Jess
Wednesday, ten past four, and I'm sitting on a metal staircase on the outside of the chemist's with one eye.
The other one's gone. I can feel it in there, somewhere behind the cushion. I walked it. A mile and a bit, up Low Drove and round the bend and along the high street, in a dead woman's boots that are a size too small, through water that was ankle deep at the cottage and shin deep by the Lamb. The boots are full. My socks are a sponge. The sign at the top of the stairs says Surgery, Evening, Five O'Clock, and under that, in marker pen, Not Before.
Five other people are already waiting on the stairs. A man with his hand in a tea towel. Two women with the same cough. A boy with a plaster on his ear. None of them speak to me. They look at my face and then they look at the wall.
At ten to five there's a noise on the steps below, a long wet scrape, and the man with the tea towel says, "That's Pudding."
It is. He comes up the stairs one at a time, soaked to the shoulders, with his fur in points and his torn ear flat. He's come by the bank and the back of the Lamb and the fire escape, I'd guess, because there's reed on him. He stops on the top step and looks at me.
"I told you to go home," I say.
"I did," he says. "And then I came here."
The two women lean away. The boy says, "Is he allowed?" Nobody knows.
At five, the door opens. The woman in it is in a waxed jacket she hasn't taken off, with reading glasses on a cord round her neck and a clipboard held like a tray. She looks down the stairs. She looks at the cat. She looks at me.
"That's not coming in," she says.
The cat goes in.
Her room is small and warm and smells of soap. There's a desk, a couch with a paper sheet on it, a poster about ticks. She shuts the door behind us. The cat is already on the couch with his paws together.
"I'm Doctor Pedley," she says. "Sit. Is that yours?"
"No."
"He's on my couch."
"He followed me. He's not my cat. I'm allergic to him. That's not the same as owning him. That's the same as being stabbed by him."
She doesn't smile. She takes a little torch off the desk and puts her thumb on my cheekbone and says, "Stand still," and shines it at where my eye ought to be. I stand still. She looks for a long time.
"Cat," she says.
"Yes."
"Smoke, as well. Something burnt."
"A vicar."
"That'd do it." She sits back. "Breathe in. Out. Again." She puts a cold thing on my back and listens, and the cat, on the couch behind her, gets up and walks across the paper to the black bag on the desk, and puts his nose into it.
"Madam," he says, "I advised her to come at once. I said, go to the doctor. I said, you are making the house damp. She is a stubborn woman and it is not my fault if she has been blown up like a toad."
To the doctor it's a cat having opinions. She doesn't look round. Something in the bag clinks.
"Stand still," she says, to the cat, because he's rummaging. "I'm not a vet."
He takes his nose out of the bag. He goes back to the couch and sits down in the middle of it with his back to her, which is as close to an apology as I've ever seen him get.
"You're allergic to cats and you're living with one," Doctor Pedley says to me. "I can give you tablets or I can give you advice, and you won't take the advice."
"What's the advice?"
"Move."
"I'm selling."
"Then you'll be fine in a fortnight." She pulls a pad toward her and writes. "She was your aunt, I'm told. You'll be wanting someone to blame."
"No."
"Good. Nobody in this town dies of anything interesting. They die of steps." She tears the sheet off. "Seventy-one, in the dark, on wet brick. In the city that's a Tuesday night in casualty. Here we just have the one set of steps."
I take the paper. The cat, on the couch, has gone very still.
"These are antihistamines," she says. "They'll take the worst of it off. They will make you drowsy. Take one."
"One."
"One. Not with a drink. Not before you drive."
"I sleep in the car."
"Then it's the right car for it." She looks at the clock. "I don't do weekends. I'm at the lock from Friday night, bar the Sunday evening round at the almshouses. Thornbury Lock, on the boat, and if you've a symptom on a Saturday you can ring and I'll ask you whether it's bleeding. It's the only place I go to get away from people who want things."
"I want a tablet."
"That's the one thing I'm allowed to give you. Next."
That's it. She doesn't charge me. I ask, and she says it would cost her more to send the invoice.
Downstairs, the chemist's has a counter at the back, past a stock room with a tide mark on the wall at hip height, and behind the counter, in a white overall with a cardigan over it, is Mo. She sees my face and puts both hands on her cheeks.
"Oh, love," she says. "Oh, your eye. Come here. Is he with you? Is he up there? He's not been in the water, has he? You'll have a cup of tea. Sit down. I've got ten minutes."
It's nearer two hours. She fills the prescription without looking at the label, which she says is thirty years of practice, and she talks all the way through it. About the flood. The stock. The chip shop's fryer. The vicar, who's been in twice for something for his stomach. Her leeks. Nine pounds ninety, she says I'm not paying, and I pay.
When I come out the cat's gone. I don't ask where.
I'm back at the car by nine. I get in and lock the doors, all four, and put the seat back. I look at the strip of tablets in the paper bag. Take one.
I take one. I sit there in the dark and count slowly to six hundred. Nothing. My eye's still a cushion. I've had four hours of sleep a night for three nights and I'm going to wake up on the A forty-seven with my face in the wheel.
I take the other.
I know what he said. He said it on the stairs outside the chemist's, going down, before he went off ahead of me with his tail up.
"One goes tonight," he said. "Somewhere. You must be awake for it."
"You're awake."
