Tyme's End

by B. R. Collins

  I stand in front of the cracked wall, and for a moment it occurs to me that I could go somewhere else. I could even go home.

  It isn’t home, though. If anywhere is home, it’s Tyme’s End.

  It’s like someone else puts my hands on the top of the wall. I don’t particularly try to move, but I find myself scrambling up and over the way I always do. I catch my finger on something and it starts to bleed, but it doesn’t hurt.

  I walk through the long grass and the sun beats down and I’m still cold. The strange, muffled, numb feeling stays with me all the way through the darkness of the sitting room and the corridor, up the stairs, and then I’m sitting on the groundsheet on the bed, bathed in sunlight from the window, and I pick up the corners of the groundsheet and wrap myself up like a parcel, because I’m freezing. I wonder about the whisky and Coke and whether this is an emergency, but the thought of it makes the stale taste of sausage flood on to the back of my tongue. I sit very still, as if I’m inside a blister of calm that might rupture at any moment.

  It isn’t that Mum and Dad are angry with me. I’d be angry with me if I were them. I am angry with me. It’s not that we fight. All my school friends fight with their parents. It’s not that. It’s just –

  I don’t belong here. I don’t belong with Mum and Dad and Sam. And no matter how much they love me, they can’t change that. Leila’s right – I’m a foreigner. I always will be. But I don’t belong anywhere else, either. None of this is mine.

  That’s why I like Tyme’s End so much. It’s shipwrecked, like me.

  I take deep breaths. I don’t want to cry, even now that I’m on my own. I’m scared of how miserable I might be, if I let myself think about it. I say aloud, ‘Don’t be so self-indulgent. Don’t be so self-dramatising. For God’s sake, Bibi, don’t be so stupid!’

  It almost works. I sit up a bit straighter and put on Sam’s don’t-you-know-there’s-a-war-on? voice. ‘Gosh, Bibi, I think you’re being jolly ungrateful. If it were me, I should simply jump at the chance to be English. Just because you were born somewhere else doesn’t mean you can’t be almost as English as the rest of us. You’re here now, so why don’t you buck up? I agree, it’s a bit unfortunate, but if you try to put the past behind you, we’ll agree to say no more about it.’

  If Sam had said it, it would have been funny. But somehow, when I’m on my own, it sounds flat and empty and echoes in the room like it wasn’t a joke.

  I try to laugh, and then I’m crying, instead.

  .

  I don’t know how long I cry for. I put my head down on the groundsheet and sob into the plastic. After a while I have to move because there’s a little puddle of tears and snot and spit collecting in the dent underneath my face. I wipe my face with my arms and sit up and take deep breaths but then the tears well up again. I tell myself it’s because I didn’t sleep properly and I didn’t have a proper breakfast, but that doesn’t make me feel any better. I think of Mum and Dad’s faces, and Oliver when he told me to go away, and the way I ran off without answering when Leila asked me if I was OK, and in the end I stop trying to be sensible and let myself cry. The last tiny bit of my brain is glad I’m here, not at home, and I can make as much noise as I want.

  I curl up and put my hands over my face. I can feel the bedsprings quiver underneath me when I move. The frame of the bed squeaks, and the plastic makes a sticky kind of crackling noise. I can’t breathe smoothly; when I inhale it’s like my lungs have to keep changing gears.

  In the end I quieten down. I lie and stare out of the window at the tops of the trees. They glow a bright, unlikely green. The sky is still completely blue. When I blink the world blurs and wavers. Then the water rolls out of my eyes and it’s clear again. It’s almost restful, letting things go from soft-focus to real and back again.

  I don’t know how I know I’m being watched. The feeling grows gradually, like a seed. At first I don’t move, but it gets stronger and stronger. I’m not scared, but I stay still, like I’m playing dead. But in the end I have to look.

  It’s Oliver. Of course. He’s standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame as if he’s been there for a long time.

  I sit up and wipe my nose and say, ‘All right, all right – I’m going –’

  ‘It’s OK,’ he says.

