Tamsin cheated at the draw every year, and every year I let her, because the alternative was saying out loud that I could see it.
She used the same hat each time, a black felt witch’s hat gone soft as a tea towel since our second year at Leeds, and the same move: a dip, a stir, and a folded slip that came up between two fingers when the hat had offered her a different one. I spotted it at the very first Hunt. I was twenty and pleased with myself and told nobody, and now I was thirty-seven, in the lanyard that said FRANCESCA DOYLE, STAFF NURSE, because I’d come straight off a long day, and I still hadn’t, which said something about me I preferred not to look at. Fifteen years of nights in A&E had taught me to read a pair of hands. They hadn’t taught me to do anything about what I read.
“Pete and Sunita,” Tamsin announced at nine o’clock, in the back room of the Sloop. Nobody clapped. The Lowes had drawn each other every year since their wedding, and Pete had stopped pretending to be surprised somewhere around the third. Sunita gave a little bow anyway. She was holding the hat this year, which she had never done, and she held it with both hands, like a collection plate.
On the bar, between the crisps and a sagging string of paper bats, sat the Turnip: a fat swede, hollowed and carved and lit from inside by a tea light, its grin gone lopsided where the knife had slipped. Tamsin carved a fresh one every October because her gran had been from Fife and had held views about pumpkins. Whoever reached the bandstand first with the right answer word took it home, where it went soft on a windowsill and was thrown out by Bonfire Night. Tamsin herself never played. She wrote the clues, ran the draw and waited at the bandstand with a flask, and in eighteen Hunts her own name had not gone into the hat a single time. This Hunt was the last. She had said so in the group chat in September, in a message with no emoji in it, and nobody had known how to answer.
“Fran Doyle,” she said, dipping, stirring, “and—”
I watched her fingers and knew before she unfolded it.
“Nadia Brennan.”
Nadia was by the fire with her coat still on, as if she meant to leave early, which she did. In January she was going to a shipyard in Belfast that built ferries, and she had told me so in the car park at Bryony’s birthday in August, in the voice she’d once used to tell me I had a flat tyre. We had been together for five years and apart for five, and the group had survived both by seating us at opposite ends of tables. She raised one eyebrow at me across the room. We had both turned thirty-seven in the same spring, and she still did that, one brow higher than the other, as if half her face had heard a better joke than the rest.
“Shark,” I said to Tamsin, low.
“No idea what you mean.” She held out our envelope, and her eyes went past me to the door. Owen wasn’t there. Owen was never late for anything; he crewed the lifeboat and could be dressed and down the slipway in seven minutes from a dead sleep.
“Running late,” Sunita said, before anyone had asked, a little too fast, and settled the hat against her hip.
Tamsin was already dipping again for whoever was left: Bryony, and Tamsin’s new lodger, a tall woman in a sensible waterproof who looked as if she’d been promised a quiet drink. I didn’t stay to watch. Nadia was holding the door.
The first card was in Tamsin’s square capitals, the same as always. WHERE THE DEAD WAIT TO BE CARRIED IN, LOOK UP. Nadia read it under the streetlight outside and laughed through her nose.
“Lychgate,” she said.
“Lychgate,” I agreed, and that was the longest conversation we’d had alone since August.
The wind had swung round to the north-east while we were in the pub. It came straight off the sea and up Church Lane with nothing to stop it, and it carried the smell of weed and diesel from the harbour and, under that, the cold mineral smell that means rain later. St Hilda’s sat on the headland above the town with its graves all leaning one way, towards the water, like people listening for something. The lychgate was the old kind: a roofed timber gate with a bench on either side, where the bearers had once set the coffin down out of the weather to wait for the vicar. Nadia’s cottage stood right beside it. She had bought it the year we split, with her half of the deposit we’d been saving together. My half had come back to me by bank transfer, to the penny, with a reference that said FRAN.
Tamsin’s second card was pinned in the roof beams, where you had to stand on the coffin bench to reach it. I stood on the bench. Nadia held the torch and held it steady, and I was aware of her below me the way you’re aware of a hand hovering near your back on a staircase, not touching and not needing to.
