Jess
Saturday, a minute to twelve, and Gavin Thew is waiting for me on the pavement outside the Lamb with a brochure.
He's in the gilet. He comes down the step with his arm already going and says, "Jess! Brilliant. Brilliant. Have a read of that while I get the plans off the landlord. I left them with him, but I'd sooner talk you through it. What are you having? Gin? You look like a gin."
"Water."
"Water! Ha. Love it." And he puts the brochure through the taxi's window, onto my lap, and goes back in.
I've parked at the kerb opposite the door. The cat is on the back seat. I don't know how long he's been in the car. He was on the wall when I went to get the keys and in the back when I got in, and I've stopped asking. I look at the brochure. It's glossy, with a lake on the front and a lodge with a man in it holding a coffee.
"Fen Edge Living," I read. "Wake Up To Wetlands."
"They are awake to wetlands, madam," the cat says from behind me. "They are standing in them."
"Forty bespoke timber lodges." I turn it over. "Each with a private hot tub."
"What is a hot tub?"
"It's a bath. You sit in it. With people."
"On purpose?"
"Yeah."
"I have sat in hot water with strangers," says the cat. "I will say only that it was unpleasant, and nobody had a drink."
"Reconnect with nature," I read. "From three hundred and ninety-nine pounds a night." The man in the picture's got his coffee up like he's about to toast the lake. "Nature's lying down in the churchyard."
I get out. I leave the window down an inch for the air and the cat's nose comes up to it like a periscope. "Do not agree to anything," he says. "Do not sign. Do not accept a drink from a gilet."
"I've said water."
"Who teaches a man to say 'love it' about water?"
I go in.
The Lamb is dark and low, with a tide mark on the wallpaper a foot above the skirting and four big fans going. About eight people at the bar stop talking when I come in and start again when I've gone past.
Gavin's got the table in the window, which looks straight up Low Drove, the whole mile, down to a dot at the end that's my gate. He's weighted the corners of the plans with four pints that nobody's drinking.
"Best seat in the house," he says. "You can see your place from here. That's what it's all about. Sit."
I sit. I put the brochure down.
It's a good plan. A road drawn in yellow comes off the high street and straight down the drove, and a little grey square at the end is the cottage, with a red line through it and out the back to the dyke. Forty brown lodges in rows. A pond with a swan on it. Hot tubs, tiny blue circles.
"Access road," Gavin says, and puts his finger on the yellow. "One road in. It's got to come past the cottage and swing round by the garden strip, down to the dyke. Without it I've got forty lodges and a field. With it I've got a destination." He sits back. "Three twenty-five I said yesterday. That's gone. Three forty. Cash, no chain, and I'll throw in a skip."
Three hundred and forty thousand pounds. I do the sum, because I can't not. Fourteen thousand two hundred out of it. Three hundred and twenty-five thousand eight hundred left. It takes me about a second. It's a lot of money to say in a pub.
"Why's it worth three forty," I say. "It's wet. It's a mile down a road that says Unsuitable For Motors."
"To be fair, it's not. Not as a cottage. It's worth three forty to me." He leans in. "And I'll be straight with you, because I like you. Nobody's going to be pumping Low Drove past twenty thirty. I've seen the consultation. They call it managed retreat. Lovely phrase. It means they're letting the sea have it. So you've got six years of a lovely little cottage and then you've got a damp shed. I'm the only buyer you'll ever get. I'm not the bad guy here. The sea's the bad guy. I'm the guy with a cheque."
I say, "Right."
"I had a hotel in Skegness once. Forty rooms. The sea took the front off it. So I know the sea." He taps the yellow line. "Three forty. Today only."
I look up the drove, because there's nothing else to look at, and then across the road at the taxi.
Through its back window there's a shape on the seat, and I know the shape. It's not sitting. It's flat on the seat with its head up and its mouth wide open and its claws in the cloth, and it's being dragged. Not by anything I can see. The back seat has gone soft under it, like a bed with someone sitting on it, with a dip in the middle where he is, getting deeper.
In daylight. Twelve twenty on a Saturday, in the high street, outside a pub.
I stand up. The chair goes over behind me.
"Jess?" says Gavin. "Jess, sit down, I'm mid."
