Falling For You (20 page)

I sleep for a bit but I wake up when I turn round because the flagstone floor beneath the sleeping bag Lawrence gave me, feels way too cold.

My head hurts, my leg hurts and my heart aches. I need to get back to Dad. And I want my mum.
Where’s Mum
? All my befuddled brain can remember is that she hasn’t been around for a long time, has she?

The encampment at Topwoods was taking over Mum’s whole life. We visited in the autumn, me and Dad. She’d asked for blankets to be brought, though it was clear she didn’t really want us there. We were an embarrassment to her, I imagined. We stood out like sore thumbs with our drab jeans and jumpers, stood out for our ordinariness amongst that eclectic group. They weren’t all pagans, dedicated to saving the woods because of spiritual reasons; some of them were eco-warriors and some of them were rebels who’d join any cause and others, I suspected, just had nowhere else to go. Autumn arrived with a flurry of huge gusty winds and rain that year. As the trees grew naked outside, the burrows beneath the woodland floor got flooded with rainwater making living conditions very uncomfortable and insanitary. Many of the activists left but the die-harders – including Mum – refused to give up. She was so near home – and yet we barely saw her!

‘
Isla cares more about those blinking trees than she cares about us’
- I remember Dad saying bitterly but we both knew once Mum had made her mind up about something there was precious little that could budge her. That Saturday in October, I remember the rain had made a cess-pit of the mud around the camp, the whole place smelled earthy but in an unwholesome way. Dad had spent the whole of Friday washing and drying those blankets for her. He took her some bright red ones that he knew she liked, even put fabric conditioner in to make them nice for her, but she put them on a rock as soon as we arrived, she hardly noticed. By the time we left they’d fallen to the floor and were as muddy and wet as everything else around there. I saw the tears in his eyes when he noticed that. I have never forgotten them.

He wasn’t a demonstrative man, my dad, but I saw him go back and plead with her that afternoon like a child. She was suffering from depression, he told her. She wasn’t herself. If she would only come home and see sense … but she laughed him off.

I can still see his face to this day, pinched and sad and confused. He loved her. If he didn’t have her, then what did he have? He came to me begging me to try and persuade her; promised me that place on the school skiing trip he knew I’d been asking after, if I could get her out of the woods, promised me the moon on a plate …  ‘Rose - you can have anything you want for your birthday, anything - if you can only persuade your Mum to come home.’

I didn’t need bribing. Dad had indulged her passion for the woodland because he thought it’d bring some meaning back into her life; she was never cut out for domestic routines or even a career that involved her having to commit too strongly to anything. She’d been working as a ceramics designer when Dad had met her, hand-painting pots. Apparently she’d been brilliant, her work much in demand, but Mum never liked having too many demands made on her. She’d wanted her freedom, so she’d given up her cottage industry. She wanted her freedom still, to do what she wanted to do now, which was to save those woodlands. But it was obvious to both me and Dad that things had gone too far ... The trouble was, Mum couldn’t see it. All she kept saying was that the woodland was centuries old and that, once lost, it would never be replaced. It was important, and somebody had to stand up for it.

I agreed to stay over with her that weekend, to try and persuade her we needed her home. But after Dad drove off, miserable and lonely, I remember being mad at her that she made him sad, irritated that she didn’t seem to care anymore about normal everyday things like cleanliness and keeping her hair brushed and … and
us
. Had she really just been pretending to care about us all my life? Did her old life no longer matter to her at all or had she just given up?   

By the end of the weekend I was stiff and damp and miserable and I knew I’d got not one jot nearer to persuading Mum to come home. I knew Dad was going to be devastated.

Right now though, my thoughts drift back to my present predicament. Dad’s going to be gutted that I didn’t make it home tonight. I roll over again, facing the fire.  He needs those meds I went to fetch him. And he needs me at home. I should not be here and I do not like this place.

It is dark, but not completely and utterly dark because Lawrence is keeping the fire well tended-to. I watched him in the early hours, bending down and patiently feeding more wood into the brazier. He’s focused, patient. He knows what he’s doing and I like that. I like the way he carried out those stitches on my leg earlier with the minimum of fuss and how calm and kind he was about everything. I like Lawrence, my tired brain acknowledges, but right now where I need to be is back home. My eyes close as sleep washes over me.

Dad needed Mum back home too. I remember that now. How was I going to get her back? I had to get her back. She didn’t want to come and I didn’t know how that was going to happen but then …

Hadn’t she spent years drumming it into me - that was the beauty of magic? You didn’t have to map out the path to your goal. You simply had to set your intention, do your ritual and the way would magically become clear.

I had to push with all my strength to get the chapel door open even a chink this morning. The snowdrifts had piled up so high during the course of the night, I had to dig the wooden door open, bit by bit, from the inside. All I had to work with was that workmen’s shovel with a broken handle that I managed to pick up last night, but it did the trick.

