Authors: Sam Baker
Reading this lot wouldn’t take long. An hour at most, and that was stretching it. He’d never been so aware of time crawling as he was now. Never had enough hours in the day before this; always hurtling somewhere, always promising to be somewhere he wasn’t, always late, always letting someone down. Not any more. He’d tried taking the kitchen clock from the wall. The ticking bugged him, that and the fact Jan had bought it, like most things in the house. But it left a dark ring of dust round a faded yellow circle and he couldn’t be bothered to repaint the wall, so he’d ended up putting it back. The little hand on the ten and the big hand on the one.
Five past ten.
Ten oh five.
Ten a.m. and five minutes.
Six minutes now.
One hour and fifty-four minutes until The Bull opened.
‘Looking smart today, Gil – hot date, is it?’
Gil gave his suit the obligatory glance, shrugged as if surprised to find himself wearing it, and forced a grin. ‘You never know,’ he told the landlord. ‘Ready for anything, me.’
‘Usual, is it?’ Without waiting for the answer, Ray turned to reach for a pint jug. It wasn’t a question. Any more than the comment on Gil’s suit had been. Dark blue, pinstripe, the suit was one of three Gil wore in rotation. Always had done. He’d contemplated casual the day after he got his all-singing, all-dancing bloody Timex; contemplated it for about three and a half seconds and still couldn’t believe it took that long. Gil was a suit man and always had been. He looked like someone’s dad in a pair of jeans, and those chino things were worse. He’d decided right there and then he’d be buried in one of his suits; and there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could do about it because suits were all he owned. Let them laugh, propping up the bar in their Pringle jumpers.
It was the same every day. The suit, the gag, the pint of Sam Smith’s.
Gil forced himself to relax. This was life now.
Assuming he wasn’t about to take an old geezer’s gap year, and he wasn’t. Gap years were for kids who didn’t know better and rich pensioners, ditto, and people who liked their adventures carefully orchestrated. Gil was none of those. There was always golf … If he had a tenner for every time one of this crowd suggested he join them at the nineteenth he could afford to take that gap year. That said, hell would freeze over before he was the proud owner of a V-neck sweater and a five iron. Time to get used to it.
Put up or shut up.
The Bull was filling up. It was a nice enough pub, not a bad place to call your local, not bad at all. A picturesque pub in a picturesque village on the edge of the picturesque Dales. It had enough oak beams to make for a pretty postcard and Ray wasn’t above a few horse brasses, if that’s what the tourists wanted. He also wasn’t above sticking a few pence on the price if he didn’t recognise you. What the incomers didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.
There was brisk trade in B&B and bar snacks. Looking round, Gil could see a fair few strangers now. The usual mix of sightseers stopping off for a pub lunch on their way to or from the abbey and walkers on their way to see the Scar or on their way back from it. Then there were ‘the regulars’. The lunchtime regulars differed from the evening ones. They were older, for a start; retired locals with or without ‘the missus’. Gil knew them by sight. Some of them he knew better than that. When Jan was still around he’d been to their houses; the obligatory dinner parties, anniversary celebrations, alcohol-fuelled New Year’s Eves, when he hadn’t been able to wangle a late shift. All that stopped when Jan left him. Whether they’d stopped inviting him or whether he’d just stopped bothering to go without her to bully him, he wasn’t sure. A bit of both, probably.
Gil took his pint, his suit and his paperback – Rankin today, only one more to go and he’d be done with Rebus and have to find a new curmudgeon to spend his days with – to an armchair in the corner, as far away from tourists as possible. Through the rain-streaked window, he could see his usual table, standing empty in the corner of the courtyard; wood sodden, fag butts swimming, he was sure, in the brewery ashtray put there by Ray in a futile attempt to stop Gil grinding his stubs out on the cobbles. Far enough away from others not to have to make small talk, close enough for people watching.
He caught himself: usual table.
Christ on a bike, he’d be getting a hobby next.
