She was wrestling with the peculiar inert weight of this question when she thought the noise of the stream changed, its undertone roughening. She looked up and around and then heard the yapping of an animal. The sounds separated out. It wasn’t the water at all: something was coming growling down the road on the far side of the flooded stream, the way she’d come, some kind of car.
A whispery voice close behind her said, “Hide yourself, half sister, or follow me to your mother.” She spun around and saw the boy standing in the stream. He’d snuck up on her without a splash. He was wood-brown and wearing no clothes; a mop of hair slicked over him like mud. He didn’t wait for any sort of answer but ducked and then somehow dropped or fell back into the current, going down out of sight as easily as a pebble sinking. The car noise became abruptly louder. The roiling of the stream had masked it until it was very close. The yapping was louder still, horribly loud, like someone shouting in a small room. Someone did shout then, a man’s muffled yell: “Shut up, you!” Unable to think for surprise, Marina stood where she was. The front of a dirty blue car bigger than Gwen’s came pushing around the last corner before the stream, wheels crunching and snapping the woodland litter on the road. Behind its smeared window Marina saw a face, a face she didn’t know. Another face poked out of one of the back windows, a pointy black-and-white face she recognized as belonging to a dog. The dog barked wildly at her as if trying to throw its head off its own shoulders. Its paws pushed at the top of the window below its neck. The car ground to a stop.
“I said shut it!” She saw the man reach back and aim a slap at the dog. It retreated from the window, still barking, going in circles in the back of the car, clattering so loudly she could easily hear it over the noise of water and engine. She couldn’t stop looking at the man’s face. He looked like neither Caleb nor Owen nor her father nor Gawain; he didn’t look like anyone. He was someone else, another person, with no name, no place: he was like one of the stuffed sacks hanging from the signpost, an inexplicable baffling copy of the idea of a man, except talking and moving. “Down! Stow it!”
The dog noise subsided. The man opened the door of his car and climbed out, staring at Marina. She looked around for the boy, wondering whether the two of them knew each other. It felt unlikely, and the boy was nowhere to be seen. For the first time the instruction he’d given her sank in. Hide yourself. Where? She felt instinctively that she’d have liked it better if she was hidden, if the man with his own strange face wasn’t looking at her, but it was too late for that. She’d have started walking up the road except that she didn’t have her shoes and socks on and her shift was still hooked over the point of a crooked branch.
“All right there?” the man said.
“What?” How could he be talking to her when she didn’t know who he was?
“I said, you all right?”
Something about the way he spoke made her think of Horace, who used to skip some of the letters as if he was too impatient to say whole words.
“Me? Yes. I got a bit wet. And I was hungry so I thought I’d . . .” She couldn’t finish the sentence. The dog had gone into another doggy frenzy. The man banged on the back door of the car with his fist, shouting at it again.
“He don’t see too many people in the roads,” he said, turning back to her. “Where’s your mum and dad?”
“I don’t know where my mother is.” The stream whistled and clattered steadily, but she only had to raise her voice a bit. “My father’s dead. She killed him.”
The man’s clothes, like his car, were a faded and dirty blue. He stuck his hands down in pockets, rather like Caleb used to do, but somehow more heavily. Lots of things about him were heavy.
“Brought you down here with them,” he said, “did they.” He pushed his lips together in what looked like it might have been disappointment. “Left you on your own. Typical.”
She wasn’t sure what he meant by the first bit but she knew the rest was right. It must be obvious to other people that she’d been deserted, or perhaps everyone just knew. His look kept dropping down to her bare legs, as if even his eyeballs were heavy.
“I’m just drying off,” she said.
“You got somewhere to go?”
“What?”
“Who’s looking after you? You got someone? Course you don’t.” His voice dropped to a half-mutter; he’d given up trying to converse with her and was addressing himself instead. “Soft in the head.”
She didn’t like the way he looked and now talked at her. When she talked to the people she knew she could feel herself reflected in them, but with this man it was like she wasn’t really there. They had nothing to do with each other and shouldn’t be having a conversation at all.