It’s seven am - barely light, but I’ve been awake for hours already. I couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t the cold; the heat coming off the brazier was comfortable enough. I was so dog-tired last night that even the hard flagstones wouldn’t have kept me awake. My own restless mind did that, fretting over what Arjuna could have meant by his last text.
A problem with Herr Lober,
he said - one that could scupper the whole plan? I have to believe not. I still have to keep to my part at this end, dangerous as it is for me personally, and with no sure outcome in sight. Damn the man. If there’s a problem why couldn’t he just say what it was? There’s a few hours left before I need to switch the phone back on to receive his call.

Meanwhile, I’m out shovelling snow. It’s a freezing, dull morning, uncannily still with a pea-souper of a fog on the hills. No faraway sounds of cars or animals or people. No wind. No birds. I’d forgotten how quiet it can get up here. I’d forgotten how the whole site is so cut off from the rest of the world, once you’re up here it’s easy to pretend you no longer have to be part of it. Right now, that might be a relief but I’ve got to keep on working.

I plan to hack out a pathway up the front so the minute there’s a change in the weather we can make a break for it. The snowdrift was a good three f
oo
t high outside the chapel door this morning. Every foot of snow I clear gets me closer to my goal. We have to be ready.

As I work, I can feel the dull ache in my arms and shoulder muscles. I can feel the sweat beginning to drip down my back but the hard exercise is good for me. It helps keep my mind focused. It stops me thinking about Dougie and why it might be that he’s failed to keep his telephone appointments with me so far. It keeps my mind off the fact that by the time I’ve dug to the edge of the ruin I’ll be able to see out over the hill. Chances are, what I’m going to see when I get there is that nothing much has changed since yesterday. I’ve got a bad feeling that my father won’t have gone out, that his car will still be there. That the diggers and the tractors won’t have been out yet, clearing the roads. It’s what I’m dreading. According to my intelligence, he should be gone already but if we’re stuck here, then maybe so is he? I curse under my breath at that because I had planned for him to be gone. I
need
for him to be gone. Without that there is no way I can go in to her.

I plunge the shovel deeper into the snow at my feet and the loud crunching sound as it makes contact is strangely satisfying. I lift the shovel, my arms aching with the weight on the end of it, and hurl the snow over to one side. There are some areas in my life where I can make a difference. Some obstacles I can remove. Others will not be so easy.

Rose sleeps still. I’m glad of that. Glad she didn’t see how the chapel door was virtually wedged shut this morning by the weight pushing in from the outside. That would freak out most girls I know. They’d get panicky. I wonder if she would? She’s a strange little thing. I watched her after she went back to sleep so easily in the middle of the night. I was up and restless, counting the hours till dawn. I melted some snow in one of the old metal buckets that had been left to catch the rain dripping in from the roof and sat there drinking tea, watching her, envying her the release of sleep. She’d been worried by some noise she thought she’d heard. I wondered where she went to in her dreams, she looked so peaceful. Somewhere far away, I thought. Maybe somewhere where only people with a clear conscience are allowed to go?

At one point, while she was dreaming, her eyes fluttered, her lips parted in a smile. Such a radiant smile! Even asleep, she enticed me, drew me in.
Who were you smiling at, Rose? Was it your boyfriend?
In the dark orange shadows cast by the fire I found myself watching her curiously for a very long time, unable to drag my gaze away, wondering about her, who she was, what she was really doing up here; if she wasn’t pregnant, then what was the real reason for the desperation I’ve sensed in her from the beginning? 

  At one point she looked as if she were about to say something. I strained forward to catch her words but like water streaming through a stand-pipe into a child’s open hands I could catch almost nothing. Mutterings and mumblings, there was nothing I could grasp. Her words weren’t meant for me.  She wasn’t
my
girlfriend, was she? She wasn’t ever going to be.

 I’d never leave her in that sad and lonely place she finds herself in now, that’s for sure.

Then she spoke my name. I swear, she said my name out loud and I felt like a voyeur in her dream-time. I told myself, it’s got to be some other guy called Lawrence who she knows, she’s talking to him in her dreams but part of me knew full well that she wasn’t. She was talking to me. For some reason that made me feel a connection to the girl which I haven’t felt towards a woman in a long time. ‘
Lawrence
…’
What did she want from me? At that moment I’d have given anything to know, to have been party to her thoughts. She piques me, this girl, arouses my curiosity. If I’m honest, arouses me in more ways than one.

But everything is intensified in this place. It’s an unnatural situation to be in, and I know this is what happens. I’ve been in war zones often enough to know that - when you think your life may be at risk - how the very same nurse you’ve worked alongside for months without a second glance, suddenly seems eminently kissable. Don’t know what principle is at work there. It’s nature’s way of perpetuating the gene pool, maybe, who knows?
          

