Just Before I Died

by S. K. Tremayne

  And now it is down to me, and Felix and Randal, who sit at either end of the sofa on which Lyla reclines. The applewood logs crackle joyously in the hearth. And Lyla lies there: staring hard at the flames. The fire is a rosy glow on her white, determined face.

  Huckerby

  Night

  I cannot sleep. I feel like I will never sleep. Not again. Not after the trauma of this evening. My daughter is now safely in bed in her room; my brother snoozes in the spare room. My husband is banished. And something about it feels wrong. More than wrong. Eyes tired, and dry, and wide open, I lie on my pillow and watch a small black spider crawl across the whiteness of our ceiling.

  There was something too vehement about the way Lyla accused her father. How can she simultaneously be so certain it was him, yet so unsure of things when questioned closely? After all, I misidentified Harry Redway, but I realized my mistake. She is certain she is not mistaken; I presume she just didn’t want to accuse her own father, her beloved Daddy, of something so awful – involvement in her mother’s near-fatal accident – not until she was emotionally unable to hide the truth.

  Yet she has claimed she sees other men as well, who look like Daddy, yet they simultaneously are Daddy. This confusion is too much. It feels like Lyla being Lyla.

  Silence fills the longhouse. The spider has reached the edge of the ceiling. It waits for me to realize. To make the guess.

  And now the idea forms so quickly in my mind, it is like a speeded-up film of ice forming over a pond, a lake, a bay. The crystals that grow, like creatures, until the glistening sheet of silver is complete. And you can walk across to the truth.

  Sitting upright, I lean to my left, for my laptop, lying on the carpet. The blue glow of the screen is spectral on my face, as I quickly type in the words.

  Identity. Faces. Asperger’s. Autism.

  It takes me exactly 4 minutes. 240 seconds to solve the conundrum that has been torturing me for weeks. And the answer is a word I have never seen before, I word I cannot even pronounce, but a word that explains the world. Much of the dark world I have been inhabiting since December.

  Prosopagnosia.

  There’s a hundred thousand references on Google. The definitions are largely identical:

  Prosopagnosia is a relatively rare neurological disorder, the primary symptoms of which are a tendency to misidentify people, or a failure to recognize faces. Prosopagnosia is also known as face-blindness. It is often linked with other disorders …

  A more precise piece of Googling gives me the rest of the answer.

  Prosopagnosia is significantly more common in people on the autistic spectrum. It can range from very mild and sporadic, to debilitating, persistent and severe. A particularly distressing scenario is when the sufferer misidentifies close relatives with similar-looking family members, e.g. siblings, or cousins. This commonly happens when a person with prosopagnosia meets the relative out of context, at a place or time they’re not used to seeing that person.

  Here it is, black and white on my screen. My Aspergerish daughter clearly has this symptom, too. A mild form maybe, but she surely has it. I’d probably have guessed sooner if we had decided, in the end, to get her treated. The psychologists might have spotted it, and told us. But we opted not to get her statemented, we didn’t want to label her. But now we have another kind of label.

  Prosopagnosia. I try to say the word to myself, here in my cold and quiet bedroom, but I don’t know how to pronounce it. Yet that doesn’t matter.

  My daughter thinks she has been seeing her father. But probably she isn’t. Because of her condition, her place on the spectrum, she’s seeing someone who looks like him, out of context. Someone who resembles Daddy, someone with his blue eyes, that distinctive, handsome, cheekboned face. Those broad and capable shoulders, the Redway walk. Aggressive. Used to hard work. Men of the moor.

  So there is someone out there. Someone who has been stalking, lurking, someone who looks enough like a relative, someone I know. Someone who did something, or said something, so terrible, it led to my suicide bid.

  Laptop shut, I seize the solution with relish. Because it means I am not bewitched, and I am not mad, and I am likely not suicidal, and it means my daughter, being just a little bit different, is making mistakes she can’t help, and it also means my husband is at least exonerated, of being there on that night, in that car: and so it all begins to make sense.

  And then my relish turns to dread. This all, in a way, makes it worse.

  Spells. Witchcraft. Hag stones. And now face-blindness? Whose face is she blinded by?

