Grace Cowley has lived in South Africa, Cambridgeshire, Oxford and Newcastle, and now lives in London with her husband and two children. This is her first novel.

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Someone keeps turning on the taps

 

A square, in a dark city.

Frost barely touched even high rooftops here. Office blocks empty, lights glaring, beneath a smoggy mist lit orange by city light. A fountain played.

It was a large, shallow fountain, its surface watched by stone, large-lipped fish and merpeople. Around the square stone lions drowsed on plinths. From the fountain’s clean floor, coppery coins glinted in the hollow fluorescent light.

Above them a one-armed stone soldier stood staring off into the fog. Traffic blurred around the edges of the square, but it was well after midnight; the embassies were shut, the last drinkers had bumbled away, and the gallery on the north side had been dark since early evening.

From one corner, a woman in a long coat wheeled a bicycle to a small house tucked beside a church’s glass portico. Seagulls slept on Victorian iron street lamps. The bicycle and the woman disappeared through a door. A bin rustled – city foxes, rummaging for winter scraps.

The water of the fountain was regular and soft, trilling from the fishes’ mouths, its movement a kind of stillness in itself. The traffic subsided to an occasional passing car. Even the night buses had disappeared.

A large bubble gurgled suddenly to the surface of the fountain, large enough to have come from a circus clown’s soap bubble wand. Several smaller bubbles followed it. The seagulls didn’t stir. The bubbles stopped.

Then another few large bubbles and a strange underwater movement drifted to the surface, with a kind of scraping sound. A dark head appeared at the surface of the fountain, from nowhere. Only its crown and two eyes lifted above the water. The eyes opened, slick with wet. No whites showed in these eyes in the city night; they were deep black, all pupil, it seemed. One seagull, one eye opening, cocked its head.

The head in the fountain circled, taking in the square, and turned back slowly. It paused, and shuddered almost imperceptibly. The eyelids closed.

The seagull set down a webbed foot from where it had been tucked into its feathers. Then it pulled its other leg up and closed its eyes again.

A bearded man in a blue sleeping bag was lying across the gallery heating vents on flattened cardboard, woolly hat pulled down as far as his mouth. He didn’t stir.

The head slipped back under the water soundlessly. More bubbles rose. A muted sound of metal grinding broke the stillness, then was gone. The fish went on spouting flumes into the chlorinated basin. A 211 bus pulled round the square’s south corner, nearly empty, one girl and her phone huddled on the top deck. The man in the sleeping bag snored a little. The fountain’s repetitive descant seemed unbroken in the false glow of the city lights. In the fog, embassy flags slapped their masts against the cold.

 

***

 

The far north of England. Where the coasts roar in winter storms; and in summer’s long daylight, the beaches lie beneficent and wide.

A river mouth. The river’s quiet emergence watched by an old coastguard station, on high cliffs. Concrete, mortar, and stone.

The river is several times older than anything human around it – than human beings themselves. It has forged a slow eastward progress here over several million years. Nowadays, as of about a thousand years ago, two cities jowl up against each other across it. Beneath its surface, two tunnels rivet its waters, and tributaries pour in. Stern, majestic bridges crown the air above it: some of steel and stone; some that swoop or swing; movement and solidity all at once.

Beyond the cities, the river winds inland through industrial estates and small, kindly towns. It loops round a motorway, through fields and low stone walls. Dab and eels swim against its currents. The land rises. At Warden Rock, its two parents meet – the North Tyne falling into the South Tyne, from where it has coursed down through Kielder Forest, over a dark limestone; cold and narrow and clear.

Various burns and becks up here gather to make the North Tyne’s dark body. One of them bustles down through the gentle hills above Muckle Moss, lithe and porous and buoyant with the secrets of new water.

Close to its source, a low crag stands over the beck, and above it, a house sits huddled below a small farm. Tall forest beyond it, it hides below a deep step in the land down from the cowsheds and barns, at the end of the narrow lane from the village.

