Just Before I Died
Page 11
‘And this was about nine p.m.?’
He nods. ‘I hear they searched, and they brought divers, but of course you were found hours later, on the other side of the reservoir. In the woods. You must have swum, I suppose.’
‘Yes, I suppose I did.’
His pain is still evident, his regret at not coming over to check on me. Before I did this terrible thing.
I look across my tea at my solitary eyewitness.
‘Brian. It’s not your fault, none of it. How were you to know? How was anyone to know?’
He nods. Our eyes meet, and then they avert. The teacups squeal awkwardly in the saucers.
My fierce anxieties deepen. What Brian says makes total sense, and makes it worse. I drove down to Burrator; and I thought about it. I hovered, I cavilled, I had doubts. I must have sat there in the car, silently thinking about Lyla and Adam, wondering if I could do this to them, go through with this, deliberately destroy my family. And I decided, Yep: I could do this to them. And I drove my car into the water, and it is now at the bottom of Burrator, where the police divers found it. It will probably stay down there forever, become a place for eels and trout. Rusting away to nothing.
‘Thank you,’ I say to Brian, and there must be anguish written in my face because he says, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t think more, didn’t go up to you when you were parked, and, and … Well, I’m sorry. And I’m so glad you are alive.’
‘Yes.’ I don’t know what else to say. This new silence is awkward, and terminal. I push back my chair; but Brian delays me with a gesture, says he will go and get my coat. And with that, he disappears.
Standing up, I am drawn to the window at the far end of the kitchen that looks out on to a humble garden. I feel, again, as ever, as if I am looking for something, but not knowing what.
Without warning, it hits me. There is a smell here, sweet verging on sickly, and I detect the source; a small reed diffuser on a shelf next to some ancient cookbooks. A heady, lemony scent. That scent. What is it? I am not sure. But it jogs a memory. A piece of the mental jigsaw puzzle; a fragment from that night. The memory is of a man, in a car, with me. The man is angry, shouting, his eyes piercing. Is this memory from the night I drove into Burrator? I am sure it is; it must be. It feels right. The doctors said memories would return, unbidden, and this could be the first important piece.
I lean my hand on the wall of the kitchen, feeling unsteady, my knees weak.
‘Are you all right?’
I turn. It’s Brian, carrying my coat.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Sorry. I actually just thought I remembered something.’
‘From that day?’
I blush. I don’t know why. ‘Yes.’
Brian helps me into the coat and we pace down the hall and I step out of his cottage, about to say goodbye. He stays me with a gentle hand on my arm. ‘Is this the first time you’ve had any memory of that day?’
‘Yes, but it was nothing. A tiny fragment. A face in a car. Nothing.’
‘But the doctors say that all the memories will eventually return?’
I nod, hesitantly. ‘Yes. But in pieces. Random.’
Brian gives me a half smile, sympathetic. ‘In the early days of my wife’s illness she found she could retrieve her memories with some, ah, techniques. Meditation. Photos. Associations. That is,’ he looks me in the eye, searchingly. ‘That is, of course, if you really want these memories to return.’
With a handshake we say goodbye. The door is closed, and I cross the road to my car. I am thinking about Burrator. I used to go there sometimes when I was younger, I used to love that view, over the water, to the woods, and high Sheepstor. It was a place I went to contemplate things. And that night in late December I went to contemplate my own death, and how to do it. Because there was no one to stop me. Because Adam was away. Because he’d left me with Lyla, in the darkest corner of the year.
Adam.
I’d almost forgotten. The figure on the hill. That really was Adam. I wonder, again, and angrily, how long he’s been doing this. Following me.
I check my phone. There’s a good signal. Urgently, I dial Adam’s number, waiting for the inevitable voicemail: Hi, this is Adam Redway, I’m probably out on the moor, leave a message.
He picks up. ‘Hello, Kath.’
‘Why are you following me?’
