He went quiet while she lay tense against him. Then he said softly, with absolute certainty: “But most of all, you didn’t tell anyone, right up to tonight, because to say it is to make it real. To say it happened is to remember it happened and to know it happened. And that’s unbearable.”
She was still and silent. Years ago she had grasped the fact that at last she had the power to say no. It kept her safe, away from all the pain and humiliation and guilt, all that Angus Fraser had wanted to visit on her again. Don’t go near the roses and you’ll never feel the thorns.
But this unusual, fathomless person was more complete than any she had ever known before. Age had nothing to do with it. Her whole universe was lit by a different sun. Streaming along its beams came a new power, the power to say yes.
David felt the change in her like a tremble in his own body. Despite his unique depth and insight, he was also young and very tired of trying to be good. Finally, he crossed the limit of his endurance. He slipped off the sofa, bringing her with him onto the deep pile of the carpet. He was on fire in seconds, answering the little cries of desire already coming from her throat.
“I told you,” he breathed against her ear. “I told you. You and I meeting would be dangerous.”
She cried.
Still lying on the carpet, he tugged cushions from the sofa to put under their heads. He pulled the whole length of her against him, holding her while she wept as if her heart was breaking. A calmness descended on him, an assurance that this was, paradoxically, good. He lifted a corner of the quilt and mopped her eyes. With only a slight hesitation, he wiped her nose as well.
“Hey,” he said, “I think we can get away with the lamp. But we won’t even try to explain the state of this quilt.”
He stroked her back gently as he listened to the melt waters cascading from her, dead water stirred to a purging torrent of atonement. Once, he twisted to look up at the window though the partly open curtains. He could see the sky. Fingers of the dawn were beginning to splay above the clouds, lacing their edges with the promise of early gold. He turned back. Why did I have to look up at the sky? A voice had started to speak insistently in his head.
No, he thought, putting his hand on the back of Robyn’s head and pressing her into his shoulder. No, I can’t. I can’t tell it, I can’t make it real. No!
She was starting to speak through gulps, her sobs subsiding. “When your father died, you needed so much more from me.”
She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and he wiped her hand with the quilt. It was too far gone to worry about now. She pulled back a little and he saw the wet fringe of her lashes framing her eyes. He flicked his tongue out and tasted salt. She held his face between her palms. “And you have things to tell me. I know you have.”
He felt as if she were scouring his soul.
No! I can’t. Living it once was enough. She has more courage than I have. Don’t ask me.
She waited, tracing the contours of his face with her thumb. Still she waited. The little piece of transparent tape was peeling off her cheek. How had it lasted this long? They’d need to find a new piece. He reached up and tapped it back carefully. As his hand moved away, she caught it.
“David?”
He didn’t want her to touch the raw parts of him. He was strong, he was there for her. No-one had yet peeled him down to the last, hidden layer.
Finally, she brushed his cheek with her lips. “When you’re ready, I’m listening.” She sat up and pulled her knees up to her chin. “I’ve always hurt people who might have got close to me.” She dropped her forehead onto her knees. “Neil had an accident on the way home one night. I said I wasn’t responsible for it. But maybe I was, partly.” She extended a hand in question. “If he’d been killed, how could I have lived with myself?”
As if he had been kicked, David rolled away from her. After a silence, he felt her move, felt her hand on his shoulder.
“What’s wrong?”
No!
Gently, she rolled him onto his back. “You trust me, remember?”
She took his hand and twined her fingers into his, pulling his hand up into the air. He watched as she opened her fingers. He opened his own and matched hers. Felt the soft pressure of palm on palm.
“Shalom,” she whispered.
He closed his eyes and felt a breeze touch the innermost layer of his being for the very first time. He forced the words from his throat.
“I need to tell you about Abi,” he said.
“Abi?”
“My sister.”
34
Mayo, West of Ireland. Ten years ago.
ANGELS COULDN’T POSSIBLY be as noisy as Abi, David thought. Legs pumping like pistons, three-year-old Abigail Elizabeth Shaw was running round this stranger’s living room as if she owned it, over-excited and over-tired. Her pink dress with the blue cornflowers round the hem flew in all directions as she climbed onto a chair and threw herself off again, arms spread pretending to fly. Her shoulder length hair was wavy like her brother’s, but unlike his, it was a silken gossamer blonde. People were always stroking it and predicting that it would darken as she got older.
Ever since her blue eyes (where had she got those?) first opened on the world she had been making a noise. He couldn’t understand how his father could call her his little angel several times a day. That was when he wasn’t calling her his little miracle. No, Abi was neither an angel nor a miracle to her brother.
David didn’t fully understand, but he knew that his mother and father had been married for several years before he was born and that it had been another six years after that until Abi arrived. His father took him to the hospital to see his mother and his new sister. He had peered into the little cot and looked at this tiny pink thing with the screwed up face and stubby wrinkled fingers.
She wasn’t what he thought of as a miracle. Miracles were when the sea parted, or blind people got their sight back, or sticks turned into snakes, or dead people came to life again. Certainly not a tiny, messy, noisy person who got all the attention that he used to get.