I'm already going. I go past the bar, past eight men with their pints stopped halfway, and I'm at the door when he shouts "Wait," and something hits me between the shoulders and drops on the carpet. A beer mat. He's written on it in felt pen. I don't look at it. I look at the door handle.
"Three forty," he shouts after me. "Today only! What do you say?"
"Monday," I say, and I'm out.
The street's wet and bright. I get across it without looking and I've got the back door open before I know I've touched the handle, and the seat's a seat.
It's just a seat. It's grey, and a bit torn, and it smells of wet cat and pine. There's a dent in the middle of it, the shape of a body. The cat is on it, on his side, with his eyes open, shaking so hard that the seat's shaking with him.
I get in. I shut the door. I sit down on the other end of the seat with my back against the window.
He doesn't say anything. I don't say anything. I can hear him breathing, in little short hard pushes, like a person who's run for a bus. His claws are still in the cloth. They won't come out. I count the cars parked on the other side of the street, because it's something to count. Seven. A bin lorry. Eight.
After a bit his feet start to let go. It takes about four minutes. The shaking goes from the whole of him to his back legs, then his tail, then just his ears, and when it's only his ears I put my hand down on the seat, flat, near him, not on him, and leave it there. He looks at it.
I sneeze. It goes all over his back. He doesn't move.
"I said Monday," I say, after a while.
"And what is Monday, madam," says the cat, in a very small voice, "if not a yes in its coat?"
"Monday's a kind of Monday."
It's quiet in the car. The beer mat's still in my hand. I'd picked it up off the carpet without knowing, I think, and it's got a sticky ring on one side and a number on the other in black felt pen, three hundred and forty thousand with all the noughts. And underneath, in a bigger hand, Today only, with two exclamation marks and a line under it.
I put it in my pocket. I stay where I am. After a minute I put my feet up on the seat, and he puts his head down on his paws, and neither of us gets out.
I go to the pumping station because I want to know if Low Drove is going to be pumped, and because I want to see if it's true.
It's at the mouth of the drove, where the town stops and the fields start, a brick building like a chapel with its windows bricked up. There's a yard, and a white van with an orange light on top, and behind it a concrete channel, the main drain, full to the brim and running a lot quicker than water should. The cat won't come in. He sits on the dash with his eyes shut. "They hum," he says. "They hum at me."
Inside it's the size of a church hall, and the noise comes up through my boots. Three big green machines are bolted to the floor in a row, with pipes as thick as my body going into the wall.
There's a tall man at the far end, in waders, with a hi-vis over the top, and his head in a gap behind the nearest machine.
"Hello?" I say. "Is it Ned?"
He comes out backwards. He bangs his head on a pipe. "Ow, Maud, no, that's, hello. Jess. Hello. It's you. I've got oil on, you don't want to, I'll not shake, I've got a, there." He shows me his hands, which are black to the wrist. He's got a spanner in one and a grease rag in the other, and he doesn't put either down. "You've come to see the pumps."
"I've come to ask a question."
"I'll do a tour. Go on. This is Maud." He puts his hand flat on the casing of the big one on the left, the way you'd pat a cow in a shed. "Maud's the big girl. She does the heavy lifting. Lettice, that's Lettice, she sulks if it's under five degrees, you've got to talk her into it. And Kezia." He puts his other hand on the one on the right. It's knocking. I can hear it under the hum, a dull hard rapping, like somebody inside with a hammer. "Kezia knocks. She's always knocked. I tell her she's knocking and she knocks louder, like. They've been flat out since Wednesday. All three. For the churchyard. Kezia's not happy." He keeps his hand on her. "My dad named her. He had Saltings, out on the marsh, before they shut it. I learned on his."
"Is that bad?"
"You don't want to hear her at four in the morning." He laughs. It's not a big laugh. "Sorry. I talk. They don't answer."
"Is Low Drove going to be pumped?"
"What?"
"Past twenty thirty. A man told me. There's a consultation."
He puts the spanner down on top of Lettice. He wipes his hands on the rag, which does nothing, they're blacker after. "There's a paper," he says. "The board does a paper. It's, they do one every few years. Nobody reads the paper. It's got a lot of words in it. Who told you?"
"A man in a gilet."
"Gavin." He nods, like it explains something. "He's, yeah. He's got a lot of paper. I'd not, I wouldn't sell on a paper, like. If I was you. I'm not saying, it's your, I'm just, you know."
