We are silent for a while. I stare out at the sea and sky, the glittery vista of cold stars, all that dizzying indigo emptiness.
“Sometimes I think—who is my daughter, really?” My voice sounds strange to me, and I’m not looking at him. “Sometimes I’m so afraid.”
“Don’t be,” he says. “Don’t be frightened.”
He comes toward me, he’s standing beside me, he puts his hand on my shoulder. I rest my head against him. It seems the most natural thing, to do this, to lean into him.
He pulls me up to stand in front of him. He reaches out one hand and touches the side of my face. His eyes are on me, but it’s so dark, I can’t read his expression. I want him terribly.
“You’re so cold,” he says again.
He kisses me with extraordinary directness. My body is fluid, gentle, eager. I press myself into him. We kiss for a long time.
He draws away from me a little, easing his hand across my face, learning my face like somebody blind. Then he pulls me back toward him, kisses me again. Searching, oblivious, like a blind man. I want to stay here forever, in this moment.
Then at last we move apart, and I don’t know what will happen now and I feel all the distance between us open up again.
“I’d better get some sleep,” I say.
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, of course.”
“You’ll need your sweater,” I tell him.
I give it back to him, but with reluctance, feeling the cold brush my skin as I slip it off my shoulders.
I open the balcony doors very quietly. Sylvie has pushed the duvet down, but her eyes are shut and her face is calm in the apricot warmth of the lamp. There’s a slight graze on my skin from the stubble on his jawline, where he hasn’t shaved since this morning.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says.
He opens the door to the corridor and leaves me.
40
NEXT MORNING I put on my tightest jeans and my boots with the spindliest heels. I’m shivery with anticipation, longing to see him again.
I go down to breakfast with Sylvie. He’s there already.
“Did you sleep okay?” he says.
“Yes, fine, thank you. Sylvie didn’t wake.”
He smiles at us, but he’s just the same as always. I feel briefly as though what happened last night was something I made up. I wonder what I mean to him—whether his kiss meant anything or whether I’m just a pleasant diversion for him while he’s away from Tessa. His hands are clasped together around his cup. I look at his slender wrists, his long, thin, clever fingers. I would like to touch him, but I don’t feel that I can.
I sip my coffee gratefully. Sylvie eats her buttered toast. Her mouth and the tips of her fingers are smeared and shiny with grease.
“Are we going to my house, Grace?”
“No, not today,” I tell her. “We’re going to drive through some different places. To see if you recognize anything. Maybe from before . . .”
It sounds so strange to say that.
On the table there’s a vase of tulips, their petals red and frilly, like the skin inside a mouth. Sylvie reaches out and touches a petal with her fingertip.
“But I want to go to my house.”
“Sweetheart, I don’t know if we can go there again,” I tell her.
“Yes, we can. When are we going?”
There’s such insistence in her voice.
“I don’t know.”
She frowns at me, as though she thinks there’s something that I’m willfully overlooking.
“But I need to see it properly. I need to go inside.”
“I don’t see how we can do that, Sylvie,” I tell her. “We can’t just go barging in. The house belongs to other people.”
“I want to. I want to see my bedroom and my family.” She gets up out of her chair, comes around to stand beside me at the table. She reaches out and cups my face in her hands. It’s how I hold her sometimes to try to make her listen. Her hands have a warm smell of butter and press hard into my skin. “Please, Grace.”
Adam leans toward us across the table.
“You know, it’s just possible, Sylvie, that we could make it happen. If we could get hold of the man who owns it.”
“Yes, Adam. When can we do it?”
“Maybe in a day or two. I’ll start by talking to Brigid.”
“Yes. Talk to her, Adam,” she says.
We drive north through empty country, beyond Ballykilleen and Barrowmore. It’s a heavy gray day, and the tops of the mountains are dulled and blurred by cloud. Sylvie doesn’t say anything, just sits there quietly, looking out the window. We stop for lunch at an abbey that’s open to the public, and eat sandwiches in a bland café with country music playing. Sylvie chooses some lurid yellow cheesecake. She draws a smiley face in the topping with her fork, but doesn’t eat the cheesecake.
