Just Before I Died

by S. K. Tremayne

  Adam felt the weakness in himself. Like a weakness in the knees. He’d been so convinced. He felt dizzy with disappointment. If it wasn’t Jack Bryant it was probably no one and his wife really was mad, and so was his daughter, and it was all getting worse, and there was no way back. This time winter wouldn’t end. This time they were finished.

  Silence filled the kitchen. Adam could hear the skitter of rats in the walls.

  Jack stepped closer to the corkboard, unpinned the photo of the girl, and threw it on the bare kitchen table, nearer to Adam. For him to see. ‘She really does, doesn’t she? You know what I mean. She looks a bit like a younger Penny Kinnersley, don’t you think? Right? Same hair, same smile, same come-and-get-me look? Sexy.’ Anger coiled inside Adam.

  ‘Because,’ Jack said, ‘this is what it’s all about, innit? You think I’ve got some mad obsession with your wife, don’t you, you dull cunt? But I haven’t.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘There are no fucking buts, Adam. Sure, I fancied Penny, we all did, her in the pubs up in Chagford, buying drinks for all the boys, and all her witchy friends dancing naked. Remember that night? Mayday. Sure you do. Who could forget it? Certainly not you. Because, let’s face it, Adam, it wasn’t me that fucked Penny Kinnersley, was it?’ He leaned closer, leering. ‘It was you.’

  Huckerby

  Sunday evening

  I haven’t heard from Adam in days, apart from the odd text when I tersely reassure him that Lyla is OK. We’ve spent all weekend, my daughter and I, pretending that all these terrible things haven’t happened. Mostly we’ve been watching TV, silly movies we’ve already seen six times, nothing surprising or agitating, cuddled up together on the sofa under duvets. I’ve been trying to forget the fact I hallucinated my mother’s voice, in the church. I am now hearing ghosts, not just seeing them.

  And what are they trying to tell me?

  The dogs have been on walks, but nowhere near the valley where we found Lyla. We’ve baked cakes we don’t really want or need, just for the sake of baking, for the scent of flour and sugar, butter and cream, simple sweet things: the smell of loaves in the kitchen, the ordinary goodness. Because an ominous blackness surrounds us.

  We are marooned on the moor, and our ever-present anchor, Adam, has been ripped away. I don’t even know where he is now: he might have moved on from the Huntsman. Who knows? We don’t talk. Meanwhile, Lyla and I are two people stuck on a listing boat, watching the waters rise, not even bothering to bail: not really knowing what to do.

  It is Sunday evening. The last clear daylight of this cold, dry winter day turns a delicate mango, a faintly tropical glow over the sullen moors. I am standing at the kitchen sink, washing dishes, staring out at the bracken and the quickbeams beneath that florid sky, the orange now dimming to a creamy, blowsy rose. Normally I would find this scene beautiful but today I wish I was looking at houses. Offices. Car parks.

  Lyla is still on the sofa, watching Jungle Book. Again. My mobile rings, spinning excitedly on the kitchen counter.

  ADAM.

  So he’s still trying. He won’t give up.

  ADAM.

  Shall I even bother answering this time? Perhaps he has something practical to say.

  ‘Hello,’ he says, and his voice is urgent and strained. ‘I’ve been trying to get through.’

  I check the top of the screen. One bar. The signal comes and goes inside the granite longhouse. ‘Must be my phone. You know what it’s like behind these walls.’

  We are talking about the thickness of the granite walls? I don’t want to talk about anything. Not yet. Possibly not ever.

  ‘But I tried the landline too,’ he says, as if this makes everything OK. As if he hasn’t been lying about that night, all along. How many more lies does he have?

  ‘I unplugged the landline, Adam, like we always do. Lyla hates the jingle. It scares her, and right now who cares? What else is there to say?’

  ‘I just wanted to check on Lyla again, is she OK?’

  ‘I would have called you if there’d been an issue, you know that.’

  And I would. Whatever has happened, however much I begin to hate or despair of Adam, he is her father, and a loving father: I would not keep him in the dark about his daughter. Even if he has been keeping me in the dark in so many other ways.

