Jess
Friday, nine at night, and there are a hundred and sixty people in a church with one toilet.
I've counted the people. I haven't counted the toilet, I've queued for it. It's in the vestry, behind a curtain, next to a cupboard full of hymn books, and there's a sign on the door in biro that says Please Be Brief, and under it somebody's written Ha.
The pews are full. Not with sitting. With duvets, and sleeping bags, and pillows from Eel Row with the wet still on the corners, and kids lying head to toe along them. There are flasks on the hymn shelves. There's a dog under every second pew. There's a parrot in a cage on the war-graves table by the door, with a tea towel over it, that says "Oh dear" every four minutes, and I know it's every four minutes, because I've timed it.
I'm on the bottom step of the pulpit. It's a wooden stair, six steps, going up to a box carved with grapes. The cat's in the box. He's been there since the vicar said that animal, and he's going to stay there, and I'm sitting on the bottom step with my back against the rail so that anybody who wants to go up has to go through me. I've got my coat on, Mo's car keys on their string round my wrist, and ten thousand pounds in my sock.
"Madam," says the cat, from above me, quiet. "There is a man in a bag."
There is. Gavin's on the end of the third pew, in a green sleeping bag, zipped up to his chest, with his phone. He came up from the lodge field at half eight with the sleeping bag under his arm, because the track to his cabin's under, and he's been typing ever since. Every so often he holds the phone up over his head and turns it round, like he's looking for a fare.
"Signal's better by the lectern," he says, to nobody.
"Is he answering his letters?" says the cat. "In a church? In a bag? In my day a man in a sack was in a sack for a reason."
To the pew in front it's a cat having opinions. A little girl looks up at the pulpit and says, "Is there a pussy cat?" and her mum says, "Go to sleep."
At the front there's a row. The bowls club got there first, with their trophies, and they've put the trophies along the front pew like they're saving seats, and the Mothers' Union want the front pew because it's got a radiator under it. The bowls captain is the man in the blazer. He's standing in the aisle in his socks with a cup in each hand, saying, "We were here at seven." A woman with a crocheted blanket over her shoulders says they've had that pew since nineteen seventy-four. He says the radiator's not even on. She puts her hand on it and says it's on. He puts his hand on it. They stand there with their hands on the radiator, side by side, not looking at each other.
Doctor Pedley's in a side pew by the chancel step with her waxed jacket on and her reading glasses on the cord and a paperback. A man comes up to her with his thumb wrapped in a hanky.
"Doctor. Sorry. I've cut it. On the trophy."
She looks at her watch.
"It's ten past nine," she says.
"It's bleeding."
"Then it's working." She turns a page. "Hold it up. Over your head. Come back at eight."
He goes away holding it over his head. I've got some respect for her. She's the only person in here who talks like a meter.
Mo comes up the side aisle with a flask in each hand and her coat over her nightie. It's a long white one, with a frill at the neck, and her slippers are wet. She pours me a cup of tea into the flask lid without asking and puts it in my hand.
"You'll have that," she says. "You've had nothing. I watched you. You had one egg sandwich and that's not a meal, that's a sandwich." She looks up at the pulpit. She's been crying, on and off, since seven. "Is he all right up there? Is he warm? I could get him a cushion. I've got a cushion in the car."
"He's fine."
"I am not fine," says the cat. "I am in a tub."
"He says he's ever so comfy," says Mo, and wipes her eyes, and goes off along the pews pouring tea for people who didn't ask.
I drink it. It's got three sugars in.
Shannon Pomfret's asleep in the choir stalls with the baby on her chest, and her mum's asleep on Shannon. Somebody's dog has got into Gavin's sleeping bag at the bottom end, and Gavin's let it. Halfway down on the left, on the aisle, two big men in work coats haven't lain down. They've got their elbows on the pew in front and a can each, and every time I look up from the tea they're looking at the pulpit. Not at me. Over my head.
"Madam," says the cat, very low. "The two on the left."
"I've seen them."
"I do not believe that they are Pomfrets."
I'm not going anywhere. The lane's under, and Mo's car is up on the grass by the lychgate. A hundred and sixty people. One toilet. And tomorrow's the thirteenth night. His last.
At half nine the vicar turns half the lights off.
He does it from the switches by the vestry, and the church goes from yellow to brown, and the candles come up. There are candles on the altar and on the window ledges and on the pew ends in jam jars, and they make it smell of wax and wet dog. People stop talking. The parrot says "Oh dear." The vicar comes down the chancel in his black thing, without the white, with a little book.
"Compline," he says. "I'm so sorry. It's what we say at night. Before sleep. It's short. You don't have to join in. I'll just, if nobody minds."
Nobody minds. He reads it. It's not bad. It's quiet, and it's got a rhythm, like a car on a long straight road. Keep me as the apple of an eye, he says. Hide me under the shadow of thy wings. A few of the older ones say it with him, under their breath. The bowls captain says it with his hand still on the radiator. Gavin puts his phone face down on his sleeping bag.
Then the vicar shuts the book, and doesn't stop.
"I want to say one more thing," he says. "Just one. Before we sleep. Because we're all here, and we're all wet, and I think we all know why."
I put the tea down.
"There's a reading for this," he says. "There's always a reading. I'm not going to do it. I'm going to say it. We're in God's house tonight because our houses have water in them. And they have water in them because the woman who kept the water out is dead. And she's dead because she went down her own steps in the dark, on a Sunday night, and something was on them."
