The knot won’t give.
Somebody has taken the blue rope twice round the post and the end bar of the gate, finished it with half hitches and a granny knot on top for luck, and walked away. It’s gone hard and grey, and the post has grown up round the back of it, so the rope goes into the wood on one side and comes out on the other. I get a thumbnail under the top turn and work at it. Nothing moves. I try the other thumb, on the side with the cut, and that’s worse, and I stop.
The Tuff-Cuts would go through it. I have them out with the blade against the nylon, and think about whoever tied this finding their gate cut open by a stranger, and put them back.
So it’s over the top.
Bag first, lowered down the far side by the strap, because there’s saline in it and I’m not having that burst. Then the left boot on the second bar and the right on the top, and the gate leans on its hinges more than I’d like, and when I swing over and drop, the knee I knocked coming through tells me about it. I land in a puddle. Both boots were full already. It makes no difference.
The feed bag’s still caught on the bottom wire, still full of rain. I check it on the way past, which is a stupid thing to check.
Past the gate the ground goes up. A track climbs along the wire towards the skyline, two ruts with grass up the middle. Sheep droppings in the ruts, some of them this morning’s. Where it bends there’s a tractor tread in the mud, deep and square-cut, and the rain hasn’t softened the edges yet. Somebody’s been up here today.
The rain’s cold on the back of my neck. The ground I came down on wasn’t. I’ve parked that.
I go up. The foil blanket crackles every step, and the light keeps doing what it’s done since I got here, coming from everywhere at once, flat and grey, so the fence posts have no shadows and neither do I.
At the top I go under the pylons. Close to, they’re narrower than they looked, four legs set tight together and the arms straight out flat. The wires go away down the other side of the hill, and the land drops away under them, and there’s the coast.
I stop.
A mile of fields going down in squares, then a dark strip that might be a railway or a road, then nothing but flat. Miles of wet sand and mud with water lying in channels, all of it the same grey as the sky, and out at the far edge a long low island with one lump of rock on the end and a castle sat on the rock.
I know that. We did the causeway in Year 8 on a coach from school, in the rain, and a lad at the back was sick in his lunch box and we had every window down all the way home to Leeds.
Holy Island. So this is Northumberland, and that’s the sea, and the sea is east. It’s the first bearing I’ve had.
That’s where the smell’s coming from as well. The tide’s out.
Somewhere down to the left, below the fields, the diesel goes along again and changes down for a bend. The same road. For all I know it’s the same lorry, coming back.
The dog comes over the wall.
The track has turned into a lane on the way down, drystone walls both sides, and the dog comes over the left-hand one twenty metres ahead without a sound, drops into the lane and goes flat on its belly with its ears up. Black and white. A collie. I’ve been bitten twice at work, both times by something small and hysterical in somebody’s hallway, and this isn’t that. This is a dog doing a job, and the job, at the minute, is me.
The foil crackles when I shift my weight and the dog doesn’t like that. Its lip lifts on one side. I stop shifting.
“That’ll do, Fly.”
A man’s voice from the other side of the wall, not loud. The dog gets up at once and goes back over the wall the way it came, and I walk up to where the wall has a gateway in it and I can see into the field.
A man is kneeling just inside the gateway in the wet grass with the dog against his leg. Sixties, maybe seventy. Flat cap, a waxed jacket gone pale at every seam. He’s got a steel rod in the ground in front of him with a T-handle on the top, and he’s leaning his weight down on it to push it in, slowly, the way you’d push a cannula into somebody with bad veins.
He doesn’t look round. He holds it there, and I count, because I count things, and I get to forty-one before he draws it out and turns it over and holds the end close to his face. There’s a glass tube set in a slot in the steel, and a scale beside it.
“Twenty-one,” he says. “At the foot.”
He says it to nobody, or to the dog. Then he gets a little book out of his inside pocket, a red pocket diary with a pencil pushed down the spine, and he writes it in.
He’s got a book, anyway. Mine isn’t in the bag. I went through it twice up there and I’m not going through it again.
I haven’t had a number off anything since I came through. Well, here it is. Twenty-one degrees a foot down, in the rain. That’s a room. That’s the thermostat on a ward. Whatever month this is, it’s the wrong number for a field.
