Explorer

by Anti-Consolatory Fiction, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The bungalow had been empty since March, and it had the cold that houses get when nobody has argued with the thermostat for a whole summer. It smelled of plug-in air freshener that had run dry, and under that of carpet. Neil Tranter stood in the hall with the nephew's email open on his phone. Skip the lot. Anything you can sell is yours. Keys back through the letterbox. The nephew was in Doha. He had attached a photograph of the front door, as if Neil might otherwise clear the wrong bungalow.

"Three-fifty," Neil said to the hall. "Plus what we can sell."

His sister Dawn had stayed in the van. She was having one of the days when the walk up a drive was a decision. She had the passenger seat tipped back and the heater running, and she was doing the crossword on her phone with the brightness turned down to nothing, as though the light itself cost her. Since the illness she had come out with him two or three days a week. She did the listings, the photographs, the phone calls to the man in Bridgnorth who bought old tools by the kilo. She said it was better than lying in her flat listening to the boiler. Neil thought it probably wasn't, but he let her come.

He worked through the rooms the way he always did, hardest first. Mrs Joan Bebb had lived alone for twenty-two years, according to the cards on the mantelpiece, and had kept everything in the condition of someone who expected to be inspected. Ercol chairs, the pale ones, which would go. A Hornby set in its boxes, which would go to a man in Wem who would complain about the boxes. A sideboard full of table linen that nobody would ever buy. In the bathroom cabinet there were nine tubes of the same denture fixative, bought one at a time and never thrown out. In the bedroom, a walking jacket on the back of the door, waxed, cracked along the shoulders, the pockets full of tissues and the stubs of pencils sharpened with a knife.

The loft hatch had a pole with a hook. He brought down the ladder and went up with the torch.

Most lofts are the same loft. Christmas decorations, a suitcase with a broken wheel, rolls of wallpaper that match a room that no longer exists. Mrs Bebb's had those, and it had a cardboard box that had once held reams of A4, and in the box were maps.

He knew what they were before he'd got the lid off. You could not do clearances in Shropshire without knowing the shape of an Ordnance Survey sheet in its folded cover. Everybody's dad had them. They came out of every house he did, in a drawer or a glovebox, the covers soft as cloth from handling. They sold for a pound if they sold at all.

There were thirty-one of them in the box. He counted them later, on the kitchen counter, because Dawn asked. The oldest was a one-inch sheet with a price in shillings on the back. Then the pink Landrangers, a long run of them, and the big orange Explorers that never folded back the way they came. They were all the same piece of country. Wellington, the Wrekin, the edge of the new town spreading on to the old map like damp.

They were all marked in the same place.

---

"Show me," Dawn said.

He had carried the box out to the van rather than make her come in. She brought the seat up and he opened the oldest map across the dashboard, over the steering wheel and on to her knees. It smelled of loft. The paper had gone the colour of weak tea along the folds.

Below the Wrekin, on the south-east side, the Little Wenlock side, there was a field. On the printed map it was nothing. A shape bounded by the thin black lines that meant hedge or fence, between a lane and a wood with the little lollipop symbols for broadleaf trees. Mrs Bebb had drawn round it in pencil. Not traced it: drawn it again, a little to one side of itself, so that the field she had drawn overlapped the field that was printed, like a bad register in a colour print. In the margin, in a small upright hand, a date in 1976, and the words gate moved.

The next map, a few years on, had the same field. The printed hedges had changed: one was gone, two fields had been knocked into one, which was what farmers had done everywhere then. And Mrs Bebb had drawn her own field again, in pencil, and it was the same as on the oldest map, except that it had moved, very slightly, further up the slope. Nearer, the margin said. Wet. Rooks.

On every map it was there. Thirty-one times, over forty-odd years. The printed landscape changed round it. A road was straightened. The wood shrank and then, in the last few Explorers, came back a little, a new planting drawn with a thin dotted outline, as if the Ordnance Survey wasn't sure of it yet. A line of pylons arrived and stayed. Through all of it Mrs Bebb had kept drawing her field. It crept up the hill. Its corners softened. The notes in the margin became shorter. Again. Closer. It knows the lane now. On a Landranger from the early nineties there was only a date and a single word, No, underlined twice, hard enough to tear the paper.

Dawn turned the maps over in her lap, one after another, holding each up to the windscreen. Her hands shook a little. They did that now, at the end of anything.

"It's the hedges," she said finally.

"What about them?"