“I’ll just put my shoes and socks on,” she announced, and sat down on the road. Putting socks on damp feet was always a struggle. She had to wiggle her knees and lift her feet up.
“Where’re you off to, then?”
An answer popped into her head. She said the name of the place where Horace lived, him and the woman Gawain had taken the mask back to. “Mawnan.” It hadn’t occurred to her until then to ask herself exactly where she was going. There was no where out here beyond Pendurra. She was just walking away from her own misery, so that something else could happen to her, something involving the people she knew coming back and everything being all right again.
“No good going back there. They all upped sticks and gone. Won’t be any of your lot left by tomorrow. Hey. You hear me? You won’t find no one there. What’s your name?”
“Marina.”
“That’s nice. Hey. How about you come with us? That’s an idea. We can look for Mummy. Eh?”
“No,” she said, “thank you.” She started on the other sock.
“It’s all right. Just drive around till we find Mummy and then she can take you home. Nice and warm in the car. You like doggies? Want to see Alfie?” The dog broke into hysterics again. “Shut up!” When he shouted at the dog, she could hear in his voice that he wanted to hurt it.
“I’m not cold,” she said.
“Come on now. Can’t go wandering around on your own.” The man took a couple of steps toward her, the stream curling over the tips of his boots. He beckoned. “You’ll be all right now. I’ve got some food. Eh? Food?”
She pushed her feet into the shoes, which were at least dry. She decided not to say anything else at all. They didn’t have anything to talk about. She pulled the lacing tight and knotted it hurriedly, stood up and lifted her shift from where it was hanging.
“No, you don’t,” the man said, and came a couple more steps toward her, as if he’d failed to notice the torrent between. He sprang back with a snarl. “Oi! Aren’t you listening? I’m trying to help you!” He’d never said that. She started up the slope without saying good-bye. The dog pushed its head out of the open window and yapped at her back. She heard the man bang the car door behind him. Its engine roared. The yapping turned into a mad avalanche of barking. She looked back, alarmed, and saw the car charge forward into the water. Its front slumped abruptly and nosed down into the deep stream. The engine sputtered and stopped. As she hurried away she left the car tilted and half overrun like one of the river wrecks. The man and the dog were shouting at each other inside, their voices blended into a single barrage of rage.
• • •
Another high crossroads, four unknown names on the signposts, a confusion of fields and valleys and buildings and stripes and smears of lingering snow in every direction, nothing to distinguish any of them. However far she went, they only seemed to rearrange themselves like the bits in a kaleidoscope. Her feet told her she’d walked a long way, probably as far as from the house to the point and back, and yet she hadn’t seemed to get anywhere at all; she was just shaking the bits around.
Without her shift on, the coat chafed. She’d been hurrying to get away from the car and the shout
ing man. She started to feel tired and a bit uncomfortable. Normally when she got tired and uncomfortable she just stopped, but when she tried to sit down and read she found she couldn’t concentrate.
She thought seriously about going back. She thought about what a relief it would be to stand inside the gate of Pendurra and have everything she looked at, in every direction and in every detail, fall back into perfect changeless place, so perfect that when she closed her eyes for a moment and thought about it she could see the outline of each individual tree in her mind’s eye.
Then she remembered how unhappy she was. With that, an unexpected thought came over her.
She realized that actually, now, she wasn’t unhappy, not at that moment. She was a little tired and quite uncomfortable and more than a little frightened, but she wasn’t unhappy. Not at all. The misery was back behind her with all the other things that stayed in place.
She heard the barking of the dog again, quite far away. She put the book back in her bag and carried on the way she’d been going.
• • •
At the bottom of the next dip in the road the flood was a kind of lake rather than a stream. The woods were thicker and taller here. A pair of ducks circled around the shallows. Some unfamiliar things occupied the water as well: three big cylinders of rusty metal and a decaying soggy lump that Marina couldn’t work out at all until she saw the shape of a withered head and resolved it into some long-drowned animal. The rain had started again, plinking through the bare trees and making circle patterns on the water. She didn’t mind walking in it but she didn’t know where to put her shift so it would have a chance to dry out. Or rather she did know: you hung it up on the rack in the kitchen. But there was no kitchen.
