Oh so ill. I didn’t kill Mike. Didn’t stab him or shoot him or put arsenic in his favourite leek and potato soup or chop his nomadic penis and testicles off. Don’t think that. But maybe I did kill him. It feels better now I write it. It was yonks ago now, and yonks after we broke up. I didn’t find out until a couple of weeks after it happened, from Beth. She was all that was left by then, our only connection. She was the one who told me not to go out with him, then she ended up closer friends with him than she was with me. She thought I should know, in case I heard elsewhere. There was nothing about it in the newspapers but I might have found out online anyhow, she said. It was in Scotland. The top left bit. A boat. A storm. Him and his mates, fishing. Only one of the four of them survived. It didn’t touch me for a while but I tracked it back and the dates matched up. That was the night: the night I wished him dead. But I don’t really wish anyone dead. Resentment. They say it’s like drinking poison then waiting for someone else to die. Only in this case it worked. I was angry: Mum was close to the end then, things were bad, I was in some other reality without hope, was thinking back to where it went wrong, held him responsible, but I didn’t mean it. But that was the night I did it. Down in the cottage, the place before here, right in the village, sleeping in the loft room, with the view of the tor, and the pony poo on top. This rain is reminding me. That was the exact night he must have died. Maybe the exact moment. I worked it out. It was raining then too. Next day without any idea of what I’d done I walked up to the pool – the deep one. Seven miles there, seven miles back. I let myself jump. I hit the surface and let the momentum take me as far under as it needed to. I was under for barely any time at all but while I was I felt I was somewhere else: somewhere where nothing was anything any more. Somewhere darker than any night, any dream. I came up into the sunlight and the sunlight felt like something you could suddenly eat and I ate it, gulped it down without chewing it the prescribed seventy-two times, or even chewing it one time. I swam against the current, my front crawl just strong enough to defeat it and get back to the rocks on the bank. I didn’t jump again. This rain is reminding me. It’s so… everything. Maybe it wouldn’t seem so fierce if the house was double glazed. There are eight reservoirs on the moor, all built between 1867 and 1972 as the expanding villages and towns below them demanded cleaner water. When the water is low, you see the remains of sunken farmsteads and clapper bridges and Bronze Age villages. When they made one, they drowned an entire farm. How could you do that? Did cows and sheep die? I hope cows and sheep didn’t die. But more cows have died since then. Ever such a bloody lot of cows. Have I ever thought about that. Oh god, the water, the drips. Is the wall going to come down again? I know what’s happening outside, all the rivers, filling up. They’re all getting high. One is being a thug out back of the Co-op, hissing and swearing at the locals. Down under the bridge, near the dual carriageway, another is taking some drugs it found floating in a bag. All the water is coming, and this is the end point. It’s rushing down the lane, right at me. The rain couldn’t be louder if I was in a tent. The power in the house is going on and off every two minutes. I can hear Reka. The song. I didn’t even know she was in. She’s playing the song. The wind is up – I think it’s coming through a gap in the wall – and it’s harmonising with her. I remember now. I heard it up there, before. On the moor. There was the house that was high off the lane, with a door in the garden wall. I think I heard it once, behind the door. I don’t know. It might have just been a dream. Everything’s mixed up now and my stomach is burning. I want it to dry out. Everything is wet. It won’t dry out. The walls won’t dry out. My skin won’t dry out. There’s a folk tale from there, near that bit of the moor. The pixy – an ugly tiny man – comes to the nurse’s house and asks her to deliver his wife’s baby. They go on a horse, very fast, to his wife, who is very beautiful, and when the baby is born, he asks the nurse to put ointment on its eyes. When the pixies are not looking, she tries some of her ointment on one of her own eyes. Suddenly the pixy and his children are even uglier than before, but the wife is even more beautiful. The next week, at the market, she sees him stealing things, and asks how his wife and baby is. ‘You can see me?’ he asks. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘but only with this eye.’ And he strikes her in the eye and blinds her with his sharp fingernails. I am lucky the shingles aren’t in my eye. Edith Boyland and her boring dog told me her aunt Agnes got them on the left side of her face and lost her sight in that eye. But, Jézus Krisztus, it hurts, especially at night, and I don’t know what is a dream. Last night I dreamt Reka stood over me with the doll and didn’t say anything and I asked her to come and be beside me but she just stood, staring. When I am better, we can leave here, me and Reka. We will go somewhere dry. We will bring the bees, we can even bring the doll if she wants. But what if the bees can’t come. What about the spiders. Will they be OK after we have gone. And what about the cows, everywhere. We can go and have our own cow, at least be nice to our own cow; selfish but that’s all you can do, be nice to your own cow, because if you think about all the cows you go crazy. It will sit down when it’s about to rain. That’s what they do, they’re always sitting down here. I like the noise of them when they move slowly and heavily through grass on a hot day. It’s a lovely calming sound, unique to them, impossible to replicate by anything that isn’t a cow. That will happen again. It will be spring again, and it will be dry again, this skin will be dry again, after the Baby Jesus has brought our presents and it is a new year and everything turns over. I just have to be patient. But right now, I admit it, Kath. I am tired, and I am not OK. Are you happy now, Kath? Can you finally shut the fuck up? The power is going on and off, every two minutes.