Significance (58 page)

They sneak away from the house by tracing a path through the trees and find that in one corner the fence ends giving easy access to the road. They walk up the steep hill then into the small town where they buy candles and bread and fresh pastries and vegetables.

On their way back it begins to rain and the sky grows strangely dark. Distant thunder rumbles as they race towards the house.

Suzette climbs nimbly through the window and as Florian is passing through the bag of food, someone not very far away, calls out, ‘Hey! Hey you!'

Florian glances around to see a man standing by the fence and knows the man has seen him too. He scrambles through the window and lands badly, turning one ankle and smashing his knee on the stone floor.

The thunder is growing louder. Lightning flashes, illuminating the window he has climbed through but only the edges and cracks around all the other windows.

Florian imagines he hears the man's voice calling after him again, but what with the torrential rain and the gusting wind and the intermittent thunder he can't be sure.

Limping, he struggles to refasten the window, then together he and Suzette lift the scrubbed pine table on its side and put it over the window, then they push the enormous old fridge freezer against the table and stand in the darkness waiting.

Their ears are deceived when the noise of nature is partly blotted out, and comforted by the closeness of the dark cave of the house, their nearness, their shallow breathing, the faint creak of a floorboard when weight is shifted from one foot to another. Minutes pass. The storm moves away, retreating by degrees, the thunder is muted by distance, the flashes lose their magnesium
-
bright violence, the rain devolves into a more reasonable patter. No voice continues to call, no animal bays at their door. Nothing now can touch them. They are safe.

Tiptoeing, they go through to the room they have chosen as their haven. They light the candles, eat the bread and the tomatoes, drink the wine from odd glasses they have found.

A sudden noise like someone taking a sledgehammer to a huge stone breaks the silence. They each picture some violence done to their sanctuary, uniformed men with battering rams or one man with some ghastly machine, a farmer with a tractor.

Florian gets up and prowls around the house looking and listening. He goes upstairs and into the bedroom with the empty bed frame. The windows are shut and behind them are metal shutters. But one window, perhaps because it faces the sea and the unadulterated salt
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kissed wind has latches and hasps that are so rusted that they bend and break easily. He pulls this window out. The rinsed cold air floods into the room, over his face, the skin of his neck, his hands and arms. Now there is only the metal shutter and he pushes this at one corner where the brick it is fastened to is already crumbling. It pops out and with a push it bends allowing him to see outside.

‘Suzette!' he calls. He is as excited as if he has found treasure.

She answers with a faltering voice, then runs upstairs to join him.

‘Look at this!' he says.

She goes to him and bends to peer down through the window and through the triangular space where the metal shutter has buckled away.

A cool mist falls on her face as she sees the sea directly down below her with only a narrow fringe of vegetation between the footing of the house and the blue
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black agitation of the waves.

‘You wanted to live by the sea, didn't you?' Florian says and touches the back of her neck. When she has tied her hair up, as she has now, he is always surprised by how perfect and slender her neck is. He can never resist touching it.

She responds by turning from the sea to him. They kiss, tasting salt on one another's lips.

‘Come on, let's go to bed,' he says. ‘No one is going to come and evict us at this time of night. By the morning we'll be gone.'

Holding hands they went back downstairs, both still wary of invasion and listening for sounds, but by now even the rain had stopped and outside the clouds had parted and dispersed leaving only veils and shreds that drifted across the waning moon.

They drifted towards sleep in one another's arms, Suzette hearing what he'd said earlier over and over in her mind, ‘In the morning we'll be gone.' It reminded her of that bedtime prayer, ‘If I should die before I wake…' And ever since she was a child she had often closed her eyes to sleep, half expecting death. You cross yourself in hope of salvation and ask for it before sleep just in case.

The abandoned house stood on chalky
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white limestone cliffs. They gave the area its name, Cote d'albatre or the Alabaster Coast. But the coastline has been retreating at a rate of 20 centimetres a year. Cliffs like these are excellent sites for fossil hunters as what has been hidden for millennia is readily released as landslides, erosion and water seepage gnaw away at the land.

This was why the beautiful house with the grey slate mansard roof, the flint and brick walls, the gabled dormer windows, was empty.

Just as Florian predicted, by the morning they were gone.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to those friends who read first drafts of this book: Katy Train, Mark Matthews, Laurel Goss, Deryl Dix, Mark Robinson, Ann George, Tony Graham and Ceri Thomas.

Thanks are also due to Literature Wales and The Royal Literary Fund for their generous support.

Many thanks to Penny Thomas at Seren, and to Lizzie Clarke who very kindly posed for the cover image.

Extract from
The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays
by Clifford Geertz (Basic Books, 1973) with kind permission of the copyright holders.

Extract from
A Short History of Myth
by Karen Armstrong, first published in Great Britain by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE.

About the Author

Jo Mazelis is a writer of short stories, non
-
fiction and poetry. Her collection of stories,
Diving Girls
, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Best First Book and Wales Book of the Year. Her stories and poetry have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, published in anthologies and magazines, and translated into Danish. She worked in London as a graphic designer, photographer and illustrator for
City Limits
,
Women's Review
,
Spare Rib
,
Undercurrents
and
Everywoman
, before returning to her home town, Swansea, where she now lives and writes.

Seren is the book imprint of

Poetry Wales Press Ltd

57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AE

www.serenbooks.com

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Twitter: @SerenBooks

© Jo Mazelis 2014

ISBN 978-1-78172-187-2 print

ISBN 978-1-78172-189-6 kindle

ISBN 978-1-78172-188-9 ebook

The right of Jo Mazelis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author's imagination. Any other resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover image: © Jo Mazelis

The publisher works with the financial assistance of

The Welsh Books Council