by Jane Jesmond
For a story about India, Ma’s book has an awful lot of Cornwall in it. It’s always in the background. India is compared to it. And sometimes she slips in stories of her childhood and the holidays spent at Tregonna sailing with her Uncle Daniel, her father’s childless and much older brother, until Daniel, unable to afford the upkeep, sold Tregonna and moved to the south of France.
She’d gone to India the year after her Uncle Daniel died. His will predated the sale of Tregonna and its text still left the house and the estate to her even though it had long been sold and the money spent. So, wild with the loss of the one thing she wanted passionately, she flung herself into an alien culture as if she didn’t care if she drowned in it.
Of course, Ma got what she wanted in the end. And I don’t mean Pa. Sure, she wanted him. Loved him. But she wanted Tregonna, too. Ma’s wishes had been fulfilled, her disappointment cured, when Pa made a lot of money out of an old friend’s sporting equipment company and, at a time when huge houses were out of fashion, bought Tregonna back for her.
It struck me as I looked at the contents of her chest laid out around me that there was a lot that wasn’t there. Nothing personal since she moved into Tregonna. No photos. No mementoes. As if her life had stopped at that point.
There was nothing of her relationship with Pa either. No marriage certificate and certainly nothing to do with the divorce. No love letters. No letters at all. Nothing to give a glimpse into their life together and the mystery of why it fell apart.
No letters at all. That struck me as strange. Ma was always writing letters throughout my childhood. Often on blue airmail paper. And receiving them. Where were they? She wouldn’t use e-mail. She shunned anything electronic, claiming it gave off poisonous waves.
There were no bank statements either.
Had she systematically thrown everything away? I looked around at the heaps of junk that had colonised the room like watchful spiders: bowls of potpourri and crystals and piles of scribbled recipes and meditation texts. It seemed unlikely.
I found everything in a box under her bed. Chucked in. The lower down you rummaged, the older the date. Bills. Mainly unpaid. Some of the money Kit had spent must have gone into sorting out the worst of Ma’s debts. The bank statements were here too. I found the most recent. Ma was overdrawn but not disastrously so, and there were no payments going out for a mortgage. Great. In fact, more than great. There were no regular payments going out at all. Kit must be paying all the rates and utility bills. On the other hand, not much came in. I wondered what she lived on. Cash payments from holistic treatments, dance classes, selling candles and crystals and other New Age junk?
The rest was mainly letters – years of them. I pulled out a few handfuls. Mostly from the UK. A few from India. Some from France and Italy and several from North Africa. A lot from the same people. Ma had friends all over the world and I had memories of exotic people coming to stay from time to time. Some of them friends from her travelling days or people who’d written to her when her book first came out and who’d become friends over the intervening years.
Nothing suspicious, though. Nothing except for a gun right under the far end of her bed. A shotgun. Twelve-bore. The local gun of choice. My fingers found the catch automatically and broke it. It wasn’t loaded and there were no cartridges in the wardrobe or anywhere else that I could see. I shoved it back under the bed.
The sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. I froze.
Not Ma. Please let it not be Ma.
The footsteps stopped. I looked round at the mess of Ma’s life strewn on the floor and the bed. Nothing I could do about it. Don’t come in, I prayed. Remember something you need to do. Get distracted. Go away.
Seconds passed. Minutes. No noise from outside. Inside, the little sounds I couldn’t help making – the swallowing to ease my dry throat, the tiny ragged breaths tearing the air, the creaks as I shifted my weight from one foot to the other – seemed louder and louder.
Just as I was wondering if I’d been mistaken, or if whoever had been there had slipped away, the door handle turned and the door shifted in its frame. My eyes fixed on the tiny movement. Had I missed the moment when she unlocked it? I didn’t breathe. I didn’t move. There was a gentle clunk as the lock hit the frame. Whoever was outside didn’t have a key.
‘Kit,’ I said but my voice caught in my throat. ‘Kit?’ I said again but I wasn’t sure it was loud enough to be heard.
