Letting You Go (4 page)

T
he sky was like a lingering bruise on the outskirts of town. Alex pulled off the main road and cruised alongside the Old Girl into Eilidh Falls, the light still steeped in the eeriness of a new day. Just over two hours without a dip into a service station was a new personal best, made possible only by non-existent traffic and two eyelid-expanding double espressos before leaving the flat.

Alex pinched between her eyes, trying to stave off her tiredness. Her dad would go mad if he knew how little sleep she’d had. She shifted in the driver’s seat, ignoring the growing ache in her back. This close to home it was pointless trying to push Dill away. He was all around her here; Dill belonged to Eilidh Falls. The tiny pocket of the world that had claimed him forever. Was it the same for Jem, she wondered, when she came home too? Jem played her cards so close to her chest you never could tell.

Another sign counting down the miles back to the Falls whizzed by the truck window. Time and distance, that’s all her dad had wanted, and she’d delivered. Now she could feel it all being undone, one mile at a time. It was always this
way on the drive back to the Falls. Dill always found his way into her thoughts, transporting her back there again, setting her down perpetually on the banks of the Old Girl with him, their weeping father, and Finn in his mournful silence, as if those few cataclysmic moments had soldered them all together forevermore.

Finn had tried so hard, but Ted was never going to see it.

Alex shuddered at the recollection of that Christmas. That first Christmas after.
He didn’t know what he was doing, it was the drink, not your father
, Blythe had tried to say evenly as she’d gathered up sticky shards of Granny Ros’s Tutbury crystal bowl from the garden path. That was the last time Alex had seen Finn or Susannah anywhere near the house. It was also the last Christmas Alex had seen her dad anywhere near a drink, and the start of all that prickly quiet between them. Thick grey silences wedged between all the safe things they still managed to talk about, like ice forming between rocks, threatening to shatter them both.

A heavy grogginess was starting to filter in behind Alex’s eyes. She tried to keep them focused on the road ahead. Dad would never say it, that this new catastrophe was most likely a consequence of Blythe having to wish Dill a happy birthday down at St Cuthbert’s, but it would be there, in one of those silences where the rest of Alex’s failings resided.

A flash of black came up on Alex’s right side. Some sleek four-by-four sped aggressively around her. She let them pass like one of the more able swimmers back at the leisure centre, as if she had any choice. Alex checked her rear
view for any more surprises. She was nearly home.
Get it together, Alex. Mum needs you on the ball.

Nope, she would not think about Finn’s return any more. It wasn’t even her place. Mum was all that mattered. She would get there and find out her part to play. She would get her mum’s things together, help her wash and dress if needs be, grocery shop, cook for them, tidy the house. She’d only be back, what, a day or two? There were a hundred ways to pass a couple of days. All she had to do was help Blythe get back on her feet, and keep as best she could out from under her father’s. Simple. Everything was going to be fine, Alex smiled. It wasn’t like her Mum ever even got ill. Give it a week max and Blythe would show them all, this was just a blip in an otherwise blemish-free record of health. A momentary stumble. Wasn’t she due one after all these years? All these birthdays? Alex gripped the steering wheel a little more assuredly. Her mum would soon be back on her feet, and then Jem could get back to London and Dad would be back busting a gut keeping the garage going and Alex could just get back out of everyone’s way and they could all breathe again.

A particularly plucky yawn suddenly took hold and Alex gave in to it wholeheartedly. She sat up a little higher in her seat and began watching the familiar landscape of her youth tumble past the windows of her battered old Nissan.

Welcome to Eilidh Falls!

The sign had changed; for the benefit of the tourists, no doubt. Beneath the salutation, an image carved into the
wood of a Viking longship under a hail of arrows fired from the banks of the Old Girl. As soon as Alex rolled past that image, the illusion that any amount of time or distance could ever really make a difference to her dad quickly evaporated.

I
t hadn’t been a nightmare exactly, Jem decided. More of a troubled sleep kind of thing, like in her teens. A sort of half-hearted insomnia. But definitely not a nightmare. Nightmares featured monsters and fear and peril, not the constant dull weight of words left unsaid.

