He insisted she keep the maps. The next morning he showed her into a chilly room at the back of the house and began pulling things out of a cupboard, a backpack, proper hiking clothes, thick-soled waterproof boots.
“Try them,” he said. “You’re taller than Lil but she’s got big feet. They’ll be a lot better than wellies even if they pinch a bit.”
She looked at him. He’d gone slightly pink again.
“I can’t do that,” she said.
“Yes, you can. You’ve got fifty miles to walk. You need proper gear. Reminds me, I think we’ve got water purification tablets in here somewhere. Go on, try the boots.”
“They’re your wife’s?”
“She’d understand.”
“You know I’m not coming back, Greg.”
“You might. One day.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Doesn’t matter.” He wouldn’t look at her; he rummaged in the cupboard, pulling out a lightweight towel, a first-aid kit. “This is just stuff. Sitting here. It ought to be used. You’re going to need it.”
She didn’t argue. As soon as she put on the boots and the backpack, she knew they’d transform her journey. She understood what lay ahead of her now. When she’d set out she’d been mad with grief and hope, but the miles and days had beaten sense into her. With the kit he was offering she’d be dry, she’d be able to carry more than she needed. Ten miles a day, she thought. Five days. Five more days and she’d be there.
He’d hoarded extra food for her as well. She turned down as much of it as she dared, until he got angry, or as near angry as he could manage. He sat her down and did calculations with calories to prove how much she needed. She couldn’t really explain that something else was fueling her. She was consuming herself as she drew closer to her boy. By the end, she hoped, she’d have got rid of herself completely. Gav couldn’t hate her anymore once she’d wasted to nothing. Greg wasn’t to know any of that, of course. Eventually she gave in and accepted everything he pushed on her, just to stop the discussion.
She thought about leaving that afternoon while he was out. But they’d worked out the most likely stopping points, and the first one was a full day’s walking away; that, and she felt one more night’s rest would help. She went out and tested her new gear, picking her way through deep snow beside the river. The bare trees glittered and dripped and the air felt almost humid. Even with the backpack loaded, she felt so light she thought a gust of wind might launch her like a seed. The skin around her wrists was drawn tight to the bone.
In the evening Greg made checklists and ticked them off as he packed and repacked her supplies. She sat and watched him, seeing the sadness his efforts at brisk efficiency were meant to disguise. She observed it without sympathy. Perhaps he was grieving for something he hadn’t dared say fifteen years ago, or perhaps because he still didn’t dare say it now; either way it was a feeble grief, so trivial beside her own that she almost felt envious. She remembered how she herself used to spend pointless hours wishing she’d been brave enough to say no when Nigel proposed. As if that mattered now.
“Oh,” Greg said, straightening up abruptly from the table where he’d pinned his list. “One more thing.”
His surprise was an act. She could see straightaway that he’d been thinking of this last thing all along and had only now worked up courage to mention it. “I’m surprised you haven’t asked about it already, actually,” he said, grinning awkwardly. “Come on. Let me show you something.” He led her outside. It was dusk. Patches of clear sky threaded among banked and layered cloud were turning deep, deep blue. He went behind the house to a breeze-block shed built against the side of a crumbling stone hutch.
“I suppose you’ve forgotten,” he said, pulling open the door. She saw a lawn mower and a shelf with a rack of tools. He reached under the shelf and got out an old cigar box with a sliding top.
“I kept it in here,” he said. “Hidden.” He opened the lid and gently extracted a small wad of tissue paper.
“There,” he said. “You should have it back. After all this time.” He put it in her hand. It was hard to see his eyes behind the filth of his glasses and yet she could sense the embarrassed intensity of his attention.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Unwrap it,” he said. She hadn’t even realized the paper was wrapping. She could feel no extra weight. “It’s still perfect. Or it was the last time I checked, which was, um, not long ago. Actually. Actually I come and look pretty often.”
She unpicked the wad of paper and found a dark, smooth, thumbnail-sized thing inside. She had to hold it up to the sky to be sure what it was: an acorn. An elongated, glossy brown one, its nubbled cap still tightly in place.
Greg watched her as if his future hinged on what she did next.
“You’re right,” she said. “I’ve forgotten.”
He seemed to go too still.
“Sorry,” she added.
“Seriously?”
“It’s so long ago,” she said. “So much has happened.”
“You gave me that,” he said. “When we all decided to give each other something. Remember? It was Dave’s idea. Come on, Jess.”
“Oh,” she said. “Vaguely.”
He shrugged and slid the top back. “Pretty funny that I kept it secret for fifteen years and you managed to forget the whole thing.”
