Hen released her hold on the woman’s hair. Raised her knee and pushed, sending the woman sprawling into the ashes and dust that spread the floor. ‘I will help Airwen,’ she said, and the ancestors withdrew the images of Tor’s grief-stricken face, Drustan’s tears, half suppressed as he strove to be an adult. I know how it feels to lose a mother. How could I impose that on him? ‘But you must aid me.’
‘Well, I can boil water, the rest is pretty much down to you.’ She was picking herself up, brushing off the ash-dust, her skin still pale but her lips trying to smile.
‘And if you ever return to this place …’ Hen gestured with the point of the knife; a mote of sunlight shining through the thatch hit the blade and twisted. ‘… I will tell Tor you threaten us and he will send you to the ancestors.’ She felt her lips draw tight across her teeth. ‘I will not have you return. Duncan is past, and this is my life now; you will not come here with your memories of what is to be. Do you understand?’
The woman looked around, as though taking in the realities of this little hut, existing on the edge between life and death, even the smallest decision rippling their community. ‘Yes.’ It was almost a whisper. Her skin had paled to compete almost with Airwen’s; she remembered, perhaps, her treatment at Tor’s hand. ‘I’ll tell Duncan you’re settled here. You have a good life. You’re happy?’
Happy. A word Hen associated with children playing in the summer sun, bellies full of nuts and meat, not her own life which could turn on a cut hand or an early winter’s snow. Then she thought of her life before, with Duncan, the endless struggle to compete, the noise and the speed of everything. Here she had her son, her man. His child growing inside her, who would become part of the family here. Warmth at her fireside. She was safe. She curled her fingers around the necklace again. ‘Yes. I am happy.’
The woman held out a hand. Hen stared at it for a moment then, with a glance over her shoulder at Airwen, whose sleep grew restless again, she grasped it, wondering at the softness of skin. ‘I’ll help you and be gone.’
Hen found herself ghosting a smile. ‘Yes,’ she said, released her hand, and began searching for the things she would need.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I was in shock. I recognised the symptoms, all those Duke of Edinburgh scheme training courses hadn’t gone for nothing, and I wrapped my sleeping bag around my shoulders to try to warm some sense into myself. That operation was thousands of years ago. It’s only you that thinks it was a couple of hours – the blood on your clothes is from a woman who’s been dead since before writing was invented.
It didn’t work. All I could see when I closed my eyes was Hen, operating with Tabitha’s canteen knife with the aid of a potion that seemed to be somewhere between vodka and aspirin on the painkilling scale. I’d held Airwen down … Hen had … she had …
A moment of sweaty sickness overwhelmed me and I had to lie down until it passed. Thankfully the camp was still dark, still quiet. Duncan was a motionless shadow on the evil camp bed, and I resisted the urge to wake him. Telling the story wouldn’t help, it would just force me to relive the scene again in greater detail, and already some moments were beginning to blur into the background as the shock did its work and focussed my mind on the bits that had involved me directly. Bleeding, screaming, the splat and burn of the fire. The sight of a bone needle against the resistance of flesh …
‘Duncan.’ I crawled through into his part of the tent. ‘Look, sorry to wake you and everything, but …’
Nothing.
I reached out an arm to shake his shoulder and retracted my fingers with a shriek when they met the hard resistance of a pile of books. He wasn’t there. The form on the camp bed was made up from discarded clothes, books, his half-rolled sleeping bag and a folded over pillow. He wasn’t there.
The camp was just beginning to rise as I dashed through the silvery dawn light to Richard’s tent. ‘It’s all right! I’m back!’ I ducked through the flap.
‘Wha’?’ Richard sat up in his sleeping bag, hair awry and his beard on sideways. ‘Oh. ’S’you. Nnnrgh.’ And he lay back down, throwing an arm over his face to block the sun that was streaming in behind me.
‘Yes! I’m fine!’
‘’S’nice.’
‘No, I mean, Duncan doesn’t have to worry.’ And then, with a gradual horrible dawning of thought, ‘The police haven’t taken him away, have they?’