End House is a mixture of low roofs over small windows, and gables where swallows nested in the summer. From the lane, it looks small; walk round it towards the woods, and you find it sprawls a bit down its hill, where it’s nudged and elbowed its way out over decades or longer.

At the end of the building, sheds and outhouses jut into a dark garden, shaded by the high firs and Scots pines of the forest ahead, where a grated-over well, made of brick and stone, hides under the trees’ protective darkness.

The kitchen door, under a little roof, looks like its lintel will take anyone’s head off; until you come up to it and see steep steps take you down from the garden to the door, and more steps inside make it all deeper, if not taller, than it looks. The whole house is set into the hillside like a child nestled in a hug. It rambles away into shadowy rooms; but here in the kitchen, on a January night, a boy sat at a table, homework in front of him, a frown on his forehead.

It was more of a glare, in fact. He was punching away at a long maths problem, but his foot jogged and his eyes kept drifting up, unseeing. Suddenly he threw himself across the kitchen to the door and up the steps into the outside air, and started thumping a basketball against the walls.

A woman appeared, noiselessly, in the kitchen doorway. She was also frowning, but anxiously. She wore a thick green cardigan. Her feet were in stockings and her hair was falling out of its old-fashioned hairpins. She watched him for a moment, unnoticed. Then: “Tom,” she started, softly.

He didn’t look round. The basketball slammed at a hoop incongruously mounted beside an old building brace end. A wisp of human moisture escaped his hood like candle smoke into the winter air.

“I’m really – I’m really sorry about today, I really am.” She had an odd mixture of accents. ‘Today’ was the only northern sounding word.

“You said that.” The ball was dribbling on the paving. No one round here played basketball. Even he hadn’t played much since he was twelve. It was a hangover from his first home: four years old and watching his foster siblings throw hoops on asphalt. “And it didn’t mean much then either.”

She winced and didn’t say anything. He spun on the spot with this next shot at the hoop, but didn’t watch to see it land. The ball bounced away into the dark hedge. His arms hung in the air from his last hurl of energy, wrists dangling like a puppet’s.

“But I meant it,” she said. “It really wasn’t – I tried everything I could – “

“Not about trying, is it?” Suddenly facing her, he was on the brink of shouting, this normally quiet, even-tempered boy. “Where were you? Where were you? Do you get how embarrassing it is?”

“I know,” she sighed, a hand pushing through greying red hair. “It changed a couple of times – it was meant to be in Carlisle and I’d’ve been back by three –“

“What was?! You can’t even explain anything! You’re never – you’re never here!” She hesitated again. He rolled his eyes and thumped the wall, and his feet clattered back down the steps into the kitchen. She followed him.

“I had to have Callum’s mum – Callum and me don’t even speak anymore – Callum’s mum. As my adult! And you – what were you doing? She said you’re in human rights! She told the Head! Where do you get off?”

“It was a – rights are part of the issues –“ Gwen trailed off.

“You’re such a blagger! I look like no one gives a sh–“ now it had come to the point, he had to stop short because tears endangered his furious confidence. “They’re probably calling the services right now. They probably did it the second I left! Know what, they probably already called you to say they’re coming round and you haven’t even seen the call.”

She hung her head. He let the breath in him rush out in exasperation and hurled himself up the narrow kitchen stairs into the house’s upper recesses.

Gwen moved to go after him. “Tom, I really –”

But he was gone. The stairs door at the top banged, and the attic room door after it. In the dark kitchen, the woman climbed several steps up, looking after him. She stopped and sank back down a step. At the top of the house, Tom was standing breathing furiously, his back against the door, the room dark.

Outside, the trees rustled in the January wind. A light went on in the attic room window at the front of the house. It faced the lane and beyond it, the edge of the farm. The kitchen windows at the back, softly lit ‘til now, went dark.

A chair was slipped quietly under the attic door handle on the inside. The little window, the highest in the house, opened and Tom’s thin figure slipped from it to the roof and the black yew branches, landing lightly in the misty lane below, and seemed to evaporate.