It goes on the pile with the rest, and I leave it there.
He puts the diary back and slides the thermometer into a long pocket down the front of his jacket, where it sits like a pen in a top pocket, and then he looks up and finds me in the gateway.
He doesn’t jump. He does a primary survey on me, top to bottom, and comes back up to the tabard.
“Medical support,” he reads out.
“Yes.”
“And the rest of it?”
“German. French. Danish.”
He thinks about that. The dog thinks about it as well.
“You’re wet through,” he says.
“I am.”
“You’ll have come off the hill.”
“I’ve come out of a field up there.” I point back up the lane, towards the pylons and the rope gate, though you can’t see the gate from here. “About an hour ago.”
It’s the second thing I’ve said out loud in this place. The first was a name, and it wasn’t mine, and nothing answered it. The rest I get ready like a handover before the doors open. Name, what happened, what you’ve done, what you need. In order, no adjectives.
“My name’s Nora Marrow,” I say. “I’m a paramedic, from Leeds. I came through into that field from somewhere else. There was an opening. My father held it open so I could get through, and it killed him. I’ve got it all written down. I need to know where I am, and I need to get warm.”
He listens to all of it. He doesn’t interrupt and he doesn’t do anything with his face. He listens the way my granddad used to listen to the weather on the radio, all the way to the end, with nothing to be done about any of it.
“Kyloe,” he says.
“Sorry?”
“You’re on Kyloe. That’s my top field you’ve come out of.” He gets up off the wet ground, and I check how he does it, same as with anybody his age: which side he favours, whether he needs the post. He uses the post. “It’s been warm since midsummer, that field.”
“Right.”
“Your father.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry for it.” He says it the way you’d say it at a gate, which I suppose is where he’s saying it. Then, straight after: “Is there anybody looking for you?”
I think about it properly, because it’s a proper question. Jas. The rotation leads. My mum’s sister in Harrogate. None of them can look anywhere I am.
“No,” I say.
“And that knee?”
“Knocked it. It’s fine.”
“Aye,” he says, to the knee. “Walter Charlton. You’ll be starved. You’d best come down to the house.” He shuts the gate behind him and drops the chain over the post. “Keep your writing dry, if it’s important.”
He goes off down the lane with the dog at his heel, and I go after him.
The farm is two fields further down: a stone house end-on to the hill, a byre and a barn round a yard, smoke going sideways off the chimney. House coal, the sulphur smell of it, which I haven’t had off a chimney since my nan’s in Armley.
He goes the long way, round the edge of the bottom field instead of across it. Along its far wall there’s a long bank of turned earth, raw and black, about the length of a car, and past it another, older, with grass already coming back over it in a green fuzz. Fly goes out towards them with her nose down and he says, “That’ll do,” sharper than before, and she comes straight back.
Drains, probably. I don’t know what farms dig.
In the porch he takes his boots off, so I take mine off and tip the water out of both onto the step.
The kitchen flags are cold. Properly cold, stone-floor cold, straight through the wet wool. Nothing else today has been the temperature it should be.
A range along one wall, black, a fire behind a little door, a steel rail along the front, a kettle on. A clock above it with a second hand going round. A dresser full of plates, and on the end of it a wooden wireless with a lit dial, Droitwich, Hilversum, Athlone. A table with an oilcloth and a brown teapot and a saucer of coins. A calendar on a nail by the passage door.
“Sit yourself down,” he says.
I don’t, yet. You don’t sit down in somebody’s kitchen until you’ve been asked twice. Once is manners. I stand by the range instead, which is where anybody with sense would stand.
He goes out and comes back with a towel and a jumper, grey, oiled wool, his, with the elbows gone. “It’ll drown you,” he says. “It’s dry.”
The tabard comes off, and the foil, which I fold, though it never goes back to the size it came out of the packet. Before the fleece goes over the rail I take the plastic wallet out from down the front of it. It’s dry. The form is dry inside it, all three sheets, the biro sharp on the top one. The jumper goes on over my vest and comes down past my knees, and the wallet goes down the front of it, flat, where it was.