She didn’t sleep that night, not really. Nor the next. Each night passing broken and jumpy, pitched on the very edge of the promise of sleep until a moaning joist or yawning floorboard dragged her back from welcome darkness just as she threatened to slide over. The yelp of a fox or whatever other animals haunted the Dales, the scraping of a branch and the scrabbling of tiny rodent claws in the rooms above her head, made her start and turn uneasily, neither fully awake nor asleep. On the plus side, no sleep meant no nightmares.
Sometime in the middle of the third night – or was it the fourth? Helen had lost all track of time – the rain eventually stopped. Perversely, when it did, she was finally napping, caving to exhaustion in the neither-one-thing-nor-the-other hours before dawn. The first she knew was when she emerged from an uneasy doze to a cracked ceiling moulding flushed pink through a triangle in the curtains. The jaundiced light of the previous mornings ousted by its healthier outdoorsy younger cousin. From the leaf-stuffed gutters outside her window the occasional drip of water on to stone slabs below. Nothing more.
She’d never bought that red sky in the morning shepherd’s warning business. Waking to a pink-tinged sky always gave Helen hope and, in spite of everything, today was no different. Within seconds she was up, floral quilt kicked to the floor, rotting curtains thrown wide, the Dales blushing under her gaze.
Suddenly, she had to be outside. There was something freeing about slipping into trainers and turning your back on everything. Optimism surged through her as she rifled in the carrier bags that still contained her new running kit. Without stopping to think, without checking the time, she ripped carelessly at the tags that swung from her new running bra, cheap knee tights and wicking top, and slid her feet into the trainers, wishing she hadn’t forgotten to get socks, and grabbed the door keys from the floor beside the bed where she’d left them after her final midnight tour of the house.
In less than a minute Helen was out of the house and halfway down the gravel drive, not so much as a backward glance when the door crashed to, rebounded and then clicked shut behind her. At the end of the drive, she turned left, away from the village, and ran squinting into the low sun. The road was quiet, not even the distant growl of traffic. She was used to running on urban roads, with no real protection from the traffic, but even here, in this relatively remote part of the country, she didn’t fancy meeting a lorry head-on. It was half a mile before she came to a gap in the drystone wall that would let her into the rocky fields. Clambering over the stile, Helen felt her knee complain. She hadn’t run for more than a week and she hadn’t stretched properly, or at all, before she left Wildfell.
‘Serves me right,’ Helen thought as she felt the muscles in her calves tighten and a familiar burning begin at the front of her thighs. So what if the fresh air bit at her still-sore lungs? Ignoring the aches, she ploughed on, something remote and forgotten flickering to life inside her, the hint of a smile playing on her face.
These new aches were her aches. No one else put them there.
Despite the early sun, the air was chill, freezing the sweat on her shoulders and spine. The sky hung low overhead, but the horizon promised a bright day and the stony fields were drier underfoot than she’d expected; the air cleaner and clearer than any she’d breathed for a long time. Maybe it was the break in the weather, or the surge of euphoria that often came with the departure of a migraine. Maybe it was simply the exercise, the sense of purpose and structure that running always gave. Whatever, her optimism wouldn’t be suppressed.
Don’t get carried away, Helen told herself. Things that were easily given were just as easily taken away. It was only a sunrise, after all. One pretty sunrise meant nothing.
For an hour, Helen ran. Slightly unsteady, at first, then gaining confidence, she kept the sun in her sights so she could turn her back on it to find her way home. It wasn’t an easy run, the fields far from smooth, but she’d done tougher. Strangely, the rockiness helped; as she ran, increasing her strides to keep pace with the landscape, her thoughts were reduced to nothing but the ache in her muscles, the pumping of her lungs, where to place her feet and how to navigate boulders and rocks without losing pace. You can do this, said the endorphins seeping into her bloodstream.
You can do this.
Her calves and thighs now burned in earnest. Her punishment for failing to warm up properly would be harsh, but there was no point stopping to stretch now. Sweat marbled the top that had claimed it would wick sweat away and her newly dyed hair was plastered to her forehead. Putting her hand up, Helen was relieved to see the sweat came away clear.
