The Codes of Love

by Hannah Persaud

On his way to the ridge he sees her underwear, discarded and covered in dew. He blocks an image of him crouched between her knees; his need to punish her surpassing desire.

  As the phone rings at his house in London, Ryan realises it’s too early to call really, not yet 6 a.m. Emily picks up on the second ring, breathless. Before she can speak he does.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m coming home, I’ll be there by lunchtime,’ he tells her. She talks over him, telling him not to come. She got a call from his girlfriend Ella’s parents in the middle of the night. They had tracked Ella and Tom down and interrupted a road trip. They’d found them checked into a hotel in Dover and halted their plans to cross the Channel the next morning. They brought him home.

  ‘Dover?’ Ryan cuts in. ‘Where the hell were they headed?’

  ‘God knows.’ Emily says. ‘Her parents checked her emails and Facebook account and found a message in her deleted items that gave them away. They said Tom had planned the whole thing.’

  ‘Look I should come back,’ Ryan says. ‘What a mess.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bother,’ Emily says, ‘I’ll deal with it.’

  ‘But I—’

  ‘Don’t bother, I mean it.’

  He makes a decision back at the cottage. Still no sign of Ada and it’s been almost eight hours. Long enough to warrant a search. He finds his walking stick and a rucksack, throws in water and some fruit. Progress is slow and his ankle throbs. Sunrise sheds a milky glow across the sky, casting everything in hues of grey. As he passes the caravan the dejected door hangs off and the inside is clearly empty.

  At the far side of the field behind the caravan is a gate that leads from their field into the woodland and it is here that he heads now. His head is clearing and clarity seeps in. When he’s found her, he’ll leave her. He’s too old for these games. Yesterday was a glimpse of what lies ahead. It was reckless, dangerous even. Unforgivable to put her before his son. At the gate he leans briefly, one hand on the post, and looks back towards the cottage that grows smaller as the darkness shrinks back. There is a movement among the trees that catches his eye, but when he peers into the green darkness, it is still. He wonders how anything grows where no light can reach.

  Descending into the valley below, he cups his hands around his mouth and calls out her name. It echoes down the valley and ricochets into the mouth of the lake quarry. Emerging through one of the disused access tunnels for diggers, he is confronted with the turquoise water that spreads the length and width of the quarry, flanked on all sides by forty-foot cliffs. Slate is heaped around the edges of the water casting silvery reflections on the surface of the water. There’s no one here at this time of day, though he knows people use it for diving practice in the height of summer.

  The cliffs loom over his head, the edges protruding above their foundations like diving boards. People regularly hurl themselves off the ledges at high speed into the water, though not everyone makes it. The path they need to clear to reach the water is wide and can’t be seen from the top. In the time since they’ve had the cottage two people have died and local media is campaigning for warning signs to be displayed around the edges of the quarry. Ryan doesn’t think it would make a difference; if anything, it might draw more risk-takers in. Some people are drawn to danger.

  At the edge of the lake Ryan bends on his good knee and refills his bottle. The water is icy, from a spring. Glancing up, he sees a stag at the far side of the lake. It raises its head and watches him, its ears pricked, then bends and sips from the turquoise shore. Ryan replaces the cap on his bottle and stepping back slowly, sits down on a grassy bank. The sun is rising swiftly and the glint from the water dazzles him. He shelters his eyes and sees the stag turn away, back towards the disused tunnel. A doe and two fawns teeter towards him, and as they grow closer he sees that one of them is limping. The stag and doe rub faces as the injured fawn struggles and falls, its mother nudging it up again with her legs. He contemplates trying to capture the fawn to get it to a rescue centre, but he knows it’s a ridiculous idea while he’s barely able to walk himself. He’ll do some research later; perhaps someone can come out to take a look at it.

