Hal takes a long swig from the bottle of water sitting between us on the attic floor, carefully twisting the cap back on. “It wasn’t just military stuff they weren’t allowed to talk about. The longer the war went on, the worse it got – but nobody wanted people at home to realize just how bad.”
“Nobody?”
“Politicians, mostly. They’d spent the first couple of months of the war saying it would all be over by the first Christmas, remember? Now we’re in…what, 1916?”
I check the date and nod. August 1916.
“Exactly.” Hal’s eyes flick from me to the letter.
There’s no escape from it. Even in the rear trenches, the guns and shells clatter and rattle like trains, constantly. They are our birdsong and our church bells, our heartbeats and our lullabies, summoning us to duty or death or both. The sounds are in our heads and under our skins. The men joke that if a chap should break his leg in the trench, the sound of whistles and machine guns would pour out of the bone.
The war is not what we thought it would be. I daren’t say what any of us imagined, but I know none of us could have pictured this in the worst of all our nightmares. Sleep here is both a friend and an enemy – a release from the mud and the rot and the stench, but an open door to every fear that each of us buries in our bellies during the waking minutes of every day. Death walks among us, over the top and on the field and in the trench, and every soldier here knows His hand could fall on our shoulder next. And, oh, the guns, Iris. The guns. Like a thousand armies marching across the roof of the world, they clatter and they boom and they shriek. And the mud, churning like an ocean of despair between us and them – and we aim to kill them and they aim to kill us, and for what?
I could lie to you. I could tell you it is easy. But that would be almost as great a lie as if I were to tell you that I did not miss you more with every passing moment, and you made me swear that I would never lie. So instead, I shall speak of happier truths: that I have made good friends, brothers, among the men and the other officers. Bill spends most of his time teaching that ridiculous dog he adopted to do tricks. No one quite knows whether getting it to play dead when he shouts “Bang” is the greatest or very worst idea any man has ever had. Dougie Marton took a hit in the shoulder from some shrapnel – a Blighty, we call it. Not enough to lose the arm, thank God, but enough to send him home. He should be back in the village by autumn, and I will try my best to send word with him.
Know this: I love you. I am yours – all that is left of me at the end of this is yours. All that I ever was or will be or might have been. And I will do everything I can, everything in my power to come back to you.
“He’d been at the Somme a month.” Hal squints as he tries to remember the right dates.
“But he’s still alive! He’s okay, right?” I slap my palm down beside the letter as though I can somehow pull Albie out of it, out of the past and into the present. As though I can save him.
Hal stares gloomily at the remaining letters from this, the last of the trunks from this period of Hopwood’s history. We’ve checked all the others – there’s only this one left, and the pile of papers that came out of it is very small.
I grab his hand as he reaches for the next letter. “Let’s stop.”
“You want to stop? Now?”
“Yes.” I nod. “Yes, I do. Just for today. Just…give him a little longer.”
Give this a little longer, because I feel more and more like me again with every day I spend up here. And with every day I spend with Hal, the less I want him to finish his project. Because what happens when he does and leaves? What happens to us? To me?
Hal follows my gaze to the few remaining pages. “You know it doesn’t change anything.”
I know that – but I can’t tell him that it’s not just Albie I want to have longer with. So I sigh and change the subject. “Either way, we’ve got to stop because I’m not even meant to be up here right now – I’ve got to meet Mira downstairs in a minute. We’re getting the bus into Bath. And I’ll see you tonight at the party…”
He opens his mouth to say something, and then closes it again.
“How’s the car, by the way?” I scrape together our notebooks and pens – the skeleton of the story he’ll take back to his grandfather – tucking them to one side.
“Oh. It’s good. Well. It’s nearly dry, so it’s a start?”
“Sorry. About flooding it.”
“Nah.” He waves a hand. “I shouldn’t have driven into a river.”
“It was a ford.”
“That,” he says, unfolding his crossed legs and jumping up in one fast motion, “was a river and nothing you can do or say will convince me otherwise.”
“Nothing?” I put my hands on my hips.
“Nothing.” In a moment, he has wrapped his arms around me, knocking my hands aside and pulling me closer. I breathe him in, feeling the warmth of him as he rests his head against mine, feeling the rise and fall of his chest as he breathes. His heart, pounding against mine.
I don’t want to pull away from him. I don’t want to let go of him.
When we turn over the last page of that stack, I have to.
He leans even further into me, the two of us taking up the same space in the attic, in the world. The thought of how much I’ll miss him, miss this, when he leaves is like someone reaching into my chest and taking hold of everything inside and twisting.
Not just because I really do like him, but because I like the version of me I’ve become since he arrived. The old me. And however much I try not to be, I’m scared that when he leaves, he’ll take that me with him.
Gently, he slips a finger underneath my chin and turns my face towards his.
“You do know, don’t you?”
“What?”
“That when I came here, I only planned to stay until I found a name. That was all I needed.” He hesitates, and I can actually feel his ears reddening. “All I thought I needed.” His words cut through everything, slicing clean through the rising noise in my head, the rising doubt. “I stayed because of you.”
