by David Mark
‘No way. I’ve got an awful voice. I sound like a goose.’
‘Very gentle voice, you’ve got. There’s a blues singer from Dublin sings like that. She doesn’t swear the same as you though.’
‘Soz, Dad,’ says Liz, and it sounds so ridiculous to herself that she starts laughing. It’s a bright, manic sound and Jude gives a twitch of a smile in response. ‘Sorry, I don’t know what I’m saying. I feel so out of it. Have I been asleep …’ She stops herself, memories surging back. ‘I heard screaming.’
He pauses, considering. ‘Curlew,’ he says. ‘You don’t know their call?’
She scowls, irritated at the notion she should know what he is talking about, while furious at herself for her ornithological inadequacies. ‘That’s a bird, I presume.’
‘Yes,’ he says, softly. ‘I don’t hear it as a scream. Yeats wrote a poem about them. Said it reminded him of a lost love.’
‘Yeats,’ says Liz, raising a hand to her head. She opens her mouth wide, trying to pop her jaw, then stops, embarrassed at herself. ‘Yeats,’ she says again, hoping something will present itself. ‘The Cranberries did a song about his grave.’
He smiles again, showing neat white teeth, evenly spaced. ‘Yeah, I think they did.’
Liz starts to sit up. Considers herself. Her legs feel cold and uncomfortable. She’s still wearing her wet trousers. Her cardigan’s gone though. She’s still got her T-shirt. She makes up a narrative, drawing swift lines between the key points. He saw the crash. He came to her aid. He brought her home so she could call for help. She had a funny turn. He brought her inside. Wrapped her in blankets and did his best to clean her up. She checks the story for things to worry about. Can’t see any obvious impropriety. Considers it again from a second perspective. Jay’s seems most suitable. She got lost. Had a crash. Abandoned the scene of an accident. Went off with a stranger to his isolated farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Swooned like a storybook princess. Came to half-dressed, being wiped down by a handsome man spouting poetry …
‘Erm …’
‘Your cardigan’s drying. I did my best to clean you up but you’re still a bit, well, streaky. How do you feel?’
‘I’m not sure. Odd. Misplaced. Sore. But kind of OK too.’
‘It was the adrenaline wearing off. Horrible feeling. I’ve gone down like that myself. After it’s all over, after the rush or the euphoria or whatever, you find yourself shaking like a leaf.’
‘I thought it might be one of my panic attacks,’ says Liz, carelessly. ‘It felt like that, a bit.’
Jude shrugs, not unkindly. ‘Either way, it can’t have been very nice. No bad dreams? People sometimes get them here, though I reckon people scare themselves half to death thinking about ghosts in the walls and it’s hardly surprising they don’t get much kip.’
‘I thought the cloth was a big tongue,’ she says, closing one eye. Her head is still hurting.
‘There’s nothing I can say to that,’ replies Jude, scratching at his forehead. His voice has a pleasing timbre; a lullaby quality that threatens to pull her back into sleep unless she clings to wakefulness. She considers the shape of him as he moves away, taking the damp cloth through to the half-dark area at the far side of the room. He dumps it in a deep sink and busies himself with making tea. There’s a black kettle rattling away on a proper old Rayburn cooker. A big, brown teapot sits atop a pile of books and paperwork that seems one loud cough away from avalanche.
She changes position. Slowly, she takes in her surroundings. The crusted dirt on her face pulls at her skin as the growing smile lights up her features. She’s in something akin to a farmhouse kitchen-diner, though the only place she has seen a room like this before was on a day trip to the Beamish Victorian Museum, and in the occasional BBC costume drama. She feels as though she has woken in the nineteenth century, and it’s clear she hasn’t landed anywhere well-to-do. It’s low-ceilinged and dingy; the only light coming from the pot-bellied log burner standing in the kind of chimney place that she imagines being a breeze for Santa each Christmas. The floor is all flagstones and loose timbers, mismatched planks stained black by exposure to the outdoors in some former life. There are only two windows, and these pitifully small, set in colossally deep alcoves that have been padded out with dusty cushions. She’s lying on a low, three-seater sofa, directly opposite a window that frames a gloomy landscape; miles upon mile of green delineated by grey walls and the occasional copse of trees. The rain is coming down again. She feels safe here, somehow. Feels as though she has found a little safe space and crawled inside it while a tempest rages outside.