  Standing, he winces. His ankle has seized up and the heat of yesterday is in the sky. He makes his way down the south side of the escarpment below the quarry and pushes through dried bracken and fallen trees. There’s no sign of Ada or anyone else. He should go back to the cottage and wait; it’s possible she’s already returned and if he were a gambling man he’d put money on Ada surviving far better out here than him. Making his way slowly back to the cottage, he remembers a story his mother used to tell him about the lady of the lake. A beautiful damsel who lived alone on a rock beside the water was spotted by a farmer who fell in love with her. Romance ensued and she gave up her solitary life to live with him in his village. She bore him three sons and at first all seemed well, but in time her behaviour became increasingly erratic. When she professed to have special powers of intuition, the farmer worried for her sanity. She did not take well to his cynicism and in time she returned to her lakeside, leaving the farmer and their children broken-hearted. Be careful who you choose, his mother told him.

  He sees the police officers before they see him. Their car is parked outside the cottage, one officer standing leaning against it and the other sitting inside with an arm flung out of the window. Realisation slams into him. As he gets closer, the man in the car climbs out and the two men walk towards him. Fear pricks the back of his neck.

  ‘A oes gennych eiliad ar gyfer rhai cwestiynau?’ The older officer asks him, holding out his hand. Ryan shakes it.

  ‘I don’t speak Welsh.’

  ‘Nid yw’n siarad Cymraeg’ the older man says to the younger one, who now speaks.

  ‘Do you have a moment for some questions?’ he translates.

  ‘Of course,’ Ryan tells them. ‘Please, come in.’ The officers are hard to understand, their dialect strong.

  Ryan leads the way, leaving his walking stick outside the front door, walking for the first time in two days without support. He is excruciatingly aware of Ada’s underwear still outside in the grass, sodden in dew. He half expects to find her inside making breakfast, but as soon as he opens the door he knows she is not there.

  ‘Please, sit.’ He gestures to the armchairs and the officers do, removing their hats. ‘I think I know what this is about,’ he says.

  ‘We have some troubling news,’ says the younger officer. Ryan swallows hard. This is insane – she couldn’t have. He should have leapt from the flagstone floor yesterday and to hell with his ankle, run after her into the open night and begged her to come back. What right did he have to send her spinning to her end? The pain in his chest is sharp and very real. He catches his breath and holds it. He puts his face in his hands.

  ‘The body of a woman was found close to your house. By a local farmer,’ the officer says.

  ‘Marw,’ adds the older man.

  ‘Dead,’ the other officer clarifies.

  ‘Where was she?’ Ryan asks, sitting up straight and pushing his hands under the cushion of the chair.

  ‘Just over there,’ the younger man says, gesturing to the forest beyond the fence.

  ‘We think she was out walking. There was an accident. A leg broken in three places. Nobody would have heard if she had called. It’s unusual for someone to go missing at this time of year. Weather is good, visibility high …’ The officer trails off when he sees Ryan’s face.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asks. Ryan nods, standing and moving to the door. He needs air. The young officer walks to Ryan and puts a hand on his arm.

  ‘We thought you should know, given your proximity to where she was found. There may be further inspections of the area. We wonder if you’ve seen or heard anything unusual?’

  ‘When did you find her?’ Ryan asks, pushing back the well of nausea in his throat. There are so many questions he doesn’t want answered.

  ‘Three days ago,’ the older officer replies. Ryan turns, un
sure that he heard right. Three days. THREE DAYS!

  ‘There was no one here when we found the body, that’s why we came …’ Ryan pushes down on the door handle and stumbles out of the room into the sunshine. He lifts his face to the sky and thanks a god he does not believe in. The officers follow him out.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ryan says to them, ‘I thought it was someone else.’ The officers exchange looks.

  ‘It was hard to identify her body – she’d been there for weeks,’ the younger officer says, ‘but we know now that her name was Marlena, thirty-six years old and on a hiking holiday with friends.’ Ryan stifles the urge to laugh out loud. It was ridiculous to have assumed the worst. Ada is invincible. They look at him strangely and he sees himself through their eyes, grinning absurdly in the face of a death.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down and we can talk this through,’ the younger officer says without smiling, leading the way back inside.

