by Jane Jesmond
The heat of the car and my body had warmed it through and it felt soft against my skin. I was sure it was cocaine but I needed to check. That was why I’d taken it, although I didn’t have a clue how to find out. I wanted to know what Nick Crawford was up to.
But maybe I’d had another reason.
It called to me, you see.
Just one last night, it said. Then never again. It’s been a dreadful twenty-four hours. Give yourself a break. Breathe in the sparkling crystals and let them explode pleasure along your nerves. Just this once. Once doesn’t matter. You stopped before. You can stop again.
It lied. I knew it lied.
And I gripped onto that thought tighter than I’d ever held onto any ledge on a slippery rock face. Clamped my concentration onto it and chucked the package into the glove compartment, locked the car and went to my room.
Eleven
Next morning, I parked my car at the top of the drive leading down to Tregonna and walked to the house through the woods that shelter it from the road. Bruises were still appearing all over my body although my brain felt clearer today. Thoughts stayed in my head longer, letting me follow them through. Cocaine was their principal subject. The cocaine I’d taken from Nick Crawford’s workshop, the little white package still locked in the glove compartment. Still intact. It was a small victory. Whereas the other cocaine that dominated my thoughts, the cocaine I must have taken on Friday night, marked a big defeat.
Where had I got it? Had I come across someone in one of the houses along the headland? Most of the people I knew from school had stayed here, as tied to the place as Ma was. Maybe I’d had a few drinks with one of them to take the edge off the tiredness, ignoring the warnings they’d given in rehab. A few drinks and your inhibitions dissolve. You feel better. Not quite great but not bad. And you remember what would make you feel really great.
Cocaine.
But suddenly I wasn’t so sure.
Coke blurs your life together so that the bars and clubs, the nights of laughing faces and glittering lights, shrill chatter and pounding music, melt into one party. But it doesn’t leave great holes in your memory like I had. As my feet crunched through pine needles and old leaves, I realised something else was much more likely. Something I would have thought of straightaway if my brain hadn’t been so jangled.
Roofies. Rohypnol. The amnesia drug.
I remembered how my body had felt when I tried to climb up the lighthouse. How it seemed to move in slow motion as though the air around it was thick and muddy. And I thought of people I’d seen on roofies. They took it if the coke was making them edgy. It slowed them down. Made them loose. Some went to sleep but with their eyes open, watching what was going on but not interacting. And afterwards they remembered nothing. Roofies made much more sense than cocaine.
Except I’d never have taken it. Not willingly. I hated what it did to people. The zombie-like stares and the empty eyes. I’d never have done it.
What did it mean?
Only one thing I could think of. Someone had given it to me. Slipped it into a drink? The same someone who had been with me on the lighthouse? Who’d tied the knot in the cord? But why?
There was one obvious reason. The one everybody associated with Roofies. Roofies – the date rape drug. A roaring sound like waves crashing against the shingle filled my ears and I felt sick.
No.
Please, no.
I sat down on a pine tree that had fallen and been left where it’d landed and drew in long slow breaths of air filled with the smell of crumbling leaves and fungus. I couldn’t think about Friday night now.
I moved on to Ma instead and the thought of her calmed me. She loved this forest. She claimed Jack Hammett, who built Tregonna in the early seventeen hundreds, bought the surrounding land to save the forest from being destroyed. And maybe it was true. Certainly, all the hills nearby had been stripped and the timber sent to Plymouth to build ships for whatever war England was fighting at the time. Pa muttered that Jack was waiting for the market to top out so he could make a second fortune after smuggling had given him his first.
Jack’s portrait hung in the hall. A young man against a dark background, wearing black clothes which made his thin face and the white band round his neck stand out. He was glancing to his right, as though something had distracted him as he posed and the painter had captured that precise moment. People say the eyes in a portrait follow you round a room but it was not the case with Jack. As you moved around the hall, his gaze always shifted away from you.
