at the wall," said the blood. She said it loud enough for the sea bank. "Half past ten, that Sunday. At your gate, with a torch. The vicar saw you from the Lamb. You told the officer you were in all evening. They're your drops. You said you hoped she'd go down those steps. You drugged him."
Mo's mouth opened, and stayed open.
"I never," she said. "I never drugged anybody in my life. I never even did Frank's, at the end, the nurse did Frank's."
"Madam," I said to the blood, "in eleven years this woman has never once given me a fish I liked."
"Not now," said the blood.
"Thirty years I've had that counter," said Mo. "Thirty years, and I've never given out so much as a wrong lozenge. I gave Mrs Pettit the wrong water tablets once and I went round her house at midnight in my slippers to swap them. Drugged him. Drugged my boy. I'd sooner drug the vicar."
"I should not object to that," I said.
"He's crying for his breakfast," said Mo, wrongly, and burst into tears herself. "I was calling him. That's all. I went out to the gate to call him in, half ten, and he never came, and I thought, he's sulking, he'll come. It was dark. I never looked at the saucer." She stopped. Her hand went to her chest. "I looked in the morning. When I went round. It was all over oil, my saucer. Not my tomato. I thought one of the kiddies." She looked at me on the wall. Then she took the blood by the sleeve, hard, the way she takes a stranger who has come in out of the rain. "Come up," she said. "Come up and look at my drops and tell me I drugged anybody. Come on. Up."
We went up. I went with them. The stairs creaked on the fourth and the ninth, as they had on the Monday, when I came up them as smoke.
It was the same bathroom. The talc had been swept and the loofah put back, and the regiment on the shelf over the basin stood in its rows with the labels turned out. Above the regiment there was a little cupboard with a looking-glass for a door, which I had taken on the Monday for a looking-glass. Mo opened it. The smell of pear drops came out at us like a verger.
It was full of things in brown glass and white card, standing in rows, and the blood took one down and read the bottom of it.
"Nineteen eighty-seven," she said.
"It doesn't go off, love, it's linctus."
"This one says nineteen seventy-nine."
"That's for corns."
The blood put it back. Mo reached past her, to the front of the middle shelf, and took down a little brown bottle with a white cap, and held it up to the window, between her finger and thumb, with one eye shut. I had seen her do it once before, in her kitchen, with a cockerel clock going.
There was a finger's width in the bottom. Less.
"I moved them up here," said Mo. "After I showed you. I thought, if I'm at them in my sleep, I'll have to get up the stairs first, and I'll fall down them and wake up. And I've had one a night since. One. I tick the calendar. I've not slept since that Sunday, love, not properly, not once." She turned it round. "It was full on the first of the month. You tell me."
"Who comes in here?" said the blood.
"Nobody comes in here. It's my bathroom."
"Who, Mo?"
"Nobody, love. Only Ned." She put the bottle down on the edge of the basin. "He has his wash when he comes off his round." She said it again, smaller. "Only Ned."
The blood stood in the middle of the lino with her hands at her sides. She did not look at Mo. She looked at me, where I sat on the bath mat.
"He wakes when the fridge opens three rooms away," she said. "He heard my laptop from upstairs. He slept through her standing on him? Through you screaming?"
"Don't," said Mo. "Don't, love. Ned's a good lad. His dad was the keeper at Saltings. Walter Rowse. He drowned in the engine house in the surge, and Ned pulled him out, twenty-one he was. Don't."
Walter Rowse.
In the December of the surge my witch came in off the bank at four in the morning with the sea in her coat to the waist, and sat down at the kitchen table without taking it off, and told me she had let the bottle at Saltings go, to hold the high street, and that the keeper had been in the engine house when the sea came over. Every big tide after that she cried for him at that table, and I sat on the sill, and I never once asked his name. The brass plate in the church porch does not ask it either.
Mo had sat down on the lid of the toilet with her face in a towel. The blood sat down on the edge of the bath. Her knees were level with my head.
"I don't care if you tripped her," she said to me. "Somebody laid you there."
I had a reply. I had several, and one was in Latin. I went over and sat on her foot, all of me, and she sneezed, and neither of us moved.
Below us the back door opened.
"Only me, Mo!" A boot came off, and hit the mat. Another. "You should be in bed. I'll just have my wash and I'll be out of your way. Kettle on?"
I got off her foot.
I had a speech. I had been making it, I find, since the word Rowse, and it was a great one, in four movements. The first put the charges, as questions, in the manner of the Assizes. The second was in Latin and had an ablative in it that would have made the vicar weep. The third was about furniture, and how a duke does not look under it, and why. The fourth I had not finished, but it ended with the word murderer, and a pause, and I was very fond of the pause. I went down the stairs with all four movements, and at the bottom I left them there.