“Remind me,” she said, but she was only half paying attention to him. She turned the acorn in her fingers. This was Iggy’s.
“Dave did that thing? Surely you remember. We were all supposed to give each other something precious to us. To show we’d abandoned our personal things and become a community instead. Gosh, it can’t have made much of an impression on you. Funny. I remember it so clearly. I remember you saying you didn’t have anything, and we were about to give up because everyone had to do it, then you went up to your room and came back with that.”
Was this all she had? An acorn?
“I can’t even remember where it came from,” Iz said. “Did I say anything about it? It’s all gone completely out of my—”
The stillness was heavy, thickened by the abrasive mutters of rooks coming to roost.
“You said it didn’t look like much but it was the only thing you had to give and I should always keep it hidden. So I did.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I gave Kat that jade good-luck charm my grandpa bought in China. Just a piece of crappy tat. I felt like you’d given me some amazing secret. The way you came downstairs with it. Everyone stopped talking. Even Mac stopped talking.”
She rewrapped the acorn and zipped it into the pocket of her jacket.
“I should get an early night,” she said. “I’ll start early tomorrow.”
He closed the rickety door of the shed and put his hands in his pockets.
“I’m coming with you,” he said.
She had to bite her lip to stop herself smiling. Oh, Iggy, she thought. I’d never have fingered you for a heartbreaker. I was the pretty one, remember?
“You can’t,” she said. “You know that.”
“I can. I’m going to. You shouldn’t go alone.”
“I have to.”
“Whatever you’re doing,” he said, “it’s important. I can feel it. I want to. . . . I’m supposed to follow you. I can tell.”
“There are people here who depend on you.”
“They can go to the camps in Okehampton. I’ve been thinking about it. They ought to have gone ages ago, they’d be much better looked after there. I’ve just been indulging them. And myself. I wanted so badly to be helpful, so I let their lives stay difficult so they’d need me.”
“That’s nonsense, Greg.”
“It’s the truth.”
“This is your home. What about your children? Your wife?”
“They’re
not coming back.”
The rooks swooped and fussed overhead. It was dark enough for them to disappear completely in the shadows of the trees.
“Lil doesn’t want me to join her either,” he said. His eyes had gone watery.
Ah, Iz thought. You think that’s unhappiness. You think life has turned against you. You have no idea.
“I was ashamed to tell you. God forgive me. We’re so stupid about these things. Or I am, anyway. You’re not.”
“Let’s go inside,” she said.
“She said . . . She says I’ve made my choice. Which is fair enough, I suppose. Though God, I miss the boys. But we all have to . . . we have to . . .”
She left him sniffling and went back to the house.
• • •
She slept poorly that night. She was slightly worried that he might try to come into her room in the dark. But no, she thought, as another chill grey morning trickled into the valley, he was too nice; he’d suffer, nicely, in silence.
It turned out he’d done his suffering downstairs, all night long. She found him at the table, looking disheveled and blank-eyed. His hands were clasped around a mug with a thimbleful of cold tea at the bottom.
“Couldn’t sleep?” she said.
He raised his head to her.
“You’re not Jess,” he said. “Are you.”
She thought about sitting down, but in the end she just stepped behind him and squeezed his shoulder, once, before starting to gather up her gear. His anxious preparations meant that everything was already laid out, packed, dry, ready to go. She’d have liked a last cup of tea since she wasn’t sure how long it would be before anything hot passed her lips again, but it was a small thing, really.
“I don’t know why it’s taken me so long,” he said. “Even tonight—last night—I didn’t think of it until late. Even though you said. Sisters.”
Iz sighed a little, then sat down opposite him and started on her socks and boots and leggings.
“We were twins,” she said. “In fact.”
“‘Were’?”
“She died.” His shoulders sagged a little. “Fifteen years ago. I don’t know exactly what happened, but when you people drove her out she had the baby by herself and it pretty much killed her.”
His head tipped forward onto his arms.
“You’ve been so kind,” she said. “Incredibly kind. I’ll always remember you.”
“So.” He kept his back to her. “Who are you really looking for? If she’s dead?”
“We had another sister. Younger.”
“And she joined Trelow?”
“No, she lived nearby.”
“Then you won’t find her there.”
Lizzie, the voice had called, twice. Help. “I will. Do you want me to give back these things? I have to take the boots and the backpack, but the rest—”
“No. They’re yours.” He twisted around in the chair at last, desolation in his every movement. “I still want to come with you.”
“No one can come with me,” she said.
• • •
He stood in the doorway.
“So.”
“So.”
He shrugged. “Good luck. God be with you.”
“Thank you. For everything.”
He took his glasses off, polishing them ineffectually with his fleece sweater. “I feel like my life just turned completely upside down.”
