“OH MY GOD!” She actually twitches – and slides half-out of the chair. “Don’t do that,” she groans, pulling herself back into the seat.
“You were asleep.”
“Resting my eyes.”
“Good night?”
“Where did you go? I looked for you…after the stairs.” She knows I’ll know what she means.
“Home. Charlie and Felix needed to get back, and I didn’t…”
I didn’t what? Didn’t want to stay after that conversation with Hal? Didn’t feel like being at a party? Maybe.
“I didn’t want to walk back in the dark,” I finish.
Mira doesn’t believe me, but she nods anyway.
“How is he this morning? After the thing with his grandfather?”
“Hal? I’m not sure.”
The truth is, on any other morning lately I wouldn’t have come down here first. But this morning…I don’t know. I’ve never heard him sound like that before – so cold. In that moment, the Hal I had almost convinced myself I could tell anything to was gone.
And after seeing the girls from school…Well.
It took me for ever to remember their names, but I did. Eventually. Lying on my bed, staring up at nothing.
Emily, Yaz and Clare.
I used to take maths with Emily. I sat at the desk across the aisle from Yaz in English, and Clare was in the year below me. I didn’t exactly know them well, but it was only a year ago – and they looked at me like I was some kind of monster. Just like I was afraid anyone would if they knew, if they’d seen me when I was bad. And then I did the worst possible thing – ran away. Because that’s what mad, freaky Flora does, isn’t it? She runs away. Oh look, there she goes again.
I have got to stop running away. I need to run towards.
Towards what?
No idea.
But there must be something. Maybe it doesn’t even matter what it is, just that I know it’s out there.
See, Sanjay? I did get it. It just took me a year to understand it.
“Go find him. He’ll be going soon, no?”
“I guess so. A couple of days, maybe.” I wonder whether I should tell her everything I overheard.
“And then it’s finished?”
“Finished?” Something stabs at my insides. Finished. Yes. It’ll be finished. How can it be anything but finished after he leaves here? That conversation made the bargain he has with his father pretty clear – and I can’t imagine there’s a place for someone like me in Hal’s life if his father’s in charge of it. All I have of Hal is what’s left of Albie’s letters. And the worst thing is, that’s all Hal has left of himself too.
He’s traded his future for someone else’s past…and I think, if I was ever going to fall in love with somebody, that might be the kind of thing that would make me do it.
Maybe?
I don’t know.
I don’t even know what love feels like, I don’t think. I always thought it would be like the mania: bright and sparkling, like cut glass. Brilliant and sharp. But this…isn’t. It’s the sound of him laughing on the roof of the car, the warmth of his jacket around me. The smudges of dust on his nose.
Is it really so easy? So little and so big at the same time?
Either way, soon all those things will be gone and only the traces in my memory will be left, ready to be wiped away by the next twist of my brain.
Mira’s still watching me, waiting. “I said, the research will be finished.” She blinks at me over her sunglasses. “What did you think I meant?”
“Oh. Nothing.” I try to sound casual. I don’t quite manage it. Mira makes a loud “Mmmmm” of disbelief. “Anyway, there’s still some stuff to sort through – we haven’t quite figured out what happened, but I think we’re getting to the end.”
Of Albie.
Of us…whatever “us” is.
All we have left is stolen time.
“Look, I should get going. He’ll be waiting for me. I’ll catch up with you later?” Maybe by then I’ll have more of a handle on all this. Even if I don’t, maybe I’ll tell her anyway, because she’s right – whether she’s at Hopwood or in Bristol, Mira’s always here for the stuff that matters. Even if she’s hungover.
And I think this matters. I think it matters a lot.
“Later? Sure. If I live so long,” she mutters, and slouches even further back into her chair. I can still hear her groaning and muttering to herself as the break-room door swings shut behind me.
