“Afternoon tea,” he said, offering them to me. The eggs were balaclava blue, speckled with brown.
“I can’t eat them,” I said. “I can’t eat baby birds.”
He laughed. “There aren’t any embryos in these.” He held each up to the sun. “See, no veins—infertile. Don’t drop them,” he said, putting them in my hand, “we’re going to have mushroom omelette.”
We climbed the mountain and looked down on die Hütte with its chimney smoke rising sleepily into the air and, as always, beyond it, the land across the river.
“Do you live over there alone?” I tried again, but Reuben jumped up to collect kindling for a fire and then produced the means to light it from his satchel, together with a cooking pot, knife, and a pile of oyster mushrooms wrapped in leaves. We sat on the wide lip, our legs dangling over the drop, and ate with our fingers, watching my father, a pocket man, chopping wood, walking to the river with the buckets, watering the garden. We saw him lift his head and heard him call for me, and we scooted back from the edge into the shadow of the mountain, laughing.
That evening in die Hütte I hid the dress from my father, rolling it into a ball and stuffing it down the side of my bed. I knew that the rip in it and the purple bruise that had flowered across my hip would make him angry.
During that summer, Reuben and I met every afternoon. We hid from my father and walked the familiar paths, sat on the boulders in the rock forest, climbed the mountain, but we never crossed the river.
“Becky and I had a saying whenever something unexpected happened,” I told him one day when we were picking blackberries on the other side of the gill. “It was: ‘We used to say it was so dull, nothing happening like in books. Now something has happened.’”
That summer was a good one for blackberries. The bushes were taller than Reuben and covered in sweet ripe fruit, so that with one squeeze they slipped off the stalk that held them. I was meant to be taking them home, but as many were going into my mouth as into my basket.
“Unexpected like what?” he said, his lips stained dark from blackberry juice.
“Just silly things, like our teacher sneezing in the middle of a lesson, or realizing Jill Kershaw, in front of us in the dinner queue, had got the last serving of mashed potato.” Reuben had a crease between his eyebrows. “It was a joke,” I said. “They weren’t really unexpected things, not like this.”
“Like this,” he repeated, “picking blackberries?”
A heat rose up from my neck and I looked away, reaching farther into the bush. “It’s a line from The Railway Children. Don’t you know it? I had the record, in London. Becky and I used to listen to it all the time.”
“No, I don’t think I do,” he said.
“Didn’t you have a record player when you were growing up?”
“No, there was no record player.”
I wanted to ask him more questions, I wanted to know everything about him, but instead I said, “You would have liked Becky.”
“Oh, and why’s that?”
“I don’t know. She was funny, interesting, clever,” I said, extricating myself from the brambles.
“Aren’t you all those things?” He came toward me, a pile of ripe berries in the cup of his hand.
I could feel the blush rising again.
“Here you are.” He tipped them into my basket. “Blackberries for supper.” He reached out and wiped the corner of my mouth with his finger. “Wouldn’t want your father knowing how few made it home,” he said, and smiled.
“What about at the cinema, maybe you saw The Railway Children at the cinema?”
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “Did you know, the blackberry can be distinguished from the raspberry not simply by its colour but because the blackberry keeps its torus, the white stalk, inside it, whereas the raspberry leaves it behind when it’s picked.”
“Daddy! My daddy!” It was my best impersonation of Roberta on the station platform.
Reuben shook his head.
“What did you watch, then?” I asked.
“Not much. I was never really one for watching television.”
“What about the book? You did read books, didn’t you, wherever you came from?” We were walking through the forest, the basket of blackberries slung over my arm.
“Sometimes, not very often.”
I tried to remember the shelves in my bedroom in London. There had been rows of books, but only Alice in Wonderland came back to me.
“But you’re always writing. In that little book of yours that you won’t let me see.”
“You are the nosiest girl I’ve ever met.” He laughed, but I knew I had been warned off.
We walked in silence until we reached the trees at the edge of the clearing. I stepped out into the sunshine. When I looked behind me Reuben had already gone.
A week or so later, I showed Reuben the nest. We had been to pick blackberries again, but already they were turning—so ripe that when we touched them the soft ones fell and were lost amongst the thorns. Rain started, large droplets, sucked down by the thirsty forest floor, making the air smell of damp summer soil. When he saw the nest he was at first surprised and then seemed angry that there was a place in the forest which he knew nothing about.
The day before, I had carpeted the nest with fresh moss and woven flowers into the walls and roof, telling myself that it had needed a good tidy-up, pushing away thoughts of other reasons. With Reuben squeezed in beside me, what had seemed a large space was now cramped. He had to prop up his head at an awkward angle and bend his legs behind him; he reminded me of Alice after she had drunk the potion and grown too large for the rabbit’s hall. We were inches apart, but I was conscious of every movement I made so we wouldn’t touch, and yet his breath—smelling of blackberries—and his body, his presence, filled the overcrowded nest.
