Falling For You (46 page)

‘Gone to have a bath,’ he observes. ‘You look a bit cold, too. My daughter didn’t ask you in?’ I give a non-committal shrug. I glance through the window and I wonder; has this man had enough air yet?

‘Sir, I’m sorry but... I’ve got to go, okay?’

‘She wasn’t at Shona’s, was she?’ He puts in unexpectedly and when I turn to look at him again I get the strangest sense of déjà vu. It’s his eyes - they’re like her eyes, aren’t they? Like hers. I didn’t expect them to be. I never saw his eyes last time our paths met. If I had… if I’d only looked him in the eye, things would have worked out very differently.

I turn away, not wanting to see his eyes; take in the frayed edges of his off-white bedroom curtains instead, the worn tread-marks on his carpet. I don’t want to see that, either. Dilapidated, that’s the best way to describe it. I’d imagined Rose as living in a beautifully-kept house, somehow; clean and modern and wholesome. Maybe Clare Farm was like that, once? This place looks so sad, worn-out. Is this what I’ve brought them to?

‘Look, I really need to be getting on...’ I turn to close his window but he stops me.

‘Not yet. Please, just a little longer.’ I can hear the pleading in his voice and it stops me in my tracks. He can’t get many visitors up here, I imagine. ‘When the wind comes from the right direction you can smell the sea from here if you take in a lungful of it.’ He breathes in again, so deeply I wonder if he wishes I could smell it through his nostrils, as if he could make me feel it through his own experience.

‘I know,’ I say. I know how the air up here can sometimes smell of the salt-sea breeze. ‘When the wind blows in strong enough it can bend back all the stalks of wild grass so far it’s like a giant hand sweeping over the top of the field. I used to love watching it do that… ‘

‘You used to,’ he picks up.

‘I used to.’

‘You’re from around these parts, then?’

‘I was, once.
’

‘You know my daughter?’ he gets in softly now. I shake my head. Then I nod. I do know her.

‘I haven’t known her long,’ I admit. 

‘You seem to have made quite an impression for such a short acquaintance, if you pardon my saying so.’

‘I’m not quite sure what you mean, sir.’

‘The way she looked at you when you two were together on the lane. I was watching, through the window, you see. I like to watch the blackbirds come and scramble for the remains of the toast.’ He points out of the window and I see what he must have seen, his viewpoint; ‘I saw you two…’ he makes a motion with his hands, as if to say -
I saw you two part
.  ‘You have feelings for each other, don’t you?’

I give a strangled laugh. What can I say?
Don’t get your hopes up!
I’m a non-committal kind of guy, that’s what I should say to him, throw him off the scent, but I don’t. Now that I’m here, something in me wants to keep on having this conversation.  I have no place here, no place at all in this family’s affairs and yet here I am, feeling as involved as a thread that’s been woven deep into the pattern of their lives. I
am
involved. She wanted him to know just how much. Because she thinks that will help him.  I’m still looking for the courage...

‘Am I right?’ He looks at me openly, asks me man to man. ‘Does she care for you?’

‘She cares about
you,
’ I tell him now. ‘She’s … she’s told me all about you,’ I carry on talking, even though I can hear footsteps, downstairs. There are other people in the house, I have to remember that.

‘She cares about me and I’m all she’s got left but …’
H
e gives me a significant look. ‘The things that matter change, don’t they?’

‘Sir?’

‘She’s cross at me right now …’
H
e lowers his voice conspiratorially, ‘because I won’t agree to leave here to go and try some new-fangled experimental therapy in the States. My brother’s been trying to persuade me to go. And now her.’

‘Could it... could it help?’ I take in this new information with a growing sense of wonder. There is something that might help him? Something that could wash away all the badness I brought into his life?

He opens his hands in a ‘who knows?’ gesture.

‘Do they think it might?’

‘I’d have to be assessed for suitability but... they
hope
,’ he says wryly.

‘And you?’

‘I don’t know. It
might.
But I can’t go unless I sell this place. And I won’t sell this place while I live. Won’t give them …’
H
e indicates with his head up towards my father’s farm
.
‘
T
he satisfaction. I promised Isla I’d never let those trees be torn down. Rose thinks I’m just a stubborn old fool and the truth is, I think she could be right. My daughter needs to move on and … I need to move on too.’ He gives me a sad smile. ‘Trouble is, I don’t have much to move on to, do I? Forgive me,’ He says, suddenly self-conscious, ‘I shouldn’t burden you. You can see I don’t get many people to talk to up here…’

‘You could move on to a life with better health?’ I feel a surge of hope rising in me at the thought of it. ‘You’ve got to try, haven’t you? For both your sakes.’