For a while, the house sat quiet and homely. An owl watched from the sessile oak on the edge of the woods. A fog was rolling in on a northeasterly wind from the sea. It crept through the woods and filled the lane. The house seemed to fall into its gradual tide.

Close to ten o’ clock, the back door opened and Gwen hurried out, footsteps soft in the frost. Her bundled up figure moved round the building, past the uneven walls of the old shed and the wood store. It was completely dark on this side of the house. Her feet rustled softly over the grass.

She reached the edge of the trees. After a moment, she quietly lifted the heavy grid that sat across the top of the well. She heaved it with a practiced movement to lean against the bricks and limestone. Then she sat on the lip of the well, hitching her wool skirt a little, and swung her legs over one after the other. Her slippers lay fallen on the grass, and she climbed down out of sight.

 

The White Lion was full and sweaty. Electrified oil lamps lit yellow-papered walls. It was a squat pub on a crossroads, just down from where the Humshaugh Burn trickled under a low stone bridge to bow its way into the North Tyne.

The fog was sitting round the pub like an excess of cigarette smoke. Inside, breath and laughter steamed the windows. Colin and Jess had driven down through the gathering January murk to meet some of Jess’s colleagues from the facility. If they’d left earlier, it might not have been such slow going in the lanes; but Colin had a mountain of marking, and by the time they’d made it out, it was like driving through a cloud. They only got to the pub with enough time for a couple of rounds before closing. There were days when this would have irked Jess, but this evening she was magnanimous: unlike anyone Colin had ever known, she was put in her best moods by a good fog or a snowstorm; even serious rainfall. Proper weather, she’d say, that you could actually feel.

It was someone’s birthday – a mix, for once, of the facilities staff and the scientists. Jess, as ever, was friendly with both crowds, because no one begrudged a Yorkshire lass the time of day. But Colin had only met some of them once or twice, and was slightly daunted as they walked in by Dan Hedger roaring, “It’s the Irish! Alright there, y’Irish blackguard?”

Hedgey insisted on buying them drinks, only to heap on Colin his fullest Geordie scorn when he asked for a lager, and not even one in a glass. Jess smirked and left them to it, as she tended to do when she brought Colin to things.

‘Ta very much,’ he muttered the second time she went past, in his best Northern English imitation. She smiled and elbowed him playfully, her hands full of empty glasses she was taking back to the bar.

‘Ah, you’re grand.’ She did a terrible impression of his accent, which only came out when she was in a really good mood.

Colin was deflecting Hedgey and his mate Scott’s contempt for his bottled beer by conjuring up his dad’s singularities for them.

“If he met yous he’d pretend it was an old Ulster saying, I swear he would. I grew up round bogs. He did too. No frogs. Frogs: ponds. Rivers maybe. The odd lough, I’m sure. But he came up with it somewhere in the distant past and now it’s just a stock Dad-ism. No one else says it. But get him going and it’s all,” he took on his dad’s broader Northern Irish tones, ” ‘ ‘–fishing rod, wee bun, cuppa tea: you’re set as a frog in a bog. Never mind if it’s rain coming in sideways, wind to take the nose from your face’–”

“–no wonder you feel at home round here,” Hedgey raised his pint to the weather outside. “This man here,” Scott, creased up over his bitter, clapped him on the shoulder, as Jess reappeared to manoeuvre back past them, “not so bad, Jess. You keep him in clean shirts and we’ll keep him in these quarter pints of dishwater.”

“He can keep me in clean shirts ‘n’ all,” she retorted. She was now balancing a last round for her team.

“Well yous take care of the shirts between you and we’ll take care of the pints, is what I’m saying,” Scottie waved his ale at them both.

“Chance’d be a fine thing,” she raised an eyebrow, heading back past.

“That girl’d be a miss,” said Scott, waving after her with his pint. “Yorkshire or no. I’ll tell you for nothing.”

