He offers me the ghost of a smile.
‘Then I never would have met you, would I?’ He puts his hand on my knee now, just for a fraction of a second and something in his expression makes me long to ask;
would that have been a cause for regret, Lawrence?
But I don’t ask.
I’m about to lean towards him, take his hand, say something, anything that will keep him here, capture us together in this moment where we’ve shared so many things, private things.
But then he stands up. I know he just wants to stop this thing that seems to be going on between us. He knows that I’m falling for him
… I’ve seen the way you look at me
… have I made it that pathetically obvious? I turn away, my heart aching because there is nothing I can do about how I feel and the worse thing is, up here, nowhere that I can go to hide it.
I have to look on the bright side. At least now I know for sure that he doesn’t have a girlfriend … trouble is, I think I just caught a glimpse as to what might be the reasons why.
While he goes off to have a wash, I line up the damper pieces of kindling wood that we dragged in before breakfast, push them up near the brazier so they have a chance to dry out before we need to use them later. I have to break some of the branches down into smaller pieces like he showed me. It’s a tedious job but I’m glad of something to do to distract me because my mind’s racing now, deeply troubled by some of the things he’s just revealed; his father who he ran away from, how he nearly got buried alive, how nobody even came looking. And does he really believe what he just told me about this place being the death of him?
I feel sick with worry at the thought of it. I really hope he didn’t mean that. I don’t like to believe that things in our life can be set in stone, that there are some things we have no way of avoiding. I like to believe we can make a difference. That it’s worth trying to. Mum believed in Fate though, didn’t she? After a lifetime of spouting all that stuff about ‘choices’, when push came to shove, she was as fatalistic as they come …
‘You could go and see the doctor like Dad keeps asking you to. Ever since you’ve come back from that camp you haven’t been right. What if it’s something that wild marshmallow roots aren’t going to fix like you think?’
With her eyes closed Mum couldn’t see me kicking the gold and royal blue clump of crocuses behind her with my foot. She couldn’t see that I was kicking the petal heads off them, sending them spinning wastefully to the ground. There, that’s what you get if you go round living too much with your eyes closed.
‘Going to see a proper doctor you could … you could maybe prolong your life.’
‘To everything its season,’ she quoted infuriatingly. She’d been home for three months now. I don’t think Dad really had a clue about how bad things had got with her. She wouldn’t see a medic so he wasn’t about to find out either. But I suspected, and I was pretty sure she did too. She maddened me, and that was the truth. She was all too quick to accept it. Too quick to say ‘it was how it was meant to be’, be at peace with it and all that crap
.
‘
Talking of seasons
,
I know what you’re after for your birthday, my love. I’ve spoken to Dad and it’s all been arranged.’
It had?
She said it as if what I’d wanted for my birthday even mattered anymore. She was dying. Me wanting to go on that school trip only seemed selfish now. It was true I’d longed to go on that skiing trip. And yet …all I ever really wanted from Mum was that she would try and be a little more normal. I’d wanted that trip because everyone else was going. I’d wanted it because it was what other people did with their holidays - not squat out in the mud. I’d looked at Mum painfully. Now all that I
l
onged for was that she might be well again, but it seemed all too late for that.
‘It’s all arranged?’ Could my parents really have gone to all the trouble of organising it so I could go on that skiing trip after all? And kept it quiet from me, too? It would have been a miracle if they had. Since she’d come back from the camp, pale as a woodland mushroom, sick as a dog, things hadn’t been going too smoothly at my house and her increasingly poor health had been the focus of all our thoughts.
‘People aren’t just like … like pots of yoghurt waiting in the fridge with a sell-by date, Mum. We have moved past the Middle Ages you know. You could prolong your season, if you chose.’
‘I can’t.’ She didn’t even open her eyes
;
I can still remember how that made me feel. She was way too happy sitting there in her bubble of light, basking in … whatever she basked in.
‘I can’t prolong the season, Rose. I know that you want me to
.
’
Mum’s voice floats back to me now, wavering like the heat floating up from the brazier.
‘I know that you’ve done your best my love. You’ve tried. But I can’t change the way things are going to be …’
Damn it, after what I had risked to get her back.
Didn’t she know
… didn’t she know
what I had risked?
‘I just
heard
something out there!’
I look up and Rose’s face looks white and pinched as she scuttles back through the door. She plonks herself down beside me, her eyes as wide as saucers. ‘It was something big,’ she adds. ‘Not just a bird or anything like that. I think…’ she lowers her voice to a hiss ‘…
there is somebody out there.’
‘It won’t be a person.’ I’m whittling down some branches I’ve hacked off the underskirts of a nearby conifer, keeping myself occupied. We’ve both been keeping ourselves occupied, one way or another, ever since that conversation earlier where we said things I don’t think either of us meant to say.