Richard sat bolt upright, like a newly raised zombie. ‘Police? Duncan? Why didn’t you say … where have they taken him?’ He was groping behind himself now, pulling a pair of trousers over to the sleeping bag.
‘I thought you’d know.’ I scrunched my face up. ‘In fact, you’d have been the person he called so …’
Richard paused, trousers halfway into his sleeping bag and skinny knees protruding. ‘Look. Hang on here. Why would Dunc have been arrested?’
‘Because I disappeared!’
He screwed his eyes up and blinked hard. ‘But … when? You were here last night. It’s only …’ A glance at his watch. ‘… bloody hell o’clock, you can’t have disappeared much. And, since clearly nobody noticed, nobody rang the police, who can’t have descended upon Dunc with side-arm batons at the ready, poor bastard.’
‘So where is he?’
Richard gave me a stern look. ‘You want to do the lovesick girlie thing, you carry on without me, okay?’ And he was lying back down before I’d even got out through the flap. His expression told me that I wouldn’t be the first woman Duncan had walked out on, and that Richard was not up for picking up after his friend.
Indignation spiralled around inside my head, and I walked up the familiar path to the wet sieves, in case Duncan had gone up to the ridge for an early morning view of the dale. I shielded my eyes from the rising sun and scanned around. People were just beginning to come out of tents, washing, tying on boots, their long shadows moving around the site like the ghosts of those older residents.
The Land Rover was gone. I double checked in case he’d moved it, but there was no sign of its mud-splattered bulk among the parked cars up on the sandy access road and a twist of worry knotted itself around the outside of my heart. Why am I so worried? And then, as I stared off across the moors, where the sun was beginning to paint colour into the sepia-toned night portrait, I began to analyse my feelings for the first time since Jamie died.
Jamie died and I was sad. Devastated. But it wasn’t just sadness – as I’d admitted to Duncan, it was partially anger; a tight, screwed-down anger that this could have happened. That Jamie could have been allowed to die, to leave me when I needed him, because I always needed him. I’d let that anger sit, covered it over with the debris of the sadness because it was easier to cope with being sad than being angry. Sadness had a time limit built in, I couldn’t grieve forever; as Jamie’s death and I became separated by months then years, the sadness seemed to stretch and thin, like cheap elastic. Never snapping, but becoming something easier to bear than that binding that had wrapped me. Anger, on the other hand, sat low in my chest and burned like a well-banked fire, smouldering.
And now Duncan had done a vanishing act, when I needed him. I wasn’t sad. I was bloody furious …
Tabs had left her car keys in the pocket of her jacket, which was hanging in the tent porch, and I don’t think the little Fiat had ever received such a gunning of the engine, as I took out my frustration and stoked anger on its accelerator. Only one place Duncan would go …
There was an alarming amount of bouncing, and I was almost sure I heard something mechanical snap as I steered down the driveway to the Addams family mansion. But I didn’t care. Sheer fury had boiled past all the usual caution and my carefully tamped-down nature and was seething and roiling its way out. It almost felt as though steam was coming out of my ears, and my teeth were gritted so hard that when the car hit a large clump of peat on the track I near
ly knocked out my own incisors.
The Land Rover was parked by the front door, but the house was quiet. I flung open the door and stormed into the carefully neutral hallway, where I stopped. ‘Duncan? Where are you?’
Silence. Then a bump somewhere upstairs, followed by the sound of slow descent. ‘Grace?’ He stopped halfway down the main staircase and looked at me. ‘Grace?’ His legs seemed to give way and he sat suddenly, catching at the stair behind him to prevent himself sliding down towards me. ‘Grace?’
‘Yes, it’s me. I’m here. What’s happening?’
His hair was all rumpled and he was wearing a T-shirt and jog pants, as though he’d been asleep. There was a knot of dark hair visible at the neck of the T-shirt and I found myself focussing on it, as though I couldn’t look him in the face.
‘You weren’t here. I was worried, okay, yes, I panicked and I came and—’ He stopped speaking. Stopped dead, as though there weren’t the words to say what he wanted to say.
