They were only words, after all, only air and noise hardly louder than the panicked cries of the gulls, and just as meaningless. And even then, it wasn’t too late, wasn’t too late as my mother made her way slowly, painfully slowly up those steps. I was young enough, fit enough to stop her, any time, as she climbed up and up and disappeared into the mist. Instead I stood and watched her go in silence, raised not a hand to save her. And waited there alone until my nerve broke and I pounded up the steps, hoping it wasn’t too late, too late for me to stop her, pounding upwards until I thought my heart would burst; until the sky darkened briefly like an eclipse, darkened with her passing. I heard nothing as she fell.
And then I looked at him again and saw that the intelligence I’d seen was just a trick of the light, a passing glimmer, and he was just an ordinary man with dark hair and dark eyes, his mind on his next cigarette, and he had known no more about it than my father, distraught and not knowing what he said, had done. I fought back the urge to confess, nodded non-committally as he went on.
‘I was thinking suicide pact you know, initially, you and the young lad, but now we’ve got this third character on the scene, I’m not so sure. I’m beginning to wonder if you were set up.’
And like the last fragment of a kaleidoscope pattern slipping into place, I saw it suddenly come clear and true, the image I’d been seeking these last couple of days, the truth of it.
We went back by train, two trains, seven hours to cover a month’s journey. Zannah handled everything – the tickets, the packing, the conversation. She sat opposite me, travelling backwards, speaking of the past, speaking of her dreams. I watched her faint reflection in the window as I listened. In the tunnels she sprang into sharper relief, her eyes meeting mine, acknowledging that I was paying her attention, that I was listening to her at last.
‘Listen, Manda, now this is over, I should let you know. I’m going back to Tanzania. They’ve offered me a job out there, in Dad’s college. Teaching business administration. Why don’t you come too? they’re crying out for people with IT, and there’s nothing keeping you here.’ She talked of her plans and smiled secretly to herself at the thought of it, of her escape. I watched her head lift and her shoulders relax, and the busy animation of her hands as she talked. She was restless in her seat, poised to be off.
‘As soon as I made the decision, I felt I was whole again,’ she said. ‘Coming home, that’s how I think of it. As though these past twenty years have just been one huge mistake.’
‘Zugenruhe,’ I said suddenly, my eyes on her reflection still.
‘Zugen who?’ she asked, smiling, but I didn’t answer. I was remembering Tom’s watchful gaze on me in the kitchen as I battered against his four walls in my eagerness to get away. There was something she wasn’t telling me, I could see that, some extra secret that she was fizzing with. Something that made her happy, that made her curve her arms around her body and hug herself as she gazed out over the wide expanse of the North Sea. Scotland gave way to England as the shadows lengthened and the flatlands stretched out around the train. Clumps of cooling towers advanced and retreated in their slow dance across the landscape. The train rocked and screeched until it slowed to crawl through the brick canyons of London and into the smoky darkness of King’s Cross. Zannah kept her silence as we travelled west to her flat, although at times I caught her opening her mouth as though to break it, then thinking better of it. It was only as we collapsed onto the sofa, in among half-packed boxes and all the paraphernalia of departure, that she finally broke down and told me.
‘There’s something else,’ she said. ‘I’m not going alone.’
‘I thought there was something you weren’t telling me,’ I said, and I was unworried, unafraid, oblivious of the coming blow.
‘I hesitated because I thought it might be a bit of a sore point,’ she said.
‘Anyone I know?’
‘Yeah,’ and she looked down at her hands before looking up, peering up through her hair almost coyly. And even as she spoke my heart sank and then gave one convulsive leap of fear. ‘It’s Tom.’
When I awoke, the air was frantic with sirens, the disregarded background wail of London. They filled me with an undercurrent of unease as I slowly realized where I was, remembered what had happened. Something was nagging at me, insistent, urgent, a sense of danger. Words, my father’s words. ‘Look after her, Manda,’ and Zannah’s hand so trustingly placed in mine, as though I might after all be able to protect her.