“Working on it,” Colin said before he could stop himself. Scott and Hedgey gaped gleefully at each other. Colin felt his face go redder than the beer had already coloured it.

“Alright, now. Mum, Scottie, mum’s the only word for us,” Hedgey patted his mate’s head. “We’ll just drink our proper beer and say nothing.”

The last call bell was ringing from the bar. Colin tried to get the other two a last round but they were still only halfway through their pints.

“But they only put about three sips in yours, didn’t they?” Scottie chuckled.

Hedgey had tactfully switched to talking about the new security set up at the facility – “As if they need more barriers, what are they guarding, the water quality tests? Ee, that one’s a bit silty, best not let anyone find out now eh?” – and Scottie joined in, genuinely riled by how much longer everything took.

The second bell went. Coats were being found, drinks finished up. Scottie and Hedgey had to hurry theirs. The condensation on the windows had furred into heavy drips trailing down the glass into the old wooden window frames.

Stepping outside was like stepping into blindness. Only the flash of the car’s lights when Jess clicked the key’s remote showed them where it was actually parked. Scottie was pretending Hedgey was too drunk to walk home and needed carrying – “You can’t stand! You can’t stand!”

“Gerrof me! You daft bastard!”

Colin had been caught in the doorway by one of Jess’s team.

“Come on, McCracken, before the fog takes us all!” Jess called, slamming the driver’s door. Colin needed the rear lights when she turned them on just to follow her to the car along the road.

As they pulled out, he thought a light flickered in the school over the way. But his eyes were still adjusting from the brightness of the pub, and an oncoming car hadn’t dipped its lights.

Jess had been talking to Carol Garth who ran the buildings at the facility.

“D’you know Carol’s from Teeside? She’s a big walker too,” she said, taking the turning home towards Otterburn. The fog was thickening and seemed to paste the bare hazel that walled the road. “We should go down south more, you know.”

“I literally never thought I’d hear you say that,” he said, looking back at the school.

“No – I don’t mean south south, I mean, Teesdale. The hills there.”

“We did that Derwent walk in – what, November?” Four forms appeared suddenly on the roadside as they passed the turning to Pitheugh, bundled in black wintry gear.

“Derwent –? I’m saying the Tees! What is it you teach again?” Jess was cocking her head innocently.

“Cut me some slack here, I’m from a whole other country. Depending who’s telling you.”

“Up Windy Gyle next week. That’ll be a good leg stretch,” she said. They were passing the Cecil Oak, snug on the roadside, last of its lights twinkling through heavy ivy. “Why do we always end up in the Lion? The Oak’s right here. And its carpets hardly smell. Bet they’re only about thirty years old, those carpets in there.”

“Lion’s handier for most of your lot.”

She shrugged. “Selfish northerners.”

 

***

 

The climb back up the yew was almost impossible compared to dropping from its lowest branch several hours before. The moon had lost itself in the fog now, and Tom couldn’t see to find the knot he needed – he felt for it but the branch felt like it had turned itself in the night and now was unfamiliar. The bark was cold as steel and slippery.

He padded back to the gate and climbed the wall beside it rather than risk the squeaking hinge. Worse in winter, that hinge; and although Gwen was a sound sleeper, Tom had a feel for silence that went beyond stealth.

Perched on the upright top stones and their moss, he turned and lowered a foot like a cat and then, improbably, thought he heard a voice, up the lane the way he’d just come.

The fog was too thick to see as far as the corner, and made him think he’d likely imagined it. Or it was a sound from the woods thrown off. Still he didn’t move for several moments – a frozen parkour outline on a stone Northumbrian wall.

The dark, and his long hours out in the cold, were just messing with him. He lifted his foot, and heard it again.

He went back through the movement he’d just taken to get up. Quiet as anything nocturnal and wild, he padded back up the lane, sticking to the old wall and the inside turn of the corner. Everything was still. Even the cows in the sheds were sound asleep.

The farm’s main gate was still blanked out by fog from here, a hundred yards or so, but faint light, faint voices, pricked through the wet greyness. He slid a little further along the lane.