  I wait. He says nothing. This is a long, pained pause. I hear him breathing as he wonders what to say next. I wonder where he is calling from. Staying with his cousin in Chagford? Sitting in the snug at the Oxenholme Arms, with its Stone Age menhir in the wall? Maybe he is all alone in his Land Rover, parked on some lonely road near Aune Head, Rattlebrook Works, or the total bleakness of Naker’s Hill, where the treeless nothingness sobs far into the distance, as he misses his beloved little daughter—

  No. I cannot allow myself to feel sorry for him. Not yet. Not until I know what happened. My mother’s fear of Adam, Kitty Jay, how it all fits together. And Lyla knows something else. And I feel she will tell me soon.

  ‘Has she mentioned me?’ Adam asks. ‘Has she said anything?’

  ‘No, not much.’ I don’t care if the truth hurts him. ‘She’s only repeated what she said before, she doesn’t want you here.’

  He falls silent again. I tilt my head and regard the moors, watching a line of white-grey smoke in the distance. One of the farmers must be swaling: burning the dead gorse and bracken. It has been quite dry around here for a week, everyone is swaling. Soon they will be swaling Hexworthy.

  It feels right. Emotionally, metaphorically. Burn down the old, make room for the new. Perhaps that is what I will have to do with my marriage. I don’t know.

  Adam tries again. ‘We could meet somewhere neutral, somewhere—’

  ‘No,’ I say, hard and cold. ‘No. Enough. And stop asking if Lyla is ready. She’s not ready. She is scared of you. Even if she’s mistaken, that’s if she is mistaken.’

  Another pause. And here it comes. His voice finally rises, with his anger. It comes roaring out. ‘Scared of me? She is scared of me? Why the fuck is she still scared? We saved her, I saved her. I carried her home. I rescued her. I’ve been looking after this family all along. I’ve been doing my best. Why is she bloody scared?’

  ‘I don’t know, but—’

  He doesn’t give me time, he doesn’t want an answer, he is shouting now. ‘Fuck you, Kath! You’ve done all this, to me, to us, you and your brother and your mother, not me, and she’s my daughter too—’ A tiny pause for breath; I hold the phone away from my face, he is shouting so loud. ‘It was you that drove into the fucking water, it was you that sent her over the edge, it’s all been you, all of it, all of you Kinnersleys, you’re the ones to blame. And now my own daughter is scared of me, when I’ve done nothing! You’re even sending me mad. I thought it might be my own cousin, Jack, but it’s not. It’s you. It’s been you all along, Kath. Fuck this shit.’

  I am not sure how to answer. Half of me believes he has a point; half of me is terrified of him.

  He rants, on and on with a violent anger that I have never witnessed before. ‘You’ve turned my own daughter against me. I will never forgive you for this. Just you wait. You fucking, fucking—’

  I end the call. I simply cut him off. The horrible swearing echoes in my mind, as my heart hurts in my chest. I can sense his burning anger, right across the moor, divided from the daughter he adores. He really thinks that I am the guilty party, that it’s all me, because it was me that drove into Burrator. And part of me cannot blame him.

  Yet he is still lying about something, and some of it is to do with my mother. And I am scared of him. We must get out of here, me and Lyla. This must surely be the end of us, at Huckerby.

  I put the phone down on the counter, and gaze out of the window. The white smoke of the swaling resembles a twilit Dartmoor fog. But this is a fog full of fire. A fog that burns, and kills.

  Monday morning

  Again this odd, forced, staged normality. I make Lyla’s favourite breakfast
: scrambled eggs. She munches the toast and eggs, in her school uniform, as she reads her latest book. The pages rip by. Hyperlexia. Her brain is a fire that I have to keep feeding, or it might go out. So many words, so many thoughts in there I do now know.

  But then she closes the book and looks at me as I dry my hands on the Come to Dartmouth tea towel. The cartoony sailor smiling between my fingers.

  ‘I am sure it was Daddy.’

  Anxiety tightens, quick and hard, inside me. I stay outwardly calm.

  ‘You really are sure?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice is small, but she seems ready to talk. ‘I know I get confused sometimes.’ She blinks rapidly. ‘But I saw him a few times, near the farm, near our home. And on walks.’

  I remember the figure I saw on Burrator hill. The man who stared at me. Had it really been Adam, even though he denied it? I have to seize this moment. ‘OK. Let’s talk about Daddy. What about Daddy, Lyla? Where did you see him?’

