The Pieces of Ourselves

by Maggie Harcourt

  “Umm.”

  And then we both laugh at the exact same time – I see the laugh building behind his eyes, and he must see it in me too, and he tilts his forehead to rest against mine. He smells like lemons and the night, like starshine and moonlight and sunset, and his hands holding mine feel like they were always meant to be there.

  When the porch light of the cottage comes into view, an eternity away down the line of chestnut trees, it feels like breaking free from orbit, breaking free of gravity. Walking towards it, stepping up onto the porch, takes everything I have. I turn around so my back is pressed against the door and try to ignore the sound of whatever Charlie and Felix are watching in the front room seeping into the quiet. Our quiet.

  “So, this is me.”

  “This is you.” His smile is big enough to hold a hundred years.

  This, now; the things he said about his family up in the attic. He’s letting me see him.

  And what am I doing? Am I letting him see who I am?

  Not exactly. An edited, tidied-up version maybe. One with the sharp edges filed off – because it’s the sharp edges that cut. Always. What would I do if they cut him away? If he got too close and they sliced straight into him?

  It would be me left with the scars.

  “Flora? Is that you?” Charlie’s voice is muffled by the door, but I can’t ignore it any longer.

  “It’s me. Just give me a second?” I shout through the door – and then turn back to Hal to say…what?

  But there’s nothing to say, is there? Not right now. There’s nothing to think, and nothing to do, except just be.

  And when he leans forward and runs his hand slowly through my hair, letting it slide between his fingers – his other arm slipping around my back to pull me close to him again because he can’t help himself and neither can I – the space between us dissolves to nothing. He presses me back against the wall of the house and I pull him with me, wishing I could bring him closer still. His lips burn against mine and my heart is beating so fast inside me that I don’t think it will ever slow down again. How can it, after this? My head spins and I never want it to stop. His hands are in my hair and on my face and on my hips, and everywhere he touches I wish there was more. The feel of him against me, of him here with me – I could get lost in it.

  “Flora? Is everything okay?”

  We leap apart at the sound of my brother calling me again.

  “Yep. All good. All good,” I call back, trying not to laugh, watching Hal’s eyes glitter in the light from the porch. “Really good, actually,” I add – quieter, just for Hal. Above us, the porch light flares and the stars and the moon glow that little bit brighter…and if the way he kissed me on the bridge was a question, this is the answer.

  “Goodnight, Flora,” he whispers hoarsely, stepping back.

  “Goodnight, Hal.” Lips numb from his kiss, for his kiss, I fumble for the handle, swinging the door open behind me. The familiar smell of the cottage – old woodsmoke, damp boots and dusty wool – floods out, pulling me back to earth…But I keep my eyes on Hal until the second the door closes between us, and I see him murmur my name into the night, and I carry the way it feels into my dreams.

  Climbing the stairs up to the attic in the morning, I have no idea what to expect. I mean, I know what to expect from the attic: dust, boxes, paper. But I have no idea what to expect from Hal, not after last night. During my whole walk across the deer park, I’ve tried to guess how he’ll be, what he’ll say.

  Basically, it’s my brain’s lucky day.

  What if he doesn’t say anything? What if he pretends it never happened? That he didn’t actually kiss you last night, or that you didn’t kiss him back?

  What if he does say something? What if he’s pleased to see you? What if he’s happy?

  What if it was a big, huge mistake and now he’s pissed because you spoiled everything? You always spoil everything, Flora.

  I dig my fingernails into the palms of my hands.

  Mira wasn’t much use, either – she didn’t answer my messages to her last night, and when I stuck my head around the break-room door on my way in, she was distracted by a folder of coursework and notes.

  “Sorry, Flora – I must get this finished today, and I’m on a double shift.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Something inside my heart deflated just a little. Part of me had hoped that she would look up and close her folder, seeing that something was different, that something had changed. Something other than her suddenly not having time to listen.

