by David Mark
She fumbles for the door handle and tugs at it with fingers that don’t seem to want to do what she tells them. The lock clicks open and she fumbles at the seatbelt clip with her other hand. She pushes the door with her shoulder, glass falling from the frame, drops of blood appearing on the backs of her hands.
She hears voices. Sees the vehicle fill with geometric shapes, cuboids and diamonds of light and shade. Slithers out of the steaming hunk of metal and lands, painfully, on a slope of sodden grass. She lies back. Squints into the leaden sky; raindrops falling in their trillions. She feels strangely peaceful. They gave her a drug in the hospital that had made her feel like this: all floaty and ethereal and no trouble to anybody.
‘She’s moving! Mick, here, grab my hand, I’m going to go down like Eddie the bloody Eagle in a moment …’
She tries to speak. It comes out as a croak. She manages to raise her arms, to wipe her face, and she registers that most of the liquid on her palms is colourless. She pushes her hair back. Pain, there. A lump forming in her parting; a sticky substance at her crown.
‘Don’t move. Stay there … for fuck’s sake … what were you bloody doing!’
She doesn’t know the voice. She pushes herself up into a sitting position and looks at the crumpled shape of the car. A familiar panic rises. He’s going to do his nut, Liz. He’s going to go fucking spare!
‘Are you all right? Shit, stupid bloody question. You came out of nowhere – on my side of the road, what were you doing?’
She pulls a face. ‘I’m OK,’ she croaks. Coughs and spits and tries again. ‘I’m all right. I can move. Don’t …’
Her words are cut short by the sudden, painful impact of a wellington boot thudding into her shoulder. She lets out a grunt and rolls into a ball as a sodden, stocky figure in a waxed jacket scoots past her in a flurry of curses; red face opening in a series of angry vowels.
He shuffles back up the slope. Peers down at her. She looks up into a broad face. Fifty-something, at least. Checked shirt and a coat she associates with the queen.
‘Christ, I nearly went myself! Are you hurt? There’s blood on your cheek. On your hands.’ He moves a light up and down her, peering at her like livestock at market. ‘What were you doing? We nearly went right through you! That little thing’s no good for here, you fool …’
‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbles. She tries to get into a sitting position. Catches a whiff of beery breath and looks into yellow eyes seamed with red.
She feels a hand slipping behind her head, ungentle fingers in her hair. Experiences a sudden lurching movement, and she finds herself upright, half crouching, pain streaking down her arm. She looks past him. On the far side of the river is an old building. Narrow, two-storeys, holes in the slate roof. There’s a light on in the upstairs window, so it seems the house is winking at her. She peers closer. She’d thought it abandoned, like the others that dot the valley. Her vision swims, and clears. She can make out signs of life. Lights. Movement. The flicker of an animal moving swiftly, shadows thrown against the crumbling wall.
‘Here,’ comes the voice, in her face. ‘Look at me. You’re all right, yeah? Christ you scared us. Thought you were going to end up in the brook! You’re all right. Cuts and bruises and you’ll be sore tomorrow but a cup of sweet tea and a lie down and you’ll be right as ninepence.’
Liz licks her lips. Shuffles backwards, trying to focus on the face in front of her own. He keeps glancing past her. Painfully, she twists and follows his gaze. There are three figures at the top of the slope, standing by the huge, big rectangle of the vehicle she had clipped. A broken light illuminates the tumbling sky. She squints, head aching. She can make out shapes. A tall figure, oddly tall, holds a large umbrella over two smaller, broad-shouldered specimens. They stand still as cut-outs.
‘I didn’t see you,’ splutters Liz, as the buzzing in her head starts to clear. ‘The rain was coming down so hard and I couldn’t work the satnav and then you just came out of nowhere …’
‘Not me, love,’ he says, one side of his face twisting, so that the corner of his mouth reaches almost to his eye. Creases appear in his skin. Neatly-spaced teeth peeking out from half-parted lips. ‘You were in the middle of the bloody road! I know these roads like the back of my hand. You bounced off the Landy like a ball!’
