The Lives She Left Behind

by James Long

She turned and looked south, found herself gasping in her attempts to blow a warning, twisting back as she ran to see Saxon men pouring from the trees. Something brave in her made her stop in her terror, made her stand still as all those men charged towards her, made her take breath after juddering breath as they came nearer and blow and blow the warning until the sweating, stinking men surrounded her. They pulled the horn from her hands and crushed it under their boots. In the present, she became aware that she had stopped talking and knew she must not drift into this silent reverie.

  ‘They caught me,’ she said. ‘They carried me back here to the camp and left me tied up in the rain. Later their men started coming back, hundreds of them with blood on their tunics and their swords. They brought in girls, my friends, tied wrist to wrist in a line. Nobody else. All the time I was thinking it was my fault for not sounding the alarm fast enough, my fault my family were dead. Then the big red-haired man started giving the girls as prizes to his soldiers. He was Cenwalch. He kept me back for himself.’

  ‘Jo . . .’

  Was it concern? She couldn’t tell. ‘No, this is the part that matters. There was a boy about my age left behind to guard me until the men came back. I thought he smiled at me when nobody could see.’ She turned and looked back into the old rampart ring. ‘It was still raining and the men were building a shelter for their king. I was tied to a tree just over there. Then the boy was in front of me, cutting my ropes, with his finger to his lips for silence. He looked at me as if to ask where we should go and I didn’t argue. We ran over the bank and along the hunting path and down to the village, where all the dead were lying like sacks of meat, then round the hill to my family’s house. There were no bodies there.’

  ‘This boy. Could you talk to him?’

  ‘No, but he pointed to himself and said his name and I told him mine.’

  ‘And those names were? No, let me guess. He was Ferney and you were?’

  ‘Gally.’

  ‘Gally? Is that what it is then, your other name? Your so-called real name. Is it Gally?’

  Her daughter nodded.

  Fleur shook her head as if to clear it. ‘I can’t call you that. It turns you into someone else.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘We were tired and scared and wet and we lay there holding each other in the hut. Before dawn they came looking and we ran for it down through the pig fields towards the trees with them whooping and chasing, and they threw a spear which cut my leg and this boy, this thin Saxon boy, picked me up and ran with me until there was no more time or breath. We came to what the village called the place of life, a little clearing round a stone, and he turned his back to shield me between him and the stone and that was where they . . .’ she fell silent, stunned by the force of that memory.

  ‘Where was this?’

  ‘It’s the Bag Stone.’

  ‘Bag?’

  ‘From the old word for life, beagh. They brought sick people to sleep next to it.’

  ‘That house. That’s Bagstone Farm?’

  ‘Yes, that’s where the stone is.’

  ‘So then you say you died and, the next time, you were both born here again?’

  Gally looked at her mother, surprised at her tone of reasonable acceptance. ‘Oh. Yes, we must have been.’

  ‘You don’t remember that?’

  Gally realised to her surprise that it felt nowhere within easy reach, as if this second life had not been part of the canon of her central memories. She saw her mother turn away to stare bleakly across to the far hills.

  ‘I didn’t know this would happen,’ said Gally. ‘It was round the campfire. They were talking about the old castles here. Then the dig ended. Did they tell you?’

  ‘Yes. You went walking and you came straight here?’

  ‘We came to Alfred’s Tower,’ said Gally, remembering her sight of Ferney and his bicycle.

  ‘Oh, I think I’ve been there.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Before you were born. Is it the same place? It sticks up through the trees, all by itself. You climb up a spiral staircase. Is it near here?’

  ‘Very near.’ She nodded towards the north.

  ‘I’d like to go there,’ said Fleur, so they did and on the way, moving further from the village’s packed core of association and memory, Gally felt herself and her certainties stretching thin and her mother moving back into the vacuum. Fleur too was going through some sort of change. As they came out of the trees and saw the tower in the clearing she said, ‘Yes, that’s the place,’ with a catch in her voice, and then, ‘Can we go up to the top?’