EIGHT SISTERS SLEEP UPSIDE DOWN. ASK THEM THE OLDEST THING THEY REMEMBER.
I photographed it and pinned it back for whoever came after us, because those were the rules.
“The bells,” Nadia said. “She means the peal boards in the ringing chamber.” She had the tower key on her own key ring, a long iron thing she had to take off before it would fit in a pocket; she’d been ringing at St Hilda’s since she was twelve. “Except they’re not asleep tonight.”
“Meaning?”
“We’re ringing for All Saints at nine tomorrow. The captain left them up after this afternoon’s wedding so we wouldn’t have to raise them in the morning.” She shoved the key into the tower door. “You’re not supposed to do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because a bell that’s up is standing mouth to the sky, balanced against a length of wood you could snap over your knee. Knock it and it goes over, and it keeps going.” The door scraped open on blackness and the smell of candle wax, pigeons and old rope. “Mind the third step. It’s shorter than the others.”
I minded the third step. The stair turned tight around its stone spine, and the only sound was our breathing and the wind finding every gap in the tower and testing it. I climbed behind her with my hand on the rope rail, and with nothing to look at except Nadia’s back in her old waxed coat I looked at that, at the shape of her shoulders, which I had once known better than my own. I thought, uninvited, of her asleep with one arm flung over her head like someone hailing a taxi. I thought of the morning she’d shown me round a cottage beside a churchyard and said, Imagine us here when we’re old, and how I had imagined it, all of it, all the way to the end, to whichever one of us would be left standing at the window, and how I had been so certain it would be me that I’d left first, to get it over with.
The ringing chamber was a square stone room with a carpet that had given up and a ring of chairs round the walls. The eight ropes had been hoisted up to the ceiling on a wooden frame, tied off out of reach, their red, white and blue woollen grips hanging in the air like something left after a party. The peal boards were black with gold lettering. Tamsin’s card was tucked behind the oldest, 1897, a Diamond Jubilee peal rung by eight men with moustaches you could hear in their names.
THE WORD IS WHAT YOU HOLD ON TO.
“Sally,” Nadia said, and pointed at the woollen grips overhead. “That bit’s the sally.”
I photographed that one too and put it back, because Tamsin checked. And above us something moved.
It was not a footstep. It was a long, dry complaint of wood taking weight, the sound a boat makes against a harbour wall, and under it came a hum I felt in my back teeth, very low, that went on longer than a sound should. Nadia’s face turned up to the trapdoor in the ceiling.
“That’s a bell leaning on its stay,” she said.
“Is it meant to?”
“It’s meant to sit there and do nothing until nine tomorrow.” She was already dragging the wooden ladder from the corner. “Either something’s knocked it, or a stay’s cracking. If one goes over in the night, it swings until it stops, and if anyone’s up there when it does—” She didn’t finish. She didn’t need to. I had worked nights in a hospital that took the trauma from the coast road; I knew what a few hundred kilos of moving metal did to a person. “Nobody should be up there,” she said. “Nobody. Stay here and keep the torch on the hatch. Do not come up.”
“Nadia—”
“I know how to move in there. You don’t.” She shot back the bolt on the trapdoor, thumbed on her phone torch and went through, and her boots disappeared into the dark.
I stood at the bottom of the ladder with the torch pointing up and listened to her cross the bell chamber. Slow, deliberate steps. A pause. The wind louder up there, coming through the louvres in long breaths. The hum again, fainter. Then a crack like a green stick snapping, and a short sound from Nadia that wasn’t a word, and then her voice, quite level:
“Fran. Don’t come up.”
Which is how I knew to go up.
The bell chamber was colder than outside and full of wind. My torch found the frame first, a cage of black oak beams filling the room, and then the bells, eight of them, every one of them standing on its head with its mouth open to the roof, so that the light slid across a row of dark bronze throats. Something about them made the hair stand up on my arms. They looked as though they were waiting to be fed.
Nadia was down on her side between the frame and the outer wall. Her right leg had gone through the floor to the knee where a board had rotted under a century of pigeons. She’d thrown out an arm as she fell and then caught herself, and her hand was spread flat on the boards beside her, very carefully not touching the wheel of the fourth bell, which stood upturned a hand’s width from her shoulder.
