fence, as was her way, and when Lily scratched behind her ears, the sow blinked at her. Beneath her ginger lashes the sow’s eyes were still half full of sleep. Do pigs dream? Lily wondered. If they do, it is about something better than real life, by the look of things. The sow came into full wakefulness and she fixed Lily with a peculiarly poignant gaze. Pigs were funny creatures. You could almost think they were human, the way they looked at you sometimes. Or was the pig remembering something? Yes, Lily realized, that was it. The pig looked exactly as if she were recollecting some happiness now lost, so that joy remembered was overlaid with present sorrow.
Lily had been happy once, though it was painful to recall it. Her father had died before she could remember, and until she was eleven she and her mother had lived quietly together, just the two of them. There had been little money and food was scant, but they scraped by, and after their soup in the evening they would lean close together with a blanket round them to save the fire, and at her mother’s nod Lily would turn the pages of the children’s Bible while her mother read aloud. Lily was no great reader. She could not tell b from d and the words quivered on the page as soon as they felt the brush of her gaze, but when her mother read aloud in her gentle voice, the words grew still and Lily found she could follow the thread after all, mouthing the words silently in time. Sometimes her mother told her about her father – how he had loved his baby daughter, watched her endlessly and, as his own health faded, said, Here is the best of me, Rose. It lives on in this child we made together. In time, Jesus and her father came to seem like different faces of the same man, a presence that surrounded Lily and protected her and was no less real for being invisible. That blanket, and that book, and her mother’s voice and Jesus and her father who had loved her so – these happy memories only sharpened the hardship of her existence since. She could not think of those golden days without despair, came close to wishing she had never lived them. That hopeless longing for lost happiness in the eye of the pig must be how she herself looked when she remembered the past. The only God that watched over Lily now was a severe and angry one, and if her father were to look down from heaven on to his grown daughter, he would turn his face away in an agony of disappointment.
The sow continued to stare at Lily. She pushed its snout roughly away and muttered, ‘Stupid sow,’ as she walked up the slope to the cottage.
Inside she got the fire going and ate a bit of cheese and an apple. She eyed the candle, a short stub melded by its own wax to a scrap of broken tile, and decided to do without it for a bit longer. Next to the fire was a sagging chair, the upholstery much mended with patches of unmatching wool, and she sat wearily in it. She was tired, but nerves kept her alert. Was it one of those nights when he was going to come? She had seen him yesterday, so perhaps not, but you could never tell. For an hour she sat, on the alert for footsteps, and then gradually Lily’s eyelids closed, her head began to nod and she fell into sleep.
The river now exhaled a complicated fragrance and blew it through the gap under the door of the little cottage. Lily’s nose suddenly twitched. The odour had an earthy base with live notes of grasses, reeds and sedges. It contained the mineral quality of stone. And something darker, browner and more decomposed.
With its next breath, the river exhaled a child. She floated into the cottage, glaucous and cold.
Lily frowned in her sleep and her breathing grew troubled.
The girl’s colourless hair clung slickly to her scalp and shoulders; her garment was the colour of the dirty scum that collects at the river’s edge. Water ran off her; from her hair it dripped into her cloak, from the cloak it dripped to the floor. It did not drip itself out.
Fear put a choking whimper in Lily’s throat.
Drip, drip, drip … There was no end to the water: it would drip