  Gally felt a froth of anxiety at the centre of her being. Ferney and Pen were still out there but they felt at full arm’s stretch, like a rescuer just clinging on.

  They climbed to the roof and the girl saw tears streaming down the woman’s face as she stood there looking out. She was astonished. In all their life together, even when they were running from the press in Yorkshire, even on the one and only time they had visited her father’s grave, she had never once seen Fleur cry.

  ‘What’s wrong, Mum?’

  ‘We came here.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Me and Toby – me and your dad.’

  ‘Why are you crying?’

  ‘I’m not crying,’ Fleur said fiercely. She looked away and they stood in silence. ‘He didn’t want me to climb up here,’ she said after a while. ‘He didn’t want me to but I did anyway.’ She sounded much younger, but only for a moment. ‘He wasn’t going to stop me,’ she said, and she was Fleur again.

  ‘Why didn’t he want you to climb up?’

  ‘Because of you. I was five months pregnant. He thought the stairs might be icy.’

  ‘Icy?’

  ‘It was a freezing day, just after the New Year. It wasn’t open, but it was for his work. He used to advise on a lot of ancient buildings. That was the part of his job he liked best. They put us up in a nice pub, somewhere near here.’

  It was the first time she could ever remember her mother talking about him. Fleur’s face changed shape as she talked, as if what had been bones were only muscles after all and had finally relaxed. She went on talking as if to herself. ‘He ran all the way up to the top to make sure it was safe for me before he’d let me come up too. I had a bit of a wobble when I got there and that upset him.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘How can I answer that?’

  ‘Well, were you happy? Was he a kind man?’

  Fleur turned away, facing into a swirl of wind which lifted a twisting cloud of leaves towards them. When she turned back, her face had set into its familiar shape again ‘He left me.’

  ‘Left you? He died.’

  ‘That wasn’t the deal.’ She blinked. ‘Come on, tell me what happened here.’

  But distance had its effect and as the girl tried to tell the story of the boy below with his bicycle, she faltered. It sounded to her as if she was relating a tale told to her by someone else. The boy with the bicycle was now everything that mattered to her and she could not see him, could barely even feel him any more through Jo’s eyes and the cladding of Jo’s mind. The land stretched out below her was scenery in a film, not the setting of her life as it had been. She stared south down the ridge, reaching out towards him, but it was faint comfort and it did not help her with her words so in the end she stumbled to a halt, leaving the story half-told and her mother unmoved and incurious.

  They walked most of the way back to the village in silence but for Gally it was a happier silence, strengthening with every step. Fleur stopped by the car and put her hands on her hips. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘enough nonsense. Now you’ll kindly explain the main thing you keep dodging.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Let’s forget about all this past lives stuff for a minute. The simple question is, who is this man Martin and why have you been visiting the house of a murderer? I’d like an answer, please.’
r />   Gally turned to the church gate, knowing that she had gone too far down the path of explanation to turn back now. ‘This is difficult,’ she said, ‘but the best way I can explain it is to show you something.’

  She led her mother to the grave and Fleur watched, baffled, as her daughter knelt on the grass in front of it. ‘Who is it?’ she demanded, then bent to read the inscription. ‘Gabriella and Rosie Martin? They were the names the policeman said. What‘s this got to do with you?’

  ‘Gabriella was Mary Martha Gabriella when she was christened, but as she got older she preferred Gabriella. She didn’t know why, except that she liked to shorten it.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘To Gally.’

  Fleur looked back down at the gravestone. ‘So what’s this supposed to mean?’

  ‘Do you see the date on the grave?’ She bent and traced it with her finger, ‘There, January 31st 1994.’

  ‘That’s before you were born.’

  ‘Four months before I was born, yes.’

  Fleur knelt down next to her and stared at the gravestone. ‘Are you trying to tell me this Gabriella was you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So who was Rosie?’

  ‘My daughter.’