We loop back through the mountains and then down into Ballykilleen and along the road toward Coldharbour that to start with follows the coast. The bulging clouds are darkening to the color of a bruise. We talk about the weather, and how soon the storm will begin.
I glance back at Sylvie. Her eyelids are heavy, perhaps she’s half asleep.
“Sylvie, don’t forget to say if there’s anything you recognize . . .”
She doesn’t reply.
If she falls asleep, I shall talk to Adam about what happened last night. I shall say, That was a lovely evening, thank you . . . Keeping it light and casual, but letting him know how I feel. I watch him as he turns the wheel, and think of his hand caressing me, moving over my skin. Heat surges through me.
Eventually our road turns inland. We come to the place where it forks, the left turn going southward toward Coldharbour—the place with the oak tree that reaches out over the road.
“Grace.”
Her voice is tiny and full of panic. I know what that voice means.
“Oh, God,” I say. “Stop, Adam. Now.”
He brakes sharply.
I pull her out of the car. She vomits onto the side of the road; her whole body shakes with it. I hold her shoulders until the sickness has passed.
“Better now?”
She doesn’t say anything.
“You’ll soon feel better,” I tell her.
Adam brings me a box of tissues. He’s looking at Sylvie intently. I know he’s thinking the same as me.
“Adam,” I tell him quietly. “It’s just the same place. It’s where it happened before.”
He nods.
“There must be a reason,” I say.
“There might be a reason,” he tells me. I watch the thoughts that chase one another like cloud shadows over his face—doubt and excitement and doubt again. “Grace, d’you think you could hang on here for a moment? I’ll see what I can find out.”
“Of course,” I tell him.
There’s a rough gravel track that leads off around the corner. He disappears briskly around the bend in the track.
I kneel beside Sylvie on the verge, smooth the hair back from her face. Her breath has a sour smell.
“I don’t like it here, Grace,” she says.
“We’ll be going soon,” I tell her.
A little breeze shivers the leaves of the bramble bushes, and the world has that echoey, hollow feel that comes before it rains. She scrambles into the car, and I sit in the back beside her.
“Where’s Adam?” she says.
“He’s just gone to look round the corner,” I tell her. “To see if there’s anything here.”
She doesn’t say anything for a moment. She pulls Big Ted from my bag and presses him against her, so her face is completely hidden.
A small cold rain is falling now, spattering on the windshield, hissing on the gravel path.
“There isn’t,” she says after a while. Her voice is muffled.
“Isn’t what?”
“Anything here,” she says. “There’s nothing. Tell him to come back,” she says.
“He’ll be back in a mi
nute,” I tell her.
“I want to go now,” she says. “I want to go back to Coldharbour.”
She squeezes my wrist, presses so hard it hurts me.
I put my arm around her. There’s a clammy chill on her skin. Being sick has chilled her.
“Hey. You’re so cold.”
I take off my sweater and wrap it around her.
“Now,” she says.
“He really won’t be long. I’ll read you a story,” I say.
I look through the books in my bag, find Where the Wild Things Are. I open it on my lap, expecting the usual magic, that it will enchant her as it always does. She peels my fingers from the page, closes the book, pushes it back in my bag.
“I want to go, Grace.”
Her eyes are narrow as she looks at me, the pupils like black pinpricks. I know this look. It’s the face she has before she starts to scream.
I ring him, thinking briefly of what Karen would say, how much she’d disapprove of me giving in to Sylvie, but ringing him anyway.
I hear his ring tone from his jacket, on the backseat. He’s left his phone in his pocket.
“I’ll go and find him,” I tell her.
“You can’t leave me.”
“Sweetheart, you can stay in the car. I’ll just go to the corner, see if I can spot him. You’ll still be able to see me.”