‘It won’t be, Rose.’ I hide the smile in my voice because I know she’d get mad if I suggested as much but let’s face it - she just went out to answer a call of nature and when you’re out in what feels like the silent wilderness with your pants down, it can be very easy to get spooked. Any little noise can sound like a monster coming to get you
.
She hesitates. She’s been a bit quiet ever since I opened up earlier and told her all those things about my past. I get the feeling she might be wishing now she’d never pressed me to tell her. Maybe that’s the thing that’s really making her uneasy? My story discomforted her, as well it might. And she doesn’t even know the half of it.
I’m already regretting now that I told her as much as I did. She’s a sweet girl. I like her. I really like her, I could go for her big time but it wouldn’t be fair. I don’t want her getting hurt, that’s all. She’s falling for me, that’s obvious. I know the signs. I’ve seen it happen often enough. I’m not convincing myself it’s because I’m an irresistible bloke. Women just tend to fall very easily for the men who rescue them. It happens all the time. It’s nature, I think. Only, you don’t usually get to see them for longer than an hour or so after the event and by the time they realise how irresistible they think you are, you’ve buggered off to do the next job and their nearest and dearest have come round and they remember they’ve got another life.
Rose hasn’t had a chance to reconnect with her real life yet, that’s all that’s happened. That’s why it’s been a little difficult here this afternoon. She’s been quiet, wrapped in her own thoughts, mulling around on what I told her but it’s important now that we get our focus back onto the matter of how we survive up here till the weather breaks.
I look towards the dwindling log pile and then take in the fading light behind her.
‘You left the door open,’ I point out but she doesn’t make any move to get up and close it. I know she thinks I should be taking her concerns more seriously.
‘We’re going to need to get some more wood in. The logs I brought in yesterday will last till this evening if we’re lucky. They won’t take us through the night,’ I put it to Rose, making idle conversation, but;
‘I
heard something out there
,’ she says again. ‘You’re not paying attention, Lawrence.’
‘You might have,’ I point out reasonably. ‘But if you’re being logical about it, what would it likely be?’ She shudders slightly, looks down into her lap.
‘I still need to go out there,’ she says in a small voice. ‘But I won’t go out again, not on my own. I can’t.’ Rose looks up at me shyly. ‘I need for you …’ she takes in a deep breath, ‘I need for you to come out with me.’
‘You want me to come out there with you and … hold your hand?’
‘Just be there.’ There’s a reluctant pleading in her voice. ‘Look the other way, of course. You don’t have to be too near me. In fact,’ she reconsiders. ‘You don’t have to be anywhere near me at all. You just have to be there.’
Jesus wept.
‘I’m expecting that phone call from Arjuna, don’t forget.’ I hope Arjuna hasn’t forgotten either. It’s way past two o’clock already. That’ll make it gone seven-thirty in Jaffna. He was supposed to ring at seven and I switched the phone on half an hour ago hoping for some news. It’s not a good sign that he didn’t make any progress yesterday. It’s already the 26
th
.
‘I haven’t forgotten,’ Rose says now. It’s costing her to ask me this, I realise. I shouldn’t make her beg. It’s dull out there and maybe a little spooky and she’ll be imagining she can hear things … but there won’t be anything there.
The truth is, right now I’ve got more urgent matters on my mind. While I’ve been sitting here ripping up the branches for tinder I’ve been working out the logistics of how I’m going to approach my mother as soon as the coast is clear; how I’m going to put it to her, bring her on board with it. She won’t be able to breathe a word to him indoors which I know she’ll find hard. She doesn’t like keeping secrets from my father. Does she?
‘Fine,’ I relent. ‘I’ll come and stand guard.’ I remove a lighted brand from the fire, brandishing it about like a sword the minute we come outside, onto the path I cleared earlier.
‘This’ll scare off any spooks and ghoulies that might be hanging around out here …’
‘Very funny.’ Rose pulls a face at me and we both look around as the firebrand throws long dark shadows against the decaying walls. The sky is so overcast, it’s darker than I thought. It’s stopped snowing for the moment but you can feel more is on its way, as if the sky has just taken a breath. The silence is so profound it’s unnerving.
‘See what I mean?’ she says. ‘You can’t
imagine
you hear something when … when there is nothing else at all to hear.’
She’s got a point, but … we both stand stock still for a minute, just listening. Nothing.
‘There isn’t anything out there, Rose. Most like, it was the snow falling off some branches you heard, further down the valley.’
‘It wasn’t snow falling,’ she says quietly. ‘It sounded like a living thing. That doesn’t sound the same as snow falling.’
