Just Before I Died

by S. K. Tremayne

  She hesitates, and then says, ‘Yes. I don’t know what to think. Nor does he.’

  I don’t want to talk about it; instead I ask her, ‘How are you guys?’

  She sighs heavily. I can picture her in her Plymouth office, staring at the concrete walls of the submarine base. ‘Not that good, to be honest. Not as bad as you, but not that good. What a mess.’

  ‘How’re the boys doing?’

  ‘We’ve managed to hide it, but they can tell. But look, Kath, that’s enough about me, this is some boring affair, average marital crap: what’s happening up there? You’re all alone, are you guys OK?’ She pauses, before saying, ‘Don’t you think you might benefit from …’

  ‘Not being stuck in the fog in the middle of nowhere?’

  She laughs, ruefully. I go on,

  ‘Yes. Yes, I do think that, Tessa. There’s so much other stuff happening here – it’s why I rang – I was wondering, that holiday place you own, in Brixham. I hate to ask, hate it—’

  ‘Oh God no, don’t worry! Of course you can stay there. We’ve got a couple in at the moment, having some romantic getaway – God knows why, in darkest February – but they’re moving out late this afternoon and then it’s empty till spring!’

  ‘Dan won’t mind?’

  ‘To be quite frank,’ Tessa says, ‘I don’t give a fuck what Dan Kinnersley thinks. Especially about Brixham. You know he used to take that girl there?’ She is snarling now. ‘Kath – absolutely you can stay there, stay as long as you bloody like. I won’t have time to clean it but if you want it this evening?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes! Thank you. Yes, please!’

  Relief floods through me. We will get away from here, Lyla and me and the dogs. We have to get away from here. I can sense that menace is coming at me, out of the fog, from that barn on the moor, from the scribbled-out photo of my face. Danger is homing in: truth is finally emerging from the mist, and I sense that it will terrify me: because the first time I knew the truth I drove the car into dark water.

  I gush my thanks to Tessa. She tells me not to worry, eight times over. I tell her I will make arrangements, pack all our stuff: drive down this evening. We shall escape. We shall get out. We will have a little cottage by the sea, and Lyla can watch the seagulls, and she will miss days and days of school: and I really don’t care.

  ‘Thanks, Tessa,’ I say, once again. ‘Can you do me a final favour?’

  She guesses before I ask. ‘Don’t tell Adam?’

  I blush even though she can’t see me. ‘There are so many issues, and Lyla is sometimes weirdly terrified of him, and … we’re a little scared, to be honest.’

  ‘Won’t say a word. Trust me. I will swear Dan to secrecy too, if I even tell him. No one else will know where you are.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’

  Closing the call, I turn the phone off again. If I leave it on another minute I am sure Adam will ring, and I don’t even want to see his name on my screen.

  Abruptly, as I slip my phone in my pocket, Lyla runs down the lane, like something magic coming into life out of the deathly grey of the fog.

  ‘Hey, Lyla-berry. Are you all right? Where are the dogs?’

  She looks at me, her lips slightly trembling. Is she scared? What’s happened? Without another word, she turns and gazes at the fogbound lane, where I can hear the dogs barking. Loudly. The fog is so thick: horrible and clammy.

  ‘They’re fine, Mummy. Felix and Randal, they’re fine. They’re rabbiting. Happy. Happy happy happy.’

  But as she speaks she lifts a hand and makes fingers as if she is working a puppet, as if her hand is shaped like a beak, opening and closing, opening and closing. These stims are almost constant now, when – a few months ago – she could go weeks without doing anything Aspergery. Now it is nearly incessant.

  And I did this. I’ve made it worse. We’ve made it worse. Adam and I have wrought this damage.

  Lyla gazes into the darkening fog. She sniffs, as if she can smell something nasty, and looks confused. She moves her lips, but I cannot hear words. After that, she runs past me, without an explanation, into the house.

  Something is very wrong.

  I follow her in. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the calendar. Her lips are moving again. Faster, faster. And no words come out. Until words come out.

  ‘I’m scared, Mummy.’

  ‘I know, darling.’ I try to hide my own fears. ‘But, hey, here’s some news, we’re going down to Brixham. Tonight!’