“No,” she says. “No.” She starts to open her door.
“But it’s raining, you’d only get wet,” I tell her.
“Grace. You can’t leave me here. You can’t.”
There’s no point making an issue of it. I get out, help Sylvie into her raincoat. The keys are in the ignition. I find myself locking the car, although we’re miles from anywhere.
We head off down the track. There’s a stretch of barbed-wire fencing to the right of the track, and to either side a thicket of hazels and nettles, and one or two stunted fir trees, and a yellow-flowered scraggle of weed. We pass a derelict concrete shed scrawled over with graffiti. People have dumped rubbish in the bushes—a rusting baby buggy, a takeaway wrapper that looks from a distance like some extravagant flower.
“It’s not a nice place,” says Sylvie. She clutches my hand.
“I know what you mean,” I tell her. “It does feel kind of creepy.”
Behind us there’s a far, open view across country. It’s empty, no sign of people, just grassland and rocks and the coiled white strand of the road. The tangled vegetation presses in around us; the gorse flowers are yellow as sulfur. It’s very quiet.
We come to a place where you can see through the bushes, the view on our right hand suddenly opening out. It was obviously once a quarry, though I can’t tell what they quarried here. There are steep rocky walls that fall away, all overgrown with spiky plants, the brambles and gorses that flourish in poor soil, with last year’s withered blackberries still clinging to the bramble stems. The berries have a scorched look, as though fire had passed over them. Down below us, there’s a wide, still pool. The water is dark, opaque, it must be thick with mud and sediment, and it has a transient glitter as a little wind grazes its surface. A couple of seagulls are floating about on the pool.
Sylvie stops quite suddenly when we come in sight of the water. She stands there gripping my hand. The raindrops thicken and spit on the gravel path in front of us.
I pull at her. “Come on, Sylvie, we’ve got to find Adam. Then we’ll go back to St. Vincent’s.”
She’s shivering as though from a chill, like the chill you get with a fever. I kneel down, hold her. She’s gasping as though she can’t breathe. She retches again, spits out a little bile.
“Sweetheart, let’s go a bit farther. Just see if we can find Adam.”
But she doesn’t react. It’s like she can’t hear me at all.
To my intense relief, I hear Adam shouting. He’s way down below us at the edge of the pool; he must have climbed down the side of the quarry. Down there, at the water margin, there’s a strip of muddy ground where people have left rubbish that they’ve dragged or pushed down the side—old tires, a fridge, some oil drums.
He waves at us. He’s poking around in the rubbish, using a stick to upend a sheet of corrugated iron. He lets it fall, and an echoey clattering rips the silence apart. It’s shocking, too loud for this silent place.
“Adam, we need to go,” I shout.
“Okay, I’m coming,” he calls.
He starts to climb a narrow path that snakes up the side of the quarry, half hidden between bramble bushes. A thick, pale smoke of sand and soil comes up from his feet as he climbs. I wish he’d hurry.
I put my arm around Sylvie.
“There. We’ve found him, sweetheart. We can go back to the car.”
She doesn’t move, just stands there clinging to me, shivering.
Adam reaches the top of the path. There’s a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead, and his hair is slick with wet.
He stops abruptly as he joins us, stares at Sylvie.
“Grace. What’s going on?” His voice is full of breath.
“Nothing. Nothing’s going on. Sylvie’s just really upset.”
He stares at her, his fierce, urgent look.
“For God’s sake, let’s just go,” I say. “We need to get Sylvie away from here.”
I half pull, half carry her back to the car. She’s difficult to carry. Her body is rigid, her wet plastic raincoat keeps sliding away from my hands. I put her in her seat, pull her wet raincoat off her, wrap my sweater around her. She’s still shivering violently.
I’m about to close her door, but Adam stops me. He crouches down on the ground outside the car.
“Sylvie—what happened?” he asks her. “Did something happen to you here?”
She’s staring straight ahead of her with fixed, unseeing eyes.