I stood up and walked to the edge of the woods and gazed down at Tregonna, my childhood home. It was the setting that made it special. Cradled between the woods and the first rise of land after the coastal cliffs, yet close enough to the sea to feel its freshness. The house itself was ugly. Jack Hammett had wanted value for his money and for him size was everything. Tregonna was a plain oblong of four storeys and the fourth storey had been paid for by sacrificing every element of style and design. There were no pillars, no grand entrance and the windows were different sizes and unaligned as if their positions had been decided by someone inside each room with no thought as to how the exterior would look.
Horrid lump. If only Pa had never bought it back. Everything had been devoted to keeping it going. Ma’s royalties and the bits and pieces she earned from appearances at festivals. Every penny that Pa earned from climbing and public speaking and sponsorships. And now it had eaten Kit.
Everything told me this talk with Ma would turn out badly. Standing at the point where the woods gave way to the sloping lawn leading to the house, with tiredness draining my energy and the background buzz of my brain fretting away at the hole in my memories and fraying the edges of my focus, something shifted inside me and a crack opened. Kit was wrong. My once sure-sighted, think-of-everything brother had made a mistake. Ma didn’t deal in logical solutions. His plan wasn’t going to work.
I hesitated, but, in the end, I had no choice. So with absolutely no idea what I was going to say to her, I stepped out onto the grass and went down to Tregonna, the apple of Ma’s eye, to fight with her on Kit’s behalf.
Ma’s hair had undergone a subtle shift from golden blonde with light grey streaks to predominantly grey with flashes of its old colour. It looked messy. A reviewer once said she resembled a Pre-Raphaelite painting with her long, tumbling curls and delicate chin. Much to Pa’s amusement. Since then she’d cultivated the resemblance, changing her Indian-inspired prints and heavy jewellery for loose pale clothes. Once her hair started to lose its curl and thickness, she dried it in tight plaits so it sprang away from her face when brushed.
She embraced me with a whiff of patchouli and incense sticks – some habits die hard. She didn’t appear in the least surprised to see me.
‘Jenifry. Gregory told me you were here. You’ve lost weight. It suits you.’
She pinched my cheek and I gritted my teeth. Kit, I thought, keep focussed on Kit and his problems. But I couldn’t resist the tiniest of digs.
‘Still in this room, I see.’
Ma had two rooms that opened onto each other on the side of Tregonna that looked out to sea. Two of the grandest rooms on the first floor but choked with stuff. She’d built herself a nest out of the choicest bits of furniture and ornaments Tregonna possessed and now she fluttered around the remaining space like a shabby sparrow.
‘Aren’t you going to change rooms? It can’t be convenient for Kit and Sofija, having you in the midst of the guest rooms.’
She waved her arms around in a flurry of movement, jangling the slender bangles on her wrists.
‘Of course, I am. Not yet, though. The timing isn’t right. My consciousness is changing, moving into a new state. It’s a painful thing. Birthing a new person. It’s better I stay in this room. The forces are balanced here.’
‘A new person?’
‘Yes, darling Jenifry. Y
ou see before you a new woman. One who moves now with the waning moon. Her time of walking with the full moon is passed.’
The muscles in my shoulders tightened but I forced them to relax. Letting her annoy me with her wafty hippy speak wasn’t going to solve Kit’s problem.
‘I hardly recognised the house, Ma. It’s wonderful what Kit and Sofija have achieved. And you, of course.’
And it was. I’d had a quick look round before following Ma up to her room. Everywhere was fresh and clean. New paint on new plaster. Woodwork and floors stripped back and polished. Beneath it, the structure of the house had been renewed too. The damp had been dealt with. The defective wiring, the dodgy plumbing, the rot. All gone. And when I’d peeped round the door into the old stables, I’d seen the metal doors of a lift and beyond them the gleaming stainless steel of a professional kitchen.
‘So Tregonna too is ready for the next generation and several after that by the look of it,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’
She turned away and gazed out to sea but her fingers caressed the battered copper of an old ship’s light.