Jem fidgeted in her old bed trying to get comfortable. She never slept well in her parents’ house any more, she realised. Not since those hideous years in high school when the late-night anxieties had first kicked in. It wasn’t easy sleeping on a lie every night, notching up the days she was keeping them all in the dark. Maybe her mum was right, the therapy might’ve helped Jem if she’d stuck with it, but it had seemed so OTT at the time.

‘Jem! It’s
3am!
’ she remembered her mum rasping from the kitchen doorway, eyes blinking and vacant after catching Jem fixing a peanut butter sandwich for the third night in a row. ‘Is it nightmares, sweetheart? Or is there something else that’s bothering you? You haven’t been yourself lately, Jem. If you’re having nightmares it might help if you talk about them.’

‘I’m OK, Mum.’ Jem had reassured. ‘I only have nightmares in the run up to maths tests, honest.’ She hadn’t mentioned those long school trips stuck with Carrie Logan and the other bimbos. Or the eve of Eilidh High’s end of year discos when Jackson Cox was always expecting a slow dance with Jem and, rumour had it, a proper good snog.

Jem lay awake in bed remembering how she had tried to play it all down to her mother. To allay the worry she had seen in the tiny furrows on Blythe’s faintly freckled forehead.

‘It’s not healthy for a fifteen year old girl to be sneaking around in the dark every night.’

‘I’m doing peanut butter, Mum, not cocaine,’ Jem had tried, but it didn’t matter. Blythe wouldn’t have it. Alex had buggered off to uni and that had left Jem alone under the spotlight. By the time she’d crawled out of bed the next morning her mum had already made the appointment.

‘She says she doesn’t want to see a
shrink
, Helen, but I’m not taking any chances. You can’t be too careful with … bereavement,’ Jem had overheard her mum confiding in Mrs Fairbanks.

‘You can’t be too careful with peanuts, either,’ Helen Fairbanks had replied. Blythe had taken
careful
to a whole new level after that.

Jem stared into the nothingness above her childhood bed and inhaled deeply. Her old bedroom still felt like a bolthole
– a pocket of refuge in the middle of whatever mess their family was dealing with. She used to spend so much time in here, hiding out. Maybe that was why she’d been so rubbish at sneaking around downstairs back when her mum had kept on busting her in the kitchen – not enough practice.

Jem rolled over onto her side and looked across her bedroom bathed in twilight. Uh, now she couldn’t stop thinking about peanut butter. Maybe she could she make it down to the kitchen without disturbing Dad across the hall? She was more gentle-footed now. Her legs twitched, ready to give it a shot but then she remembered the new pup down there. The thing got all excited as soon as anyone looked at her, Dad would wake up and it wasn’t fair on him. He’d been awake half the night too, floorboards creaking under his restless pacing.

Jem’s legs twitched again. She felt a sudden need to get out of the farmhouse and get to Kerring General, just as she had the last time tragedy had hit here. When they’d brought Alex home from the Old Girl, soaking and catatonic. Alex had looked like a little wet ghost, Dill’s bow and arrows clamped in her taut hands. Just one more minute with Dill, it was all Jem had wanted, so she could take it all back, all those awful things she’d said to him that morning and tell him the truth instead. But they all just kept saying the same thing, over and over;
it’s too late.

Jem wriggled down into the bedding and let her thoughts
travel back to the hospital.
You have to wake up, Mum,
she thought anxiously.
You have to be OK and you have to wake up. So I can drop my bomb on you.

Jem squeezed her eyes closed beneath the covers. In the long dark hours of the night, she’d made a vow. No more hiding, no more lies. They had a right to know. She’d tell Mum first, then Alex and Dad. Maybe it would be Dad who would try frogmarching Jem off to Dr Bullock PsychD’s office this time.