“I said don’t,” she said.
“You did.” I put the torch on the floor, pointing at the wall so it lit us both without blinding either of us, and got down on my stomach on the nearest joist. Assess first. Always assess first; panic can wait in the corridor. “Where does it hurt?”
“Shin. Something went in when the board went.” Her breath was quick and shallow. “If I push up I’ll push on something, and if I push on the wrong something—”
“Then don’t push. I’ll do the pulling. You hold on to me, not the frame. Me.” I gave her my forearms and she took them, and her grip was hard enough to hurt. Good; I wanted her holding on to something that wouldn’t fall over. “Can you feel your foot?”
“Yes.”
“Wiggle your toes.”
“They’re wiggling. Fran, the fourth is right—”
“I know. Look at me, not it.” The broken board had splintered downwards into a ragged collar around her leg, the points dug into her jeans. I worked them free one at a time with my fingers, snapping them back towards the joist, while the wind came through the louvres and the bells stood over us and hummed. I didn’t let myself look at them. I looked at the splinters, and at her face when she flinched.
When the last one snapped I got up onto my knees to lift her, and that put my eyes level with the louvres and the churchyard far below them.
There was a light at the lychgate.
It was small and orange, and it was a face. A carved face, grinning, glowing: somebody down there holding a turnip lantern up at shoulder height, and standing perfectly still under the gate roof with their own face turned up towards the tower. Towards the louvres. Towards us. I couldn’t see who it was. I could see a long dark coat, and the lantern, and the stillness, which was the worst part. People who are just passing don’t stand like that.
I didn’t say anything. Nadia had enough to be frightened of. I took her under both arms and said, “On three, I lift, you bring the knee up, nothing else moves,” and on three she came up out of the floor in one long scrape with a hiss between her teeth, and we lay on the joists together breathing like we’d run up the stairs twice. Habit made me look at my watch, the way I would after anything on the ward that needed writing up: fourteen minutes past ten.
When I knelt up and looked again, the lychgate was dark.
Nadia, being Nadia, made me hold the torch while she checked the stays on all eight bells from the hatch before she would let me help her down. None of them was cracked. “It’s the wind,” she said at last. “North-easterlies get in through the louvres and the whole frame breathes.” She did not sound like someone who believed it.
There was a card at the lychgate.
It was tucked into the beam beside Tamsin’s, and it was not Tamsin’s. No square capitals. This was slanting, joined-up handwriting in black ink, the kind people learned with a fountain pen and never lost, and it said, You never put your own name in.
“That’s not hers,” I said.
“I don’t know it.” Nadia was leaning on the gatepost with her weight on her good leg and blood in her boot. We both turned and looked at the churchyard, at the leaning stones and the black yew and the long grass bending away from the wind, and nothing in any of it moved that shouldn’t.
I photographed the card and wedged it back where I’d found it. Rules.
“You’re bleeding into your sock,” I said. “Inside. Now.”
Nadia’s kitchen was exactly as I remembered it and nothing like it. Same Rayburn, same slope in the floor, different mugs. She sat on the table with her boots and jeans off and her leg along the bench while I washed the cut out at the sink end with warm water and the good light on. It was a ragged six centimetres down the front of her shin, deep enough that I picked out two slivers of oak with her eyebrow tweezers, clean enough at the edges that strips would hold it until morning.
“It wants two stitches,” I told her. “The urgent treatment centre opens at eight. You’ll have to go before the ringing, and you’ll want a tetanus booster while you’re there, and you won’t argue with the nurse.”
“You’re enjoying this.”
“I’m good at it.” I laid the strips across one at a time, pulling the edges together, her skin warm and goose-pimpled under my fingers. I could feel her watching the top of my head. “Why Belfast?”
“Because they asked.” A pause. “And because you’re here, and I’m tired of the far end of the table.”
I pressed the dressing flat with the heel of my hand and kept it there longer than a dressing needs.