It was only when the road was far to one side and she felt confident she was alone – no walkers, climbers or birdwatchers in this early morning world – that, for the first time in a very long time, longer than she could bear to consider, Helen realised she felt entirely safe. Ahead was a long low cliff jutting from the dale. Looking closer, Helen recognised the rock from the painting above the fireplace in the upstairs drawing room; the rock on which the boy in the bedroom portrait stood. The Scar, according to a little brass plaque fixed to the painting’s frame.
Part from superstition, part for luck, she ran up the sloping grass. From this side, the cliff was deceptive, the dale rolling and surging benignly, like the back of a sleeping giant. Only the occasional cluster of boulders puncturing the grass as the Scar rose beneath her feet.
Helen knew she must look like hell but she didn’t care, she felt better than she could remember. The endorphins were doing their work, flushing out the last of her migraine, reducing the nausea to a memory. Slowing to a halt, she dropped forward, resting palms on bare knees and watched sweat drip from her newly tawny fringe and spread a Rorschach blot on rocks at her feet.
Several minutes passed as she hung there. Not looking, not thinking, just breathing. And listening.
She’d expected total silence out here on the Dales, but she was wrong. In the near-distance a crow called and overhead the shadow of something wheeled far above. She didn’t know enough about birds to recognise it; but she knew hawks wheeled. Several fields away, black-faced sheep bleated. Behind her, she felt, rather than saw, a small shadow shift. Then it was gone. Another bird, probably, moving quickly overhead. Everything else was still and, gradually, her heart rate eased and her breathing slowed.
When eventually she righted herself, the landscape took her breath away. A handful of paces in front of her the ground dropped away, plummeting perilously. In the distance was the crag that gave the village its name. Somewhere in the opposite direction loomed the skeleton of an ancient priory. At least, according to the old guidebook she’d found in a drawer at the house. It was well beyond her vision, though. This bit of the Dales was famous. People came from far and wide to see it, which was why she’d chosen it. Just another tourist, as far as anyone else was concerned, albeit one staying longer than most and a little further out of the way.
The idea solidified on her run back to the house. She badly needed Internet access, a new email address, possibly several. She needed to teach herself to appear to be someone else. She’d seen people do it often enough. It couldn’t be that hard. What she needed – what she should have bought before leaving London – was one of those three-month so-many-gigabytes pay-up-front things you could slot into a laptop. Something anonymous. Art had known about stuff like that. Using a virtual private network to tunnel safely through filters and blocks and leave no traces. If he could learn it, then so could she.
It all seemed so obvious; Helen couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it earlier. Mentally she thumbed through the cash she’d sewn into the lining of her rucksack. There was enough there for a few more months, if she was careful. She’d need a car, something very cheap and short-term, bugger-all MOT and turn a blind eye to the insurance. And a vaguely decent phone. Not the pay-as-you-go flip-top handset that had been the very cheapest she could find at the time. If she wasn’t choosey she could probably stretch to a laptop too, something basic, to upload her pictures. They’d all come with her, on a couple of USB drives at the bottom of her camera bag, along with the old 35 mm Leica, a present from her dad for her twenty-first, and a tiny digital Canon point-and-shoot she’d bought on a whim passing through some airport or other.
Behind her the sun split the horizon. Still tinged with pink, still auguring ill for shepherds. Searching for a hint of warmth on her skin, she turned and watched as the black speck that was the hawk wheeling endlessly in the distance suddenly came to a halt. For a split second he was hanging there, an almost invisible speck in the sky, then he plummeted, dropping hard and fast on his unsuspecting prey.
The new tenant of Wildfell House didn’t show up. Of course she didn’t. Gil had known she wouldn’t. Why would she? He was disgusted with himself for even being there, let alone noticing who else was.
‘This is what you’ve come to,’ he muttered, as he made his way back up the empty high street to his cottage five pints later. ‘The village sodding social. And you didn’t even have the excuse of writing about it. You’ll be signing up for the WI next.’
He lit his last remaining cigarette and inhaled sharply. There’d been a large turnout tonight. Gil had been surprised to push open the door to The Bull at 6.45 p.m. and find the lounge bar already heaving with people who’d more usually be tucked in front of the television with the last of supper on their knees, wondering if they could get the washing up in before
Corrie
. There was not a chance of claiming his usual table, not a chance of any table at all.