Empty Space

years too late. Bonuses tanked. A few footsoldiers got jobs in the remaining heartlands of the industry, where they found competition fierce. Families like Marnie’s still drove everywhere, but their Range Rovers and Audis went unreplaced year on year; and though their incomes remained good they felt hard-up. Adults were forced to find new ways of viewing the idea of success; children were having to mature earlier. Some of them felt resentful about that. Sharp divisions appeared at the upper end of the middle class. Suddenly your parents could afford the Wyndlesham cheese shop or they couldn’t: Marnie’s cohort found itself defined by this. In her mid-to-late teens Marnie revised the contents of the future, but she still expected it to bring itself about. Meanwhile, her father began to look tired, then died without warning of pancreatic cancer. Luckily he’d protected the family from that too. Marnie, nineteen and a half, came home to the funeral by train — a long, grinding journey through a landscape composed of empty industrial estates and abandoned parking structures — to find Anna sad but also frisky. They spoke about how free she felt, but it turned out she hadn’t made any plans either. All that time, Marnie had been doing well at a good university, though when her twenty-first birthday arrived she turned out not to be married after all; towards the end of graduation year she accepted a job offer from one of the emerging mutual associations.

Looking back on it all now, she felt that so far her life had been demanding but satisfactory. Women only ten years older than her, encouraged to remain adolescent until they were thirty, had failed to make the transition from the liquid world: they seemed brittle when they had what they wanted, spoiled and bitter when they didn’t. The younger ones, struggling to avoid the underclass enclaves of Eastbourne and Hastings, were simply worn down. At twenty-eight, by contrast, Marnie had charge of herself. Though money was no longer a serious career, ‘the New Economics’ — cautious, simplified and heavily shifted to the co-operative — brought her security. A single mother since her last year at uni, she found herself able to rent a small house well away from the chaotic suburbs; her employer financed childcare until Enny Mae was five, then a nice school. Marnie could afford medical insurance. She still saw Enny Mae’s father, a man called William. Once or twice a year they had a talk. They were making sure that whatever future the little girl imagined for herself, a plan was put in place for achieving it. Anna, recognising Enny Mae as competition, had never shown much interest; to avoid fractiousness and tantrums, Marnie had learned to keep them apart.

That was how things had rested until this morning.

Marnie put the phone down on Helen Alpert, stared out of the window of the Coldmorton Lane house, which she supposed was now hers, and wondered what would happen next. She had woken eager to share her test results with Anna, suddenly able to feel happy after the inexplicable anxiety-states of the night before (in which relief at being cancer-free was somehow overpowered by the dread of a completely new future — one into which the possibility of cancer had now been firmly embedded): but Anna had somehow evaded her again, deftly remaining the absent parent to the end. Marnie felt weightless. It was too early to collect Enny Mae from school; to obviate further changes in his lifestyle, James the cat had eaten hastily and hidden himself under a wardrobe. Marnie washed Anna’s supper things at the sink — there was a dishwasher but she couldn’t bring herself to run it — then wandered around the living area. Anna still owned books. In them, the self figured largely: self-help books of thirty years ago, novels about women finding themselves, a book of photographs entitled Events of the Self; even books by a man calling himself Self. She turned on the TV — found only news of the Indian reoccupation of Pakistan — turned it off again.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, she caught someone hanging about in the garden. He was a boy of about sixteen, somewhat shorter than Marnie, dressed in tight grey jeans rolled halfway up his calves. His white T-shirt was too small for him, his black lace-up boots were covered in hardened dribbles and spots of yellow and pink enamel paint. With him he had a small dog, a kind of long-legged Border terrier, sand-coloured, with short, bristly hair and scruffy-looking ears. Boy and dog stood in the middle of the lawn. Both of them seemed fascinated by the wreckage of the summerhouse.

Marnie rapped on the window.

‘Excuse me,’ she called. ‘Excuse me! Can I help you?’

He didn’t seem to hear. Marnie went out on to the lawn and marched up behind him. ‘Excuse me!’ she called again, perhaps more loudly than she had intended. ‘Do you mind if I ask what you’re doing here?’