‘You take sugar, I presume?’
She bristles, unhappy at being read. ‘What makes you say that? All girls take sugar, do we?’
‘I asked if you wanted sugar,’ he says, without turning.
‘Oh,’ she says, deflating. ‘Misheard. It’s the sound of the storm. I can barely hear you.’
He brings her a mug of strong, brown tea. Hands it to her without a word. She follows him with her eyes as he sits down in a rocking chair by the window. She sips her tea. It’s strong and sweet, just the way she likes it.
‘This place is amazing,’ she says, through the steam. Her eyes keep alighting on new peculiarities. There is a wooden spinning wheel by the long table in the gloom of the kitchen. A wrought-iron range hangs above; all copper saucepans and patterned metal kettles. By the fire a deep chest, black metal hinges and untreated wood: a woven table runner hanging off one end; scuffed paw-prints turning its creamy pattern a mess of earthy browns. The walls are decorated in mismatched prints, an eclectic mix that reminds her of the John Derian coffee-table book she had failed to persuade Jay to buy for her last birthday. Huge roses in a brocade frame; eye-test charts in a language she doesn’t recognize; anatomically precise cross-sections of human organs and limbs, interspersed with sprigs of dried flowers and random pieces of cracked mirror, reflecting random flashes of red-gold light on the higgledy-piggledy walls. There are dried grasses in empty ordnance shells by the fire. Porcelain dolls stuffed haphazardly atop a low table, a dog basket beneath. And everywhere cobwebs, a fog of them, hanging in every angle: parabolas of dirty lace.
What are you doing Liz? You’re chatting with this bloke like it’s a date or something. You’ve been in an accident. Nobody knows you’re here. What are you doing, you silly girl!
She shakes her head, two bright spots of colour suddenly giving her face a doll-like aspect.
‘My car,’ she says, pulling herself upright. ‘I need my phone. I need to phone home. I had an appointment.’ Her vision fills with the sound of metal on metal and the horrible slalom down the hill. She pulls at her hair, the frustration needing to find an outlet. She doesn’t cut any more. Doesn’t burn herself or starve herself or fill her guts with tissue so as to always feel full. But she’s never stopped the hair-pulling.
‘It’s in hand,’ begins Jude.
‘He went and left me! I know the crash was my fault but he basically said if I wasn’t dying it wasn’t his problem. Told me to send him the bill and buggered off!’
Jude turns away from her, his words thrown back carelessly. ‘There’s an old saying. If it walks like a tosser, and talks like a tosser, it’s probably a tosser.’
Liz finds herself smiling. ‘That Yeats too?’
‘Occam’s Razor,’ he says, smiling, and although she doesn’t get what she presumes is a joke, Liz grins, knowingly.
‘Yeah. Ha.’
‘I’ve got a copy of the manuscript showing William of Ockham, actually. Wouldn’t know where to put my hands on it.’
‘Yeah? I’m like that. Honestly, the amount of phone chargers I lose in a year is insane. Jay would be tearing his hair out, if he had any. Plenty of chest fur and his back looks like a pedestal mat, but it’s hardly the same, is it?’
He laughs at that, a genuine, happy sound. ‘You’ve got a gift with words. Are you a writer? Something creative, I’m sure.’
She pulls a f
ace. ‘I’m still working it out. Done lots of things but it doesn’t always suit. Creative? Maybe. I used to think so. Jay would say I just create chaos. I create headaches.’
‘I’m not warming to Jay,’ says Jude, smiling. ‘Husband?’
Liz shakes her head. ‘Long-term boyfriend. He was married before me and it put him off the whole idea. She took a lot of his money when they divorced. You can understand his reservations, I’m sure.’
Jude scratches a hand through his hair. Looks at the fire and then back at her. ‘I don’t know enough.’ He shrugs. ‘Walks like a prick, talks like a prick …’
‘Don’t,’ she says, and means it. ‘I shouldn’t say mean things about him. He’s my rock really. He put up with a lot. I’m a nightmare. I’ve got a few loose wires.’ She taps her head. ‘Bats in the belfry, he says.’
‘Yeah? I like bats. And I’m good with wires.’
‘Are you a farmer, or something?’
