Pudding
At eleven o'clock on the Saturday night I stood on the sea bank for the first time since 1725, and I made my will.
I made it on the path at the foot of the bank, out loud, in the blood's arms, because the path along the dyke had been a mile of salt water to her shins, and I was not going to climb the last of it without having put my affairs in order. I left all my fish, wherever they might be lying, on any wall in this parish, to the Church of England. Has it ever had a decent one? I have seen its sandwiches. I named the vicar as my executor and the bowls club as witnesses, and I asked to be remembered at the Lamb, by the bread oven, on the anniversary of the frost.
"Is that it?" said the blood.
"That is it."
"Right," she said, and climbed.
It is wet on one side and wetter on the other. I had said so for three hundred years and I had been right, and I take no pleasure in it. On the far side, the sea. It was not where I had left it in 1725. It was up. It was right up, black, a hand below the lip of the bank at the low place, and breathing, a long hiss coming in over the mud and a long hiss going out, and every time it came in it came a little higher. On the near side, the land, which was worse. The drains were running backward. The dyke along the foot of the bank had come up salt and was still coming, and behind it, a mile off, the town sat in water with the pumps silent, and up on its hill the church had every light lit, and the bell had stopped.
And on the bank top, at the low place, there was the lamp.
He had set it on the grass. It was a big square lamp off the van, and in its light he stood in his waders with the book open on his arm. Her book. The size of a paving slab, with the strap hanging. He had a finger in the page.
Behind him, along the bank-top track, both ways, there were people. Forty, perhaps, in coats over their nightclothes. They had come up out of the town with torches to see the bank hold. They had come because he was the board, and he was the pumps, and he had pulled half of them out of the high street on the first night, and in my experience a town will follow the man who says he is holding the sea. I knew a good many of them by their smell. The bowls captain. The woman from the bakery. The two men from the Lamb, without their sack. The gilet, in new waders, with his telephone. And the doctor, a little apart, with her black bag, who had said no.
The vicar was at the foot of the bank on the town side, in the salt water to his knees, with his cassock tucked up and no bell.
Mo was behind us. She had come the whole mile on the blood's coat-tail, holding on.
The floor came at five past eleven.
It did not come as the floor. It came as the bank, the grass under the blood's boots going soft and the clay under the grass going warm as a bread oven, through her and into me. It was tied to the turn now, and I could feel the turn coming in it, as you feel a stair you cannot see.
"I've got you," said the blood. She had her chin on my head. Her face was so swollen she could not see out of it.
She got four steps up the landward slope.
The dyke came over. It did not rush. It lifted, all along the foot of the bank, black, as a sheet lifts on a line, and came up the slope at us, and took her feet. She went down on her side in it. I went with her. I was under her arm, in the salt, and the pull had my back legs, and the water had the rest of me, and Mo was screaming, and the blood's hand was in my fur and then it was not.
A hand came down into the water. It was not hers.
It took me under the chest and lifted me straight up out of the dyke, streaming, into the lamplight. I knew the smell of it. Diesel and drain, and a pink seam on the wrist where a window had been.
He carried me up the slope in three strides, and on the bank top, in the light of his lamp, with the sea on one side of him and the town on the other, he held me against his chest with one arm. I could not move. The bank was pulling me through his boots. He opened the book.
"Azzariel," read the pump man.
He read it to the people on the track. He read it loud, in her order, out of her book, in her hand, the hand that goes uphill.
"Thorncrown. The Unquenched. Duke of the Ninth Furnace."
I had given her those on the first night, standing on her table, while she wrote them down with her tongue between her teeth.
"Smut."
Her, the first week, because of the soot.
"Old Scratch. Tom. Grimalkin. Sweep."
A curate. A carter. A schoolmaster with a cane and a Latin grammar who could not get my name right either. A boy with a brush.
"Gib. Coal. Your Worship. Bishop."
The landlord of the Lamb, in the frost. The Bishop of Ely, at dinner, in 1760, who did not mean it kindly.