“There.” A girl’s voice.

“Waiting.” Another.

“Fog blocks signal, right?”

It was Callum. Just home from somewhere – Callum with that Blakey girl, and Edie Ramage. They had their phones out and were barely speaking. Only the light of their screens made them seem alive at all.

“Well I’ve lost all my toes. Now or never, women.” Tom hadn’t clocked the fourth – Kester Beattie, year above, sounded like he had car keys to jangle, and impatience, and so must have nicked a parent’s car to bring them from – where did he live? – Wark maybe. Couldn’t be far to have borrowed a car he couldn’t drive – legally – but far enough to need to. Tom crept backwards through the fog.

Murmurings and car doors and a small engine starting up. “It’s been real, Cal-bob!”

Tom’s eyes flickered upwards a little. An eye roll was too expressive for him, even alone. He dropped over the wall, picturing Callum finding his way similarly home to the farmhouse and up the back of the old coal store. Where was there to have been with Edie Ramage and those others?

The cold had gathered into his skin now, having stood still for just those few moments, after hours of keeping moving. The climb back up the yew to his window wasn’t going to be any easier from inside the wall and he went instead to the kitchen door, where the lights were off and he had the best chance of getting in unheard. But the basketball had rolled down the steps and in the darkness he stepped onto it, not heavily but hard enough to fall into the door instead of a quiet unlatching.

Stepping into the kitchen, the fumble of the door and the ball bouncing away still in his ears, he had to stand still to reset to the quiet. Faint light in the passage made his eyes adjust and then Gwen appeared in it, wearing thick wool socks and wrapped in a blanket, her face bleary. She stood just beyond the door from the kitchen and they looked at each other.

“Where have you been?” She said after a while, her voice even.

“Walking,” he said.

 

Only two people had seen the four of them in the village last night, the police had said, and the second one was just saying he’d seen four slight figures walking at the Pitheugh turnoff. Which didn’t seem much, Callum thought, to be coming talking to him about the science block flooding last night – water vandalism, the police called it, the second instance locally in a month.

But then, nine houses in a place did limit who might plausibly be walking there, close to midnight in a deep winter fog.

Callum’s mum was furious.

“And they’ve just had poor Tom up to the Head’s office! When did you two get back in cahoots?”

“There’s no cahoots, Mam, it was never me – I don’t know about Tom, not anything.”

“And who is this – Kester? With these girls – what were they doing up here at that hour?”

“He’s a friend of Sarah’s. They were just – they had a car, Kester drives – they were just heading home. To Wall.”

“Wall! And I suppose they just popped by to admire that new tanker?”

It had been a tense day at school, once the news of the science labs flooding seeped out. Callum had seen Gwen leaving Barrowclough’s door that morning with an icy, slightly ashen face. She was scary, he knew from experience, if you let it scare you – when she held her own, when she put her game face on, Karen would say. Unlike his mam was with him and his siblings, though, Callum had sometimes seen Gwen waver with things to do with Tom, especially to Tom’s face. Karen was just iron, as a mother; Gwen went between ice and water.

But Tom was in all his classes as normal. And no one at the farm had seen Callum leave or come home.

Sarah Blakey’s parents ran the pub at Hesleybridge, her brother had helped Bob repair dry stone walls on the farm a few times. She was the safest of the gang to mention to his mam, Callum felt instinctively – almost a farming family, running a farmers’ pub. He was lucky Mam hadn’t mentioned Edie – so far – ‘that Edith Ramage’, she was likely to say, though Edie had been an Edie since she was small and as quiet as she is now, and just as much going on in her head.

Callum was tightly wired, waiting for Mam’s next bombardment, wondering how his dad would go when he got in – unpredictable, was Dad, especially lately, as Callum’s scrapes had got less funny.

He was unsurprised though wholly livid when Mam seized his phone from him and whipped out with it through the kitchen door, past a wide eyed Emmie, sat at the table with her times tables.