“How did you know my name,” I asked, “when we first met?”
“I don’t think I did,” he said. “You introduced yourself. Thank you for asking me round, by the way.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, trying to remember if he was correct or not. “I only did it so I would get a return invitation.”
Reuben made a vague “hmmm” and shifted to avoid a steady drip which was coming through the fern roof.
“I’m sorry it’s not very big. I was thinking of building a glasshouse, south-facing to catch the winter sunshine.”
“Then you could grow ferns all year round.”
“Orchids and grapes.”
“With birds of paradise showing off their tail feathers.”
“Pooping on the cane furniture.”
“Lovely,” he said.
We were quiet. I plucked a thistle head from the ceiling and pulled out the strands bit by bit, letting them float between us.
“What’s it like where you live?” I asked.
“Similar to this. Trees, forest, river.”
“But is it a cabin, or a tent, or what?” I tried not to let my irritation at his evasiveness show.
“It’s below the ridge, amongst the trees.”
“I’ve never been up there. Except when we arrived, before . . .” I trailed off.
“Do you want to?”
I had imagined the Great Divide many times. It still came to me in dreams. I would stand teetering on the brink, my feet tipping pebbles into the dark, pebbles that never reached the bottom. Or I would fly above our patch of land, the mountains like cupped hands with the river running through the valley they made. But as I flew higher, I could see that we floated in an infinite black sea. I searched for other islands of life but saw nothing.
“I could take you,” he said, shifting onto his back, stretching his legs and hitting the woven sticks at the bottom end.
“Maybe.” There were strands of moss in his beard.
“Now.”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re always too afraid to do anything,” he snapped. “You’re going to end your days in that tumbledown hut with
your weird father without having done a single thing for yourself.”
“Die Hütte is not a tumbledown hut,” I said. It was the only answer I was confident of.
“I could blow it down with one breath.” He blew through his mouth and a few white thistle tufts flew around us.
“OK, let’s go now,” I said, but neither of us moved. I continued to lie on my back, watching a woodlouse crawl across the roof. I was waiting for something, without knowing what.
“Woodlice have their lungs in their hind legs,” he said, and then, “You don’t have to come back here.”
I didn’t say anything, although I knew it was a question and he was waiting for an answer.
“You could stay, on my side of the river.” He didn’t say “stay with me.”
“Do you have a piano?”
“No, of course not.” With some effort he turned onto his stomach and crawled out of the nest, and I wondered if my chance for something I didn’t fully understand had just been lost.
We walked in the rain, heads down, to the flat rock where every day my father lowered the bucket into the pool. It was an open and dangerous place. We stood together on the slippery green lip and looked over the edge. Drops of rain joined the river water many feet below.
“You just have to jump,” said Reuben. “The current will take you downstream to the other side.”
The opposite bank was stepped through several layers of rock until it became level with the river. Here, thick bushes and trees crowded the water, thinning out where my father and I had crossed when I was a child.
“Can’t we go in farther down, past the reeds?”
“And get swept downstream, hit our heads on a rock, and never come up again?” he said, and I shuddered.
I contemplated the still pool again and knew I wouldn’t be able to jump. My body would resist leaving solid rock for air and water. They were the wrong elements, not meant for me.
“For God’s sake, Punzel. It’s only a small jump.”
“I can’t do it.” I shook my head and moved backward.
He was angry—shouting that I was a pathetic child, that he had no idea why he was bothering with me at all and it would be much better for both of us if he jumped now and never returned. I tucked my chin into my chest, letting the raindrops follow the curve of my head and run cold into the secret hollow in the nape of my neck. I wondered if he was right, whether everything would be better if I had never met this strange man and just let things play out with my father. Eventually Reuben was quiet and we left the river and went up through the trees, skirting the clearing. By the time we were sitting under my favourite wintereye, the rain had stopped, leaving beads of water clinging to the ferns. The sun came out and shone on the cabin, nestled in the crook of the mountain’s elbow.
“My father told me that he and I are the only two people left in the world,” I said.
“He’s lying,” Reuben said. “I’m here too.”
He pointed to an eagle far above us, its wing tips outstretched like fingers as it circled in an updraught. I caught the smell of blackberries again on Reuben’s words and leaned closer, breathing him in.
He looked down. “You aren’t watching,” he laughed, and I thought maybe he had forgiven me for not being able to cross the river. He took my chin in his hand, tilted my head upward, and kissed me.
23
For the remaining days of summer I stayed out of my father’s way, keeping a physical distance between us—pressing my back against the piano or the shelves when he squeezed past. Sometimes he still caught me though, made a grab for my dress and pinned me between his knees. I stood rigid and kept quiet, so that later I could be sure I had done nothing to encourage these episodes of weeping or anger, and subsequent apologizing.