My husband’s silence is prolonged. Stunned or guilty. I cannot tell. He says nothing. I rage on, ‘Tell me! Why? I saw you today. On the hill. Why are you following me?’
‘What the bloody hell are you talking about?’
‘You were there, on the hill. It’s creepy. It’s wrong. Stalking. Stop it!’
I can hear him breathing heavily as if he’s formulating a lie. I can hear wind in the background. He is still outdoors.
I want him to say the word Burrator, without me saying it. So I know he is guilty.
‘I’m not following you, I’m not doing any such thing, Kath. Jesus Christ. This is crazy shit. I’m not stalking my own wife! I don’t have time! I’m at work!’
‘I don’t believe you—’
‘Listen. I’m up at Throwleigh, helping Nigel, we’ve got more fly-tippers, that frigging roof insulation kills the ponies – I can take photos if you like, would that be enough proof?’
‘I saw you! Looking down at me, with binoculars!’
‘No you didn’t! Christ, not unless you’ve been in this farmyard. Jesus, Kath – stop it!’
I hold the phone hard in my hand, so hard I feel I might break it. Or break something else. My knuckles are white with anger. Why wasn’t my husband the first one to come see me in hospital?
I have to press this now. ‘Adam, what were you doing that night? Why did you have to go away for a week? Right after Christmas?’
‘I was restoring the rangers’ hut. Told you.’
‘Just you?’
I hear the whinnies of ponies in the background. He goes on, talking above the weather. ‘Dez was meant to join me. Dez Pritchard. But he didn’t, he had some Christmas shit, you know.’ He pauses, I hear a curt sigh. ‘You know the kind of shit that happens at Christmas, Kath, don’t you? Eh?’ His sarcasm is laboured, but it still hurts. ‘So, yeah I was alone. Got some peace to myself. For once.’
The phone is pressed so hard to my ear it hurts. I am angry, and also confused. My husband was not merely uncontactable for the entire period after Christmas – he was alone. I didn’t know this. I had presumed he was with others, that was certainly the plan, I didn’t know it hadn’t panned out. This surely means something. He could have been anywhere. He could have been doing anything. He could have come home. He has no alibi.
Before he can ring off I ask again, ‘Let me get this right. You preferred being alone up there, all week, sleeping in some hut, to coming back home, at night, to me and Lyla?’
Wherever he is, the wind is loud; his voice is louder. ‘For a few days, Kath, yeah. So I got some bloody time to myself, away from Huckerby. What would be the point in coming back anyway? It’s a long drive from Manaton, in the deep of winter, half the roads were flooded: it would’ve taken hours. And besides, who bloody cares, why do I have to explain myself? You know I haven’t had a damn holiday away from Dartmoor for three years! Three years straight! You do know that, Kath, eh?’
I can’t help wincing as I stand here in the speckles of rain. This is true. For the last three years I’ve gone to sunny Portugal with Tessa and Dan and the cousins, for summer holidays. Dan pays for me and Lyla.
Adam refuses to accept the charity, to come with us: he won’t take Dan’s money. But he reluctantly agrees that we can go, so Lyla can have fun with other kids, otherwise she wouldn’t get any summer holiday at all.
And when we’re gone he stays on the moor, and works. Fifteen hours a day. The long, exhausting summer shifts.
My anger abates. Or my willpower.
I tell my husband we will talk about it later, and I ring off, before I damage our marriage further.
And I cannot help but wonder where he was, the night I drove into Burrator.
Enough. Clicking my seat belt into place, I twist the key in the ignition. Foot to the floor, I race away. As I leave the village, a further, even darker thought intrudes. Brian Angove said that I drove that night as I am driving now: he said I drove quickly into the reservoir. What if I didn’t actually mean to press the accelerator, what if I meant to do something else? Hit the brakes? Turn away?
One man would know, the only man who fixed my car.
Adam.
He was always tinkering, keeping the Toyota going, saving us money. We can’t afford proper garages and mechanics, and he knows all about engines. Everything. He grew up on a farm fixing tractors, and trailers, doing up old motorbikes.