“My sister always had that effect on people.”
“Jess . . .” He squinted upward, blinking. “She was amazing. I had such a crush on her. I probably made that rather obvious, didn’t I?”
“She had that effect too.” Sometimes.
“What . . . What did actually happen to her? Before she came to Trelow? We all knew there was some big story. I’ve wanted to know for fifteen years.”
“I don’t know.” Iz hitched the pack on her shoulders, adjusting the straps. “She and I, we went our different ways. After university. It was after the Wall came down, she went to Romania, I think. She was going to save all those orphans.” And I met Nigel with the City job and the sports car and the wife he dumped because I was young and fit, and you despised me, and you were right, Iggy, you were right. “She wrote to our sister from different places. Bulgaria. Greece. She was traveling with gypsies, something like that. Then the next thing we heard she’d arrived in Cornwall and turned Christian.”
Greg winced.
“No offense,” she added.
“She was afraid of something,” he said. “Jesus was her refuge. We all had our different reasons for ending up there but she . . . she was happy at Trelow, but it was almost like relief. Like she’d got away. She always said she felt safe with us.”
“That’s good to hear.”
“I assumed it was a family thing.”
“We didn’t reject her. She rejected us.” Us? Me. Mum and Dad too, but me, mostly.
“Was that true, that thing about her skin?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“About the sun. Not getting the sun on her. No, I always thought there was something strange about it.” Her blank look had obviously confirmed a suspicion. “It was more like she was terrified of the sun. Like a phobia.”
“Not that I ever knew.”
“She wouldn’t go anywhere near direct sunlight. All summer long she’d only work at night. You didn’t . . . ? No. It never really made sense that it was a medical condition. She got twice as much done as the rest of us anyway, so no one minded.” He laughed his weak, rueful laugh. “She was amazing. When I drove around that corner and saw you . . .”
She had a sudden dread that his disappointment was a bad omen. She too was looking for someone lost, after all. She thought she’d better get away before he infected her.
“Good luck to you too, Greg.”
“Yes. Better let you go.”
Their breath steamed between them.
“Her real name,” she said, “was Ygraine. Everyone called her Iggy.”
“Not surprised she changed it, then.”
She turned.
“Back up to the corner,” he said behind her, “and then the other road leads over to the bridge.”
She raised a hand and waved.
Twenty minutes later, as she forced her way through the deep, undisturbed snow banked between walls of low stone, she thought she heard the waters of the Tamar trickling softly somewhere under their three-month mantle of ice.
• • •
She walked, rested, walked, hid herself, and slept. Time passed in a slow trance of sweat and solitude, her breath the white cloud ahead of her, the blots of deep bootprints behind. She saw vehicles abandoned or burned, birds picking over things half buried in the fields, barricades of broken gates stacked between hedges. Now that she was no longer dragging bicycle panniers and chafing in clammy clothes, her slowness was patience and steadiness instead of struggle and exhaustion. The ten miles she’d promised herself every day were a fantasy, but even the distance she managed around dawn and twilight each day marked out visible gains along the pencil line on her map. She stayed hidden during the full light, resting. Illness had sapped her. The slightest hint of the presence of another person made her take cover and wait. But mostly when she walked it was through a wasteland, an obliterated kingdom.
On the third day the wind picked up, turned southwesterly, and took on the smell of the sea. It tore pale blue gashes in the clouds and let the sun in, so dazzling on the snow it was impossible to go on westward in the evenings. The hedges sparkled with meltwater and she sank halfway up her calves with every step. Then the rains began.
A world of silence became a world of noise. It was as though the landscape she’d been crossing since entering the grip of the snow had been asleep and now woke up screaming. She sat out a whole day a
nd night on a pile of tires under the corrugated-iron roof of a dairy barn. Its roof made a tinny thunder louder than she remembered sound could be. When the rain moderated enough for her to leave her shelter, she heard the noises farther afield, a sound like a low angry wind from valleys below the moor.
That sound was water seeking the coast. She was lucky she’d reached higher ground before the melt took hold. The small streams draining the moor were overwhelmed. The ground beside them turned as porous as moss, shedding suddenly uprooted trees down to the valleys. Roads were buckling under the floods, bridges breaking. But in the open heathland where Iz was, the slopes were still gentle. The meltwater around her boots was in no hurry yet.
Nevertheless, there were long hours when she could make no progress at all. Even the best gear couldn’t keep her dry in that kind of rain. As her progress stalled she began breaking into the low-slung slate-roofed farmhouses that went with the decrepit barns. In one of them she found the farmer thawing too, going soft, hanging by a noose of tied sheets from a rafter above his staircase.
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