I look at him. He's looking at the floor.
"I'm selling," I say.
"Right. Course. Yeah. No, that's fine."
"What do you do here? All day?"
"Oh, everything. Rounds, callouts, the gauges." He turns the spanner over. "Board's cut my hours. Spring of all times. I'm on twenty a week now, officially. I do the rest for nothing. You can't not, can you. You can't leave her. I'd feel, if anything went."
"Do you ever go home?"
"Home? Ha. I get an hour in the van. Is the cottage, is it dry? Your side of the drove's the low side."
"I don't know. I sleep in the car," I say. "At the gate. On the drove. The cottage is full of cat, I can't be in it."
"On the drove," he says, to the spanner. "In a car."
"It's got a heater."
"Right." He doesn't say anything else for a second. Kezia knocks. "Right, well. Can I have your number? In case the dyke comes up. All the callouts come to me, like. If it's coming I can ring you, give you a bit of a warning."
I give him the number. He types it into a phone with a cracked screen and a lot of oil on it, one letter at a time. When he gives me his I put it in as Ned Pumps.
"Thanks for the tour," I say.
"Any time," says Ned. "Mind Kezia."
He's a nice lad. He's got oil on his phone.
At five, Mo's got a tomato sardine on a saucer and a mug of tea in my hand.
I've told her I'm not stopping. She's got me in the kitchen anyway, with crocheted things on every chair. The cat's on the table in a sort of loaf, with his eyes half shut. He hasn't said a word since the pumping station.
"Eat something," says Mo. "Go on. Eat. You're not eating. Is it the cat? It's the cat, isn't it, you can't eat for sneezing. Here. I've done him a tomato one. I know you like the tomato." She puts the saucer down in front of him. He opens one eye.
"Tomato," he says to me. "Again. Eleven years of tomato."
"He says it's lovely," says Mo. "He says thank you, love."
"He does not."
"He says," Mo says, and stops, and looks at him, and puts her hand on his head, "he says he's missing her."
The cat closes his eye. He doesn't say anything. He's let her keep her hand there.
"Close," I say.
"What, love?"
"Nothing."
She sits down across from me with her own mug and a shelf of biscuits, and starts talking. The stock, the flood, a woman in Eel Row who's been bitten by a swan. She gets up, and sits down, and gets up again and takes something off the shelf over the cooker, a little brown bottle with a white cap, and holds it up to the light with one eye shut.
"Look at that," she says. "Look. You tell me. That was full on the first of the month. It's my drops, it's Doctor Pedley's, one at night, I count them. I'm a counter girl, love, I count everything, you'd not believe what I count. Two weeks. That should be, that should be a good half, and look. A quarter. It's going down like the Lord's drinking it. I must be taking extra. In my sleep. I must be getting up and doing it. Sleepwalking. Or the Lord's drinking them."
"Right," I say.
"I've told Doctor Pedley. Hester. She says I'm not to worry. She says, take one, Maureen, and stop counting, and her with the same bottle in that black bag for the almshouse round. I'll tell you what, I'll count them again tomorrow." She puts the bottle back. She puts her hand on her chest. "Oh, I'm talking. I'm always talking. You eat that. You've a face on you like a wet week."
I eat the biscuit.
At eleven, in the car, in the dark, he gets onto my chest.
I don't throw him off. I don't count. He settles down with his chin on my collarbone, and says, in a low voice, in the dark, so it's only me who can hear it, "I wish to propose a second string."
"What?"
"If you will not be my witch, madam, and I do not say you will not, but you have a face in the mornings that says Monday, then I must have somebody. On the last night, anybody may. I mean to ask the whole town."
"Nobody's going to."
"Everybody wants something," says the cat. "I have been three hundred years in this parish and I assure you everybody wants something. I should like to ask them. I have made a list."
"You can't write."
"I have it by heart." He shifts. "The vicarage, on Glebe Lane. The lock, at the end of the towpath off Sutton Road, the boat with the geraniums. The chapel on Chapel Row. The pumping station. And next door."
"Mo?"
"Next door."
I say it back to him, once. He looks at me from my chest with his two coins and doesn't say anything for a bit.
"You will want to write that down," he says.
"It's five stops."
"We shall begin tomorrow," says the cat. "At nine."
"It's Sunday."
"It is a Sunday, madam, and we shall be wanting a clergyman."