Felix snarls. As if it is our fault she is gone. And he is right.
Randal rests his head between two paws. Whimpering.
‘This is no good,’ I say, biting back my grief. My sadness and desperation surround me, like the endless grasses. We cannot find her in the dark, if we can find her at all. She is gone.
This desperation gives me an idea.
‘Hobajob’s.’
‘Surely not. After the scare.’
‘You have a better idea? If someone hasn’t taken her, she’ll go to one of her favourite places, and she still loves Hobajob’s.’
I dazzle him with my torchbeam. His mouth is set and grim. But he nods. ‘All right.’
We run out of the farmyard gate, on to the open moor, the dogs following, yelping. Up the muddy track, the dogs running ahead, into the wood. There is real moonlight now: the wisps of mist are disappearing. The silvery views of dry moorland open up, but they show nothing but black tors against almost black sky, and stars that shine on nothingness.
Together we vault the little wall, our torches shining on grasping branches and hanging moss and rotting leaves. I can hear the dogs, but nothing else. They are making the strangest noises, of grief, or fear. Nearly human.
We call and shout, ‘Lyla! Lyla!’
Nothing. I have an overwhelming urge to turn and run back along the deepening shadows of the path to the longhouse. The dogs are making such strange and terrible noises. Eerie yowls. I don’t need to know what the dogs have found. I really don’t. We should go. Lyla must be somewhere else.
She is not here. Why are the dogs yowling so oddly?
Because they have found Lyla?
That must be it. She is in there: dead. Frozen. The song my daughter was singing, about the blue light, was a prediction of Lyla’s own death, hurtling towards us.
Adam runs after her dogs. Their howling gets even louder. I can barely see a thing: the winter night is dark and grey, and the mossy, crowding trees make it darker still.
A wooden cage of night and cold.
Pushing through some icy brambles, I step into the sombre glade. The dogs are still circling, half demented. I prepare myself for the sight of Lyla dead, and naked, her throat slit. A white body in the cold, a smear of mud on her face. Raped and killed. Of course.
And now I see. The dogs are loping repeatedly around the corpses.… . . of two hares. Laid tail to tail.
There are always lots of dead hares on Dartmoor. Dead hares, dead ponies, dead sheep, dead rabbits – the moorland specializes in death. Dartmoor sometimes feels like a year-long, 24/7 Exhibition of Death, and you get used to it. You get used to finding the bodies of ponies broken in streams, or the reek of decomposing mutton on the air. You get accustomed to finding bleached skulls sitting on natural granite plinths like ritual objects.
But this, these hares, this is a different kind of death. Deliberate, carefully arranged. I put a hand to my mouth. Adam is staring in shock. Someone has cut off the left hind legs of both hares. These animals have been tortured and mutilated. Their eyes have been viciously gouged out, leaving deep dark sockets of oozing black. The hare on the left is staring right at us with its nightmare dead eyes, weeping trickles of blood.
And this isn’t the worst. Because suddenly I see a pattern. The hares are meant to be eyes. The eyes of a face. A dove, blood red, has been laid among the dead leaves. That’s the mouth. And a trail of gorse flowers and clumps of moss and of tiny dead mice streams from the mouth, in swooping curves.
And this, I think, is the pattern my daughter was trying to make with the dead birds at Huckerby. She didn’t do it very well but I see it now. A kind of grinning face. A Green Man. The pagan symbol of rebirth, fertility, death. My mum was obsessed with these symbols.
Someone is repeating or copying this ghoulish pattern.
The blood thumps in my throat. Lyla has been here before and seen this, or someone has seen her. There really is someone out there.
The trees are black and the clearing is empty. Still we call, ‘Lyla, Lyla, Lyla …’
Hobajob’s merely shivers in silent response, a ghost of a breeze, cold and subtle. Nothing else. Nothing here.
‘This way!’
As one, we run back through the trees on to the open moorland, the dogs loping alongside us, sensing our desperation.
Once the trees are behind us, Adam shouts again, ‘Lyla!’
And now the moor answers, at last, with an echo, resounding, faintly, from the great granite rocks of Combestone Tor.
Lyla
But there is no other noise. Just a grand and terrible nothing. She is lost. I am crazed.