“It’s in the well,” she said when he got out after her into the freezing yard. There was no point looking, down there into watery darkness, or anywhere else out here – it would literally be searching through haystacks. She’d gone inside without another word.

He stormed off past the top shed, up the first field and past the copse, freezing already in just his hoody and a cardy over it; out beyond the tip of the reservoir that had taken eighteen of his grandfather’s fields fifty years before. Cows looked after him, cocooned in their own breath.

Up towards the grey hill, he kept striding, hands locked behind the back of his neck inside his top, his anger keeping him determined – though not remotely warm – but determined, if nothing else, to freeze out here and make a point better than Mam’s.

Coming up to the foot of the craggy ridge at the end of the hill, he put on a burst of speed and leapt a few steps up rocks on the crag side. They slid treacherously under his soles. He was wearing terrible shoes for this – nothing like farm shoes – another non-understanding between him and his parents. The sixth rock really did slip and he fell into the crag side in front of him, hands grazing on moss made sharp with frost, his heart suddenly up somewhere up his throat. He’d frightened himself. Getting his feet back under him, he pulled himself up to the top, turned himself right side up and sat on the flatter ground at the top of the ridge to catch his breath.

From here he could see the agency facility on the edge of the farm. RAF land, it had been in the war – lot of use that was up here, I’ll be bound, his Grandad used to say – and then the buildings went to the government for something agricultural until the agency moved in. It wasn’t a place he saw often; it seemed quiet and very boring.

Callum was not prone to eerie feelings, but perhaps because he knew him so well, his stillness and watchfulness, fine tuned since childhood, he suddenly looked round with a full conviction there was someone else there – and found Tom crouched by the only tree up here, a low hawthorn.

Callum started, but only slightly. The old familiarity between them softened his surprise.

“What you doing?” he asked, looking away, as though it was a bus stop and you often ran into people here.

Tom shrugged. “Nothing much.”

“Are you watching them?” Trouble with an old friendship was that, even now, after it seemed fairly long dead, he knew Tom too well not to instinctively guess what he was doing.

Tom looked away, unresponsive.

“Bit dull even for you, that, isn’t it?”

Tom stood up. He had a stretch he did that didn’t involve lifting his arms or really moving much visibly at all. Callum, who liked to feel all his limbs’ furthest reaches, had forgotten that stretch of Tom’s, and he wondered for a second if Tom knew he did it. Callum watched him put something in his pocket: binoculars.

“Seriously?”

Tom looked at him. The expressionless expression had never left him.

“What’s down there, then?” Callum asked.

Tom shrugged again and looked into the distance.

Callum waited a moment, then shrugged a little himself. He was really cold now. Tom was wearing a proper coat. God knows how long he’d been here, spying on office nobodies. The ground under Callum’s bum was freezing. Squatting would have been sensible, but he’d not been thinking.

“You couldn’t’ve helped me when I fell just then, I suppose?”

Tom narrowed an eye in a brief flicker. “I saw you coming,” he said. “I just didn’t see you were going to slip. ‘Til you did.”

Callum shrugged again, turning back away again. He pushed himself back to his feet. “I’m away home,” he said. “Have fun with your spyglass. Loser.”

He started down the hill. But after ten paces he stopped impatiently and called back, “So what is it down there?”

Tom looked after him and in the same movement started walking the same way.

“Don’t know.” A few paces, and then he added, “Just something doesn’t make sense.”

Callum kicked at the heather and kept walking. “Like you make all the sense.”

It seemed they were walking back at the same time. Neither of them spoke again. Neither of them mentioned the flooding of the school.

They came through the hay barns, a dozen paces between them. The cows in the top shed lifted their heads and watched them go by. Karen’s face appeared in the kitchen window. Tom kept walking, towards the gate and End House.

Callum stamped in and straight upstairs, and turned on the hot water in the bathroom. He was blisteringly cold.

His phone, unknown to him, was in the dust behind the kitchen cupboard. It had silently received four messages.