by Jane Jesmond
The last time we played the Game, seven months ago, the bricks didn’t hold. A warmish, humid day that had brought the biting insects out in force, distracting us from the climb, which was tedious anyway. Another old mine tower. Just a crawl up a brick wall, sandy and slippery. Dull. Until Grid fell. Or rather the top part of the wall fell, taking Grid with it and all the equipment he’d carefully placed to secure the rope. The force of his fall would have ripped me off the old windowsill I was sitting astride but the belay attached to an old iron bar held.
At first.
Inexorably but smoothly Grid’s weight bent the bar outwards until it gave way with a quiet crack and clattered after Grid, leaving me holding him. Inch by inch, my knees lost their grip on the stone. My muscles screamed as his weight hauled my legs over the rough granite.
I cut the rope. I had to. It was the logical, rational action. It’s something all climbers think about and hope will never happen to them, but we all know what we have to do. If I hadn’t cut it, I’d have fallen too. And taken the others with me.
I’ll never forget the climb down, wondering with each new hold whether the wall would collapse and, all the while, the noise of Grid screaming down below. Only the drugs turned off my waking nightmares of those moments.
‘No, Talan,’ I said now, in the windy car park, with the memories crowding my thoughts making it hard to get the words out. ‘No. I haven’t been climbing things.’
I couldn’t tell if he believed me.
‘Be careful, Jen. I won’t mention you in the report, but be careful.’
He opened the car door, pulling it against the wind.
‘Be careful?’
‘Yes.’
I was being careful. Very careful. Careful not to give myself away because I didn’t know what he meant.
‘It wasn’t me, Talan.’ He let the door go and it slammed shut. ‘I don’t climb any more.’ Then, because he still looked doubtful, I said. ‘Something happened and Kit made me promise.’
Talan smiled.
‘Kit told me you’d promised to stop climbing and I’m glad. You frightened me. But, don’t forget, you still have the caution. It’s on your record and if anyone finds out you were here they might put two and two together. It probably wouldn’t amount to anything, but you don’t know. This is a lighthouse. A functioning lighthouse. Not an old ruin in the back of beyond. They’ll take it seriously and with a caution on your record you’d be looking at a prison sentence, probably not long and probably suspended, but you don’t want that, Jen. You really don’t want that.’
Caution. So Talan knew about the caution and the accident. Of course he did. It had happened nearby. The local police had given me a caution and he was one of them. He was also my brother’s friend. And a good person, an upholder of the law. Talan the responsible and mature.
One unimportant mystery was solved. Talan must have been the person who told Kit about Grid’s accident. I’d wondered from time to time how he’d known. Talan had been the reason Kit came to find me at the hospital and screamed at me while I was desperate to get to Grid.
We hadn’t been able to move Grid on our own. It was clear when we got to the bottom. The ankle joint of his left leg had splintered and pierced the skin and his foot hung from it. It swayed when we tried to lift him. We needed specialist equipment and paramedics and when they came, they brought the police. Vince and Ricky slipped away. I told them to. We knew there was going to be trouble but I couldn’t leave Grid.
I’d admitted everything to the police. It was the quickest way out of the police station and to the hospital. They’d taken Grid into theatre but I didn’t know if he was going to come out with both feet still attached to his body and I had to be with him when he woke up, whatever the outcome. And while I was being interviewed, Talan had been calling Kit.
Talan patted my arm and I gave him a little wave as he got into his car and drove away from the lighthouse. I stood watching his car disappear for a while. It meant I could keep my back to the others as I waited for the panicky feeling that thinking about Grid’s accident always stirred up to subside. I’d talked about his fall time after time in rehab but reliving it never failed to strip the strength from my bones. The counsellors said that was good. That I needed to feel the loss and grief. I knew they thought that running away from it was what drove me into taking drugs. They were probably right. No, I was sure they were right, although sometimes it seemed as though I’d been running away from something else. Something that was still chasing after me.
