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While Louie fumbles with his zip, I lay a newspaper down on the floor of the Wendy House. I can’t help but think about next week’s presentation while he does it: a conference paper on the mating habits of waterbirds in the Bering Sea, specifically their fidelity to certain breeding sites, what we call philopatry. It would break Louie’s heart if he knew my mind was on my paper but he’ll never know. His eyes are always scrunched closed. I watch him like that, concentrating while he works above me. His grunts have become deeper in the past seven years. He sounds like the cormorants I recorded on the shores of the Aleutian Islands last summer: gruff and guttural. They’re a philopatric species too.
Afterwards we brush each other down and fix each other’s hair and then return to the rowing boat. This is the way it goes every year, with Louie slipping the wedding ring back onto his finger and me pausing to glance back at the Wendy House to see if any birds have alighted while we were inside. The first year a purple heron landed there: a rare sight.
Do you remember that? I ask him. The heron?
He climbs back into the rowing boat without answering. Every year he insists on taking the oars, though he’s the weaker rower. Every year, as he rows us back across the Meare, he bumps into another boat or steers us too close to the bank so that we’re dragged under low-hanging branches and come out scratched and leafy. Still, he insists. I direct him politely through the winding streams towards the stretch of water that links Crusoe’s Island with the Spanish Main. All the areas of the Meare take their names from children’s literature – Otter Isle, River Hundred, the Happy Isles. The place we always make love is called Peggotty’s House after the family in David Copperfield. I watch Louie trying not to strain with the weight of the oars. I enjoy seeing him like this – puffed-out and vulnerable with the lust drained from his face. He looks like he did when he was seventeen, the summer we first came to the Meare, his family and mine.
A shrike screams in the trees on Otter Isle.
I’m sorry if I hurt you, he says.
You didn’t, I say.
He never has, not even at his most vigorous. Louie isn’t the most physical lover but he’s a born romantic. I know that our annual pilgrimage to the Wendy House means everything to him because he tells me so, every time. He doesn’t know what it means to me. He struggles to believe me when I say it was lovely, wonderful, amazing – but it’s usually true. If circumstances had been different, I might have a wedding ring on my finger instead of Martha.
You know what your body does to me, he says, just as the shrike launches from the trees and whooshes overhead.
Again, it’s the same thing he says every year. The first time, when the purple heron alighted on Peggotty’s House, was the year I finished Sixth Form and he finished college. I’d already asked him whether he wanted to go to university and he’d said no, no point, waste of money. He was qualified and earning, earning even more than his parents, and he didn’t have a spirit for adventure. I’d been dying to get away from home for years. I read Zoology for want of any other ideas – just because I loved birds, we both did. But birds weren’t, he told me, financially viable. Martha was, is, a surgical technologist. Much more suitable.
I’ve been thinking, he says, rowing harder. I don’t think I can wait until next year.
Please, Louie, I say, we go through this every time.
I know we do. But this year really feels different. I want to be with you.
This is the talk we have in place of the after-sex cuddling which we have never shared. I know if we were to make love anywhere else, in a hotel or in his house or in one of the many Airbnbs I use while travelling for work, things would be altered forever. No, for all our intimacy there’s a reason for the Wendy House, for the newspaper on the floor, for the precautions we’ve developed against torn clothes and mud-stains.
You don’t want to be with me, Louie. You just want to be with the idea of me. It’s perfectly natural. I don’t resent it.
But I don’t, he says. I know you think I’m projecting but I’m not. I think about you all the time, all through the year.
I know you do, I say. That’s why I asked you to stop calling me.
Yes, and I’ve respected that. I haven’t called, have I?
No, you haven’t.
I watch the line of the oar through the water and the ripples rolling outwards. His voice is grating on me. I want it to be quiet so I can think about my presentation. I want to be back at the boathouse with the others.
I still think about you all the time, he says.
That’s just because you’re having problems at home, I say. I know we agreed not to talk about it and I think that’s for the best but you should know it yourself.
I’m happy at home, he says. That doesn’t stop me thinking about you.
The cluck of moorhens reaches us from the bank. There are more boats in this stretch: couples, families, people in canoes, kayaks.
I think this year should be the last year, I say. I’ve decided.
