The trees parted above me and the tarmac gave out. The ground was warmer here and gritty, smothered with dirt and twigs. I was nearing the mill-race. The sound of rushing water overlaid every other sound. Where crumbling brick embankments canalised the river, turning it past what was now the front door, a wooden railing guarded the drop. I laid my mother’s body down in the dark and pulled the socks and shoes from her feet. The flagstones were slippery under me as I tugged the body alongside the balustrade, to where water spilt over the weir.

A light beside the porch snapped on. I wheeled round, dazzled, and stared at the glossy black door of the mill house. The lion’s head knocker. The little glass eye of its spy-hole. Had my movements triggered the light – or had someone turned it on from inside the house?

I pulled my mother by the arm. The arm gave slowly, turning and articulating like machinery. I let go and it stayed in the air, pointing back at me at an unnatural angle. I crawled around her and sat down and got my feet against her and pushed her underneath the balustrade. The uprights of the balustrade were close together and she was too tall to simply slip between them. I pressed my foot into her stomach. The air remaining in her lungs escaped and the bag around her head inflated like a balloon. The plastic sticking to her eyeball peeled away. The black pebble disappeared. The bag misted, saving me from the sight of her face as she fell through the balustrade. The rushing waters masked all other sounds. I barely heard her hit the water.

The porch-light went off. After all, it was only a security light. I stood up and the light came on again. I put my shoes and socks back on, gritting my teeth in concentration.

A new plan was forming in my head. Up till now I had only been concerned with getting the body out of the boot. Mum’s eventual discovery was something I had been prepared to leave to chance. Now I realised that this too could be managed. There was a way I could tie everything up tonight, and I would not even have to tell a lie, or not much of a lie. What could be more natural than for me to run back now to the pub, breathless, staring, haunted, close to tears? I would tell my dad I had seen Mum – spotted her on my shortcut home. That Mum was floating in the river. Dad would follow me down the track, over the bridge, along the bank of the river – and there she would be. Together we would find her, and terrible as this would be, it would be better, unimaginably better, than what would have happened if I had not intervened.

I leaned over the parapet. I could just about make her out – a pale shape, rotating slowly in the middle dark.

I’d forgotten to take the plastic bag off her head.

I closed my eyes, trying to work this out. I wanted her body found, of course. The sooner the better. But with the bag over her head? Who puts a bag over their head before jumping in a river?

I was going to have to find her and take off the bag.

The bridge was fenced off to stop sheep wandering off the common. I was half-way over the stile when I heard:

Click-clack.

I froze.

Click-clack.

I knew this sound.

The porch-light went out. (Click-clack.) I waited, my eyes adjusting little by little to the dark. I heard nothing more beyond the race of the water. I saw nothing at all. Even my mother had disappeared. No white shape blurred the millpond’s soot-black surface. She had been carried downstream.

I climbed off the stile.

Click-clack.

I was being watched.

I waved my arms. I was out of the range of the porch-light, but even in the dark:

Click-clack.

There was a soldier out there, watching me. My movement was enough to trigger his visual vest! I tried to find my voice, but no sound came. I hunted the darkness for a halo of white hair, but all I saw were the ghost limbs of distant trees.

I moved forward.

This time there was nothing. Perhaps it was too dark here for the soldier’s vest to respond to my movements.

I climbed off the footbridge. I strained my ears. If he were moving, then I would surely hear him, vest or no vest. I could see the pattern of bushes and trees now, the river bank, the fence line – enough to know I was alone here. Unless, of course, he was hiding from me.

I clambered along the edge of the race, clinging to the stiff woody stems of the rhododendron bushes, and hurried bent-backed along the river bank, hiding from shadows. Away from the sound of the millrace there was nothing to hear, unless you counted, just at the threshold of hearing, the low arterial thrum of the bypass on the other side of the valley.

I ran along the river bank, all the way to Michel’s circle of fridges. Try as I might, I saw no pale shape – no white-haired soldier; and no pale body either, spinning in the river’s dark. I had in the end to abandon my search for her. All the way home, along the track the soldiers used sometimes, I slouched, defending myself against a blow, an assault, a confrontation. It never came.

I had not imagined the sound. In the end, though, I had to concede that the sound was not proof of anyone’s presence, let alone the presence of a blindsighted soldier. Heard over the sound of the millrace, well, that ‘click-clack’ sound could have been anything. The catch of a gate rattling in the wind.

More strange – though I had no room to deal with it at the time – was the disappearance of Mum’s body.

THE SHAMAN

The opening passages to The Shaman, Michel’s first novel, go something like this.

A subtle current bears Cole inland, over flooded levels, past the comically bloated corpses of drowned cattle. Rushes grow up to tickle the branches of dying trees. The new coastline rises incrementally above this shallow sea: an unreliable medium, a waterland where men and livestock founder and blue lights flicker mysteriously in the hours before morning. Inland, axes ring out as the locals, obeying a long-suppressed folk-memory, chop wood for boats of shallow draught and, salivating, eye the skies for teal, widgeon and wintering geese.

Cole is an old man now, perhaps the oldest in the village, his long life earned through guile and a fertile imagination, but he has grown weary of the land, weary of the tales he tells and all the claims which he exerts there. Discontented, he makes for the open ocean, seeking renewal, perhaps – or extinction. But he is, after all, just a dotty old man, the genius of his own place but a fool beyond it, and the sea wall, long since submerged by the rise of the world’s oceans, presents an absolute barrier to his ambitions. No way can his keel-less and homemade raft negotiate the surf that wall kicks up.

So the urge to flee dies in him, as it has died so many times before, and Cole contents himself with a wet and exhilarating attempt to explore the ruins there. The waves will not allow him to get close, and every so often the foamy break threatens to overturn his craft, but Cole persists (it is his chief quality), filling in with his imagination what will not reveal itself to his eye.

Of the houses that were ranged along the sea wall, only stumps of masonry remain to cut the surface at ebb tide. Under the sea’s merciless action, these stumps are falling away very fast – faster than the seaweed and the limpets can colonise them. There is something proud about their ruin, as though they would sooner be extinguished than be subsumed into an age to which they do not belong.

Time is getting on. Cole steers away from the wall, toward lagoon-smooth inner waters and his first acts of daily ritual. Adaptability is his great strength; his only virtue. The old world dies. The old man lives.

Away from the churn thrown up by the submerged wall, Cole throws out his primitive sea anchor – a wicker dog basket, attached by its handle to a length of plastic clothes line – and waits patiently for the bell to sound. Cole understands, better than most, the flow of waters round these parts, and comes to this spot once, sometimes twice a day to hear the church bell in its squat and flooded tower not far beneath the waves. The changing tide sets it ringing, three times, sometimes four. Once, at full moon he heard it sound a dozen times, and trembled, expecting a marvel. A big wave. A flood. A great bubble of marsh-gas. Nothing very surprising happened. The tide was higher than usual, flooding his nephew’s pig pen. In the next village, a two-headed calf was born. But that’s foreigners for you.