  Again her lips move as if she is talking but no words can be heard. So I speak for us both. ‘Remember that place your cousins have: that lovely holiday cottage, in Brixham, right by the sea, with the little garden – well we’re going there, Lyla! Soon as we get sorted, we’ll head down there this evening. Going to stay there for a long while, have a really nice break.’

  She stares right at me. And says again, ‘I’m scared.’ Now she slowly lifts a hand and points at the calendar. The photo for January is Kitty Jay’s grave in the snow. Yet it is February. And I know I am never going to turn the page. It will always be January. Just after I died. Or just before I died.

  ‘What are you scared of, darling? We’ll be fine. We’ll be fine. It’s only fog.’

  ‘Remember you talked about Kitty Jay on the day you drove into Burrator, Mummy?’

  This comes out of nowhere. I don’t know how to respond. Though I understand what she must be referring to: my poem. My so-called suicide note.

  Lyla’s lifted hand flutters in mid-air. As if she cannot control it, as if it is not part of her any more. ‘Kitty Jay. You told me the story, that day you tried to go away forever. You said you would write a poem about it—’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘It made me remember something. And I’ve remembered it again.’ Her hand wobbles violently now, her lips move, fast, without words, her mouth opening and shutting. ‘I’m scared, Mummy, really scared.’

  Her eyes are fixed on mine. Hard and blue and beautiful, like her father’s. Like her beautiful, angry father.

  ‘Something is coming. Something is coming to get us. Someone you know.’

  ‘Shhh,’ I say. ‘Shhh. Don’t be silly. We’re safe in our house, and soon we will be in Brixham. We have to pack a few things and we’re out.’

  ‘That poem you were going to write about Kitty Jay.’

  Her other hand hovers in the air as if she is a marionette, on a string. My daughter is mad now, as mad as her mother. Her mother who probably did not attempt suicide. I should perhaps be elated that I did not attempt suicide, that I am not that evil, selfish woman, the woman who could leave her daughter, but I am not elated. I am as terrified as Lyla.

  ‘Mummy, I remember what I remembered. When we were talking that day about Kitty Jay, I asked why Granny was scattered there and you said you didn’t know, because she never really liked the story, and never liked the grave, and never put flowers there like other people, and you told me the legend, and you went off and said you might write something—’

  ‘Lyla.’ I can smell smoke. I turn and look at the warm stove but it seems OK. Perhaps they are swaling close by. ‘Lyla, I think—’

  Lyla shakes her head: this is one of her lectures. ‘Mummy, I remembered something. It’s Daddy. I can see him, he’s leaning over the cot, and he’s singing me a song.’

  ‘The cot?’

  This must be one of her special memories, from before her first birthday. She might be nine months old, in this memory, or six months old, or three.

  ‘Daddy is singing me a lullaby so I can go to sleep because I am crying, and do you know what he sang first, it was that song from his nan—’ She closes her eyes and sings it. ‘O little blue light in the dead of the night, O prithee, O prithee, no nearer to creep.’ Her voice trails away and she looks at me. ‘I think he was singing it because his nan was dying and he was sad, and then, Mummy, then he sang another song to me, the Kitty Jay song. O Kitty Jay such a beauty cast away an
d and and—’ Lyla’s left hand twirls, very gently, her right hand hidden under the table, ‘And after he finished the song he said to me, “Your granny was Kitty Jay: she cast her beauty away.” Why did he say that, Mummy? And after that Daddy sang it again, but different: O Kitty Jay, her baby cast away, her baby cast away. And then he looked very sad and then I went to sleep. Why did he do all that?’

  I sit here, bewildered. ‘I don’t know.’ And I don’t. Yet. But an idea forms. I am sure Adam never imagined that his five-month-old daughter would remember him saying any of this; so he was talking to himself when he sang all this, he was admitting something to no one but himself.

  What was he admitting?

  Lyla is trembling now, trembling all over. ‘Mummy, I’m scared, because he’s coming.’

  ‘What?’

  The smell of smoke has become quite intense. And yet I am fixed on my daughter’s trembling face as she speaks.

  ‘I know I have Asperger’s, I know you don’t want to tell me, I know I am different, I know I have synaesthesia. I know this is why I have memories from being a baby. I have read it all, Mummy, I know what people like me are like and why I do these movements that scare people, so they don’t like me. I know I am stimming. I know I can’t understand people, or friends and games. I read it all, I know it all. You need to know. Because I’ve been reading on Google and I know that 1.8 per cent of men and boys surveyed had a diagnosis of autism, compared to just 0.2 per cent of women and girls, but girls are different because—’

  ‘Lyla! Stop.’

