There is shuffling and grumbling but they all agree.
‘We could draw up a rota,’ says Kat, ‘allocate everyone a job or two. That might be most fair?’
Ben groans. ‘Sounds to me like the holiday’s over.’
‘Maybe,’ says Simon, ‘but the most important thing is to lie low. We’ve been lucky. Let’s keep it that way. I’m not ready to go home just yet, are you?’
They shake their heads and for all the mumbling and groaning, Kat can see that they’re excited and up for the challenge that lies ahead. ‘What about Mac’s car?’ she asks. ‘It’s just sitting out there on the track. Bit of a giveaway, don’t you think?’
‘Yes,’ agrees Simon, ‘I’ve been thinking about that. We could move it into a corner of the meadow, cover it with brush or branches. Only use it when it’s absolutely necessary, ration our petrol.’
They all nod.
‘What about the bedrooms?’ Kat asks.
‘What about them?’
She swallows. ‘Well, we’ve never really allocated them. I wasn’t sure . . .’ She clears her throat, suddenly embarrassed. ‘You know . . . Ben and Carla took one of the upstairs rooms and I’m in the other . . . but it seems a bit selfish, me there on my own and you and Mac squashed downstairs.’
Simon eyes her. ‘What are you suggesting?’
‘Nothing . . . I just . . .’ She flushes pink, suddenly wishing she’d kept her mouth shut. ‘I just wonder if we shouldn’t draw straws . . .’
‘But we’re a couple,’ says Carla. ‘Ben and I need our own room.’
‘I wasn’t saying . . .’ Kat swallows again. ‘Perhaps Simon and Mac should share the second bedroom and I could sleep downstairs. It’s just me, after all . . .’
Simon shrugs. ‘I don’t mind being downstairs. Do you, Mac?’
Mac shakes his head.
‘Unless one of you wants to share with Kat?’ adds Carla with a sly look.
Kat colours and shakes her head. ‘And listen to their snoring?’
‘So we’re agreed?’ asks Simon.
They nod again.
‘Good,’ says Simon, ‘tomorrow we get to work.’
‘Yes,’ agrees Ben, ‘tomorrow we work; but tonight . . .’ he adds, with a grin, ‘we party.’
He hands his still-burning roll-up to Carla then saunters to the jetty where he struts his way along the creaking boards, removing his T-shirt and shorts in an exaggerated striptease while Kat and Carla cat-call him from the shore. When he reaches the end he turns his back on them all and shimmies his pants to the floor, mooning them with his pasty buttocks in the half light. Throwing them one last glance over his shoulder, he acknowledges Carla’s wolf whistle with a low bow then dives high out over the lake, bellyflopping onto the surface of the water with a loud slap and making the rest of them groan in unison. ‘Ouch,’ laughs Simon, ‘now that’s got to hurt.’
The atmosphere in the cottage changes overnight. Whereas before they lazed around, living hand to mouth, drifting between the house and the lake like spoiled children at a summer camp, now they begin to rise earlier, waking at first light and gathering around the long table in the kitchen before heading off to complete a long list of tasks Simon has drawn up. Kat knows that for all their grumbling they are excited to be making the place their own. At first they take it in turns, each trying out different jobs, but very quickly they fall into their preferred roles.
Ben, to his surprise – and everyone else’s – assumes the role of cook. They each have a go but no one else has his deft touch with the feisty old range in the kitchen. After a few nights of sloppy stews and blackened loaves of bread still doughy in the middle, they agree it should be left to Ben. He’s the only one who seems capable of stoking the fire and producing edible meals and they are happy to agree that the kitchen should be his domain. Kat grows accustomed to seeing him sitting on the back doorstep in just his boxers and one of his florid Hawaiian shirts, smoking his joints and stroking his goatee while he appraises his marijuana plants growing on the window sill or the vat of homebrew fermenting in the larder. Carla is never far away, more often than not out in the garden with a basket over one arm, hunting for berries, hunched over flower beds or pulling up oversized stems of rhubarb, hunting for anything edible she can find. ‘You two are like a debauched Tom and Barbara Good,’ Kat jokes one afternoon.
But Carla just smiles and turns back to the garden. ‘I like it out here, it’s so peaceful.’
