The Telling

ever, and the sky was blue, and the sea was blue, and I waded with my skirts bunched up in my hands, and all around my legs tiny fishes fed, picking off scales of skin like the minnows do in the river; painlessly, slightly ticklish. I was happy, walking through the water and letting the fishes feed off my skin, but as I walked the sea grew shallower and shallower and the fishes began to die, drifting away from me and down into the bottom of the sea, and I knew I had poisoned them, that they were dying from my contagion . I tried to run, but the water was too thick and heavy, and I couldn’t get away from them; they mouthed off flakes of skin, and they gulped them down, and they died in their multitudes, and the reason the water was thick was that it was now dead fishes, slippery and heavy around my legs, and ahead, a mountain rose up into the sky, and ash tumbled out of it, and fire, and smoke filled the skies, making it dark, and something was coming towards me out of the darkness, and I didn’t know what it was, but I knew I had to keep on going, on into the darkness and the heat.

 
     
     
     
    I was feeling sick; that kind of low-level nausea that you barely notice till you swallow your saliva and your stomach lurches. The sky was too bright; it made me squint. A man stood outside a house: Willow Cottage. He was cleaning his car, an orange-red Volvo estate. He watched me pass as he soaped the roof with a sponge. I shoved my hands deep in my pockets and nodded at him. He was in his fifties, losing his hair. He didn’t quite nod back. There was money in my pocket; a satisfying clump of coins. I was going to the shop. Bread. Cheese. Tea. I raised my hands to push the hair from my face, and there was a shake to them, and my hair felt damp and greasy against my skin. Then the air was suddenly dim, cool, as if I’d stepped into the shadow of a large building. I glanced around. It was just a glance; the ordinary blank face of a bungalow stared back at me. Then the grey roughcast surface of the walls seemed to begin to melt, to slip and ooze away and reveal natural stone beneath. I blinked, and there were just grey walls and plate-glass windows and sunshine. The man straightened up from his car-washing, stared towards me. I turned and headed on up the street. On the right, on the end wall of a house, a bricked-up window seemed to shimmer with old glass; I glanced over, but the gable wall of the cottage was blank, just an outline of stone lintel, sill and upright, and infill where the window had once been. I could feel the hair pricking on the nape of my neck. As I passed, the converted barn seemed to sprout sun-bleached wooden shutters; to leak drifts of hay on to the road. When I looked it straight on, there was a 4x4 in the drive, net curtains in the downstairs windows. I turned away, and the garden seemed to melt back into pasture, to scatter itself with pale flowers. A water pump stood against the far end wall of the barn. As I came closer, I knew, I could hear, I could feel in the prickling of my skin, the faint whispering of women’s voices. I reached the corner, made myself glance around it, almost expecting to see her there, a young woman standing with a water jar on her hip, head cocked to listen to the evening gossip; the frown line between her brows, the shawl tucked over her head.
    The pump stood with its back against the wall, its mechanism locked solid with thick black paint. A black bin-bag leaned against a green recycling box, and the tarmac had cracked to let a tuft of grass through. No one there.
    I pressed my fingers and thumb on to my eyes, pushed at them, trying to gather myself. I glanced back to see if I was still watched, but the man had gone. Somehow this made me even more uneasy. Then my phone went off, making me jump. I fumbled in my back pocket and flipped it open. My hands were shaking. Mark.
    His voice was brittle. ‘I’ve been calling and calling. All I ever get is Call Failed.’
    I unpeeled my lips. I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d spoken. ‘The signal’s dodgy.’
    ‘Are you okay?’ his tone had shifted, softened. ‘Honey. Rache. Are you okay?’
    The breath on my skin. The prickling air. The figure almost there in the corner of my eye. The way the houses had seemed to melt into something older. The way I disappeared. I couldn’t risk naming it; I couldn’t risk naming it to him. Then something moved, over to the right: my heart kicked; I glanced around. A