  Out there beneath the tors, an evil has burbled out of nothing: like a black moorland burn, springing unexpected from the rotten sedge.

  Bellever Tor

  Wednesday afternoon

  I see a man who is trying to understand me, even as he tries not to hate me. And yet we are a couple who have been deeply in love since he was eighteen and I was seventeen. Father of my beloved daughter. The child who has expelled him from his own home.

  ‘How is she?’

  The winter sun is spangling cold on our faces. But I can see long acres of grey cloud in the west. The afternoon dies.

  ‘She’s all right.’

  ‘That’s it – all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  And it’s true. She’s all right. Considering.

  Adam falls quiet in his taciturn way, and as he gazes at the rolling waves of the moor, the monstrous green swells, I recall the day following Lyla’s disappearance.

  The doctor came first thing the next morning and checked her. He told me she was remarkably intact: a tough girl. Used to being outdoors. For all her strangeness and vulnerabilities our daughter Lyla Redway, it seems, has some serious strengths, both mental and physical. The walls she has built around herself to survive her social failures, the jaunts and jeers, the lack of friends, have also protected her. She has an inner resilience. He even said she was fine to go back to school.

  But even now, two days later, I cannot bear to think of when she went missing. We haven’t yet discussed it. Lyla and I haven’t discussed her father, either: the only passing mention of Adam came when a car pulled up in the yard. Lyla and I were stacking firewood, the winter fuel so diligently sawn and split by Adam. Lyla and I were loading the logs in the wicker basket by the woodburner when I heard the grind of brakes.

  It sounded like Adam’s Land Rover.

  Lyla grabbed at my arm, and said in terror, ‘Is that Daddy? It’s Daddy, isn’t it? Please don’t let him in, please don’t let him into the house. I’m scared of them all, they’ll make you do it again, they’ll make you drive in the water.’

  I told her to sit on the sofa, and snuggle under the duvet, then ran out into the yard.

  But it was just a delivery guy, a smiling young man from Amazon, with a load of books I’d ordered for Lyla a week ago and quite forgotten. He handed me the cardboard package, and laughed. ‘You’re quite out of the way here, aren’t you? Don’t you ever get lonely?’

  ‘Hah no,’ I said, attempting a happy smile, accepting the package.

  He gazed around the yard, at the naked black trees, the thorny grey fence. ‘Guess it must be great in summer?’

  ‘Yes, it is. We love the moors, we love the way we’re lost, all alone out here,’ Even as I said this, I realized my words betrayed my feelings: we are all alone out here. And for the first time since we moved here I felt that we were too isolated. And now it seems that the moorland wastes stretch on, ever further, and I don’t know the exit roads any more.

  The young man gave me another smile, this time with a squint of doubt, as if he didn’t quite believe me, or felt sorry for me. Perhaps he discerned the disguised anxiety on my face. And he got in his van and drove the winding miles to Princetown, and the main roads, and people and pubs and places with life.

  Adam interrupts my thoughts. ‘Why did you want to meet me out here?’

  ‘Well, I want the fresh air, and, also: you’ve been bu
sy all day—’

  ‘Relaying paths, up Lakehead.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s OK,’ I say. ‘This is fine here. Lyla simply won’t have you back at the house, not yet, and here we can be private.’

  He nods, frowning. The two of us walk across the grasslands, towards Bellever Tor, a soaring outcrop of dark, malignant rock. Whatever the weather, Bellever Tor, of all the tors on the moor, always looks the most lonely and forbidding. Like a fortification from a terrible, long-ago war, not quite forgotten. Like a ruin they couldn’t level.

  Dartmoor ponies roam around it this afternoon, cantering and random, their eyes wild and sad, and strangely inconsolable: like a cavalry with all the soldiers dead, leaving the steeds to linger bewildered on the battlefield.

  I turn to my husband to confront our domestic war. The home front.

  ‘This is far enough. Let’s sit.’

  I point to a fallen tree covered by moss so thick it resembles upholstery. Adam sits, waiting and obedient. The exile. He’s told me he stayed in the Huntsman the last two days, the pub nearest Huckerby, looking out for us. Ready at a moment’s notice to help. But we haven’t needed help. Nothing has happened. Less than nothing.

  I go first. The stiffness between us is intense. ‘Did you speak to the police about Hobajob’s?’