  She looks away from me, blushing. She looks down at her empty plate, the crusts of toast. She looks at the window, at the calendar, at the photo of Kitty Jay’s grave, which refuses to be turned. She looks everywhere but at me. I can see how difficult this is for her. She hisses briefly, in her agony. Her left hand flickers, nervously on the table.

  ‘Lyla …’

  She shakes her head and grimaces at the table.

  ‘Lyla, we don’t have to talk about it.’

  The stimming stops, apart from one hand, twisting, twirling, faintly. Suspended in the air, but moving gently. And then she says, ‘First I saw Daddy by the barns, under Black Tor, just once. I saw him in Hobajob’s, I think. But mostly I saw Daddy in the car with you.’

  I pull up a chair and sit down at the kitchen table. She still won’t look at me. Her hand twirls, doing rigid little twists in the air.

  ‘After you left me with Auntie Emma. I saw you in the car with Daddy.’

  ‘Where, Lyla, and when?’

  ‘At night.’

  ‘Where? Exactly?’

  She shakes her head, staring at her plate, as if she disapproves of the crusts. ‘The back of Auntie Emma’s house, that little road, Mummy. That little road – you took me there.’

  I know where she means. There’s a tiny lane behind the Spaldings’ house: it leads past a disused stables, Conybeer’s. They went out of business years ago but we took Lyla there when she was an infant. She learned to ride when she was five, maybe before. We thought it might help her socialize. But what was I doing there on the road to Conybeer’s? And what was Adam doing there, if it was him?

  ‘How could you tell it was me and Daddy, darling, in the dark?’

  The right hand drops, the left hand quivers in mid-air. ‘You parked your car and you had your light on and – and I saw, for a second, Daddy’s face, his blue eyes. He was shouting at you and you looked scared, Mummy, and then – then he – then you—’ Now both hands come up again, shaking violently, opening and closing, and her grimacing returns.

  This is clearly very painful. I try to calm her. ‘Lyla, you don’t have to tell me.’

  ‘No, I must tell you. I didn’t say before because it is Daddy and I love Daddy but I hate Daddy because Daddy makes you do that. I should have told you before, Mummy, but I didn’t want you to do it again, but this is what I saw, this is it this is it this is it—’

  She looks as if she is about to cry, to fall apart. I get up and go round the table and give her a hug: a big warm Mummy hug. ‘It’s OK, Lyla. You’ve said everything now. It’s all going to be all right, you and me and Daddy: everything is all going to be OK.’

  I’m not sure she believes me, I doubt that she believes me. But her hands stop shaking, and her grimacing slowly goes away: the act of confessing is perhaps enough to calm her. Quietly she pushes back the chair, and says, ‘We have to go to school. I mustn’t be late.’

  In the middle of all this, she still has that urgent, rule-following need to be punctual. I struggle to be normal. Choking the words out.

  ‘Have you got all your things?’

  ‘Yes.’ She lifts her Jungle Book lunchbox, and her school bag. ‘Ready.’ The drive to Princetown is silent. Lyla really does seem calmed. I am, in contrast, even more roiled and anxious.

  After I have dropped Lyla at school I pause with my head resting on top of the steering wheel. Eyes closed, sensing the plastic on my skin. My mind is ablaze. The swaling season has begun.

  Taking deep, long breaths I follow the road homewards to Huckerby. But at the last junction, where the old oak bends over the broken gate, and a shaggy brown Dartmoor cow munches thistles, I swallow my piercing fears and I turn right. Heading for the Spaldings’ elegant house.

  But I don’t stop there: I go right round, on to the Conybeer’s road.

  Slowing the car to a stop, I look at the rocks and rusty brambles that line the weeded road, a road almost no one uses. It goes nowhere. Or so I always thought. A typical Dartmoor dead end.

  There is a gale of smoke on my right: the swaling is getting nearer. Chasing the plovers and the dunlins. These burn-outs are so close I can see the dirty yellow flames of scorching grass, the black silhouette of a farmer, and a beater, managing the swale.

  Fire breaks. Warnings. Danger.

  My heart pounds, my throat hurts, but not from the cold.

  Did I really park here, with Adam, or someone else, that night?