Although she had become mildly more interesting as she had begun to crawl and then graduated to toddlerhood, life as it was before Abi had never returned. Sometimes his mother would be too tired to talk to him. Sometimes his father would spend so long reading bedtime stories to his little miracle that David would have his homework done and put away before Vincent reappeared.
“All finished, David? Well done. You’re a bright boy.”
It was all finished, but he would have liked to share it, to talk about what he was learning. It seemed to him he was doing well at school with very little effort and it puzzled him. There was nothing in the world that didn’t interest him and he felt like a sponge, greedily absorbing all knowledge, all wonders that were put in front of him. Sometimes he would have liked the reassurance that he wasn’t doing anything wrong. He flew through any new work. He was devouring books while some of his classmates were still struggling with words. Was this because he was good at bluffing and would he be found out one day?
But now it was holiday time and they were making their annual journey to their summer cottage out in the west of Ireland. If only they hadn’t met these people, David thought. They seemed to know his mother. They had insisted that the Shaws stop off with them for tea. They had a bungalow overlooking a wild, rocky stretch of the Atlantic coast. They had no children of their own and spent all their summers here.
Close to the bungalow, they stopped above the spectacular cliffs of the coastline. They stood in a line on a grass verge in the blustering Atlantic air to gaze down at the sea boiling around the jagged outcrops and abandoned needles of rock that formed the arms of an isolated cove. David was mesmerised. His father lifted Abi and held her tightly, her hair tossing like a broken cobweb as she gazed round-eyed at the shear, harsh faces of the land’s edge. Seagulls were buffeted like confetti in the wind. David’s mother was keeping him close to her side. He had his ninth birthday so
me months before and he wouldn’t let her hold his hand, but he didn’t mind being wedged securely against her. He fixed one gull in his sights and followed it, feeling his heart soar and wheel along with it, exhilaration in the tilt and swirl of wing and tail, abandon in the rise and fall, near and far of the squalling cries ripping into the wind.
He looked up at Abi, still in her father’s arms. With a quick jerk of her head, she looked away from the sea and down at her brother through the blonde wisps whipping across her face. Her thumb was in her mouth, a sure sign that something had seriously moved her. David smiled at her. Like a burst of sun, a smile lit Abi’s face, her mouth spreading around her thumb. David had a sudden sense that maybe there were things they might share as she grew older; that inside her head, Abi was indeed made of the same stuff as himself.
When they were fastened back in the car, Abi whispered to her brother: “Adventure.”
She said it perfectly. Once she got a word, she got it right. This was a new word that she had grasped and she understood it very well. She had heard stories of the brown hen going for an adventure across the farmyard. She had heard about the spotted puppy going on an adventure through a busy town. Her blue eyes sparkled and David thought of the stormy beach, the power and the glory there would be in standing down there alone in the roaring wind, a small atom, the solitary audience of a mighty drama.
Now however, in this strange living room, she was noisy again. It was so late they were going to stay here overnight. Abi the aeroplane landed in the middle of the room, and David covered his ears and waited for someone to take her away and get her ready for bed. But she wasn’t ready to go.
“David, David! Watch me, watch me!”
Ignoring the four adults in the room, she held her dimpled arms in front of her until she was sure her brother was watching and then rolled her short length into a somersault. Her little bottom went up in the air and the skirt of the pink dress with blue cornflowers blossomed on the floor round her upturned head. She landed on her back, her hair askew over her face. She scrambled up, lost her balance and fell over again, landing effortlessly with a tiny bump.
“I can turn over!” she cried in triumph, bouncing up again onto her short legs. The pink hairslide slipped further round to her ear.
Her mother’s friends owned a cot because they had a niece who came to stay sometimes. Abi complained about being put in a cot. She wasn’t a baby any more. In her yellow pyjamas she jumped up and down in a fury, rattling the rail and demanding to sleep in the bed on the other side of the room. But her brother was going to sleep there, and she was stuck, her little fingers unable to manipulate the catches on the rail.
Later, when she was asleep, David heard the adults laughing about this, about how Abi wanted to sleep in the bed. He said nothing, but it occurred to him for the first time that perhaps sometimes Abi was jealous of him.
When he crept into the room later, his sister was fast asleep. He changed and, just before slipping into bed himself, he stood beside the cot and studied her. He still couldn’t think of her as an angel or a miracle. But maybe, maybe, as an ordinary sister, she might grow up to be just about OK.
He pulled the strange bedclothes up to his chin and turned his mind to the mysteries of different houses and how odd and exciting it felt to be in someone else’s. He turned over and saw the light slide across the wall as the door opened quietly and his mother came in. She ruffled his hair.
“Are you all right, son? Are you warm enough?”
“I’m fine, Mum. Can we go to our own house tomorrow?”
“Yes, tomorrow. Now sleep tight.” She bent to kiss his forehead and smiled. Still smiling, she went to the cot and stood with her hand on the rail watching her sleeping daughter, a small hump under the blanket, a dynamo recharging.
Then she went out and the light crept back across the wall as the door swung behind her. David tucked the blanket under his chin and closed his eyes. His last thought before he went to sleep was of tomorrow. He always remembered that.