The conversation we’d had the night before came back to me. I hadn’t known how to get through to Zannah. All I had at the time was a seething mass of suspicions, circumstantial, no proof, the evidence gone. Handwriting in a notebook, David’s words re-remembered in a different context, an unfounded sense of unease. How could I put it into words, the feeling of something slipping into place, a pattern coming true, suddenly, after being muddled and unfocused? What I had said had come out wrong and she had turned it on its head, accusing me of jealousy.
‘You can’t bear to see him happy with someone else, that’s all,’ she said. ‘You can’t bear to see me happy.’
Tom had called her after I’d left that day in the van, wondering if she knew where I’d gone. She hadn’t then, but the minute I got back in touch, she’d told him. That was when the trouble started. And everything I’d told her since – where I was going, where I had been, the problems with the van – it had all been faithfully relayed to him. He’d always been better on the phone than he had been in person, I remembered that now. He came across as more relaxed, cooler, less intense. They’d talked nightly, week after week, always on his mobile because he said his land-line wasn’t working. Gradually they’d talked less and less about me, and started to talk about other things, other subjects, Tom’s own worries, Zannah’s hopes and fears. And then, at the time when I disappeared again, Tom had gone silent for a few days before showing up at Zannah’s flat looking dishevelled and drawn, with three days’ growth of beard. He’d eaten half a loaf’s worth of toast and then slept on her sofa for almost twenty-four hours. At what point he’d transferred into her bed, and how, she wouldn’t tell me.
‘What’s this?’ she shouted finally. ‘Christ, Manda, get your thrills somewhere else. You didn’t want him but now you’ve changed your mind? Or now you just want him hanging on around you, keeping stringing him along? Can’t you not begrudge me one little piece of happiness in my life, something that’s mine?’
‘He’s using you, Zannah,’ I shouted back. ‘Can’t you see that? Using you to get at me.’
‘It’s not all about you, Manda.’
‘Jesus Christ, Zannah,’ I said. ‘I was trying to hide.’
‘Yes, but not from Tom,’ she wailed. ‘Not from Tom.’
The police had told us David had gone up to Scotland ‘with a friend’, a trip to recuperate, an ideal convalescence. Fresh air and exercise, a little birdwatching, beautiful scenery, what could be more helpful to a fragile young man who’d had a difficult time of it? But they had never mentioned the name of the friend. Someone who’d suggested the trip, had arranged it, had chosen Aviemore as the destination. Someone who had done all the damage to the van, who had hounded me up the length of the country. Someone who had camped up there in the bothy, awaiting my arrival in that lonely spot.
‘If it wasn’t David, it could have been anyone,’ she objected. ‘Gareth, even. He warned you off Tom, didn’t he?’ But Gareth’s handwriting was an untidy sprawl, his notebooks a mess of crossings out. The notebook I’d found in the bothy had the neat precision of one of Tom’s.
‘It was Tom’s handwriting, I should have recognized it at the time,’ I insisted. ‘It must have been Tom who was up there with David.’
‘So you say,’ she said. ‘But it’s all just what you say, isn’t it? Maybe there was nobody else up there at all. Maybe there was no damage to the van, no notebook. Maybe you made it all up.’
There was nothing more we could say about it after that.
She apologized, backed off, and I was exhausted enough to be persuaded that we should sleep, that we could discuss it again in the morning. I had forgotten her cunning at getting her own way, her persistent refusal to give up, until I had woken to the dawning realization that the flat was empty, that she had gone to Tom, walking as confidingly as a child into a danger she couldn’t understand.
I wasted time even then, ringing her phone and getting no answer, ringing Tom’s phone and getting through to his voicemail. I even walked round the confines of the flat, opening doors, hoping against all expectation that she would appear, somehow, among the wilderness of boxes. But the rooms were all empty. Zannah was gone.
