‘Kath, you clearly know you have retrograde amnesia? Because of the brain trauma?’
‘Yes. Of course! I know I’ve forgotten some stuff from before the crash, a week or so, but there are fragments, and the psychiatrists at the hospital say it will all come back. But, Jesus, I wish I could forget the actual crash! I still see the ice, the skid, the water – ugh—’
I close my eyes to dull the mental pain. When I open them, Tessa is frowning.
‘Well, the thing is, Kath: what the doctors at Derriford Hospital might not have properly explained about this amnesia is that you can forget that you’ve forgotten. That is to say, there are holes in your memory that you don’t even realize are there, and the mind tries to fill them.’
The wind has stopped abruptly. The whole house is quiet. I realize that the dogs must have gone with Adam and Lyla. All I can hear is Dartmoor rain on the window. A tinkly-tankly sound. I feel a sense of congealing fear. Some kind of horror is approaching. Like a moorland witch, creeping along the hedgerow. And we don’t have any hag stones. We have nothing to keep the witches away.
I can’t stand this any longer.
‘OK, this really is enough, Tessa. Tell me why you are here, in my kitchen?’ I am close to shouting. ‘I’ve told you everything. You know most of it already. So now it’s my turn to ask. Why are you here?’
‘Because,’ she says, looking deep, deep into my eyes, ‘you didn’t have an accident, Kath.’
‘What?’
‘Your mind has invented this. Invented the ice, invented it all.’
‘What?’ The panic rises in my throat, an acrid, metallic taste. ‘What? What do you mean? I had the bruises, I’ve seen the doctors. The bloody car is at the bottom of Burrator Reservoir. I had to buy a new one!’
‘Yes, it is. The car is down there. But that’s because you drove it in there, deliberately.’
I sense my life pivot around this moment. A ritual dance. ‘You mean – you mean – you can’t possibly—’
Tessa Kinnersley shakes her head, and I see the most enormous pity in her eyes. ‘Kath, there was no accident. You tried to leave your husband and daughter behind, to destroy yourself, to destroy everything. You tried to commit suicide. We just don’t know why.’
Later Thursday morning
Absolute stillness. That’s what it feels like. Absolute stillness, as if the beating heart of the world has slowed to a stop. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Then a lash of rain hits the windowpanes, breaking the quiet, and my words rush out.
‘How can you think that?’
Tessa remains calm, doing her job. She’s not here as a friend, but as a professional psychologist.
‘You were observed.’
‘Sorry?’
‘There was a witness at Burrator. By the reservoir. Walking his dog. It was night but there was a full moon, and he saw you drive your car, quite deliberately, into the water.’
‘But—’ The panic rises, like that black cold water, the water I can so vividly remember, and yet I can’t? ‘But. No. No way. Can’t be. There was ice. I skidded.’
‘Check the records, Kath, go back and look.’ Her arms folded, Tessa continues, her voice deliberately low and kind: overtly calming. ‘Go online and look at the weather for that night, December thirtieth. It was one of those dry and mild winter evenings we get. Twelve degrees centigrade. A southwest wind. There was no ice. Also …’ I flinch, inwardly.
‘Also, Kath, there is a wall around Burrator, you must remember that. A big, thick brick wall, a solid Victorian construction, far too strong for a car to smash through. You know Burrator well, you must recall this?’
She’s right. I do. There is a wall. Yet my mind has deceived me, recreated a different place: a place where I might drive in accidentally.
‘So how did I … I don’t get it—’ I swallow. I mustn’t cry.
Tessa guesses my question. ‘They were doing some construction at Burrator, rebuilding part of the wall, leaving a gap, barely wide enough for a car to slip through. The chances of skidding on ice, or whatever, and hitting the right spot would be pretty tiny, infinitesimal. But anyway you didn’t skid, and there was no ice, and you simply aimed the car, very carefully.’
‘There must have been someone else in the car.’
‘I’m sorry, it was you, just one person was seen, driving, and it was you. Only you drove into the reservoir; only you came out.’
‘I don’t believe it!’