‘You can’t feel it either, can you?’ Her voice was husky.
‘Feel what?’
‘The spirit of Tregonna weeping.’
‘What?’ I could hear the years of pent-up irritation vibrating in my voice. This kind of comment was why I avoided having serious conversations with Ma.
‘Kit’s torn the soul out of the place.’
‘What utter crap!’
She turned towards me, the hint of a smile curving her lips and ran her fingers over the carved wooden chest by her bed. The dust rose in a trail behind her hand and somehow made me feel better.
‘Did Kit ask you to speak to me? He always used to send you to do his dirty work. And you always did. Like a faithful little dog.’
I made a supreme effort and pushed the irritation back down.
‘You know he’s in deep trouble, don’t you? A complete financial mess?’
‘I never asked him to spend so much money, Jenifry. I just needed to pay a couple of bills, but he came along and gutted the place.’
‘But Ma, it was falling down round you.’
‘He’s poured money into it. Smothered its spirit with… with luxury.’
In a way, she had a point.
‘Maybe he has got a bit carried away. But he was only trying to do his best for Tregonna, and for you.’
‘No. He sees Tregonna as a building. Something he can make money out of. He doesn’t understand the place like I do.’
‘It is a building. There’s nothing to understand.’
She walked back towards me, grabbed my hand before I could stop her and stared into my face.
‘Not you too.’ she said.
‘Not me what?’
‘You shouldn’t need to ask.’ Her fingers found a cut on the side of my palm and she turned my hand over and examined it. I winced. ‘I’ve got a comfrey and honey salve that will help,’ she said, but she stayed where she was and ran a finger along the grazes on the ends of my fingers. ‘History. That’s what you can’t feel. Neither you nor Kit. The sense of the family and Tregonna intermingling down the centuries. I thought Kit and I were going to work together to preserve the spirit of the place. I was so excited. But all he meant was getting exact replicas of doors and finding suitable bathroom fittings.’
Her face had lit up as she spoke of Tregonna and its history. My anger drained away. Ma was bonkers. But what was new? She’d always been odd about her family heritage, laughable as it was. A dodgy but go-getting ancestor with money from dubious sources and, since then, a slow sinking into poverty through the ages until debts forced her uncle to sell the house when she was a teenager. Maybe that was why she was so obsessed by its future.
‘I wish Pa had never bought it back for you,’ I muttered.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. It was nothing.’ I took a deep breath and concentrated on what I had to do. ‘Kit loves Tregonna, Ma. We both do. It gave us a wonderful childhood –’
She interrupted me.
‘Oh Jen, and it’s all been lost.’
I had to stop her thinking that. Focus her on Kit.
‘Do you remember the time Kit and I climbed in through the attic?’
I’d been eleven, maybe twelve, and Kit must have been fifteen. We’d been late coming home. Very late. I don’t remember why. And Pa was home so there would be trouble.
‘We should have a rope hanging from our bedroom,’ I’d said. ‘Then we could bypass the parents and pretend we’d been home for ages.’
Kit surveyed the higgle of windows punched out of the stone facade, his face thoughtful. I knew that look.
‘Can you see a way up?’ I asked.
The wide ledge outside our parents’ bedroom on the first floor was a short leap from the jutting stone frame of the scullery window. From there it was an easy scuttle from window to window, a short swarm up a drainpipe and then a shuffle round a corner, using the gutter for support. The drop down from the gutter to the windowsill outside the attic playroom was the only difficult bit. I was too short and Kit had to go first and catch me as I let go and haul me in.
Ma didn’t remember any of it. I could see from her face. It had been Pa who’d found it funny when we’d come downstairs acting like we’d been there for hours. He’d guessed. Of course he had, and he’d told Kit not to do it again, at least not without ropes. But it had given him an idea and later on he’d installed pulleys in the roof and we practised climbing with them.
I hunted out another memory.
