She had to drag one of the tables into the back corridor so she could stand on it and tie the knotted cloths to the rafter. That’s right, she thought, as she climbed up. You stand on this and get the length right and then put it round your neck and kick the table away. It’s going to hurt, Iz. Yes, Nigel, yes it is, but not for long, not every day and night like being married to you hurts and losing the boy you despised hurts, so just shut up and watch me. She measured out the length. Too short was better than too long; she might fail to break her neck, but as long as her toes didn’t touch, she’d strangle. And too tight better than too loose, same reason.
There.
Perfect.
Perched up on the table, she took a few deep breaths, to concentrate. She tugged hard on the knotted loop to make sure it would hold.
She remembered the message on the phone.
Just remember what I said, okay? I’m not coming back, but one day I’ll find you.
And this would be where he’d find her. The grimy grey corridor with the old yellow pay phone in a niche. The heaps of rubbish and the smell of mold.
She had a sudden, overwhelmingly intense vision of the very last time she’d seen him, only an arm’s length away but separated by the thick glass of a train window. Her husband muttering over his shoulder, Get on with it, for God’s sake, or he’ll have fucked up our holiday before it even starts. The grumble of the locomotive. The twitch of heavy motion. The angle of light changing on the glass, making him hard to see. “Take care of yourself, Gav, love. I love you!” Maybe she saw his lips moving, saying he loved her back. Maybe not. Probably not. And then gone, gone, and the secret of his last words to her gone forever too.
How desperately relieved she’d felt, then. She remembered the thought like a scene, like a tune: thank God he’s gone. Had she actually said it aloud? No, but the words had formed in her more vivid than speech. Thank God he’s gone.
“I’m sorry, love,” she whispered. She braced her legs to kick.
A small voice behind her said, “Gwenny?”
A sliver of watery sunlight reached in through the broken window and slanted across her feet.
“It’s me, Gwenny,” the small voice said. “I’m here. You found me. It’s all right.”
PART IV
24
The woman who wasn’t Gwen sat on the floor beside the yellow telephone box, cradling the handle close to her mouth. From where Marina was watching at the entrance to the corridor, she couldn’t hear anything the woman had whispered into the telephone. She could tell what the last thing she said was, though, by the shape her lips made.
Good-bye.
The woman stood up unsteadily and put the handle back on top of the box. It settled into place with a click like a full stop. She stood like that for a long time, both hands on the telephone, her eyes, raw from all the crying, fixed on nothing at all.
Marina waited as long as she could and then scuffed her feet to remind the woman she was still there.
The woman looked up at her with an expression that made Marina wonder how she could ever have taken her for Gwen. She looked broken, or haunted, or something else Marina couldn’t describe, but definitely un-Gwen-like.
“Did it work?” she said, shyly. It had been her idea that the woman try using the telephone. “He asked me who I wanted to talk to most.”
The woman who wasn’t Gwen nodded.
“Yes,” she said. The crying had dried her voice out. Marina’s was the same. They both sounded scratchy. For a long while they’d kept setting each other off, as if weeping was as contagious as yawning. “It did.”
Marina went closer and held out her hand. She guessed it would probably start one or the other of them sobbing again, but the woman looked so desperately fragile, she couldn’t help herself. Calloused and filthy fingers met hers and knotted together.
“Was it Gwen again?” Marina asked. “Did she say where we can find her?”
“No,” the woman said. “Not Gwen.”
“Oh.”
“It was,” she began. The fingers gripped Marina’s hand very tightly, and the woman drew in a long breath. “It was,” she tried again, “my sister.”
Marina frowned. “You said you were Gwen’s sister.”
“My other sister. My twin.” The woman scrunched her eyes shut. “The one who died.”
• • •
The two of them stood outside, looking up at the pole with the snaky black wires dangling from it. Beyond the ruined buildings the woods dripped and sparkled with the luster of sunlight after rain.
“They’re all broken,” the woman said.
“So’s everything,” Marina agreed, kicking at a fragment of colored glass by her feet.
“Those are the phone wires. See? There’s the box where they went into the building.”
Marina could only agree again. She hadn’t yet worked out how to confess to Gwen’s sister that she didn’t really know anything about the world outside Pendurra. It had taken them long enough to get through even just a few of the things she did know; she’d had to say most of them three times before the woman properly understood, and as often as not one or the other of them had ended up bursting into tears before she could finish.
The woman took the mug that said trelow christian fellowship off the windowsill again and turned it in her hands. She stepped through the junk to the box with its broken padlock and its scattered soggy papers. She knelt beside them, picking them up. Most were so wet they curled limp like cloth. She had to lay them out across her thigh.
“Iggy,” she whispered.
“What?”
The woman who wasn’t Gwen looked up, pulled out of a reverie.