Jem flinched at the recollection of her very brief spell in therapy. Pleading had been a complete waste of breath at the time, obviously. ‘Of course you don’t need to see a
shrink
, Jem,’ her mum had carefully nudged, ‘but it can’t hurt just to get a few things off your chest, can it? Think of it like tidying your room.’ But Jem didn’t like a tidy room, thanks. She liked a bombsite nobody dared or desired to enter and wanted her jumbled little mind to be left just so too. Sleep was for wimps, anyway, she was fine as she was. Jem had been all set for hiding out behind one of the waterfalls up at Godric’s Gorge and dodging the appointment altogether, but then her mum had given her that look. It had stilled Jem. Dill had gone. Then Alex. Jem had known instantly what that look had meant.
Please don’t let me lose this kid too.
Anything was preferable to seeing her mum look that way again, even an hour with Dr Bullock.

‘I feel that Jem is likely suffering from delayed anxiety. It’s only just been a year since your son’s death, Mrs Foster.
Grief can manifest itself months, sometime years, later in all sorts of ways.’

Jem shook her head against the pillow.
Nitwit.
Dr Bullock hadn’t the faintest idea that he’d been Jem’s unwitting accomplice.

‘The sleep issues have coincided with your sister Alexandra’s leaving for university, haven’t they?’ he’d asked. ‘The start of the Autumn term? Detachment issues? Fear of another sibling leaving the family home? All very explicable.’ All very perceptive of the doctor. Only he’d missed that the sleeplessness had also coincided with the Autumn term at Eilidh High too, and the return of two bus journeys a day with Carrie’s crew.

It had been a lot like being stuck on the school bus, trundling sluggishly through her own psychoanalysis, sitting politely while Dr Bullock made all the necessary stops on the way to his grand resolution. The friend conversation, the boyfriend conversation, the drastic-new-hair conversation. Jem had felt an inexplicable sense of relief when they’d finally gotten around to the Dill conversation.

Spilling about her argument with Dill in the days before the accident had been easy. Even sharing how she’d never thought those jagged words she’d thrown at him would be the last ones Dill would ever hear her say. She hadn’t meant to talk so much about that, but she had to give them something. And it had felt good almost, like loosening your fist
and realising that your fingernails had been sticking into your palms all that time without you knowing. Her mum had nodded, as if it had all made perfect sense. This was something Blythe could work with; there was light at the end of the tunnel. Jem knew her mum had never suspected that Jem’s opening up had been an exercise in frugality. Give a little here so that the bigger things could be held back.

Jem remembered her mum’s locket pressing uncomfortably against her ear as Blythe had locked Jem in an embrace in the car park afterwards. She remembered feeling her mother’s fingers deftly teasing strands of Jem’s new hairstyle and she’d known that Blythe was mourning the loss of something more than her little girl’s hair.

‘Jem? I don’t want there to be any more secrets between us, OK? Secrets can pull people apart. Even little ones,’ Blythe had whispered.

Jem could have just said it. Right then. It had practically been a green light situation for sinking bad news. The words had been there, on the tip of her tongue. But then she’d felt the cold press of that tiny locket again, she’d pictured the little photographs it held inside of her conventional parents and their conventional marriage, and the truth had dissolved like sugar on her tongue.

‘OK, Mum,’ Jem had said. ‘No more secrets.’

A
lex slowed for the approaching turnoff to Godric’s Gorge and the run of waterfalls after which the town was named. She knew the road by heart, how many dusty laybys there were to allow the occasional passing car making its way to or from the falls, the cluster of properties that lined the dusty track there and each of the families who lived in them. In one of those properties, the large cream farmhouse with the spindly wisteria her mum couldn’t get to grow right, Alex knew her dad would be awake already, drinking his morning coffee out on the front porch, smoking his first roll-up of the day. Alex let her hand hover over her indicator before settling it back onto the gear stick. She looked at the clock on the dashboard. The hospital ward wouldn’t let her in at six-thirty and Jem would probably still be sleeping up at the house, which wasn’t going to make conversation with her dad any easier.