  Is this a balanced reaction?

  “Hey,” she said, resting her pen on her notes. “I want to hear. Really.”

  “No, it’s fine – you’re busy. It doesn’t matter.”

  Liar.

  “Flora. It does matter. I just…” She waved at the spread of notes and doodles on her pad. The whole page was covered in tiny black handwriting and little sketches. It looked like the inside of my head feels half the time: busy. But, looking at it, I think I started to see how much she wants this. Nobody puts in the kind of hours she must be with studying on top of a housekeeping job, not unless they’re serious. Or hate sleep.

  I shook my head and shook away the shadow that had formed in the corner of my mind. “You’re busy. It’s okay – you do what you need to do.”

  “I’ll find you later?” She glanced down at her folder and back up at me with one of her big smiles, and whispered, “And you can tell me everything.”

  I’m not sure what to tell her, especially when I’m not quite sure what “everything” is right now, but I should probably make the most of her still being here. After all, who will I tell when she’s gone?

  But when I reach the top of the stairs, there he is, sitting on the landing, his back against the door and his feet drawn up. His eyes are closed and he’s so lost in his thoughts that he hasn’t even heard me coming up the stairs. He looks so himself…so normal.

  Just like everybody else, but not.

  “Hi.” I lean on the banister. His eyes open and focus on me – only on me – and they light up.

  “Hi.” He slides himself upright, still leaning on the door. “Sorry, I was miles away.”

  “That’s okay.” I fumble with the key. I seem to be forever unlocking things lately. Doors, gates, histories…my English teacher would have loved that. Very symbolic. So would Sanjay.

  The attic is just as we left it…but as soon as the door closes behind us, I know that we aren’t the same as we were when we left it last night. He doesn’t say anything, and neither do I, but it hangs between us in the air.

  It wasn’t a mistake.

  He meant it.

  And I meant it too.

  I press the shutter back into the catch that holds it open, letting sunlight into the room. “You, uh, got back to the hotel okay then?”

  “Yeah. And I only put my foot into one rabbit hole and tripped over three big clumps of grass.” He grins. “Bit distracted.”

  “You didn’t have to walk me home, you know. It was…” I can’t finish the sentence – because actually we both know what it was.

  “I did,” he says softly, brushing my hair back from my face. “I wanted to.”

  “I’m glad you did.” Now it’s my ears turning pink. I can feel them, burning like tiny furnaces stuck to the sides of my head. The way he’s looking at me isn’t helping either – it makes me want to laugh, to shout and wave my arms around and run as fast as I possibly can…and also to stay right here with him and pull him to me and never let go of him.

  A quiet cough from the doorway makes us both jump and leap apart.

  Where the hell did he come from?

  Barney is standing in the open door, one hand still on the doorknob – and while he’s making a big deal of looking at his fingernails, his face says he saw everything. Even what I was thinking.

  Nobody can see what you’re thinking, stupid.

  “Sorry to…interrupt. I just thought I’d pop by and see how things are going.�
� He takes a cautious step into the attic, and Hal takes an equally cautious one towards the boxes, like he’s protecting them.

  I want to say “It’s only Barney”, but I don’t, because something tells me it doesn’t matter who walked in – Hal’s first response is to protect Albie’s story. His second is to change completely. I see him do it – another version of himself locks into place around him as his chin lifts and his eyes cool and everything about the way he’s standing shifts, until the Hal in front of me is a different one altogether. The way he holds himself says money and power; it’s sharp, but it’s brittle. I see it all the time in the people who come to stay here – and seeing it on Hal is a shock.

  Barney either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. Probably both. Instead, he glances out of the window and smiles his best manager smile at Hal while I fade into the background. It’s what I do best.

  “I hope you’re finding everything you need up here? I can only apologize for the state of the attic – if you need anything bringing down to the library, I can—”

  “No. Thank you.” Hal cuts him off with a wave of his hand. “It’s absolutely fine.”