For my sake, too..
.

‘Maybe… I am just too old now.’ His voice suddenly sags in the middle. ‘And too scared.’

‘I know you are scared. She told me,’ I look directly at him, ‘About how it was after you got hurt. How you still have nightmares over it …’ Rose’s father is looking at me so closely I get a sudden shock to my system. Does he know me? Christ.

 ‘What’s your name?’ he demands suddenly.

‘Lawrence.’

‘Speak up, young man
.
’
H
e indicates his ears.

‘
Lawrence
.’

He smiles. ‘Thank you for bringing my daughter home safely to me, Lawrence. Thank you,’ his voice cracks, ‘For bringing her home.’ He’s been so worried about her, I can feel it in his voice. Because he loves her so much and he feels he can’t protect her anymore.

‘Sir, I know what happened to you that night …’ I swallow, realising that I am about to go somewhere maybe I shouldn’t go at all. But she’s right; he’s got to know that he doesn’t need to be scared anymore. ‘I just need you to know that Rose is safe, now. That you’re both safe. No one is going to hurt you …’

He’s silent now, taking me in. Then;

‘Would you indulge an old man for a moment, Lawrence? Answer me one question?’

‘Sure.’ I swallow.

Is there any reason you know of in particular why I should
hate
you, Lawrence?’

‘Why you should hate me?’ The question sends a series of shock waves surging through my system. This innocent-seeming, harmless old man - why has he asked me this? What does he know? And ... what could he possibly do about it? ‘I like to play reggae music very loud,’ I say stupidly. ‘I love dogs. Especially very large, noisy dogs. I hate cats. I love fast, flashy motorbikes but I can’t currently afford to buy one. I have just lost my job …’ I look at him wildly.
Are these all reasons why you might hate someone
?

‘I don’t …’
M
y words are tumbling out, one on top of the other, jumbled, unstructured as a house of cards when it all comes crashing down. ‘I don’t get on very well with my own father. I … I don’t like him very much, sir. In fact, I can’t stand him.’ We are coming to it, aren’t we? Slowly, like a prairie dog circling a wounded deer we are coming to it. ‘He’s a bad man.’
He and me both
. ‘As a consequence of that, I haven't seen my own family in years.’ I stop, feeling my whole body trembling, hearing my own heart thudding in my chest. I am young and strong and he is old and weak, but if he learns the truth now, I know the tables will be turned and he will have the power to take me down.  

‘For how many years?’ he asks softly.

‘Five years.’

‘Five,’ he says and I think I can see water beginning to gather behind his eyes. ‘
Five years
.’ And the unimaginable truth is starting to dawn.  Something about him seems to shrink in now and he goes very silent.

‘I try my best to be an honourable man,’ I continue unsteadily, my voice perceptibly slowing down, ‘but I haven’t always done the right thing. On occasion,’ I croak, ‘I have done some very bad things.’

The silence between us now becomes thick and gloopy. It feels like the darkness in the air when I’d take Kahn out on a chill autumn night and there’d be the smell of decaying leaves, an unwholesomeness, as if the earth were calling everything that was stagnant back to herself…

I bend down now, kneel beside his chair,

 ‘Bad things. Including one thing for which - yes, I believe you would have every reason to hate me.’ He blinks, saying nothing, but I see a solitary tear roll down one weathered cheek. For a moment, his hand moves, flutters in his lap, but the rest of him seems immobilised and I feel a stab of pain at my own handiwork.
I never meant to do this to you.
The sight of that tear rolling down his face catches at my heart and I feel the swell of water behind my own eyes now, a burning at the back of my throat
. I never meant to hurt you.

I lay my hands over his.

He stiffens, and when he takes in a small breath now his whole frame feels shocked and so very fragile.

‘What did you do, Lawrence?’ he says. I feel his hands, thin and weak as they are, turn surprisingly quickly to catch hold of my own in his lap.  And I want to run; like I have never wanted something so much in all this life.

But I won’t.

Not until I tell this man something that I should have told him years ago. 

‘Sir,’ I lean down and look into her father’s eyes, ‘there’s something I need to say to you ...’