“It’s such a long time ago now. You weren’t even born. But here she was. This is the place. This is where she lived.”
Marina couldn’t feel whatever emotion was making the woman’s voice suddenly all hoarse and whispery.
“And those were her things,” she said, after a while. She didn’t like it when the woman was silent for too long. It was as if she’d forgotten Marina existed. Gwen was never like that.
“Yes.” The woman ran a fingertip along the edge of the box, still not really listening. “Yes.”
“Your sister.”
“Yes. My twin.”
“She’s the one the man told me the story about, then.”
The woman turned away from examining the soggy papers to look at Marina.
“The same man?”
“Who took the acorn, yes. The other people took whatever else was in the box. If he comes back you can ask him.” She’d been going to say we can ask him but she felt much happier about someone else doing the talking.
“What was the story?”
Marina shut her eyes tight to help her concentrate. “The man said she ran away from him but he found her. He made it sound like he might have hurt her. I can’t remember exactly. He was holding the acorn while he said it, though. I’m sure about that. He said it was her seed. I remember that because I thought an acorn was a fruit, not a seed. Then right afterward he showed me the telephone.” She opened her eyes again. The woman who wasn’t Gwen watched her intently.
“It was a story,” she added, nervously. “That’s what he said. But you could tell it had actually happened. He said that too. He said everything he said happened. Something like that.”
The woman went on staring.
“She ran away,” she repeated at last, slowly, “but he found her?”
“I think that’s what he said. I probably wasn’t listening properly. We could wait in case he comes back. Although I’m getting hungry. I ate all my food yesterday.”
When the woman smiled it was better than holding her hand, better than being hugged. It never seemed to last more than a heartbeat, but for an instant it made her feel as if no one had left, not Gwen, not D
addy, not Gawain.
“So did I,” she said.
Marina came closer and peered over the woman’s shoulder at the papers from the box.
“Can we read any of it?” she asked. “The ink’s all gone runny.”
“Not much. The odd word or two. It looks like it might have been a kind of will.”
Marina was confused for a second before she remembered stories she’d read. “Oh. When people give instructions after they’re dead.”
“Exactly.”
“They’re ruined now. I shouldn’t have left them out here after the people broke the box open. I had no idea it was important.”
The woman leaned back and curled an arm around Marina’s legs. It was like being hugged by Gwen’s shadow, a faint copy of remembered love.
“It’s all right, Marina,” she said. “She wants us to find Gawain.”
Marina felt her heart twitch. “Where does it say about Gawain?”
“No.” The woman peeled the sheet up and draped it carefully back in the box. “That’s what she told me.”
• • •
Marina still wanted to stay in case the not-man came back and made the telephone work again, but the woman who wasn’t Gwen pointed out that neither of them would last much longer with nothing but leaves to eat, and anyway it wasn’t too far to where they were going. When she said that, Marina remembered how the bright not-man with the yellow coat had promised to send her a guide, and decided not to argue. She thought of what it had been like yesterday, on her own, baffled by the endless strange roads. Now she was with someone who knew the way everywhere. She didn’t even have to explain about not wanting to go near the river. The woman said they’d go inland to get around it. Best of all, she was going to take them to Horace’s village even though she’d apparently never heard of Horace (which surprised Marina: Horace had always told her everyone knew about him).
“We’ll have to be careful,” she said. “It’s very close to Falmouth.”
“What’s wrong with Falmouth? Horace says it’s the most boring place in the universe.”
The woman who wasn’t Gwen gave her another very un-Gwen-like look. “Things have changed,” she said.
“Oh.”
“We should try and avoid meeting anyone. If we do, let me do the talking, all right?”
“Except Horace.”
“Yes.”
“Or the friend Gawain went to see. He said I’d like her. He said I ought to meet her some day.”
“But you never have?”
“Never have what?”
“Met her. The professor. What’s her name, Hester Lightfoot.”
“No. She never came to our house. Hardly anyone ever did.”
“Gwen knew her, though?”
“Did she?”
“She must have. She . . .” The woman put her hands on her head and squeezed. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. It’s all we have to go on. You say that’s where Gav went first, so we’ll go after him.”
“He didn’t say where her house was.”
“Oh, don’t worry.” Her look went grim, as if she was remembering something painful. “I memorized her address.”
Which turned out to be in Horace’s village. Marina didn’t say anything about it aloud, but secretly she was sure this was part of the not-man’s promise. Everything she’d hoped to find when she decided to leave Pendurra had been waiting for her, all neatly packaged together. She’d just needed someone to show her the way.