No answer. Nothing.
‘Kit? Sofija?’
The handle slid back round. Footsteps faded into the distance. I tiptoed to the window and looked out. No cars. No one. Except the ginger kitten sitting in the shelter of the rockery and staring back up at me.
Time to tidy and get out. I felt stupid as I stuffed everything back where it had come from. Searching Ma’s room had been a moment of madness. With one last glance to check I’d left the room roughly as I’d found it, I rushed to the window, clambered out and stood on the ledge, my hands holding the ropes. A flick of the knee closed the window so that its edge rested on my feet and I prepared to push off and climb down.
Some whisper of caution made me hesitate – or did I catch a glimmer of something out of place on the edge of my vision? Maybe. Or perhaps the gaze of watching eyes pierced my consciousness? Who knows… But I stopped and glanced up into the eaves.
I saw a flash of movement. Then a black object hurtled past my head and landed with a thud on the gravel two storeys down. It was the pulleys. The force of their fall yanked the ropes from my hands and pulled my body away from the window so I teetered in space. I snatched at the wall, my fingers scrabbling in the bricks and mortar for a grip while gravity grabbed at my wavering body, desperate to seize it and dash it against the ground thirty feet below.
Seventeen
My feet saved me. They hooked themselves round the underside of the window and held me upright until my hands found a hold in a broken brick. I pushed one leg back into Ma’s room, forcing the window open, and sat astride the ledge. It took a while for the adrenalin to stop sparking pain in my nerve endings and for my breathing to calm. And then I felt sick. This was no accident. My hyper-efficient brother had checked the system before we started washing the windows. Besides, the seconds before the pulley fell were taking shape in my mind. I’d seen something in the eaves. A hand, I thought, snaking out, yanking the pulleys and whipping back.
I gulped the air. It was cold. But that was good. Icy air calmed the dizziness. Pushed the panic down to manageable levels. I made myself focus on the now. Was the owner of the hand still here? Waiting?
I shut out the exterior sounds – the ever-present rushing murmur of the sea and the fainter, sharper noises of the hedgerow birds foraging in the garden – but inside the house, the silence was thick and impenetrable.
I had two options. I could climb back into Ma’s room – I couldn’t unlock the door from the inside so I’d have to sit there and wait to be found but at least I’d be safe. Or, I could climb down and run the risk that someone was waiting for me below.
I heard a thud, faint from travelling along corridors and up stairs. In my head, an image of the back door slamming shut appeared. I was sure that was what I’d heard. Then the sounds of footsteps crunching through the gravel at the back of the house. Were they leaving? I thought so. For a moment my body sagged with relief; then it didn’t. I needed to know who it was. I needed to see who was running through the woods to the road. I’d have to climb down.
I looked toward the ground.
Ma looked back up. How long had she been there? How much had she seen? I couldn’t tell whether she was angry or worried or shocked. Did she know I’d been in her room?
We stared at each other for a few frozen seconds that went on forever. Then she turned and stalked off.
I grabbed the drainpipe and shimmied down, tore after her and headed her off. She stopped. Colour rose in her no
rmally pale face and she breathed as though she’d been running.
‘You’ve been in my room,’ she said. ‘You broke into my room.’
I looked behind her at the drive curling round the side of the house. No matter how fast I ran up it, I’d never catch up with my would-be killer now. Fuck! I turned back to Ma.
‘I had good reasons,’ I said.
‘So?’
‘So what?
‘What were your reasons? Your good reasons.’ She raised a finger and tapped my chest.
‘I thought… I thought… Oh shit, I thought you might be smuggling drugs – cocaine, heroin.’
The rapid breaths pumping her chest in and out stopped. A nasty little part of my brain wondered whether this was due to shock that I could think that of her or horror at being found out.
‘Jenifry.’ She moved her hands to her face and pressed her fingers into her forehead. ‘How could you think that? I’d never do anything like that. How could you…?’
