The Listener (12 page)

She made a warm cavity for her heavy body and drew the covers over her head. Through a little air hole for her nose she could see two pink wallpaper roses. Nothing could get at her. Slowly she drifted back to sleep. She had learned to sleep more and more. She loved sleep.

The rain darkened towards evening, when she woke up hungry. It was very cold in the room. She wrapped
herself in her blanket and went down to the cellar to get a tin of food. She forgot the torch and took a tin at random in the dark. And stopped, listening, stock-still with the tin in her hand. The squirrel was somewhere in the cellar. There was a tiny scurrying sound and then silence. But she knew it was there. It was going to live all winter in her cellar, and its nest could be anywhere. She’d have to leave the vent open and make sure it didn’t get covered with snow. And she’d have to move all the tinned food and everything else she needed up into the cottage. And, nevertheless, she’d never know for sure if the squirrel was living in the cellar or the woodpile.

She went up and closed the trapdoor. The tin she’d brought with her was boiled mutton with dill sauce, which she didn’t like. A belt of clear sky had opened up at the horizon, a narrow, glowing band of sunset. The islands lay like coal-black streaks and lumps in the burning sea. The fire burned all the way to the shore, where the waves swallowed it and then slid around the point in the same curve over and over again as they broke over the slimy November granite. She ate slowly and saw how the red deepened across the sky and the water, a violent, unthinkable crimson. And then suddenly the red winked out, everything went violet, lapsed slowly to grey and then into early night.

She was wide awake. She dressed and lit the lamp and all the candles she could find, got a fire going in the stove. She turned on her torch and put it in the window. Finally she hung a paper lantern outside the door, where
it shone clearly and steadily in the quiet night. Now she took out the last of the Madeira and put it on the table beside her glass. She walked out onto the rock and left the door open. The glowing cottage was beautiful and mysterious, like a lighted porthole in a foreign ship. She walked all the way to the end of the point and began walking around the island, very slowly, right at the water’s edge, and the whole time she turned her face towards the wide-open darkness of the sea. Only when she’d walked around the entire island and had come back to the point would she turn and consider her illuminated cottage. Then she’d walk straight into its warmth, close the door, and be home.

When she came into the cottage, the squirrel was sitting on the table. The animal dashed away, the bottle fell and started to roll, she leaped forward too late, and the bottle shattered on the floor. She got shards of glass between her fingers, and the rug soaked up a dark Madeira stain.

She raised her head and looked at the squirrel. It hung on the wall among the books, legs outspread, heraldic, immobile. She stood up and took one step towards the squirrel; one more step; it didn’t move, and she stretched out her hand towards the animal, closer and closer, very slowly – and the squirrel bit her, quick as lightning, sharp as scissors. She screamed and went on screaming with rage in the empty room. She stumbled across the broken bottle and outdoors, where she stood and bellowed at the
squirrel. Never ever had anyone forfeited a confidence, misused a covenant the way this squirrel had done. She didn’t know if she had reached out her hand to the animal in order to caress or strangle it. It didn’t matter; she had reached out her hand. She went in and swept up the broken glass, blew out all the candles and put more wood in the stove. Then she burned everything she had written about the squirrel.

In the time that followed, none of their rituals changed. She put out food on the rock slope and the squirrel came and ate. She didn’t know where it lived and didn’t care. She no longer went into the cellar or up to the woodpile on the hill. It showed her contempt, an indifference that didn’t stoop to revenge. But she moved about the island differently, impulsively. She could rush out of the cottage and slam the door behind her. She rattled the pans and stomped on the floor. Finally she started running. She would stand still for a long time,
motionless
, and then set off across the granite, running and panting back and forth across the island, flapping her arms and screaming. She didn’t care in the least whether the squirrel saw her or not.

One morning it had snowed, a thin covering of snow that didn’t melt. Now the cold was coming. She must get the motor running, go to town, buy things. She went and looked at the motor, picked it up for a moment and then put it back against the wall of the cottage. Maybe in a few
days. The wind was blowing. Instead, she started looking for the squirrel’s paw prints in the snow. The ground was white and untouched around the cellar airhole and the woodpile. She walked the shoreline, walked the whole island systematically, but the only prints she found were her own. Clear and black, they cut the island into rectangles and triangles and long curves.