Is it conceivable he did something, over Christmas, to the brakes, the throttle, something to make my car more dangerous? I do not know enough about cars to judge, and the car is now deep underwater and cannot be examined. But it is surely possible. Adam would only have done it when he knew I wasn’t carrying Lyla. So he would have had to return to Huckerby, that week, that day – or perhaps, with this knowledge, he got someone else to do it at the precise moment, someone who was watching me. Maybe I never intended to drive into the water at all, but the car was altered that way.
My hand goes to my mouth, as if I am saying something terrible.
No. I cannot think this of my husband. What possible motive would he have, why would he want rid of me? Or want me to have a fatal accident? The thoughts are a whirl of snow in a Dartmoor gale, a white-out up on Skir Hill. And still, as I drive, as I race away, the crows are watching me, from the telegraph poles.
Black feathers. Black eyes.
Princetown
Monday afternoon
Adam stood, blowing warm air between cold hands, waiting in the chilly schoolyard for Lyla to come out of Princetown Primary School. The same way his nan would once have waited for him, when she could still drive.
His mother rarely came to collect him from school: too sad, or too drunk because she was sad, or taking those pills that made her sleepy and apathetic and unable to drive, but which made the humiliation of her marriage tolerable. His dad never came for him either: he was always away, working on some site, or more likely with some woman. Grinning when he came home, but never sharing the joke. Because it was never a joke for anyone else.
Nodding at some of the other parents chatting in the schoolyard, Adam wondered if he had broken the pattern. Of bad fatherhood. The repeating cycle, like the endless churn of water in a mill-race. Until this past Christmas, he would have said yes. Because he was a good father, a good husband: he worked every hour he could, he provided and protected, he hadn’t kissed another woman since the wedding kiss with Kath.
But now? Ever since Kath had driven into Burrator, Lyla had occasionally behaved as if this calamity was his fault. She would sometimes push his hand from her face when he went to comfort her, flinch when he tried to kiss her. Sometimes she did this with a look of real fear, as if she knew something about Adam that he didn’t.
Adam desperately wanted the old days back. He didn’t want to be here in horrible Princetown, glancing sideways at the prison, looming over the end of the town, like the mad black palace of some tyrant.
You could never ignore the prison in Princetown. As he rubbed his hands against the bitter cold, Adam thought of all the ageing criminals in there. The rapists, the paedos, the murderers. The prison had long ago been downgraded from Category A to Category C, but plenty of the worst villains remained inside, because they were deemed too old and inert to attempt escaping. Too rotten inside, too morally eroded. Harmlessly evil.
Perhaps these guys were staring out at him now, from their cells, wondering what he was doing. Perhaps they were simply waiting to die, waiting for the moment when they might be buried alongside the Napoleonic soldiers in gloomy Princetown Church, where the damp was so bad weeds and ferns grew inside the nave, sprouting from the two-foot-wide stone walls.
When they had lived here in Princetown, years ago, the prison used to obsess Kath, gave her bad dreams. And so Adam had done everything he could to find somewhere new, somewhere better than Princetown for them to live. He’d searched and searched, with their limited budget, until a friend of his Uncle Eddie put him in touch with the Spaldings, and they’d offered to rent them Huckerby.
He’d done that. Him. Adam. The man of the family. He’d saved them. And now he was being blamed. Now he was becoming estranged from his only daughter, his only child?
The emotion threatened to choke him. He tried to fight it. He looked at his watch, then glanced up at the noise. Kids were pouring, early, out of the school, rushing like a torrent, like the joyous, falling waters of the West Dart, singing its way under Crockern Tor, and Adam knew he would have to wait.
Because it was too early.
Lyla was a rule-follower. If there were rules or codes she had to follow them, rigidly. Anything else panicked her. It was another reason why they all lived much more happily – or happily until this Christmas – out in the wilds, in the longhouse he’d found at Huckerby, the house he’d spent weeks, months, years making watertight and comfortable, a home where his girl could roam the wild moors at will, unworried that she might be trespassing, breaking rules.
