Jess
Tuesday, five in the morning, and a man from the Drainage Board is looking at three pumps.
His half seven was cancelled and the next was ten to three; I sat in the station car park till it came, and at midnight I rang Mo's hall phone, off Agatha's fridge, to ask if the cat was alive.
He's been looking for eleven minutes. I've timed it. He's in a suit with a hi-vis over the top of it, and he stands in the middle of the engine house with his clipboard held against his chest as if it's cold. The pumps hum. One knocks. He looks at the one that knocks.
"Early next week," he says. "A contractor. Realistically."
"Next week," I say.
"Early." He writes something. "Is there a, is the gentleman who looks after them about?"
There isn't. The man looks at the knocking one a bit longer, then says he's seen all he needs to, and I drive him back to Ely. He pays me the second sixty in cash, then gives me a form to sign saying he has. A hundred and twenty pounds. I put it in my sock.
When I get back from Ely at half past eight, the cat's on the bonnet at the gate. He tells me about the tin in nine sentences, without a title or a joke in any of them, and I say, "Right," and sleep in the car with my coat over my face.
At noon I knock on Mo's back door, and I'm still wearing yesterday.
She opens it already crying. I haven't said anything. The cat's on her windowsill, between a cactus and a china shepherdess, with his feet together, and he doesn't look at me, because he's looking at her.
"Come in, love, come in, I've done a stew. Have you eaten? You haven't. Sit, you look dreadful."
"Mo," I say. "The tin."
She stops with a plate in each hand.
There's a clock in the kitchen, a big round one with a cockerel, and I can hear it going. Mo puts the plates down one at a time, and wipes her hands down her cardigan, and sits at the table with her whole face coming apart from the middle.
"Oh, love," she says. "Oh, I knew. I knew you knew. Oh, I wanted to tell you, I wanted to tell you on Sunday, and then the teapot."
"Pudding says it's in your airing cupboard."
"It's in my airing cupboard," says Mo. "It's behind the towels. He was on it, wasn't he. Last night. I put him on the towels." She looks at the windowsill. "I put him right on it."
"I was carried," says the cat.
"I know, love," says Mo.
She gets up, and she gets the tin. It's on the table before I've seen her go. A square blue biscuit tin, old, with the paint worn off the corners, and on the lid in black capitals in a hand that goes uphill it says STEPS.
"It was for a rail," Mo says, wiping her face with her wrist. "For them steps. She'd say, I know where my feet are."
"How much?"
"Oh, love."
"How much did you take?"
"Four thousand," says Mo. "Eighty." She says it quick, like pulling off a plaster, and then her hands are over her face. "I've got it written down. Date and amount. I'm a counter girl, I wrote every one. It was Frank. Frank was four years going, you know, and the telly was all there was, and you could do a scratchcard in the bath. A pound. Then two. And I'd think, it's got to be this one. And it never. And the tin was on the shelf, and she never counted. And I'd say, I'll put it back on Friday. I always meant it. Every Friday."
"Mo," I say.
"I'll get you the cards." She's up again. She takes a tin down from the top of the dresser, and it says biscuits on the lid in gold, and I think, finally, something I can eat. She puts it in front of me and takes off the lid.
It's full of scratchcards. Scratched down to the silver, every one, thousands, in rubber bands and sandwich bags.
"I keep them in case I misread one," Mo says.
I look at the cat. He's looking at the dresser. I say, "Right," which isn't what I mean, and there's a noise on the windowsill like a very small person clearing his throat.
"Madam," says the cat, "a woman who takes bread from a stair-rail has a good deal to answer for."
"He says you've a good deal to answer for," I say.
"I know I have, love. I know. Tell him I know."
"She has eleven years of tomato sardines to answer for as well," says the cat, "and I did not say it first."
"He's not a bad boy, he says it's all right," says Mo, wrongly, to the sink. She's crying into a tea towel. She has put a ginger nut on a saucer and put the saucer in front of me, and I pick up the ginger nut, and I eat it. It's what you do.
"Tell me about Sunday," I say.
I don't know why I say it. It comes out of my mouth like a coin from a slot. The cat has gone very still on the windowsill, with his ears forward.
Mo stops crying, which I'd not have thought she could do. She puts the tea towel down, and she folds it, in four, and puts it on the table.