‘My name is Jack,’ he tells me unexpectedly. I didn’t know his name. This man, whose life I ruined, he has a name. It brings a lump to my throat. He has a name and he has a loving daughter and he likes to smell the sea breeze and feel the wind on his face. …

‘Rose has told me about you, Jack. How you’re a good, family man. A loving father. She told me a little about her mother, too, how it all turned out that you were up there at Macrae Farm that night, how you got injured, trying to get that land back. She told me that you never knew why it happened. How that’s affected you deeply…’

I know why it happened though. It happened because I made a mistake. It happened because the man who lives next door to you is a psychopath and five years ago I was young enough and foolhardy enough to think that I could stop him. I take in a breath and go for it.

‘Look, it was never you who was the intended victim of that attack. You need to know that. That bit was a mistake. The police - they never found … they never caught up with ...’
M
y voice catches in my throat, ‘but I know,
I promise you
…he’s never been a free man since the day of that attack either. Just like you.’

His fingers close almost imperceptibly tighter around mine now, his eyes close for a brief second but when they open they are directly on my face.

‘
You
, Lawrence?’ he says. I stare at him for a moment. Then I look down, a brief nod. I cannot bring myself to say the words. I don’t have to say the words. I hear that small strange sound now, at the back of his throat, and there is no mistaking that
he knows
. He knows who I am. He knows what I did.

It’s going to happen now. Any minute now, it’ll all come crashing down, it dawns on me. This whole fragile life that I have created for myself; this life in which I am someone good, someone who does the right thing by others; this life where I am not someone who is hated for who I am and for the one thing in my life I have done that I regret beyond all else ...

‘
You
?’   He says again, and I am back in the space where I told her the truth, disappeared almost to nothing, shrunken to almost a dot on a page, waiting for his howl of anger, waiting for the scream of fear and shock to reverberate right through the house that I have come right into his private space, disturbed the sanctity of his home like this but he doesn’t sound angry. He sounds, instead, so
sad
.

He sounds so full of disappointment. I can’t understand it. This isn’t what I expected his reaction to be. The truth is, this feels much worse.

‘You
are the man who did this to me?’ I can’t lift my eyes to his. I can’t. My eyes are glued only to his legs, his stick-thin legs that someone has wrapped so lovingly in a red chequered blanket.

 ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you
.
’
M
y throat and nose are full of phlegm, so bunged up now I can barely breathe, let alone get out the words. ‘I
meant ...
’ I close my eyes, hard, wanting to stop whatever it is that’s happening in my chest and my belly. ‘I meant to hurt
him
.  To teach him a lesson. Only him. Not you. I thought you
were
him.’

‘Your father?’ His hand on mine feels so strangely warm. His hand is like a little bird’s foot, warm like a pigeon which once landed on my hand, a little thing, so fragile and trusting. ‘You thought I was him. You wanted to hurt
him?
’   

‘Rob Macrae.’ I bring myself to look sideways at him now. I feel the tears that have wet my face without my even noticing. ‘Your enemy. Mine. My father. I wanted to...’

I can’t say it.

At the mention of my father’s name his fingers lift slightly on my hand. He makes no other movement but I know, I can
feel
him, making connections in his mind when I tell him that.  So many connections, they fly around like leaves in a dust-bowl. Who I am. What I am. What we are to each other. And then me... what I suddenly appear to be to her, his daughter, that’s there too, all whirling around in the mix. 

‘So. Rob Macrae is your father,’ he says. When I look into his eyes - so like her eyes - I am waiting to see the gates go down, now that the truth is out.  For all those hundred-and-one ready-made assumptions about the person I must be, to slot into place. I am a Macrae. I am the thug who hurt him. What more does this man need to know about me? What more do I need to say?

‘And yet ...’ he says hesitantly, ‘my daughter loves you?’

And you. Enough to want to bring us together
, I think. If this man could walk, he’d get up and leave this room right now I am sure of it. If only it were possible for him to do so, he’d move away from this unfamiliar and difficult place, he wouldn’t stay here. Not in this place, where his truth is being challenged so uncomfortably, this place that should not exist; where the currents of two opposing rivers converge, run confluent with each other.

‘She
loves
you,’ he says again, and I can hear the bewilderment in his voice, the upset. Because by all rights, such a thing should not be possible - should it? For a while there, he’d been prepared to love me too, I know it.