I traipsed back to Gregory and Nick. My legs were still wobbly and all the rest of me ached or stung.
‘… And the metal eyelet in one of the corners is missing. Rusted right away, although it shouldn’t.’
Nick smiled at me. You shouldn’t, I thought. You don’t know how close you came to having your head smashed in last night. You don’t know what a messed up… mess I am.
‘Tied on with a bit of cord, it was. That’s gone missing, too.’
‘This?’ Nick said. He reached into his coat pocket and brought out a handful of frayed sash cord. ‘I found it. On the ground.’
I felt in my pocket. My piece was still there. Without thinking, I pulled it out.
‘Snap,’ he said. But they weren’t identical. His half had a knot in it. I took it from him and stared at it. My stomach lurched and I forced myself to breathe lightly and rapidly to control the nausea.
‘Ms Shaw,’ Nick said. ‘I’ll say goodbye for now. I live in what was Simon Mullins’s place, or so I’m told. I’m sure you know it?’
I forced my mind away from the rope, nodded and tried to smile. I wanted him to know I was grateful to him. For helping me. For keeping quiet in front of Talan and Gregory. Something flitted across his face in response.
‘Pop in some time,’ he continued. ‘I’ll show you my furniture.’
‘Furniture?’
‘Yes, I make it. Along with more run of the mill carpentry. I made some doors for your brother.’ He pulled a card out of his back pocket and handed it to me. For a brief moment our fingers met. A fleeting touch of warmth on my chilled skin. I would have liked to look at his hands, to have grabbed one and turned it over. You can tell a lot from hands.
‘And you can show me your car,’ he continued. ‘I assume the flashy beast in the car park is yours. I like Astons. Maybe you’d let me take it for a spin. If you trust me.’
It was impossible to tell if there was a threat in his words or amusement. His face was a blank too. Smooth as the slick slabs in Yosemite, squeezed out of the earth and polished by the slow passage of glaciers, it gave nothing away. I like a mystery and a challenge, and Mr Nick Crawford was certainly both of those.
Once he had left, I turned to Gregory.
‘When did Nick Crawford arrive in Craighston?’ I asked. ‘He’s not one of the normal no-hoper outsiders.’
But Gregory, gazing out to sea hadn’t heard me. I thought he didn’t listen much any more. The inner current of his thoughts preoccupied him and the rest of us were rocks in the river he bumped up against from time to time.
‘Well?’ I said.
‘Crawford? A while back,’ he said vaguely, and started hobbling back to his cottage.
I drove back to the hotel. I couldn’t face Kit. Not yet. And I couldn’t stay at the lighthouse. I needed somewhere quiet and impersonal to check what I’d seen was right. When I reached the car park, I picked up the knotted cord Nick had given me from the passenger seat on which I’d flung it, and examined it. It matched with the half that had been in my pocket, as I knew it would. The edge of the stone on the lighthouse must have cut some of the threads and the rest had snapped. I ran it through my hands like a nun with her rosary, slowing over the knot. The sickness I’d felt when I first saw it returned. I hadn’t tied that knot. I’d never have tied that knot. A reef knot. My fingers traced its flat inte
rlocking semi-circles. It’s an attractive knot in its neatness and simplicity. But yank too hard on one side of it and it slips through itself and comes undone. I never used it. Someone else had tied that knot. Someone else had been with me last night at the lighthouse. I tried to think what it meant but I couldn’t. Ideas flickered in my head but vanished as soon as I reached for them. Nothing made sense. A shiver crawled over my skin and I made a decision. I was going to grab some sleep, then go back to London. Back to rehab. I’d ring Kit and tell him where I was. Explain why I couldn’t come to see him. Force him to tell me what the problem was.
I thrust the rope out of sight under the car seat and looked up.
Shit.
Sofija, Kit’s wife, was in the hotel. In what must be the office behind Reception. The day was grim and dark and the light was on so I could see her clearly. Arguing, I thought, with someone I couldn’t see. Vivian? Her hands clenched in fists and the long black plait of her hair rose and fell with the rhythm of her words.
