by David Mark
‘Kiss,’ says Betsy, dreamily.
‘Not until I shower. I’ll repel you.’
Betsy pouts. ‘I thought it was “repulse”.’
‘Neither sounds great,’ he says, and reaches into his shirt pocket. He pulls out a joint, expertly rolled. Lights it without another word and sucks the smoke deep into his lungs. Breathes out a thin plume of grey. He holds it out to her, eyes asking if she wants to try.
Panic shoots through her, shredding her serenity as if with a blade.
Why’s he smoking that? How often does he do that? He didn’t even ask if I was OK with it! Is that what he needs to get through the day? How can she believe him when he’s off his head on that stuff? Is she not enough? Why isn’t he as happy as her, sitting here, high on him … ?
She reaches out and takes it from him. Takes a puff. She hasn’t smoked since she was a teenager and even then all it had done was make her feel sick and then put her to sleep. This stuff doesn’t taste like that. It’s smooth and slips into her lungs like honey. She breathes out without coughing. Feels a warmth spread through her and in moments she is telling herself not to worry about the detail that everything’s good, that she’s safe and desired and maybe something more. That everything’s, well, groovy …
‘Groovy,’ she says aloud, and starts to giggle.
Jude grins, enjoying her. ‘Music?’ he asks.
‘I’ve got Spotify on my phone if the signal’s working,’ says Betsy, though her words sound distant and thick inside her head. She slithers back into the chair, staring past the empty stables. ‘You should play for me. Did I tell you I kept listening to your music? Kept looking at your picture on the website too. You were very handsome. Still are. More so. I bet you got so many groupies, didn’t you? I’m kind of paranoid about that, if I think about it. That you’ve had lots of women and I’m … well … I mean I’m not going to get married in white, but …’
‘Sorry, were you saying something?’ asks Jude, emerging from the kitchen and unspooling a long extension cable. He plugs in a battered old CD player – the sort she imagines painters and decorators used to use before the iPod came along and made the world less untidy. There’s a crackle of static and then the sound of piano, sinewy and deep; a poem of sound written entirely on the black keys. ‘Bartok,’ says Jude, and takes a seat on a wooden crate: old and well-made. It might once have carried beer bottles or ammunition.
‘I like it,’ says Betsy, listening. ‘Sad, but beautifully so.’
He grins at that, as if she’s said something insightful and wise. ‘I’ve always preferred the minor key. My dad used to tell me to play something cheerful when I was practicing but it just feels a bit … well … flimsy to me. I like music that reaches in and touches you where you’re vulnerable.’ He takes another drag on his joint. ‘Sorry, just occurred to me – are you cool with this? I don’t smoke much, I’m just kind of in a good place right now.’ He twinkles as he says it. ‘You’ve already made me high – this is just a chaser.’
Betsy doesn’t reply. She feels like she’s floating above everything, looking down at two people falling in love without knowing the first thing about one another. She makes one of her endless pacts with herself. Don’t overthink it. Don’t analyse it to death. Don’t deconstruct it because it might not fit back together again.
Jude notices her look in the direction of the stables. ‘Something sad about an empty stable, don’t you think? Like a ghost ship. You know something’s happened and that it can’t have been good. She’d hate to see them like this.’
Betsy feels herself descending. Floats back down and into herself. She wants to be properly present if he’s going to talk about his dead wife. She’s awake enough to see the wisdom in continuing to look half-asleep and fully stoned.
‘I don’t know much about horses. They scare me a little.’
‘Scare me too. Never been a rider. I can muck out and I know how to lead one by the nose but I’m with my dad on this one – you can get the same experience bouncing up and down on the sofa and throwing money out the window.’
A breeze rushes up the valley, rustling leaves, sending birds squawking into the air. Betsy shivers as it cools the sweat on her brow. She feels the air pressure drop, as if rain is on the way; this afternoon’s brief downpour a mere prelude to a Biblical tempest.
‘You don’t have to talk about her if it’s difficult,’ says Betsy, hoping to God he doesn’t take her up on the offer of remaining mute.