“I left first,” I said, “because I could see the whole of it. This house. Us in it. One of us at the window at the end. I was so sure it would be me at the window that I went before I could find out.” I made myself look up. “That’s all it was. It isn’t clever. It isn’t even interesting. I was frightened, and I made it your problem, and I’ve been sorry for five years.”
Nadia looked at me for a while. The wind leaned on the kitchen window; the Rayburn ticked.
“You know what we call before the bells go,” she said.
I did. She had taught me, years ago, in that ringing chamber, laughing at my hands on the sally. “Look to,” I said.
“Look to.” Her voice had gone low. “And if anyone wants it to stop—”
“Stand.”
“Stand,” she agreed. She laid her palm flat on my chest, over my jumper, and left it there, and then she said the next call, the one the treble ringer gives when she’s ready to pull off: “Treble’s going.”
“She’s gone,” I said, and kissed her.
She tasted of the cold and of the pub’s mulled cider, and she answered it hard, both hands in my jumper, hauling me in between her knees until the edge of the table pressed my hips. Five years is long enough to forget a great deal and not nearly long enough to forget that. I knew where her breath would catch before it did. I got my hands under her jumper and she shivered at how cold they were and pulled me closer anyway, and when I pushed the wool up she lifted her arms for it like she’d been waiting all night to.
“Your leg,” I said against her throat.
“Is fine. You’ve fixed it. Stop being a nurse.”
So I stopped. I put my mouth to her collarbone and then lower, to the soft weight of her breast, and she hissed and caught the back of my head and held me there, and her heel hooked behind my thigh, the good leg, pulling. I slid my hand down over her stomach, over the waistband of her knickers and under it, and found her already slick, and her whole body answered, hips rolling up into my palm. “There,” she said, “there, Fran,” and I knew there; I had always known there. I went slowly at first because I wanted to watch her, the flush climbing her throat, her mouth open, her fingers digging into my shoulders, and then not slowly at all, because she asked. When she came it was with her teeth at my shoulder and a long shaking breath that turned into a laugh halfway through, the way it always used to, as if pleasure caught her by surprise every time and she found that funny.
She didn’t let me get my breath back. She slid off the table, swore at her shin, ignored it, and towed me into the front room by my belt loops. The wood-burner had burned down to red. She sat on the edge of the sofa with her bad leg stretched out to the fire, pulled me down beside her, opened my jeans and slid her hand inside, and every time I reached for her she caught my wrist and put it back on the cushion and smiled, until I stopped reaching. When I came she held me through it, kissed my damp hairline and said, quite smugly, “Well struck.”
I laughed so hard I nearly fell off the sofa.
At twenty to midnight she sat up and looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and said, “We’re going to lose.”
“We were always going to lose. The Lowes win. Pete keeps a spreadsheet.”
“We have to turn up, though. She’ll worry.” Nadia limped back to the kitchen for her jumper and returned wearing it inside out. Her hair was flattened on one side. I wanted to sit and look at her until morning and settled for helping her into a clean pair of jeans over the dressing, carefully, while she complained.
“Belfast,” I said, when she was dressed. “They’ve got an A&E.”
She went still with one arm in her coat.
“They’ve got several,” she said.
“Then I’ll start applying to the worst one. Nobody will want to work there. They’ll have to take me.”
She finished putting her coat on. Then she took my face in both her cold hands and looked at me for long enough that I started to feel it in my stomach, and said, “Don’t you dare go first this time,” and I said I wouldn’t, and meant it.
Out on the step the wind nearly took the door off her. Below us the town was all streetlights and wet slate, and beyond the harbour the pier ran out into the black water, shut these seven winters, its gate chained and its lamps dead. There was a light moving out along it. Small. Steady. Going out to the end.
“Somebody’s on the pier,” I said.
“Nobody’s on the pier. It’s condemned.” But she looked too, and we watched the light reach the end and stop.
When we passed the lychgate, Tamsin’s card was still pinned in the beam. The other one was gone. I felt along the wood with my fingers to be sure. Nobody took cards; that was the rule, and Tamsin was the one who made the rules.
“Who do you think it was for?” Nadia asked.
I thought about Sunita holding the hat with both hands, like a collection plate, and gave Nadia my arm for the hill.
“Someone who cheats,” I said.