"She counted," she says. "That's the thing. Sunday, eight o'clock, I went round with her Radio Times, and she had the tin on the kitchen table with the lid off and her glasses on. She never wore her glasses. She'd been going through it coin by coin, in rows. And she looked at me and said, Maureen, how long. And she said it was nine years by her reckoning, and she was right to the month, and she wasn't even angry. That was the worst. She said, I'd have given you it if you'd asked. And I shouted."
"What did you say?"
"I said a thing. I said a terrible thing." Mo shuts her eyes. "I said, I hope you go down those steps and don't get up."
Nobody says anything. The clock goes. The stew's on the stove, ticking, a little lid dancing.
"I didn't mean it, love. You say it, don't you. Like you'd say, I hope you choke. And I went home, and I had my tea, and I took my drops, and I took two, because I was in such a state, one a night it says but I took two, and I slept like a log. And in the morning I went round to say sorry. The kitchen door was on the latch, and the tin was on the table, and I thought, if I put it back before anybody counts. And I went out to the step to find her, and she was." Mo's chin goes. "She was at the bottom."
I count the clock. I get to eleven ticks.
"I took the tin," says Mo. "God forgive me. I touched her neck, she was cold, and I took the tin. And I've been putting it back out of my pension. Twelve a week."
"Did you push her?" I say.
I don't mean it as a thing. It's flat. It's the same voice I'd use for the fare.
"No!" says Mo. "No. Oh, love. No. I was asleep. I'd had two of my drops. That's why the bottle's down, I've been at them like Smarties, I'm such a fool, and I'd never. She was my friend."
On the windowsill the cat doesn't move.
I think about the officer, with her cold. The back gate bolted. The front gate in full sight of Mrs Tebbutt's window. Nobody came up that path, Mrs Tebbutt says. I look at Mrs Tebbutt, who's sitting with her hands round a tea towel, and I think, she's the only one who'd know. I think it once. It lies there on the table next to the ginger nuts.
She said it. She hoped it. She's got a curse and a bottle of sleeping drops and an evening nobody saw.
"How much have you put back?" I say.
"Eleven hundred and ten."
I do it in my head. It's one second. "Two thousand nine hundred and seventy."
"Oh, love, you've got it to the pound."
"It's what I do." I stand up. I don't know what I'm going to say. "I owe fourteen thousand two hundred, Mo. To people who ring me at eight every morning. I'm not your judge." I pick up the tin. I put it back in her hands. "Pay it back."
She looks at the tin and then at me. Her face goes completely. She says "Oh," in a very small voice, and she puts her arms round me, tin and all, and I stand there with a corner of it in my ribs and a hairnet in my mouth, and I sneeze into it.
"Bless you."
"Don't."
Over her shoulder the cat has turned round on the windowsill. He's got his back to the room. He's looking very hard at a drainpipe.
I get my mouth clear. I say, because nobody's said it, "Mo, where was—"
"Biscuit," says Mo.
She's already got the tin open. She holds it out with both hands, the ginger nuts, in fives, and her face is wet and shining, and it's a very good biscuit, and I take it.
"Why was she like that? On the Sunday. Counting."
"She was tired." Mo's wiping the table with the tea towel. "She'd been tired for years, love. She'd not been right since Saltings. She never forgave herself for Saltings."
"The plaque," I say. "In the porch."
"Don't." Mo puts the tea towel down. "It's not mine to say. It was before you. It was hers."
The cat has gone out through the window, which I didn't know opened. I eat the biscuit.
I'm in the taxi at the gate at ten past nine that night when my phone goes. It says Ned Pumps.
"Jess. It's Ned. Sorry. It's Kezia, she's going. I need every hand. I've rung everyone. Sorry. If you could."
"Where?"
"The station. Sorry. Sorry."
I'm already turning the key.
The cat's on the dash before the engine catches. I didn't see him get in. He's got a smell on him of Mo's stew and wet grass, and he has his eyes shut.
"I shall wait with the car," he says.
"Good."
"I mention it in case of questions."
I drive the drove at twenty with the dyke at the lip of the road and the reeds hissing on the doors. At the mouth of it the station's lit up like a ship. In the yard there's a foot of brown water, moving, with the white van in the middle of it up to its sills. At the far gate there's a trestle with a big steel urn on it, and the bowls club in their blazers handing out tea in mugs.
"Jess!" It's Ned, in the doorway, in waders, soaking, with his head torch on. "Hands! Bags! Put them on the door!"
I get the twelve sandbags out of the boot, one on each shoulder at a time, and wade. It's to my knees, and the noise from the engine house comes out of the door at me like a wall. Maud booming. Lettice with a thin hot whine. And Kezia, with the hammer in her, going faster and harder, up and up, and then a bang.
