Before the Ruins

by Victoria Gosling

  I put my head out. The rain was falling more softly. When I turned back, David had knelt and was lifting a large piece of slate.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking.” Under the slate were earwigs, a long pale worm, white roots. “I think we’re going to find them soon. Don’t you think so?”

  * * *

  Night was falling but Marcus wanted to drive, just the two of us, after we’d dropped Em home. We passed the standing stones at Avebury and I waved at the Devil’s Chair. At the bend in the road, Silbury Hill looked like a giant sandcastle, an upturned teacup of soil upon which the grass had inched over the ages.

  Marcus seemed to be struggling with something, but I wasn’t going to help him.

  On the lane toward home, a leveret leapt out in front of the van and bounded ahead of us in the yellow light of the headlights, till we’d clocked it breaking the thirty-mile-an-hour speed limit before it leapt into a gateway.

  In the lay-by, Marcus killed the engine and in the sudden darkness leaned in to kiss me. After a few moments he drew back. He let out the slightest of sighs, the smallest of reproaches. I let go of the door handle and put my hand on his thigh. I kissed him again, this time properly, feeling his breath quicken and his body respond. It was mean of me, but it made me think of one of the Hacketts’ old Labradors, how you only had to drop a hand to it and it’d be felled, on its back, imploring for a belly stroke with dying eyes. Marcus kissed my neck, one hand on my back, the other slipping between us. I could tell he felt he was owed it.

  “We could go out Friday. Into town. Up to Bristol if you wanted, see a band. Just us two.”

  “What band?” I cracked the door.

  “I don’t know. Could see if there’s something on at the Thekla.”

  “If there’s anyone good, it’ll be sold out.”

  “Don’t you ever get bored of hanging round with him?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I know you and Peter have always been mates—”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes we have.” And I got out and slammed the door.

  A light was glowing in Mrs. East’s kitchen. I heard the van swing round and drive off. She came out onto the step and beckoned me over.

  “Saw your mum take a fall today.” She indicated a spot a bit further up the road. “I offered to call a doctor but—” And she shrugged.

  “Was she pissed?”

  “She was in a bit of a state. A bit … confused. Have the empties been stacking up?”

  I tried to think. “They could be in her room. Or out the back.”

  “Might want to check on her, Andy.”

  “I’ll look in.”

  But I didn’t. I looked for cans or bottles, but there weren’t any. I stood outside her door awhile, a long while, staring at the doorknob. She was breathing at least. Part of me wanted to go in, but it was small and weak, and a much larger part of me wanted to be elsewhere, and before very long that was the part that won.

  * * *

  David was sleeping, lying on his back with the sleeping bag drawn down about his waist. The moon was waxing again. On the side was a pack of cigarettes. I guessed Peter had bought them for him. I slid one out and sparked it at the window. I fancied I could feel him wake, that there was the slightest perceptible change. He didn’t ask me what was up or why I was there.

  Eventually, I said, “He hid them at night. We haven’t played at night yet.”

  “Just us?”

  “Yeah.” I heard him get out of the bag and slip on his jeans.

  “Do you have them? Am I hiding them?”

  “I want us to look for the real ones, for Mortimer’s ones.”

  We went down the stairs in the darkness and then out into the courtyard.

  The diamonds were there, I knew it. The lake shimmered and the wind swayed the trees. We looked together for an hour, maybe two. No luck. No luck anywhere. I sat down on the stone bench where Mortimer died and the tears rolled down my cheeks.

  “What’s all this?” he said.

  When I reached out for him, it was like grabbing a handhold because if you didn’t you were going to fall.

  Did I cry because I wanted him to touch me? Possible. But I couldn’t have stopped it. Once we started touching, I couldn’t stop that either.