"Look." She had the oldest map and one of the newest side by side, the one-inch and an Explorer. "On this one, from seventy-six. Where she's drawn her field. She's put a hedge along here, see, where there isn't one on the printed map. And here, a corner, coming off at a funny angle."

"So?"

"So they're on this one." She tapped the Explorer. "Printed. Proper. Look. This hedge wasn't there in seventy-six, and she drew it. Then thirty years later somebody planted it."

He looked. She was right, or nearly right. Nearly enough. On the oldest map, in pencil, a hedge ran along a line where, in 1976, the Ordnance Survey had seen nothing. On the newer map the same line was printed in black, a field boundary like any other.

"She went back and drew it in," he said. "On the old ones. Later. Once it was there."

"Maybe."

"She must have done."

"Maybe," Dawn said. She folded the one-inch map up along its old folds, which took her three tries, and held it in her lap with both hands on top of it like something that might get away.

---

They finished the bungalow on the Thursday. The Ercol went to a dealer in Ludlow for less than it was worth, the Hornby to the man in Wem, the linen to the hospice shop, the rest to the tip, where Neil knew the men on the gate and they let him use the trade bay without paying. The maps should have gone in the paper skip with the rest. That was the rule. Paper was nothing. Paper was weight.

They stayed in the van, under the passenger seat, in their A4 box.

On the Sunday Dawn rang him at nine, which was early for her.

"I've had a good night," she said. "I'm not going to have another one for a fortnight. Come and get me."

It was the end of September and the weather couldn't make up its mind. Big clouds came over the Wrekin from the west and dragged their shadows up one side of it and down the other. Neil drove out past Wellington and down the lanes on the south-east side, where the hedges were high and the verges had been flailed back to stalks, and Dawn sat with the newest Explorer open on her knees and told him where to turn. She was better at it than he was. She always had been. On holidays when they were children she had done the map in the back of their dad's Cortina, aged nine, while Neil was sick into a carrier bag.

"Here," she said. "Pull in."

There was a gateway. A metal gate, galvanised, tied shut with orange baler twine. A trough, a feeder, the brown mud of a place where animals stand. Beyond it a field going up towards the wood, ordinary, bitten short by sheep that were not now in it. The pylons went across the top corner, humming faintly in the damp. To the north-west, the Wrekin stood up out of everything, the way it does, too big for where it is.

Neil got out. He had the oldest map in his hand. The wind tried to take it off him and he folded it small, so it showed only the square he wanted.

"Is this it?"

"That's the gate," Dawn said through the open window. "That's her gate. Gate moved. They've moved it since. It was over there, I think." She pointed along the hedge to a place where the hawthorn was thinner and newer. "I'll stop here."

"You sure?"

"I'll be on the gate," she said. "If I'm on the gate I'm out, aren't I?"

She got out slowly, one hand on the van, and went the six steps to the gate and leaned on it with her forearms along the top bar, the way their dad used to lean on gates, as if he were thinking of buying the field. Neil climbed over further along, where the bottom bar was bent.

---

He had imagined, if he had imagined anything, that he would walk Mrs Bebb's pencil line and find nothing, and that this would be the end of it. That was mostly what happened.

He started at the gate and went up the field along the line of the new hedge, the one she had drawn in 1976. It was a real hedge, hawthorn and hazel, thirty years old perhaps, nothing special. The ground was rough with tussocks and he went over on his ankle twice. Rooks were going up and down out of the wood like burnt paper over a bonfire. When he reached the place where Mrs Bebb's field turned its corner, the funny angle Dawn had pointed out, he stopped and unfolded the map again and looked at the hedge and looked at the map.

The hedge turned. It turned at the angle she had drawn. That was all.

He went on, along the next side of her field, the side that ran across the slope. Here there was no hedge, on the printed map or on the ground. Her pencil line went straight across open grass. He walked it as well as he could, counting his paces against the scale bar like a boy doing an orienteering badge. Seventy, eighty. Wet grass came through his trainers. A sheep track crossed his path and went off into the distance, the way sheep tracks do, with total confidence.

At a hundred and ten paces the ground under him changed.

It was not much. It was the kind of thing you would feel if you were walking at night and stepped off a path on to turf: a softness, a slight give, a different sound under the foot. He looked down. It was the same grass. He looked back. Dawn was a small figure on the gate, her pale jacket, her forearms on the bar. She raised one hand.