"I cannot dig."
"Not my problem."
"Take one tablet, if you must," he said. "One."
"Right," I said.
I'm asleep in four minutes.
I wake with something on my chest.
It's heavy, and warm, and it smells of wet cat and mud and something like cold stone. It's lying with its front feet tucked under it and its chin on my collarbone, and its eyes are shut, and it's breathing in time with me, or I'm breathing in time with it. The little window at the front of the passenger door, the quarter-light, is open about two inches. That's how he got in. It's light. The dash clock says six.
My face has gone from a cushion to a football. I can see out of a slit.
I don't throw him off. I look at the clock. One second. Two. Three. Four.
Then I sneeze, and he's on the dashboard before I've finished.
"Good morning," he says. His voice is thin. "You have missed it."
"Missed what."
"I watched from the wall in the back lane at eleven. I came to wake you at one. You were not receiving. I have sat on you since."
"What happened at eleven?"
"The church clock struck and something went, in the churchyard, in the corner by the old graves, and the water came round."
I look at him. He doesn't look at me.
Somebody hits the window. It's a flat hand, then a fist, and a face I can't see because the window's fogged, and a voice.
"Miss Crowle. Miss Crowle! I'm so sorry. Miss Crowle, please."
It's the vicar. He's standing at the gate with his bicycle in the water behind him, in wellingtons and a dog collar with no jacket on, and he's crying. Not a little. His nose is running and his hair is wet and he's got one hand pressed to his mouth, and the other has mud up it to the elbow.
"It's the churchyard," he says. "I'm so sorry, I wouldn't ask, but I didn't know who else. It's all coming up. Could you come? Please? Could you come and see?"
I don't want to. I want a cup of tea and an hour. But the water on the drove has gone down in the night to puddles and wet ruts, and I've got a car with an engine in it, and he's crying in my wing mirror.
"I'll drive," I say.
He goes ahead of me on his bicycle at walking pace, wobbling, all the way up the drove and along the high street, like a funeral, with the cat on the passenger seat looking straight ahead and not speaking. It takes twenty minutes. I could do it in four. Past the war memorial there's a wall of sandbags across the bottom of the street, soaked black, three bags high. Further along they've left a gap for the lorries. We go through the gap.
The low corner of St Guthlac's is round the back, down a slope from the church, where the old graves are, the ones with the names worn off. The back lane runs beside it. The wall's a low one, about knee high, and it's got a hole in it where the water got in.
I park in the lane. I get out. I look.
The water's mostly gone back out through the hole. What it's left is the corner. The grass has slid. The whole slope has come down a yard, in a long brown tongue, and the headstones in it are leaning every way, some flat, some at forty-five degrees, some with only their tops showing. They lean like drunks at closing time. The ground's the colour and thickness of porridge. I put my boot on it and it takes the boot to the ankle and lets go of it with a noise.
Twenty or thirty people are standing about in it with spades. The man in the bowls blazer. The woman from the bakery. Two men from the Lamb. A girl with a bucket. None of them are doing much. They've turned round to look at me.
And at the bottom of the slope, where the mud's worst, there's a corner of wood. Brown, with a brass plate on it gone green. It's sticking up out of the ground about as much as a hand would. I look at it for as long as I need to, and then I look at the plate, and I can't read the name, because the mud's on it.
Nobody says anything for a bit. The vicar comes up behind me wiping his face with his sleeve.
"It was the sandbags," he says. "The wall sent it round the back. We built it, all of us, I carried them myself. It wasn't anybody's fault. You'd have said it was, but it wasn't. It's just that the water had to go somewhere, and it came here."
"Right," I say.
"But who made it have to go anywhere?" He rounds on the cat, who's on the wall by my boot. He points at it with the muddy hand. "Who? That. That was in the garden on Sunday, and on Monday the high street, and on Tuesday the drove, and now, in the night, the dead are coming up out of the ground. It looked at me during the Nunc Dimittis."
"It's a cat," I say.
"Is it?"
I don't answer that.
The man in the bowls blazer takes his hat off. He doesn't say it to me. He says it to the mud.
"She'd have been down here at midnight," he says. "With a bucket, and her stick. She'd have had every one of us out."
"I was asleep," I say.
"Course you were, love."
"I took two tablets."
Nobody says anything to that either. The girl with the bucket looks at her bucket. The woman from the bakery looks at me. I feel it come up the slope at me, the whole lot of them, thirty people in wellingtons, looking at the heir. Not angry. Worse. Patient.
There's a small cold weight against my boot. The cat's come down off the wall, and he's pressed himself against the side of my foot, which he's never done, and he talks very low, so low I have to bend to hear it. The vicar can't, and wouldn't, and I don't think the thirty could either.
"It's the bottle," he says. "It cracked at eleven, under that wall. A crack makes a place weak. Where the water goes after that is up to you lot."
"The sandbags."
"Yes."
"Not you."
"I did not carry one," he says. "I was supervising."
I look at the thing in the mud. I look at the vicar, who's started crying again quietly, into his sleeve. I look at the town, which hasn't moved.
My eye's shut. My nose is full. I'm down a hundred and ten pounds on Tuesday and another hundred and ten on Wednesday, and I owe fourteen thousand two hundred, and I've got a coffin lid at my feet with a name on it I can't read.
"Right," I say. "What do I have to do?"