  ‘I’m going, I just came to – I thought you’d . . . What?’

  He shrugs and scrapes at the ground with his toe. For a split second he looks about fifteen. ‘I – you were crying. I couldn’t help hearing. Sorry.’

  There’s nothing sensible to say to that, so I don’t answer.

  ‘Listen, I –’ He puts his hands in his pockets, without looking up. ‘I came to get your book for you. I thought it wasn’t fair of me to make you leave it here, so . . .’

  My book? I want to laugh. I say, ‘Oh. Right. Thanks.’

  ‘I was here anyway, I mean, but I thought – but obviously you came to get it yourself, so . . .’ He tails off. ‘I was going to apologise for being rude to you.’

  ‘Were you? Why?’

  He opens his mouth. Then, suddenly, he looks straight at me and grins. ‘I have no idea. Good point.’

  I grin back at him; I can’t help it. Then I realise what I must look like and wipe my face on my sleeve. When I can see again he’s sitting against the wall, fumbling in his pocket. He sees me looking and says, ‘Cigarette?’

  ‘I don’t smoke.’

  ‘Me neither.’ He takes the cellophane off the packet and taps a cigarette out into his hand, then lights it. He’s got a heavy silver lighter that throws a reflection into the corner of the room. ‘This is my first for ten years.’

  ‘So why –?’

  ‘Bloody England. I can’t handle it. No, not England, just this bit of it. I can’t –’ He stops all of a sudden, as if he’s said too much. ‘Never mind. Don’t start. It’s a horrible habit.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  The corner of his mouth twitches, and he glances at me through the smoke.

  I think he’s going to say something – ask me what the matter is, or say something meaningless and comforting, or talk about something irrelevant like the weather – but he doesn’t. He just sits there and smokes, so there’s no sound but his breathing and my sniffles. He’s staring at the floor, and he turns his head every time the house creaks. But the pause doesn’t feel awkward. I let it go on until I can’t imagine either of us speaking, ever. The sunlight from the window creeps further into the room, and the smoke wavers and spreads out.

  Eventually he stubs the cigarette out on his shoe, looks round for an ashtray, and finally puts the dog-end back into the packet.

  I say, ‘Were you really going to apologise to me?’

  ‘Yes. Well, I was going to leave your book with the people at the bookshop, and if you’d been there, I might have. Apologised.’

  ‘Oh.’

  This time the silence does make me uncomfortable, even though he’s not looking at me. I say, ‘You were only rude because – I mean – sorry. About following you, and telling Eddie that you owned Tyme’s End. I was – it was a bit –’

  He looks up expectantly, as if he’s waiting for the end of my sentence.

  I screw my face up. ‘Vile. Me. I was vile. I didn’t mean to be, I just –’

  ‘Thank God you think so,’ he says, leaning forward. ‘I thought you were being vile too. But I thought maybe it was just me, and I was overreacting. That’s a weight off my mind.’ He has to be joking, but he doesn’t sound like he is.

  ‘Wait. You thought I was vile but you were still going to apologise?’

  ‘Um. Yes. God, how English.’ He shakes his head, mocking himself.

  ‘I thought you were American.’

  ‘No.’ He raises his eyebrows. ‘No. I went to the US when – ten years ago. When my grandf
ather died. This is the first time I’ve been back.’

  ‘Oh.’

  More silence.

  He says, ‘I didn’t watch you crying or anything.’

  ‘What did you do? Close your eyes?’

  He catches my eye and smiles, making a funny movement with his head that could be a nod or a shake. Then he says, ‘I’m sorry. If I – if whatever upset you had anything to do with me. If I got you into trouble with your parents.’

  ‘They’re not my –’ It’s automatic. I stop, but he’s watching me like he’s listening. I lace my hands round my knees and say, more quietly, ‘They’re not my parents.’

  ‘I thought maybe . . .’ He trails off too, as if he’s scared of saying something wrong. ‘You don’t look much like them. I did wonder.’

  I laugh, but not because it’s funny, exactly. ‘You mean I look Middle Eastern and they look English?’