The tears gather now. I stare, blurrily, up at that calendar. Kitty Jay’s grave, covered in snow, the flowers so forlorn against the whiteness. This is the famous beauty spot near Chagford, where my mother’s ashes are scattered: and I shrink inside. I huddle from the thought, the irony: what would Mum think of me? Of this terrible thing. Suicide? Like Kitty Jay herself? My mum loved life, she devoured it, despised the idea of suicide, and she taught that to me.
The words come again, all too quickly. ‘But why would I kill myself, Tessa? Why on earth would I do that? It’s hateful, suicide: it’s so selfish, the most selfish thing, and I was quite happy, I was. Yes, we had problems, with money, and Lyla, but I love her, I love – I love my husband – I love my daughter!’
And now the waters engulf me, and the truth pours in through the car window. Adam obviously knows all this, hence his cold anger, his strange distance, these past weeks. And I don’t blame him. What must he think of me? I tried to kill myself, for no apparent reason, I was prepared to leave him without a wife; and, worst of all, far worse, the deepest, darkest water of all, I was prepared to leave Lyla without a mother.
‘No,’ I say, flatly, defiantly. ‘NO. I don’t believe it. I would never do that. Never leave Lyla without a mother, never ever, ever. I am not that kind of woman, not that sort of mother! I love Lyla to bits. I would die for my daughter. Not die and leave her here. Oh God.’
I have to take a huge breath or I will shatter. I am a monster, a gargoyle. I am a leering thing made of dead birds and smeared blood. A horrible Inuit spirit-doll with feathers and yellow teeth. Here I sit in this warm bright kitchen with its ancient walls and the Come to Dartmouth tea towels: and yet I am something grotesque, a woman who would leave her lovely, fragile daughter without a mother … No.
‘I didn’t do it, Tessa. I didn’t! There has to be some other explanation.’
Tessa looks at me assessingly, as if judging how much I can take; reaching into her bag she lifts out a folded piece of paper, places it on the table. As she unfolds it, carefully, she reveals an image. The image looks scanned, photocopied. There seems to be handwriting on it, and it is small, introverted handwriting: scratchy and spidery.
I recognize this distinctive handwriting, from all the way across the kitchen table.
It is mine.
Tessa advises me, gently, ‘Adam has the original. This is a copy.’
I know what I am about to see: it is obvious. It doesn’t have to be said. But I also need to see it, to secure the lid on this. To hammer in the iron nails, so that no hope can escape.
Tessa pushes the paper across the table. With trembling hands I turn it around, and read my own handwriting:
The words are mine. I don’t remember writing them, don’t remember them at all, but this is my handwriting: I wrote this.
I tried to kill myself.
I shunt the paper aside, lean forward on my folded arms, gently rest my head on them. I can smell the clean, honest wood of our kitchen table, where I have spent so much time, with my husband, with my daughter, cooking suppers, drinking wine, laughing loudly, being a family. Here at this table. And now, at this same table, I quietly break into a sob, and keep sobbing.
Tessa says nothing, I stare down at the darkness between my arms, and sob and sob, in my white-painted kitchen. But I am not crying for me, I am crying for Adam, for my dead mother, for my brother, for this house, for this place around me, for the wildflowers on the high moors in the summer, for the meadowsweet at Whitehorse Hill, for the foxgloves down at Broada
Marsh, for the sundews and shepherd’s dials and pennyroyals and roses – all the flowers my daughter loves, all the ones that she can name and I cannot, all the one she shows me, all the flowers and rocks and feathers she collects, because I am crying, crying, crying for my daughter, the little girl I was prepared to hurt, to damage, to dismiss, to throw away; the girl I picture, standing alone in the farmyard, listening for the tiny animals, puzzled in her anorak, wondering why her mother tried to run away forever.
To kill herself.
And my God. It is too much. And the rain tinkle-tankles on the window, as my tears run to their end.
How long I sit there, with my head slumped, I don’t know. An hour or more. But even the fiercest tears find a cease, as all things must die, and I lift my head. Tessa is sitting there patiently with a look of deep pity on her face.
‘Sorry,’ I say.