It's not like a bang. It's like someone's dropped a piano down a lift shaft.
Then it's quiet where she was. And Ned says, in a voice I've not heard him use, a small flat one, "Oh, Kez."
"Ned?"
"The red switch, Jess. On the board, by the door, left of the clock. By the clock. Red. Put it down. Lettice is cooking. If I don't isolate her she'll go as well."
I find it. It's a switch like a fire alarm, red, with a plastic cover. I put it down, and it's heavy, and there's a clunk in the wall, and the whine goes out of Lettice in a long falling note, like a kettle taken off. I smell hot paint and something worse. Ned's inside the machine, where Kezia was, with his arms in her up to the shoulder, talking. "Come on. Come on, you daft cow. Come on, Kez. Don't you dare."
"She's not coming," I say.
"Door! The door, Jess, bags on the door!"
The water's come in. It isn't over the sill. It's coming up through the floor drain in the corner, in a black bulge like a boil, and then it's across the tiles toward the machines. Ned's voice, from inside Kezia: "Not the door, the drain, Jess, put them on the drain!" I pile three on the drain. It comes through them anyway, brown, in little fountains.
Something's moving in the yard.
I put the torch on the yard, round the van's wheels. A long grey rope, thick as my wrist, is sliding across the top of the water in an S.
Then another. Then a bunch of them coming up out of the yard drain together, in a slow wet knot, and the beam goes over them, and every one has a face.
I don't do eels. I've never had to. I stand there with a bag on my shoulder, and I count them. Seven.
On the roof of my car, across the yard, there's a noise. It's not a cat noise. It's a voice, high up, and it says, "Eels." It says, "Eels. Eels, madam, there are eels," and it says it faster, and then there's a scrabble and a splash, and a black shape goes off the roof of the taxi and across the top of the yard and out through the gap where the gate was, into the dark, going the way you'd go if the floor were on fire.
"Oi," I say. I shout it. "Cat!"
Nothing. The water goes round the van. Maud booms.
"Pudding!"
The torch goes over the field. Nothing but reeds and a long black dyke. I've got a bag in one hand, the torch in the other, and an eel going past my boot.
"Come here! You lump!" Nothing. "Your Grace!"
Nothing.
I'm not proud of it. It's one in the morning. I wade out to the yard gate, out of the light, with the engine house roaring behind me, and I put my head back and shout across the whole of the fen at the top of my voice.
"Fleabag!"
For a second there's only the reeds.
Then the dark moves. It's out in the field, low and fast, a line in the grass coming straight at me, and it comes through the gate and across the yard through water up to its neck, and goes up my leg and my coat and my arm without stopping, and sticks on my shoulder with every claw it's got. It's wet through. It's heavy. It smells of eels and mud and Mo's stew. It's shaking so hard that my teeth shake.
Neither of us says anything. I don't say it again. I carry him back to the door and put the bag on the drain with my one free hand, and it holds, and I go back for another.
Twenty minutes on, Ned's head comes up out of the machine. "Jess! That's lovely. Lovely. Keep them coming."
"There's eels in the yard," I say.
"They'll not bite. They're only looking for the high ground," says Ned. "Same as us."
It's till first light. The bowls club stacks the door to the lintel, and Ned comes out when it's done, black to the chin, and sits on the step in the dawn with his feet in the water.
"She's gone," Ned says. "Kezia. The bearing's gone and the shaft with it. I'd not get her back without a part, and the part's three weeks. I've got Maud, and Lettice if I'm kind to her, but Maud's doing for all of them now, and the drove dyke's running high. It's been high since Monday." He looks at his hands. "Sorry. I called Kezia something, at the end. I'd not have called her it if she'd been well."
"Go home," I say.
"I get an hour in the van." He rubs his face. It makes it worse. "If she doesn't come back, and Maud can't hold it, I might have to open the drove sluice. The one halfway. Let the main drain spill down the drove, take the pressure off her. It's what it's for, like. Not yet. Friday maybe. I'll give you plenty of warning. I'll ring. The drove'll take it, there's nothing down there but the cottage."
"Right," I say.
"Brilliant," says Ned. "Sorry. Thanks, Jess. That was brilliant."
I get in the car. I put the cat down on the seat beside me. He's still shaking, in little bursts, and when I put the key in he looks at me for the first time since the eels, and I look at the road. I put the heater on. It's a mile to the gate. I count it on the clock.