I slipped out of the car and closed the door softly, bent double and scuttled behind the van I was parked beside. Could I get in through the back door without her seeing me? Now was absolutely not the time for us to meet.
I peered round the back of the van. A quick dash across the tarmac and I’d be out of view of the window. I put the hood of my jacket up and prepared to run when strong hands gripped my shoulders from behind and dug themselves into the gaps between my bones. I gasped.
Six
Fright shut my brain down and my body took over. It threw my weight back onto my assailant and at the last moment, just before I collapsed against him, I kicked back onto his knee. He yelped, swore and released me. I spun round.
It was Kit. Bent over and clutching his knee.
‘What the hell did you do that for?’ he said.
‘What did you expect me to do? Next time try approaching from the front and saying “Hi Jen”,’ I snapped back, anger and surprise unravelling all my determination to stay calm when we met.
I made my breathing slow down. Kit straightened himself. My brother. Tall and stringy. It annoyed me he had Pa’s inches and I had Ma’s lack of them. He had Pa’s authority too. Mainly because of his hawkish nose and a certain confidence in his physicality that when you knew him well you learned was nothing more than that. Kit’s body was sure, his movements calculated and exact, but his mental gifts were confined to the laws of physics and engineering. Outside of that he was lost. And in the months since I’d last seen him, he’d developed a stoop in his shoulders and a way of looking at the ground rather than straight ahead that was new, along with the bitterness tightening his lips.
What had happened to us? We’d always been different people but, despite the four-year age gap, there’d been a bond between us, forged by our chaotic childhood and erratic parents.
Pa was often absent, away on a climbing expedition or in London meeting sponsors and raising money, and when he was at home, he was rarely alone, bringing fellow mountaineers with him. Eager voices and laughter echoed through the house as they shared experiences and planned future expeditions. Kit and I would hang around and wait for those rare occasions when Pa would have time to teach us to climb or take us on night-time jaunts over the moors, dumping us somewhere with a map and a compass and instructing us to find our way back to the road.
Ma wasn’t much better. Her awareness of us rose and fell like the tide. Sometimes she’d spend days with us, fishing for crabs in the rock pools below Tregonna or making costumes to celebrate the winter and summer solstices; other times she’d be absorbed in one of her many passions and spend hours alone making candles or taking long walks along the sea shore. If one of her sailing friends appeared we wouldn’t see her for days. Even when she was around, she was never very concerned about clean clothes and regular meal times.
Kits and I were happy, though, and in our parents’ absence, we looked out for each other. But our lives were very different to those of our friends and I think it was that realisation which held Kit and I so tightly together. No one else had a childhood like ours, so no one else understood the magic of those golden days when we roamed free through the grounds of Tregonna and the surrounding countryside.
Now, in the hotel car park, my brother shoved his hands into his pockets and tried to get his anger under control. His face, thinner than I remembered, calmed except for the occasional spark twitching the stretched skin round his eyes.
‘I thought I recognised your car,’ Kit said. ‘If you want to sneak around, you shouldn’t drive such a conspicuous one.’
‘I’m not sneaking around.’ I was angry too, but I made a better effort than Kit to control it. ‘I’m on my way to you.’
He gave me a look like he didn’t believe me and rubbed his knee again. I had been on the point of leaving without seeing him but I pushed the thought away.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘this is a great place for a family reunion.’
‘Yes. So it is. Another car park. Another occasion when you’ve come to Cornwall without telling us you’re here. We must stop meeting like this.’
I didn’t want to discuss the fight that had torn us apart. I didn’t want to discuss why I’d stayed at the hotel. I didn’t want to think about how Kit and I had ended up like this. I didn’t even particularly want to find out why Kit needed my help. Not now. But if I walked away I had a feeling the damage between us would be irreparable.
‘Kit. I’m here to see you. It’s not how it looks.’
He acted as though he hadn’t heard me. I felt my teeth grind, top against bottom.