He doesn't look at the pulpit. He doesn't have to. A hundred and sixty people do it for him.
"I said it from the start," he says. "I've been laughed at for it. I don't mind being laughed at. But I said there was a beast in that house, and it went under her feet. And since she went, every night, every single night, the water's come. The high street. The drove. The churchyard. Our dead. And tonight, Eel Row. It isn't a cat. I've said so. It's never been a cat." He's crunching. He's got a sweet going round and he's talking past it. "And I ask you, I just ask, whether God means us to sleep in His house tonight with that thing in His pulpit."
Nobody says anything. The parrot doesn't say anything. A kid somewhere asks, "What thing?" and gets shushed.
The two men on the left get up. I know them. They're from the Lamb. They were in my back seat on the first night with their trousers wet to the thigh, and one of them sat on the cat's tail. They're big and they're tired and they look at each other and then they look at the vicar.
The vicar goes into the vestry.
He comes out with a sack. It's a coal sack, from the boiler house, black, with the coal dust coming off it when he moves. He holds it out to the two men in both hands. He says, "I'm so sorry." One of them takes it.
Then the vicar turns round. He turns his back on the whole thing and stands at the altar rail with his hands on it and his head down, looking at the floor, and he doesn't look round again.
The two men come up the aisle.
I stand up. I'm on the bottom step and I've got the rail at my back, and the cat's above me in the box, and I don't know what I'm going to do, because I've never done this. I've thrown out drunks. I've had a man try the door at the lights with a bottle. I've never stood in a church in front of a sack.
"Move, love," says the first one.
"Nope."
"Come on. You don't want it. You've said. You're selling."
"He's not your cat," I say.
"He's not anybody's."
"He's not even mine," I say. "I'm allergic to him. He's a nightmare. He's not mine." I don't move. "You're still not having him."
The second one's got the sack open. It's a big sack. "She went over it," he says. Not loud. He says it the way you'd tell someone their tyre's flat. "Everybody knows. Black hairs in her hand. Mrs Tebbutt said."
"Nobody knows where he was."
"Course they know. Where else would he be?"
"Nobody knows," I say.
Above me, in the box, there's no sound at all. Not a word. I can feel him up there over my head like you can feel a car behind you with its lights off.
And behind the two men, from the pews, there's a noise, and it's Mo.
She's standing up. She's in the middle of the nave, in her white nightie with the frill, with her coat come off one shoulder and a flask in her hand, and she's crying so hard her face has gone shapeless, and she comes out into the aisle between the two men and me, waving the flask at them, and she shouts it. She shouts it up the whole church.
"He never did! He never, he never did, he didn't even wake when I screamed! He was on the third step above her, dead to the world, God love him, he didn't even wake up, I screamed and screamed, and I picked him up and carried him home and he never even…"
She stops.
She stops because she's heard it. I watch her hear it. Her mouth stays open. The flask's still up in the air. A hundred and sixty people heard it with her.
The parrot says "Oh dear."
I didn't know.
I knew she found her. I knew he woke on her cushion. I knew she said he was, in the doorway on the first night, and stopped, and gave me tea. I never asked, on purpose. I didn't know the answer was the third step.
I count the candles on the altar. Six. I count the jam jars on the pew ends on the left. Eleven.
"Oh," says Mo. "Oh, no. Oh, I never meant."
Nobody moves. The two men are standing in the aisle with the sack between them, and they're not looking at me now, they're looking at Mo, and the vicar's still got his back to all of it at the altar rail. Doctor Pedley has put her book face down on the pew. Gavin's sitting up in his sleeping bag with his phone in his lap.
I turn round. I go up the pulpit steps, all six. He's in the bottom of the box, flat, with his chin on the boards and his eyes open, looking at the grapes. He doesn't look at me. He doesn't say anything. I put my hands under him, one under his chest and one under his back legs, and I lift him, and he's heavy, and he's warm, and he lets me.
I sneeze all over him and all over the pulpit. My eyes go before I'm halfway down the stairs.
I walk down the middle of the nave, past the two men with their sack, past Mo with her flask, past the bowls club and the Mothers' Union with their hands on the same radiator, past Gavin in his bag, past the doctor, past the parrot. I sneeze on the bowls captain. I sneeze four times between the pulpit and the door and nobody says bless you. Nobody stops me. One of the men steps back into a pew to let me by, with the sack held behind him, as if I'd not seen it.
At the back the water's still lying on the flags by the second pillar, an inch of it, brown. I walk through it. It's cold through my trainers.
I don't look at the vicar. I hear him, though. As I get to the door, behind me at the altar rail, he says something I don't catch.
The door's heavy. I get it with my shoulder.
It's dark outside. Dark, with no lights in the town below, and the rise going down from the porch in the grass to the lane, and at the bottom of the lane, all the way round, water, flat and black, with the street lamps standing in it. I can hear it. Not moving. Just there. Somewhere off to the left the pumps are going, one of them, low, on its own. The air smells of mud and diesel and wax.
I stand on the church step with him. I'm breathing like a bellows. My face is going up. I can feel it at the top of my cheeks, tight, like a mask that's too small.
I put him down on the step.
He sits. He sits up very straight, with his feet together and his tail round them, the way he sits on the wall when he's waiting for somebody to bring him something. He doesn't look at me. He looks at the water.
I get my breath. I get it in three goes.
"We're going to the cottage," I say. "You're going to show me the steps."