I had said, with him on her bonnet, that there was a heron on it. I had said, with him up a ladder in front of me, that he was all height and no prospects. He gave no sign.
He was at Mo's sink in his waders, with his sleeves pushed up and the tap running over his hands. The cut on his wrist from the taxi window was going to a pink seam. I went up onto Mo's table, among the cups, and sat, and behind me I heard the blood come to the kitchen door and stop, and Mo behind her on the bottom stair.
I said one plain thing.
"She chose the high street. She cried about your father every big tide since. She told me."
The water ran over his hands. Then he turned off the tap.
"She told you that?"
"Told who what, love?" said Mo.
Nobody answered her. The pump man dried his hands on Mo's tea towel, slowly, between each finger, and folded it, and put it over the rail of the cooker. Then he turned round and looked at me. I could not remember him doing it before.
"Hello, Azzariel," he said.
He did not say like. He did not say sorry. He said it as you say good morning to a man you have passed every morning for years and have just decided to speak to.
It went into me under the fur. Nobody had said that name to me since 1725. She said it at the start, once, and wrote it down. I sat among the cups with my tail round my feet and my claws out in the oilcloth, and I did not go long. I had nothing long. I felt my ears go flat, and I let them.
"You took her drops," said the blood, from the doorway.
He looked past her at Mo, on the stair, with the little brown bottle in her hand. She had brought it down with her.
"I'm sorry about your bottle, Mo," he said.
"Ned?" said Mo.
"The vicar saw your torch on the dyke," said the blood. "That Sunday. On your round. You took her tomato off the wall and you put down one in oil."
He did not say anything to that. He did not have to.
"You gave me the Ely fare," said the blood. "The night the back lane went."
"Sixty each way," he said.
"You opened the sluice on me. You rang me first."
"I did ring you."
"And the book," said the blood. "You were on the memorial steps when I told Mo where it was. With Albert, and Albert's deaf. You're not. And she looked away for one minute."
"One," he said. He looked at me on the table among Mo's cups.
"A heron in a hi-vis," I said.
"I liked the heron," said the pump man. "She taught me on the bank. Three winters. At the turn, every big tide. You were always asleep on your step." He put his hands in his pockets. "You missed some good ones."
You missed a good one, you lump.
"On the Saturday she said she was done," he said. "On the bank. She said she'd let it all go when she went. The sea's owed this town, love, she said. It's been owed a long while." He said it in her voice. He had her exactly, the gate in it. "Saltings paid for her high street. I thought the high street could pay for Saltings. And I came home and I looked at the tables."
"For the big tide," said the blood.
"For the big tide." He looked at the window, where the light was coming grey over the field. "If she'd stepped over you, I'd have waited for the next one."
Mo made a sound on the stair, not a word.
"Tell the police, Jess," he said. "Tell them the cat said."
"What do you want him for?" said the blood.
"Somebody has to say who gets wet," he said. "She said it at four in the morning, on her own, and cried about it at a table after, and they put up a brass plate with nobody's name on it. Whoever holds him tonight holds the bank, and says, every big tide after. I'll say it out loud. Where they can all see me."
"Tonight anybody may," said Ned Rowse. "I'll see you on the bank."
He went past the blood in the doorway, close, and she did not stop him, and he went past Mo on the stair and said, "Get some sleep, Mo," and he put his boots on at the back door, one and then the other, and went out. He took nothing with him. Wherever the book was, it was not in his hands.
The van started. It went up the drove with its exhaust rattling, toward the pumps, and the pumps hummed under everything, as they have hummed every night since they put them in.
Mo stood on the bottom stair with the bottle.
"Twelve years," she said. "Twelve years he's had my back room. I do him two rounds of sandwiches, cheese and pickle, and a banana, because he forgets. He did my gutters." She looked at the bottle in her hand, as if somebody had given it to her in a shop and she could not think what it was for. "He did a jigsaw on my landing at Christmas. A lighthouse. A thousand pieces. He let me put the last one in."
The blood went to her and took the bottle out of her hand and put it on the table among the cups, and put her arms round her, which she does not do, and Mo cried into her coat, and the blood sneezed into her hair, and did not let go.
I looked at the bottle. The man who had my names had just gone up the drove to his pumps, and it was my belief that the whole parish would follow him onto the bank if he asked it to, and thank him for the walk.
"Get in the car," said the blood.