He makes tea in the brown pot and puts two sugars in mine without asking, which is correct. I’d have done the same. He cuts bread and butters it and puts it on a plate with a lump of cheese, and I eat it standing up by the range. All of it. The last thing I ate was a sandwich in a tent in Kiel at eleven o’clock at night, and this is gone before I’ve tasted any of it.
I empty the side pockets of the bag onto the end of the table, in a row, in case the warm does anything for them. Phone. Torch. Thermometer. The warm does nothing for them.
He picks up the phone and turns it over and back, and studies the hole in the bottom where the charger goes.
“What’s that, then?”
“My phone.”
“Where’s the wire go?”
“It doesn’t.”
He puts it down exactly where it was, square to the edge of the table, and doesn’t ask anything else about it.
The coins in the saucer are big. Brown pennies as wide as a jam-jar lid, like the ones my nan kept in a Quality Street tin on the landing for no reason anybody could get out of her. A brass one with twelve sides. Silver ones with milled edges, heavier than they need to be. He collects them, then, or it’s the egg money and he’s never got round to changing it. I don’t touch them.
There’s a second hand, so I use it.
Resps first, because they’re the one you can’t fake by thinking about them, and I’ve been thinking about everything. Sixteen. Pulse at the wrist, now my fingers will do it: ninety-two, regular, good volume. Cap refill on my thumbnail, under two seconds. Colour: the blue’s gone out of my lips, or he’d have been sat there staring at them. Shivering: stopped. That one you check twice, because stopping is either very good or very bad, and I’m warm at the front and warm at the back and still making sense, so it’s good. GCS fifteen, which you’d give anybody who was arguing with you about it. Temperature: the only thermometer in the house is in his jacket pocket, and it goes in the ground.
Injuries. The knee is swollen at the front, and the bruise coming up in it is red. Red, not blue or purple, nowhere near yellow. The cut across my palm has clean edges and a clot in it; it’s stopped bleeding and not started to knit. The nail on my third finger has gone at the root, burned out, and the bed underneath is raw and still weeping.
All of it says an hour. Two at the outside.
Then I read the calendar.
It’s a Coal Board one. National Coal Board, Northumberland Area, with a photograph for every month, and this month’s is a pithead against a grey sky, black steel, with the big wheel at the top, and white letters underneath: CRESSWELL MAIN COLLIERY, No. 2 SHAFT. The squares are crossed through in pencil, one diagonal each, up to and including the nineteenth. In the square for the twenty-ninth somebody has written Wooler mart in the same pencil.
OCTOBER 2026.
The year’s right. I take that like a pulse I can feel under my fingers.
October.
I went in at 04:41 on the fourteenth of August. It’s written at the top of the form, flat against my chest, in my own writing. I count it off on the squares. Seventeen days to the end of August. Thirty in September. Twenty in October. Sixty-seven. Nine weeks and four days.
“Is that right?” I say. “Your calendar.”
“It’s the Board’s.” As if that settles it.
“What day is it?”
“Tuesday.”
“The twentieth.”
“Aye. Chapel was Sunday.”
I do it again and get sixty-seven again. The knee says an hour. The cut says an hour. Half a bottle of water says I haven’t been lying out on a hill for nine weeks, because nobody lies out on a hill for nine weeks on half a bottle of water.
My watch says quarter past three, which is what it said in the field. His clock says twenty-five to five. If his clock’s right, my watch stopped on his time, somewhere about when I came down in that field, and not on mine, which would have been the middle of a night in August. That’s not something I can do anything with.
I do it a third time and get sixty-seven and stop, because a fourth go is how people end up sat on the floor.
Somebody’s wrong. It isn’t the knee.
He’s reached across and turned the wireless up. A man is reading the shipping forecast, Tyne, Dogger, Fisher, south-westerly five to seven, rain, moderate or good. Then a woman, just as flat and careful.
“And now the soil temperatures for the northern counties, taken at one foot: the Ministry’s figures for the week, in advance of Thursday’s tables. Cold ground. Berwick, nine point two. Alnwick, nine point six. Morpeth, ten point one. Warm ground, in the districts affected by the Low Heat. Berwick district, twenty point eight, up four-tenths on the week. Alnwick district, twenty point one, up four-tenths.”