  * * *

  “Did you turn him down?” We were in the little room at the top of the house, pink sunrise flooding in so it was like being inside a jewel. I had my hand on the small hollow that lay in the center of David’s chest, a few inches down from his heart. Outside, under the eaves, the wood pigeons cooed. They were so fat now they could barely get off the ground, wobbling and bobbling their way across the lawn, fanning their tails at one another, courting.

  “Not in so many words, but yes, I suppose I did.”

  “You didn’t get off with him?”

  “Would it make a difference?”

  “I’d feel worse.”

  “This makes you feel bad?” David turned on his side and laid the fingers of one hand on my stomach. The thing was, it should have, but it didn’t.

  * * *

  Three weeks? Less than a month certainly. Going back nights, waiting until Peter would have departed to meet his curfew. Then threading my way across the Downs, the rabbits bolting, the stretch through the copse, Crow Wood, lightless, where the night was thicker, heart picking up—the feeling of a presence there, nothing human, nothing in time—then down over the field, over the gate. The lawn wet. Looking for a light in the window.

  I wouldn’t have given the journey up. Going through the dark alone to find another person, even if they were crooked and not offering anything.

  “Here, I’m over here.”

  My body drenched, the fear melting when he kissed me. It was like my heart was in a lift, and the lift would suddenly just fall, and then judder to a stop, and then fall some more. On the bed, in the darkness, I pressed down on David’s hands, my hair falling to cover his face, and I didn’t recognize my own voice.

  * * *

  One morning, slipping back in at five, I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table. My lips were tender, my whole skin felt raw. She looked up slowly, her face blank. Nothing dawned in her eyes. It was like she didn’t know me from Adam.

  Maybe I didn’t know me either.

  Who else knew? Em with her keen eyes? I watched Marcus go for a guy who squeezed up against me in a pub and thought maybe. Peter? A cold stream flowing between us, a bewildered, hurt look that made me wince. Not enough to stop.

  * * *

  “There’s jobs on the Greek islands. Bar jobs. Not now, but in summer. You can make good money.” I was testing the waters, not sure I could leave, even if David agreed to it. What would become of my mother without me?

  “How much?”

  “A few grand at least.”

  David grimaced. He got up swiftly from the bed and went over to the window. I knew what he was thinking. David had spent a lot of time around rich people, at the fancy houses and holiday homes of school friends. It was where he felt he belonged. It wasn’t the money, he said, it was what it bought you, which was freedom. The freedom not to worry all the time, to not test the smoke alarm on Sunday mornings or write down everything you eat and spend in a book.

  “How much would the diamonds be worth, do you think, Andy?”

  But he came back. Lying down beside me, our fingers lacing. His lips on my collarbone.

  When I awoke, David was gently shaking my shoulder.

  “Is it time to go?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  “You cry in your sleep.”

  “I was crying?”

  “You’ve done it before.”

  I brought my hand to my face and it came away wet. Was there the slightest tinge of accusation to his voice?

  “Peter said—”

  “What?”

  But he didn’t go on. Yet that final week, every time he looked at me it was like he h
ad something he wanted to say, but then drew back from saying.

  * * *

  Mrs. White pointed me in the direction of the church. As I walked down the familiar stone path, the bells were silent in the tower. One was cracked. It always rang flat, a weird dissonant BOOOONG, clearly audible among the peals.

  Peter was sitting at the organ and as I entered the nave and walked toward him down the aisle, he toyed with a number of chords, first this one and then another. The pipes breathed out and the air within the church hummed.

  “What’s that you’re playing?”

  “I’m just fiddling really.” I went to stand at his side, the place I took when I turned the pages for him. His long white fingers moved over the keys as though he was searching for something. “I suppose I was thinking people are like chords. I mean they can be. Listen.” His left hand roamed toward me. He played something that sounded like a wet fart and raised an eyebrow. “Doesn’t it make you think of Mrs. Duncan?”

  Mrs. Duncan had been a dinner lady at our infant school, a gigantic, myopic Scot forever bursting into tears.

  “I see what you mean. And what chord am I?”

