Authors: Sam Baker
‘It was like being put in a box. How you end up in there is the biggest trick. Maybe you think it’s a treasure box at first. You’re in there because you’re special. Soon the box starts to shrink. Every time you touch the edges there’s an “argument”. So you try to make yourself fit. You curl up, become smaller, quieter, remove the excessive, offensive parts of your personality. You begin to notice lots of these. You eliminate people and interests, change your behaviour. But still the box gets smaller. You think it’s your fault. You don’t realise that the box is shrinking, or who is making it smaller. You don’t understand that you will never, ever be tiny enough to fit …’
Helen paused, tears leaking down the side of her face and into her hair. She didn’t bother to wipe them away. Being lonely was hard enough. Realising just how long you’d been lonely was worse.
‘Art said we had a fierce I-feel-like-I’ve-known-you-all-my-life affair. No one had felt like us before. We were different, unique, a team. I wanted to believe it. I told Caroline we were different, once. She fired up her laptop and talked me through a flow chart of the abuse cycle. It turned out we weren’t different at all.
‘Art’s jealousy ate into everything. Most of my friends, my real friends – and I admit I didn’t have many to start with – dropped away. The slightest thing would trigger Art’s fury. One night we went to dinner with his new boss. The guy considered himself a serious amateur photographer and grilled me about cameras. I didn’t know what to do. If I held forth, Art would accuse me of dominating the conversation. If I didn’t, he’d say I was rude and showed him up. So I said as little as I could and still be polite. Yet, when we got home I got the “team” lecture and a lesson …’ Helen took a deep breath, hoping Gil wouldn’t ask what that particular lesson involved.
‘Next morning, Art was hurt at what I’d made him do and I had to convince him we were OK
, a team.
As I always did. By the time we got to Paris, my days simply became about working out what it was safe to say.’
Gil nodded, discomfort evident in his eyes.
‘Climbed this once,’ he said suddenly, leaping to his feet.
Looking at the side of the Scar, Helen tried to imagine it.
‘I was thirteen,’ he said. ‘We came out on a school trip and it seemed like a good idea. Showing off, I guess. Proving just because I read books didn’t mean I was afraid. The teacher was at the bottom, shouting at me to come back. I was too terrified to do anything but keep going.’
‘It’s the looking down that kills you,’ she said.
Gil put out his hand to pull her up. To her surprise, she took it. ‘Sometimes in life you have to look down,’ Gil’s face was earnest. ‘But it’s better not to do it if you’re hanging by one hand from a rock.’
He looked at her and Helen knew another question was coming.
‘Did you kill him?’
‘I don’t know,’ Helen said. ‘I honestly don’t. I think I must have.’
Halfway up the mild grass slope, Gil looked back, raising his eyebrows to see her right behind him. What would happen when the grass ended and the rock began was anyone’s guess. Gil’s done this before, Helen reminded herself. She wasn’t so old or scared she couldn’t match what had already been done by a thirteen-year-old boy. Not any more. Whether a sixty-year-old man could pull it off again was another matter.
As Gil stopped to get his breath Helen pushed past, stepping up on to a grey rock, reaching for a handhold above and pulling herself up.
‘Helen, wait …’
She didn’t.
Having found a second foothold, she reached again and pulled, feet scrabbling for a footing she couldn’t seem to find. One foot turning almost sideways to balance on an inch-wide ledge as she reached up again, clinging to the cliff with two hands and barely one foot. Anyone would have thought she had something to prove.
‘Just do it,’ she told herself, as she’d been telling herself for years, in the rare gap when her self reappeared. Just leave, move out, tell him it’s over.
Just do it.
They’d loved each other at first. At least, Helen thought they must have. Maybe she’d simply liked the idea of him, his charisma and easy charm, his way with people when he wanted something. Maybe she’d simply been lonely with only her camera for company, and everyone settling down and having babies around her.
He’d certainly said he loved her. Art loved her so much he could hardly bear for them to be apart. He wanted her always; he wanted to be with her always; he hated it when they were apart. Especially when her job was the cause of the parting.
‘How could you be so gullible?’ Helen muttered, clinging to the cliff edge, unable to go forward or back.