Temper starts to flare. She’s in pain. The car’s a mess. She’s missed her appointment. Jay is going to be so angry with her and she knows he won’t really believe her when she explains that she had tried so hard to get things right. She feels herself filling up with angry words.
‘I’m laying here bleeding and you’re having a go!’
‘You’re all right …’
‘And you’re getting your story straight for your insurance claim while I’m still not sure if I can bloody walk …’
‘You’ll be the one who needs a story, you’ll be paying for that light on the Landy, I can tell you that much …’
‘Will I?’ She grabs a handful of wet grass and yanks herself upwards. She feels ill-treated. ‘You’ve been drinking, I can smell it. There’s barely a pupil in your eyes! Wait until the police get here and then we’ll see who’s laughing, eh?’
‘Don’t start with me, lady, I’m the one trying to help!’
‘You all right down there, boss? Need a hand getting back up?’
Liz turns at the sound of the voice. One of the smaller shapes is leaning forward. The headlight illuminates a fleshy round face, dark hair brushed forward and snipped neatly in the centre of an unlined forehead.
‘Nowt I can’t handle,’ comes the reply. He pushes his face close to hers. She sees little white flecks of stubble that he missed with his morning shave. Notices a weird strip of coarse white hair growing between his collar and his Adam’s apple. Sees flecks of food in the overlap of his front teeth.
‘I don’t even know if I’m with the AA any more,’ stammers Liz. ‘I was, but I think that came free with a credit card, and that got cancelled, so …’
‘You’re burbling on, love. Rest your voice.’
‘My shoulder feels like I’ve been hit with a baseball bat …’
He gives her a hard look. ‘Much experience of that, have you?’
Liz doesn’t laugh. Keeps blinking, hoping the fog will clear. Hears him clap his hands and rub them together, decision made.
‘You’re all right,’ he declares. ‘No lasting damage. We’ll say no more about it. You can get the car back up the bank with a tow rope and a tractor.’
She can hear static. A crackle of voices, as though an old transistor radio is picking up interference. She can’t seem to concentrate. Had she heard right? Was he just going to leave?
‘A tractor? What? I mean, pardon? I mean …’
‘You’re just waffling now, love. You’ll sort it, I’m sure. Pretty lass, people will be falling over themselves …’
She can’t seem to process the words quickly enough to respond with anything helpful. She rubs her forehead, unsure she has heard right.
‘Me? I can barely bloody stand up – you sound like you’re going on your merry way!’
‘Like I said, I’ve got places to be, and you’re OK. Somebody will be along in a minute. I live at the Manor House in Carrshield, a couple of miles that way. Send me the bill if you’re going to be a cow about it. Car like that, though, I’ve done you a favour writing it off.’
Liz feels as though the world is shifting beneath her feet. She realizes the rain is slowing down – the tectonic plates of grey sky slowly parting to reveal a streak of blue.
‘You can’t just piss off and leave me. I don’t know where I am!’
He gives a nasty smile at that. ‘Modern woman, aren’t you? Strong, independent, shouldn’t need any help from a man.’
‘Are you out of your pissing mind?’ she shouts, her nose almost touching his. ‘I’m calling the police, I swear it …’
‘Good luck getting a signal,’ he says, and pushes past her, reaching down for fistfuls
of wet grass to haul himself up the slope.
Liz is too stunned to say a word. In the silence, as the raindrops dry up, she hears the sound of a low, throaty engine; the revving of gears; the whispered shush of big tyres moving over long, wet grass. She turns in the direction of the noise. From lower down the valley, not far from a twisted copse of trees, a quad bike is speeding towards her, bumping expertly over the divots and trenches. The man has stopped climbing the slope and is glaring at the nearing shape. A hard-to-read expression clutches his face. He looks at once hateful and afraid.
‘There you go, love,’ he spits, hurrying further up the slope towards the road. ‘Knight in armour coming to save the day. You’ve survived one brush with death, another might do you good. Watch yourself with that one. He’s got blood on his hands.’
