Jess
Saturday, a fortnight on, half past five, and there's a fish on the wall.
It's a kipper, on a plate, in cling film, with a fork on the side in case. Next to it there's a box of antihistamines. One a day, non-drowsy, thirty tablets. There's no note. The price sticker's the chemist's, and there's only one person in this town who'd leave a box of pills on a wall and then not mention it at surgery.
The cat's sitting beside them with his feet together.
"I will give you my review," he says.
"Don't."
"A box. Served at five o'clock on the witch's wall, by a person unknown, beside a kipper. The box is excellent. It is the right size for a duke to sit in. The contents I cannot speak to, as they are not a fish. I put it to you, madam, that somebody in this parish wishes you to go on living with me, and I find that I approve of them."
I take one, with no water, standing at the gate. I sneeze anyway. He eats the kipper.
It's been like that every night since. Something on the wall at dusk. Nothing from Eel Row. Nothing from Brian Pettit. I'd not have left me anything either. The vicar cycles past at six, on the far side of the dyke, and rings his bell, and the cat looks at him, and he doesn't go any faster.
At ten past six the little girl from the bungalows comes down the drove in her school shoes with the buckles undone, holding something out in front of her in a napkin.
She puts it on the wall, and stands back with her hands behind her. It's a fish finger.
The cat gets up. He walks along the wall to it, slowly, one foot in front of the other. He looks at it for a while, with his head on one side, so she can see him looking. Then he eats it in five bites, with his eyes half shut, and when he's done he washes his whole face, behind both ears.
"Good boy," she says, and runs.
"A fish finger," says the cat, to me, "is a lie told to children about the sea."
"You ate it."
"I did," he says, and goes on washing.
The taxi's on the hard standing. Les had it back on the road on the Tuesday, with a new driver's window that Ned paid sixty pounds for. It smells of eels. It's going to smell of eels for the rest of its life. Every fare this week has said, "What's that smell?" and I've said, "Fen."
The bailiff came on the first of April to a flat in Peterborough I don't live at any more, and found a man called Darren and nothing worth taking. I'm on a plan. Forty pounds a week. It's going to be fourteen thousand two hundred for a long time before it's anything else.
Gavin comes at half six.
He walks down from the bend, in wellingtons that aren't new any more. He hasn't got a folder.
I give him his cheque. It's been in my sock, then the glovebox with the lock that doesn't lock, for a fortnight. Ten thousand pounds, in his neat writing, with a crease down the middle.
He looks at it for a long time.
"I'm pulling out," he says. "Letter Monday." He puts the cheque in his gilet pocket without looking at it. "Nobody'll insure it. Six insurers, Jess. They'd all seen the film." He rubs his face. "My film. That night, on the bank, on my phone. I sent it them for the lodges. That was a mistake."
"Right," I say.
He looks past the cottage at the field where his forty little lodges were going to go. It's flat and brown and there's a gull on it.
"I'd named them," he says. "Heron. Kingfisher. Marsh Harrier." He doesn't say anything else for a bit. "I'm not the bad guy here."
"I know," I say. "The sea is."
He nods, and goes back up the drove, and at the bend he lifts his hand, and I lift mine.
Mo's in the kitchen.
She moved in for a week, ten days ago, with three suitcases and the brown teapot with the new handle on. One suitcase is clothes. One is cardigans. One is tins, tomato, forty-eight of them, and the cat sat on that one in the hall for an hour and wouldn't get off, and Mo said, "Look at him, he's so pleased." She can't sleep with Ned's room through the wall. The lighthouse is still on her landing, all thousand pieces, and she can't put it in the box and she can't look at it. So she's in the box room, with a crocheted thing on the bed, and the cat can't have it. I read the letter again the night she moved in. Don't let him have the box room. He didn't. I've got Agatha's room.
The tin's on the shelf over the range, where Agatha kept it. STEPS, in her black paint. On Fridays Mo puts twelve pounds in it. She does it with her back to me, so I won't see, and I hear the coins go. Two thousand nine hundred and forty-six. Hers goes down.
"You'll have your tea before you go up," Mo says. "You'll not go out on that bank on an empty stomach, love, I won't have it, there's a bit of ham."
"After."
"There's no after with you." She puts the ham on a plate anyway, and puts the plate in front of the cat. "There you are, my lovely. There's my boy."
"Madam," says the cat, "thank you," and eats it.
"He says he wants the tomato," says Mo.
There's a letter on the table. It came on Thursday from the drainage board, in a long envelope, and it's still there under the salt. It's very polite. It says that following the events of the twenty-first the board is reviewing its arrangements at Thornbury, and that it would be grateful for the views of residents, and that in line with the consultation it is minded not to pump Low Drove after twenty thirty. Managed retreat, it says. It says it twice.
On the Monday after, a crane cleared the outfall flap, and there was an iron bar jammed in it the length of my arm. Kezia's part came from Holland on the Wednesday. She knocks. They hum all night. I listen to them now.
They searched the marsh for three days. Boats, and dogs, and a helicopter that went up and down over Saltings till it got dark. On the third day a man with a spaniel found his waders on the Saltings bank, by the old engine house, side by side, the way you'd leave your boots at a back door. The book was with them. It had swollen to twice its size, and every page had gone to blue. They didn't find him. The coroner's still got her down as an accident. It'll stay that till they find him.
We buried her on the Thursday, once the hearse could get down the drove. Top of the churchyard, where the water doesn't get. Half the town came. Nobody brought a fish. The cat took it personally.
Doctor Pedley gave me more tablets on Wednesday. She looked at my face, which is a face now, and at the cat, who'd come up the metal stairs behind me and sat on her couch, and she wrote it out.
"You'll outlive me," she said. "Take one."
I've done two of the bottles. One a week, from the photos on my phone, at night, in Agatha's boots. The school field and the allotments. Lift the old. Pour out the old water. Fill. The other ten are holding, the cat says, now there's somebody. Not well. Holding.
At half eleven I put Agatha's coat on.
It's too small across the shoulders and it smells of liniment and sheep and salt. Her stick's by the back door. I take it. I go out of the back door and down the steps in the dark, and I don't put a light on, and on the third one there's a cat, asleep on the warm, with his chin on his paws.
I step over him. I go down the rest, counting. Nine. Ten. Eleven. I open the gate and go out along the dyke path toward the bank.
The cat isn't behind me. I stop on the path and look back. He's on the third step, a black shape on the dark, with his eyes open.
"Fleabag," I say.
He comes.
He comes down the steps and through the gate and along the path and up my coat, and he sits on my shoulder, heavy, with his claws in, and my eyes go, and I don't stop walking.
The bank's a mile. I walk it with the stick. At the top it's wet on one side and wetter on the other. The tide's in, high, black, a long way up the mud, breathing. On the other side the land goes away flat in the dark, with the pumps humming under it, and the lights.
I stand at the low place where he stood.
I can see the high street, and the church on its hill, with one light on in the porch, over a plaque that hasn't got a name on it. I can see Eel Row, low down along the back lane, where the water went because I mended the garden. The cat told me that, the Tuesday after. I can see the drove, a mile of it, straight, and the cottage at the end, and Mo's window with the light on. And off to the right, two miles out in the marsh, there's nothing at all where Saltings is. Just dark.
There's more sea than there are bottles. Next spring, or the one after, or the one after that. And one night I'm going to stand here with the water coming and work out which wall goes, and who gets wet, and it's going to be me that says.
Not tonight.
The cat's breathing in my ear. I sneeze, and he doesn't move.
The sea comes up the mud as far as it's going to, and stops, and stands there, and turns.