by Freya North
‘And you met again?’
‘This morning.’
Esther observed softness mingling with trepidation in her son's expression. ‘How amazing,’ she said.
‘It is,’ Arlo said, ‘but I won't say more. I don't want to tempt fate.’
‘You won't be tempting fate if you believe in it,’ Esther said. ‘If one has hope, one has the power to fulfil it.’
Arlo lies in bed, the single bed that's always been his, and he's glad to be home. In retrospect, today was a mad day; it was all a bit weird, really. Not so much the fact that he bumped into Petra Flint in Suggitts, Great Ayton, having not seen her for seventeen years. But more, the feelings – strong, soaring, unequivocal – that seeing her has incited.
And Arlo feels a bit pissed off, actually. Because he was getting on fine in life without thoughts of love. And now his mind is whirring with them. And his mind's eye is playing a slide show on a loop, of Petra now, Petra then, Petra today, Petra seventeen years ago. A drop of rain coursing down her face like a tear, this morning. Oh, to kiss it away. Dunlop Green Flash and a short summer uniform. Her legs. Her skin. The swell of unseen but imagined breasts demurely hidden by school shirts or a man's pea-green cagoule.
Arlo's hand goes to his cock, straining with pent-up spunk which he wanks away in seconds. He's been celibate, by choice, for five years, which isn't to say that he hasn't been aroused, hasn't masturbated; but for five years he's been satisfied with pneumatic anonymous fantasy women rather than anyone known to him.
He lies in the dark in his childhood bed, holding the duvet aloft while he wonders if there are any tissues. He laughs when he remembers how fastidiously prepared he was as a teenager for masturbation in this very room. Tissues. Magazines. Brilliant hiding places. Twice-, thrice-nightly eruptions of unharnessed pubescent lust. The noiseless route to the bathroom. Silent comings and goings.
Twisting, he flicks on his bedside light. There are no tissues in sight. He tiptoes fast to the bathroom, knowing which creaking boards to avoid, and cleans himself. He regards the jars of his mother's lotions and potions. This is something new, just as her penchant for expensive scented candles is new. He remembers when he was young watching her massage a little olive oil into her face, her neck. How she'd smile at him and dab a little on his nose. Good old Mum.
He's back in bed and he feels exhausted. His back is nagging. He's not used to driving such a distance. Nearly six hours from Ayton to London via Durham Tees Valley Airport. But he can't get to sleep. Which is baffling because a wank is usually a good sedative.
And though he's spent, he can't stop thinking about her, seeing her.
What are you doing now, Petra? This precise moment in time? Are you in bed too? I feel I know the exact scent of your skin. But how the fuck can I? I've never got that close to you. Is this what love at first sight does, then? Imprints all your secrets, all of you, into me, in an instant?
Shut up, soft lad.
It can't be love at first sight because that would negate how I felt for her years ago. And I did love her then. At a distance. Gently. I remember.
But if I loved her then, where's she been all these years?
Where've you been all my life?
Stop it, idiot.
Is it love at second sight, then? Is that as good?
How will I know?
How can I find out?
Do I dare?
Chapter Twenty-two
A drawback of a converted stone stables is the cobbled flooring. It would be a crime to cover it up but it makes positioning of furniture problematic, if not precarious. The wobble factor requires specific alignment of items, with minimal room for manoeuvre in their placing. Then there's the chill factor: fitted carpets would be anathema, however if areas of the floor aren't covered by rugs then a year-round coldness travels up through the soles of the feet deep into the bones. If you're a sleepwalker, though, you would be safer without the rugs. You are at greater danger sleepwalking inside such an abode than if you opened the door and wandered out into Stokesley. Out in the town, the only threat you might come across would be the stares and sniggers from the kids loitering outside the Spar. Inside the Old Stables, however, your bare feet follow the undulations of the cobbles thus your toes can slide under a ruck in the rug, tripping you up and sending you down hard and fast; your hip catching the arm of the leather chair, your head whacking down on the stone slab of the fireplace. The pain will be so great that your subconscious tells you it's better to stay asleep than wake up. What would you do anyway – call a cab to take you to A&E at the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough and explain that bumping into your first love had set you off crashing into furniture and fireplace?