  Peter shrugged. His fingers picked out again the notes he had been playing with when I came in. His brow furrowed. Who was he thinking of? Then I knew who he was thinking of.

  “Peter? What have you been saying about me to David?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Because if I want to tell people about myself, I will. Just like I let you tell people about yourself.”

  “Not everything is about you.”

  “He said after the pills, you said stuff. You don’t get to talk about me. You don’t get to tell people things you think you know, when you don’t know anything. I never told you anything. When Joe was around you hid in your bedroom with your head in a book while downstairs your mum cooked your tea. Then after, you treated me like I had a disease. Telling me he wouldn’t come back, because it was what you wanted to believe, like life’s fucking wish fulfillment—”

  “Joe’s not coming back.” Peter pushed the stool back and got up. He looked sick, the color draining from his face. I followed him back down the aisle. “Just leave me alone, Andy, for fuck’s sake.”

  Suddenly, he was on the verge of tears and my own eyes prickled in response. He had his back to me, taking long strides I couldn’t match. He couldn’t wait to get away.

  * * *

  On the last morning, I stayed till it was light. David walked me part of the way back. I had to go to the office to do the wages. I kissed him at the stile. When we drew apart, the wind dried the kiss on my lips.

  When we touched each other, it was like we were drawing a map, a map of a place that we never spoke about. I wasn’t sure it was a safe place. There was far too much of me there.

  * * *

  Marcus picked me up in the van. Em and Peter were already inside. The day was dull, the light sluggish, and the wind damp. The hedgerows were going to seed. I yawned.

  “Should go blackberrying later. Take some back for Mrs. East.”

  Marcus’s hands were tight on the wheel. He drove fast, accelerating out of corners so Em and Peter slid about in the back. He slowed down as we came to the manor.

  “It wasn’t like that yesterday,” he said. The front gate was open, the sign about guard dogs lay on the ground.

  “What were you doing out here yesterday?”

  I’d been in the office. In the evening Marcus and I had gone to the cinema in Swindon and then for pizza, a proper date like he’d wanted. When I thought about breaking up with him, it was Darren I worried about, not just the job, but that he wouldn’t think the same of me.

  “I came past. On the way back from the Upham site.” Marcus swung the wheel round and we went in, through the gates and over the gravel that spat under the wheels.

  An empty quiet met us. The front door was bolted from the inside, the back door locked.

  “Where was Darren yesterday?” Em asked.

  “He was in the office with me,” I said.

  David had originally got in through the back, crawling in through a window that wasn’t latched properly. It was latched now. I called out for him. Em jogged down to the lake and back. There was no sign. We went back to the front steps. I kept my face blank.

  “He’s got our numbers. He can call.” Marcus was worrying a bit of crumbling stone with the toe of his boot. The tips of his ears were red.

  “But what happened?” I said.

  Em shrugged. Peter was perched on the steps in his black coat, like a crow. “Maybe he got what he came for.”

  “Meaning?”

  He unfolded himself, turning his back on me to look at the house. He sounded bored.

  “I mean the necklace, Andy. What else?”

  * * *

  David had our numbers. I sat on the front step at night waiting for the phone in the red box to ring. I didn’t know what to do with the pain. Sometimes a car would drive up the lane, its headlights passing over me, the glow of red taillights fading on the skin of my hands. Mostly the phone stayed silent. On the few occasions it started ringing, as though pulled from a dream I would go over, swing open the door, pick up the receiver, and press it to my ear. And there was silence, not the silence of an empty line, but the silence of someone listening.

  In mid-September, a few weeks before Peter left for Oxford, I saw the family, the ones who owned the manor. Work was being done to make it livable, and they’d come to inspect the progress. Darren was savage because they’d given the job to someone else.

  “That’s them, the Calcrafts.” Marcus indicated the four people sitting at the next table in The Sun. The girl was complaining about the food. She was my age, give or take a year, and turning over a salad leaf with her fork.