  She stops. She doesn’t have to spell it out any more. I let the silence fill the longhouse as the answers fill my mind. At last.

  I may have worked it out. Kitty Jay’s grave. What was my mum telling me by having her ashes scattered there? That she too had fallen in love, maybe got pregnant, and she was dying anyway from cancer: so she killed herself, with the baby inside her. She couldn’t bear to tell me, or she was too ashamed, she always hated suicide – but she left clues. That was why she wanted her ashes scattered there. Where the suicide was buried, the woman ashamed of her pregnancy.

  Lyla is trembling more violently. As if she guesses what I am thinking. I am terrified by her words, her movements, my thoughts, my ideas, my realizations, everything.

  ‘Mummy I can hear him coming very close now.’

  ‘What? Who?’

  I know enough to trust Lyla’s remarkable hearing. I can only hear the nothingness, the dark rustling sound of swaling, burning gorse.

  ‘He’s in the yard. I can hear his footsteps on the twigs, it’s a kind of reddish sound. He’s going to do it again.’

  Running to the kitchen drawer, I yank it open, and urgently seize a knife. The biggest knife we have.

  The moment I look up I see that the fog is darker than ever, and it is tinged with yellow, a strange, glowing yellow, at the base, where it meets the ground. And now I realize it isn’t fog. It is smoke mixed with fog and fire, burning gorse and bracken.

  The swaling is out of control. It is coming up the path, heading for our house.

  And framed by this fog is the figure of a man, striding towards the door. He looks eerily and disturbingly familiar. Terrifyingly familiar. He has the distinct, full mouth of my mother, the set of her features, the high forehead.

  But there is another, closer resemblance, too.

  Panicked, rigid, trembling, I shove the knife in the back pocket of my jeans. A second later, the man kicks the door open. And looks at us both. I remember it vividly now, the blue eyes and the brutal hatred.

  He has a knife in his hand, a blade that is so much bigger and nastier and shinier than mine.

  ‘You could say hello,’ he says. Unsmiling. He looks hard at Lyla. ‘After all, I am your brother.’ Then he looks at me. ‘And your brother, as well.’

  Three Crowns Inn, Chagford

  Tuesday morning

  Tessa Kinnersley put down her phone and gazed into the roaring log fire in its thirteenth-century hearth. The last of her coffee was cold; she pushed the cup away, and considered.

  She was certain she’d made the right choice: helping Kath, offering Brixham. But what was she going to say to Adam Redway? He’d rung her this morning, begging for a meeting. Presumably, he was going to plead for Tessa to intervene.

  She wouldn’t do that. Helping Kath and Lyla was fine, giving them a way off the moor, a place to be safe; but she wasn’t going to get more involved in their problems: she had sufficient marital problems of her own.

  Nor would she mention that Kath had called. She didn’t quite know how to handle Adam Redway.

  ‘Hello.’

  Tessa turned and there he was, reaching out a hand. He looked tired, she thought: tired, resigned, a lesser man.

  ‘Thanks for meeting me at such short notice, is it OK if I sit down?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Adam sat in the big leather seat on the other side of the fire. The hotel bar was nearly empty, serving coffee to a few residents: it was too early for lunchers or drinkers. She looked at him while he gazed around.

  ‘Used to come here when I was a kid,’ he said, reminiscing. ‘They’d let us drink underage. Doubt they’d do it now, far too posh.’ His smile was regretful. ‘Like the rest of Chagford. Have you seen the wine shop next door? Like something from London. Everyone’s from London in Chagford these days.’ He rubbed his face with his hands, and asked, ‘What brings you up here, Tessa?’

  ‘A friend from London.’

  ‘Ah.’ He blushed. ‘Sorry. I wasn’t meaning to insult anyone. God, I keep getting everything wrong.’

  Tessa assessed Adam’s uncombed hair and badly ironed shirt under his fleece. He was a cliché of a man exiled from his wife. Falling apart. Unkempt. At least he had the grace to look like shit. She wondered, as a contrast, what Dan looked like, right now. Working from his hotel room in London. Probably he was in a pricey suit, a dazzling white shirt, wearing a silk tie and a smile: laughing down the phone. Perhaps he was with that girl.