‘I don’t ask your forgiveness.’ My words sound so strange. I can hear this whooshing sound in my ears and the whole room seems suddenly a little darker, a little yellower. Now the entire household outside of this room, all the sounds I have been so acutely aware of up to this moment, all the little noises I’ve felt so keenly they could have been my own heartbeat, every breath, every movement... they’ve all gone quiet, I can’t hear them anymore. No ticking of the radiator. No footsteps moving about on the creaking floorboards, no sounds of water rushing away down household drains, no more cracking as the ice on the roof starts to shift and melt, no hushed voices. No breath. Only now... through the partially-opened window, I can hear the raindrops pattering outside, I can hear them spitting and sizzling on the snow. I don’t ask for his forgiveness. Right now my whole body has gone numb. The only part of me I can really feel is the part where he’s still holding my hand. It’s the only part that’s still got a pulse, I don’t know where the rest of me has gone.

What would it take for him to forgive me, anyway?

An eye for an eye? A prison sentence?     

‘I know I... have never lost the proper use of my legs.’ I wipe my face again. ‘I never got sent down. But there are so many ways in which a man can be imprisoned. Right now…’ I glance uneasily towards his door, because I know our time alone in here together is nearly up.  The voices coming from the hallway - female voices - are slightly raised now, tense. I can’t hear what they are saying but the household is on the move, I sense this much.

‘Right now I’ve got my nemesis coming to me. Does it help you to know that, Jack?’

‘Your nemesis,’ he repeats softly and his eyes are pained, full of an unexpected concern for me that haunts me, humbles me. ‘What shape would that take, Lawrence?’

He presses my fingers when I don’t answer.

‘She cares for you,’ he says, and I can hear the edge of his voice shaking. ‘You matter to Rose. I know that much. And... she matters to me, too.’ He says feelingly. ‘She brought you here?’

‘Yes, sir.’ My mouth feels dry, like a lizard’s mouth in the desert sun. He considers this for a long time. The fact that she brought me. The fact that I have come. The minutes - they could be mere moments, but they tick by so slowly they feel like hours. He can’t get up and walk out but he could call out to his family and they’d soon come running in, I think now. They would get me well away from him. He doesn’t have to stay here and listen to this. He doesn’t have to stay... 

‘Does she know what else you are planning... your
nemesis
?’ he comes back after a long while.

I shake my head, slowly.

‘She asked me to come back here. We didn’t discuss anything further.’‘  

‘No?’ His eyebrows raise a fraction and I see a host of conflicting things surge up in his eyes now. Understanding, that I want to somehow put things right. Concern,
fear
, that I mean to go back. Curiosity. Compassion.  I see all these things, the colours of them merging and pulling apart into separate thoughts in his mind while he considers what’s best to do next.

 ‘What will your father do to you?’ he asks me at last and for some strange reason it does not feel out of place for him to ask it. Still, I feel a little surprised - honoured even - that he cares. My hand, still in his, feels comforted and warm. How strange this is. How unexpected. I do not want to move it.

‘He’ll kill me, probably.’ I let out a humourless laugh.

‘Don’t go, then,’ he says simply.  The edges of his eyes are crinkled up in an unexpected sadness for me. ‘You didn’t mean to do this to me, did you?’ There’s a new strength in his voice now - a strength in
him
- that I didn’t suspect would be there. ‘I won’t derive any satisfaction from you getting yourself hurt, Lawrence.’ 

I shake my head now. I don’t want to get myself hurt. That isn’t why I need to go.

‘I have to go. I do not want to do it. But I need to face him, Jack.’ I didn’t know till this moment that I still had to do that, but I see now that I do. I see now that my reasons for coming home were way more complex than my desperate need to find a sponsor for Sunny. ‘All you need to know…’ I lean a little close to his chair, ‘from the bottom of my heart, is that I have never stopped paying for what I did to you that night, Jack Clare. And I am truly sorry.’

‘Lawrence,’ he shakes his head, regretful, as I straighten now. In a minute I am going to make my way back out through that fire-door. I want to go before Rose comes in and stops me. I want to go before anything
else
happens to stop me. They’re going to take me in, now. I know this. They’re going to catch up with me and then I’ll never get the chance to face my father - do what I never did five years back; what I should have done then.

‘All
you
need to know,’ he gives my hand one last squeeze before I let his go, ‘... is that the only person left who needs to forgive you now, is yourself.’