As sure as there’s sap in the trees, I can feel something viscous and destructive moving through me

I’d haul myself out of bed and stagger through the cold house in my candlewick dressing gown, hearing the sound of a kitchen chair being dragged across the flagstones. I’d go in and he’d be up balancing on the damned thing with the cupboard doors swinging open, stripping them bare of ingredients. How big everything looked in his small hands: white parcels of sugar, glass jars of sultanas and tubs of cherries.

The flour in a vast enamel bin on the dresser. The flour came from the mill.

Arthur loved it when we ran out of flour. He would pester and pester, and I would huff and puff, and say: “Come on then, as if I’ve nothing better to do.”

And we would walk, hand in hand, down the drive and across the road and along the track, with the dogs going mad about the place and the grass soaking our shoes.

My mind would be on my marking, or my latest funding application, or the chapter I was trying to write.

Arthur’s nose would be turned up to the sky, watching out for buzzards, or listening for woodpeckers.

Dreamer

Sometimes a blackbird with white feathers in its wings would appear by the mill door.

Arthur was a dreamer back then. I don’t know if he much cares for it now.

Halfway down the lane you’d hear it – the deep, throaty rumble of the millstones, the steady dunk and splash of the wheel.

The boy would start to run, flying through the open door of the mill, into the dark, dusty interior to find his father.

I cannot see the inside of the old place now without seeing Jim, sitting on a sack, sharpening this tool or that, wiping things down with an oily rag.

There was a quietness in Jim back then, an acceptance.

He was a countryman, old before his time. Steady. I thought he’d always be like that.

I thought in 20 years the mill would still be rumbling and Jim would still be sitting there, on a sack, sharpening this tool or that.

I was wrong.

The flour, newly milled, would be all powdery and still smelling of the fields. We’d bring the flour up to the house in a tiny sack kept especially for Arthur.

No wonder the boy grew up to be a family baker. A family baker without a family.

That familiar urge drives me from my chair. This is the story’s fault.

This is why I cannot settle, why my heart struggles to find the right rhythm, and I feel sick to my stomach.

The story has a mill in it, and the mill calls to me from the page, calls to me in real life, real time.

On mornings like this it pulls me from my chair. My pen rolls to the floor. The notebook flutters shut.

I walk the familiar route, heedless, leaving the front door standing open and the dogs, whining, penned in the kitchen.

I try not to visit the mill too often. I don’t like the way the door sticks on the stone threshold.

You have to turn the huge rusty key in the lock and shove it with your shoulder until it finally gives and scrapes across the floor.

Destructive

The noise tears at my insides. That’s why I have a pain in my arm, no doubt.

I shouldn’t be shouldering old doors at my age, not with the aches and pains I have – arms, chest, jaw – that could well be the symptoms of an imminent heart attack.

It’s this place getting into my bones. As sure as there’s sap in the trees, I can feel something viscous and destructive moving through me.

But here I am, with the big key in my fist. There are cobwebs clinging to the plank door, reminding me I haven’t been here in a while.

I try to tell myself I’m just here to air the place, to throw open some shutters, maybe disturb the dust with the old besom broom.

Arthur used to call it my witch’s broom. The village kids all wanted to borrow it at Halloween.

But that was before the accident.

Nobody wants to come here now.

The interior is as grey and gloomy as the inside of a flour sack.

The floor, the whitewashed walls, the oak beams – all wan and listless, as if nothing has moved here in a hundred years.

As if the great wheel has never cranked into life, the millstones never turned.

The mice have fled. The cat is dead.

The blackbird with the white feathers has long since gone. The building is lifeless, and I’m glad.

I head straight to the back wall, to throw open the shutters on the long window.

To my right, the two great sets of millstones sit and slumber.

To my left, narrow wooden stairs lead down to the basement.

Through the window I can see the old bridge. The grime on the windowpane acts like a filter; the outside looks greener than it is, and it cheers me somewhat.

The trees are bare but starting to bud. Spring is on its way. The days will be longer, fresher.

I will have survived another winter.

I open the window a crack and the fresh scent of water hits me.

I crave it, sucking it in, letting my ribcage swell around it. Breathe. In, out; in, out.

Only then, when I am in control, am I brave enough to turn and face the mill.

Lucie

I’m huddled in my bathrobe on the bench outside the back door.

It’s too early in the morning, and when I light up a cigarette the smoke blooms in the air like frosty breath.

Smoking is one of the many things I’ve always done in secret. My mother hates it.

From my perch, I can see nothing but a mess of damp, tumbled greenery.

My heart is skipping around painfully, while the rest of me is numb.

Reuben moved into the manse just a year after he and Jane first met.

They wanted to save money for their own flat. A wedding, or at least an engagement, was assumed. He had his own room, of course, it being the manse.

My bedroom was between his and Jane’s, so perhaps it was only me who heard the creaking of the floorboards late at night, closely followed, if I listened really hard, by the creaking of Jane’s mattress.

I would lie in my own bed and fume.

How could our mother not realise what was going on under her sleeping nose?

It made me cranky in the mornings.

More tomorrow.