While Ben and Carla busy themselves in the vicinity of the cottage, Mac ventures further afield. He proves himself to be the most resourceful of them all, roaming the countryside, hardly ever returning empty-handed. No one knows quite where he goes or how he does it – no one actually bothers to ask – but more often than not he returns with prizes foraged on his travels. One afternoon it’s handfuls of earthy brown mushrooms plucked from the forest floor; another it’s a basket of tender dandelion leaves which they eat in a salad; there are wild nettles and bilberries and plump rabbits caught in his carefully laid snares which they roast over the campfire. Another morning, he rises especially early and hammers away at a pile of timber, wrapping it in chicken wire until Kat can see the definite outline of a coop take shape. Before nightfall the next day he is back at the cottage with five laying hens scratching and pecking at each other in an old wooden crate.
‘Where on earth?’ asks Carla, peering at the disgruntled birds through the slatted wood.
‘Don’t ask,’ says Mac, wiping his brow with the back of his hand. ‘I know they seem scrawny but they’re heavier than they look.’
‘Ugly things, aren’t they?’ says Kat, staring at their beady eyes and scraggy feet.
‘Doesn’t matter what they look like,’ says Mac, ‘as long as they can lay.’
She looks at him in wonder. ‘You were a wasted talent at university, you know that?’
Mac blushes at the compliment and they coax and then shove the flapping, protesting birds into their new home. Kat watches them unruffle their feathers and strut about the coop. Chickens, she thinks, whatever next?
With the other three focused on matters relating to food and provisions, Simon’s responsibilities inevitably fall to the maintenance of the place. He spends hours up the old ladder they have found lying in the long grass behind the lean-to, patching up roof tiles or fixing the guttering. He moves Mac’s car to a far corner of the overgrown meadow and covers it with an array of branches and ferns, until it is completely camouflaged from view. And every day he spends several hours collecting and chopping firewood, stacking the logs and kindling up behind the house into an ever-growing pile. Kat likes to watch him out by the lean-to; the wide swing of the axe in his hands, his shirt tied around his waist, the sheen of sweat shining on his tanned shoulders, the intense concentration on his face.
As the days pass, they each seem to fit naturally into the new set-up; it is just Kat who struggles to find her role within the group. Mac is a loner and she feels like a gooseberry in the kitchen with Ben and Carla. She’d happily spend her days with Simon but she isn’t strong enough or practical enough to help him chop wood or fix the roof, so in the end she focuses on the more basic tasks, the ones she knows she can manage.
She starts with the cottage, sweeping and scrubbing the floors, washing the grime-streaked windows and wiping down walls until the place almost gleams. She brings firewood and kindling in for the range, hammers nails into a wall by the front door for them to hang their raincoats and drags the mattresses from the bedrooms, beating them outside until the last plumes of dust have wafted away over the lake. Each new job brings her in some way closer to the cottage, helps her to see the details of the place: a whorl in the old wooden floorboards, a loose brick in the chimney breast, the curve of an iron window latch upstairs. It is hard work but she doesn’t mind it. She doesn’t mind the calluses on her hands, the dirt beneath her fingernails, the splinters and the grime. All those hours spent in lecture theatres and pondering the abstract ideas and
philosophies of the world, when really Simon had been right all along: none of that matters. It’s the simple tasks, she realises, that fill her with the greatest pleasure. Laying a fire, boiling water, picking strawberries, making tea, scrawling words in a notebook or sitting upon the front step with her hands clasped around a mug and a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from her lips as the sun warms her face and the lake shimmers seductively before her. It’s these moments above all others that tell her she has made the right decision coming here.
‘This place suits you,’ Simon tells her one afternoon, regarding her from the open doorway. She is down on her hands and knees with a bucket of water scrubbing at the muddy floorboards, her hair tied up in an old scarf, the hem of her T-shirt twisted into a knot above her navel. ‘You’re different here,’ he adds.
She nods and watches as Simon uncurls his fist to reveal a cluster of blackberries lying on the palm of his hand, their juice already beginning to stain his skin.