  “Iceberg,” she said witheringly. “Iceberg?” She and her mother were fair. The men were heavier set, the son verging on fat. He looked a bit like Henry VIII, already jowly with a rosebud mouth and red-blond hair. He grinned, showing his teeth, and said something. The girl shrieked with laughter.

  “Rob. Alice.” The woman’s eyes slid toward her husband, but he was looking down at his plate as though he couldn’t hear them. The moment he finished eating, he stood up.

  “I’ll meet you at the car.”

  Alice watched him go, jaw set, eyes ablaze. Her mother murmured something about the pressures of work. The boy, Rob, caught my eye and I looked away. He said something else and both women laughed, his sister with enthusiasm and the mother as though she really shouldn’t.

  “Wicked child,” she said, and Rob grinned again and looked straight at me.

  When Marcus went to pay, I went to the ladies’. It was down a narrow corridor at the back of the pub. When I came out, Rob was blocking the corridor. I stepped left and so did he. Then right, so did he.

  “I could dance like this all night,” he said. He was so close that I could feel his breath on my face. “Made you look. Made you stare. Made you lose your underwear.” He took a step nearer, cast a quick look back over his shoulder. “What is it, gorgeous? Why don’t we scoot into the ladies’ here and you tell me all about it before your gorilla comes looking.”

  I wanted to ask him about David so badly I almost took him up on it, but he made a mistake. He put his hand on my waist. Picking up his fingers, I bent the index finger back till he yelped and snatched his hand away. I pushed past.

  “Well, you’re no fun, are you?” he called after me.

  * * *

  It was getting colder but still I went out, not every evening, but some of them.

  The phone rang.

  “Hello?” I said. I wanted him to know it was me, but there was no answering voice, not even the sound of breathing, as though the caller at the other end had covered the mouthpiece with their hand.

  One night it rang and rang. Each time it was the same.

  “Hello? Hello?” I listened into the waiting silence, heard the receiver being placed back gently in its cradle.
Only once the sound of a ragged breath, as though drawn by someone breaking the surface of the sea.

  “Is it you? David, I—”

  Then the dial tone, and then nothing.

  The next morning the air tasted bitter with burning. The verge was soaked in dew. It seeped through my shoes, which left silky green footprints among the silvered grass. The glass in the door of the red phone box had cracked and blackened. I opened it. From inside, you could see that the roof was half-gone. The receiver lay among blackened coils on the floor, the unit was half torn off the wall, and everywhere the stink of petrol, the acrid smell of burning, but the fire long out. Water dripped down the ruined walls. A black puddle was forming.

  Could have been vandals. Locally, there was hardly a bus shelter, a phone box, a parking meter left untouched. But I had my suspicions. Peter. Or Marcus. Or Peter. I kept them to myself where they smoldered in my chest, a damp, toxic fire giving off choking billows of smoke, still holding my peace when, at the end of the month, we waved him off to Oxford.

  I might have spoken them to Em, but my mother died. On October 18, four months after she predicted the end of the world, she fell again, this time in front of a car.

  It was a Friday. I took the call at Darren’s office. What had she done now? There had been an accident. Yes, I would come.

  Darren looked up from his desk. He was wearing reading glasses, crappy ones he bought for a couple of quid in Boots because he couldn’t stand the idea of an eye test, being loomed over by someone in a white coat.

  “Mum’s been hit by a car.”

  I looked back down at the computer screen, at the columns of numbers I was doggedly inputting. I loved them then, or rather I appreciated that I loved them, loved the safety of the office, the boiling kettle and tinny radio that Darren turned off every time the DJ played a dance song. We went in Darren’s Beamer. They’d taken her to PMH in Swindon. The Chiseldon road was closed so we went over Hackpen, across the Downs. Darren had sent word to one of the sites and we’d barely been there five minutes before Marcus jogged in.