  “And Flora’s help has been…?”

  “Invaluable.”

  He says it like he means it, and my heart shimmies in my chest.

  “Great. Great.” Barney claps his hands together in his standard manager-fashion. “Well, if there’s anything you need…”

  “This is everything I need. Thank you.” Hal fixes a perfectly polite and perfectly chilly smile on his face. “Don’t let me keep you.”

  He basically just told my boss to get out of his own hotel’s attic. Even more bizarrely, Barney actually does it. With a smile. And a nod. I’m half-expecting him to back out of the room while bowing.

  I wait for his footsteps to reach the bottom of the stairs.

  “How did you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “You just kicked Barney out. How? Was it magic? Mind control? Because I need to know how to do it. Please teach me?”

  Hal laughs, softening again. “You don’t want to know.”

  “No, I do. Seriously. He listened to you. Nobody ever listens to me.”

  “I was just my dad. That’s all.” And he turns his face away from me, back towards the boxes.

  “Umm.” The page is covered in Albie’s familiar looping black writing – but something about it is different. It looks rushed; in places the letters have almost pressed through the paper, leaving grazes and scars on the back of the sheet. I turn it round to face Hal.

  He reaches for it, and as he takes it from me, my eyes search his as his hand brushes mine. It feels warm and soft, despite all the dust and the grit that seems to have become a second skin to both of us while sorting through the most recent pile of abandoned papers…It feels safe.

  “When has anyone ever saying” – I bend the paper back towards me, tilting my head to read the upside-down words – “‘I must speak with you, come whenever you can, I’ll be waiting’ been good?”

  “When’s it from?”

  “I don’t know. There’s no date.”

  “They’re always dated. He always dates them, and he always signs them.”

  “Well, apparently he doesn’t.”

  “What’s the next one in that pile?”

  I shuffle aside what looks like a receipt from a tailor – something about a tunic, dated May 1915 – and suddenly there’s nothing but floorboards under my fingers. “This is the last one from that crate, I think.”

  “Give me a minute.” In one fluid move, he’s up darting across the floor – away from the window, where we’ve taken the stack we unpacked this morning for better light – and back to the wooden tea chest that seemed to be absolutely stuffed with Albie’s papers. It had felt like a gift when we opened it…but now I’m starting to get a bad feeling about it – the same heavy dread I’ve had so many times when I’ve woken up, knowing that all I had ahead of me was another day of pretending everything was fine when it wasn’t.

  With a sound of splitting wood, Hal levers the loosely-nailed lid off the next crate along and carefully lifts out a bundle tied up with string, carrying it across the attic with one hand underneath, one on the top, as though he’s afraid it’ll evaporate. Maybe it will. When he lays it down in front of me, carefully undoing the knot and pulling the twine apart, the top letter is face down, unfolded – but when it was sent, it was folded and a single word was written on it.

  Iris

  Not My Iris, or just an initial. Her name. Blotched and smudged as though it’s been caught in the rain.

  We stare at it, sitting between us like a miniature wrecking ball.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Hal’s hand rests on the edge of the letter, ready to turn it over.

  “Are you?”

  “We already know how the story ends – we just don’t know how it gets there. Don’t we owe it to them?”

  “Okay then.” I put my hand on his, and together we turn the page over.

  More than the others, this letter shows its age. The water splodges have bled into the ink, dragging it out of line and into rough grey circles, and it’s been unfolded and refolded so many times that the paper is soft along the crease lines and wants to come apart more than it wants to hold together. Albie’s writing is still strange, like the last note – smaller than usual, with the letters crushed together as though he’s written in a hurry.

  I have to go…

  You know that I can’t stay here, doing nothing when everything is happening over there. We must take a stand.

  Go where?