He woke in the very early morning. He could hear the sea. Slipping out of bed he went to the window. He discovered that it looked out onto the front, towards the sea which was just across the road at the bottom of the long drive. The light was the sharp, cool, damp light of an hour when only the very earliest land birds were beginning to stir, when most people were still in their deep summer sleep with hours to go before the first yawns and stretches and the realisation that day had stepped in the window unnoticed.
That was the Atlantic Ocean out there. David pressed his small nose to the glass, feeling drawn to the whistling wind and the stunted trees bent like old men to the prevailing wind. In this place, the sea paid no notice to the fact that it was summer. Storms could harry the coast at any time and with very little warning.
The power and the glory! Bewitched beyond resistance, David began to pull on his clothes. He was as quiet as he could be, but as he slipped on his shoes he heard a rustle from the cot and looked up. Abi was standing, the cot clothes rumpled and her eyes bright with vanishing sleep. Her chubby fingers were fastened round the rail.
“Adventure, David?” she whispered, seeming to understand the need to be quiet.
“No, Abi,” he whispered back. “You’ve to go back to sleep.”
“David going out!” she accused, giving the rail a shake.
“Not far, just to the garden. I’ll be straight back.”
“Abi go too!” she demanded, her voice beginning to rise, petulant.
“Don’t be silly,” he said scornfully. “You’re too small.”
It was the wrong approach. Abi inhaled deeply and opened her mouth wide. David flew to the cot and put his hand over her mouth.
“Shut up, Abi! You’ll spoil everything.”
She waited until he removed his hand and then repeated with a stubborn set to her chin: “Abi come too. Adventure!”
“You can’t! You’ve no clothes to put on.”
She pointed to a chair. “Clothes there.”
“You’ve no coat.”
“Coat out there.” She pointed at the door.
“No shoes.”
“Have shoes! Have shoes!” She jumped up and down and took a deep breath, her face red.
“All right, all right!” David said, annoyed.
He fiddled with the latches on the cot rail and finally managed to lower it. It was a nuisance and a fidget, but with her enthusiastic co-operation Abi was dressed quickly. There was a further hold-up when she whispered that she had taken off her night-time pull-ups and wanted her potty. David waited, expecting his father’s voice to pin them to the floor any moment.
The bolt on the back door gave his fingers some difficulty but finally it slid back with a slight clunk. Then he discovered the door was also locked with a key. He looked round the kitchen ledge and went straight to a ceramic jar in the shape of a tomato. He reached up to the green leaves of the lid and found the key.
At first he held Abi’s hand tightly, but the dawn and the gulls and the wind and the trees and the sounds and the scent of the crashing sea made the restriction unbearable. Soon she was running free with the wind and David was running too, high spirits and wonder warring for space in his soul.
Abi had stopped at the bottom of the drive. Some of the gusts were so strong they made her stagger. David had found her elastic hair bobble and tied her hair back so that it wouldn’t get in her eyes. She stared at the other side of the narrow road, knowing that she mustn’t go onto a road alone. That rule had been embedded in her so firmly that she wouldn’t disobey it.
David ran down the lawn and jumped across a flower bed. It was the longest jump he had ever made and he didn’t touch a leaf as he sailed over. He swung round and trotted to Abi. They were the only people alive in the whole world! Abi put one arm round his leg and pointed across the road.
“Over there. Look down.”
More than anything, David wanted to do that too. He remembered looking down at the thundering br
eakers in the cove the evening before and the thrill it had given him deep inside. He took Abi’s hand.
“You’re not to let go of me. Do you understand, Abi? I mean it.”
He felt her fingers tighten in his. “Abi hold tight,” she said, nodding for emphasis.
On the grass above the cove, he made her sit down well back from the edge so that there would be no possibility of her running away suddenly. She kept tight hold of his hand and they sat together speechless. Gulls screamed above and below them. The sea thundered onto the headlands on each side, spray rising high, tossed backwards, upwards, occasionally spattering the air around them in the strongest gusts. The smell of salt and seaweed stung their nostrils. The rocks seemed to live as the spume gushed over them, foamed towards the stony beach, then sucked away again, licking across the boulders, running in frothy rage in the gulleys between.
Abi put her thumb in her mouth. Then she looked up at her brother with eyes like blue china. Speaking round her thumb, she asked: “God?”
Even at the age of nine, David’s sense of the spiritual was keen. With a surge of pleasure, he realised that this sense was in Abi also. He smiled at her and squeezed her hand.
“Yes, God,” he answered.
To his right, David could see that the cliff face leaned backwards and made a more gradual slope down to the inlet. With some care, he might have been able to slither down, but it was out of the question for Abi. How he would have loved to confront those breakers! To stand before their might and feel the wind rip through his hair as they crashed and foamed towards him. The power and the glory!
They had to go back. He would be skinned alive if his parents found out what he had done. With a sigh he said, “Come on. We have to go back. And don’t tell Mum and Dad about this. They’d be very cross.”
Briefly, he let go of her hand as he pushed himself up from the grass. She didn’t let go of his. He let go of hers. At that moment a large gull swooped down close above their heads and sliced over the cliff edge.
Healer of My Heart Page 27
