"Upland" by Gail Anderson
It came in the night, stepped in through the boat’s barely open window. She’d been aware, just, of some small, stirring presence, lost among other presences: the creak of mooring lines, water washing over the weir, reed-bed rustlings and, as dawn came, begging swans séance-tapping the hull of the old river barge. Nights were perfectly still, until you listened.
She shone her phone’s light around the cabin’s dim. Whatever it was had found the fruit bowl. Mink? Water-vole? Rat. Drawn along the gunnels by a sweet musk of ripe. One perfect peach, two plums, four bananas: the lower halves were untouched, the uppers grazed flat by tiny teeth.
A sign, sure as anything.
She cut out the ratty bits, tossed them into the river for the fish, watched the current take them. Chopped the untouched rest into small pieces for Frank’s breakfast. He’d never know. The whisky bottle empty, his snores unbroken even after her clattering attempts at a quiet tidy-up.
Stepping out into the wheelhouse, she listened for the short-eared owl. He’d appeared to her only twice, this daytime hunter; but his low call, like a chuckle at a shared joke, cheered her winter mornings. Now, silence. Perhaps he’d gone. His yearly migration north.
Never trust a man who wears jewellery. It was her mother’s best advice, but she’d always wondered where one drew the line. Cufflinks? Wristwatches? Frank wore a leather medallion on a chain. A small replica of something archaeological, covered in little symbols. He joked that it bestowed ‘the power of the ancients’. Back in the beginning, lying at his side, she’d spent hours studying it, fingering its circular pattern: heads with plumed hair, striding men, shields. Unfathomable. Uncomfortable.
Frank hailed from the Kyle of Tongue in Scotland, practically the top of the world. She’d never been north of Newcastle. Hearing him speak of the place made her long for it, an unfounded homesickness. The sea loch’s arm stretching into moorland, whales and otters playing at its mouth. The sky awhirl with black-backed gulls and lapwings. Sands and rocky points filled with chattering waders and plovers. She wanted to hear the distant tolling of the tiny church’s single bell. To climb to the ruins of Castle Varrich, spread her arms and lean into the wind.
Since the day he’d moved onto her boat he’d been clear that he would return to the north country, but he always spoke of it in the singular, never the plural. He’d be on his way… right after he made a bit more money; after the winter snows melted; after he got his truck’s transmission fixed. Two years had passed, all on the verge of his leaving.
She’d looked it up online, his medallion. The Phaistos Disc: Minoan, thousands of years old. A dull biscuit of clay, stamped with Cretan hieroglyphics. An archaeological mystery which some believed to be a fake.
Her mother had not been wrong.
Stepping off the boat into the cold forced an intake of breath. The icy grass on the bank shattered like spun glass at every step. Still no owl. The river spooled like quicksilver, a liminal moon on the wane. Crossover time. Dark to light. Winter to spring.
In the boatyard’s shower block she considered the sticker on the grey metal box of the coin-drop. Isolate power supply before removing. Washed Frank’s scent from her body, towelled herself, rubbed sweet oil into her skin. Last night’s intruder would be sleeping in a hedge somewhere, gorged on fruit. She pictured the lithe little body twisting in at the window, the tiny foot on the table. Taking its chance. Ready to bolt.
Bread and chocolate in her rucksack, a cup of lay-by coffee to warm her hands. She was three hours north and thumbing her second lift on a quiet road when she heard the owl. Six short laughs of hoo hoo hoo. So close she could hear his breath. Like a wind she could lean on. Like the ringing of a solitary bell, singing a day out of darkness.
Gail Anderson won the 2020 Winchester Writers' Flash Prize, the 2019 Reflex Fiction winter competition, the 2019 Scottish Arts Trust Story Award and has been shortlisted twice for the Bridport Prize. Recent work is published/forthcoming in The Southampton Review, Epiphany, Mslexia, Popshot and Ambit. She works at the University of Oxford and sails a boat in the Solent.