And he catches my face between both of his palms and draws me to him again; his lips on mine and mine on his until everything else – the rest of the world, the ghosts and the living, all the clocks and calendars and all the time they keep – flares brightly, then flickers out.
“You still want to go to Bath? Not Bristol? We could have gone to Cabot Circus!” Mira drops the loose change for her fare into the bus driver’s hand, then yanks her ticket out of the machine and pinballs off the seats along the aisle until she gets to an empty double.
“Like either of us could afford something there.” After a bit of rummaging around in my bag, I manage to dig out the right cash and grab my ticket, dropping into the seat next to Mira as the bus starts moving with a lurch. We only just made it to the stop on time – and that was only because Mira came barging into the attic and dragged me out. That’s the thing about Hal – when I’m with him, time seems to have no meaning.
Except the stack of pages is so small, and however much he says he’s stayed because of me (has he? Did he mean that?) he can’t stay for ever. He has a life away from here – one he’ll have to go back to. One I’m not part of.
Mira elbows me – hard. “Hey! Stop it.”
“What? I wasn’t doing anything!”
“You were. You were thinking.” She nods. “You were thinking about him, weren’t you? Your face does this…thing…when it’s him.”
“It does not! Hang on – a ‘thing’?”
She just nods again, infuriatingly.
The little bus bumps its way out of the village, climbing up from the valley and out onto the top of the next hill. Mira flicks through a shopping list of dresses she wants to look at in town, skipping between pages and maps on her phone, planning the afternoon like it’s a military campaign.
“And there goes my phone signal,” she sighs. “Give me your phone?”
“I don’t think my si
gnal’s any better,” I say, unlocking it and handing it over. She jabs at the screen…and misses the icon she was going for, hitting the one next to it. The screen immediately fills with a scroll of photos, each one more perfect than the last. Perfect people with perfect hair and perfect faces and clothes, all in perfect places living perfect lives with perfect friends.
“You have an Instagram account?” Mira stares at my phone. “You never told me!”
I shake my head. I want to ask for my phone back – or for her to at least close the app – but my lips have glued themselves together and my tongue is stone in my mouth. I watch her swipe over to my profile page – and frown when she finds a completely empty grid. “Where are all the photos?”
“I deleted them.” I force my voice to work, to say the easiest thing, and reach for the phone before she asks any other questions…But it’s too late. I’ve been caught.
“Why?”
If I close my eyes, I can do it. Mira may be my best friend, but there are things I haven’t been able to tell even her. Things I keep in the darkest, softest corners of my memory. “It’s complicated.”
“I’m listening.”
“When I was…ill, you know? I wanted to…disappear.”
“Disappear?” I can feel her looking at me.
“Everything was so hard. I just wanted it to stop. I wanted to stop.”
Silence, except for the bus engine and tinny distorted grime leaking from the headphones of the guy three seats in front of us.
Then she understands. “Oh.” It’s less of a word than a breath – but at least I can’t see her face. I don’t want to see.
She’ll be different around you now. She can’t not be after that – not even Mira. She’ll think you’re weak or weird or looking for attention. Freaky Flora, right? Just like everyone else thought.
Doesn’t matter anyway. She’ll forget all about you when she gets to college.
But then, from somewhere behind the voices inside my mind comes another one. Quieter, gentle, but clear like a bell.
And you let her in anyway. Well done.
And even though I can’t see Mira’s face, I feel her hand close around mine, holding it tight.
“I don’t think you should delete it, Flora. Take down the photos, by all means. Temporarily deactivate it if you must. But keep the account.”
“Why? I don’t want it any more. I don’t need it. I don’t…”
“Need anything?” Sanjay leans back in his chair. “Come on. We’ve talked about this kind of language.”
“I don’t care.”
“I know.”
We sit in silence, him in his chair and me in mine. He waits. He always waits. It drives me crazy. Crazier.
I fold my arms. He knows I’m not going to break first.
“Our brains,” Sanjay says at last, leaning forward in his chair again and putting his hands together on his knee, “are the windows through which we perceive the wider world. Not,” and he holds up a hand, because he knows I’m going to say it, “the eyes. No, Flora, listen. Our eyes take in the information, but they don’t process it. We see with our eyes, but we don’t perceive with them. That’s what our brains are for. So, if you picture yourself as standing behind a window, looking out, then the glass between you and the world is your brain. With me so far?”
“Sort of.”
“And just like glass, our brains – or the way they show us the world – can be tinted or obscured, changing the way we see things. Sometimes, the glass gets smeared up and it makes things look distorted, or prevents us from seeing them altogether.” He presses his hands together, almost like he’s praying. “Glass can be cleaned, Flora. Just because you can’t see through the window now doesn’t mean you never will.”
I only glare at him. He doesn’t know anything.
“Everything is temporary,” he says. “Even this.”
I kept the account. I didn’t understand why my therapist was so fussed about one stupid social media account – but now I think I get it. It was about the future. It didn’t matter what I did with it – all that mattered was that I believed there was one. That I might want one.
When I open my eyes, Mira is still holding my hand, watching me.
“I’m okay.”