  ‘It was a case of mistaken identity, sorry,’ Ryan says, rearranging his face into a more sombre expression and sitting down. ‘I thought it was Ada. My partner’, he adds. ‘We had an argument and she walked out.’

  ‘And your Ada? How long has she been missing?’ the young officer asks, frowning.

  ‘Since yesterday,’ Ryan says, ‘but she’ll come back; she always does. A hiking holiday you say?’ Uneasily, he remembers that blistering hot day in June.

  ‘If you did see or hear anything the coroner may want a statement from you,’ the older officer says stonily. ‘As you can imagine, her family are desperate for answers.’

  ‘I remember,’ says Ryan, ‘I saw her friends when they were looking for her. I forgot about it until now.’

  ‘Anything else you might have forgotten?’ the officer asks, casting a look at his colleague and rolling his eyes. Ryan shakes his head.

  ‘She didn’t have a phone or an emergency flare on her. It’s possible she died of dehydration,’ the younger officer tells him. ‘Though we’ve got to consider all possibilities.’

  ‘Of course,’ Ryan says, ‘her poor family and friends.’

  The younger officer speaks, animated. ‘Yes, a shock to the community. Not often we hear of unexpected deaths round here. Most are on the coast – swimmers, climbers. People who don’t know the area taking risks. But this was an ordinary hiker on a walking holiday.’

  After they leave, Ryan sits for a long time staring at the unlit fire. He considers the bottle of wine he saw in the fridge this morning but decides against it. He wants to be sober for when Ada returns. He should feel worried at the thought of her enduring another night outside. He thinks of the walker and how many different sounds of life she must have heard in her wait for death.

  Rules of an open marriage #16:

  Have faith in intuition

  London, May 2016

  Monday and the week has started badly. The call from the college came just after lunchtime. Sam was playing cricket and they think he’s broken his collarbone. The timing’s terrible. He’s got his first exams next week. So now Emily is on her way to St George’s Hospital, window down and humid air clogging her lungs. She never wanted Sam to play any dangerous sports but Ryan insisted and so followed years of freezing on the sidelines of rugby fields and cricket pitches, stamping numb feet against frozen earth or baking in the sun. She took her little boy, whom she’d cossetted against the world in soft mittens and babygros, and thrust him into a pitch where parents gathered round like pit bulls. It felt counterintuitive to clean his wounds and ice his bruises and send him back the following week. It builds resilience, Ryan said, still proud of the crooked finger from his own youth.

  A bus honks as she swerves to avoid a cyclist and she slams her fist down on her horn. Bloody buses, the dinosaurs of the London roads, still thinking they own it despite the growing web of cycle lanes that suggest otherwise. She used to love going on buses when the boys were small. It was the highlight of the day for them, back when she was not working and they were not in school. She’s stuck in traffic beside a park and, nearby, children are playing on the swings, their mothers sitting on a blanket beside them in deep discussion. Everyone looks happy and relaxed. She never could adjust to the social structure that having children brings. She envies their slow movements and easy smiles, the way their children run to them for a snack or a tissue now and then. There is a whole chunk of life that she has missed out on that cannot be clawed back.

  She remembers Ryan’s disappointment in the early days when he’d return from work to find her sitting in a dishevelled lounge, lights down and the boys with their noses pressed to the telly. You should go out with them, he’d say, do child-friendly things. They’re happy with this, she’d insist, one eye on the clock, waiting for it to hit 5 p.m. so that she could have a glass of wine. It’s all they know, was his standard reply, the look on his face far worse than any reprimand. That first walk to the bus stop was a milestone. She remembers the joy of leaving the house, the freedom. There was no stopping once they’d started. They travelled the entirety of London by bus. Never-ending day trips of packed lunches and parks. Bus was Sam’s first word long before he managed Mum or Dad. But once again Ryan didn’t approve, insisting the boys would be better off at toddler groups and Monkey Music mornings. ‘You don’t understand what it’s like,’ she told him.