  It wouldn’t be right of me to stay, and if I did, I don’t think I would be the man you believed you had given your hand to. I know you will be anxious, maybe even a little angry with me, but I’ll be home before you know it. I have your ribbon – the precious ribbon from that night that meant so much to us both and still does, tied around the lock of your hair, and I will keep it with me always.

  It will bring me luck, and bring me home to you again from France.

  The room suddenly feels cold, even sitting in the middle of the sunlight from the window.

  I shan’t be alone – George Harbutt from the gardens and Charlie Brewer and Dougie Marton from the village are with me. We’re to report to our training officer first thing in the morning. Charlie’s a little nervous we’ll be found out, but they’re as keen as I am to get over there before it’s all over and do our bit.

  The splodges on the paper come thicker and faster towards the end, and now I understand that they aren’t just water or age marks. They’re tear stains. Iris’s tears. She must have opened this letter and cried when she read it – even if she knew it was coming. Did she know?

  I carry your ribbon with me, and I leave my heart with you. Keep it safe and wait for me.

  Always, your Albie.

  I sit back, the letter still in my hand. It feels like someone has hit me, hard – and it must show.

  “He left.” I flap the page gently at Hal.

  “We knew he left. We always knew he left.” Carefully he takes the page from between my fingers, running his thumb along the side of my hand, and lays it on the floor. “We always knew he died.”

  “But he doesn’t know that. Not when he’s writing this.”

  “Neither does she.”

  “Yes, she does.” I point at the tear marks all over the page. “She knows.” I blink back tears from my own eyes. “What does he mean about being ‘found out’? He says Charlie…” The name sticks to my tongue, impossible to separate from my own brother; impossible not to imagine him in the middle of a war, even if for a fleeting, heart-stopping second. “He says he’s worried they’ll be found out. But everyone’s going to know they’re gone, aren’t they?”

  “That’s not what he means. Hang on.” He fishes a small blue notebook out of his back pocket. “I did a bit of research as soon as we had a name.” Folding a page open, he holds it out to me – but there
’s no actual words on it, not as far as I can see. Just a very untidy collection of loops and squiggles.

  “Your handwriting’s awful.” I take the book, turning it round. “Is that even the right way up?”

  His cheeks flicker with colour, and then he mutters something under his breath, shakes his head and snatches the book back. “All right, all right. Seeing as you’re having so much trouble reading what is perfectly obvious, it says – very clearly, actually, right here – Albert or Albie Holmwood. Born 1898.”

  “So he’d have been…” I count along on my fingers. Hal watches expectantly. “1915, 1898…he’d have been…seventeen?”

  “Give or take, depending on when his birthday was. I think they had to be eighteen or nineteen to join up, and maybe this Charlie Brewer was even younger?”

  “They lied about their age?”

  He studies his notes, barely even looking up. “Lots of them did, especially early on. Everybody thought the war would be over fast, and they didn’t want to miss it.”

  They didn’t want to miss going to war.

  “But…they’re our age. I’m seventeen. Me. Now.” I blink at him. Something in my brain has jammed and the cogs won’t turn. I shut my eyes. It’s not quite enough, so I lie back, flat on the floor. It doesn’t feel like a puzzle now, or a story, or some kind of game – and the idea I ever thought that’s what it was…it makes the room spin.

  There’s a rustle of paper, a creak and a scuffling sound and an arm brushes against mine. Hal is lying on the floor beside me. I can hear his breathing, steady and slow. “Hey.” His voice sounds a little odd, with him flat on his back, but it’s soft; as soft as the touch of his hand against the side of my wrist. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m just…it’s just…”

  “Suddenly a bit real.”

  “That. I mean, they’re…can you imagine being them? Either of them? I thought…I was starting to think…that we’re kind of the same, but how can we be? We can’t be.”

  The silence stretches between us. Then suddenly he says, “Maybe they’re the same as us, but they’re different too. Their world was different, so maybe being seventeen was different. Like, getting married, going to war kind of different.” He gulps down a lungful of air. “You know?”