Once outside her flat the unaccustomed bustle of rush-hour London hit me. I was hurrying now, struggling through crowds, dodging and weaving through the indifferent mass of people. The tube was no better, nightmarishly lit, a press of backs and elbows and shoulders swaying as it screeched through the dark, stopping and starting, waiting endlessly in tunnels. The passengers around me seemed dazed, comatose, uncaring whether the train moved or not, staring at nothing. How could they be so calm? I scrambled through the doors at Paddington and forced my way up to the concourse, trying to get my bearings. Train after train delivered endless waves of people, all unspeaking, moving with the relentless fixed purpose of automatons. Every face was a blank, unseeing, a multitude intent on their journey. I pinballed between them until I found a train that would take me out west, back to the place I’d called home. Only as London gave up its grip and the fields spread out around the tracks could I begin to relax, begin to plan what I would do next.
The taxi driver was reluctant to drop me off at the gate to the forest.
‘Here?’ he said. I could see his point. There was nothing but trees, even the gate well hidden behind the summer growth of weeds.
‘Here,’ I insisted. ‘It’s OK, I’m meeting friends.’ He gave me one of his cards and I could see him peering at me in his mirrors as he prepared to drive off. I squared off my shoulders as I opened the gate, feigning a confidence I didn’t feel.
I wondered how I could ever have thought of this spot as a haven, a place of refuge. The leaves were dark now, and thick, and the air beneath them as cool and as still as deep water. Tom’s cottage was shut up against the bright sunlight of the clearing, and the trees seemed to have closed in around it. No Land Rover, but Zannah’s car was there, parked at an angle as though hurriedly abandoned. The cottage door was locked, the windows closed tight, curtains shut. Uselessly I called and waited, listening. There was no response.
No response, but there was a sound. I stood, tuning my ears in to the faint drone, barely audible against the noise of the forest. I could faintly hear the traffic from the road, rising and falling as the cars passed by. I could hear the birds, busy with their own dramas, as indifferent as the London crowds. I could hear the sound of leaves being touched by a slight breeze that came and went in a moment. And, borne in on that breeze, I could hear more clearly the rise and fall of a chainsaw, biting through wood.
There was nothing else to do but to walk towards it, drawn further and further into the woods, my unease deepening with every step. I found myself walking along an old neglected track, almost completely overgrown. Here and there I saw a broken branch, or a deep rut where the Land Rover had forced its way through, tearing at the overhanging vegetation. I paused every so often to get my bearings and each time the sound of the road had receded a little more, my sense of isolation grown. Then I hurried on, hastening towards the sound, stumbling on my way. The trees were thicker here, tangled with undergrowth, the ground heavy with dead leaves. Fallen trunks and branches were rotting slowly into the ground, new growth springing up in the gaps they’d left, consuming them, covering them over.
I was being drawn by the sound towards a clearing that shone lighter through the shadows of the trees. As I approached, I glimpsed the dark gleam of water, saw the lush green of a reed bed, and I recognized the spot. We’d come here once before, Tom and Gareth and I, back when the track was better, still easily negotiable. There were old brick pits here, long abandoned and half filled with water. We’d picnicked and watched the dragonflies dance in the shafts of sunlight, and the kingfishers flash by on the wing. I wondered now what Tom must have been thinking as he sat there watching us, Gareth and me, laughing and happy. Out of the blue, I had run to him, driven by fear. And then, when I must have seemed almost within his grasp at last, I had gone again, disappeared, tipping him over the edge.