‘It’s not difficult,’ he says, looking past her to where the moor starts to climb. ‘It was for a while. I think I went a bit mad after it happened.’
‘All the best people are mad,’ says Betsy, quietly. ‘I used to have a T-shirt that said that. Jay didn’t let me wear it.’
Jude cocks his head. ‘How did he stop you?’
Betsy thinks about it. ‘He didn’t get in my face about things like that – just made it impossible for me to enjoy them. If I wore something he didn’t like he’d make me hate it too – poke me in the stomach and say it showed off my tummy, or sneer at me for trying to be cool, or hang with the kids, or whatever.’
Jude sucks in another lungful of smoke and starts picking the flower petals and seeds off his arms. ‘So that night – that was the first time he went for you physically?’
Betsy answers in Liz’s voice, a reaction so swift as to seem like a hypnotic suggestion. ‘I pushed him too far. The stuff I sent his work, his contacts, his mam – it humiliated him and for him that’s the worst possible thing. He has to measure up to this vision – the status symbols, the house, the flat-screen TV. His mum made him like that. He’s a good dad really – he was my rock for a long time …’ Her voice fades as she talks, the words losing their meaning as she regurgitates lines she has said countless times before. ‘I think he would have stopped,’ she says, flatly. ‘I have to think that.’
Jude doesn’t say anything. Just turns his gaze back up the valley to where his wife died, and where today, he and Betsy became something so much more than lovers and friends.
‘I’m sorry – I interrupted,’ says Betsy. ‘You can tell me about her. You know I’ve read the article about what happened. Sylvia said to make sure I did. I think she could see I was falling for you and wanted to make sure I knew what I was letting myself in for.’
Jude shakes his head, a half smile at his lips. ‘You wouldn’t get many facts from the way it was reported. Lies, mostly, and guesswork the rest. Truth is, she was here and then she wasn’t. She was alive, and giving me her usual routine of telling me what I’d done wrong, and then she was stomping off in a huff, and then the next thing they’re showing me her body and she’s turning from alive to dead before my eyes; the colour draining out of her the way ice lollies go when you just suck the juice.’ He shakes his head as he considers the memory. ‘People need somebody to blame. Some people blamed me.’
‘And you?’ asks Betsy. ‘Who do you blame?’
He doesn’t reply. Edges his crate forward so he can reach her bare foot. Strokes his rough knuckles against the soft sole and stops when she shivers.
‘It must be killing you,’ he says, looking into her eyes in that intense, earnest way of his. ‘Not asking. Not letting yourself be the person you are. I appreciate the gesture, Betsy, but Sylvia’s right – you deserve to know what you’re letting yourself in for. I know you will have trouble trusting me on that and I don’t expect it to serve as some miracle cure for any problems you’ve faced in the past, but I want us to be together. That’s suddenly more important than anything else.’
Betsy wishes she could look back into his eyes with the same intensity but she suddenly feels uncomfortable and twitchy, as if there are little electric charges going off inside her. She can’t work out how best to reply, even while a choir of voices within are screaming at her to reply that she feels the same about him. Instead, she sets her face into something resembling seriousness, and tries to put her thoughts into some kind of order.
&n
bsp; ‘I feel safe with you. Then I don’t. And I don’t know if that’s because I’ve got BPD and mess things up for myself, or if my paranoia is like a superpower and it’s warning me to get away from you.’
Jude reaches out and wraps his hands around hers. She’s still holding her empty glass and he takes it from her and puts it down at his side.
‘Long story short?’ he asks, softly.
‘Long as it needs to be,’ replies Betsy, and her fingers fasten around his, holding on as if he might pull away.
‘This is her place,’ says Jude, turning a slow circle with his head to take in the bastle and its land. ‘She’d been here for years when she and I got together. Did most of the work herself. It was a ruin. A proper ruin, like the ones all over the valley. The landowners around here get it in the neck for making it so difficult for people to buy up these abandoned houses and turn them into modern homes but there are ways around it if you’re determined enough. This place belonged to an old couple who live over Ireshopeburn. They used the land a little but nobody had lived in the bastle since the end of the First World War. Maeve fell in love with the place when she was up from London visiting her mum …’
‘They’re local?’
