Sandlands (28 page)

That, and the curlews. It felt as if they were following me all the way home, but I suppose their cries just carry a long way, especially on a still evening. It was completely dark on the way back except for a few early stars, and I suppose it was with being on my own, too, because they started to sound weird and spooky, almost human – like a human child, wailing in the darkness, or calling out for help. But I told myself to get a grip, and by the time I'd got in and switched on all the lights in the kitchen and called through to Agnes, who was still in her studio, to ask her if she wanted any toast, and had put the kettle on for the inevitable Earl Grey, and then stuck my head outside the door again while I was putting away my wellies, they were back to sounding like normal, plain old birds.

 

Did I say that Agnes has given me her old room? Her old, old room it must be, I mean, from when she was a kid, because it's got all her old kiddy things in it. She gave me lovely guest towels and soap the night I arrived, like in a hotel, but of course she hadn't been able to take them upstairs and lay them on the bed or anything, so when I got up there I had to move two moth-eaten teddy bears and one of those old cloth dolls with yellow wool for hair to get at the pillows, and there was a rather misshapen sort of shawl thing laid across the foot of the bed, made up of different coloured knitted squares all sewn together, which must have been done by a child. And there are some child's drawings on the wall, pinned up to the beams – she could obviously really draw, even when she was a girl. There are two or three of the river or the garden here at the house, and several of a little black dog with a red collar, one of those spaniels with its tongue lolling out that looks as if it's laughing. Photos, too, in frames on top of the big chest of drawers, of Agnes in various summer frocks with dark hair in pigtails, aged seven or eight or nine but still very much with Agnes's features.

It all made me wonder when she moved downstairs – how long she's been in the wheelchair. I suppose I'd just assumed it was some recent thing – well, somehow with elderly people a wheelchair doesn't seem that surprising and you put it down to some problem of being old – but perhaps she's actually been disabled a long time, since she was young. Or even since she was a child – some accident, maybe? Wouldn't that be so horribly sad? Maybe the little girl with the pigtails never grew up to ride the bulletproof bicycle at all. Maybe all she got was a wheelchair. You don't like to ask, though, do you, and she's never said. But why else would there be a room with everything left in it like this – almost frozen in time, like a museum, or a shrine to Agnes's childhood? If she'd just carried on living in the room she'd have chucked out the scroggy old shawl and rag doll and there'd be her more recent sketches instead of her old kiddy ones of the dog and maybe some teenage things lying about, and the bookshelf would have Jane Austen on it or Georgette Heyer or whatever she was into and not be stuck at
The Swiss Family Robinson
.

I mentioned it to her at breakfast. ‘It's nice of you to let me have that room' is how I began, and I wasn't sure she'd know what I meant but I couldn't think what else to say that didn't sound as if I'd been prying – well, not poking through her stuff or anything but at least thinking prying thoughts – so I left it at that. Agnes looked hard at me for a really long time, except that she didn't seem to be looking actually
at
me. In fact, I almost wondered if she'd forgotten I was there, but she can't have because finally after an absolute age she said, ‘I thought you'd like to be able to see the marshes, my dear.'

 

Agnes's cough is worse today so she took herself back to bed after breakfast. I wondered if I ought to stick around in case she needed anything but she said, ‘No, you go out and enjoy yourself,' which I thought was funny because it made it sound as if I was about twelve and was going to go and play in the garden. But it was a glorious bright day, with everything looking all freshly washed after a high wind and battering rain in the night, and it also occurred to me that there might have been some migrants driven inshore, taking shelter from the storm. So I decided to risk life, limb and terminal exhaustion by riding the two-ton rattletrap of a bicycle out to Iken to see what I could see.

I had been hoping for spoonbills or a little egret or maybe even a razorbill – a stray one of which, according to a local birding website, turned up after strong winds this time last year. Instead I got totally distracted by sitting and watching some little penguin-suited oystercatchers feeding on a spit of mud that was jutting out into the estuary. They're crazy-looking things, with a staring red eye that makes them look mildly deranged, and those scarlet beaks, too, which always seem a couple of sizes too big. Their name is just right for them, although I think it was mainly mussels they were getting rather than oysters. What's amazing is all the different techniques they use. Some of them wedge the shell against something and then use their beak to prise it open, and some seem to look carefully for the sweet spot and then give it a sharp stab, while others abandon all pretence at subtlety and just stand there hammering away until the thing smashes open. I was trying to decide if there was some pattern to it – like maybe the males were hammerers and the females were prisers or something like that – but in the end I decided it was just random.