But that’s all you were. You weren’t frigid, you weren’t stupid, you weren’t useless, you weren’t a whore. You wouldn’t have fallen to pieces the moment you left. You really didn’t need to be grateful he bothered with you at all.
By the time he’d finished all she had left was her ability with a camera. He couldn’t take away the one thing she had that other people didn’t.
The Helen Lawrence touch.
Photography was an art of observation. When she looked through a lens she saw the world as only she saw it for that second. He hated that, she realised now. Too late, far too late to do anything about it. It was one of the reasons he’d taken her apart, piece by piece, systematically hacking pieces from her soul, trying to snuff out her light. By the time he’d finished, she’d believed him when he told her everything he did was her fault. Art stripped everything from her except the thing he wanted to take more than anything.
What she’d rediscovered by coming to Wildfell.
When she picked up a camera she was her again.
‘Are you all right?’ Gil was behind her, uncomfortably close.
Helen lurched dangerously and clutched at a rock above. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, forcing herself to breathe as she found a handhold that dug deep into her fingers. Ignoring the pain, she dragged herself up, kicking her foot into a gap that was barely there and reaching for a better handhold, pulling herself higher.
‘Sorry I made you jump. Thought you were stuck.’
‘For a while I was,’ she said. ‘I’m not any more.’
Gil grunted and Helen could hear him behind her, his breath laboured and his brogues showering the grass below with gravel as their leather soles scrabbled for purchase. ‘This was a bloody stupid idea,’ he said. In his voice there was amusement and pride, and a hint of resignation. Maybe he’d expected her to argue him out of the climb. He certainly hadn’t expected her to join in.
For a moment Helen let herself look down; wished she hadn’t.
Look, Ma. No hands.
Except then she’d be down there, instead of clinging for dear life to sun-warmed rock that smelled slightly acrid as it pressed against her face. There were tiny weeds dug into the cracks of the Scar. Her fingers crushed them and they sprang back up. Helen wracked her brain. Something was wrong. Not about the climb. The climb was wonderful. She was used to the amnesia, the blackouts and fog, they’d been there ever since Iraq. But this was different.
This was a black hole.
Smoke … sourness … chemical burning, stinging her eyes. Rolling out of bed, brain so foggy it almost defeated her. The shock of landing barely waking her before vomit splattered across tiles …
Suddenly the memory was there, just a flicker, but more than before.
Migraine, she thought, her gaze sliding out towards the Dales. But the colours were true. No migraine. Not this time. This was different.
Arms and legs barely finding the strength to drag herself through the blazing living room … somehow reaching up to find a door handle … flinging herself through on to the cold stone landing beyond … leaving Art’s body to the flames behind her …
‘
Helen
…’
‘Just getting my breath.’
‘You’re almost there. Look above you.’
The edge of the Scar was a couple of handholds away. The rock face was not so steep here and she dragged herself on to a slope that lessened as her foot found a hold and raised her on to more level ground. Collapsing on her back, Helen stared at the sky, gulping in big breaths. Below her she could hear Gil’s ragged breathing.
‘You need to move,’ he gasped.
Rolling over, as she’d rolled over to roll off that bed, she made space for him. He dragged himself on to the rough grass beside her and then, obviously deciding he was still too close to the edge, crawled over her, and collapsed on the far side.
‘That was stupid. You trying to kill me too?’
He was joking, she thought.
‘There was a body.’
Gil rolled on to his side to look at her. His face suddenly serious. ‘You don’t mean just now …? No, you don’t. Where did you see it?’
‘In the flat. I was there, Gil. I should have told you sooner, but I wasn’t certain until now.
‘It was Art. I’m almost sure of it.’
Gil rested his head on his arm and let the tension go out of his body, his face smoothed and at least a decade dropped away. When he spoke his words were careful, his voice neutral. ‘Of course it was Art.’ He looked slightly shame-faced. ‘I’ve checked the reports,’ he said. ‘Well, some of them. They’re doing DNA tests, but they seem pretty sure it’s him.’
He hesitated. ‘They’re looking for you, you know.’
Helen nodded.
‘You really were telling the truth when you said you didn’t go online?’ Gil asked.
‘I did for a while. I set up a VPN so that if the police had filters set to capture anyone showing excessive interest in the case it looked like I was in America.’