‘Come on, Adam, come on – please think! Where might she go out here, when she’s wandering?’
‘I don’t know. Jesus. She wanders all over! Kath, you know her, she could be anywhere.’
Adam scans the moorland urgently with his torch, a pitiful beam in the vastness, picking out clumps of brown-and-grey winter grass, and silvered patches of wetness. He shouts again, pointlessly, and again the moor answers with echoing silence.
Now he turns the torch on to the cold, muddy dogs. ‘Felix, Randal, follow Lyla, follow her. Where do you go? Where does she take you? Where?’
The dogs gaze up. They growl. And suddenly they bark, as if they understand, and they start running off the track, downhill. I have no idea where they are going.
I hesitate. ‘They could be taking us entirely the wrong way!’
Adam shakes his head. ‘What choice do we have?’
He’s right. This is our only hope. It is about minus three out here. Bone-cold and grimly damp, and with a new wind picking up. Even steelier, even chillier. We shiver as we follow the dogs.
How could a small girl in pyjamas survive in this cold?
The dogs run on, with definite purpose. My hopes rise. Panting and barking, they head down a beaten sheep track I do not know. Between tumps of turf, over tiny streams, pebbles rolling in my torchbeam. For a second I stop, astonished.
A pair of shining green eyes looms out of nowhere on my right, caught in the torchlight.
‘What the—’
‘It’s a pony,’ says Adam, panting like the dogs. ‘Just a pony.’
He’s right. A pony in the night, standing by a dark pile of rocks. The ponies have green eyes when you see them illuminated in darkness. Those same sad green eyes might have seen my daughter run this way. She loves the Dartmoor ponies, if this is where ponies go, at night, she might be here.
A new noise jolts me. The dogs are barking, but this time excitedly.
Have they found her? Is she alive?
‘Look, some kind of shed,’ Adam directs his torch beam.
I see a small conifer wood, grey and black in the freezing moonlight. But there, where the trunks begin, Adam is right. A shed. Shelter. And this is a place the dogs clearly know, so I reckon she probably brings them here, with her picnics. When I make her peanut butter sandwiches, give her a brace of apples, and off she goes, on long summer days, on her own, wandering free.
I am praying the way I used to pray, when I wanted to annoy my mother.
The dogs run excitedly up the wooden steps into the shed. They have surely found her. Adam runs up behind them and I follow, my heart ready to burst with relief.
The dogs stop barking. Our twin beams quickly scan the single wooden room. Smelling of old planking and mould.
There is no one here. Lyla has not been here. Felix and Randal sniff around the shed as if Lyla might have come here many weeks ago. But there is no sign of any recent presence. Nothing else at all.
I sink to my knees. I am not crying. I have crossed some horizon, beyond emotion. I am hollowed out: there are no more tears.
I have lost my daughter. It is what I deserve. For what I did at Burrator.
Lyla has done to me what I tried to do to her. Here is my righteous punishment. My death is returned to me, with interest.
Dartmoor
Night
; Adam has his head sunk in his hands. I listen to the wind rattling the windowpanes of the shed. The glass is broken, the cold cuts through. Lyla might have survived if she’d found her way in here, but she didn’t make it—
No. I say the word aloud. I shout at myself.
NO!
She is not dead. It is 11 p.m. and we know nothing. We will find her. She is a child of these moors. I will fight for her as I fought for my life, in Burrator. I may have made that terrible decision, but I also got out of the car, swam to the beach, because I love my daughter.
Pacing to the door, I look out into the severity of a cloudless black night, and a moon that curves in on itself; a foetal spine of silver on a dark ultrasound. Lyla aged five months in my womb.
The moonlight illuminates a standing stone. There are so many standing stones on Dartmoor. Hundreds.
I look at this stone. It vaguely reminds me of the stone I remembered, the stone that didn’t look quite right, that I have been unable to identify, even as I google endless images.
‘Lyla!’ Adam is calling by my side, through the door. ‘Lyla! LYLA!’
I ignore him, keep gazing at the standing stone. An image from that terrible night returns. I remember seeing a different standing stone, from the car; but where? I remember thinking how impressive it was.
‘You’re right.’