He went on, and the field felt — he never found a better word for it — the wrong size. Not bigger, not smaller. Mis-measured, as if the distances in it had been done by someone using a different kind of pace. The Wrekin was closer than it should have been. He knew it was a mile and a half off, more. It stood over the top of the wood as if it were leaning on the trees. He could see the mast on the summit and a single figure moving up there, against the cloud, very clear. It seemed impossible he could see a person at that distance, and he could see them, the colour of their coat, red.

Everything smelled of rain that hadn't come yet. There was a sound he took for the pylons, then knew wasn't, a thin continuous note like someone running a wet finger round the rim of a glass, very far off, or very close and very small.

He thought: she came here thirty-one times. She came here every time they printed a new map. She bought it in the shop in Wellington, or in Shrewsbury, and drove out and stood on this line with it, with her knife-sharpened pencils. He thought of the walking jacket on the back of the bedroom door. The tissues in the pocket. He thought: it moved, and she followed it up the hill. Or she moved, and it stayed where it was. He could not tell which, and it seemed to him for a moment that there was no difference.

It knows the lane now.

He looked at the map in his hand to find where the next corner should be. The wind had got into it and was riffling the edge. When he looked up again the field had stopped being the wrong size.

It was a field. Rough grazing, rushes in the low bit, a few thistles the sheep wouldn't touch. The Wrekin was where it always was, a long way off, its top in cloud now so that there was no mast and no red coat and no way of saying whether there ever had been. The pylons hummed. Fat drops of rain began to come down, few and far apart, darkening the map where they hit it, then all together.

He stood there anyway for a while, in case.

---

Dawn was still on the gate. She had her hood up. She watched him come down the field, and he could tell from the way she was holding herself that the good day was nearly spent. In an hour she would be grey. Tomorrow she wouldn't be able to lift the kettle.

"You were walking funny," she said.

"I went over on my ankle."

"Before that." She didn't look at him. She was looking up the field, at the hundred and ten paces. "You were walking like there was something along there. Along the side of you. Like a wall, or a hedge. You kept your arm in."

"There's nothing there."

"No," she said.

He helped her back to the van. She got her legs in with both hands, one and then the other, as though they belonged to someone she was looking after. He turned the heater up all the way and they sat with the windows streaming and the engine running, the A4 box at her feet.

"Did you see someone on the top?" he said. "On the Wrekin. Red coat."

Dawn thought about it. "You can't see people on the top from here," she said. "It's miles."

"No."

"I saw you," she said. "Halfway up. You stopped for ages. I thought you'd seen a dead sheep or something." She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the window. "You looked happy," she said, as if this were a symptom. "I don't know. You looked like Dad when he got the car going."

---

The maps stayed in the van. October came in, and with it the usual run of people dying in the autumn, and the bungalows and the semis and the one big damp farmhouse at Rodington with a stuffed otter in every room. He did the clearances. He sold what he could sell. Dawn came out less. She had a bad month and then a less bad one, and some days she rang him to tell him what she had seen on television, and some days she didn't ring.

He told himself he would put the maps in the paper skip at the tip. He went through the gate there three times with them under the seat.

At the end of the month he was in Shrewsbury for a probate valuation and found himself in the bookshop, in front of the rack of orange Explorers, with the sheet in his hand. There was a newer edition than the newest of Mrs Bebb's; it said so on the back, in small print. He opened it on the counter while the girl was ringing it up and found the field below the Wrekin. The printed lines were the same as on her last one, except that along the open side, the side with no hedge, the hundred and ten paces, there was now a short dotted line. It could have meant anything. It looked like a boundary nobody was sure of yet.

"Is that all right?" said the girl. "Do you want a bag?"

"No," he said. "Thanks."

He drove out to the lane that afternoon. The gate had a new length of baler twine on it, blue this time. The field was empty. The cloud was down on the Wrekin to the trees, and the light was going early, the way it does once the clocks have gone back, so that by four o'clock everything was the colour of an old map. He stood at the gate. He had one of Mrs Bebb's pencils in his coat pocket. He had sharpened it himself, with the knife he used for cutting tape, and the point was rough and uneven.

He opened the new map across the top bar of the gate, holding it down against the wind with his forearm, the way Dawn had leaned there. He looked up the field for a long time. Then he licked the end of the pencil, though there was no reason to, and in the margin, in small upright letters that were not quite his own, he wrote the date.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Fictiōnis Sōlācium Recūsantis per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Anti-Consolatory Fiction, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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