The Canal

The piglet had got out again.

Padraig said something short and agricultural and went after it. The piglet, pink and extremely pleased with itself, tucked under the bottom rail and made for the gap by the charity tombola. Cormac watched him catch it on the second attempt, one hand under the belly, the animal pedalling at the air.

“That’s the third time,” Padraig said, dropping it back among its siblings. They sorted themselves with the indifference of things that had never yet been sold. “If you’re going to stand there looking like a man who’s funded a marquee, you might at least block the corner.”

“You invited me to the fair,” Cormac said. “Not into agricultural employment.”

“I invited you because you said you’d help.”

“I drove the trailer off the lane. That was help.”

Padraig squinted at him, the look he had been giving Cormac for the best part of twenty years: money, sense, and a remarkable gift for being present without being useful. “You’re in a good shirt.”

“It’s a Saturday.”

“It’s a pig fair, you daft article.”

Cormac almost smiled. He had been there since half past ten, because Padraig had said half past ten and had, for once, meant it. The field above St Ephraim’s was already full: livestock at the drier top end, food stalls along the hedge, local businesses under a canvas that snapped when the breeze came off the road. The place smelt of warm grass, diesel, onions and animals. A woman from Marple had asked the price of two of the gilts and gone away to find her husband. Cormac had listened and said almost nothing. It was one of the better arrangements of their friendship.

The piglets had no interest in arrangements. Eight of them, treating the pen as an insult. One stood with its front feet on the rail and regarded the fair with the optimism of the very young. They were clean, or had been an hour ago, and the pink of them was almost indecent in the sunlight.

“Don’t lean on that,” Padraig said.

“I’m not leaning on them.”

“You’re encouraging them. They think you’re a feature.”

“Then charge extra.”

Padraig snorted and went back to the sign he had already rewritten twice. Litter of eight. Ready now. Cormac looked past him, because the fair had changed temperature by a degree and he had not yet decided why.

She was coming up between the cake stall and the poultry pens, and she was working.

He saw the phone first, and the small microphone clipped to the neck of her dress. Then he saw her. Dark hair, glossy with the heat, caught back and already loose at the nape. A freckled face, and small enough that the man beside the poultry pens had to look a long way down to answer her. Mahogany, he thought, absurdly, of her eyes, and let the word go because it was not a word he used. She laughed at something the man said. The laugh was quick and real and gone. She thanked him and came on.

Cormac did not look away. There was no reason to. He had the ordinary thought that she was very attractive and the ordinary accompanying thought that she was young, and neither required him to do anything. The rail was warm under his forearm. A piglet squealed for no reason at all.

She saw them.

Her face changed, not for a camera. The seriousness she had been carrying between one interview and the next dropped out of her shoulders, and she came the last few yards looking at the piglets as if they had done something personally pleasing. One of them saw her back and put its feet on the rail.

“Oh, hello,” she said, to the piglet, and then, properly, to Padraig, “I’m sorry. Are you the person to ask about these?”

Padraig, who had been about to accuse Cormac of something else, turned and became a man who might sell a pig. “Depends what you’re asking.”

“Whether I can film them. And take a few photographs, if you don’t mind. I’m with the Stockport Chronicle. We’re doing a piece on the fair for the site, and for the video.” She tipped the phone a little, not quite offering it. “They’re the best thing I’ve seen all morning. I’d rather have them than another tombola.”

“They’re not trained,” Padraig said.

“I shouldn’t think they’d need to be.”

Cormac moved.

He did it without making anything of it, a step off the rail and back towards the spare straw bale, out of the line between her and the pen. She glanced at him because he was standing there and because people glance. There was nothing in it. He was a tall man in a good shirt beside a livestock pen, and she had a job to do. Her eyes went back to Padraig. Cormac put his hands in his pockets and stayed out of the shot.

“I’m Jessica Briars. Chronicle. I won’t keep you, and I won’t put the price in if you’d rather I didn’t.”

“You can film them,” Padraig said. “Mind the rail. That one thinks gaps are a suggestion.”

“I’ll mind it.”

She set her bag down and crouched. One of the piglets came straight over, snout working, ears too big for the rest of it. She held the phone steady and let it arrive. Another started squealing at not being the one inspected. Padraig laughed despite himself.

“Ignore that one,” he said. “He’s been doing that since Tuesday.”

“What’s his objection?”

“Being a pig, mostly.”

She smiled into the phone, not at Padraig, and asked him about the litter. Eight weeks. A White cross, out of a sow he had kept back last year, called Margaret for no reason he was prepared to defend. Born on the farm. Used to people, within reason. She took him through it without the bright, slightly insulting voice people put on when they had already decided a thing was quaint. When he stalled she waited. When he got going on Margaret she let him. Cormac watched her not fill the silences, and watched Padraig, who hated being looked at, begin to talk as if the phone were not there.