Sitting on the old Chesterfield under the window in the lobby is Hal. And beside him is his grandfather. They must be waiting for a car to pick Pa up. A jacket I don’t recognize is folded neatly over the arm of the sofa, which reminds me that I still have Hal’s jacket from last night hanging on the handle of my wardrobe door. He’s swapped his clothes from the party for grey jeans and a dark T-shirt, but I catch myself studying his face for any hint of his father. There’s nothing. In fact, watching him sitting beside his grandfather, leaning in to hear what the older man is saying and smiling as he replies, makes me see him even more clearly. He runs his hands back through his hair – and then suddenly he looks right at me in that way he always does, as though he can feel me watching him. Maybe he could. His smile widens and brightens, and he tilts his head to one side…and then his grandfather looks over at me too and even from here I can see his eyes are as sharp as anything.
“We were just talking about you.” Hal jumps up as I reach the sofa. “He really did leave last night, by the way,” he adds – meaning his father. “Don’t worry.”
“I wasn’t.”
I was. But.
He eyes me warily, then nods and gestures to his grandfather. “Flora, I’d like you to meet Pa – Marcus Waverley. Pa, this is Flora.”
His grandfather stands slowly, as though he’s off-balance, and looks me up and down, breaking into a broad smile. “Flora.” He holds out a hand.
“Mr Waverley.” I take it and he closes both his hands around mine, laughing.
“Marcus, please. ‘Mr Waverley’ makes me feel old. Older, anyway,” he adds, nudging Hal. “Hal’s been telling me all about you.”
I nod, keeping my mouth shut. It’s the only way I can guarantee I won’t spend the rest of the day worrying whether what I said was actually stupid or just felt it.
Marcus lets go of my hands, waving at the lobby in general. “Well, I must say your staff are doing a beautiful job of…”
Hal’s cheeks slowly fade up to scarlet. I shake my head and try to keep my own face from doing the same. “Sorry, but I think Hal’s promoted me. I am the staff. I work in housekeeping.”
This only seems to confuse Marcus for a split second, because then he shrugs and smiles even more warmly. “In that case, I’m very impressed. I know a little about keeping a hotel looking smart – yes, Hal, I do,” he interrupts himself, as Hal tries to say something, then carries on smoothly, “and it’s harder work than most people think. So good for you. And it’s nice to finally see my grandson getting along so well with someone his own age. His father never saw the point of friends, I can tell you…”
“Pa, Flora doesn’t need to know my life story right now.” Hal steps neatly between us in an uncanny echo of the way he separated his father and grandfather last night.
I swear Pa actually chuckles, resting his hand on Hal’s shoulder. From outside there’s the sound of a car horn.
“That must be my driver,” he says, turning to check through the window, where a smart blue car has pulled up outside the door. “No, no, you don’t need to walk me out, Hal. I’m sure you have more interesting things to do with your time, and I’m not that decrepit yet.” He drops his hand from Hal’s shoulder and moves towards the door – then stops and turns back to me. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Flora. I hope our paths cross again soon.”
Watching him walk out to the car and climb into the back seat as the driver holds the door, I find myself hoping exactly the same thing. And as the car disappears d
own the drive, I turn to Hal.
“Did you tell him about Albie?”
“No. Not yet. I decided I want to tell him all of it at once.” He tucks his hands into his back pockets as the car finally vanishes from view. “Thanks for not bringing it up.”
“I wouldn’t. I mean, it’s your thing, isn’t it? Yours and his.”
Anyone who saw the way Hal and his grandfather spoke to each other would have got it – why he’s been so determined to do this, and what it means.
“Ah, I think it’s yours too now, don’t you?” He turns away from the window. “Look, about last night. My father…”
“No. You don’t have to apologize.”
“I do, though. He did kill the party mood a bit.”
“You really, really don’t. You never have to apologize for something somebody else does. And anyway, if that’s how he talks to your grandfather, he’s a bit of a dick, isn’t he? You definitely don’t apologize for other people when they’re being dicks.”