"Beelzebub. Puss."
Puss. A chimney in the vicarage, and a curate with a herring, and I came down. I came down for the herring.
"Nelson. Bartholomew. Inky. Mister Black. Jet. Pharaoh. Methuselah."
He read them as a man reads the levels off a gauge, steadily, without stopping to look at them, and the people on the track stood with their torches and did not know what they were hearing. I knew. I knew every one. A child at the school in a year with no swans. A drunk in the Lamb in a year with a king. A farmer's wife who fed me cream on the quiet and called me what she liked.
"Captain. Kipper. Cinders. Pudding. Beauty. Mog. Sir. Your Grace."
He stopped. He looked at the page. He turned it over to see if there was anything on the back.
There was not. I had never kept count.
The bank pulled. The sea breathed in. Nothing turned.
Nothing. No key. No click in the back of the head. I hung in the crook of his arm with the bank sucking at my back legs through him and his heart going under my ear, steady, and the people on the track had heard a pump man read thirty names, and were waiting, politely, for something to happen.
Whether he had done his three I could not tell. I never felt any but hers.
He read them again. Faster. All of them. Azzariel to Your Grace.
Nothing.
At the foot of the bank the vicar stood in the water and looked up at us. He had wanted those names since the day he brought a basket. He had them now, every one, read out in the lamplight for anybody with ears, and he stood there with his hands empty, and did not say one of them.
We stood like that for the better part of half an hour, while the sea came up the mud a yard at every breath. Below us the blood tried the slope, and the dyke took her feet, and Mo hauled her back by the coat, and she tried it again. The pump man held me, and looked at the page, and did not read it a third time.
Then the turn came.
It came in my teeth. All of them. Every tooth I have, at once, front and back, left and right, as if a hand had closed on my whole jaw, and then the crack, the last one, under my feet, under his boots, under the bank itself, cold, and deep, and final, and a taste in my mouth not of pennies but of the whole sea.
The bank at the low place gave a sigh.
The sea came over the lip. Not a wave. A sheet, black, a yard wide and then ten, flat and quick, pouring over the top of the bank where the grass was lowest, past his boots, past the lamp, and down the landward slope toward the dyke and the town, and somebody on the track said, "Oh, God," quite quietly, and nobody ran.
The pump man looked at it go. He did not move. He held me, and the book, and he said the one thing, to the sea, or to her, or to nobody.
"She chose the high street," he said. "Somebody always chooses. I was going to be the first one who chose in front of everybody."
I bit him.
I bit him in the arm that held me, on the pink seam, with every tooth that still hurt, to the bone, and held on, and felt the bone, and let go. He made a sound. His arm opened.
I went off the bank into the sea.
I did it on purpose. I will say that once. I went down into the black water pouring over the lip, and it took me, and it rolled me, and it carried me over and down the landward slope in the dark like a leaf down a gutter, salt in my eyes and my ears and my mouth, and I did not know which way was up, and I did not care which way was up. I knew which way she was. She was at the bottom. She was in the dyke at the foot of the bank with Mo's hands in her coat, where he had left her.
I swam.
I swim badly. I swam for the only person I wanted, down a slope of moving sea in the dark, and I could not see her, and I could not smell her for salt, and I could not hear her for the water in my ears, and I swam anyway.
The sea turned me over. It put me under. I came up against a fence post and lost it. Something went past my flank in the black, long, slow, and I did not look at it. I went under again and the cold came into my mouth, and I thought, quite clearly, in very short words, I am not going back, and I am not going down there, and I am not going anywhere but her. I came up. I had no breath for anything grand. I said her name, the once, into the water.
There was a light. It was above me, small and white, held up high and wavering, a telephone held up over somebody's head at arm's length, as a man holds it up in a church to find a signal.
"I can see it!" shouted the gilet. "Jess! Left of you! Left!"