‘That’s possible?’
She smiled. ‘Yes, Gil, it’s possible. Anyway, then I went to London. I had to. I had to see Caroline …’ Helen hesitated. ‘It was a huge mistake. I haven’t really felt safe since, so I stopped using it. I know he’s dead, the police say he’s dead, the papers say he’s dead. I saw the body. But ever since I got back, I can’t shake the feeling I’m being watched.’
She told him about the birdwatcher and a flash of concern crossed his face.
‘Journalist?’ he suggested. ‘Private investigator?’
‘Could be.’
‘What will you do?’ Gil asked. ‘I mean, long term.’
Helen shrugged, clambered to her feet. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘You catch your breath. I’m going to take some photographs. Then we need to think of a way to get down.’ She looked at the flat slab of rock under her feet, a ruined liner in the yellow-brown sea of gorse and grass around them. It felt so solid that she stamped, imagining the sound waves travelling almost forever.
‘Everyone does that.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘Some places are more real than others. I’ve never been anywhere more real than this. Have you ever read Alan Garner?’
Helen looked blank.
‘You should. He writes about places like this. Children’s books, supposedly. For very sophisticated children. He’d have a field day with the cave systems under the Scar. Miles and miles of twisting tunnels and shafts. Used to play in them when I was a lad.’
He grinned at her. ‘Pre health and safety, naturally. Most of them are shut off now. They’re unsafe. Limestone’s like that. Though I don’t doubt a person could get lost in there if they really wanted to.’
She gave an involuntary shudder.
‘Don’t worry about getting down. The nearest path’s over there. It’s not that steep.’
‘Now you tell me.’
‘Which would you rather have done? Walked the path or climbed the cliff? I’ll wait here while you take your photographs. Then tell me again about the body. I want to know everything you can remember. No matter how insignificant.’
Opening her mouth to say something, Helen stopped.
‘Go on,’ Gil said.
‘All I know is there was a fire and I saw Art’s body. But I don’t know what I was doing there. I’d moved out of the flat. I hadn’t been back since Syria. I swore I’d never go back. I know my track record isn’t great on that. So it’s possible I’m as stupid as Art said. But I’m pretty sure even I couldn’t both go to sleep and set fire to the flat. Not even a flat I’m meant to have set fire to twice.’
Gil’s suit jacket was sodden by the time he reached the General Stores next morning. Another sleepless night full of images of Helen, Art, and the dead child had left him ragged and in need of nicotine and coffee. Nothing else would have persuaded him into the lion’s den. Just as he pushed at the door, it burst open from within, its ancient bell clanging overhead. Clutching at the frame, Gil narrowly avoiding being mown down by a tourist.
‘’Scuse me, mate.’ His sarcasm was wasted.
The man grunted from inside the hood of his navy cagoule and barged past with two plastic bags. No walking sticks though, Gil noticed. Mind you, who could blame him? It wasn’t exactly walking weather. Bracing himself for a tirade about tourists’ manners, with a side order of meaningful looks and leading questions, Gil pushed his way inside.
To his relief there was no sign of Margaret Millward.
The young woman behind the counter smiled sympathetically as Gil wiped rain from his face. When had he turned into the kind of man that pretty shop assistants could smile at with no danger of either of them misunderstanding the smile? Truth was, he’d probably been that man for decades. Was that why Helen Lawrence seemed so relaxed with him?
It was an uncomfortable thought, and Gil dismissed it. Smiled again at the girl as she handed him his paper. He had a feeling he’d known her mother. Then realised, with a lurch, seeing exactly how young she was beneath her make-up, that it might have been her grandmother. Glancing at the paper, he almost handed it back and chose another simply to prove he wasn’t that predictable. Only, he was. Here he was, sodden wet in the General Stores, buying a paper that mostly contained news he’d read already online, for no reason other than that he always bought it.
His had been the glory days. Fleet Street as Fleet Street, strong local papers with strong local views. He knew he was lucky. He knew things changed. Gil simply didn’t feel he was sufficiently old to be taking it this hard. Handing the girl the exact change – how sad was that? – he wiped more rain from his scalp, smiled his goodbye and pushed his way back through the squeaking door into the rain. Unscathed by gossip for the first time in days.