Hal chokes back a laugh. “He’s like that pretty much all the time.”
“Then he’s obviously a full-time dick.” I scoop up a napkin, crumpled and dropped by the side of the sofa, sticking it in my pocket.
He tugs at his hair and lets out a growl of frustration. “I just didn’t want you to see all that. The Waverley family drama, you know? It’s not…it’s not what I want to be. I try not to be…Like him, I mean.” Running out of words, his eyes search for mine and lock onto them like a lifebelt.
“I know.” I slip my hand into his. His fingers close so tightly around mine that pins and needles prick my fingertips. “I like your grandfather, though.”
“You do?” He visibly brightens.
“You can tell the two of you are related.”
“Everyone always says that. I don’t get it,” he says, shrugging. “We don’t look that similar, do we? Please say no,” he adds in a whisper.
“Not like that. But there’s something. It’s hard to explain. It’s just that, seeing the two of you sitting together, you sort of…go. Does that make sense?”
It makes no sense. But it’s what I mean – that there’s something about them that matches. Inside.
“I think so. Like you and your brother. You look alike.”
“We do? That’s unfortunate for one of us.”
“I didn’t…You have the same nose, is what I meant. Same eyes.”
“Luckily for him, we’ve got different brains, though.”
“Sorry?” Hal frowns, confused.
“Nothing.”
I can’t believe I said that. Of all the things I could have said…
“Come on. We should get up to the attic. Albie’s waiting – and didn’t you say you wanted to tell Pa the whole story?”
But as we head for the attic, all I can hear is ticking. In my head, a clock has started counting down the hours until he has to leave.
“Do you recognize this writing? I don’t think we’ve seen it before.”
Hal slides the letter he’s reading across to me. It definitely looks different from any of the other pages we’ve read – where Albie’s writing is heavy and looping, Iris’s is sharper and more hesitant, but this is something new. It’s narrow and the loops are thinner, the letters taller, and it’s written in pencil pressed heavily into the paper. All the other letters have been in ink.
“Where was it?” I start scanning the first couple of lines. It’s not like there are many places it could have come from – the stack is so small now that I can practically count the sheets from here.
“It was just in there with the rest.”
He shifts in his spot on the floor, waiting for me to read. Halfway down the page, I look up – and he’s watching me. Still waiting.
“You’ve read it?”
He nods.
“And?”
His eyes flick down to the floor.
He stopped seeming himself, you see. At first, we thought he were tired – time’s a funny thing here, and no matter how much a man sleeps (if he can sleep) he’s still as bone-tired when he opens his eyes as he were when he shut ’em. But with the Lieutenant, there’s something as isn’t right. Most times, he stares into the wall or the mud. Rats have run right over his boots and all he does is stare at them. Sometimes he talks about the birds at home, to himself, over and over. That worsened after he were trapped in a shell hole. The man with him – you’ll know it now, Charlie Brewer – took a bad hit, and he were a goner. The Lieutenant were there the whole time, held his hand, talked to him about the swifts because he knew he loved ’em. He were pinned down by guns and shellfire, in there with Charlie’s body for two days, half-dead himself. When they found him, scouts tried to make him come away, and he said he wouldn’t. Not until they brought a stretcher to bring Charlie back to our trenches. The Lieutenant wouldn’t leave him, not even for himself.
I suppose you’d be wondering why I’d tell you that, seeing as we’ve never met more’n to pass the time of day. Or why I’d wait to write you till now when I’m back, and not send straightaways from France. It’s like this: they read our letters home you see, over there. Some of the men say it’s because of spying, but more of us think it’s because they don’t want everyone to know what it’s really like. Once this war is over, I can’t think of a single man who’s seen it who will ever want to speak of it again. George said they call it the war to end all wars, and by Christ (if you’ll pardon me) I hope that’s so.