  ‘N—’ He bites his lip. ‘Um, yeah. Essentially. Yes.’

  ‘No shit, Sherlock.’ I roll my eyes at the look on his face.

  ‘I didn’t mean –’

  I shrug, and he doesn’t finish his sentence. Then I look out of the window at the sunlight on the trees, and hear my voice as if it’s coming from a long way away. ‘I’m adopted. It’s sort of complicated, because Mum – the one you met – is my real father’s cousin. Was, I mean. He had a heart attack. My mother was an Israeli Arab. I was born in Tel Aviv. But after my father died she moved to England to be with his family, and she . . . Mum helped out with me when I was small. And then she – my real mother went a bit . . . funny. I mean, I don’t blame her, with me to bring up.’ It’s a joke, and I grin fiercely at him, but he bites his lip and meets my gaze without smiling. Something about his expression makes me want to cry again. I clear my throat. ‘I don’t think she spoke English all that well, and she didn’t like it here much, and . . . Anyway, there was an accident. She walked out in front of a car, on a really fast, busy road.’ I hunch my shoulders, like I’ve frozen in the middle of a shrug. ‘So Mum and Dad took me in. It wasn’t that they wanted to adopt kids, it was just that I needed someone to look after me, and they didn’t want me to go into care.’

  ‘They must have loved you already.’

  I glance at him for signs of irony, but he’s looking out of the window as if he’s thinking about something else.

  ‘Either that or they felt guilty.’

  ‘I don’t think the one necessarily excludes the other,’ he says, tilting his head as if he’s trying to get a better view of the sky.

  I open my mouth to snap at him. But he isn’t trying to make me feel better, the way everyone else does. He’s not saying stupid, comforting things that neither of us believes. It’s as if his attention is on something else, so he can say casual, careless things that might actually be true.

  It’s because he doesn’t seem to feel sorry for me that I can say, ‘The driver of the car said she looked him straight in the eye, and – just walked out in front of him. He was going really fast, and . . . He said he thought she was crazy.’

  He looks at me then.

  ‘I’m not supposed to know that. I heard Mum and Dad talking about it, when I was small. They didn’t know I was listening.’ I swallow. ‘Do you think – if someone wanted to kill themselves, do you think they might . . . ?’

  ‘Accidents do happen,’ he says slowly. ‘They drive on the right, don’t they, in Israel?’

  A pause.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I suppose someone might do that. It’s possible.’

  ‘I’m not saying she meant to – I just –’ Suddenly my throat fills up with a hard slippery lump, like wax. I swallow but it won’t go away, and I know that if I carry on talking I’ll start to cry. I’ve never asked anyone that before. There’s never been anyone I could ask, who’d give me an honest answer and not care too much if I got upset.

  His hand makes a short movement, as if he’s about to touch me, but he doesn’t. ‘Is that what you think happened?’

  ‘No. No, it isn’t. But I don’t know. If I knew, one way or the other . . . I hate it that I don’t know and I’ll never know.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘That does pretty much suck.’

  He sounds so matter-of-fact that I laugh.

  ‘On the other hand, you do have two parents who love you. Presumably.’

  ‘They’re not my real parents.’

  ‘Yes, you said. But they love you. That’s something.’

  I say, ‘It’s not enough.’

  He flicks a glance at me. ‘Yeah. I know how you feel.’ He digs for his cigarettes, and an odd smile plays round his mouth. ‘You poor little orphan.’

  I stare at him. I think how stupid I was to think that he was actually being nice. I say icily ‘How could you possibly know how I feel?’

  ‘I feel – I felt – the same. I never knew my parents either. My mum got cancer when I was two, and my dad –’

  He stops and lights another cigarette. It’s only when he’s put his lighter back in his pocket that he meets my gaze. There’s a pause, as if we both need time to take in what he said. Then he smiles, a bit too quickly, and flicks the ash off his cigarette, even though he’s only just lit it.

  Suddenly I’m scared to say anything in case I make a mess of it. Suddenly I have an urge to go and sit next to him. But I stay where I am, just watching him.