  I regard the narrowing road ahead; and a big untrimmed bush that flourishes out of the tumbledown granite. What is that bush? I recognize it. The little yellow flowers are probably near enough to the car for me to pluck the white-and-yellow petals. I think it is some sort of winter honeysuckle. I have a memory of Mum growing it in Totnes, or Salcombe, because it brightened up the grey winter garden, with vivid colour and a distinctive scent.

  Winding down my window, I lean to pick a flower, but before I can pluck the bloom the perfume hits me. Lemon. A sweet, almost citrusy aroma. This is it. This is the lemon I remembered. We must have parked here, with the windows open. It was a mild evening. The scent would have filled the car.

  Reminding me of Mum, perhaps.

  I wonder if it will remind me of anything else. I do not want to know. I want to know. I am frightened, but I have to do this; it worked before.

  Stifling my fears, I lean out of the car window, grab a big handful of the soft creamy little flowers, a dangerous posy, the nosegay of my suicide bid, and I crush the petals and stamens to my nose and close my eyes and breathe in deep.

  At once another memory returns, like a bright piece of colour falling through the darkness, a section of a glowing, stained-glass window. I can see Lyla sitting at the kitchen table singing the Kitty Jay song. We are in Huckerby and it is a winter afternoon. That winter afternoon.

  I am sitting opposite her. Thinking about Kitty Jay’s grave, where my mother’s ashes are scattered. And here’s the other part of the memory: I am holding my pen, writing some lines. It is a poem. A poem. This is what I was writing that very afternoon: one of my stupid poems that I never show anyone. It was a poem about Kitty Jay, the woman who killed herself, after she was impregnated and cut adrift by some blackhearted gentleman, some handsome cad.

  My suicide note wasn’t a suicide note at all. It was the first lines of a poem:

  I did not write a suicide note. I wrote some amateur verse about Kitty Jay and left it on the kitchen table, in my usual way, never satisfied with my work.

  Which means the only evidence for my suicide bid is the glimpse of me in my car, at Burrator. And the fact that someone was possibly parked with me in this car. Where we smelt the winter honeysuckle.

  Half of me feels intensely relieved: I surely didn’t try to kill myself. Half of me is even more scared. Adam looms larger. But I still can’t work out his motivation. If it wasn’t Adam, then who was it? If Lyla misidentified someone so closely in the car I reckon it would have to be someone who looked extremely like Adam. Not like a cousin. Not Harry, or Jack. More like a broth
er. Yet he has no brother. He has a much older sister. That’s it. So it’s Adam. Has to be.

  Closing the car window, excluding the lemony scent, I press the accelerator and drive on, ignoring the urgent beating of my heart. I drive slowly past the disused stables.

  The Conybeer’s sign is still there, but it hangs by one nail from its rotting wooden post. Clearly, no one has bought the business. The buildings beyond are black and empty. Dead windows. Shattered glass. A single tractor tyre lies on its side in the yard gathering brown rainwater. Ravens wheel above, watching me. Seeing if I can follow through on my suspicions about my husband. About the world.

  Hands on the wheel, I gaze down the narrow lane. I have never gone beyond here. I do not think. But I did continue down the Conybeer’s lane, on 30 December. Perhaps Adam came here, drunk, to see me, after his session at the Warren.

  The smoke from the swale drifts over the road in a pungent mist. Part of me hopes the smoke will get so thick and bad I cannot go any further, so that I cannot find the truth, cannot reach the end. But the smoke lifts, and my excuses vanish.

  The lane is so absurdly narrow the brambles scratch the paintwork of the car on either side, as I inch forward, five miles per hour. If I met someone coming the other way I’d have to reverse a mile. But I won’t meet anyone coming the other way: there is nothing down here. No one ever comes here.

  It is a dead end.

  The brambles get thicker. The road turns from asphalt to mud. The winter birds are watching as I near the conclusion. I can see a rusted iron gate ahead of me, but it is open, and the open gateway leads to brown, unbroken moorland.

  The end.

  Way out there on the moors I can see standing stones. They are far away so they must be big, to be so clearly visible. Very big. Giants. Three metres or more. The sight of them makes me faintly nauseous. I’ve seen these stones before. Especially that one at the end: it has a strange shape I remember, yet it doesn’t. Not quite. How does that work?