Jem had accused her of being paranoid. Ted wasn’t awkward around Alex, he was just usually preoccupied, that was all. Running a garage by himself took a lot of energy, didn’t it? Easy for Jem to say, she always had something useful
to contribute. Knew how to pull a conversation right out of him.

Alex automatically shifted up a gear and passed the turnoff for home. No point disturbing them this early. She followed the road down off the valley. Eilidh Falls high street was deserted, the only movement where great swathes of fabric in reds and golds fluttered lazily from the street lamps lining the road through the busiest part of town.
Wait, was that a …
‘Bloody hell! There’s a huge dragon hanging off the Town Hall roof …’ Alex blurted.

Jem hadn’t been kidding. She’d told Alex about Mayor Sinclair’s ramping up of the annual Eilidh Viking Festival a few times but it had never appealed, not that Alex had really grasped just how far the town had taken to gearing up for the festival, loosely based on the arrival of marauding Vikings to the area some 1200 years before.

‘Viking Fest is gonna be a national treasure eventually, Al. Like the cheese rolling in Gloucester!’

Alex let her eyes follow an endless run of circular shields all along the old library gates as she drove past. ‘Flipping heck … It looks like something off the history channel … on acid.’

Alex let her foot off the accelerator to take a slower look at the settlement of re-enactment tents down by the riverbank. Were they supposed to be the Anglo-Saxon presence then? A few of the tents looked more regal than the others, Alex was trying to get a better view and draw on her sketchy Viking knowledge from her St Cuthbert’s Primary
days when something black appeared like an ominous apparition at the front end of her truck.

‘Shit!’

Alex reacted, stamping on the brake, probably harder than was necessary. She bounced in her seat while the truck jarred to a halt around her. The eyes glaring back through the windscreen at her looked amused. Alex felt herself swallow and ready an apology for the burly gentleman in the business suit who’d just stepped straight off the kerb and directly into the bloody road in front of her, but something about his smile made her hesitate. She’d only been travelling at a jogging pace and wasn’t entirely convinced that his hands braced on her bonnet, cigarette still burning away where it was sandwiched between his knuckles, wasn’t a touch overly dramatic.

Alex looked up at his face again and was reminded of a gorilla. Large and unpredictable. He definitely didn’t look like a local, tourist probably, not that the suit made any sense. Alex had nearly gotten her
sorry
out when he grinned. He lifted his hands and brought two balled fists down hard on her bonnet. Alex flinched. He seemed to approve of her silly girlish movement. ‘You stupid tart. Watch where you’re going,’ he delivered, his Hollywood smile sharpening the words as they left his mouth. Alex’s mouth dropped open a little, a nervous thumping started in her chest as he pushed himself off her truck and casually strolled over to the black four-by-four parked across the street. Alex swallowed and found her voice again.

‘Nice,’ she muttered, once the ape was safely back inside his truck and
definitely
couldn’t hear her. Alex had a rule about confrontation. She didn’t do it. Jem was the sister for that. Jem wasn’t backwards in going forwards like Alex, she was made of tougher stuff. Jem would’ve smiled sweetly just then and flipped the horrible git the Vs. Jem wouldn’t have been intimidated, she’d singlehandedly confronted a group of teenagers once for calling Millie Fairbanks
Clubfoot
; the girl had no fear.

Alex began cruising again along the last of the high street. She drove steadily past her father’s garage still with its heavy arched wooden doors in blue keeping her eyes well and truly off the hardware shop opposite as if merely glancing there would constitute an act of total betrayal. She drove towards the little primary school with its bright hanging baskets and sunflowers grown spindly through the summer holidays, on past the adjacent church – also St Cuthbert’s – with its newly refurbished railings and worn stone path. Her mum had been round there last night, alone, slumped over in the churchyard before Mal Sinclair had found her. Alex’s throat tightened. The hospital was only another two miles beyond the bridge, it was hard to resist pressing down a little harder on the accelerator but this was the stretch of road where Millie Fairbanks had lost two inches off her left leg after Finn’s dad had signed their faulty car off.