 I keep shovelling snow. The exertion helps dull down the ricochet of thoughts churning in my mind. It doesn’t silence them completely though;
what happens if the old man’s still there tomorrow? The day after that?
It’s not something I’ve addressed yet. How I’m going to deal with that. I didn’t think it would be a problem - he’s always gone away over Christmas, every year for as long as I can remember. It was the only thing that ever made Christmas worth anticipating for me, we never had much in the way of festivities in our house, but his absence for a few days as he went to pay his respects to his old man,
that
was worth waiting fo
r.

Has the weather this year really put him off?

I’m going to need a back-up plan, aren’t I? I didn’t want to do this but if push comes to shove, I may have to ask Marco for help after all. He won’t want to, I know that. He’s not the sort of guy who likes to get involved, he keeps himself to himself, always has done, but we were mates once. He’s the one person I rang before I left Sri Lanka. Waiting for the connection from Colombo to Heathrow, I phoned him from a call box inside the airport. I needed to know what the situation was like at home, was my father expecting to go away like he always did? Marco seemed to think so and I reckoned he should know. He was freaking out big time to hear my voice though, I could tell that even over the phone.

When I rang him from Colombo that day, he was clearly edgy,
w
hy had I rung him
, he kept on asking me? He kept saying he couldn’t speak, he shouldn’t be speaking to me, I’d get him into trouble. It was awkward for him. I can see that. But if things don’t lighten up here, weather-wise, I’m going to have to contact him again. Asking him if he’ll be my back-up help now isn’t going to be easy either, given his reluctance, but I can’t afford to hang onto my pride.

I keep shovelling the snow, clearing another two foot of path before I stop to peel off my coat, then my jumper. I’m down to my short-sleeved T-shirt now but still I’m feeling like I’m burning up from the inside. At last, I peel off my T-shirt as well and fling that on top of the coat. It’s a strange feeling, an almost enjoyable sensation, as the morning air freezes the skin on my arms, my chest, my cheeks. A day or so ago I was in a country where I was so hot all the time I couldn’t remember what snow felt like anymore, what it smelt like. I couldn’t remember what it felt like to be in temperatures this low. But I am back.

I am back, and he is still here, my father. He hasn’t gone anywhere. He is so near.
I
am so near to him - and yet he does not know it. This whole thing is surreal, that’s what it is.   

I wipe the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand, a slight panic rising at the thought of how
near
my father is. But I won’t give up on Sunny. Fuck that. I’ll find a way
.

‘Good morning, Lawrence,’ Rose shocks me now, her voice coming out of the deep silence. I didn’t know she was there, watching me. I turn around to look at her standing by the door. Her face is sleepy and rumpled but she’s more alert this morning, steadier on her feet, I can see it.

 ‘Good morning,’ I smile.

She steps properly out into the uncovered area of the ruin now, joining me.  We both stand there, looking at each other and eventually she laughs. How pretty she is. Pretty and fragile like ... like a bunch of white lilies I saw clustered in a pond soon after I arrived in Colombo. Like them, she feels somehow very strong, full of a beautiful dignity.

‘What?’ she
S
preads her arms.
What are you looking at?

‘You remind me of …’ I try and think of the right words - ‘A snow angel.’

‘A
snow
angel?’ She brushes the white flakes out of her eyes, her hair. She laughs again, this time intrigued.

‘There used to be two little angels, up there.’ I point to a place just above the jagged edge of one of the broken castle walls. Every time I used to run up here as a kid I’d see them. I used to think of them as two guardians, protectors, waiting for me. They stood up there through rain and snow for centuries until one day my father came with his diggers
…

‘When it got really cold up here they’d get covered in frost. If you shone a torch at them their robes would glitter like fairies on a Christmas tree,’ I tell her now. ‘You remind me of them.’   

‘Do I?’ she smiles shyly. ‘You’ve been up this way before then?’ she breathes. Too late, I realise that was something I had not meant to reveal. 

‘Many times,’ I say, knowing that this will open up the way for her to ask when and why, but I am not going to deny it.

‘Oh,’ she nods her head;
I see
. She doesn’t pursue it. But then, I’m sensing now that she’s distracted by my nakedness. Her eyes take in my discarded jumper, the coat I threw on the jagged wall. She’s looking at my bare arms, my chest, drinking me in. Is she wondering why it is that in these sub-zero temperatures I’m naked from the waist up?

‘I was digging. I got hot,’ I tell her. She must realise she’s staring because she looks away, suddenly self-conscious.

‘I heard the sound of shovelling outside,’ she says breathlessly. She’s studiously looking at the ground now, the path I’ve just made with the snow piled up on both sides, carefully not looking at me, looking at her feet which she’s stamping rhythmically into the ground. ‘You were up so early. Couldn’t you sleep?’

‘I had a job to do,’ I shrug. ‘I have to keep a path clear so as soon as it’s safe, we exit.’ Then I look at her more closely. ‘How’s the leg holding up this morning?’

‘Great,’ she smiles suddenly. ‘I’m a lot better than I thought I’d feel. I think I could make it down there today.’ I stare at her for a moment. My clearing efforts have given her a false picture, obviously.