  He stares down at the rectangle of sunlight from the window. He reaches out and runs his middle finger along the edge of it. The ribbon of cigarette smoke streams up through the light, blue-grey, almost opaque.

  ‘I met my father a couple of times. The last time was when I was about thirteen. He didn’t die – he chose to leave. I don’t know if that’s better or worse. But I had my grandfather. And he was – he loved me a lot. Well, as far as I know.’ He laughs softly. He digs at the floor with his fingernail, as if he’s trying to scratch the sunlight away.

  ‘But – you didn’t think it was enough?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said, just now. That you felt the same way as me, about – I mean, when you met your dad – what was it like?’

  ‘I –’ He looks up. His voice cuts out, like a car stalling. For a second it’s like he’s looking straight through me, that he can see someone else where I’m sitting. It’s a weird, horrible sensation. Then his face changes – snaps shut, like a padlock – and he gets to his feet. ‘How did we get on to this? Look, I – I’m sorry you’re adopted. Poor you. It must be terrible. Now get your stuff.’

  ‘I only –’

  ‘Come on. You can’t stay here.’

  ‘I wasn’t being nosy, you started talking about –’

  ‘Right. Well, now I’ve stopped.’ He goes out into the corridor. There’s a rucksack leaning against the wall, and he swings it on to his shoulder. ‘I don’t even know why I told you that.’

  ‘Because you were trying to make me feel better?’ I kneel up on the groundsheet, putting a hand on the windowsill to steady myself. The strange, intimate silence that filled the room a minute ago has dissolved so quickly I can’t remember what it felt like.

  ‘Probably because I know I’ll never see you again. Did you have anything else apart from your book? If so, you’d better get it. You’re not coming back here.’

  I reach for my book and hold it against my chest, hugging it. I say, ‘You can’t stop me coming back. You’re leaving.’

  ‘Do your parents know you spend so much time here?’

  I squeeze the book tighter and tighter. I say, ‘You can’t. You won’t. Don’t you dare tell them –’

  He shrugs stiffly. ‘You shouldn’t be here. I don’t know if it’s structurally sound any more. If the roof came down you could be very seriously –’

  ‘That’s bollocks.’

 
‘Did you bring anything else, or is that everything?’

  I glare at him. He doesn’t seem to care. He stares straight back at me, with that closed, unsympathetic look on his face.

  I stand up, go to the space by the fireplace, and take out my tin of biscuits and bottle of whisky and Coke and my torch. His forehead creases when he sees the torch, as if it worries him, and I open my mouth, ready to say, ‘Yes, fine, I know, I really shouldn’t be here alone in the dark.’ But he doesn’t say anything, so I just pick everything up in my arms and say, ‘OK.’

  He steps aside so that I have to walk in front of him, down the stairs and out into the sudden heat and sunlight.

  .

  If it wasn’t for the weather, we could’ve gone back in time, to yesterday. Oliver stands in the long grass and jerks his head towards the cracked bit of wall. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Are you going to tell my parents that I come here?’

  ‘Not if you promise to stay away.’

  I don’t say anything. We just look at each other.

  ‘Goodbye, then,’ he says. He drops his rucksack on the ground and crouches to adjust the straps, frowning.

  ‘Are you really going back to America?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘What about – never mind.’ I turn to leave, and then turn back. ‘So you’re still going to sell it? Tyme’s End?’

  ‘I’ll get the solicitors to sort it out. I only came back because – I needed to see it. I wanted to find out if –’ He stops.

  ‘I thought you hated it. I thought you wanted to raze it to the ground.’

  ‘I do,’ he says, and rubs his forehead with one hand. ‘I do.’

  I glance over my shoulder. There are tiny dark green rags of ivy fluttering in the attic window, and I can hear birdsong. Oliver follows my gaze and takes a long, deep breath. Under the tobacco I can still smell the clean washing-powder scent of his clothes.

  I hear myself say, ‘Give Tyme’s End to me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you don’t want Tyme’s End, give it to me.’