It would have been better still if it had actually been Gwen. As they went along she couldn’t help noticing the differences more and more. Walking with Gwen was as familiar and natural to her as breathing, and she knew what it was supposed to be like, interesting and cheerful. Gwen had always been chatting away about something or other. Gwen’s sister went along quietly, in the kind of silence that said it didn’t want to be interrupted. Also, and also unlike Gwen, she went slowly. She seemed terribly tired, like Daddy on one of his bad days. She leaned on Marina some of the time, especially when they were going uphill. Marina carried the bag, slung over her other shoulder. There was nothing in it now except for her book and the broken box with the soggy sheets of paper. She’d given the woman her last extra pair of dry socks. But slow as they went, at least the woman knew the way, and she never halted in surprise or alarm no matter what they passed, though almost every corner brought them in sight of things Marina had never seen before. The only thing that made her stop was the sound of a car. Every time they heard it, no matter how distant, whether or not Marina thought it was actually just a momentary surge in the constant background grumble of running water, the woman took her by the arm and hurried her off the road, even if it meant standing in ankle-deep mud behind a gate until the sound went away again.
They toiled up one straight tree-shaded lane so laboriously that Marina wondered whether they might not reach the top at all, like in the puzzle about the arrow that never reached its target because there was always a bit farther to go.
“Sorry,” less-and-less-like-Gwen said, as if she’d been reading Marina’s thoughts. “I can hardly keep up. I think I’m going to have to stop soon. I walked all last night.”
“Stop where?”
“We’ll find somewhere.”
Soon enough they came to a wide clearing of gravel and weeds beside the lane, at the back of which stood a small wooden hut with no windows. Marina went to investigate the faded words painted on its side.
“It says ‘Organic Farm Stand.’ Does that mean there’ll be food inside?”
The woman had a way of looking at her that also reminded her of Gawain, as if they didn’t believe what she’d just said.
“Not anymore,” she said. “If there was, someone will have taken it by now. Are you hungry?”
“Very.”
She hobbled over to join Marina by the hut. “Let’s see if we can manage one more day, all right?”
“We’ll get there tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
Marina examined the tall unruly hedge behind the building. “There might be the kind of leaves we can eat.”
“Leaves would be nice.”
“Maybe we can find roots and berries. I’ve read books where people eat those. Though it’s too early for berries, and roots need boiling water.”
“There’s always a catch.”
On one side of the hut was a cracked door with a fist-sized hole punched through it where the latch would have been. Inside was a dark dry space smelling of dust and cardboard and mouse droppings. Winter had driven away the mice, and the spiders too, though there were old cobwebs sagging from the roof. A heap of empty sacks filled one corner, leaking trickles of old straw. They spread them over the floor. The woman slumped down on the makeshift bedding without even taking off her muddy top.
“Shouldn’t you get out of your wet things?” Marina wriggled off her sweater and shift. There were hooks on the inside of the door to hang them on. “That can’t be comfortable.”
It was dim inside, the only daylight coming through the hole in the door, but she thought the woman was giving her that look again.
“I don’t have any other clothes.”
“Nor do I. Don’t you want to hang those ones up at least?”
“Aren’t you cold?”
“No. Owen’s always asking that.”
“Who?”
“Owen. Oh. One of my friends. He comes to the house from the village.”
“Does he.” The woman began tugging off one of her complicated boots. “You didn’t say you had a friend nearby. An adult?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe we should be trying to find him. Instead of trying to get to Mawnan.”
“No.” Marina squatted down abruptly. “Let’s not. He’d only tell me to go home. That’s all he ever said. Let’s go on, please
. Horace will give us food. Or the lady Gawain was going to see, he told me how nice she was. You said it’s not much farther.”
The boot came off with a squelching sound. A dark stain spread over the sacks.
“He might not be there,” the woman said.
“Who?”
“Your friend. Horace.”
“It’s where he lives,” Marina said. “He told me. I remember the name. I’m certain it’s right.”
“Hardly anyone stayed in their homes. I’ve walked past hundreds of empty houses. The professor, Lightfoot, she almost certainly won’t be there. She was in hospital. I can’t believe they’d have let an invalid go home to this.”
“Why?”
The woman took a while to think about it as she worked on her other boot. “The snow, at first. You couldn’t get to the shops. Places were cut off. Then, I don’t know. Freezing pipes, power lines down, things like that. Supply problems. Falmouth’s on the coast, of course, so they could get some things in that way, but still. They’ll probably be gone.”
Marina wasn’t sure she understood, but this version of Gwen wasn’t as easy to put questions to as the proper one. “Horace wouldn’t let things like that bother him,” she said, although she was thinking, But he stopped coming to see me.
“Well, that’s good to know.”
“You said you’d take me there. You said that’s where we’re going.”
“We will. Yes. But.” She wriggled on the sacks, folding one into a pillow. She seemed almost too tired to speak. “I’ve seen some terrible things on my way here. We might not find anyone there. Or it might be worse if we do find someone, the wrong people. You need someone to look after you properly.”
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