  She crawls into Tooting Broadway, another area where Ryan wanted to live that she wouldn’t consider, now unaffordable. The transient and fickle housing market has no loyalty to anything but money. She’d like to move out to the country where the air has room to move and the sky stretches infinitely, where the rain when it comes is wet and cold and doesn’t stick like glue to clammy skin.

  She daydreams about a writing cabin by the sea, the only distractions the calling birds and the singing waves. She has enough to buy somewhere modest, just. She’s made enquiries. But it would be every penny she has saved. Ryan’s never bought into her dream of having a second property. Why commit to one location when you can travel freely? he says. Maybe now is the time to do it, while he is distracted.

  Back home the proof of his betrayal is on the table. She opened the letter addressed to him this morning. She’s never opened his post before. She’d expected it to be some sort of clue – a bill from a hotel, or a receipt. When she lifted the seal carefully, steamed from the kettle, she’d slid out the paper inside. It was a letter from a Welsh estate agent, particulars for a property in Wales. Nothing more than a bundle of stones really, though it promised so much more. A holiday retreat, a weekend idyll. A home away from home. A chance to make your mark, the description stated. She thought of the times she’s implored him to consider a holiday home away from the city. The times she’s dreamed of throwing their stuff into the car on a Friday and taking off somewhere else. The thrill of escape. It hurts more than his affair. She slid the letter back into the envelope and pressed the seal with clean, careful fingertips until it looked unopened. He’d never know and perhaps she’d never tell him. Perhaps it wouldn’t matter in the end anyway. She considers telling Adeline about this latest indiscretion when they meet for lunch tomorrow. She didn’t seem that interested in Ryan’s affair last time they met, so perhaps she won’t. She feels slightly sick at the thought of seeing Adeline again after their last encounter.

  The car park is heaving, cars crawling in ant-like rotation waiting for a spot; the ticket inspector is spotless in his blue suit and weaves between windscreens peering through his reflection to inspect dashboards. Emily sighs and taps her fingers against the steering wheel, trapped now between an MPV and a Beetle, unable to go forwards or backwards. It’s not serious, they’d said when they rang her, people break their collarbones all the time – it’s just painful and takes time to heal. There’s no bone breaking through the skin, they’d told her, surgery won’t be necessary; no damage to the nerves in his arm. He’ll still be able to sit his exams. Her phone rings and she answers it; it’s Ryan.

  ‘I haven’t seen him yet … not serious, no … no
rush, I’m here … Sure, see you at home.’ She puts her phone back in her bag and jumps as the car behind her swerves angrily around her and into the spot she’s had her eye on. Finally parked, she navigates the ticket machine, which is accepting only coins. She doesn’t have any and the emergency button for assistance doesn’t work, transmitting a piercing crackle that hurts her ears. She leaves a note on the dashboard and follows signs for A & E. Distracted, she finds herself in a waiting room in the oncology department. She turns to leave but stops. At the end of the row next to a small table piled high with magazines is a water cooler. She is so thirsty. Beside her an elderly man stands shakily and inches across the room where he fills a plastic cup. Painstakingly he carries it back across the room to where Emily is standing and passes it to an elderly woman who accepts it without thanks. As he turns and starts to head back across the room towards the cooler, Emily goes over.

  ‘I’ll get it for you,’ she says gently, placing a hand upon his arm.

  ‘There’s no need, dear,’ he says softly.

  ‘I know,’ Emily says. ‘Please, let me.’ He tilts his head and nodding agreement, shuffles back to his seat beside the old lady. When Emily brings him the water he looks at her with watery eyes rimmed pink.

  ‘That’s very kind of you. Are you here alone?’

  ‘I’m lost, actually.’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ He leans forward and Emily mirrors his movement, ignoring the eyes of the nurses at the reception desk.

  ‘I’ll just ask reception which way to go,’ she says. ‘I’ll be fine,’ and she pats his arm with familiarity.

  ‘We all think we’re fine until we’re not.’ He strokes the back of the hand of the woman beside him who in turn looks up at Emily, smiling weakly. ‘Mildred here, fine for eighty-two years and then wham, out of the blue it came, and knocked her sideways.’