Her hand came down into the water. It came down out of nowhere, as it had come down into my scruff on her kitchen floor, the whole of my scruff, and closed, hard, and held.
She got her other hand under my chest. Mo had her by the back of the coat, both fists, with her slippers dug into the slope, saying, "I know, I know, I know," over and over, as if the saying of it were a rope, and the blood came up out of the dyke with me against her and went up the slope through the water coming down it, on her knees, then on her feet, then on her knees again.
On the top of the bank she stood up in the lamplight with the sea round her ankles, pouring past, and held me.
She could not breathe. I could hear it. Her throat had nearly shut. The wind had salt and cat in it, and she had a cat in her arms, and her breath was going in through something the size of a straw and coming out as a whistle.
"Stand still," said the doctor.
She had come along the bank from the track with her bag open. She took something out of it, and took the cap off it with her teeth, and put it into the blood's leg through her wet jeans, hard, as one stamps a passport.
"I'm not a vet," said the doctor, and stepped back.
The blood breathed in. It went all the way down.
The pump man was standing three yards off with the book in his good hand and his other arm hanging, and the blood dripping off the fingers of it. He had not moved. He was watching her. He had his lamp at his feet, and it lit her from below.
She turned to the lamp. She held me up against her chest in both arms, on the sea bank, at the turn, with the sea going over the lip round her feet, and with her eyes shut, because they would not open, she said it back to him. She had heard it twice, from the dyke.
"Azzariel. Thorncrown. The Unquenched. Duke of the Ninth Furnace. Smut. Old Scratch. Tom. Grimalkin. Sweep. Gib. Coal. Your Worship. Bishop. Beelzebub. Puss. Nelson. Bonaparte."
She stopped.
"Bloody hell," said the blood. "No. Bartholomew."
The sea went over her feet. The bank pulled at me through her, harder.
"Bartholomew. Inky. Mister Black. Jet. Pharaoh. Methuselah. Captain. Kipper. Cinders. Pudding. Beauty. Mog. Sir. Your Grace."
That was all of his. She did not stop.
"You lump," said the blood. "You. Pudding."
The bank pulled.
"Fleabag."
The pump man lifted his head from the book.
It went into me like a key.
Not a click. A door. A whole door, in the middle of me, turning on its hinge, and shutting, with her on my side of it. The heat went out of the bank under us as if somebody had opened a window somewhere unpleasant. The clay under her boots went hard. The pull let go of my back legs, and it did not let go as a mouth lets go of a thing it means to come back for. It let go as a hand lets go of a rope it has been told to drop.
And in my teeth the last crack closed.
I felt it close. Under us, under the bank, at the low place, cold and exact, a quarter-turn. The sea came in over the lip once more, a long black sheet round her ankles, and stopped. It stood there on the top of the bank for the length of a breath, as if it were thinking. Then it went back. It went back over the lip, and down the sea side of the bank, onto the mud, and out, breathing, and did not come again.
Nobody on the track said anything.
The pump man looked at the book in his hand for some time. Then he closed it, and did up the strap, one-handed, with the blood running off his fingers, and put it under his arm.
He left the lamp. He turned and walked off along the bank top, away from the town, toward the far end, where Saltings stands roofless in the marsh, two miles off in the dark.
Nobody stopped him. The vicar came up the slope out of the water with his cassock soaked to the chest, and got in front of him on the track, and put up both his hands.
"I'm so sorry," said the vicar. "But no. I'm so sorry. You can't. Ned. You can't just—"
The pump man walked past him. He did not push him. He walked past him as one walks past a post, and the vicar turned round with his hands still up, and watched him go.
We watched him go out of the lamplight, and then we watched where he had gone.
The blood stood on the sea bank with the water running off her, and her eyes shut, and her face like a cushion, and me in her arms, wet through, and heavy. She sneezed. She sneezed all over me, the whole of my head, with her whole face. Then she put her chin down on top of my skull and held on.
Out on the mud, the sea breathed in, and out.