SEVENTY-FOUR

There were people were in the garden. Men in white suits with elasticated cuffs and rubber boots. Some of them were moving. Their faces were obscured by masks and hoods. The men moved around the holes they had dug in the black earth. On thin paths made out of slats, they carried blue crates as they walked between the holes.

One of the insertions into the soil had been covered by a white tent. Through the entrance she could see a figure bent over and scraping at something they held close to their face.

Green canvas screens had been erected across the back of the property so people couldn’t see inside the garden, and the maize in the fields, an ocean of waxy leaves swept by the wind all the way down to where the sea splashed and frothed upon the stony shore, was hidden from her view. But she could hear the crop and the sea out there, the old and eternal sea, hissing.

Underneath the longest limb of the oak tree that grew in the middle of the lawn, four women hung by their necks, their heads cocked like pensive birds. They watched the movement below their booted feet, as the men in white suits collected more of the brown things that looked like sticks from inside the holes. They put the sticks inside clear bags and then gently placed the sealed bags inside the blue plastic crates.

A machine juddered and sucked water out of a hole dug close to the house. A woman stood by the machine and smoked a cigarette. Amber wouldn’t meet her eye but knew the woman was looking at her.

Lights in the sky made parts of the garden white and left other sections in darkness. It was hard for Amber to tell what was shadow and what was a person slipping about in the mud, made worse by the rain. Amber peered at the night sky. She could see four big lights, but no stars. Sometimes the lights moved over the house, sometimes they just hovered. The sounds of the rotors made her nervous because she knew she was being watched and filmed.

In the field at the side of her property, through the tree branches, she could see the candle flames of the vigil. She could hear the singing of the women’s group that had been camped in the field for days.

Downstairs, inside the building, a crowd of people chattered. All of them were talking at the same time as each other.

From behind her back a voice called her name. A man’s voice she recognized and her eyes filled with tears at the thought of Ryan being so near. But there was something wrong with his voice and when he called to her again, ‘Stephanie’, it sounded as if his mouth was crammed with food.

She turned from the window and looked at the red door of the bedroom, now open and resting against the foot of the bed. From where she was standing the figure inside the bed distracted her from Ryan; she could only see the top half of a dark body with arms thrown out sideways. The face was covered. The occupant of the bed wasn’t moving.

‘Stephanie,’ Ryan repeated, the word moist, lisping and more slurred than before, as though he was struggling to move his jaw around an oversized tongue. He turned his face away, dipped his head. ‘Got ver deposssit.’ When he said this she was sure he must have been dribbling, because he made a sucking sound as if to draw something back inside his mouth.

‘I don’t want to be late for work,’ she told him. ‘Can I stay at your place?’ she asked, afraid of the building around her. She didn’t want to stay another night inside the farmhouse.

The light in the corridor outside winked out and put the already dim passageway into darkness. The lights were on timers. She could no longer see Ryan’s legs in the doorway.

She ran into the corridor on the second floor of the house. This was not where she lived; she lived one floor down, in the room with black walls and mirrors.

She heard Ryan on the stairs, going down. Lights from the garden flashed against the window of the stairwell, but Ryan would not look at her and kept his face turned away as he descended.

When Amber arrived downstairs she couldn’t find Ryan. She kept calling his name.

Down here, it was hard to hear herself think. She wasn’t sure whether the sounds of rustling plastic were coming from the doors that opened onto unlit rooms, or whether the voices were coming from the walls.

*

The ringing of her phone woke Amber. She sat bolt upright and said, ‘Ryan. I can’t find—’

And then she realized many things all at once: she was lying on the sofa in the lounge of the farmhouse with the curtains closed; her phone was vibrating across the coffee table; the television was still switched on, and the film must have finished because she could see the DVD menu on the big screen mounted on the wall. She had fallen asleep and had had a bad dream.

Thank God.

But all of this information about her situation and her surroundings confused her. Because someone was running up the stairs outside the room, and she had caught the last of their shadow leaving the living room as she sat up.

Amber looked at the ceiling.

Footsteps bumped heavily across the floor upstairs, and then stopped.

She reached for her phone and tried to work out which room was directly above the living room.

Your bedroom.

She picked up the phone and answered the call from Josh.

‘Amber. It’s me. I’m—’

She cut him off, her voice so tense she squealed, ‘He’s here.’