As I took the last few steps towards the clearing, the sound of the chainsaw stopped at last. The forest noises filled the silence, reasserting themselves. There was a moment of stillness and calm. I could see through the trees Zannah and Tom, facing each other across the clearing, frozen there as though in a tableau. Tom had put the chain-saw down, but he held in his hand a sharp and shining bill-hook, its blade honed to razor thinness. I’d seen him wield it once, flaying a young sapling in a fit of impatience, splitting the tree from tip to stem like slicing through butter. His head was averted from her, looking upwards, and I could see his profile was a stony mask. I knew that look, that locked-down expression of total indifference, closing off all human contact, cold with rage. He was watching the tree that still stood between them defiant of gravity, a flay of bark around its base, its trunk cut through. It was an old oak, once magnificent, grown half leafless and gaunt, stag-headed, its branches home to a colony of rooks. I felt the sense of a stalemate between them, even as I stepped out into the open ground. Then the last rooks flew upwards from the surrounding trees as though they knew something was about to happen, their cries filling the air. Zannah’s eyes met mine and they were wide with fear, fear and something else, an acknowledgement that I was right, that I had been right all along. She screamed and as she screamed the tree fell, slowly at first, pushing its way through the surrounding branches, then accelerating towards the ground.
It should have missed them both. Tom knew how to drop a tree precisely, reading the weight and the lean, angling the cut so it fell where he wanted. But I saw him move towards her while she was distracted, the wicked blade held upwards in his hand, and I thought only to save her. I sprinted towards him, forgetting the tree, catching the small of his back so he staggered a step or two forward. And Zannah, instead of moving back to safety, ran in towards us just as it fell with an explosion of shattered wood, crashing into the hard dry ground. And under it lay Tom and Zannah, caught up in its tangled branches. I stopped in my tracks. All I could see at first was blood and all I could hear were the birds’ cries, as they circled in the suddenly opened air. Zannah lay motionless, but the blood was Tom’s, not hers, fountaining out, sparkling in the sun. His arms had flown up to protect himself and the tree had driven the blade of the bill-hook hard into his arm, severing the artery, draining him of life. By the time Zannah had come round from her brief stunning and scrambled unhurt from under the branch that had pinned her, he was dead.
Zannah backed away from me, white under the drying blood.
‘You’ve killed him,’ she whispered, but I knew better. I’d seen him start towards her, I’d seen the murderous intent. I had had no option, I knew. Look after her, my father said. Look after her, when so often it had been her looking after me. At last I had fulfilled my promise to him.
‘I saved your life,’ I said. ‘He was going to kill you.’ She remained silent, shaking her head in confusion, kneeling down beside his fallen body. Together we pulled him out from under the wreckage of the tree, knowing it was too late even as we did so. He lay inert and silent, his helmet knocked awry, arm twisted and gashed horribly open, still slick with all the blood.
‘I just wanted him to tell me the truth,’ she said.
‘You shouldn’t have come here,’ I said, but she dropped her head and wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t meet my eye. I wanted to give her some comfort, but I was afraid she’d shake me off, afraid she’d flinch away from me again in terror if I did. Finally I rea
ched out and tentatively touched her shoulder with my fingertip. She didn’t move.
‘I needed to know what had really happened,’ she whispered again finally, and then she just sat and looked down at him for a long time in silence as if waiting for an answer. ‘You know, I really thought he loved me.’ The tears washed pale clean streaks down her face. I had nothing to say in reply. She buried her face in her arms and sobbed while I stood uselessly by, my hand still resting on her shaking shoulder, watching her cry.
When the storm had passed and she was calm again, I pulled her up, unresisting, and led her back down the track to Tom’s cottage. The key was hanging where it always was, under the window sill beside the kitchen door. I washed her down as best I could, removing her blood-caked shirt and giving her mine, scrubbing the evidence clean from her skin while she sat silent and compliant with everything I did. I needed to erase all traces of her from the scene. I needed to let her get away.
‘When was your flight?’ I asked.
‘Tomorrow,’ she whispered. ‘I was going to change it, but I was too busy.’
‘Take it,’ I said, and she looked at me, the uncertain look of a child being given permission to do something it had barely dared even hope to do. ‘Take it, go.’
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