Rules made her anxious. They had to be obeyed. Especially the school rule which said that school finished at 3.25 p.m. And for some reason the kids were pouring out, today, at 3.16 p.m.
He gazed about him. The other parents were dispersing briskly, ushering their offspring into cars.
3.17.
3.18.
The supervising teacher strolled back inside. The last cattle farmer took his bonny daughter by the hand and left the yard, with a nod Adam’s way.
‘All right, Adam? Cold weather comin’, I hear?’
Adam offered a polite smile. And now he was all alone. 3.20. He could see a curious face in the window of the school office, looking out at him.
Quickly the face turned.
3.22.
3.23.
3.24.
Everyone else was gone now. Apart from Adam, and the killers in the prison. Finally, Lyla appeared at the painted school door, gazing out at the empty yard, her face puzzled. She shuffled over to her father.
‘Where are they? Why’ve they gone early? It’s not allowed.’
Adam reached for her hand but she was flapping her fingers. Stimming anxiously. ‘They shouldn’t let people go early. It says school finishes at three twenty-five. I tried to stop them going.’
‘What?’
‘I tried to tell the other children. They were breaking the rules!’
Adam gazed at his daughter, inwardly wincing, but as they walked to the car he attempted a smile. ‘It was probably a teacher. Letting them go. Maybe you didn’t hear. But,’ he paused, pained, ‘what did the other kids say to you? How did they react?’
‘Oh. The usual. They laughed at me.’ Her voice was almost a whisper now, softer and sadder than the summer breezes at Skaigh Woods, so quiet it tore at his heart. ‘It’s OK, Daddy. They always laugh at me, I’m used to it. Do you know what they call me?’
Adam wasn’t sure he wanted to hear this. ‘What do they call you, Lyla?’
‘The Girl Who Isn’t There,’ she said. ‘Some boy said it, and now they all say it. I’m The Girl Who Isn’t There.’
The stab of pain was sharp, but deep. ‘Sweetheart.’ He kept his voice as casual as possible.
‘You will tell me if anyone bullies you, won’t you?’
‘But they don’t bully me, Daddy, they ignore me. That’s why I always spend playtime by myself, by the water fountain. Or in the corner where no one can see me.’
‘You don’t ever play with anyone else?’
‘They play so strangely, Daddy. I did try to understand, I did, I tried to join in but they laughed at me.’ She was smiling brightly but sadly, up at the sky, following some bird, smiling bravely at something Adam could not see.
‘But it’s not their fault I can’t understand their games. One of the boys said I was like a witch who lives at the end of the village, who no one talks to. They were joking, Daddy. Weren’t they?’ She looked up at him and he could see the troubled thoughts she was trying to hide.
Adam strived to conceal his own pity. The Girl Who Isn’t There. It was cruel and it was raw. It was also accurate. Sometimes when Adam looked at his beautiful, eccentric daughter, when the two of them were out hiking on the high granite tors, or standing in the oakwoods of Soussons, with her pretty head tilted, and her blue eyes half closed, he could see her listening to the imperceptible noises, the sounds of the moor: shrews under the witchbeams, butterflies in the honeysuckle, and sometimes he would think, she’s not here. She’s somewhere else. And no one knows where.
They climbed inside the Land Rover. Adam started it up and they headed out of Princetown, Lyla mute now. Adam checked the mirror. She was staring at something in her hand. With a faint throb of anxiety, he realized what it was.
A hag stone. A polished stone with a weathered hole through it. A stone against evil. He hadn’t seen one of these in years.
‘Where did you get that, darling?’
Lyla looked up, caught his gaze in the mirror, and shrugged. ‘Somewhere.’
‘Tell me?’
She shook her head. Turning the stone. Over and over.
‘You know that’s a special stone, don’t you?’ No answer.