The Wolf Border(17)

I have a winner. Five-hundred and eighty-nine dollars and twenty-five cents from the Greer High School charity drive. Go Roosters!

So the game continues. Some days this is as good as it gets, transforming the prejudices of the next generation. Hearts and minds won by Kyle’s high-school ‘Paw-Talks’, by the eager T-shirted volunteers who steward busloads of children round the visitors’ centre and clear up after their picnics, and by her, the hours spent in the makeshift lab, considering serotonin and keeping the anger down, though it rises like indigestion.

She likes the routine. The stove burning through cords of wood and the walls of the cabin creaking and clicking as they warm. A young black bear – not hibernating – demolishes the communal bins. On nights when the road is clear they go to Sammy’s, or The Red Barn, or Big Sky Shack, play pool and drink beer, listen to eighties music. The weekly special: venison burger, venison stew, Ma’s Trapper Loaf. They receive Canadian footage of the pack and upload new photographs onto the website. There’s a debate on the website forum about using numbers rather than names. A debate on the forum about the definition of animal intelligence. New portraits of the centre workers are taken, too: Kyle, laconic, his dark eyebrows shadowing his dark eyes. Rachel, actually smiling. Oran, grinning and woollen hatted, looking like a West Coast stoner, which he is. She continues to avoid Oran. It has not lasted with the volunteer, who is sniffling while she works and being comforted by her co-worker. Twice he knocks on her cabin door late at night. She ignores him.

Late in the month the centre receives another report from the Canadians. Caribou numbers are down: the pack has split to become more effective. The radio signal shows them a hundred miles apart. Christmas arrives. She receives a luxurious card from Annerdale, the paper glossy and gold embossed, and an invitation to join the Earl for drinks at the hall on the morning of the 25th, if she is back in Cumbria for the holiday. On the day itself, while the others are preparing the communal meal, she phones Willowbrook. 10 p.m. GMT. Binny sounds tired, congested, and out of sorts. Lawrence has been there most of the day with Emily, who has no doubt rubbed their mother up the wrong way.

We could Skype, Binny says. Dora has it on her computer.

I don’t have a camera on mine, Rachel says.

Can’t you click it or whatever you do? You’re not working today, are you?

No. Day off.

Though she has been rereading her chapter. Binny coughs, coughs again, the phlegm thick-sounding. Finally she clears her throat.

Have you rung Lawrence?

I was just about to.

Ring your brother.

I was just about to.

Ring him.

At the New Year’s party they put tin lanterns up in the office and push the tables against the wall. Rock music hammers from the stereo. She dances with Kyle. She dances with Oran. The volunteers are a couple. There is nothing else for them to do, especially at night. A few friends from town and from the Reservation join the festivities. Kyle’s brother, who came to the last two New Year’s parties, has been sentenced to nine years. White brandy has been brought in from someone’s still, a lethal demi-john. It is eye-wateringly strong, tastes of Vaseline and sour apples, and burns all the way down. Oran is smoking hydroponic weed, heating knives on the hot plate of the boiler. They party hard, one of dozens of groups lost in the woods, getting industrially f*cked up. She dances with Kyle again. He does not usually dance. They dance slowly, their closeness unfamiliar, disarming; she thinks, Shouldn’t I know? The brandy is cut with something else maybe, will crystallise her brain or send her blind; she doesn’t care. It strips sense and inhibition. The back of his shirt is damp. She can feel the slow ride of his back. Midwinter’s Law of Misrule. He says something into her hair. The question is unfathomable, or wasn’t a question. Her hands, when she stares at them, are like dead birds on his shoulders. So what, she thinks. Soon everything will end, even the stars. OK, she says, OK. OK.

Midway through the act she loses concentration or realises the mistake. They begin to move out of unison. They change position – her on top. It does not work. It becomes ridiculous. Slap, slap. Nothing feels right. They stop. Sorry. The failure is humiliating. She kneels and goes down on him, but the sensation of her mouth is too light, or he is impartial, or alcohol has killed their nerves. He pulls her up and kisses her, but she leans away. He turns her round and on her side, takes hold of her hip, locks her neck inside his elbow, which is better. His movements are enormous, too strong, going on until she might break, the chaos of bedding, the bed trying to shift across the floor. Then it is over. Wetness like blood slopping inside. Fumes of liquor and sweat linger in the room.

When he is unconscious she leaves to go back to her own cabin, through the stiff iced branches. No sound, no wind, the year is too stunned to begin properly. The stars are nailed tight, holding up the enormous black sky. The air is immaculate, too difficult to breathe. She stops and kneels and vomits, acid washing up her throat, her nose and eyes stinging. She feels raw. Under her hands, the ground radiates cold. She lets it creep up through her bones, like an infection. Impossible to think of seasons now, of summer’s spontaneous brush fires, grass so aspirated the reflection from a parked car’s mirror could ignite it. Her hands begin to ache. After a while she stands and walks on through the white branches.

The following morning there is a phone call from England – the manager of Willowbrook. The line is faint; Rachel is not properly awake. Her head blooms with pain, terrible and frontal. Her mouth tastes evil. The conversation begins murkily – a message from Binny, or something about Binny. In the end the hangover acts as prophylactic for the shock, when everything finally becomes clear. Binny has taken an overdose of aspirin and Amlodipine. She was taken to hospital in Kendal as soon as she was found. She was listed as a DNR. They worked on her until the seizures became too much for her heart. He is sorry to break the bad news, he says. Perhaps he could call back later when she has had a chance to absorb the news? Rachel thanks him. She hangs up. She sits for a moment, in the quiet of the cabin, then looks up her brother’s number and dials it. She does not expect him to answer but he does.