  He nods, picking up a random moorland stick, and throwing it into the dimming light. It twirls and falls. ‘It was what I suspected.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They said it was some teenage Satanists, the usual, kids up from Plymouth, torturing animals, having a laugh. They get it all the time, all across the moor. They found some spliffs, whatever you call them, skunk, in the area, round the clearing. Sniffer dogs found them. Bottles of vodka, too. Usual shit.’

  ‘But – but it was so creepy, Adam, those poor blinded hares. It was a definite symbol, Adam, the Green Man. The same symbol that Lyla made with the birds, weeks ago. My mum loved those pagan symbols.’

  He looks at me and sighs. ‘Well, the police aren’t so fussed. And there’s no real damage, unless you’re a blinded bloody hare, so they’re not exactly calling in Scotland Yard. Is Dan still at the house?’

  I’ve been waiting for this question. Dan left this morning. He has a job to do, and a marriage to save. Both are more than difficult at Huckerby, with its remoteness, and its indifferent mobile phone signals and feeble Wi-Fi.

  ‘He’s gone. Finally. Went back to Salcombe this morning. And to be honest, Adam, we wanted him to go, there’s some awkwardness there, too, with my brother, between me and him. Oh God.’

  I pause. I think it’s time Adam heard about Dan, unless he has heard already. I have no idea. Our lives have diverged so quickly. Preparing myself, I look across the roiling billows of turf: gazing at a stretch of mire-water, leathery brown, glistening in the uncertain winter sun.

  These are the blanket bogs, where the rivers Avon, Plym, Erme and Swincombe all began their seeping descent. Down the coast to the sea, like Dartmoor villagers dutifully carrying their dead to Lydford Church.

  I speak. ‘Adam, you know I had a vision, a returning memory, of seeing Dan at Two Bridges, the afternoon I drove into Burrator?’

  I wait for him to answer. The wind whirrs in the sedge. Like a quiet engine. At length, he shakes his head, bemused.

  ‘Did I know that? To be honest, Kath, I’ve heard so much, so many stories, seen so many things, these last weeks, I can’t remember.’ His shoulders are slumped. I do not like seeing my big strong husband like this. Even if sometimes I resent him, fear him, wonder what he did to me, I don’t want him broken. Not yet. Anyhow. Not until I know.

  I persist. ‘Well. Don’t you want to know why Dan was at Two Bridges?’

  He grunts. ‘Sure.’

  And he listens as I explain: how Daniel Kinnersley, my handsome, rich and oh-so-fortunate brother, has been lying to Tessa for a year. Lying to everyone. Screwing some girl from the Bridges.

  The wind ruffles his dark, dark hair, and Adam laughs, coldly. ‘A year, you say? With that little bargirl? Blonde one, with the piercing and tats? She used to sleep with my cousin, Jack.’

  ‘Yes. Her.’

  ‘What a predictable wanker. Dan fucking Kinnersley, having an affair with some teenager. At Two bloody Bridges. I remember Jack saying she liked it rough. But that’s Jack’s scene. Is Dan into that as well? The posh middle-class property guy, likes to tie a girl up, give her a slap?’

  I interrupt. ‘But that isn’t all of it, Adam. There’s a lot more. The point is, I now know that these returning memories are real. And I have other fragments of memory. I remember a man in a car that night. He was angry, I think. Lyla said it was you. But you say it wasn’t.’

  My husband shakes his head. ‘Where’s this going?’

  I ignore him, and continue,

  ‘And there’s that line, that song Lyla sings. I heard her singing it again, yesterday.’ I sit closer to Adam, like someone might overhear our secrets. ‘She was standing at her bedroom window, like she was in a trance, it was evening, a full moon, and she sang that folk lyric about death again: O little blue light in the dead of the night, O prithee, O prithee, no nearer to creep …’ I shudder as if I am cold. ‘She didn’t even know I was watching. Her bedroom door was open and I stood there on the landing and looked in and there she was in her pyjamas, barefoot, singing it through an open window, her room all cold from the wind, and it made me – well. It was so odd. Where did she get that song? Does she still think someone is going to die?’

  At last, as if he has had enough of this, Adam grasps my shoulder. Nearly shaking it.