Later that day, she grew suspicious and looked under the furniture in the cottage, opened drawers and the cupboard. Finally she climbed up on the roof and looked down the chimney. You little bastard, you’re making me ridiculous, she said to the squirrel. Then she went to the point and counted the pieces of timber, the squirrel boats she’d set out for a following wind to the mainland in order to show the squirrel how little she cared for it. They were still there, all six. For a moment she was uncertain. Had there been six, or maybe seven? She should have written it down. Not writing it down was indefensible. She went back to the cottage, shook out the rug and swept the floor. Nowadays everything got out of order. Sometimes she brushed her teeth in the evening and didn’t bother to light the lamp. The lack of order was because she no longer had the Madeira to divide the day into proper periods and make them clear and easy.

She washed every window and rearranged the bookcase, not by author this time but in alphabetical order by title. When she’d finished, she happened to think of a better and more personal system and decided to arrange the books according to herself – the ones she liked most on the top shelf; the ones she liked least on
the bottom. She discovered to her amazement that there wasn’t a single book she liked. So she let them stay the way they were and sat down by the window to wait for more snow. There was a bank of clouds to the south. They might bring snow.

That evening she felt a sudden wish for company and went to the top of the island with her walkie-talkie. She pulled up the aerial, turned it on, and listened. There was a distant scratching and swishing. A couple of times she’d picked up conversations between two boats. It might happen again. She waited for a long time. The night was coal-black and very quiet. She closed her eyes and waited patiently. She heard something very far away, no words but two voices talking to each other. They were slow and calm. They came closer, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. She heard that they were winding up their conversation, their tone of voice changed and their sentences got shorter. They were saying goodbye, and it was too late – and she started screaming, Hello, it’s me, can you hear me, although she knew they couldn’t, and then there was only the distant swishing noise and she turned it off. Stupid, she said to herself. It occurred to her that the walkie-talkie batteries might work in the radio and she went back to have a try. They were the wrong size. She needed to go into town. Madeira, batteries. Under ‘batteries’ she wrote ‘nuts’ and then crossed it out. It was gone. There must have been seven pieces of wood
after all, and not six, all at precisely the same distance from the water, sixty-five centimetres.

She read through her list and suddenly it was an inventory in a foreign language and seemed completely alien. Shear pins, mobilat ointment, powdered milk, batteries, a catalogue of strange, unreal items. The only thing that mattered was the bits of timber, whether there’d been six or seven. She took her measuring tape and torch and went down to the shore again. The shore was barren, completely clean. There were no pieces of timber at all, not one. The sea had risen and taken them.

She was utterly amazed. She stood at the shoreline and shone her torch down into the water. The beam broke the surface and lit up a grey-green watery cavern that grew darker as it went down and was filled with very small, indistinct particles that she had never noticed before. She shone the beam further out over the water and into the darkness. And there the weak cone of light captured colour, a clear yellow colour, a varnished wooden boat drifting away on the breeze.

She did not understand right away that it was her own boat. She just stared at it, noticing for the first time the helpless, dramatic bobbing of a drifting boat, an empty boat. And then she saw that the boat wasn’t empty. The squirrel sat on the rear thwart, staring blindly straight into the light. It looked like a piece of cardboard, a dead toy.

She made half a movement to take off her boots but stopped. The torch lay on the rock and was shining at an angle down through the water, a rampart of swollen seaweed that swayed as the sea level rose, then darkness
where the rock curved downwards. The boat was too far out. It was too cold. It was too late. She took a careless step and the torch slid into the water. It did not go out; it stayed on as it sank along the side of the rock face, a smaller and smaller vanishing light that illuminated quick glimpses of a ghostly brown landscape with moving shadows, and then there was nothing but darkness.

“You damned squirrel, you,” she said slowly and with admiration. She stood there in the darkness in continuing astonishment, a little weak in the legs and vaguely aware that now everything was radically altered.

Eventually she found her way back across the island. It took a long time. It was only when she closed the door behind her that she felt relief, a great, elated relief. All decisions had been taken from her. She no longer needed to hate the squirrel or worry about it. She didn’t need to write about the squirrel, didn’t need to write about anything at all. Everything was decided, everything solved, with a clear and unconditional simplicity.