  ‘Your friend here on holiday?’

  Adam was trying to be amiable, but it was painful.

  ‘Yes. We’re having lunch up at Gidleigh. I want her advice,’ Tessa said. ‘She’s a divorce lawyer, you see.’

  Adam blushed, again.

  Tessa went on, ‘Adam, I don’t want to be rude, but I haven’t got long, and this is pretty awkward. Because of Dan, because I am friendly with Kath. For all the reasons you know.’ She paused. ‘I really do want to help you guys, in any way I can, but I’m not sure how. And I am busy.’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry, Tessa, I know my marriage is my marriage. Not your fault.’

  ‘So why did you want to meet me?’

  Adam faltered. He looked uncharacte‌ristically nervous. His eyes slid to the side, taking in the stones of the hearth, the huge iron tongs, the mighty cast-iron spit that would once have roasted entire hogs. Like a huge torture device. He looked back at Tessa. ‘I want to tell you the truth, about the past. Does that make sense? I want to tell you, Tessa, so you can tell Kath, and tell Dan, for that matter. So I can bloody clear my name. I would have told Kath myself, by now, but she won’t let me visit, won’t even take my calls.’

  ‘All right.’ Tessa glanced at her watch, as a clear signal. Hurry up. Get on with it.

  He cleared his throat. ‘It’s difficult,’ he said, finally. ‘I’ve never told anyone.’

  ‘You’ll have to try. Or this is pointless.’

  ‘I know.’ He took a long breath. ‘OK. You see, it all relates to this mad idea, that I … assaulted Kath on the night she did what she did. And somehow this idea has got into Lyla’s head, too. She’s claiming I was in the car. That she saw me in the car.’

  ‘Yes. I heard.’ Tessa kept her tone deliberately flat. Neutral. She would hear him out, but that was it.

  ‘Tessa.’ His blue eyes were imploring. ‘Tessa, it’s nonsense. Bullshit. She might have misidentified me, because of her condition, ASD, we don’
t know. But it’s crap. All of it. I never came back to Huckerby that night. Wasn’t in that car. I was up at Manaton all week, until I got the call from the hospital.’ For a moment he hesitated, then added, ‘It’s true that on the afternoon she drove into Burrator I was out, but I was just having a few pints at the Warren, and there was no signal, and I was drink-driving on my way back to the hut. I kept it all quiet because, if I’d told anyone I was drink-driving, I’d have lost everything. Car, job, money, everything. On top of the accident. We’d have been totally ruined. What was the point?’

  ‘OK …’

  His gaze was desperate now. ‘Believe me! Please! I need someone to believe me. I had nothing to do with Kath’s accident. I wasn’t there.’

  ‘I see.’

  Adam abruptly raised his arms, in surrender, as if Tessa was pointing a gun at him. ‘No, you don’t see. Because there is something else, something important. I have been lying, in another way. About the past. About Kath’s mum.’

  Tessa leaned forward. This was new. What was he going to say?

  Adam shook his head.

  ‘Truth is, something … did happen. To the three of us. Way back. I did do something. Something very stupid. I had sex with Penny Kinnersley.’ His blush was fierce, but he continued: ‘It was just one night! I was nineteen, bloody nineteen. Just a boy. Kath was in her first year at uni, living in halls, we were going steady, I was in my job, but it was my first year. I was so bloody naïve. Not even twenty. Then one night, here in Chagford, where they have all the dancing, drinking, boozing all night, I ended up alone with Kath’s mum, with Penny Kinnersley.’ He shook his head, blushing in shame. ‘Everyone was hammered. It was the traditional Mayday party, with a lot of London people, everyone in green, doing acid, waving pagan flowers up at Scorhill, all that – and Penny was staying at the Ring O’Bells, and I was trying to be gallant: I offered to walk her home, through the dark. It was such a beautiful night, warm and sweet, and I wanted to impress her, be chivalrous, show her I would be a good husband for Kath, that was all, and—’ Adam sank his face into his hands for a second. Then he lifted his gaze and his blue eyes focused hard, on Tessa. ‘On the way back to the pub, she did it. She seduced me. Simple as that. I was drunk and she was a very good-looking woman, very extrovert. She knew exactly what she was doing, she had so many men, and she took me and she kissed me, and we went back to her room, and I was drunk, and we did it, and that was it.’