‘And the time we had the bonfire on the cliffs and danced round it? Do you remember?’
‘Beltane. Yes.’
‘And the coastguard came round and said we were distracting the shipping.’
‘It was a large fire,’ Ma said. She laughed.
‘He was a grumpy old bastard,’ I said.
‘I placated him. He stayed for a drink as I remember. Mead, I think. We had some bees, didn’t we?’
‘Yes, Ma. We had bees until they stung that friend of Kit’s and… So you see we had a wonderful childhood. And that’s why Kit wanted to save Tregonna. For us all. He loves it. He wouldn’t have spent all his money on it – and more – if he didn’t.’
She nodded her head slowly and I crossed my fingers. Maybe there was a chance.
‘I don’t think he’s explained properly. He’s so stressed about everything. About money, really.’
‘I’ve told him not to worry about money. You must tell him too. Worry creates its own negativity. Look at how bad things were with money last year but I didn’t worry. I knew something would turn up. And then darling Kit came and saved the day. So you see there’s no point worrying about money.’
Ma was like one of those infuriating games we used to get in stockings at Christmas with little silver balls that had to be rolled into tiny holes. You’d get one in but it would slip out as soon as you got another one close to a hole. I ploughed on, though.
‘Ma, I know Kit’s asked you this already. But please, you need to agree to sell the land. The bit over the road. We never use it. And it’s a pain to maintain. It would solve everything. Pay Kit’s debts and leave enough for him to market Tregonna as a holistic conference centre. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
Clearly not. She strode from one end of the room to another, the hem of her dress swirling against the clutter of chests and small tables, while she told me exactly what she thought. Tregonna was the Hammetts’ home. Always had been. Always would be. The spring where we renewed our vitality. Our harbour from the outside world. And, make no mistake, we needed every bit of the land to protect us against its creeping darkness.
I stopped her when she started on about the road cutting a gash through the heart of the place. ‘What about a mortgage then?
You must have hundreds of thousands of pounds of equity in the house now that it’s been renovated.’
I didn’t think a vast mortgage would solve Kit’s problem long-term but, as the owner of Tregonna, Ma would have to take it out, so at least the debt would be transferred to her and to Tregonna. But she wasn’t having any of it. In fact, the idea of a mortgage seemed to infuriate her. She clenched her hands and raised them into the air. ‘Impossible. Never. But never.’
For once it was a straight answer.
‘OK, OK. Calm down. But what are we going to do?’
‘Something will come up.’
‘Really! Like what? And while we’re waiting, Kit has to carry on avoiding everyone because of all the money he owes them?’
She sat down on the bed and started combing the fringe of a shawl with her fingers.
‘Come home, Jenifry,’ she said.
‘I’m here now, aren’t I?’
‘Come home and stay. With all the family together we’ll find a solution. The Hammetts always have.’
It was patently obvious they hadn’t and I opened my mouth to remind her of this but something about the look on her face made me stop. She was serious, deadly serious. And she had more to say.
‘I can see you’ve been suffering. Come home and heal for a while. It’s what Tregonna and this part of Cornwall does. It’s a healing place. I know I’m explaining badly and I know you don’t think the same way as I do about Tregonna, but please stay. I sense there is great danger for you outside.’
Her eyes were fixed on me as she spoke and her words stung a swarm of thoughts into life.
‘Great danger,’ she said again.
‘Ma, I’m not in any danger.’
Black spots. Like flies. They buzzed round the outside of my vision and I swatted them away. Missed them and staggered.
‘Jenifry. What is it? You’re very pale.’
‘Feel a bit dizzy. Hate arguing with you.’
She pushed me down to sit on the bed, dampened a cloth with some liquid from a glass bottle on her bedside table and started patting my forehead and the back of my neck. The cold was good. I took a few deep breaths and thought about danger. The word had roused a horde of new ideas that buzzed through my mind but wouldn’t settle long enough to take shape. Was I in danger?