He shakes his head. ‘Warwickshire, ancestrally speaking, but they’re not short of money. Her mum owned a couple of holiday properties up here. Rented them out or came to stay herself when fancy took her. And Maeve had always been a countryside girl and wanted somewhere she could keep horses and ride and teach and be as far away from what some people call the real world as possible. She managed to get the money together to make an offer on this place, even while everybody else said she was mad to do so. The council’s planning department were never going to approve any plans to do it up – there was no precedent for it. But she did it anyway. Moved in to a place that wasn’t much more than a hole in the ground and four tall walls. Pitched a tent in the grounds and set to work. There are photos of all that she did. Half-killed herself grafting away clearing the site. She had to prove there was a “functional and financial need” to live here, because it was listed as an ancient monument and they preferred it to be a ruin than risk somebody ruining it, which is her phrase, not mine.’
Dutifully, Betsy smiles. She feels cold, suddenly. The clouds, high and gold, are racing up the valley; turning grey and purple: a bruise on drowned flesh.
‘She got a lot of people on her side,’ he says, and Betsy notices that his hands, clasped within hers, have gone still. He is somewhere else now, remembering. ‘Got the planning officer at Hexham council eating out of the palm of her hand and the local businesses and most of the farmers supported the application. She wanted to run a trekking centre – that was the plan, and managed to get agreements with a lot of official bodies that she would do it all in a way that encouraged wildlife and would have managed the land in an eco-friendly way. She couldn’t have done more.’
‘But?’
‘Campion,’ he says, eyes flashing like flint against stone. ‘He made a formal objection to the planning committee.’
‘Why?’
Jude laughs, drily. ‘Because he gets great joy from being a complete and utter bastard, Betsy. That’s what he lives for. He’s got a lot of clout in this valley. Used his wife’s name to open a few doors and turned himself into Toad of Toad Hall. The local copper has been in his pocket for years. Half the planning committee too, if the rumours were to be believed.’
Betsy rubs her thumb against his dry, crackled knuckle. ‘She got her application rejected. She wasn’t going to be allowed to live here, or do it up, and she’d spent every penny she had on buying a ruin.’ He looks away, eyes downcast. ‘They came to an arrangement,’ he says, and the word seems to disgust him.
‘You don’t have to tell me …’
‘She went to him cap in hand and asked what she could do to get the committee to support the application. And he was enough of a bastard to tell it to her straight. He wanted a share of the profits, and he wanted a share of her.’
‘Jesus,’ whispers Betsy, her face twisting.
‘It went through like a dream at the next planning meeting,’ sneers Jude. ‘She got what she wanted. Started work. Turned this into what you see. By the time we met she was doing good, taking parties out on treks, teaching kids to ride, applying for land management grants and renting out land to farmers. She was doing what she set out to do. All for the price of letting that sweaty bastard enjoy her for a few seconds of her time.’
Betsy shakes her head. She remembers the sensation of being used; of her body being a cash machine. It twists her guts. She needs to stop him talking before she throws up on her own bare feet.
‘How did you meet?’
Jude shrugs. ‘It had all gone wrong. For me. I hadn’t been good enough. Band did OK, I did OK, but I was creeping towards cruise ship territory career-wise and I was living wrong. Drinking. Too much powder up the nose. I couldn’t rely on my fingers to play the way they had before. I came home for a while. My dad still farms at Heddon-on-the-Wall. I grew up in this life. Born to be a farmer but left to study music at university and didn’t come back until I was pushing forty. We met in a bar over Edmundbyers way. I was living here within six weeks.’
‘You do like your passionate beginnings,’ says Betsy, with a meanness she instantly wishes she could take back.