Heart and hearth, in Petra's case, was not a homely combination.
It was the cold that awoke Petra just before dawn, when it's not quite light but nor is it night-dark; a wearisome time too early for waking up but too late to restore satisfying sleep. Petra scrambled up, which made her head spin. When that stopped, she noted that her jaw really throbbed. Gingerly she took her hand to her chin. The side of her face felt fat. Shivering and a little unsteady, she went to the bathroom to search for paracetamol and look at the damage. She had acquired a rather unbecoming jowl on the left side of her face though she couldn't quite tell if it was purple with bruising or with cold. Certainly, her lips had a bluish tinge.
‘Arlo can't see me like this,’ she told herself and was then simultaneously cheered but troubled that this should be her first thought.
‘Bloody Charlton,’ she muttered, scrabbling around in his bathroom cabinet. ‘Why can't he have something simple like paracetamol?’
But more than the discomfort of being so cold and sore was the disappointment of having sleepwalked in the first place. She was really, really vexed by this. She'd been so high, so happy, all day yesterday; with thoughts of Arlo and the serendipity of it all. Now, she lay in bed, desperate to sleep; concentrating on relaxing her body, not scrunching her eyes tight shut. She took the duvet from the bed and went back into the sitting room, glowering at the small but significant lift of the rug, like a little mouse hole, that had caused her to trip. Swaddling herself, she nestled into the sofa and tried to settle while night seeped away into day.
‘Think nice thoughts,’ she told herself – which was what Eric always used to say to her, instead of sweet dreams, when they house-shared. She imagined herself regaling Eric and Kitty and Gina with an embellished version of how she had come across Arlo, embroidering it into a windswept tale of Brontë magnitude.
And did he take you in his arms and kiss you? she could hear Eric ask with a swoon.
And what would she say? What could she say?
No, she'd have to say, we didn't touch. We were too wet. Too surprised.
But what did he say? Gina, ever the pragmatist, would no doubt ask.
Well, he said I looked just the same.
And then what? Kitty would probe.
He said he'll find me!
How? Kitty again.
I don't know.
Find you? What tosh. How can he? Does the ice-cream lady know where you're staying?
No.
Did you tell him?
No.
Did you even say Stokesley?
I can't remember.
Well, I'm sorry for deflating your bubble of romantic delusion, but even if he wanted to find you, he couldn't. And if he wanted to see you, he'd have asked for a number or something. And if he wanted you, he'd have bloody well kissed you seventeen years ago. Popped your cherry way back then. Been your boyf. Your first love. Christ.
Easy, Kitty.
‘I know I know I know,’ Petra said out loud, covering her ears as if her Studio Three were actually there.
‘I know,’ she said quietly. And then she did precisely what she would have done, had she been in the studio. She turned away from them, stopped listening, and concentrated on working.
Still cloaked in the duvet, Petra sh
uffled across the small garden to the workshop at the back. The birds seemed to sing louder as she went, as if protesting at her presence at a time when the garden should be theirs. Clear off and leave us to our early worms!
‘Dew,’ Petra said, crouching to the grass, transfixed. ‘I'm never up early enough for dew. I don't see dew in London.’ To her eyes, the buds of dew which clung to the undersides of blades of grass, rested on the veins of leaves, hung in stillness from twigs, seemed to be made of something heavier than water, a viscosity keeping them so perfectly round. Petra stood up; the air felt gauzy and as she looked around she noted a vaporous quality, more than a mist, more like a mild sea fret. Thank God I'm awake at this time, she thought, as she eased open the studio door and sat down, cocooned in the duvet, the thrill of wanting to get working swelling like a wave inside her.
This wasn't going to be a tanzanite moment. This was a time for something simple, something vernacular – something inspired by the North-East, for what it had brought her, what she had seen.
