How I slept that night, I will never know. The fear must have finally exhausted me. Worn down, I simply closed my eyes and slept, undreaming, until seven, later than I’d planned. The camp was slowly waking around me as I made my final preparations, closed up the back of the van and settled at the driver’s seat, ready to go. The beep of my phone startled me and I had to rummage around to find it, slipped under the seat, glowing with a message.
Get out of the van.
I looked at it stupidly for a moment. The number of the sender was blocked. It beeped again.
Get out of the van.
A minute must have passed. Around me people were getting up, exchanging brief pleasantries, running water, boiling kettles. A dog barked. A child cried, then laughed. Music played somewhere. Another beep.
Get out of the van now.
Before I did, some instinct had made me grab my pack, my precious Leicas, map and notebook, but everything else I owned was in there, neatly packed away. For one more minute the van just sat there, gleaming a little in the morning sunshine. And then it was gone, replaced by a ball of flame, the whoofing sound reaching me before the sight of it did, so that it seemed a magical transformation, untouched by reality. Children scattered, people turning to watch as I stood rooted and open mouthed and watched my world burn. The bones and structure of the van showed starkly through the billowing flame and smoke.
There was one final message on my phone, coming through even as I stood and watched, thinking about calling the fire brigade. Two letters – NN – and then a string of six digits. A map reference. And a familiar one.
Fury replaced fear instantly. In the distance, sirens were sounding. Someone else had called the fire brigade. I heard a timid noise behind me. It was the old couple from the next door caravan, who had emerged in their night clothes and were staring at me in horror.
I rounded on them. ‘Who did you tell? Why have you been spying on me?’
The man shook his head, bewildered, pushing his wife behind him as I approached. She cowered behind him, her face slack with fear.
‘Did you see who did this?’ I asked, shouted. ‘Did you see? Did you send me those messages?’
He hadn’t put his teeth in, I saw. His face was shrunken, suddenly ancient. His wife whimpered and he clutched at her hand. I waved the phone at them. ‘Did you?’ They backed away, still staring at me, and then stumbled back into the safety of their caravan. The phone still glowed in my hand, a smug reminder. I threw it into the flames.
I didn’t wait for the arrival of the police and the fire brigade and all the rest of officialdom. The fire was already subsiding as the petrol in the tank burned out and with the dying of the flames the extent of the damage was clear. The bare framework had survived but the paint was blistered right off, the tyres gone, everything in the interior a mass of still burning wood and fabric. It was destroyed. People were gathering around it at a safe distance, drawn by the rising column of smoke, their eyes catching the reflection of the dancing flames. Quietly I threaded myself through the flow of people, slipping behind their watching backs. The sirens were coming, I could hear them, could see in the distance the red bulk of the fire engines and preceding them, speeding in, the blue strobing lights of the police. I had to get away before they found me, before I got caught up in their questions. I turned my face away and down, and hurried towards the train station.
The taint of smoke was still on my face when I boarded the train, the map reference still burned onto my mind’s eye. I had recognized it immediately because it was one I had written down myself that morning. It was still in my notebook – one of the golden eagle sightings I’d seen on the internet. David must have been behind those too, luring me onwards into ever lonelier locations. This was the loneliest of all. A train would get me part of the way there, but the rest would be on foot, a long walk according to the map, fifteen miles of walking deep into the high hills, far from the reach of roads. The spot pinpointed on the map showed no particular place or summit, just a shoulder of mountain, pressing out beside a steep cliff into a corrie, a ruined hut, no track or path or road within miles. I sat with the map spread open on my knee and watched the countryside rattle past, listening to the voices flowing indifferently around me.
As I got off the train and shouldered my pack I felt no sense of hesitation, the fear all burned away, replaced by a kind of blank determination. There was but a brief walk along the road and then onto a path that led out into the mountains. The morning was just getting going, the sun already high and warming the air. Above me black birds circled like dust, their calls croaking and deep. Rooks, I thought at first, squinting up at them, but then my eyes adjusted to their scale against the looming mountain. Great black birds with a wedge-shaped tail and a huge wingspan, much bigger than a rook or crow. Ravens.
I squared myself to the path and began the long walk in.
RAVENS REVISITED
He was ready for me, waiting, totally unsurprised. He must have had hours, I realized, to observe my approach, watching me toil steadily towards him from the moment I stepped off the path in the valley and began the long climb upwards. By then I was no longer thinking about what I was climbing towards, or why I was doing it. I had set my teeth for the last burst of effort and faced the final slope and he chose his moment well. The light had been fickle and changing all day as the wind set the clouds racing, their shadows playing across the whole emptiness of the valley. As the sun appeared from behind a cloud, he stepped out from the loose crown of rocks where he had been hiding so his shadow reached out towards me, cast black across the bright radiance of the heather. I was forced to look straight into the sunlight, squinting, unable to make him out. It was as though he had appeared out of nowhere.
‘David,’ I said, and that was all I could say before he grabbed my arm, looking hastily over his shoulder, scanning the bare expanses of the mountain.
‘Are you alone?’ he asked, and I knew then the stupidity of what I had done, the futility of coming out here to confront him. ‘Does anyone know you are here?’