He often called me Ute, and I gave up correcting him. He reminisced about the fuss made when they were newly married, laughing at how they had run away from a newspaper photographer who had hounded them. He became frustrated when I couldn’t join in with the names and locations of the hotels they had hidden away in when they were on honeymoon. At other times, he talked about how the three of us should be together again. This idea grew so gradually it was impossible to remember one conversation, one defining moment, when the course of our lives changed and his decision was made. Most nights after I was in bed, he wrote more words on the cabin’s walls, elaborate schemes and lists. He said he had a death list and laughed at his joke. In bed I sometimes heard him crying, muttering and burying his head under his pillow. The nights of weeping made me feel insubstantial, as though I existed only inside my father’s head, but it was worse when, in the dark, he tried to engage me in his plans.
“If we had dynamite—yes, dynamite would do it. Kaboom!” He gave a bitter laugh. “We could blow up die Hütte. Bring the mountain down on our heads.” He let out a groan as if he were in pain. “She left me—Ute. It’s easy to die when you don’t have to do it yourself, but you and I, Punzel, we have to work it out. We’ll do it together, won’t we?”
When I didn’t reply, he called out my name again like a child calling for his mother in the dark. I pretended to be asleep but he got out of bed to shake me.
“Promise you’ll come with me? Promise me.”
“I promise,” I whispered.
“You have to mean it. If you commit to something you have to stick with it. Not like Ute. We’ll go together, won’t we?”
“Yes.”
“We just have to work out how.” He sat on my bed, biting his fingernails, planning.
“Ute broke her promise,” he said, choking on the words, and he curled up on the floor, shaking and sobbing, until I put my hand out to touch him and said again, “I promise.”
Reuben and I met after the vegetables had been watered, the traps checked, and the piano played. The summer was warm, the ferns the tallest I remembered, the moss on the wintereyes a tinned pea green, and the rain, when it fell, never fell for long. One morning there was a smell in the air, of the season turning, of leaves collecting in the crevices of the mountain, of the blackberries fermenting under a grey down of mould.
“How does the spider make his home?” I asked Reuben, gazing at the cobwebs above our heads. We were lying on our backs under the wintereyes, the afternoon light catching on silk threads.
Reuben was silent, his eyes closed. Flies hummed about us, and I wondered whether the skin on the rest of his body was as pale as his face. I prodded him in the ribs.
“Hmm?” he said.
“The spider. How does he start? Does he spit the first thread, or jump, or what?”
“Or what,” he said dreamily, still not stirring. I ran a blade of grass down the bridge of his nose. He flapped his hands in front of his face as though a spider were crawling there. I moved the grass over his skin again, and this time he opened his eyes.
“OK,” he said, and sighed. I wasn’t sure if he was irritated or tired. “He lets the wind take it,” Reuben said, “and wherever it lands, that’s where he builds his home.”
“Like you. You live wherever the fancy takes you, don’t you?” I asked.
Reuben had already closed his eyes.
I shut mine too and let the warm afternoon carry me. In my dream I lay on my bed in die Hütte. Reuben was curled behind me, his arm over my waist, his fingers moving rhythmically between my legs. His beard and warm breath tickled the back of my neck, and more than anything I wanted the bite of his teeth against my skin. I lay quiet, listening to the curious creaking noise the circular motion of his hand made, as if something inside me needed oiling. Still dreaming, I rolled over onto my back and saw the soles of my father’s boots just above my head, slowly swinging, and realized that his body was hanging from one of the rafters. I woke with a cry, the sun in my eyes. Reuben had gone from beside me, leaving behind the shape of a body in the flattened grass. I looked up and saw him sitting on a branch, his feet dangling high above me. Behind him, the shadow of the mountain crept forward.
“What c
an you see?” I said, standing up.
“Your father. He’s looking for something under the beech trees.” My stomach lurched. Reuben was holding his book, but he wasn’t writing.
“My father’s searching for destroying angels,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.
“Amanita virosa: the deadliest of the poisonous mushrooms. Eat any part of its pure white body and its toxins will bind to your insides, your liver, kidneys, and even your brain. No known cure.” With one vicious motion he ripped a page from his book. “Wrong trees. Tell him to look under the pines. It’s still too early for destroying angels anyway. Come up and see.”
It took me several attempts to scramble onto the lowest branch of the tree; once there, I edged toward the trunk and levered myself up until I was at Reuben’s level. He didn’t look at me or shift from his position. I scraped my knee on the rough surface, and when I lifted up my skirt, beads of blood rose through the ripped skin and tears came to my eyes. I gripped the wood and, with sweating fingers, shuffled sideways toward him. On the ground, a branch lay in the long grass. Its bark had fallen away, leaving a bleached bone underneath us.
Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel Page 19