The Wolf Border

She tracks through the papers and the blogs – there is a huge public outcry over the dead wolf; the picture is being widely circulated. So like the English, Rachel thinks: object, ignore, and then, late in the day, after a tragedy, rally.

Please don’t, Rachel. Don’t. I’ll be no good around a baby. I don’t want to fuck that up, too. Please don’t make me. She does not understand. Only later will she understand.

Rachel misses the funeral. She does not send a wreath. She does not supply words of remembrance for the service. Communication has ceased between her and Lawrence, that is to say, between her and Emily, who has assumed control of the proceedings, and after a huge argument on the phone about duty and emotional incapacity, excludes her. She is now fu

They continue on, into the mountains, sedately, like some kind of royal procession, the diplomatic arrival of a crowned couple. And it is historic, she thinks. It’s five hundred years since their extermination on the island. They are a distant memory, a mythical thing. Britain has altered radically, as has her iconography of wilderness, her totems.

She does not take her mother’s hand. Instead she finds herself repeating a line she read once, in a poem, in a book on a shelf in a house where she spent no more than a few illicit hours. Everything tends towards iron.

She would like to believe there will be a place, again, where the streetlights end and wilderness begins. The wolf border. And if this is where it has to begin in England, she thinks, this rich, disqualifying plot, with its private sponsorship and antiquated hierarchy, so be it. The ends justify the means.

When she woke, there was a sense of powerlessness, of it all being over. The Annerdale pack. The cottage in the woods. She got up, brushed her teeth, and sat on the bed, watching the sun rise and the rain on the lake, feeling the light of day translate notions of what is right and wrong – or expand those notions.

Its head lowers: eyes level again, keen as gold, sorrowless. Then it releases its extraordinary jaw. Inside is a lustre of sharpness, white crescents, ridges, black pleated lips. A long, spooling tongue. In her brain an evolutionary signal fires. What a mouth like that means.

She attempts a joke, about whose turn it is to refill the office coffee pot – who is the wife? He does not respond to the banter as he ordinarily would, but fixes her with a look, patient, undefended. And it is this that convinces her there is something more, something very real underneath the silence. The unspeakable is always louder than declarat