Because it was low tide there were loads of these bars and spits of mud, and even banks of it islanded out in the water – and almost all of them patrolled by waders or at least a few teal or wigeon. I was watching this old guy in a boat – just a little wooden thing with a puttery engine on the back – who I think was heading out fishing, and it was quite a business, picking his way along the estuary avoiding the mudbanks. There are a lot of willow branches sticking out of the water all the way along and he was steering a zigzag course between them. I thought at first they were actually growing there because they look a bit like spindly saplings that have got themselves surrounded in a flood, but then I saw him stop and pull one out and replant it a little way further over, and I realised they must be put there for navigation, to help anyone in a boat to get about without running aground or being mired in the mud. I guess that after the storm last night the channels and banks have all shifted about. It's the same even up near Agnes's in our own little patch of river: the mud is all hollows and ridges and runnels, with wet bits and drier bits, which are left in slightly different places every time the tide runs out. It's got to be pretty treacherous, however well you know it. No wonder you never see fishermen in waders, actually out on the flats; they seem to stick to boats. Don't worry, Mum – before you ask, I'm not about to get sucked in and drown. I'm staying firmly on the bank with my binoculars.

Poor old Agnes doesn't seem great at all tonight. The fits of coughing really rack her and leave her shaken and exhausted-looking, all sort of hunched and hollow-shouldered. I can hear her hacking away down there now, doing a duet with the curlews outside. I wonder if I ought to get her to the doctor tomorrow.

 

Sorry I haven't emailed for a while, only we've had a bit of a drama here. Agnes has had to go into hospital.

I took her to the GP like I said, and she listened to her chest and did a lot of frowning and prescribed her some penicillin, but after a day or two it was clear they weren't really knocking it on the head, and the cough was worse and she was complaining of chest pain, too, and off her food and looking deathly pale, so the doc said she ought to go to A&E, and because she has no car and it would have meant me taking her in on the bus they actually got her an ambulance – though it was just one of those sitting-down ones they use as an outpatients' minibus, no blue flashing light on top or anything.

At Emergency they poked her about and did a lot more listening and frowning, and took blood samples, and then whisked her out of her own chair and into an NHS one and off into the bowels of the hospital, and left me to get the bus home. I went back again in the evening during visiting hours, which was all quite an undertaking because the bus to Ipswich takes an absolute age and then you have to wait for a different one to get you up to the hospital, and really I might as well have hung around the café all afternoon or taken myself for a walk instead of trailing home and back. Anyway, it turns out Agnes has pneumonia. They've got her rigged up to a drip, which is apparently partly because they're concerned she might be dehydrated but also to get some hard core intravenous antibiotics inside her. She was completely out of it. I talked to her for a while but I couldn't tell if she was even properly aware I was there – I suspect she must be on some pretty zonking painkillers, too – so I just sat there a bit longer and then set off for the bus stop and the long trip home again.

That was last Thursday. She's off the drip now but still very weak, so they're doing some more tests, she says, and keeping her in for observation. It's going to be at least another week, they reckon, depending on how she does. And I'm left to fend for myself, with nothing but a lot of empty rooms and the curlews outside to keep me company.

 

So sorry, Mum – another long gap since I last communicated, and this time there's no excuse because I've not exactly been short of time on my hands. Agnes is still in hospital. The pneumonia is turning out to be a bit stubborn, and they say she's got pleurisy as well which might mean something viral going on, not bacterial like the pneumonia, which is why the antibiotics haven't sorted her out. Something like that, anyway – this is all gleaned from what Agnes says because I'm never there when the doctors come round, and she's been in and out of consciousness and not always completely on the ball. Even further off inside her head than usual. I'm not convinced she's eating anything either. I bought some Earl Grey teabags, because she only has loose leaf at home, and took them up there, because I thought, well at least she must be drinking and she can't survive without her tea. I asked the nurse about it but she said she didn't think there was anything they could do because they just make it in the one big urn, which is a bit depressing but I suppose is bound to be how it is. Agnes looks all sort of diminished, propped up on the hinged metal bedhead thing and her regulation pillows – older, when you look at her face, though that might be the harsh strip lighting showing up the lines, but also oddly childlike at the same time, as if she's receding back into being the little girl in those photographs. It's probably the way they organise you and you just have to lie there and not make any decisions about anything. I left the teabags anyway, just on the off chance.