‘They’re from the bushes up behind the house. They’re just beginning to ripen. Ben says he’s going to make a pie for Carla’s birthday tomorrow . . . maybe even some jam.’ He holds one out to her and she rises from the floor. ‘They’re sweet,’ he adds as she accepts the berry he holds to her lips, opening her mouth and then biting down, enjoying the warm syrup on her tongue. Juice trickles from her lips, making her laugh, but Simon reaches out and catches it on his fingertip, then lifts it to his own lips, a gesture so intimate it makes her blush.
Something about the sweet taste of the berry, the warm sunshine falling through the open door, the loud drone of insects outside makes her feel peculiar, almost drunk; embarrassed, she turns away from him and returns to the half-scrubbed floor. It’s only when she finds the courage to glance back towards the doorway that she sees he has gone.
For twenty-four hours she tells herself she has imagined it, that the look in his eyes in the cottage, the way he raised his blackberry-stained finger to his lips, was nothing but her own overactive imagination. She has fantasised about such moments far too many times to convince herself it was real. But later, out by the lake, under the stars, with the remains of Carla’s birthday dinner still spread before them and Ben strumming quietly on his guitar, she feels Simon’s gaze fall on her once more. His eyes blaze in the darkness, and his face, lit by the occasional flare of a cigarette, remains tilted in her direction. The thought of his eyes on her makes her dizzy. She tries to focus on the flickering stars overhead and remembers something Simon once told her, about how the lights glimmering up there in the sky are probably nothing more than the residual flare of stars burned out many millions of years before, beamed at them from light years away. She gazes up at them and wonders how something so lovely can be nothing but a lie – an illusion – a dark deceit. The thought doesn’t help with her giddiness.
‘So what did you tell them?’ she hears Ben ask as she tunes back into the conversation around her.
‘I told them I was taking a year off,’ says Simon. ‘I told them I wanted to experience a little of the world before I settled down to complete my legal training.’
‘Did you tell them about this place?’
‘God no.’ Simon shakes his head. ‘You think I’m crazy? The fewer people that know about this place the better – I thought we’d all agreed that?’
Ben nods.
‘Besides,’ Simon continues, ‘I don’t think squatting in a derelict cottage up north really fits with my parents’ ideals of success and personal achievement.’ He grins in the darkness. ‘For all they know I’m halfway to Africa.’
Ben chuckles but Carla gives a low groan from where she lies propped against his leg. ‘Don’t jiggle like that,’ she moans, ‘you’re making me feel sick.’
‘Sorry, my love,’ says Ben, putting his guitar down and stroking her hair.
Kat watches Ben’s hand moving across Carla’s curls, sees his fingers stroke the round curve of her cheek and sighs quietly. They are always together, always entwined.
‘How did your dad take it?’ Simon asks Ben.
‘Oh you know,’ says Ben, ‘sat me down, asked me where my drive was, my sense of responsibility; told me I’d flushed his school fees and several perfectly good years at university down the toilet . . . threatened to cut me off. I thought it went rather well, considering.’
Simon gives a low laugh and Kat lets the soft sound of it wrap itself around her like a cloak. She gazes up at the sky and watches as dark clouds steal across the pale orb of the moon. Far out on the lake a fish jumps with a splash. Other than the light from the campfire and the occasional flare of a lighter or burning cigarette it grows increasingly black. She lies on the ground and gazes up at the emptiness.
The boys’ talk of family stirs Kat’s mind. Something about their conversation brings a memory floating up to the membrane of her consciousness. There she is, hunched inside a stale-smelling wardrobe with her little sister trembling in her arms while outside the flimsy chipboard door the shouts and thumps of her parents’ terrifying fight rage on.
‘I’m scared,’ Freya whispers.
‘Shhh,’ she murmurs, holding her sister close. ‘It will all be over soon.’
Their father roars. They hear the sharp sound of splintering wood followed by the soft whimpering of their mother. They wait until the front door slams, then creep out into the kitchen. Her sister accepts the milk and biscuits she offers her, but her blue eyes are still wide with fear.
‘Do you want anything, Mum?’ she asks at the open door to her parents’ room.
‘You’re a good girl, Kat,’ her mother slurs, sprawled like a discarded rag across the bed. ‘Always looking out for your sister. You’re a good girl.’