  ‘What are you trying to say, Kath?’

  I take out my phone.

  ‘I read something. Discovered something.’

  ‘What?

  ‘Have you ever heard of prosopagnosia?’

  I feel oddly triumphant. He shakes his head; I say,

  ‘Adam, I think I’ve worked it out. I keep sensing a man on the moor, someone stalking me, but you say it’s not you. And Lyla says she sees you, but you say she doesn’t. And I think I’ve worked out how this all makes sense, how it can all add up. It’s because Lyla is Aspergery. And she’s got some related condition, it’s called proso-pagno … sssia.’ I stumble on the words again. I don’t care. ‘See. Here. Read these two definitions. I screen-grabbed them. See!’

  He takes the phone from my hand. I watch as he reads, waiting for his reaction. His face, however, is blank. The wind tugs at the grasses, the ponies run away from us forever.

  Returning the phone, he is wordless. I am not.

  ‘You get it, right? It means she sometimes misidentifies people, especially people close to her. That’s why she keeps thinking she sees you. If you’d let us get her statemented before, we’d have known this. But anyway. Look! This is it! The answer.’

  He gazes at me. He has read the words I read. He frowns. He turns his head away, grim-faced, as if I am disappointing him. Or upset about Lyla? I am not sure. I carry on anyway:

  ‘So we know it’s someone that looks like you. And that someone was in Hobajob’s. And it’s someone who hangs around here, who resembles you. Which means,’ I wait for a moment, I want this to have an impact. ‘It has to be Harry. Your cousin. I’m sorry. Whatever you say, it has to be him. He’s involved, that’s who Lyla is seeing. If she saw someone in the car with me, it was him.’

  He opens his mouth, and he speaks.

  ‘No. It wasn’t him.’

  ‘Why?’ I search his face, the air is so cold. ‘You keep saying this. How do you know?’

  ‘Because I was with him that night. The thirtieth. We were drinking together. Warren House.’

  The confession stings, it hurts me hard inside. I gaze his way.

  ‘But you said you were alone?’

  My husband shrugs. Stiffly. ‘So I lied. A little white lie, is all. The roads were flooded that night, I was bored at the hut, so I drove a few miles to Warren House, had a drink with Harry and some of the guys, d
rove back to the rangers’ hut. No mobile signal, all the way. Too remote.’

  I feel a kind of allergic reaction.

  ‘You didn’t tell me this? You didn’t tell anyone? Really?’

  He sighs, vehemently. ‘I was drink-driving, Kath. Don’t you see? I was using a Dartmoor Park Land Rover. If I’d told anyone, especially the cops, I’d have lost my job as well, and my car. And then where would we have been? What was the point? We’d have had no transport at all. Not your car, not my car. So I told a little white lie to save this family but, y’know, I begin to wonder, perhaps we are unsaveable—’

  A despair rises in me. There must have been eyewitnesses in the pub. My husband is clearly telling the truth, so it can’t have been Harry Redway. Or Adam. Not that night, anyhow. Or could it?

  ‘And what time did you finish drinking? What time did you drive home?’

  His eyes try to meet mine, but they don’t quite make it.

  ‘About … six, half six. I got there mid-afternoon. Downed about four pints, then drove home at two miles an hour, so I wouldn’t hurt a fly. Ron told me they all carried on boozing till late, Harry included, so that’s why I know he wasn’t with you.’

  I let this information settle. And what it implies.

  ‘So,’ I say, quite carefully. ‘You still don’t have an alibi, do you? For where you were later? It could still have been you, at Huckerby in the car. The night I did it.’

  His eyes are narrowing. In anger. ‘For God’s sake. Make your mind up. One minute I’m innocent, because of this – what was it prosopo— something. That thing. Face-blindness. One minute I’m innocent, the next I’m your bloody murderer again. This is just useless, Kath. Pointless. Blaming it on Lyla, pretending she mixes up faces? She never does that. Never … I’ve never …’ Without explanation, he looks up, and gazes at the tor, over my shoulder. And then his expression changes. Profoundly.

  Abruptly he stands. Different, angry, determined. But determined to do what? His demeanour unnerves me What has happened?

  ‘Adam. Are you OK?’