This is the part I always dread. I said it the summer before he married Martha and again the first time after that but the family holidays continued, his family and ours, and it was still me and Louie taking out the dinghy, and Louie insisting on rowing, and then our pilgrimage to Peggotty’s House. And then this part. He pulls hard on the oars, lopsidedly so the boat begins to turn. We’re heading into the Spanish Main, where soon we’ll be visible from the boathouse. Teatime. Our families are waiting for us.
You say that every year, he says.
I mean it, I say. It’s time. It’ll be better for both of us.
He stops rowing and the boat begins to drift. Another part of our routine, this whole section. Running like clockwork.
I’m going to tell her, he says.
We stare at each other while the boat drifts in a calm circle.
What are you going to tell her exactly? I ask.
Sound of lapping water. Sun over the Spanish Main.
That I’m in love with you, he says.
Ridiculous.
No, he says. I’m going to tell her I’m in love with you.
That you’re in love with her sister, I say.
I’ve never said it like this before. So things have changed. So be it. Now, maybe, since that gently-hissing word has finally escaped, he’ll tell Martha the truth. It feels like the first year we crawled out of the Wendy House to find the purple heron and he was already wanting to tell, desperate to tell anyone, anything about what happened. He had gripped my hand as the bird took off, and it felt as though he wanted to reach out and grab it by its claws and tell it: We fucked. Me and her. I’m no longer a virgin. We’re in love. But he stayed silent like he would always stay silent. Silent as a heron in flight.
He moves to speak. A rush of air. That’s as far as our conversation gets.
*
The duck is a mallard, a drake. Its flank is static grey, bordered at the wing by a speculum of blue-tinted feathers. Above the white collar of its neck, its head is dark and verdant. Its bill is sheathed in hard keratin, though soft at the edges to help it feel out food. When the bill strikes Louie’s temple, it’s like thrusting a line of human fingertips at a brick wall. The keratin cracks, causing a long fracture to snake up the bill to the mallard’s nasal cavity, just as the impact jolts and twists the cells within Louie’s brain. He crumples and the bird drops without a honk into the hull of the boat. The oars slip out through the oarlocks and disappear into the water. Louie lies silent in the bottom of the dinghy, with one wing of the dying duck draped over him like a lover. For a moment, I float above it all, weightless. Just for a moment.
*
Memory can be a violent thing. The first year we took boats out on the Meare, the last Friday of the school holidays, my sister Martha fell into the water and swallowed a lungful of muck. She never went out again, just sat by the boathouse with our parents, watching me and Louie row out together. I thought she liked it that way. It became just another innocent tradition, me and Louie sharing a boat, like the arrival of sand martins in March. No surprises. Later, it had been her who called to say she and Louie were seeing each other, one night during my second year of university while I was being pawed in the smoking area of a nightclub. It was obvious Louie hadn’t told her that we’d slept together, twice actually by then, and already it was clear to me that what we had was just a fling, it wasn’t supposed to last. Martha had no real desire to leave Norfolk, though she had the grades to do anything she liked. She was smarter than me and more well-read, but she wanted a husband and a family and all the things that never interested me. I’d always guessed she would find somebody smart, sensitive and unremarkable, but Louie had never crossed her mind. After they moved in together, he gave up birding and bought himself a hyacinth macaw named Mungo which he thought he could teach to speak. It never spoke a word.
Now, in the still-rocking boat, Louie’s tongue hangs out like Mungo’s, dumb and limp, with his head bleeding onto the gunwale. I check his pulse, test the wound with my finger, splash some water on his face. He groans but he won’t wake up. Families in other boats are rowing towards us – no one I recognise. They shout support but they’re clueless. I need to get Louie back to the boathouse. Martha will know what to do. Then there’s the duck, twitching in the hull with its head craned back from its body, kicking its feet, grasping for life. Its neck is broken. If I put it back in the water, it’ll drown. If I leave it on one of the islands, it’ll starve. Its eye is dark and shiny like a pomegranate seed.
The Meare is too mucky to see the lost oars, so I take off my boots and lower myself into the water to push. It’s freezing, even more freezing than I’d expected, the sharp cold coming up to my thighs so that my dress pools around me like a lily pad. My bare feet sink into an ankle-deep layer of mud and duck-shit. I reach down into the water and feel the cold running up from my belly through my breasts and collarbone, up to my shoulders until my whole front is soaked. I scrape along the shit at the bed of the Meare, my fingernails catching on plant-life, debris. There’s no sign of the oars – maybe they’ve sunk into the soft bed or drifted away. People in other boats are gasping, calling out. I look at Louie’s bloody temple. Somehow, this is just like him.