But you need to know – knowing as I do about you and the Lieutenant – that he’s not in his right mind. Not since Charlie. It’s what we call the collywobbles. And I don’t want to fright you – he’s not so bad that he won’t follow orders, they can’t court-martial him just yet – but I’ve seen it happen a dozen times already. I know it’s hard with your place, but the family need to know, and I can’t tell them. Maybe you can get word to someone in the house, someone they would give an ear to? Tell them Master Albie is the bravest Lieutenant we have on the whole of the Western Front and not a soul would doubt it, but the war has cracked something inside him. There’s no shame in it, no weakness. The opposite, to tell the truth. It’s just that he’s our Lieutenant, and he’s been looking out for us since the minute we got on the boat at Southampton, and now it’s our turn to look out for him, as it were.
You’ve a fine man in Albie Holmwood, Iris. And God willing, he’ll be home with you soon.
Dougie Marton.
“That’s the Dougie Marton in Albie’s letter, isn’t it? From the village. He said he got…what was it?”
Hal screws his eyes shut, trying to remember. “A Blighty. I looked it up – it was what they called it when they had to be sent home for treatment.”
“So now he’s home – and he sent this?” I pat the letter. “What does it mean?”
“I think it means Albie’s got shell shock.”
“That’s like PTSD, isn’t it? There was something about it at Fallowmill,” I add, before he can ask any questions.
“Lots of soldiers suffered from it, especially at the Somme.” He fumbles his phone out of his pocket and taps something into the browser. “There’s more about it here.” He holds it out to me, but I already know what it’s going to tell me. A deep breath – and then the bomb I knew was coming. “Albie had a mental breakdown.” He sighs.
The bars across the windows, the locks on the doors at Fallowmill flash before my eyes.
Locks and bars. Barbed wire and trenches. No war as complete and no prison as secure as your own mind. Nowhere harder to escape from. And whatever happened to him after that, he never came home.
We already know how the story ends.
There are only two pieces of paper left. That’s it. Nothing else left in the attic is from the same period. Hal has carefully noted it all down and retied the strings that held the stacks and bundles together as we found them. The last two pages sit there in front of the crates, face down.
I press a finger into the middle of the kno
t Hal’s tying. “What happens now?”
“I don’t know. We pack them back up, I guess. And they stay here.”
“You’re just going to leave them here?”
I only realize I’m not actually talking about the letters after I’ve said it.
“I can’t take them with me. What am I going to do with them?”
Maybe I wasn’t talking about the letters, but I really, really hope he is.
“And anyway, they probably belong to somebody. Albie’s family – or the hotel.”
Relief washes over me. He did mean the letters.
Relief…and hope.
“Maybe that could be the next thing. We could try and track them down? His family, I mean.”
There has to be something I can suggest. Anything that gives us more time.
Anything for there to be a future. It doesn’t even matter what it is.
I don’t think he’s listening, but I try anyway. “Maybe there are hospital records somewhere. Maybe he…”
Maybe what? He ended up somewhere like Fallowmill after all?
You’ve seen those bars. If that’s what happened to him, would you really want to know?
“Hmm, what?” Hal looks up from scribbling something in his notebook.
“Oh, nothing. Just an idea, but it doesn’t matter.”
“Sure?”
“Yeah, it’s fine.”
I eyeball the pages. They look so innocent while we can’t see what’s written on them.
All right, Year Eleven. Settle down. You have exactly one and a half hours, and you may turn your exam papers over…now.
Out of the corner of my eye, I’m sure I can see something fluttering. Sheets of paper, thrown up in the air and falling again.
Falling…
He takes a deep breath. “I guess this is it. Are you ready?”
Ready to find out what happened, or to let go?
“Are you?”
“No. Yes. Fnnnph.” He makes a sad noise in the back of his throat. “It’s just…I’ve been doing this for so long, planning it, researching it…I’m not sure what I’ll do now.”
He’s lying. He knows, and – just like me – he doesn’t want to face it.
The Pieces of Ourselves Page 21