  ‘So Gabriella Martin was married to Michael Martin, the man I met at that cottage, the one whose phone number you gave the girls, and he’s the one who murdered his wife and his daughter? Murdered you?’

  ‘It’s not true.’ She didn’t know exactly what happened but she knew it wasn’t that.

  ‘So you tell me. How did they both die?’ Her mother stopped herself, got to her feet, rubbed dry grass cuttings from her skirt and reached out to touch the gravestone as if she needed to know it was really there.

  Gally could not respond because a kaleidoscope of deaths was whirling through her from all corners of the graveyard earth. A middle-aged woman came out of the church carrying an armful of wilting flowers and walked past them towards the gate. Fleur swung round.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Do you live here?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ the woman answered. ‘Just down there.’ The armful of flowers turned her gesture into a vague and hampered movement which took in half the available three hundred and sixty degrees.

  ‘I wonder,’ Fleur said, ‘could you possibly tell us what happened to these two?’ She pointed down at the gravestone and the other woman read the inscription, looking surprised.

  ‘Oh, the Martins. We only moved here the year before but I remember it well. Everyone was talking about it.’

  ‘How did they die?’

  ‘Well, that was the question, wasn’t it? Still is. We all thought at the time that he’d done it, the husband, but he got off.’ She dropped her voice. ‘He still lives in the village. I don’t think anybody talks to him but my neighbour knew them and she reckons it wasn’t him at all.’ She nodded towards the stone. ‘She reckons it was her, the mother, that did it. Said she went a bit bonkers. Postnatal depression, she thought. Poisoned the poor little thing. You’re not a relation, are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you just passing through then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s just I ought to ask. Neighbourhood Watch, you know. We have to keep an eye on the church and everything. Oh dear, what’s wrong with your daughter?’

  Gally had sunk to the ground and was clenching and unclenching her fists. Her face was white, her eyes wide and staring.

  ‘Jo?’ said her mother. ‘Now what’s wrong?’

  ‘Ferney, I need Ferney.’

  ‘Come with me. Let’s get you in the car.’ But the girl seemed unable to walk so Fleur and the other woman had to take an arm each and half carry her to the BMW.

  ‘Is she ill?’ the other woman asked.

  ‘I’ll see to her. Don’t worry.’

  ‘The cottage,’ said Gally in tones of desperation as her mother started the car. ‘Take me to the cottage. He’ll be there. He must be there. Or the hill.’

  ‘Yes,’ said her mother and drove south, but at the junction below the village, where the cottage lay to the left, she turned right.

  ‘No,’ said Gally, urgently. ‘It’s back that way. Turn round.’

  ‘It may be,’ said her mother, ‘but I’m not going there. Home’s this way. We’re going home.’

  ‘I have to go back to him.’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere near him, whoever he is.’

  ‘No. Stop the car.’

  They came to the slip road on to the A303 and Fleur accelerated.

  ‘Don’t. Stop it. I’m not coming. I can’t. I don’t belong with you.’

  ‘Yes you do,’ Fleur shouted back at her. ‘You bloody well do. I’ve had enough of all this rubbish. I should never have trusted those two. You’re going to stop it right now and you’re going straight back on the pills.’

  Gally tugged the handle and tried to push the door open against the wind. Fleur lunged past her, the car snaking and a horn blowing behind her. The door slammed shut and she hit the central locking button.

  ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ the girl cried.

  ‘I’m responsible for you. I’m doing it for you, not to you.’

  She tried to reach the ignition key to turn the engine off but her mother slapped her hand hard. She flinched away, looked back, and there was the heart-punching sight of the receding ridge through the back window. The village and him and love and safety and her future were all leaving her, disappearing backwards at eighty miles per hour, and she knew she could not stand it.

  ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ she said wretchedly.

  ‘No, I don’t. I need to get you home.’

  ‘But that’s my home,’ Gally wailed.

  ‘Home is where your family is. I’m your family, in case you’d forgotten.’