The investigating piglet put its snout against her wrist. She glanced down, delighted, and ruined her line.

“Sorry,” she said, to the phone, and then to the piglet, “you’re not helping.” She sat back on her heels. “Can I start that again? He walked into the middle of it.”

“He’ll walk into the middle of the next one as well.”

“Then we’ll have an honest film.”

She did start again. Her voice for the camera was warmer than the one she had used on the poultry man, and cleaner, the voice of a woman who knew she would be edited and did not intend to give the editor much work. She gave the fair its name. She said the piglets were eight weeks old and looking, with great confidence, for someone foolish enough to take them home. She asked Padraig a question she already knew the answer to, so that he could give it in his own words, and he did, forgetting the camera halfway through. A second piglet attempted the rail and thought better of it. She left that in. Cormac could see her deciding to leave it in.

He was amused. Padraig could talk for half an hour about a gate latch and freeze if anyone pointed a lens at him, and she had him telling a story about Margaret to however many people watched the Chronicle’s Saturday film. The piece would have worked if she had only wanted the pink of them. She was getting the farm as well, because she had asked.

She finished with the piglets and told whoever was watching that the fair went on through the afternoon, and that she would be near the produce tent if anyone had a story the paper ought to have. Then she stopped the recording, pushed her hair off her forehead with the back of her wrist, and became a person again.

“Thank you. They’ll put it up this afternoon if the signal behaves. Features, not news.” She stood, brushed the straw from her knee, and took a card from a small metal case. She tapped the address under her name. “That’ll get you there. Along the top. If it doesn’t turn up, ask for me, not for features generally, or you’ll get someone doing a wedding anniversary and they’ll be furious.” She handed it over. “They’re perfect.”

“Mind how you go,” Padraig said.

She went. The fair took her back between the cake stall and a family arguing mildly about the beer tent. Cormac watched the dark head until he could not reliably pick it out. There was no reason he should remember her once she had gone. He knew, even then, that he would.

Padraig was still holding the card.

“Features,” he said. “Where’s features? Along the top of what? I’ve got a phone that tells me the price of feed and sends me pictures of my own gate. I’m not searching a newspaper for a pig.” He turned the card. The sun caught the printed address and the name above it. “You’ll find it for me later. You like all that.”

“Give it here, then.”

Padraig gave it. Cormac looked at the card because that was what a person did with a card, and then he looked at it again.

Jessica Briars. Features Reporter. The Stockport Chronicle. A number, a web address, an email that was only her name and the paper. One corner was faintly soft, as if it had lived in the case for a while.

He told Padraig he would show him.

He did not hand it back. He put it in his shirt pocket, and Padraig had already turned to stop a piglet making another attempt on the rail. To Padraig it was the reporter’s card. He would want the film, if he remembered, and that would be the end of it.

Cormac stayed.

They sold the two gilts to the woman from Marple, whose husband had been found and was resigned. He saw Jessica once more, not close, at the charity stall beyond the produce tent, crouched to the height of a boy with a clipboard. She laughed, included the woman running the stall, and made a note on her phone. He could have walked across. He could have said that Padraig had lost the card, or that he had not, and either would have been a way in. He stayed by the pen and watched her move on towards the beer tent without looking back.

Patience was not a virtue he had cultivated. It was how he was built. Wanting a thing had never struck him as a reason to reach for it before he knew what it was.

By four Padraig had decided the remaining six could try their luck another week. They loaded them with the usual argument. Cormac backed the trailer. Padraig complained about the reversing, then admitted it was better than the last time, when he had taken the wing mirror off against a post.

“You coming back for a drink?”

“Not tonight.”

“Too clean for the yard.”

“Something like that.”

Padraig jerked his chin at him, which was as much farewell as either of them managed, and got into the truck. Cormac waited until the dust had dropped. Then he drove out of St Ephraim’s with the windows down and the card still in his pocket.

The mooring took the best part of an hour, off the road onto the track that served nothing but the old wharf and the field beyond it. He left the car under the elder and walked the last hundred yards. The inlet opened off the Macclesfield where the canal narrowed between trees, a short arm that had once taken coal and now took only his boat. Nobody else moored there. The towpath ran along the far bank, public and ordinary. On his own side there was grass, a sagging ring of stones, and the boat, lying quietly in the evening light, green along her waterline, the paint honest rather than smart.

Inside, the saloon held the day’s warmth. He opened the doors and let the air through. A mug was in the sink. The newspaper was folded on the seat, his glasses on top of it. He put the kettle on and did not make the tea. He emptied his pockets onto the table. Keys. A receipt from the tea van, soft with heat. The card.