‘No, look, you can’t just …’
He’s already too far away to hear. She watches, despairingly, as the tallest of the spectators offers a hand and yanks him back on to the road. Watches as he folds the umbrella and the quartet wordlessly climb back into the great shining shape of the vehicle. Puts her hands in her hair and almost cries with the pain and frustration of it all. Turns as the revving gears drown out the sound of the car pulling away in an elegant crunch of gravel and shattered glass.
On the quad bike, a man and a dog. It’s a Border collie; black and white, tongue lolling from a happy, pink mouth. It sits behind a man who is looking at her with a gaze of such piercing intensity that it chills her all the way through. She realizes how cold she is; how her clothes cling to her like just-washed bedsheets.
‘Bastard left you, did he?’ asks the man, his accent North East. ‘Prick. You all right?’
Liz isn’t sure what to say. So much has happened. Her head is too full to process it all. She blinks the rain from her eyes and engrosses herself in him. Short grey-black hair, blue eyes, a few days of stubble on a weather-beaten, angular face. He’s older than her. Ten years, maybe more. His gloved hands protrude from the cuffs of a battered, military-style, leather coat, hanging open to reveal a work-hardened body in a plain white tee and quilted shirt.
‘You all right?’ he asks again. ‘I just live yonder. You want to come phone somebody? Get yourself cleaned up?’ He gets off the bike and steps towards her, blue eyes close enough to see herself in. ‘I’m Jude,’ he says, quietly. ‘This is Marshall. We live in that tip of a place across the river. I’m asking if you want some help. What’s your name?’
Liz doesn’t know why she chooses to introduce herself falsely. Will never be able to adequately explain why she chooses to leave Liz on the damp valley floor.
‘I’m Betsy,’ she says. And it feels true.
FIVE
Up close, he smells of leather and damp dog. Arms around his waist, face pressed against the wet fabric of his coat, bouncing over the muddy ground, she has plenty of opportunity to consider his aroma. Her eyes are shut tight, and the roar of the engine and the rushing of the wind fills her heard with a noise that does not need examination. Unencumbered, she devotes herself to scent. There’s wood shavings in there; that sawdust smell of hamster cages. Wood smoke, perhaps. That mustiness of clothes dried in a damp room. And there, on the traces of her olfactory map: the sweet green musk of marijuana. She wonders whether he would notice if she poked out her tongue and tasted the seam of his jacket. Grits her teeth and wonders what the fuck is wrong with her.
A hand, gripping her arm: rough leather on her exposed wrist. She opens her eyes instinctively. Stifles a squawk as he turns the quad sharp left and she feels the soggy furry bundle of Marshall press against her back.
She realizes he is speaking to her. Raises her head from his back and tries to catch the echo on the air.
‘Up there,’ he says, again, and nods up the slope. ‘Sorry if it gets bumpy, I’ll try not to shake you to pieces.’
She squints up a lonely stretch of green, a drystone wall snaking along a ridge to her right, shielding the rutted track from the worst of the wind. It drops away a little further ahead, then rises steeply again to where she can make out the half-dark oblong of the house she had seen from across the river. He twists the throttle and the quad surges forward. A straggle of dark hawthorn slashes at her face and hair, the road narrowing; high grass and cow parsley sprouting tall between the tyre tracks. She hears the grass whip by. Sees a stem of some unknown wildflower bleed green across the dark fabric of Jude’s sleeve. Swollen grass heads and dandelion clocks burst in tiny explosions of smoke.
Above, the sky is a great anvil. In the distance, a stripe of scarves: billowing, grey; distant rain moving fast.
Liz feels her stomach heave as they surge back up the far side of the rise. She glimpses a steep-sided ravine; white water surging through ancient rocks and fallen trees, and then they are swinging hard left into the muddy forecourt of a building that glares down like an Easter Island face. It’s a perfect rectangle: a fairy-tale tower; rough-hewn sandstone and mossy stone slab roof. Three storeys, maybe twenty foot by twenty foot, but it has the forbidding air of a siege fortress and looks as though it could boast a portcullis and moat at the far side. She squints upwards. Some of the windows have been smashed in the upper floor. Deliberately, by the looks of things. Tattered strips of glass hang from a mullioned framework. Jude looks up too.
‘Bastards,’ he mutters, turning off the engine. She can feel tension in his body; see the strength with which he grips the throttle. ‘Bastards.’