So now I've got nothing to do, no job left – not that it ever seemed like a proper job as such, but even less to do than before, I mean. I wondered about coming home for a week or two until she's discharged. Agnes said, ‘Take care of the house for me,' but there's honestly nothing to do, beyond sticking a quick hoover round now and then and remembering whether it's the grey bin or the blue bin to go out on a Tuesday. It's not that – it's her, it's Agnes. I go up there every day, and I'm thinking, who would she have to visit her if I cleared off home?

It's made me realise, too: I don't think she's had any friends drop round to the house the whole time I've been here, and she doesn't seem to chat to anyone on the phone or want taking to the pub, or wherever it is that people like her get together with their mates – I don't know, fundraising coffee mornings or an art group or something, or even church on Sundays. And being on my own in that echoey old house, all by itself on the edge of the salt marsh, has had me thinking a lot about what it must be like being Agnes. Not that she seems to mind in the least; she seems to like being away in her own thoughts. It's as if she's not only tied to the place but actually part of it – connected by her childhood, and the pull of the past. But I seriously couldn't hack it for long. It's been grey and foggy this week – not just early river mist that burns off by mid-morning but proper full-on November fog that lurks around all day until you've forgotten what the sky looks like. It's the sort that seeps into everything until it's dripping. Apart from my daily trek to the hospital and back I've barely been outside the house. All this time to myself, but I've not even been out birding – it's so gloomy and miserable and you wouldn't see anything until you were practically treading on it anyway. Plus also... well, it might sound a bit pathetic but things look different in the fog, all distorted and with the shapes and distances messed up, and I'm a bit scared I'll somehow lose the path, even though I know it pretty well by now, and end up blundering off into the marshes and getting lost or cut off by the tide or something.

Even indoors, it feels as if the fog has crept in behind you – or at least, you can sense it out there all the time, pressing in at the windows. Stupid, I know. Maybe it's just because of the way it blots out the view. It blots the sound, too, but only partially. Everything sounds dampened down and fuzzy round the edges but weirdly amplified at the same time, if that makes any sense, so you can't tell whether a noise is close by or off in the distance somewhere. A car on the Snape road can sound a million miles away and then the curlews, at night, can seem like they are right outside my window, when I know they are really way out in the reeds.

No – I couldn't last by myself here for a fortnight, never mind months and years like Agnes. It would drive me nuts. When I thought about it, it occurred to me that I've hardly ever gone to sleep on my own – really alone, I mean, with no one else in the house – because there was always you and Dad along the landing, and after he left there was you, and if you went away or were even out late there'd be a babysitter downstairs or Grandma came over and slept in the spare room, and when I went on sleepovers or school trips there were always other people, usually snoring away in the next bed, and even that night on holiday in the New Forest when I was going to camp out and listen for nightjars I only lasted until about 2 am before I came creeping back to the cottage. I know it's weedy of me, and I know lots of people are single and live on their own, and I'll be on my own at uni next year, but that's different, because that'll be in a hall of residence with other students all round me, not by myself in a whole big empty house in the middle of nowhere. Even the reign-of-Henry-VIII thing, which in the daytime I think is great, and the old beams and low ceilings and funny dark corners and the great gaping fireplace are quite fun, at night just sets me thinking about all the people who've lived there and conjuring up ghosts. I wondered if Jess fancied coming down for a few days, because she's got reading week at Keele, but apparently there are some parties she doesn't want to miss and, really, you can hardly blame her, because who'd want to come out here and stay where there's nothing for miles around except a lot of mud and she's not even a birdwatcher?