Warren House Inn
Monday lunchtime
Lyla is at school and I should be at work in Princetown. Instead I’m parked down the road at Warren House Inn. The fog is so thick I can barely see the humble old whitewashed building, though it is only a hundred yards away. Normally the inn is visible for miles around – because it is the only building for miles in the rolling, bony moorland. Today, in the Dartmoor murk, Warren House looks like the vague, gloomy idea of a cottage, half-formed in someone’s mind.
Stepping out, locking the car door, I pause and stare at my own hand, unnerved. I never used to do this. Locking my car, in one of the wildest places on the moor. We never lock anything on the moor: bikes, cars, houses. And who’s going to steal my worthless old Ford? A team of stoats?
One of the shaggy Dartmoor bullocks?
Or the sheep?
I can hear sheep, somewhere around me, also invisible in the fog:
meh, meh meh meh meh, as if they are mocking me.
MEH, Kath Redway, MEH.
It was Lyla who first suggested this to me, that sheep say meh not baa, and once she’d said it I couldn’t get it out of my head; because she was right. Sheep are laughing at us, mocking; meh meh meh, look at you, what are you doing here, look at this person locking her car door, meh, why is she locking it, mehh, is she scared she might get back in and drive into a reservoir?
Mehhhhhhhhhh!
Thoughts press in on me: I am stuck inside myself. How could I possibly have tried to kill myself? What did I do on that fateful December day? I do not believe it; yet I have to believe it.
As I walk up the mist-swirled moorland road towards the inn, I go over it for the seventeenth time this morning. Yesterday I thought it through two hundred times or more. I’ve been obsessing like this since Tessa’s visit.
I remember Christmas, I do remember that. It was nice. We did what we always do, went down to Salcombe like the poor relatives we are, and feasted at my brother’s expense.
We had a roasted goose, like they eat in Dickens. And Lyla actually got to play with other kids, her rambunctious eight- and ten-year-old cousins, Oscar and Charlie – or Foxtrot and Tango, as Dan calls them. Charlie and Oscar tolerate Lyla because they’ve grown up with her: when she twirls her hands repeatedly or gets phobic about scratchy things or hides shyly under a table with an encyclopaedia, they accept it, and laugh good-naturedly, and that makes Lyla smile and come out from under the table and play with them in her own awkward, funny way, and that’s why I like Christmas. Lyla is always happy at Christmas.
And I enjoyed Christmas this year, too. I remember crackers and sloe gin, and luxury chocolate assortments my brother bought from some posh London shop, and then a fat, contented drive home to Huckerby on Boxing Day – and that evening Adam went away for a week, to do up the rangers’ hut on the northern moors, leaving me alone with Lyla.
And after that, the horrible fog comes down on everything, like a door closing, and everything is lost in the remorseless mist of my post-traumatic, retrograde amnesia, the vapours of my bruised and useless brain.
From Boxing Day onwards my mind is basically a void. Four days later I tried to kill myself, and I have no idea why.
Meh.
As I get nearer the pub, I see the door is shut and the windows are dark. It looks as if the pub is closed. The peat fire in this pub has, famously, never gone out since 1847. But sometimes they casually close the place in the dead days of winter. But I need this pub to be open: because it is the one place I might find Adam, when I need to find my elusive husband.
It’s not his fault he’s a ranger. But it means he ranges, across a sizeable tract of moor with all its sparkling streams and clapper bridges, its hidden spinneys and forgotten villages. He is always out and about, usually in remote areas with no mobile coverage, so I can’t get hold of him. And right now I want to get a proper hold of him. We’ve spent the days since Tessa’s visit quietly not addressing the massive issue: pretending that this enormous thing isn’t there, didn’t happen. Let’s have some more tea and say nothing. I know Adam is resentful but he keeps it pretty much hidden.
This morning my mood changed. I dropped Lyla at school, went back to the office at Princetown, opened my computer and typed in some words: The first recorded instance of the word ‘swaling’ comes from a thirteenth-century poem. It means the spectacular, controversial winter burning of Dartmoor’s stubborn gorse and bracken, and can still be witnessed every winter, on the higher moors … And then I stopped writing and looked at my stupid words, so irrelevant to the gaping void in my life, the open wound in everything, about to be infected. So I decided I had to leave the office and talk to my husband: immediately. And I made my excuses and headed out here.