The silence that follows is a physical thing; a damp blanket of absolute soundlessness that makes her feel as if even a whisper could be picked up by the breeze and amplified to a roar as it crossed the fields.
He is gone for a moment. Drowsy, dizzy, she watches as he crunches across a tatty courtyard to a big, iron-studded wooden door. She thinks she must be hallucinating. Blinks and tries to clear it. It’s still there, a huge, red-brown bird, head lolling, chest mangled; its vast wings nailed either side of the doorframe as if crucified.
The world spins again. She sees him unpin the bird and take it in his arms like a child. Sees the way he screws up his eyes, doing battle with tears, as he crosses the yard and deposits the great, destroyed creature in a plastic sack that hangs from the wooden gate. He shakes his head. Spits.
‘There you go,’ he says, and she feels his arms around her, gentle. She sees herself as a dying bird, her wings broken, plumage blood-spattered, his big gentle hands delicate against her frail bones.
She feels herself being helped down from the bike. Her feet squelch in thick, chocolatey mud. She shivers, uncontrollably, as the wind charges up the track. She sways where she stands, the house moving forward and back in her vision. She feels woozy. Empty. There’s a strange humming feeling in her lips, as though she has been fiercely kissed or softly slapped or eaten something spicy.
‘I feel really odd,’ she mumbles, but it sounds thick and far away. She looks across the forecourt to where the dog is running in happy circles. Jude is standing still, waiting for her to follow. She can’t make him out. There is three of him. Nine. A procession of paper dolls, their hands joined, strobing like silhouettes in a spinning zoetrope.
From nowhere, a rush of paranoia. Of hypochondria. An absolute flood of apocalyptic worst-case scenarios: her mind becoming an open medical journal chock-full of horrible propositions. A fractured skull. A swollen brain, soon to manifest itself with bloodied eyeball and the trickle of vibrant red from her ears. No, a brain tumour. An aneurysm. An approaching fugue state, certain to plunge her world into mute incomprehension and incontinence. No, something new, something as yet unidentified, the explanation for all of it, for the BPD symptoms; the erratic behaviour, the mood swings. Alleluia, an epiphany, a truth, suddenly revealing itself here, now, miles from home, alone with a strange man; a man who isn’t Jay, a man that Jay wouldn’t like; a man close enough to smell, to leave his scent on her; to mark her like an animal; a wolf, all fur and claws and pheromones.
‘Oh, there … wow … that’s to
rn it …’
She falls forward, banging down on to one knee, a silly half-smile on her face; church bells and ice-cream-van chimes singing in her head. She feels bloody stupid. Feels sick. Feels weirdly, oddly high. And then she feels wet and cold and the world tastes of dirt, and her face is sinking into the mud with the same sensuous ease that her consciousness is drifting into darkness.
SIX
She wakes to the sound of shrieking: a shrill crescendo; an inhaled scream. At the same time she registers rough wetness on her skin. Like thrown playing cards, her mind fills with pictures. She sees a huge, rough-tongued beast, crouched over her, scenting her, lapping wetly at her exposed face.
‘Fuck off … fuck the fuck off …’
She flails, her legs tangled up in something, lashing out as if she has kicked a wasp’s nest. Pushes herself backwards, eyes fluttering open, expecting to see red-seamed eyes and an open, hungry mouth.
Jude is staring at her, one hand holding a warm, damp cloth, muddied where he has been trying to softly remove the crusted dirt from her cheeks.
‘What are you fucking doing?’ she asks, her arms tightening at her sides – one knee coming up, coiled to kick out. She hears the rustle of wool on silk. Glances down at herself. She’s under a blanket, laid down on something soft. The cushion beneath her face smells of damp dog and wood smoke. It smells of Jude.
‘You swear a lot,’ says Jude, quietly. ‘And you sing in your sleep.’
He’s crouching in front of her; a boy staring into the depths of a pond. His gaze is intense, as if checking her bones for fissures and cracks.
‘No I don’t. I never sing in my sleep.’
‘You do. It’s nice. A lullaby. Alive-alive-O.’