I had a sudden, horrified vision. I’d told him I was coming to the house to do laundry. Well, he’d practically ordered me to come here and do it. And then he’d come to find me. And I’d been gone. ‘Oh Duncan.’ I put my hands to my face. ‘I am so, so sorry.’
‘You weren’t here, Grace.’ Slow, simple words that didn’t express half of what was written on his face. ‘And I thought it was all happening again.’
I looked into that dark, terrified face. ‘I didn’t think.’
He dropped his head onto his arms. ‘I’ve been upstairs, lying on the bed. It smells of you, still. Earthy and warm and coffee and – I thought you’d gone back. Thought you’d run into the past to get away from me, like Anya. Or she died, and, right now, I don’t know which is worse.’
‘She didn’t die. She’s living back there, in the Bronze Age, Duncan. I found her.’
Duncan went completely still. ‘You found her.’ He raised his head.
‘Yes. She’s got a man, well, she hasn’t, it’s complicated, but there’s a man and she has a son, well, sort of, and she’s having another baby.’ I gabbled the words out, wanting to erase that awful look from his face. ‘She’s happy, Duncan.’
‘Happy,’ he repeated, slowly.
‘Yes.’ And I felt a twitch of anger again inside me. Not at Duncan this time, not even really at Anya. Just at this whole shitty circumstance. She was there and happy, and he was here and suffering. A suffering that couldn’t and wouldn’t end. I bit my lip. Who was I angry at, really? And then I had a brief, strong vision of Jamie, sick, leaving me to fend for myself when he’d promised to be with me forever.
‘Why did you go back? After what happened the last time? How could you put yourself in that kind of danger again?’ Duncan sounded angry now too, but a flat, emotionless kind of anger, the sort of anger that knows it should be a nuclear white-heat but can’t raise the energy.
My anger sort of spluttered out into a moist damp that burned its way up my cheeks. The real reason I was so angry slowly crept up on me. Nothing to do with Jamie. Nothing to do with what had happened before. Everything to do with Duncan, with who he was and how I felt. ‘Because …’ The heat in my cheeks reached the backs of my eyes and I felt a small tear burst out. ‘… because I care about you. Because I know how much you hate the whole being under suspicion thing, even though you try to pretend that it’s nothing.’
He sat for a moment in more silence, then stood up. ‘You went back for me? To find Anya, for me? After they tried to kill you the last time?’
But the sandbags of grief that I had been hiding behind for so long had begun to let emotion, real emotion seep through. ‘It was horrible, Duncan. I had to hold her down, and the knife and there was blood and the noises – and I did think about living there; just going through and never coming back because it’s so quiet, and everyone’s so busy, there’s no time to think about being unhappy, but if you get appendicitis you can die, unless …’ The words stopped, running into the tears that had begun to overwhelm everything else.
Duncan was down those few remaining stairs and pulling me into an embrace before I really registered him moving. He smelled of sleep and damp hair and shower gel and it was so good to not have to be angry any more that I rested my head against his chest and let the shock wash over me again, safe in the knowledge that I was back. Here. With Duncan.
He held me close and tight, until I stopped crying and began to focus on that knot of hair again, then he rested his cheek on the top of my head and talked into my hair. ‘I was so wrong, Grace. I thought Anya had just walked out on me, but she’d lost both her parents and I hardly even drew breath to say sorry. I expected her to carry on being my girlfriend, being all free and easy and doing whatever we wanted. I never stopped to think about her, about how it affected her whole life. About how upset she must have been. I never …’ He coughed and moved his cheek up and down, scratching at my hair as though it distracted him. ‘… I never comforted her.’
I thought of Hen, her torment at having to decide whether to try to save Airwen, or to take the family that she so desired for herself. She’d done the right thing. It might hurt her, but she’d saved Drustan’s mother. Tor’s wife.
‘She’s a good person, Duncan. She’s found herself a place in life, she’s strong now and living the life she wants. You were both very young, too young to really know how to cope with that kind of grief. You pretended it hadn’t happened, and she ran away, that’s all.’
‘She ran away three thousand years. That’s quite a big run.’