Alex tried to take the incline of the old bridge in the wrong gear and the truck juddered around her in protest. She dropped it down to second. Ted reckoned you could
always tell a local from an outsider on how slow they took the bridge.
Bloody tourists, careering in and out like they own the place.
Even over the ruckus in the pub on backgammon nights, Alex’s dad had said how they’d hear the screeching of tyres when some wazzock took the bridge too fast. Every time they heard the screech, Hamish would put a pound in the pot, ready for the next time he had to have his beer-garden wall rebuilt. ‘Someone is going to get themselves killed at the bottom of that bridge someday,’ Hamish liked to warn his patrons, ‘as if the Fairbanks girl hadn’t come close enough.’

Alex took the bridge cautiously. The Old Girl and the rest of Eilidh high street fell away in her rear view mirror, Alex’s shoulders releasing a little the more the bridge shrank into the distance. A light twinkling of morning sun on water held Alex’s attention on the disappearing view. It made her feel sorry to leave it back there without a proper look, it wasn’t often she thought the Old Girl pretty. She had time for a little look.

Alex pulled over onto the side of the road in case she nearly killed anyone else before breakfast and shut the engine off. Her door cranked outwards like an arthritic hip. She sat there for a few moments with her feet on the cool earth outside the truck. It was so quiet here. Alex held her face to the sky. The air felt lighter up here in the Falls, lighter than it did back in the city anyway. Cleaner. Good for the soul. She’d taken it for granted as a child. She wanted to inflate herself with it now, purify herself with it. Alex
clambered from her truck before even questioning herself and slammed the door shut behind her. The morning sun was spreading its greeting along the river catching like crystals on its changing surface. She’d spent so much energy distancing herself from this place, she’d almost forgotten its beauty.

Alex took in the view back towards the river where it cut past Hamih’s pub.
You used to play Pooh sticks off that bridge with Jem, Dill Pickle.
Alex would invigilate while Mum and Dad watched from The Cavern’s beer garden.

She missed him so much it ached. She missed Dill too.

None of the self-help articles ever said what to do about her dad. There wasn’t a fear ladder for that, no psychological tool that would make her apology substantial enough to brave offering it again.

You’re not here for that. You’re here for Mum. And then you’ll be gone again. Out of his way.

Alex shook off her inner monologue. She always became the same useless wimp when it came to Ted, that was a given, but Alex had decided on the drive up here that she would at least shuffle up a couple more rungs of her self-help strategy while she was here. She was going to pay a visit to an old adversary. The Old Girl looked welcoming now, winsome and pretty, just as she had been a thousand times before on still summer mornings such as this. Perfectly safe, if you chose the right spot.

Alex shuddered. That was a few rungs up yet. The Old Girl was right at the top, the end goal. She was going to
wade into the Old Girl one day and she was going to do it without becoming a dithering wreck. Just like that. Tra-la-la. Alex quivered a little at the prospect.
One step at a time
, Dr Phil said. She could start up at the plunge pools, in the shallows. Alex found herself drifting away with her thoughts. Yes, before leaving the Falls again, she was going to achieve something. She was going to stand in the plunge pools up to her knees. That was the benchmark,
that
was something realistic she could aim for, a rung she could climb.

Ain’t no thing but a chicken wing,
she reassured herself.

She’d seen an allegedly phobic woman on
Oprah
say this, again and again like a magical spell of protection while someone had steadily placed a boa constrictor around the woman’s sweaty neck. Alex had watched intently and the woman hadn’t even blinked. The not blinking thing wasn’t as impressive as having a snake near her windpipe though, in fairness.

Alex watched the sparkles on the water. ‘Ain’t no thing but a chicken wing,’ she said aloud. It felt strange. Liberating. She’d read that in the
Climb your fear-ladder
article too.
Face your fears and assertively tell them, ‘No! I will not be a slave to you any more!’