‘You used to grow weed.’
‘That’s different.’
‘Don’t tell me you didn’t sell some of it.’
‘To friends.’
‘That’s what they all say.’
She took a step back and stared at me as though she didn’t know me and for a moment I thought she was going to walk away again. This time, I thought, I wouldn’t stop her but I’d never speak to her again. Never.
But Ma stayed where she was, looking away beyond me, out to sea. Tregonna towered behind her, blocking out the light.
‘I stopped growing weed,’ she said quietly, ‘when they started saying it damaged adolescent brains. And it was only for a few years anyway. It got me over a bad time. I needed something. But how you go from that to thinking I was… I don’t know. I don’t even think I’d be very good at it.’
‘You need money. And you were always up for a bit of smuggling.’
‘What?’
‘You used to buy stuff from the boats.’
‘Wine and cigarettes. That’s ancient history. How could you leap from that to thinking I’d have anything to do with serious drugs?’ She bent over and tugged a handful of weeds from what had been a rose bed. Some pulled free and she scrunched them and flung them away. They scattered over the grass and rolled in the breeze.
‘You’ve always jumped to conclusions, Jenifry. You’re like your father, you know. So like your father. You don’t see the people around you. You’re so focussed on what you want. What you think you need. So sure you’re right. And you hurt the people around you in your stampede after it. Why didn’t you just ask me?’
Something exploded inside me.
‘Would you have told me if I asked?’ I knew I was shouting. ‘I don’t think so. It’s your top skill, isn’t it? Avoiding difficult conversations. Everything has to be sweetness and light with you. As though it’s all part of some great plan the universe has for us.’ Now that I’d started I couldn’t stop. ‘You never told me Pa had left. Not in so many words. I had to work it out for myself. When he didn’t come back from that expedition to wherever it was. All those months, just you and me in Tregonna, and you never said a word. I had to ask Kit when he came home from university in the holidays.’
Her face mirrored my own anger at first, which pleased me no end. I was sick of her Zen-like quality. But, as I continued, it took on a bewildered look and when I paused for breath she turned away. I thought she was going to leave.
‘Ma?’ I said. ‘You can’t walk away now.’
‘I’m not.’ She sat down on the grass and patted the ground, inviting me to sit too. ‘Why do you think I’m a drug smuggler? There must have been another reason. Not merely because I’m short of money. I’m always short of money.’
‘Can we go in?’
‘No, let’s discuss it here. Then we can leave it behind us. Time and the wind and rain will clear it away.’
I sighed and sat down, although I chose a large, flat stone. The grass was damp and the earth under it sodden. Only Ma would think this was a sensible place to have a conversation.
‘I don’t think you’re a drug smuggler.’ And I didn’t. Not now she was sitting in front of me, her body ramrod straight and her eyes still and calm. ‘But you asked Tom Mullins which of the fishermen might bring in stuff for you and I – well, I jumped to the wrong conclusion.’
‘Tom. Oh yes.’ She laughed. Not her normal trill but a sad laugh overlaid with a hint of sourness. ‘I remember. He was horrified. Wouldn’t listen to me. Warned me off and stomped away. It must have gone deep for him to tell you. But I didn’t want to smuggle drugs, Jenifry. It was a person. I wanted to get someone into this country. A very dear friend. Nahla. I’ve known her for a long time. She’s Libyan. She and her husband are writers I met at a conference years ago. He’s Libyan, too… or, was, I suppose. They should have got out before the civil war but they didn’t. Nahla had elderly parents and she thought she was safe but, since Gaddafi’s fall, Libya’s become a terrible place, especially for a woman. Her husband’s dead so she’s on her own. I’d have done anything to get her out.’
I’d seen the pictures on the news. Even in rehab they’d let us watch the news.
‘Did you get her out?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘But I’m sure there are people who could do it.’