Jude looks away. Grinds out the dead joint on the heel of his boot. ‘I think we were happy. More happy than sad, anyway. She was always cleverer than me, and I’m not saying I’m a dunce, but she always had a million ideas running at any one time and had this fire in her, like she wanted to change the world. I couldn’t keep up sometimes. She’d studied Classics at Durham and did another degree in Forestry Management just because she thought it would look good when applying for land grants. She was exhausting. And she could be nasty when things didn’t go her way. One moment I was her everything and the next I was some sponger, some loafer, trying to get her money. I didn’t even know she had any money! And when she left me this place …? I swear, I never knew. Sometimes I felt more like a punching bag than a partner and I was only just working out how to co-exist with her properly when the accident happened.’
‘I’m sorry, Jude,’ says Betsy, because she feels that she should.
He nods thanks he doesn’t seem to mean. ‘Afterwards, Campion came to see me. Nice as pie at first. Sat in my kitchen and I didn’t know he wasn’t like any number of other locals coming to pass on their respects. I knew of him, course I did, but it wasn’t until that moment that I found out what he really was. He took delight in telling me, of course. Sat there with his feet up, one of his blokes standing by my back door, drinking my tea, enjoying my hospitality, and then he tells me about the arrangement. All he’d done for her in the beginning. And he wanted to make sure I knew that now, her debt was mine. Maeve had signed it over to me, you see – the house, the land. In her will, it all came to me. Which would have been a nice surprise if it hadn’t come with a side order of Campion. As far as he was concerned, the profit sharing arrangement was going to continue, even though I couldn’t possibly run a trekking centre without Maeve because I knew next to nothing about horses. I was too overwhelmed to speak – especially when he started telling me how hard she’d worked to get him onside in the first place. Told me in great detail.’
Betsy experiences a rush of pure hate. She squeezes Jude’s clenched hands. ‘You can stop, Jude. I’m sorry I pushed …’
‘I was numb for months, Betsy,’ he says, despite her protests. ‘I didn’t know what I wanted. I sold the horses and it wasn’t long before the tax man and the bailiffs were knocking on the door saying they’d been tipped off I hadn’t paid my full death duties and was skimming on my taxes. I got audited and had to pay a huge chunk to make it all go away. Equipment started going missing; stock I bought for the fields got savaged; got ill. And Campion just kept sending down little reminders that he was owed, and was running out of patience.’
‘An
d the grouse shooting?’
‘Maeve fought that until her last breath – I was damn well going to honour her wishes. He wasn’t having it. I tried to be as reasonable as I could. I said I’d do jobs for him in part-payment until things worked themselves out. Ended up at his big house managing his woods and taking orders from these halfwit city lads he’d brought out to get the local tenants to do what he wanted.’
Betsy puts the pieces together before he speaks. ‘His wife? Is it Candy? Sylvia mentioned …’
Something a little like a smile rushes across Jude’s features. He looks momentarily bashful. ‘She needed somebody to talk to. Maybe I did too.’
‘You slept with her?’ asks Betsy.
He shakes his head. ‘No. I liked her, I suppose. Liked her enough to want to be her friend and nothing more, and if I’m honest, she wasn’t really my type. But the fact that Candy maybe wanted to – well, that didn’t do much for Campion and from then on it was out and out hatred. He wants me out of here. Wants me to suffer. He’s got people for whom it’s a full-time job. Debt collectors trying to recover goods, enforcement officers trying to seal off the house and evict me.’ He stops talking and shakes his head as some realization pains him. ‘I shouldn’t have brought you here. You should have gone to your sister. I’m a selfish prick for putting you in the middle of all this.’
Betsy leans back in her chair, digesting it all. ‘The money he gave me,’ she says, at last. ‘He sent a man with it. A big man. And those two at the river … he has more of them too? Jude, you can’t be everywhere at once. What are you going to do?’
He extricates his hands and rubs his palms across the stubble at his jaw. ‘Sell up, maybe. Not to him if I can help it, but nobody else will buy with him hovering over the sale like a cloud. I’ve been keeping on keeping on just for bloody-mindedness but now, maybe … I don’t know. I woke up this morning and thought of you. I’ve thought of nothing but you since we met. But then I picture us here together, you and me, and I get this feeling in me that you get when you’re a kid and you realize Christmas isn’t far away.’