Walter has his diary open on the oilcloth and follows it down with the pencil. Then a choir starts up, a hymn I know from other people’s funerals, and he turns it down a bit and leaves it on.
At home it’d be the pollen count. Here they’ve a category for warm ground, and a woman on the radio to read it out, and I’d like to know why. Up four-tenths on the week. Both districts, the same four-tenths. One reading’s a reading; three’s a trend, and you chart a trend, and he’s charting it. I’d want last week’s, and the week before, to see if his line’s straight. That goes with the twenty-one. The pile’s getting bigger.
He gets up and says he’ll just be a minute. He goes out into the passage and pulls the door to behind him. It doesn’t catch. It swings back an inch and stays there.
The phone’s out there. I passed it coming in: black, on a shelf under the stairs, a pad beside it and a pencil on a string. Above it there’s a printed card drawing-pinned to the wallpaper, a crest at the top and small type under it, and I read it going past, because I read anything that’s on a wall, and then I did nothing with it. It comes back now, word for word.
Anything or anyone found on warm ground that cannot be accounted for is to be reported at once to the police. Articles are not to be removed from where they lie.
I’m hoping that second line’s for the anything.
The receiver comes up off its cradle, and the dial goes round and comes back four times. Then his voice, lower than he’s used with me.
“Ian. It’s Walter Charlton.” A pause. “No, I’m grand. It’s not me.”
A long bit where he listens.
“I’ve a lass here, come off the top field.” A gap. “Aye, off the warm ground.” Then a question I can’t hear. “No. No, nothing like that, she’s wet through, that’s all. Knocked her knee.” Another gap. “She’s very sensible. Very sensible. She knows what she’s about.”
The hymn goes into its second verse.
“She says she’s come from somewhere else. Says her father died getting her here.” A shorter gap. “No, I didn’t. What would I ask her?”
A longer one.
“Not so as you could write it down, no. It’s on the card, Ian. I’m only doing what it says.” Then: “She’ll not run. I know. I’d not have rung else. It’s for her own good.”
The receiver goes down.
I don’t move from the range. I’ve made that call. Female, late twenties, found wandering, wet, cold, kempt, orientated, coherent, states she has come from somewhere else. I’ve made it from a kitchen not much different from this one, in a quieter voice than his, and then put the phone down and gone back in and put the kettle on.
He comes back in and puts three shovels of coal on the range and wipes the shovel on a cloth hung there for the purpose. Then he tells me, straight.
“That was Ian Hall at Belford. The police. He’s coming up.”
“Right.”
“He’s a canny lad. He’ll see you right.” He sits down on the far side of the table. “You’re not right, hinny. Anybody can see that.”
Hinny. I put it with canny, words they say up here, and I don’t say it back.
Not right. He’d say it of a ewe standing off on her own at the edge of a field. Nothing you could put a name to. Wanting watching.
“My obs are fine,” I say.
He doesn’t know what obs are. He fills my cup up out of the brown pot and pushes the sugar across.
We stay like that. The choir finishes and a man reads a prayer and the wireless goes on to coal allocations, and Walter turns it off. The window over the sink goes from grey to a darker grey. Rain on the glass.
The back door’s through the scullery, past the sink. I clocked it on the way in, because you always clock the way out. Top bolt drawn. Bottom bolt not. Key in the lock. His wellingtons beside it, three sizes too big. The road’s two fields away, and past the road I don’t know. I don’t know what the money is. I don’t know if my name is written down anywhere in this country. It’s nine weeks and four days later than it should be, or it isn’t.
The clock over the range says twenty to six.
Headlights come across the window. They go white along the dresser and the plates, across the calendar, and swing away, and there’s an engine in the yard and then there isn’t. Fly goes off in the porch, two barks and a whine.
Walter gets up. “That’ll be him,” he says, and goes down the passage to the front, and the latch lifts, and for a second the rain is louder.
The back door is four steps away. The bottom bolt isn’t across.
I pull out the chair he offered me when I came in, and I sit down.