‘Dew. And land that climbs and rolls and drops away. Khaki and slate and lilac. Air – up on the hills it's so fresh you can taste it, here in the garden right now you can see it. Ice cream and chocolate and sweets. The river Leven at Ayton rushing over the weir. The Leven behind me, tiptoeing through town. Hills ahead. And moors. Rain licking down my face yesterday. Raindrops, like translucent pearls, on Arlo's forearms.’
With creative energy flowing and charging her brain, Petra was at once warm enough to be done with the duvet. She started to sketch though her design was already set in her mind's eye and before long she was working with copper, crocheting with fine wire and looping in tiny clear beads here and there. Copper as an economical preliminary for the finished work to be executed in white gold perhaps. Earrings, she thought. Long, sensuous, danglies. White gold with moonstone.
Suddenly it was late lunch-time. Petra looked at her work, slipping it over her fingers from hand to hand like a child with a pet hamster. She was delighted; the slink and flow was organic, the beads placed perfectly, just like dew buds glinting on stems against gauzy air, like the tiny flowers finding their footing on the moors.
‘Do you know something? You're fine as you are. Copper is just right because the colour will change just like the landscape. And you're not going to be earrings, you need to trickle, not swing. You're going to be a rather gorgeous hair grip. And I'm going to have you.’
There were plenty of places to buy simple kirby-grips in Stokesley but it was only when she found everywhere closed that Petra remembered it was Good Friday. She had so fancied a cheese-and-onion pasty but she returned to the Old Stables, empty-handed and alone. Just the chocolate Easter bunny for company and she bit off his head without pause for thought.
‘He owes me ten pounds,’ Petra said and it was the first time she'd thought of Arlo since the early hours. You bloody owe me ten pounds, she said again, softly this time and with the coy smile she'd use if he was here in front of her. If only he was. She didn't really want her money back, she just wanted to be able to ask him for it. It could provide the purpose, the excuse, to see him again. Otherwise, what could she say? With a day's distance from their encounter and a full morning's work behind her, she felt shy and a little detached. What would she say if she saw him again? Could she really be brazen enough to smile and flirt and say, Oi you, where's my ten quid?
She drifted off into fanciful imaginings of what could have happened the day before had they only had more time. If he hadn't been rushing off, if the rain had stopped. They could have walked a while, perhaps all the way up Roseberry Topping, the odd hill which looked from some angles like a child's drawing of a wave. They could have sat there and marvelled at both the view and the happenstance. And what would they have said? Every now and then I've thought of you. Always fondly. With a sense of regret that we didn't—That we never—That we didn't even ever kiss. Like this. Kiss like this.
Petra opened her eyes. She was still in the living room at the Old Stables, on her own with a headless chocolate rabbit lying decimated on her lap in his gold-foil coat. She didn't doubt that she'd probably always been a little in love with Arlo. Or the idea of him, at least. She hadn't seen him all that often, after all. Just when it was pottery, when he wasn't revising. But it was such a vivid time. He'd been in her life at one of her most vulnerable periods; when her parents split up and school work moved up a gear and Mrs McNeil, beautiful Lillian McNeil, was her extracurricular teacher of life, love and death.
But that was seventeen years ago. And it wasn't fate or Cupid that had brought Arlo to Suggitts yesterday. It was just a crazy coincidence. One Petra should perhaps marvel at for a moment and then let that moment pass. Because it wouldn't be realistic to imagine how they could possibly get it together. She lives in London, he lives up here. What has he done and where has he been these seventeen years? He's probably married with kids – that was probably his wife honking the horn of a nice MPV. And even if he isn't spoken for, however would he find her again? It was just something to say. It was a silly thing to say. He didn't mean it – how could he? In the age of mobile phones, who on earth offers to find someone else on wits alone? Who did he think he was, some Heathcliff type who'd tramp the moors bellowing Petra! Petra! and sweep her off her feet in the centre of Stokesley to carry her over the threshold of some picture-perfect cottage?