‘A farmer-or-something just about covers it, yeah. I’m just like you. Don’t know what I am. I was meant to be one thing and now I’m not, but whatever I am, I think I enjoy it. Hope I do.’
He stretches out. Marshall, who has clearly been secreted away waiting for an opportunity, scurries in and leaps on to his master’s lap. He gives him a heartfelt stroke, scratching behind his ear.
She smiles. ‘You sound as mixed up as me. Would you believe me if I told you I was on my way to see a shrink? I got so lost. Got in such a tizzy and the next minute that big car clipped me and I really thought that was it.’ She pouts, a petulant toddler. ‘Is it wrecked? Proper wrecked.’
‘Friend of mine is on his way to tow it to the garage in Stanhope. They’re built to crumple and it did its job.’
Liz looks crestfallen. ‘Jay got me that car because he couldn’t stand watching me try and park a normal-sized one. I don’t even know if I’ve kept the insurance up to date.’ She sits forward, face in hands. Pain shoots down her arm. It awakens other dormant injuries and at once she feels like she is a patchwork person; a quilt of alternating wounds.
‘I brought your bag down from the boot. A few other odds and sods – I wasn’t sure what you’d need.’
‘Odds and sods,’ says Liz, quietly. ‘My grandad used to say that.’
‘Wise people, grandads.’
‘Mine was. Loved the outdoors. Loved adventure. He’d have loved this place. Is it like … a castle?’
‘It’s like a castle, yeah,’ he says, smiling with his eyes. ‘It’s called Wolfcleugh Bastle. A fortified farm, really – very popular around here in the old days when you had to defend what was yours.’ He thinks about what he’s saying and laughs, as if at a private joke. ‘Nothing much has changed really. Still all about mating rights and territory and who owns which blade of grass. Never could understand it and I’m a farmer’s boy. It drove Maeve to distraction and she was from money. Went from being one of the toffs on horseback to getting mucky in the gutter with the saboteurs. Never afraid of getting stuck in. I sometimes wonder whether it was about animal welfare or having a good excuse for a ruck.’
Liz enjoys his voice. She stretches her back, feeling warm and oddly relaxed, the way she remembers feeling before the operation when she was small. She could fall asleep, given half a chance.
‘Did you say you were visiting a shrink?’ he asks, as he produces a tin of tobacco and starts sprinkling brown leaf into a cigarette paper. It’s a dark brown; almost black – the resultant roll-up the sort of thing she imagines a cowboy smoking. He seals it with his tongue, expertly. He tucks it away, clearly not intending to smoke in company.
‘You don’t approve of shrinks? Should I just man up? Need a kick up the arse, do I?’
‘No, I just thought I knew everybody round here? They must be new to the valley. And as for the other stuff, no, of course not. What sort of twat thinks like that?’
‘She’s based in Corbridge,’ explains Liz, brushing over the question. Her eyes drift up towards the mountain of books. She could sit here and read them, one after the other, in the warmth, with this nice man who seems to listen when she talks. ‘I’m excessively crap at directions.’
‘Ah,’ he says, ruefully. ‘You’re about ten miles out, but that’s only as the crow flies. Your satnav let you down, did it?’
‘Went barmy,’ she says, cross again. ‘Just kept spinning and back-tracking and I started freaking out.’ She frowns, a memory surfacing. ‘Was there a bird pinned to your door?’
He gives a tight smile. ‘Endangered species. Raptor. People know I take it personally when they get caught in the firing line. They were probably trying to get my attention. I’ve got a mate with the RSPB. I’ll take it to her.’
‘I heard a story on the radio, just before the crash. Do people really pay that much money to shoot grouse? I don’t think I know a grouse? Is it like a fat pheasant?’
He smiles at that. ‘Yeah, that just about covers it. Half a million will be shot this summer and no end of other animals will be killed by gamekeepers in case they spoil the sport. They burn the heather too. They’d wreck the whole bloody valley if it meant there were more grouse for their rich mates to shoot each summer. Rare birds getting caught in the crossfire is just collateral damage.’ He stops himself, aware he’s lit his cigarette without meaning to. He grinds it out into a dirty coffee mug. ‘Sorry. You’ll already have enough reasons to dislike Campion. Don’t need more from me. Tell me about yourself. I’m sorry you had to go through all that. Must have been scary.’