Maybe I should have bluffed it out then, told him I’d talked to the police, threatened him with exposure. Anything better than the craven shake of my head as I struggled to free my arm from his grip, my struggles getting fiercer as he drew his face closer to mine and hissed at me how stupid I’d been, how foolish, how little I saw, how little I understood. And his words only served to echo my own thoughts, my own recriminations.
‘Don’t you see what danger you’re in?’ he asked, as though to taunt me. ‘Have you really no idea?’ And then his other hand grasped me too, so that I was pinned by him, both arms trapped by my sides. The pack on my back left me feeling destabilized, pulling me off balance as I struggled to free myself to no avail. Then I felt the weight of my fury descend and after that there were no more words. The speech I’d prepared in my head about leaving me alone and letting me get on with my life evaporated in the need, the fierce animal need I felt to be free of him, free of his grip. It was a grim and silent struggle, him against me, twisting around on the rough grass and loose scree up there in the shelter of the rocks. Terror lent strength to my arms and one last explosive burst of effort pulled me free of his grasp, free and falling backwards onto the turf.
Him against me. That’s what I thought it was when I fell sprawling and saw how we had moved in our struggle, right to the edge of a steep drop. The ground was sloping away from me, loose stones and grit as much as grass, the drop gathering momentum towards the final plunge down to the waiting rocks below. We were poised right over it and he was stronger than me, bigger and fitter and not encumbered by a pack, at home on this ground. Him against me. Acting in self-defence. Those were the words I comforted myself with afterwards, through the long dark hours of the night. I was frightened and it was fear as much as fury that had me scrabbling for a stable footing, trying to get upright, bracing myself as he loomed over me, grabbing at me once more. It was fear, not fury, that made me shake him off even
as I realized he was off balance now, that he was saying something, words I didn’t listen to, didn’t want to hear. They changed into a gasping plea for help as he lost his footing on the uncertain turf. I let him turn towards the sloping drop, his feet scrabbling on the loose scree, his words dying as his grabbing hold grew desperate. He was grabbing for his life, trying to stop the acceleration of his fall. It was because I was frightened that I shook him off, even as his grip failed on my arm and he slipped, tumbling and twisting, pulled inexorably towards the drop, even as my last wrenching kick for freedom sent him to his death.
It’s easy to say that it all happened so fast, that what really happened was confused and unclear. But it wasn’t fast, not really, not that last bit as his hand lost its grip on my arm and he slipped, twisting and grabbing at the loose rocks and grass. Although I tried not to, I heard his last words, his last despairing gasp as he reached out towards me, his hand coming out even as his body slipped away, retreating, inevitable as the tide. And I caught the last look in his eyes as he realized he was falling and that there was nothing that would stop him. His mouth opened and he asked me to help him, and I couldn’t, it was too late, there was nothing I could do but watch. Watch him as he fell. It happened in the stretch of a reaching hand, not quite reaching far enough. Him or me, I had thought, it was him or me, and nobody could blame me for acting in self-defence.
And yet even so, the words echoed still and wouldn’t be chased out, however far and furiously I walked, trying to drive them away. ‘Help me,’ he had said as he reached out. ‘Help me,’ as he had slipped, had fallen. Help me. And I hadn’t.
After the long hard night spent in the bothy, I spent the next day crossing the hills, walking like one possessed. The ravens were a constant, brooding presence. I kept my eyes down, avoiding the sight of them, and walked all the faster, spurred on by the need to get away. The landscape was empty, scoured clean, valley after valley, hill after hill with just sheep and moorland, seemingly untouched by man. I stumbled on blindly for hours and the thought was there that it might in the end be better if I just died out here in the hills, but in the end I found I could not quite shake off my own sense of self-preservation. I came to a path and I took it, conscious of the day drawing on, of the need to find shelter. Other walkers appeared, bright dots of colour strung out along the path, and then, further along, I caught the glint from the windscreens of cars parked in a lay-by below.
By the time I reached it, I didn’t need to feign tiredness to cadge a lift back to the nearest town. There there were rows of anonymous bed and breakfasts, ready to take me in. I had cash, plenty of cash, taken out in readiness for the journey down south. I found the cheapest place I could and crashed in my single room, bone tired, and slept the last dreamless sleep I would have for weeks.
I meant to move on, but somehow I didn’t. I was weary of moving. I feared being found, hunted down, and was still haunted by the sensation of being watched, but hiding seemed better than flight for I had nowhere else I could flee to. I had no idea when someone would report David missing, or when I myself would be missed, when his body would be found, when we would be linked in some way or another. I husbanded my cash carefully, not wanting to take out any money from my account and give away my location. At some point I would run out of cash, and then I would have to decide what to do. But for the first few days I simply kept my head down and waited.
I spent my days out walking, not in the hills but around the few streets of the town, pacing its bounds. There were enough tourists there to render me inconspicuous for a while, just another holidaymaker on a walking holiday. The town was a strange little pocket of neat pebbledashed houses and clipped lawns set down among the brooding hills. I passed the tiny stone-built police station every day as I walked and I kept my eyes down, my head averted. I sat in the miniature park with its immaculate grass and bright flower beds and tried to think, trying to get my story straight. Above me, high and distant, I saw or thought I saw the ravens, riding the air, watching, waiting for something to feast on, their presence a grim remembrance of death. Not just David’s, but my mother’s.
