MERCY KILLING
When the shower is over, the sky sapped and pale, Emma steps on to the puddled patio. The house squats behind her, a 1970s dormer bungalow with brown double-glazing units and ugly corrugated roof tiles. It has low ceilings and thin walls and is prone to damp. The dehumidifier runs at all hours, a mechanical dowsing rod, detecting water wherever it is employed. She had dreamed of a Victorian house in town: terrace or semi, two bedrooms or three – she was flexible, and prepared to accept some dilapidation in exchange for a large garden. But the combination of antiquity and acreage proved well beyond their means. Their house-hunt took place in the spring, and thoughts of high ceilings and period features vanished when, having driven to the very cusp of the town, they followed the canny estate agent, not through the front door, but through the wooden gates at the side of the house and into the garden. The acre of scrubby pasture sold the place to them. Infected by nostalgia, Chris for his early childhood on the farm, Emma for summers spent with her grandparents in Cornwall, neither truly considered the upkeep of the house or imagined times when the weather would force them indoors, and anyway, on the day they looked round, the interior, though basic, dated and empty of furniture, was bright and clean, the walls scrubbed and whitewashed. Months later, mould crept out from corners, blooming along skirting boards, contouring window frames and speckling the ceilings.
Chris divided the land into three, laying turf at the near end, which he keeps short for the boys. Behind the lawn is the space they call the meadow and beyond it, beside a row of fruit trees at the boundary, is the vegetable garden, relegated to the back of the plot to spare the greenhouse and young plants and trees from the boys’ balls. On a Saturday afternoon in a month or two, Chris will climb a stepladder and, muttering about colony collapse and neonicotinoids, he’ll fertilise the early-flowering plum trees with a tiny paintbrush. Subsequently, as the rest of the garden wakes up, Emma will come out in the afternoons to count bees. It won’t be a representative sample, of course, but she hopes her reported sightings will make Chris feel better.
She splashes across the patio to the garage. If they’d built it themselves, they’d have arranged things differently. It was here when they bought the house, nestled alongside the boundary fence and within swinging distance of the wooden gates that open on to the driveway. Wide enough to contain two vehicles, the previous owners described it as a ‘workshop’, though as far as Emma knows it was only ever used to store old furniture and garden tools; unsurprising, perhaps, as ‘work’ requires light and whoever built the structure didn’t think to intersperse the concrete sections with any windows. Not long after they moved in, Emma and Chris had the up-and-over opening replaced with a pair of steel doors, making the building more secure for Chris’s van and tools.
Between the boundary fence and the exterior of the garage, a gap, barely a passageway, acts like a black hole, collecting fallen leaves and garden rubbish. Chris usually clears it in the winter, but this year he hasn’t, so Emma will do it herself. Perhaps the physical exertion will help to dispel thoughts of him standing beside the memorial, soaked and scruffy. The shovel blade scuffs the concrete hardstanding as she scoops a pile of saturated leaves. Squeezed between the fence and the concrete wall, she backs out of the narrow passageway and transfers the mess to the green wheelie bin. She thinks of Chris and works harder, repeating the movements, until the wood of the shovel’s shaft grows warm against her supporting hand and her head is empty of everything except the sound of her coat sleeves brushing her body and the beat of her breath.
She is almost halfway through the job, about to scoop another shovel of muck, when a frog crawls out of the rotting leaves, twitching and bleeding. Emma closes her eyes for a moment, an involuntary response when the boys are hurt or there’s violence on television. She takes a long breath and opens them again. The frog is badly injured. She must have caught it with the blade. Her hands tighten around the shovel. She is armed, and it is her unpleasant duty to end the suffering she has caused. And she will. After three. She counts, and nothing happens. She tries again, unable to determine whether the insubordination originates in her brain or arms. A breather, she thinks, a moment to collect herself before she delivers the blow.
She backs out of the passageway, passes the garage doors and comes to a stop on the puddled patio. If she pops into the house for a glass of water, the frog, with any luck, will be dead when she returns.
‘You haven’t cleaned the sandwich maker, Mum,’ Dylan complains as she steps through the back door.
‘Neither have you,’ she replies.
James sniggers and pats her on the head. ‘Good one, Emma-Jane,’ he says.
Emma is ambivalent about this recent use of her full name. Only her mother addresses her that way, and it’s hard to tell whether James is motivated by camaraderie or a desire to undermine her.
She removes her sodden trainers, awkwardly, without undoing the laces, and as the boys butter the outsides of their sandwiches and lock them in the toaster, she tells them about the frog.
‘You kill spiders,’ Dylan says.
‘Only massive ones with hairy legs. And faces.’
They laugh at her.
‘What? They’ve got faces; they have. And I mostly don’t kill them.’
‘No, you get Dad to do it. You’re, like, an accessory.’
Emma wipes damp hair from her forehead. She pulls her phone out of her back pocket and types ‘humane kill frog’ into the search engine.
‘I can put it in a Tupperware box and stick it in the fridge. It’ll fall asleep, and then I can shut it in the freezer and it’ll die.’
Except she would have to pick up the frog, somehow. She could use a piece of kitchen towel so as not to touch its mucusy skin. But it might wriggle or groan, and the thought of it, agonised and struggling, makes her feel queasy. She lifts the lid of the slow cooker and checks the curry before taking a glass from the dish rack and filling it with cold water.
‘Stop procrastinating – you know what you’ve got to do,’ Dylan says.
‘Do you think you could—’
‘I’m not doing it!’
‘How much would you pay me?’ James asks.
‘I’m not paying.’
‘In that case’ – James extends an arm and points at the back door – ‘get out there and finish him off, Emma-Jane.’
Emma downs the water and places the empty glass on the worktop. She returns her phone to her pocket, wriggles her feet back into her trainers and steps outside. The shovel is propped against the wall, beside last year’s moribund Christmas tree. Emma grabs it and, with her spare hand, retrieves one of the bricks Chris uses for propping the wooden gates that open on to the driveway.
She hurries down the partially cleared passageway and covers the frog with the brick. Then she stands on it. After a few moments, she steps off and scrapes the brick with the shovel, trying not to look at the paste on its blade. Shovel aloft, she reverses out of the passageway and squelches away from the garage, through the boggy lawn and into the meadow.
When they first bought the house, she thought of this place as ‘the countryside’, a natural landscape, forged in slow time and silence. Of course, she was wrong. In times past, this was the shore of Martin Mere, formerly the largest body of fresh water in England: a vast sheet, silvery in the sun, black in the shade, widening in wet weather and tapering in the dry. She has tried to imagine it as it was, hundreds and hundreds of years ago. A treacherous wilderness, covered in deep pools of acidic water and bog, blurred by lingering fogs and mists. A place ancient people skirted while hunting for food and collecting peat for fuel, the ground so flat it was probably difficult to discern the water’s edge. The mere used to reach as far as the primary school where she works as a welfare assistant, and the house where she grew up, not much more than a mile away, in High Park. As a child, Emma was familiar with the Moss, the flat plain of farmland that bordered the town, but she had no idea what it was before, no idea about the lake. She found a book on local history and realised the words had been there all along: some of the older generation didn’t say High Park, they used the name their parents had used, Blowick, an Old Norse word, meaning Dark Bay. She discovered that people had been trying to drain the mere since the late 1600s. Eventually, in the mid-nineteenth century, steam pumping led to effective drainage and the soil offered up its treasures: spearheads and palstaves, red deer and aurochs bones, and an ancient canoe that lay across the first-floor landing of the Botanic Gardens Museum like a felled tree.