‘For fuck’s sake, Kit. You’ve dragged me all this way with your mysterious mail. I’m freezing and I’m tired. Let’s go inside and talk.’
‘No.’
‘You want to talk here?’
‘No.’
‘Well, what the fuck do you want to do?’
The hotel door slammed and Sofija marched into the car park. When she recognised me, she hesitated for a second before looking over to Kit.
‘Well?’ he said.
She shook her head.
Sofija was thin, I thought. Terribly thin. She’d never been fat but there used to be a sturdiness about her. Some sense of the Bulgarian farmers her family came from, although they’d long since abandoned farming and become bank clerks and shop assistants. Now she looked as though the slightest touch would break her.
‘Not even a few days?’ Kit asked.
‘No, Kit. They’ve heard the rumours. You can’t blame them. They won’t wait for their money.’ She turned to me. ‘Hello, Jen. Are you the hotel’s mystery guest, then? The one who went out last night and came back in someone else’s car? Dripping wet?’
Only her pronunciation of ‘dripping’ gave her away. The hint of a guttural roll on the R and the falling tone of the vowel. Otherwise she sounded as English as I was. She looked me up and down and I saw a flicker of something in her still, dark eyes, a twitch in the muscles round her mouth as though she was holding something back. Was she angry with me too? But she stretched her lips into a smile.
‘Talan just passed by and told me you were back,’ Kit said.
I knew he would. I bet he’d gone and found Kit. I wondered what else he’d said.
‘Let’s go home,’ I said.
They looked at each other.
‘It’s cold,’ I said.
‘We can’t talk at Tregonna,’ Sofija said.
I sighed. ‘OK. So, Kit, why did you want to see me?’
Kit didn’t look at me but he didn’t look at Sofija either, and I wondered if it would be easier for him to talk to me alone. Neither of them answered my question.
The strain of the last twenty-four hours caught up with me.
‘Could we do something, please. Go somewhere. Or have you both lost the ability to move?’
‘Wow,’ Kit said. ‘
What’s got into you? No, don’t bother to explain. I’m sorry, I thought you’d want to help. Or are you still pissed off with me because…’
His voice trailed away and we stared at each other like two cats preparing to fight, bodies tensed, silent anger threatening to spike out. Kit made the first move.
‘Because I told you a few home truths.’ He spat it out as though it was a poison pellet he’d just discovered in his mouth.
‘Please, Kit…’ This was Sofija.
‘And it’s no surprise to find you here. Breaking into lighthouses now, are you? I should have realised you –’
Sofija cut him off.
‘Don’t, Kit. Leave it be,’ she said.
But he couldn’t.
We once had a cat that got knocked over by a car and put back together, but afterwards, no matter how much it hurt, the cat licked and bit and pawed away at the stitches until it opened the wounds again. Kit was like that, I thought. We could have been back in the hospital car park. Kit hurled the same accusations as he had after Grid’s accident. I was a thrill-seeker, he said. An adrenalin junkie. Not a real climber. No! A hooligan. Flawed. And now I’d broken into the lighthouse. I couldn’t be trusted. And on and on. Clearly Talan had shared all his suspicions with Kit.
But it wasn’t quite the same. Sofija was there for a start, her hands fiddling with the end of her plaited hair as she watched anger shred her husband apart. And the other big difference was in me. Kit’s anger didn’t provoke me to rage.
Seven months ago, shocked by Grid’s fall, I’d been so glad to see Kit arrive at the hospital. My big brother. The person I could always count on, even if we’d already started to drift apart. I thought he’d come to comfort and support me. Instead, he’d been raging and the shock of it had made me react with fury in turn.
Most of what he said was fair enough. I’d betrayed all the climbing principles Pa hammered into us as children. People died doing what I’d done. A couple of weeks before I went into rehab, two of my free climbing heroes had been killed in separate accidents on easy pitches. Then a young lad had lost his legs train-surfing on the Paris Metro. It felt as though life was paying us back for the glorious insolence of our youth.