‘Did she fall?’ the police had asked me, over and over, but the answer to me seemed self-evident. Of course she fell, everything falls, in the end, after all, the same acceleration, ten metres per second per second, towards the waiting earth. Accident or suicide or murder, it all ends the same way. It’s how it starts that’s important.
Zannah asked me the same question too, years back, before we called a truce, weary of picking over the same ground. She had taken me on some ill-thought pilgrimage to find the spot where it had all happened, as though the answers might be lying there, broken on the promenade. Did she fall? she asked, and I knew then, too, what the question really meant: did she fall or was she pushed? Did she fall or did she jump?
I said I didn’t know, and that was the truth. I could tell her only what I saw, the darkening of the air, and in the strange atmosphere of the sea mist that was all that there had been to see: a thickening shadow passing over me, like the darkening of the sky in an eclipse. A sight that I could never properly put into words. A sight that I had never managed to shake from my mind’s eye.
But Zannah heard only something simpler, a fact.
‘So you didn’t. . .’ she hesitated and changed tack in mid sentence. ‘You weren’t at the top of the cliff then? Dad was wrong?’
‘Did you ever believe that I had . . .’ I couldn’t say the words either, as though that might break the enormity of the accusation, make it seem likely, make it real. Her eyes met mine and her silence said more than she ever could.
She broke her gaze and turned and hugged her knees. We were sat on the sea wall where we thought my mother had gone over. Even that had been hard enough to establish with any certainty. I remembered the scene with such clarity – the houses neatly spaced, the clipped green hedges hallucinatory in the thinning mist, the road so suburban in its ordinariness, but ending abruptly in open air and nothingness – yet now I could recognize none of it. Hedges had grown, houses had changed. The retirement home I remembered had gone completely, replaced by crammed-in houses canted at awkward angles to catch their glimpse of the sea. Only the car park and the steps were as we remembered them, and even then there was no real rush of recognition, just a sense that this must be it, after eliminating everywhere else.
We had gone back on a day of bright breezy sunshine, clouds scudding over the sea and casting shifting shadows on its surface. In my memory the place had had an eerie silence, even the sea muffled, but now it was loud with the waves and with birds, the sounds of voices carried up in bursts from the promenade below. But Zannah remembered it differently. She had no memory of the silence.
‘I heard her scream,’ she said, kicking her heels against the wall and talking to her fingernails.
‘You were with Dad, though,’ I said. ‘In the car.’
She shook her head. ‘I decided to wait for him at the top. But I didn’t see her. Not here in the car park. She must have jumped from somewhere else, over there, further west.’
‘It was right by those steps.’ The steps I’d been climbing, racing to get to her, trying to undo the thing, the terrible thing that I’d done. She had to have jumped from them or near by them, had to have. Because she went right over me, passing like a dark shadow in the air. And fell in silence past my outstretched hand. Too far, just too far, to reach.
Zannah shook her had again and then we sat, replaying our respective memories. The truth seemed stretched somewhere between them, unreachable.
‘You didn’t see her?’ I asked again.
‘Only the scream,’ she said. ‘That’s what I remember.’
After a pause I said, ‘You thought I’d pushed her,’ and I kept it flat, uninflected, not a question, but a statement.
She dropped her head and cradled it in her arms, resting them on her knees, balling herself up tight against the memories. ‘I didn’t know what to think.’
; ‘Is that what you thought Dad meant, when he blamed me?’
She looked up now, frowning. ‘Isn’t it? What else could he have meant?’
And I said nothing further, for there was nothing more I could say. We drove back to her flat then in silence but I felt her gaze returning to my face over and over, dark with suspicion, not quite dispelled. She opened her mouth when I dropped her off, as though to get in the last word, but then she thought better of it and merely waved. We never returned to the subject again.
The room in the B&B had a mirror over the sink, flyblown and faded with age. My face in it seemed remote, receding. Long sleepless nights had hollowed out my eyes. More and more I saw my mother’s features looking back at me, as though she were taking me over. I thought I caught too in my face her look of desperation, the one I had glimpsed sometimes at her worst times, as though there were another person looking out through her eyes, pleading for release.
At night I had stopped trying to sleep. I sat at the open window and my thoughts flew further back, into my childhood, before all our troubles began. Africa seemed more real to me then than the neat rows of houses, silvery in the moonlight. My mother’s voice floated through the night, caressing, addressing the unknown darling, whispering down the phone. I listened to her lies. Juma had been told off the next morning, harangued like a sullen child by my father for using the phone. He didn’t defend himself, but stood with his eyes down, saying nothing, absenting himself in all but the physical sense. I stood in the doorway listening, saying nothing either. She sat there too and listened, the picture of ease. A long drink clinked in her hand, ice cubes cracking cold against the gin. I could hear the faint fizz from the tonic. Occasionally her eyes would drift over my face as though in challenge, daring me to tell the truth.
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