I turn. Adam is pointing at the stone. He says,
‘There. That bloody stone. Lyla loves them, doesn’t she? I’ve seen her sit next to them. Merrivale. Scorhill. Dance round them. If she came this way, she went to the stone—’
‘But the dogs?’
‘They’re guessing. They’re lurchers. She may have left a better scent, by the stone, and we can try again: it will be fresher, the dogs might pick it up.’
There is no argument. This slender hope, my husband’s idea, is, once again, all we have. Wherever she is, if Lyla is outdoors, she cannot survive much longer, not in this winter blade of a wind, this icy scythe slicing the uplands.
‘Felix, Randal!’
Together, we race out on to the moor. I stumble over a soggy hump of grass. I drag myself up. We approach the stone.
‘Here.’ I am gasping: harsh February air is scalding my throat. My torch shines on the granite of the standing stone, patterned with grey and silver lichen, so many thousands of years old. I say,
‘Give me the T-shirt.’
Adam hands it over. I bend to the dogs, and offer it to them and they inhale Lyla, all over again. I point at the moonlit ground, making clear my meaning: now sniff there, sniff the grass, the watery sedge, pick up a scent!
Felix looks at me.
And then he sniffs the end of my pointing finger. His eyes are a melancholic brown in the torchlight. These final hopes, already feeble, begin to fail. I try once more. Offer the dogs the T-shirt, and point at the ground. ‘Smell it. Find her!’
Felix gazes my way, head cocked. And again he sniffs the end of my pointing finger.
Adam pushes me aside.
‘That’s not how lurchers work! They don’t understand that. Do it this way. Big dogs need manhandling.’
He grabs Felix by the collar, leads him a couple of yards to a kind of a sheep track. I shine my torch on them, counting the moments as Lyla shivers by a wall, waiting for her parents to find her, but failing, her fingers trembling, her white face turning whiter as her body slows to a stop.
It’s all my fault. I have brought her to Merrivale. To the Plague Market. I have infected her with my death wish, despite myself. My love is gold in vinegar, and it carries my disease.
Adam firmly pushes Felix’s muzzle to the earth, to the beaten grasses of that livestock path.
‘Lyla,’ he says, to Felix. ‘Lyla came this way, your girl, our girl, she came this way. Find her. Find Lyla. Find Lyla. LYLA.’
A frozen moment waits. The starlit darkness gazes at the drama. Felix barks. Then he barks again, very loudly. And he is off, running, and now Randal is barking too, like proper bloodhounds, carrying the intrinsic DNA of all dogs. I whisper, to myself, You can do it, boys, you can do it, as my ankle bends in a ditch, as my knees knock against the skinning rocks.
I can see a stream, and a clapper bridge.
And the dogs go straight across. No hesitation. Noses to the stones, definitely following a trail. The moon shines on the four of us, but every silvery fraction of a second sends Lyla nearer to a shivering end, barefoot in pyjamas on the frigid hills, or stumbling, falling over, breaking her head on a jagged boulder—
‘There!’
Adam shines his light on a kind of corral. A ring of dry-stone walls, erected to protect moorland livestock – cattle or sheep or ponies – from exactly this kind of ferocious winter weather.
The dogs are yowling, crazily. Are we too late? Adam climbs the stone wall, using a granite stile, I follow him. The dogs leap over. I never knew they could jump that high. The two of us, two terrified parents, direct our torches on to the circle of grass.
Wild ponies are sleeping at the other side of the corral. And that is all. A team of wild ponies, lying side by side.
‘Jesus,’ says Adam. ‘She’s not here. That’s it. What else can we try? What else??’
His voice is cracking, with a despair I have not heard before. But I am not despairing. I have a sense.
‘Wait. Let’s go nearer. We can’t see properly from here.’
Slowly, painfully slowly, we walk towards the sleeping ponies. Adam holds the dogs by their collars, keeping them quiet. A few steps from the animals, I shine the torch down. And now I see a flash of pink, the bright pink of a child’s dressing gown. Lyla is lying right between the sleeping ponies, hidden in the middle, as if the animals chose to huddle around her. Like they found her lying here, and lay beside her, to keep her warm, keep her alive. Like dolphins that support and save a drowning swimmer. My daughter has become one of them, one of the Dartmoor animals, a feral child, lost in patterns of stones and pelt, and darkness.