‘Oh yes. There certainly are. Gregory found out for me. People will do anything for a price.’ She ran her finger across the grass. ‘Do you know what the going rate for bringing an illegal, as they call them, across the Channel is?’
‘No.’
‘It’s ten thousand pounds. And rising. Ten thousand pounds. I don’t have one thousand pounds, let alone ten, and neither do her family nor her friends. Besides, we’d have to get her across the Mediterranean first. So, no, I didn’t get her into the UK.’
‘I haven’t got any money. I’ve given it all to Kit.’
‘I don’t want your money, Jenifry. I did think, at one point, I might ask Kit but…’ She stood up and brushed the grass off her dress. ‘I look at that hideous new kitchen sometimes and I feel sick, when I think of what it cost.’
I stood up, too. There was nothing I could say and we walked back to the house together.
‘Where is she? Nahla, I mean.’
‘I don’t know.’ She picked up the rope and pulley and gazed at them. ‘What happened?’ she asked.
I took them from her. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, but I thought I did. The eyebolt that attached the pulley to the beam had come out. It lay thick and heavy in my hand. I brushed the last couple of wood splinters off the deep thread of its screw and wondered how that was possible.
‘Did you see anyone?’ I asked. ‘In the woods. When you got back today?’
‘No. But I came along the coast path. I went to see Gregory and walked back.’
We heard the noise of a car turning into the drive and Kit’s Land Rover appeared.
‘I’ll go in,’ Ma said and turned to climb the steps up to the front door.
‘You might want to change,’ I said. ‘The back of your dress is very wet. Oh – and why have you got a gun under your bed?’
‘It was Uncle’s. I use it for pigeons.’
‘You shoot pigeons?’
‘Scare them off the cabbages. I don’t aim at them.’
‘Have you got a licence?’
‘I don’t use it for shooting at anything.’
‘You still need a licence. You must get one.’ I thought again. A shotgun could decapitate a person, blow a hole through their chest, amputate a limb. ‘No, get rid of it. Give it to Talan. He goes shooting – or he used to.’
‘I don’t want anyone using it for killing things.’
I remembered outings with Talan. Him patiently teaching me how to stand to shoot, then break the gun to insert new cartridges.
‘Clay pigeon shooting, Ma,’ I said. ‘They’re not live pigeons. The clue’s in the name.’ She laughed and things felt good between us. I seized the moment. ‘Ma, won’t you think again about helping Kit? Maybe not selling the land. I get how you feel about Tregonna. But a mortgage? We’ve sorted most of the money so it wouldn’t be massive.’
But as the words left my mouth, her body stiffened. I should have waited. I wished I could have gathered my words back up and buried them.
Her shoulders rose up and forwards like a BASE jumper about to hurl herself off a cliff.
‘Another one,’ she said. ‘Another one who’s only interested in money.’ And she swirled round and stalked up the steps into the house, holding the damp material of her dress away from her back with both hands.
I took the pulleys and rope up to the attic. Pa had used a belt and braces system to attach the pulleys to a roof beam. A huge eyebolt screwed into the wood took the weight and a chain slung round the beam provided back-up in case the eyebolt failed. It hadn’t failed. But it had come out. The adjustable spanner on the floor beside the window gave a big clue as to how it had been unscrewed. Kit’s adjustable spanner, I supposed. Stored up here with the rest of his tools. I ran a finger over the hole where the eyebolt had been. Its mouth was splintered. Someone, I thought, had unscrewed it but left the tip in. Just enough to hold the weight of the ropes and pulleys. They’d waited and watched until I’d come out of the window. Then they’d yanked the bolt and brought the whole lot tumbling down.
The safety chain was missing.
They’d left nothing to chance this time, I thought. No slipping away and trusting that my weight would be enough to pull the bolt free. They’d hung around to make sure. So the lighthouse wasn’t a one-off. No, someone had been out there, watching me and waiting for another chance. And they probably still were. Lying low wasn’t an option. I’d have to stop them before they had another go.