She checks his face for any indication he may be taking the piss. Finds none. ‘I’ve got a sort of, well, condition,’ she says, confessing. ‘I get worked up. I have a kind of excess of emotions …’
‘A lot of metal in the ground here,’ says Jude, thoughtfully. ‘Old mining area, I’m sure you know that. Creates a bit of a blackspot. That, and the fact no bugger wants to invest in an area where you could cram all the residents into one half of a football pitch. Can be a bugger getting deliveries but at least the bailiffs and the Jehovah’s Witnesses stay at arm’s length.’
‘It really is the middle of nowhere,’ muses Liz, looking around. ‘Very Wuthering Heights.’
‘Bit of a history,’ he says, waving in the general direction of the walls, the ceiling; the little courtyard and the miles and miles of damp green valley beyond. ‘It’s one of those places that exists between the lines. It’s at the edge of things. Northumberland, County Durham, Cumbria. Stone’s throw from Hadrian’s Wall and the Scottish border. Suffered plenty at the hands of raiders from across the Border. Plenty of blood spilled in these fields and plenty men buried beneath them. Farming and mining, that’s what this valley has always been about and those who didn’t die beneath the ground coughed their lungs up once they were too broken to work. It’s like living in a big, old museum half the time. You sometimes get the feeling you’ll open the back door and see soldiers going past on their way to crush the Jacobites.’ He stops himself, aware he has been talking more than listening. ‘Sorry, I don’t get much company. Not company I want to have a chat with, at any rate. I’ve never been the chatty one. I like to listen. Maybe I just want to tell you everything about me so it’s all out there. I must trust you.’
Liz feels her cheeks twitching, as though a grin is hiding under the surface. She wants more. Wants him to share confidences. Wants to hear about whoever he shares this draughty, tumbledown, little palace with. She jumps in, unable to think of a subtle way to introduce the subject. ‘Is there a lady in your life or is it just you and Marshall?’
He rubs his tongue over dry lips. Pulls a face that’s hard to read. ‘She died,’ he says, quietly. ‘There’s just me.’
‘Oh I’m sorry,’ says Liz, automatically. She curses herself. Knows she’s just brought the room’s mood down by a good few degrees. She eyes him again, unable to make the action inconspicuous. ‘She must have been young.’
He scratches at his stubble with his left hand while stroking Marshall with the rig
ht. He looks older, suddenly. ‘Too young,’ he says, shrugging. ‘But she lived well. Packed a lot in.’
‘Sounds like you still miss her,’ says Liz, and tries not to react when she hears the little voices in her head howl with laughter at the idiocy of the statement.
‘Doesn’t do to dwell. That’s what she used to say, though she tended to say it in a fancy Latin way that drove me up the wall. So much cleverer than me. Cleverest person I ever met.’
‘Are those her books?’ asks Liz, pointing up.
‘Aye. I’ve read a couple. Classics, mostly.’
‘Her instruments?’
‘No, they’re mine.’
‘You play? That’s a trombone, right, the long curly one? And I recognize the saxophone there. Love the sound of the sax. Sexiest instrument ever.’
He smiles, clearly pleased. ‘Yeah. I’m all right. I used to be good. I don’t practice enough now but yeah, I was OK. You play?’
She shakes her head. ‘I wanted to learn the piano but Jay said it was too expensive, what with his Snowdonia trip.’
Jude is about to reply when he glances towards the window. A moment later she hears the low thrum of a big car working its way up the track. ‘Good ears,’ she says, approvingly. ‘Company?’
‘Your carriage,’ he says, with a soft little smile. ‘Don’t expect to get a word in edgewise on the way, she likes a chance to talk at somebody new. She’ll drop you home.’
Liz’s face twists in puzzlement. ‘Who will? Who’s here?’
‘Sylvia,’ he says, with a wave. ‘Lives in Sparty Lea. Nice woman when you get to know her. Unfortunately she rarely allows people the time. But she’s an old-fashioned sort and happy to help. I asked and she said yes.’
‘But my car … getting it back, or written off, or whatever, and I haven’t got any money to pay her …’
Jude stands. Marshall, after a moment’s protest, drops to the floor. Jude gathers up Liz’s possessions. Her bag, some letters that might be important, a couple of paperbacks and some leaflets. One is an NHS guide to living with BPD. His gaze lingers on it for a moment. Then he hands it back.