“You are. I know.” She lets go, and throws her arm around my shoulders, rocking me alongside her. “But whenever you aren’t, even if I’m not here, you’ll call me? Yes? You promise?”
“You don’t want that. I mean, thank you, but—”
“No. No ‘but’. And no, I don’t want you to not be okay – but if you aren’t, I want to be there.”
Something has stuck in my throat. I don’t know what it is or how it got there, but it feels like it’s the size of a fist. “Even if you’re going away?”
She shakes her head. “I’m going to college. Not the moon.”
The last hill before Bath drops away, and the little city spreads out along the river valley, its honey-coloured buildings shining like possibility as the bus bounces down towards it.
“No. No. Nope. Maybe – oh, no. Definitely no.” Mira grabs the dress hangers out of my hands and, one by one, tosses them all over the nearest rack. It’s so like it used to be, like I used to be, but different. Better? Not sure. But it’s something.
“What’s wrong with this one?” I lunge for my favourite from the pile, a dark blue one.
She just gives me a withering look. “You are kidding me, yes?”
“Fine.” I drop onto the padded bench in the middle of the changing-room waiting area. “So what do you suggest? I told you leaving it until the day of the party was dodgy.”
“And I told you we should have gone to Bristol, but here we are! Never mind. I have an idea.” She ditches the last of the dresses and scoops up the bag with her dress in it. The very first one she tried on, made from gorgeous green lace. Twenty-three attempts later, I’m still dressless. “Come on.”
“Maybe it’s me and dresses. Maybe we’re just not meant to be.”
She tows me out of the shop and along the busy main street. “Shhhh. This way.”
“Mira, can we not just…” She yanks me down a narrow side street, then another – and finally into a tiny lopsided courtyard. “Where are we going?”
“I told you. I have an idea.” And she gives me a shove towards the back of the courtyard.
“Would you stop shoving…oh.” Because there, in a shop window hidden away from the street, is a dress. A perfect dress. Such a pale blue that it’s almost grey, and soft enough to look like it could fly; it’s floor-length and chiffony, and there are rows of tiny pearls sewn around the edges of the neck and the arms.
“Oh.” I look at the shop sign. “But it’s a vintage shop – I’ll never be able to afford it!”
Mira grins. “Don’t you see the tag? It’s half price.”
I spin back around so fast I almost fall over on the uneven cobbles of the courtyard. “It is? Oh my god. It is. And it’s my size. How is that possible?”
“It’s a sign.”
“I don’t believe in signs. Or coincidences,” I mutter. This is enough to make Mira snort with laughter.
“Then let’s say I do.”
As she propels me through the door, I spot the little framed notice.
I picture Felix’s face when I tell him.
Maybe it is a sign after all…
Inside, the shop is tiny and nothing like the ones we’ve been in already. Each piece of clothing is carefully hung and labelled with a brown cardboard tag: heavy woollen suits, a black-and-white dress that looks like it was meant for dancing all night in a smoky jazz club, a duffle coat, a pair of trousers that shimmer under the light like water. Hats and old leather suitcases sit on antique luggage racks above the rails, and below the clothes, neat pairs of shoes sit side by side. Mira spots what look like cowboy boots and lunges for them – leaving me to face the woman who has appeared behind the counter.
“Can I help you?”
“The…um…dress in the window. Is it really half price?” She looks me up and down and narrows her eyes. “You’re interested in that one?”
Mira emerges from underneath a fake-fur coat waving a cowboy boot. “She is. She really, really is.”
The woman’s face softens and she actually smiles at me. “Good. It’s my favourite, and it’s been stuck here for ever. Would you like to try it on? It should fit you perfectly.”
“Please.” I clamp my hands together in front of me so she can’t see me shaking as she edges past to reach the window.
“I told you,” Mira whispers. “A sign. It’s been waiting for you.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
But when the owner lifts the dress out of the window and swirls it around in front of me, it feels like maybe Mira’s right after all. Maybe it has been waiting.
“It’s not the most valuable piece we’ve ever had in, but I think it’s one of the prettiest. Based on a pattern from 1912, I believe – altered, of course. You’d never have had a neckline like that, or the cross-ruching on the front, but the idea’s still there.” She holds it out to me. “The changing room’s through the curtain there. I’ll be right here if you need anything – sometimes the fastenings can stick on these ones, so just call.”
A pattern from 1912? Okay. That’s so much a sign it’s almost spooky.
The little changing room is hidden behind a heavy red velvet curtain, and everything is softly lit by warm white bulbs all around the full-length mirror. Another mirror, just about as tall as I am and mounted in a wooden frame, is tucked into the far corner of the room along with a deep red velvet armchair.
“How are you getting on in there?”
“Good, thanks!”
I’m not about to say that I’m just standing here, staring. Hooking the hanger over the top of the mirror, I shrug my T-shirt off and drop it on the floor along with my shorts and kick off my trainers. The dress slides over my shoulders like it was cut for me, sitting perfectly. It even fastens without a single hiccup. When I pull back the curtain and step out into the shop, Mira lets out a squeak, then beams.
The Pieces of Ourselves Page 18