I raised my head and looked him in the eye. ‘We can’t stop some things. I didn’t want Jamie to die, but he did. In the words of my mother, “these things happen”.’
‘Does she often deal in clichés?’
‘Oh yes. Queen of the Clichés, my mother, which is a cliché in itself. But she’s sort of right. Things happen, and part of the reason we get so angry about them is because we don’t get given a say. I’m sure you’d rather that Anya had talked to you about how she was feeling rather than walking out. I’d rather that Jamie hadn’t got ill. But we can’t control everything, Duncan. You’re not a bad person because you didn’t see how she was feeling; you were practically a child, you had no experience to go from. I got angry because Jamie was taken away from me by his illness, and the worst part is I got angry at him! Like he had a choice!’
Duncan sighed. I felt his whole body move with the force of it. ‘I see where you’re coming from. It’s a sort of “let it go” scenario, isn’t it? Stop feeling angry, accept what happened … am I getting warm?’
‘I suppose that’s what I mean, yes.’
Gradually he eased himself away from me until his arms were by his sides. ‘But I can’t, Grace. I can’t let it go, that’s the problem.’
His withdrawal left the front of my body feeling cold. ‘What?’ Another sigh and he half-turned, angling one shoulder towards me and staring down at the floor. He couldn’t have given me the brush-off any harder without listing through my faults on The Jeremy Kyle Show. ‘Duncan?’
‘Look at me, Grace. I came here to find you. And why? Because I was afraid. Scared that you’d come to this house and just disappear, like Anya did. And when I got here and you weren’t … I was running around the place in some kind of panic attack, so scared that you’d gone. And now I find … now I find that you’d done something even worse than disappear, you’d gone back to those people who nearly killed you.’ His breath ran out on a gasp. ‘And I can’t live like this, Grace. Scared all the time of what might happen to you. Scared that the police will just keep on coming after me.’ He kept his eyes away from mine, staring down at the plain flooring. ‘And now …’ He began pacing, rubbing at the back of his neck and keeping his eyes on the hallway floor. ‘… here’s you, telling me that Anya is in the Bronze Age, happier there than she was with me. That she’s stayed in a time whe
re life expectancy was about thirty, which, by the way, makes her a really old lady by their reckoning, rather than face me?’ He stopped the pacing, but was keeping his eyes on a section of the rush-matted flooring as though it was about to rise up and reveal a pantomime villain. ‘I don’t think I’m ready for relationships,’ he muttered into his chest. ‘I’m clearly not a nice person.’
‘You were twenty years old! I know every twenty-year-old thinks they know everything, but it’s not much more than a kid. You didn’t know how to handle Anya’s loss, that’s all. Your upbringing was like Enid Blyton on steroids, of course you didn’t! So you’re not even going to give us a chance because of something that happened a lifetime ago?’
He flapped a hand at me. ‘I don’t expect you to understand, Grace, but I feel pretty shitty right now. The constant fear of losing you, maybe I could get over, but … she went three thousand years into the past to get away from me. That’s worse than emigrating to Australia – at least then I could Facebook her and ask for forgiveness.’
‘And that’s what you want? Her to forgive you?’
Behind him, on the wall of the hallway, I could see one of the big family photographs; all those little boys in black and white, as though they’d lived in the Victorian era. Four fighting to show off a small fish in a jar and one, solemn in the background, staring at the camera. I’d take any bets that was Duncan, probably overthinking things.
‘Yes. No. Och, I don’t know.’
‘Well, I’ve been told in no uncertain terms never to go back.’
He nodded, slowly. ‘You shouldn’t really have gone back after they tried to kill you last time. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful that you did, and you found Anya but …’ Now he shook his head as though he was trying to rebut any former agreement. ‘Yeah. You were missing and all I could do was wallow in self-pity and think about how badly I treated Anya. Coming to terms with how shitty I really was. And now I know how I’m going to have to live the rest of my life with the police just over my shoulder, because I can’t tell them what really happened without looking so insane that they’d just lock me away anyway. I know I said I’d rather have you and bugger what the police think but I don’t know if I can do it. Think I need to be alone, here, if you don’t mind.’
Living in the Past Page 24