To reassure her, I walk right out into the ruin, casting the torchlight all around me but there are no traces of any footprints other than our own ones from before. There is nothing. I was right, she was imagining it, yet a strange sense of discomfort is flooding through me, too. I have been up here so many times and yet this afternoon the landscape feels unfamiliar. Alien. I don’t recognise anything and nothing feels the same.
‘
What if it’s him
?’ she says in a small voice behind me now.
‘Him who?’ I spin round to look at her and she pulls a discomfited face. Who is she talking about?
‘That guy who the police are looking for,’
s
he says under her breath. ‘That guy on the news.’
I walk back to stand beside her, bend my face down so I can see her eyes properly. I take in a breath.
‘Who are the police looking for, Rose? I didn’t know the police were looking for anyone.’ Rose has been in contact with her cousin, though, hasn’t she? She’ll know what the local buzz is, even if I don’t. I lift her chin up with my fingers.
‘Who are they looking for?’
‘I don’t know who he is
.
’
S
he looks around as if worried that he might be here with us, as if he might jump out from behind one of the broken walls any minute. Then she looks at me, and her eyes are still wary, hooded and I can feel my pulse quickening.
Is she wondering if I might be that guy, now?
I hold up my hands self-effacingly, give a little laugh and she smiles back at me, a small smile because she is still afraid.
‘I’m going to go round the corner now, okay?’ she says. ‘Just there. Will you wait for me?’
I open up my arms; what am I doing out here, otherwise?
‘At your service, my lady. If you hear me talking to someone,’ I remind her as she disappears around the corner
.
‘That’ll be Arjuna.’ She doesn’t reply. On the outside, I am affecting calm, but on the inside I can’t keep my heart from thudding. Unlikely that it’s me they are after, I know,
I know this
, but the fear of discovery is always on the horizon. I shouldn’t have come back here, that’s the thing. Even coming up here, even risking getting this close, it was always going to be like walking into the lion’s den with the lion still in there.
‘If there’s anyone else,’ I yell into the echoing courtyard, ‘I’ll just…deal with them for you, okay?’ She’s gone. It’s two-thirty pm. It’s getting darker already, and cold, so cold I feel my lips will freeze on my face just standing here. I bash my hands together, button up my coat, and peer into the lowering sky. When I screw up my eyes hard enough, the clouds appear to be moving. Perhaps they
are
moving away? Could we possibly have seen the last of the snow for now? When I walk over to the edge of the battlements all the lights are on at Macrae Farm, the half-hidden shape of my father’s jeep is still on the drive. If it doesn’t snow tomorrow perhaps he’ll get the tractor out and carve a route for himself through the lanes and onto the main roads. Those must surely be getting cleared by now. Perhaps he’ll just … go? He must, I tell myself. If it stops snowing and he goes, I’ll get a chance to go in to Mum.
It also means the police will start taking a closer look at outlying areas they haven’t been able to reach up to now. Dad always had good links with the police force around these parts didn’t he? If they know something, maybe he knows it too? Even if it’s not me they’re after -
of course it won’t be me, nobody knows I’m here -
it’ll still raise awkward questions if I’m discovered up here. I mustn’t be found. I’ve got to do what I came to do and then go.
Marco wouldn’t have said anything to anyone, would he
? The thought is like a little needle of ice hitting my chest. He wouldn’t. He’s the only one who knew I was coming and he wouldn’t betray me, no way. It must be someone else they’re looking for, but still …
The sharp pain in my chest grows deeper and wider. For a minute I wonder if this is what a heart attack does to you. Or what a panic attack feels like. But it’s just the cold hitting my lungs.
Hurry up Rose.
I want to get out of here. I don’t want to stay out here too long. I’m going to have to come out here in a bit to take that call from Jaffna though, aren’t I? Arjuna had better have some news for me now I’ve waited all this time. He’d better have been pro-active, not sitting on his dumb arse waiting for ‘other people’ to get back to him.
Two thirty-five pm. That’ll be gone eight o’clock Jaffna time. Damn it. He isn’t going to phone. He’s forgotten. He’s gone off duty and got too busy with domestic things. He hasn’t heard from anyone. I cover my watch with the top of my gloves to stop myself looking at it anymore. It’s getting too late. I stamp my feet to keep the circulation going, keep moving, keep pushing that news Rose has just given me that the police are looking for someone, out of my head.
Think
. Lawrence, keep your mind on what you need to get out of this phone call, don’t let yourself get distracted.
I should have a pen to hand, I’m thinking. I dig into my duffle coat for a biro. I’ll have to write down any details he provides on my hands. Flight times and meeting times and names and numbers. If I can still move my hands by then, that is. Sod it
.
He’ll just have to text me.
What was it Rose just said she heard?