Enough tea; enough denial. Enough imaginary men in woods.
I need the facts.
Turning the rusty handle of the knackered wooden door, I step through. The pub is open, but almost empty. There are a few local drinkers with drams and pints at one end; a huge grey wolfhound snoozes by the undying fire at the other.
I suspect this story about the eternal Warren House fire is a lie, told for tourists, but we all tell lies, to get by. And why not? I wish I had more lies, to tell myself. I would happily lie to myself for the rest of life if I could: I didn’t really try to commit suicide, no: I was trying to explore the reservoir. I was trying to see if my car would float. I was in a parallel universe at the time. I never tried to kill myself and leave my daughter alone, meh meh meh meh meh. I feel like crying again.
‘Hello, Katarina.’
A friendly face: Ron, behind the bar. He’s owned this pub for decades, possibly centuries: I wonder if he kindled the hearth fire in 1847. He certainly knew my mum, who loved this poetic little pub with its ghosts and legends and mummified cats buried in the walls, and the stones of the Iron Age village visible from the saloon bar windows. He knew she called me Katarina, and he knows that I shortened it to Kath because I felt it was pretentious. So he teases me.
‘Hey, Ron. Call me Kath?’
‘Nah,’ he says. ‘Doesn’t feel right. What would your mum think?’
We’ve probably had this conversation six hundred times. It is comfort food for my soul, right now.
‘How are you, Kat? I heard about the accident.’
‘Oh, OK. Recovering. Wouldn’t mind the odd holiday in the Maldives, you know.’
He ponders. ‘Isn’t that the place that’s, like, sinking underwater?’
‘Bit like Dartmoor in January, then.’
He chuckles, and turns to serve another customer, lifting a glass to the optic, draining a shot of Gordon’s. I look at him as he works, his weatherbeaten, grog-blossomed face. He probably kissed me as a baby, when I was called Katarina Olivia Mirabel Kinnersley, not Kath Redway.
I am shortened. Abbreviated. Truncated. I have fallen off a social cliff. And I don’t mind. Because all I wanted was an ordinary life, with ordinary happiness, and my ordinary and handsome husband and my extraordinary and beautiful daughter, and the happy dogs and the ancient house, and yet I tried to throw it all away? To damn them to a kind of
hell, without me?
I must not crack. I must keep a grip.
I wonder if Ron knows the truth about my ‘accident’. I wonder how many people know that it was actually a suicide bid. I don’t think it appeared in papers, I suspect the local police did Adam a favour, a Dartmoor favour for Dartmoor people. Because Adam is popular, the handsome Chagford boy, one of the Redways, a National Park Ranger, and the moorland people are so tight-knit.
And I am not quite one of them. I’m a well-spoken girl from the coast, with connections on the moor, and I’m always very welcome – but I’m not quite one of them. And never will be.
‘So, Kat, love, what can I get you?’
‘The usual.’
He chuckles. ‘Your husband? I’m not sure if he’s been by today, I was out this morning.’
We nod at each other. Ron leans over the bar, and calls out to one of the drinkers at the distant tables, a farmer I’m guessing by his muddy boots. He’s drinking on his own. I think I recognize him: yet another cousin of Adam’s. He has so many: so many with the very same dark hair, striking eyes and rakish, slanted cheekbones, the looks inherited by Lyla. This particular handsome cousin is on Adam’s aunt’s side, his dad’s sister. And I’m not sure he and Adam get on.
‘Jack, you seen yer cuz?’
Jack nods as he drinks his beer. ‘Adam? Yeah. By an hour back. He’s up at Vitifer, I think, some sheep in a wire.’
Ron turns to me with an expressive shrug which says: What do you want to do?
‘How far is Vitifer, where is it?’ I ask.
Ron shakes his head. ‘Half-hour walk, straight across the moors. But you don’t want to do it in this fog, Kath, you’d get lost in five minutes, we’d have the air ambulance out. And that goes on my tax bill.’ He is grinning. I’m not.
‘I really have to see him. It’s really, really important.’
‘C’mon now, Kath, please—’
‘I have to. Please. I have to! HAVE TO.’
Just Before I Died Page 7