He jumped in surprise. His face had a raw appearance, as if he lived up on the Downs somewhere in the constant blustery wind. His arms were stringy and tough. ‘I don’t know what you think,’ he said, ‘but I’ve come to do some work for a woman who lives here.’ He stared expectantly, then, when Marnie failed to reply, offered ‘She’s an older woman. She’s lived here years. She does her shopping down in Wyndlesham.’ He made a movement with one shoulder, a shrug or perhaps a wince. ‘Some people like her, some don’t. She’s got some work she needs doing.’

‘What kind of work?’

It wasn’t much, the boy said: it was just some painting.

‘I don’t live far,’ he said. ‘She said if I called, I could do the work she needed.’

‘There’s no work here. No one wants any work done here.’

The boy tried to take this in; for him, Marnie could see, the meaning of it lay fully in the words, divorced from body language or tone of voice. ‘She does her shopping down in Wyndlesham,’ he said, as if this explained anything. ‘She likes a pint of Harvey’s.’ He wiped his left forearm across his face. His dog barked suddenly, a small but sharply cut sound that went across the garden like the cry of some less well-known animal. ‘This new bitch of mine,’ the boy told Marnie, ‘I got her from them down the estate. Some say she’s dangerous, but I know she’s not.’ Forelegs braced, its little bristly face sniffing the air, the dog appeared too small, too willing, to be a danger to anyone. Every so often it would gaze up at Marnie or the boy, seeking confirmation of the things it saw. Yes, Marnie wanted to explain: this is grass. It’s a lawn. And that’s a tree, with a pigeon in it. And that, which used to be my dad’s Russian-looking summerhouse, that’s a pile of wood: quite right. This morning my mum died. It was just like her to die without any clothes on, half in and half out of a Russian summerhouse, and be found by firemen. You can tell a lot about her from that. I don’t know, she thought suddenly, what Enny Mae’s going to say.

‘You don’t need worry about this bitch,’ the boy said. ‘She wouldn’t harm a child.’

‘What kind of dog is it?’

The boy gave her a sly look. ‘A working dog,’ he said. ‘An older woman lives here, her name is Anna. She said she had some work she wanted done.’

‘There’s no work,’ Marnie said. ‘I don’t know who you are, but whatever you thought you’d get from her it isn’t here.’

She added: ‘No one lives here now but me.’

The boy blinked. ‘She’s supposed to live round here somewhere,’ he said; then, accepting the situation suddenly, lunged away across the lawn. His shoulders were hunched, his torso compressed and tense, but his stride had a loose, loping quality; the upper and lower halves of him, it seemed, had little experience of each other. The terrier followed, yapping and gambolling, nibbing at his heels for attention. Up at the house, he stopped and fumbled with the side-gate latch. ‘If I did the work, I wouldn’t have to go to the toilet here,’ he promised. ‘I’d go in the village.’ Marnie, completely unable to interpret this plea, felt that they were misunderstanding one another to a degree that could only be her fault. She likes a pint of Harvey’s. Where her mother had met the boy, or how, she preferred not to think.

‘Wait!’ she called. ‘Wait a moment.’

If he wanted work, he might as well deal with the mess Anna had made of the bathroom. He looked strong enough.

The next day, waking in the startled recognition that she had dreamed one of Anna Waterman’s dreams, Dr Helen Alpert threw a single worn item of Mulberry soft luggage into the rear seat of the Citroen, cancelled her appointments for the near future and closed the consulting room. By four that afternoon, having used up almost a fortnight’s fuel coupons, she was in Studland on the Dorset coast. There, despite the sea wind, the smell of salt, the herring gulls sideslipping in and out of the turbulent air above Great Harry rocks, she found that the dream wouldn’t be shaken off.

In it, all her belongings had gone missing from an old-fashioned writing bureau she was using, while, crammed into its hidden drawers and on to its complicated little shelves, she found items the thief had left in return. These stale wrapped sandwiches and bits of half-eaten fruit made her as anxious as she was disgusted. She was afraid he might come back at any moment. The place itself was shabby, half-exterior — the ground floor, possibly the only floor, of a gutted house still in use during some long, slow crisis, some failure of human or political