The dinghy is easy to move, much easier than if I was rowing. Families on the bank have stopped to point. I can just about make out Martha on the shore, sitting at her usual place in a deckchair by the boathouse. Our dad is behind them talking with Louie’s dad, and further down the line our mums are haranguing a teenage boy in a boating lake uniform. The boy wades in to meet me as I get closer. By the time I make it to the bank I’m soaked and shivering, and Louie’s mother is crying and Martha is on her feet.
Bring him here, she shouts to me.
The boy from the boating lake pulls the dinghy towards the jetty and ties it off. Our dads lift Louie carefully out of the boat and lay him on the boards, Martha kneeling down at his head, cradling it in her hands.
It was a mallard, I say. Flew right into the side of his head.
Martha examines the wound carefully, professionally, through the tears. Finally, Louie opens his eyes. We watch him as he regains his vision, his awareness. Within a few minutes, he’s up on his feet, supported by his dad, before being led unsteadily across to the umbrellas. He slumps down into a deckchair and the boy from the boathouse, soaked to the waist, gives him a puffy fabric bag to press against his head. Louie’s eyes are low. He looks battered and tired. Martha crouches down at his knees and tells him how silly he is. She looks relieved when he laughs about it. He winces and she kisses him like something that has been returned to her. I watch them with nothing to say, until Martha stands to confront me.
Come on, she says, looking down at my mucky legs. There’s a hose at the back of the boathouse.
I follow her to the hose and she crouches down in front of me to blast the duck-shit off me. Crouching like that, her knees pass either side of her belly so that I can see for the first time how much weight she’s put on. Before the end of summer, she will begin to show.
How was he? she asks me.
The final part of the process. I’m usually prepared for it: the Meare, the boat, Peggotty’s House, and then this. Tradition, habit.
More upset than usual, I tell her. But nothing special.
I expected that, she says. He’s been getting more anxious.
He’ll be fine once you’ve told him about the baby.
She’d probably never intended to tell me before she told Louie. I’d only worked it out because I’d overheard her at The Dolphin last night, whispering to the barman to switch up her beer for a Becks Blue. She flicks a little stubborn muck from my shin with her thumbnail.
I’m sure he will, she says. It will be out of his system by then.
I tried to tell him, I say while she aims the water between my toes. He didn’t take it very well.
No, she says. Well, I expected that too.
It doesn’t matter, I say. I’ve said it out loud, he knows where I stand.
And you? she asks, staring at my feet. Are you happy to let it go?
I wait for her eyes to meet mine. They never do.
Of course I am, I say. I only carried on with it because you thought it was for the best…
I wait again. It was true, and I’d always agreed to it. It meant that Louie could go on loving me while never leaving my sister, never doing something rash. It did that much. It’ll flow out of his system naturally, now she’s expecting. What it did for me never came up. No one ever asked.
Well, now you have the baby, I say.
Yes, Martha says. Now we have that.
Martha turns off the tap with a furious flick of the wrist and I wonder if I should say something more. It’s been seven years after all – seven years of fucking and talking and waiting things out. I’m sure Martha will want to say something definitive to end the whole thing but she doesn’t. She just walks off back towards the chairs on the other side of the boathouse. I rub my freezing legs and pad after my sister across the grass.
Louie is being pandered to by our mums, stroked, offered water. The dads stand hands-on-hips on the jetty, peering at the duck. The boy from the boating lake is cradling it carefully, his hands around its wings. It neck droops down towards the jetty, its beak at a slight upwards angle as if trying to speak.
Here, Martha says.
Without another word, she snatches it from the boy, lowers it down and walks across to the nearest boat. A pair of young children who have gathered to watch are hustled away by their grandparents. Martha brings an oar and raises it with both hands and again I see the new weight on her, the first signs of her glow. She brings the blade of the oar down hard on the duck’s neck. Someone yelps. The sound cracks something inside of me.
I’ll fetch a bag, says the boy from the boathouse.
Joe Bedford is an author from Doncaster, UK. His short stories have been published widely and have won several awards, including the Bridport Prize 2024. His debut novel A Bad Decade for Good People was published by Parthian Books in 2023.