Think I’m OK, she tells him. I stocked up.
Anything for the little one?
No. Thanks, though. Incredible weather.
Expect another good week of it, he says.
Small talk, about that most English of subjects: weather. It feels like a temporary ceasefire between them. He climbs back on the quad, and she watches him drive away — the dog riding pillion, adjusting its paws as the bike tips and wallows over the polar rifts, at one point springing off into the new snow, then mounting itself up front between Michael’s legs. She doesn’t need anything, not yet. Her cupboards are full. There is ample baby formula, nappies, medicine. There’s still meat in the freezer, unlabelled purple and red packages now mysterious with permafrost, bags of summer berries and green beans. If she was in danger of forgetting the practicalities of a rural Cumbrian childhood, the Pacific Northwest continued her education — and seriously. There is dry wood for the fire. She has cans and jars stacked deep. They will sit it out.
She keeps the radio on for updates, a lifeline. All over the country airports have closed, schools, hospitals are running skeleton crews; the economy is haemorrhaging. Every day there’s a debate about why England can’t cope with extreme weather conditions, while in Berlin and Kiev and Japan flights leave on time, the workforce remains productive. The government has ordered salt from abroad, which will arrive by tanker ship in May. Not so across the border. Calling in to the morning programme, the new transport minister says Scotland is equipped and faring well. The ploughs are out; the roads are gritted. Glasgow airport is open for business, flights to Heathrow are being redirected there.
Charlie burbles over the sound of the radio. He wants her attention. She learns to become verbose, to blether. He likes her voice, understands something about it, if not language. She reads to him, all kinds of books when repeating the same baby prose begins to send her crazy, a gory thriller — she stops when the serial killer begins to dismember a victim. His eyes are huge and preverbal. He makes long, purring, grating sounds, trying to talk back. She reads her own book chapter to him, edits it a little as she does so. She even sings, her voice flat, tuneless, but does she not owe him disinhibition, rhymes, the silliness of the nursery? One two, buckle my shoe, three four, open the door. . If she stops, he protests. She is desperately in need of sensible conversation. She calls Lawrence, but there is no answer. She calls Alexander. Chloe answers.
Carrick 205, hello, Chloe Graham speaking.
As if she is answering the phone in the 1950s. The vintage chic of landlines.
Hi, Chloe; it’s Rachel.
Hi, Rachel.
Are you off school?
There is no school.
They speak in a friendly fashion for a minute and then Alexander takes the receiver.
Do you need rescuing?
No, I’m alright. How’s it there?
One catastrophe after another. Some idiot crashed through the bridge into the river, had the first responders out with the defibrillator paddles. The pub’s run out of ale. There’ll be a civil war any moment. How’s Charlie?
He’s fine. He’s driving me nuts. He wants me to talk all the time. I could read the phone book to him and he wouldn’t care.
There’s laughter down the line.
Yeah, I remember that stage.
Shit. He’s awake. I have to go.
Alright. Call me back if you need rescuing. Or if you want to talk dirty.
The snow begins to melt and the ice beneath reveals itself like broken glass, the weapons in a Saxon hoard, instruments of havoc. The country begins to move slowly, to right itself again. Then, more snow. Huge white floes, like a nineteenth-century dreamscape. Everything stops.
In the middle of it, away from the malady of humans, the wolves sit watching the red deer moving across the moor, high-stepping daintily, testing each foothold. They assess the prospects of the hunt, judge the expenditure of energy, the resistance, the lack of traction. The herds keep to the best routes, ground where the snow is thinnest, where they will not have to flounder to escape. Since autumn, their behaviour has changed rapidly. A new nervousness has arrived; the running past has caught up with them. Ra and Merle watch from a high vantage point, ready to accelerate down the slopes and across the valley bottom, muscling through the drifts, bipartisan hunters of the mountains and the plains. But there is a refractory quality to their watching. Below, the deer pass by, single file, ears twitching, eyes glimmering black. They move safely on. A carcass lies close to the entrance of the den; another hunt is not yet necessary. Several times during the month they’ve been locked in a tie, rear to rear: their season of cold union.
When the weather lifts, it feels as if a dire, convulsive event has passed: miscarriage or seizure. There is a sudden upswing in temperature, ten degrees and more, alarming in its own right. Meltwater flows over the measled remnant snow. The earth is left slack and raw, streams trickle in the road, downhill, into culverts and under cattle grids. Pools of water all over the landscape flicker like poured metal. Rachel brings the baby outside again, a woollen blanket hanging around him like a holy robe. She turns slowly, holding him against her chest, a ritual figurine, showing him all the angles of the sacrificial world. He is the prize of all agonies. A strange little god, incapable and testing, who has taken over her life. She kisses the back of his neck softly, and he squirms and barks. How unlike herself he has made her. That night, reading in bed, she turns to look out the window. The skull of the moon glows, internally, as if tallow-lit, its surface cracked and pitted. A symbolic relic, reminding those beneath that not everything survives. Her mother has been dead for more than a year. She gets up and goes into the baby’s room, watches him sleep for a few minutes, something she has not done since he was newborn. One morning soon after the thaw, a giant toad presents itself on the doorstep like a muddy gift, a messenger. Spring is arriving.
She drives to the office, most days, weekends also, trying to recover something of her role. She brings Charlie, sets him on a blanket on the floor with a contraption of mirrors and swinging toys above him. He kicks, tries to grab things. She works in efficient bursts. She goes into the enclosure with Huib again, but the wolves are much more reclusive, a good sign, and the decision is made not to disturb them again until later in the year. She studies their transmitter signal patterns. They have been staying near the den site, returning to carcasses more frequently, picking them clean. Biding. Merle’s movements especially are becoming conservative. When Gregor returns from Nepal, he will leave a discreet, motion-triggered rig by the den, and they will know for sure.
Work is difficult. Charlie demands time; he demands love and energy. Keeping him is fascinating and acutely boring. There are slow, torturous hours in the middle of the night when he screams dementedly, his face hot and wet, the ridges between his eyes and ears lined with salt, his body taut as a drum. Extreme tiredness begins to wear her down. She wishes she were still breastfeeding; there was comfort in it for both of them. She wishes he would shut up. Shut up, she thinks, and then says it to him, almost shouting, actually shouting. Immediately, she feels wracked with guilt. He cries so much, he vomits. His shit is green. She calls NHS Direct, Jan, Alexander. She takes him to Frances Dunning. He is not sick. It is a stage, then: growth, or an experiment in anguish. He throws his bottle away, knocks things out of her hand, so furious, so inconsolable, his tongue beaking out of his mouth. What, she says, what’s wrong! A malevolent changeling has been exchanged for Charlie, like the gurning, earthen toad on the doorstep. In his face, hatred, scorn, or is she imagining it? She is being punished, of course, for everything she has done wrong, every sin. She takes hold of herself — such thoughts are pure, fatigued irrationality. She walks with him in her arms, backward and forward across the floor, shushing, cooing. He exhausts himself finally, and she collapses back into bed. He wakes in the morning, contented and smooth, smiling, giggling, as if nothing was ever wrong. The following night, the same bawling demon possesses him.