She locked eyes on the riverbank. ‘No’, she said in a small voice, ‘I will not—’

This was ridiculous. She was losing her mind. Alex let out a little laugh. Then she cleared her throat and tried it again. All this clean air was flushing something out of her, it felt kinda good. And weird. ‘Ain’t no thing but a chicken wing!’
she called, louder this time. The wall of evergreens called back with a small echo. There were only squirrels and, rumour had it, a headless ghost she might disturb back here. Sod it, call it coffee jitters but she was going to go for it. She’d see a car coming a mile off before anyone would hear.

She took another lungful. ‘AIN’T NO THING BUT A CHICKEN WING ON A STRING—’

‘From …
Burger
King?’

Alex snapped her head round to her right side. Her heart hurt, like it had a stitch. It might actually have just stopped.

The mud was the first thing. New toffee-coloured mud spattered across his jaw. She glanced up and down, scanning him for possibility.

Oh God. Oh my God.

Another pain in Alex’s chest. She felt the beating in there fire up again on all cylinders. This was why kids pedalled stories of headless ghosts in the forest, the mulchy floor spongy enough that any person with a half-decent pair of trainers and a degree of athletic grace (that was Alex out then) could suddenly, soundlessly appear from the woods and scare the crap out of you.

Finn looked stunned too.

Alex didn’t know where to look. The mud was a running theme. His trainers were caked in the stuff, so were the calf muscles glistening with tiny beads of sweat. He hadn’t been a runner in his youth. He hadn’t been so defined, either. She tried to take him all in. His chest was heaving beneath his t-shirt, fervently but steady, like a racehorse. A thin
white wire trailed down from the headphones either side of his face giving the rise of his chest a glancing blow on its descent to one of the pockets of his jogging bottoms. Joggers cut off at the knees. He wasn’t just a runner now, he was a
hardcore
runner.

Alex was dumfounded. ‘You’ve … changed colour.’ Her voice caught in her throat. Maybe he didn’t notice. He’d appeared from the trees as fluently as he did in her sleep. Alex swallowed, her heart already migrating to her mouth. Finn gave a gentle yank and sent the earplugs tumbling towards his waist.

He looked down at himself. ‘I guess that would be mostly the mud.’

It wasn’t the mud, it was adventure seeking in the southern hemisphere while Alex had been making vats of chilli con carne at the food bank. He probably smelled of coconut oil and ylang ylang now, she usually smelled of fried onions and disinfectant. His hair had changed colour too, lighter at its edges than it was. It still sat long just over his ears but it looked more deliberate now, like he’d just fallen off a billboard advertising surfboards, or cranberry juice, or something full of antioxidants.

‘You haven’t changed colour.’ He smiled. ‘Still a striking red head.’ Alex cringed at her own statement. ‘Well, actually you look a little less red than the last time we spoke if I remember right.’ He offered a half-hearted smile.

She was going to die. Right here on the spot. The last time they’d spoken had been in her student bedroom. Trying to
be quick, efficient, like ripping off a plaster, hadn’t worked. There had been nothing clean and clinical about it. Just lots of arguing and hurt. And red faces, obviously.

‘Actually, you look a little pale, Foster. Are you OK?’

She hadn’t heard her name on his lips since the last moments before watching him walk away through the snow.
Be kind to yourself, Foster
, he’d said. Because not having the balls to go home and tell her dad about them sure as hell wasn’t being very kind to Finn.

Alex swallowed again. Finn’s breath was levelling off but hers was becoming shallower. She felt a bit fuzzy, actually.

‘I, er. Actually just, I erm … just tired, actually. Long drive.’

Finn’s eyes narrowed. She didn’t want his eyes to narrow, he was always working something out when he did that.

‘Jem said you don’t come back here. Don’t they have fast food where you live now?’ Nope, he’d lost her.
‘Burger King
, wasn’t it?’ Alex cringed. The woman on
Oprah
hadn’t sounded like such a muppet when she’d said it. ‘Or have you come back for a run in one of the most beautiful spots in the world? It’s some morning, isn’t it?’