Kat shivers in the darkness. She’d thought perhaps she was alone in wanting to free herself from the weight of family responsibility, but as she lies on the damp grass listening to the chatter of her friends, it becomes clear to her that no matter what experiences they’ve grown up with – whether privilege or affection or neglect – they are each trying to escape the constraints of their history in some way. Perhaps that’s one of the attractions of their life at the lake, she thinks; the freedom it offers them to explore who they are . . . and who they want to be . . . without the baggage of the past weighing them down.
‘So who wants to go?’ asks Simon.
‘Go where?’ asks Kat, rejoining the flow of the conversation.
‘To the shop tomorrow.’
Carla offers up another groan from the darkness.
‘Carla’s going to be too hung-over to go anywhere,’ says Ben cheerily.
‘I’ll go,’ offers Kat, ‘if no one else wants to.’
‘Good’ says Simon. ‘Mac can drive you.’
‘Actually, I was planning to—’
‘No,’ says Simon cutting Mac off, ‘you’ll drive Kat.’
‘I can probably manage by myself,’ says Kat lightly, not wanting to be the cause of discord, but Simon isn’t having it.
‘Mac, you’ll drive Kat. End of discussion. Whatever Swiss Family Robinson plans you had will have to wait.’
Mac shifts uncomfortably and they all see the colour rise in his face, even though it is dark. Kat shoots him an apologetic look. Far out on the horizon above the hills a flash of late summer lightning zigzags across the sky. ‘There’s a storm coming,’ she murmurs, but no one moves, not for ages, not until the first drops of rain begin to fall from the sky, sizzling and spitting onto the glowing embers of their campfire.
Upstairs, sprawled on her mattress, Kat can’t sleep. It’s not just the lightning strobing across the room or the thunder rumbling across the valley, it’s fragments of the evening’s conversation still niggling at the back of her mind. All their talk of family and responsibility has brought a wave of guilt crashing down on her.
Freya: she hasn’t told her sister where she is. She’s tried to justify her disappearance by telling herself that Freya will be caught up in her own life in London – busy with her ow
n friends and her course; and she understands Simon’s desire to keep their whereabouts secret, she really does . . . but Freya is her little sister and no matter how intoxicating it feels for Kat to be free of her past and free of any sense of duty or responsibility, she has never not been there for her. It doesn’t feel right.
With a sigh, she slips out of bed, relights the oil lamp and rummages through her belongings until she finds her notebook and a chewed biro. She looks at the blank page before her and then writes in a careful hand: Dear Freya. She stares at the words, the biro poised at her lips, before she lowers the pen and continues to write. When she has finished, she reads the letter through then tucks the piece of paper beneath her pillow and turns off the oil lamp. She will slip it into the postbox when she goes to the shop. No one need know. Besides, she hasn’t given an address, just a few sketchy details and reassurances that she is all right, that she’ll be in touch again soon. It’s enough to make her feel a little better as she slides back beneath the covers and turns off the light.
The storm is closer now. White lightning explodes again in the darkness and Kat squeezes her eyes shut and counts . . . waiting for the accompanying thunder, trying to calculate just how close the storm is: one Mississippi . . . two Mississippi . . . when the drumroll comes it seems almost to be upon the cottage. Kat wriggles down deeper beneath the covers. She thinks of Carla and Ben curled up together in the room next door, Mac and Simon slumped about the living room downstairs and feels very much alone. She wills sleep to come but moments later there is another bright flash, a white pulse of light. She opens her eyes and gasps. In the split second of the illumination she sees the outline of him in the doorway; then the room falls black again. Her breath catches at the back of her throat. Did she imagine him there? She peers into the darkness but it’s no good; her eyes remain blinded momentarily by the flare as another loud rumble shakes the valley.
There is the unmistakable squeak of a floorboard, then the sound of footsteps moving across the room to where she lies. Her ears strain and she just makes out the soft whoosh of a T-shirt being dropped to the floor, the rasp of a zipper, the creak of another floorboard then the mattress shifting beneath a new weight. Kat closes her eyes, tries to breathe, her body tingling in the darkness. For a moment there is nothing and then she feels his hand on her hip bone, his fingers grazing the strip of bare skin just above the waistband of her pyjama bottoms.
The Shadow Year Page 8