“No no no no.” She has a little gasping voice we can only just make out.
Adam is insistent.
“Sylvie, what are you seeing? Can you tell me what you’re seeing? Something happened here, didn’t it?”
Her eyes are huge, all the color is wiped from her face.
“Did someone hurt you, Sylvie?” he says.
It’s as though she doesn’t hear.
“No no no no,” she says again in her small, choking voice.
I see all the fear in her face. Cold creeps through me.
“Is that the water you told us about—the water where you died?” he says.
It’s shocking when he says that.
“No no.” Her voice fades, like she has no breath.
Adam glances toward me, perhaps wanting me to question her too.
But I’m desperate to get her away from this place—from whatever she’s imagining or reliving, from whatever it is that haunts her.
“Adam, we need to go, we need to get away from here.”
“Who said that?” says Adam to Sylvie. “Who said these things? Who said, ‘No no no no’?”
Sylvie starts screaming, a thin, high-pitched scream, the scream of a panicked animal. She doesn’t sound like a child.
“Adam, for God’s sake.”
“Okay, we’ll go,” he tells me.
But I know he’s reluctant. He has that overeager, fanatical look on his face.
He gets in the car and we drive away. Sylvie goes on screaming. I feel so angry with him for putting her through this. I daren’t say anything. I know if I speak I will shout at him. The harsh rain lashes the windows, blotting out the view around us. There’s nothing but the storm and Sylvie’s screams.
But as we drive down into Coldharbour, her crying stops abruptly. I turn, and she is asleep. Perhaps the rhythm of the windshield wipers has soothed her.
Some of my anger seeps away now that she’s quiet. I feel like I’ve been holding my breath. I let myself breathe deeply.
“We need to speak to Brian,” says Adam. “Find out about that place. Find out if anything’s happened there.”
I glance across at him. His knuckles are whi
te where he’s grasping the steering wheel. I feel a flicker of some different, gentler emotion, some empathy or compassion. I sense how he suffers, how driven he is. But I still feel he shouldn’t have done it.
“I wish you hadn’t pushed her like that,” I tell him.
“Grace, it’s what we came for. We have to understand it.”
“She was so upset,” I tell him. “I always feel as though you’ll break her when you do that . . .”
“You can’t protect her, Grace. Whatever happened, has happened. You can’t undo it, you can’t protect her from it. We have to help her face it.”
I glance back at Sylvie. She’s still very pale, but the strain has left her face now. She’s slumped down in her seat so the seat belt catches her throat. I reach back and push it away from her neck. It’s left a red mark like a scar or a cut on her skin. She shifts and murmurs something, but I can’t hear what she’s saying.
41
SYLVIE PLAYS ON her bed with her LEGO. She still seems white and subdued. I go to stand on the balcony, staring out at the sea. I keep seeing all the fear in her face at the quarry.
I think, Karen was right, we should never have come. It’s happening just as she predicted: Sylvie seems even more desperate now, just getting deeper in. We’re putting her through all this pain, but to what end? There’s nothing certain, nothing clear, nothing but hints and guesses. Most likely we will never reach the heart of the mystery.
The rain is easing off now. There are glints of light in the sky. I turn to watch her through the glass, my small pale child, with her quiet, decorous movements and the silk hair that shadows her face, and it suddenly seems so clear, so obvious, to me. So simple.
I go back into the bedroom, kneel beside her.
“Sylvie, I’ve been thinking, sweetheart. I guess we shouldn’t have come here—that it was stupid to come. It’s time to go back home again.”
She turns to me with a puzzled frown, as though she can’t make sense of this.
“What, Grace?”
“Sweetheart, this isn’t working, is it? It isn’t helping you, really. It’s only making you miserable. I’m going to take you back home.”
Her mouth is a thin, tight line.
“I’ll talk to Adam,” I tell her. “See if we can get a flight to London tomorrow.” I smile at her lightly, encouragingly. “Sylvie, let’s go home.”
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