Entity story · 4 min read · Set in Halloran Cross ·
Pavement Counts Backwards
A postbus driver whose van floods out on the last March run walks eleven dark kilometres home, accompanied the whole way at her own pace by something warm that means her nothing but good.
Ivy Callow had driven the Mere End postbus for nineteen years and had never once finished the route. The van went as far as the last farm gate, and past the gate the road went on without her, eleven kilometres of nothing that belonged to walkers, weather and Mrs. Ingham's sheep. People from the town expected her to say she dreaded those kilometres. She said instead that they were the honest part of the run, because nothing out there could be delivered to.
The night the fuel line flooded out — March, no relief transport until morning — she tied her scarf down and started walking. She had company for half a mile in the shape of an ewe that lost interest at the cattle grid. After that the road was hers alone, and she settled into the flat, empty pace that long lanes put you into. The pace where you stop thinking. She had always counted that a kind of rest.
The clicking began behind her left shoulder. Not hooves. More like someone pouring gravel in a held rhythm, one dry pulse at a time. She stopped. It stopped. She waited out a held breath and heard no second pair of footsteps at all — only, when she went on, the pouring again, at exactly her pace, a body's length off her shoulder and a little to the left.
She looked once. She has not looked since, and she says this felt less like fear than manners. A low rounded shape, sheepdog-high, wearing a coat made of the road: packed grey chippings, two dark flints set where eyes go, moving on four stub legs with a small dry music. When the wind turned, warmth came off it steadily, like a wall that had held the sun since teatime, and a smell of hot stone. She had a cold coming. The warmth was welcome. She has written that down herself, not to excuse anything but because she insists on it.
It walked her the whole way. At her gate it did not stop at the distance animals keep. It came up the last stretch, went past her to the verge beside her door and lay down there, stone settling on stone in one long sigh, and Ivy went in and lit the lamp and did not go back out. She has written that down too, called it good manners, and admitted she is less sure of the word every year.
By morning the verge was bare, with no tracks in the frost, and the lamp had burned itself out. Walking up to meet the relief van, she found it already short of where the schedule put the pickup. The driver overtook her sooner than he should have been able to, started a joke about the weather, and did not finish it.
The junction plate says eleven kilometres to Mere End. The county resurveyed after the Misprint and the same lane came out at eight. Ivy and her nephew Denis have been taping it since, season by season, with a wheel borrowed from the highways depot, and the figure keeps coming back lighter — a few metres at a time, always behind her, never ahead. Once, after a hard rain in the second April, she found instead a damp heap of ordinary stones lying by her gate, nothing in the heap she could swear she had not walked upon, and nothing the shovel would lift that looked like anything but verge-stone. The next fine night the pouring was back in the lane, pulse by pulse, patient. The wheel came back shorter that week. When the heavy rain comes again it will take the same walker apart, and by the night after, the road will be shorter for it.
Denis, who plots the shortened lanes on the ordnance sheet in his own ink, says they all lean one way — that the lost kilometres are not being lost but spent, end over end, toward somewhere. The trouble is agreeing where. His overlay puts it past one landmark. Ivy's hand-plotted sheet puts it past another. The 1962 survey, the only one anyone trusts, suggests a third. All three lie within a night's walk of her gate, and if you ask her which of them the road is bringing closer, she looks at you the way she looks at undeliverable addresses and says the maps do not agree — and then she goes in, and does not turn the lamp off for some time.