  ‘Can’t we just stop for a minute?’

  ‘I’m not stopping.’

  Her mother accelerated again, pulling out to pass a truck. The speedo was touching ninety.

  ‘But I owe them.’

  ‘Who’s them?’

  ‘Ferney and . . . and Mike, for what I did.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  Five miles back Gally could have answered that clearly, but they were still doing over eighty and her clarity was fading away at more than a mile a minute.

  ‘You saw, back there.’

  ‘I didn’t see anything that made sense. You tell me, what did I see?’

  She couldn’t answer. Fleur glanced at her and she was frowning, her mouth working as if words were reaching her lips then turning back.

  ‘I don’t know any more,’ she whispered in the end, and all she did know was that something was dying inside her and she might never see him again and she didn’t even know who it was she might not see again. Her head was full of ghosts and there was nobody to save her.

  Fleur shot a quick glance at her daughter as she braked for the Ilchester roundabout, wondering if she would make another bid to open the door, but her eyes were closed. They opened again a few miles further on and she jumped as her daughter screamed.

  ‘I killed him,’ she said. ‘I know I did. Edgar. I sent you off and you died. Sebbi, why did they take you? Ferney, don’t go. Keep away. You can’t have him. No, don’t do that. It’s not your fault. It will be all right.’ Her mother looked at her in horror, seeing the girl’s head jerking from side to side and her eyes focusing far away, then she dropped her voice as if talking to a child or maybe a pet. ‘Sebbi’s dead, poor Sebbi’s dead and Ferney too. Why should Gally stay? What’s to keep me?’

  ‘Jo,’ said her mother. ‘Stop it. I don’t like this.’

  ‘Put it down, Rosie. Don’t be frightened, darling. Don’t be frightened. I’ll explain when you’re older.’ The girl began to sing in a harsh voice,

  ‘Alone on the hill in the mist’s winter smoke

  That’s when loneliness cuts like a knife

  For death still has power to play its old joke />
  When it takes away only one life

  When it takes away only one life . . .’

  ‘They can’t hurt us, brother,’ she called, and her voice was different again. ‘There’s only you and me. Leave him. Don’t hurt him.’

  For the rest of that interminable journey, she alternated between eyes closed silence and sudden outbursts of what seemed to Fleur’s ears to be increasingly random nonsense, until at last Fleur nosed the car into the garage at the Exeter flats and turned the engine off. Jo suffered herself to be led up the stairs by the arm, and when Fleur opened the door she went straight to her bedroom. When her mother looked in five minutes later she was asleep with her clothes still on.

  At eleven the next morning when Ali and Lucy rang the bell, Fleur beckoned them into the kitchen, holding a warning finger to her lips. ‘She’s in her bedroom,’ she told them. ‘Can you go and see her?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Ali. ‘What’s she told you?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ said Fleur. ‘She hasn’t said a word since she got back.’

  ‘What, you mean she’s refusing to talk to you?’

  ‘I wish it was as simple as that, but it’s more like she can’t talk any more. She looks at me as if she wants to but she just can’t. I don’t know what’s going on, but you’re going to tell me, aren’t you? Right now.’

  CHAPTER 27

  Fleur interrogated the two girls, making them describe the whole trip from the moment they left Exeter to the moment they came back.

  ‘Did anything else happen?’

  ‘Nothing that matters,’ Ali said. Lucy shook her head.

  ‘She didn’t bang her head or fall over or anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you take any drugs? I won’t be angry. I just need to know.’

  ‘We drank wine round the fire at the dig. We had a beer in a pub when we were walking,’ said Lucy. ‘We looked old enough because of the dirt. She ate some mushrooms.’

  ‘Magic mushrooms?’

  Lucy flinched. ‘No, the ordinary kind.’

  ‘I would say Jo’s psychotic,’ Fleur said. ‘She’s never been as bad as this before. It must be drugs of some sort. Come on. You have to tell me.’