Dying Fall

wiring. Could Dan the Man really be destroyed by a bit of flex, a badly earthed plug, a few pluses and minuses going the wrong way? It just doesn’t seem possible.
    ‘Are you sure it was him?’ asks Ruth with sudden hope. ‘
Our
Dan?’
    ‘Yes,’ says Caz sadly. ‘I rang his sister. You remember his sister Miriam, two years above us?’
    Ruth dimly remembers a darkly glamorous presence at some of their parties. Miriam Golding. She had heard rumours that she became a model.
    ‘How did you track her down?’
    ‘It was easy enough. She’s on Facebook.’
    Ruth has never got to grips with Facebook. It’s another aspect of the modern world that seems beyond her. She can’t understand why you’d want to update your friends every time you make a cup of tea. In any case, her friendsare a small select group. Smaller now.
    ‘The funeral’s tomorrow,’ Caz is saying.
    ‘So soon?’
    ‘It’s the Jewish tradition, Miriam says.’
    Ruth had never even realised that Dan was Jewish. They didn’t talk much about religion when they were students – the meaning of life, yes, everyday beliefs, no. In any case, Ruth had been in full-scale flight from her parents’ evangelism. The G-word would have sent her running for cover.
    ‘I wish I could be there,’ she says, meaning it.
    ‘I know. I don’t know if it’s appropriate to send flowers or not, but if I do I’ll send them from both of us.’
    ‘Thanks, Caz.’
    ‘Good to speak to you, Ruth. It’s been too long.’
    ‘Yes, it has.’
    ‘Maybe you’ll come up to Lytham some time?’
    Ruth laughs. ‘Maybe.’ Secretly she’s thinking that, after the events of the past few years, she needs to take Kwells if she goes further afield than the Chinese takeaway.
    ‘Maybe you’ll come to Norfolk,’ she says.
    Now it’s Caz’s turn to laugh. ‘You never know. Take care, Ruth.’
    *
    As Ruth makes supper she thinks about the fact that Caz, in the north of England, seems further away than her neighbour, Bob, who’s currently in his native Australia. It’s more than distance, surely. The truth is that when Caz got married (to Pete, another university friend) andhad her children, she began to move away from the single, childless Ruth – just as, some eight thousand years ago, the sea levels rose and Britain was separated from the European landmass, the channel river widening into a sea – so that, now Ruth feels herself almost a different species from her erstwhile friend. True, Ruth now has a child of her own (interesting that Caz had forgotten, but then Ruth herself sometimes still finds it hard to believe) but she still doesn’t feel that she is a Mother (capital letters) and certainly she’s never been a Wife. She has her work but Caz, along with most of Ruth’s other classmates, long ago abandoned archaeology for a more lucrative career.
    There is something quixotic, almost eccentric, about carrying on digging and sifting and lecturing on flint hand-axes. Come to think of it, Dan was probably the only other member of the class of ’89 still involved in archaeology. Ruth and Dan were the only two students in their year to get firsts but Ruth feels now that she wasn’t really passionate about archaeology until she did a post-graduate degree and met the brilliant and charismatic Professor Erik Anderssen, Erik the Viking. Well, Erik is dead now, and though he still haunts her dreams he does so less and less. But Ruth is still plugging away at archaeology. It is just a surprise that Dan was doing similar badly paid, unglamorous work. And now he, too, is dead.
    Ruth makes pasta and they eat at a plastic table in the front garden, a sensible precaution given Kate’s predilectionfor smearing food over all surrounding surfaces, but also a real joy on evenings like this. It is still light but there is a soft, diluted feel to the air. Beyond Ruth’s fence the long grass is tawny and gold, with the occasional flash of dark blue water as the marsh leads out to the sea. In the distance the sand glimmers like a mirage, and further still the sea comes whispering in to shore, heralded by the seagulls flying high above the waves. Ruth has lived here for thirteen years now and she has never tired of the view, the lonely beauty of the marshland, the high-arching wonder of the sky. The situation is isolated in the extreme; just three cottages perched on a road to nowhere. One neighbour, Bob Woonunga, is an Indigenous Australian poet who spends much of the year on