‘Anyway, if I've learned anything from the Rob debacle, it's my tendency to fall in love with an idea; to let unrealistic daydreams falsely colour and distort reality. And my time here will change from being days in which I work productively and feel myself flourish – to hours dragging by with me wondering if he'll turn up. Hoping. Waiting. Imagining. Romanticizing. It's daft.’
And so, straight after the bank holiday, first thing on the Tuesday, she headed south by rail.
At much the same time, Arlo belted back north, a day early, his internal compass buffed up and ready, primed to hone in on Petra Flint.
Chapter Twenty-three
The lie of the land appeared to create an appropriate backdrop to Petra's mood. With the expansive romance of the moors, of the changing light and fast-paced weather, Petra could indulge her feelings of melancholy and drama. The roll and swoop of the moors, the rush and plummet of my heart. By the time she'd been trundled along the Great North-Eastern Railway network and deposited at King's Cross station to be then shunted up the Northern Line to Woodside Park station, just one more automaton with an Oyster card, she simply felt flat. And her flat, when she arrived, felt dull. Being in the basement, the presence of the family upstairs, their footfalls and furniture, for the first time felt oppressive to Petra. As if she was some caryatid, holding them up, or at least having to prevent them from compressing her. Her living space was small anyway, but she felt further diminished by it; envisaging an aerial view of herself where she was just another inconsequential speck of a person living in cramped rented accommodation in a huge city.
Not taking into account the garden and the workshop, the Stables itself hadn't been much bigger than her flat. But Stokesley for Petra, though smaller than North Finchley, seemed to have the capacity to let its inhabitants breathe, according them their individuality, accommodating their sense of space. Slumping down into the sofa, she closed her eyes and banished the voice that asked her if she wasn't being a little too melodramatic – about her reasons for leaving North Yorkshire so abruptly as well as her ambivalence to her home city. A vivid recollection of Mrs McNeil, however, brought her to task.
‘Home isn't necessarily where the heart is, Petra,’ she remembered her saying. ‘You have to put your heart into the place that you call home. That's how I made Tanzania work for me when we moved there. And that's how I established an affection for London when we arrived here from Tanzania.’
Petra wandered into her bedroom and took a pensive look at the watercolour of Kilimanjaro, next to Hector McNeil's abstract oil, both of which Mrs McNeil had bequeathed her. ‘Didn't you also tell me a pa
rt of your heart would be forever with this mountain?’
And she could hear Mrs McNeil answer her back, she could see again the wry smile arising from the lady's superior worldliness and wisdom. ‘And when are you going to tell me that you left a little of your heart in North Yorkshire?’
‘You'll say I'm daft.’
‘I'll say no such thing. I only ask if you ensured that it was placed carefully before you belted back here.’
Petra decided not to answer. Not to talk to the dead. Or to their pictures. She made herself a cup of camomile tea and decided not to phone Lucy or Eric as she'd intended. No more questions, thank you very much. Not when there were no answers to be had, anyway.
‘Petra!’ Gina and Kitty said in unison.
‘Ee by gum,’ said Eric. ‘Hey up, lass.’
Kitty gave Eric a withering raise of her eyebrows before smiling at Petra. ‘You're back.’
‘I am,’ said Petra, preparing to bat the volley of questions on the tips of the tongues of her Studio Three.
‘How was it?’
‘It was great.’
‘Did you do much work?’
‘Loads.’
‘What's Charlton's place like?’
‘Glorious.’
‘And the surroundings?’
‘Glorious too.’
‘Nice people?’
‘Lovely.’
‘How did you sleep?’
‘Pretty well.’
‘What's with your jaw?’
‘I fell.’
‘Asleep?’
‘Yes, you could say that I fell, asleep.’
‘Very droll. Do you feel better about – you know – stuff?’
‘Yes, I feel fine. Absolutely fine.’
‘Did you make friends?’
‘I didn't really fraternize.’
‘Was a fortnight long enough?’
‘Oh God, yes,’ said Petra. ‘It was great. Country air. Peace and quiet. But you know me, I'm a Londoner, born and bred. It's great to be back.’