He looked at it as if it had got there without him.

Jessica Briars.

He had almost forgotten it. He told himself he had, and sat down anyway. The laptop was in the drawer under the seat. He typed her name because it was unusual, and because the alternative was to sit holding a card like a man who had been to a fair.

The Chronicle came up first.

Her profile was a small photograph and three lines. Features reporter. The photograph had tidied her. He preferred the version with straw on her knee. He read a piece about a bakery in Edgeley that had been about to close and had not, and another about the benches outside a clinic, which ought to have been dull and was not, because she had talked to the people who sat on them. Her sentences were clean. She let people finish. He could hear, in the quotes, the same patience she had used on Padraig.

He read a third. Then he stopped pretending he was only looking for the film.

The personal accounts took longer, and not much longer. Briars was not a name the internet was full of. He found her under it, and then he found the places where the name did not quite hold.

A tagged photograph. A comment under a picture of a birthday table, ordinary, from a woman who had written Jessica Brentworth as if that were the name a person would use. Cormac sat back. He opened another tab. He typed the second name.

Married. A wedding photograph, a few years old, reposted by someone who wanted the day again. She was laughing with her head tipped into the man beside her, confetti in her hair and on his shoulder. Tall, light brown hair, blue-eyed, sun on him even in October. Jude Brentworth, said the caption, and Mrs Brentworth.

No jealousy came up in him, or nothing he would have called by that name. She had a husband, and the husband had a name. Cormac felt the small adjustment of a fact arriving. Then he opened another search.

Jude Brentworth was not a difficult man to find. Commercial property. A surveying firm in Manchester, a photograph with a bike in it because he had wanted the bike in it. Thirty-two. Club rides, mud to the knees. And Jessica, once Cormac knew to look. A hillside somewhere hot. A Christmas table. Her feet in his lap. A post in which Jude had finished a long ride and she had met him with a flask, and he had written something affectionate and slightly embarrassing, and she had answered in the shorthand of people who did not need the rest of the sentence.

Cormac went backwards.

The ordinary life continued, and then it did not. A couple of years ago the photographs thinned. Jude posted rides and nothing else. Jessica’s account went quiet. He might have missed it. He did not. He had spent too many years reading the places where a set of accounts failed to meet.

The post was still there. Jude, publicly, on an evening in March. Cormac read it twice.

I hurt the person I love most. I am not going to dress it up. Jess, I am sorry. I will spend as long as it takes.

Under it, the comments had done what comments did. A friend had said this was not a thing to put on the internet. Further down, a woman had been less delicate. Another woman, then. That is what this is. You don’t get to be vague about it on her page. Someone had told him to take it down before Jessica saw it. Jude had not. Three weeks later there was a coast path and no caption. Two months after that she was back in the pictures, thinner in the face, her hand in his.

Cormac sat with it.

The saloon had dimmed. He had not put a lamp on. The card lay where he had left it, Jessica Briars facing up, the name she used for the paper and not the name on the wedding photograph. Outside, the water moved against the hull with the small repeated sound he no longer heard unless he was listening for it. He listened now.

He did not know what he meant to do with it. The marriage in the photographs was not a ruin. She had looked happy that afternoon in the way of a woman whose life was intact. She had forgiven the man, or gone back to him, which was not always the same thing. Jude Brentworth had had another woman. He had said so, as nearly as made no difference, where anyone could scroll.

And she had stayed.

Cormac closed the tab. He did not clear the history. He sat for a minute with his hand on the table, the receipt under his wrist, and then he went back to the Chronicle.

The film was up.

He found it under features, where she had said it would be, posted an hour ago. The still at the top was her beside the pen, hair coming loose, the piglets a pink confusion behind her. He started it.

Her voice came into the boat. She gave the fair its name. She crouched, and the investigating piglet came into the frame exactly as he remembered, snout against her wrist, and she lost the line and laughed and told it that it was not helping. They had left that in. Of course they had. She started again, warmer for the mistake, and Padraig told the story of Margaret, and the second piglet considered the rail and declined it. She finished with the produce tent and the offer of the paper. Then she was gone, and the next film began to load, something about a road closure in Heaton Mersey.

Cormac moved the marker back to the beginning.

On the far side of the canal a blackbird was still going, late, in the trees above the towpath. The light on the water had thinned to the last of the evening, long and pale and full of summer. He watched her crouch again. He watched the piglet choose her wrist. Somewhere in south Manchester she would be in a kitchen, or a car, or a pub garden with the husband from the photographs, getting on with a Saturday that had nothing in it of a man on a boat.

He pressed play.