‘My God,’ says Adam, very quietly, as he reaches gently between the sleeping ponies and puts his arms around and under our daughter, lifting her away. She does not wake. He carries her in his arms.
‘She’s cold,’ he says. I see him hiding his emotion. ‘But she’s alive. Let’s get her home.’
I don’t know how we ever got here, in so many ways. I don’t know if we’ve wandered for hours and miles, but the return journey feels like bare euphoric minutes, the dogs yelping ecstatically as Adam carries Lyla home, across the moors, back to Huckerby, back to warmth and safety. While we walk the torchlit path, Adam calls all his friends, authorities, calling off the search. His voice is faintly trembling. Overfull of emotion. We have made it to Huckerby. When we push the gate, I see Dan, climbing out of his car.
‘You’ve found her!’
He looks delighted, but still very frightened. ‘Oh Jesus,’ he says. ‘Oh Jesus Christ. Thank God. How? Where?’
‘She was sleeping with the ponies.’
Adam kicks open the longhouse door. ‘Inside.’
We carry our daughter over the threshold into the soft-lit living room, where Dan piles more logs on to the woodfire. Hearth and safety.
We found her. Adam found her. The dogs found her. The ponies saved her. Her father saved her.
There is no one out there to threaten her. We have survived.
I look down at my sleeping daughter in her slippers, pyjamas and pink dressing gown. ‘Do you think,’ I say, quietly, my throat hurting from all the cold, ‘we should get a doctor now, or wait until tomorrow?’
Dan shrugs. ‘Who can say? She looks all right, but you never know—’
We are interrupted. By Lyla. She is awake, and staring, First, she looks at her uncle, and at her daddy. Finally she turns to me, and speaks.
‘I woke up, Mummy. I woke up like it was a dream and I looked out of the window and I thought I saw Daddy waving to me, in the moonlight. Pointing to Hobajob’s.’ Her eyes are fixed on mine. ‘So I climbed o
ut, to go to him, but when I got there, he wasn’t there. You can never get there, it always changes.’ She looks towards the fire, and back at me. ‘And I was climbing back into my room and I heard you arguing, you and Daddy, and I couldn’t bear it any more. I can’t pretend, I ran away.’
‘Pretend what, darling? What are you pretending about?’
‘Them.’
‘Who?’
Slowly, too slowly, she turns. And she screams, at Adam, ‘You, Daddy! YOU. You were there. In the car. With Mummy. You! You were shouting at her, that night, when she drove there, into the water. Like you were shouting tonight. That’s why I ran away. You shouted, that night, and you were shouting again!’
Adam steps back, utterly bewildered. He looks as if he is about to cry. I have never seen my manly husband do anything like cry. Not once in our relationship. He never cries.
Lyla is shrieking again, at her father. ‘Get out!’ Her face contorts into a demonic leer. ‘Get out! Get out! Get out! Get away from me and Mummy! Get away!’
‘Lyla, darling—’
Adam looks astonished and distressed.
‘Get out get out get out! Daddy! Ssssss! Sssssssss! Get away from us! You were there in the car SSSSSSSSSSSSS!’
Her ferocity is untameable, unnerving. She is going to hurt herself, unless we somehow calm her.
My husband seeks my gaze; I shake my head, telling him: we have no choice. Adam closes his eyes, as if in brief but silent prayer.
‘What about Hobajob’s?’ he says. ‘Someone did that. Who will look after you?’
It’s a good question. I shrug, despairingly and he holds my attention, and says, ‘I’ll go down the road, find a bed at the Huntsman. I’ll be close by.’
He turns and leaves the room; the door slams as he exits into the yard. The engine rumbles, and dies away.
Now I look at Dan and remember my memory of running away from him, at Two Bridges. He cannot be trusted either. And yet I feel a need for a man here, if only for tonight. And Adam has been expelled.
My brother clearly senses my mood, and my decision. ‘We’re all so tired, shall I use the spare room?’
I hardly have time to say Yes when he ascends the stairs.
Just Before I Died Page 21