She waded through the flood, which turned out to be deeper and faster moving than it looked, though still easy enough for her to manage. Then, since there was no point stopping to let things dry when it was raining, she wiped her feet off on her shift and got back into her still slightly damp socks and shoes and went on. The light had changed, not just because of the showery clouds. It was more spread out, higher overhead. With a small shock she realized time was passing. Despite the fact that she was wandering in this nonworld where nothing was properly itself, the morning had, in fact, become the afternoon, as if everything was normal.
Her road ended. It did so by emptying into another road, a much wider one, with much lower hedges on the sides. She stopped at the junction, halted by a new kind of uncertainty. It hadn’t occurred to her that the road would stop. She was just getting used to it. She’d assumed it was the one taking her wherever it was she was going, leading on toward whatever was going to happen to her.
Only at that point did it strike her fully that she was lost, that she didn’t know where she was, that she was a point in space with no knowable relation to any other point.
She sat down to calm herself and tried to organize what she knew of the world. She’d looked at maps: ones that showed everything, like the big globe on its lovely noiseless axis in her father’s study, and ones that showed only a few things. She knew that the sea was to the east, that the river ran east and west, that the church tower with the ringing bell and the field of straggling pilgrims was across the river to the north. But she could see none of those things, the river, the sea, the church, not even a hint of them. The sky told her west was sort of ahead of her, but that didn’t help her with here, wherever here was. Here there was no north or south or east or west at all. Here was just a floating somewhere or other on which she was drifting like a castaway.
She began to feel much more afraid.
She chose one direction along the new road. It was much worse to walk along. Its width was unfriendly; it made her feel small, like an ant crossing a path for people. After a little while she saw a house right by the road, right on top of it, walls and windows overlooking where she was walking. She stopped at once, turned, and went the other way. The same thing happened, though now it was a different house, but still unmistakably a place for people to live. The windows were evenly spaced rectangles like wide, sad, unblinking eyes, like a drawing of a house in a book. One of the huge-wheeled tall cars she knew they used on farms was leaning into the hedge opposite it, at an angle that suggested it would have a hard time getting out. She’d seen things like that at a distance already, houses, farm machines. She hadn’t yet seen them close. Their strangeness loomed huge. She turned away again, went back to the junction, and sat down in the trickle of rainwater flowing over the surface of the road, feeling hopeless. She looked back down her road, the one she almost liked now. It was like a string attaching her to Pendurra, the gate, Holly, the house, the cat, the fire.
Then she remembered the man and dog and their car, stuck now in the middle of it, snipping the string.
The problem of what she was going to do became immediate. What was she going to do now?
Now, like here, had nothing to it; it was empty; it was like reaching for the banister in the dark and finding nothing. She felt her breath coming faster. The rain intensified. Its noise in the branches mocked her with phantom familiarity: I am a thing you think you know.
After a while she decided she ought to try finding a sign that pointed to where Horace lived, or a person who knew where he was. Horace had always loved to tell her things about the world, before he’d stopped coming to see her (without even a good-bye). Though she wondered now whether all of it had been lies, like the other things people had lied to her about, her father and Gwen telling her they’d always love her and look after her, Gawain promising he’d stay with her always. Gwen had always told her the world was full of people, so many that the number of them was actually impossible to think about. Where were they? She thought there were supposed to be cars in the roads and dwellers in the houses. She’d read about them. Owen had talked about everyone else having to abandon where they lived because of the snow and not having any food or warmth, but most of the snow was gone now. There must be someone who knew where she was supposed to go next.
She went back onto the wider road and walked along it again until she reached the less tiny of the overlooking houses. She watched it for a while, looking for firelight in the windows, or smoke from the chimney, but it was as quiet as a dollhouse. She went closer, step by slow step. The strangeness of it, the differentness, seeped out of its stones. They were yellow-brown like stream pebbles, the wrong color for a house. The wood of the window frames was rotten and the windows themselves were sheets of flat darkness. She made herself walk in front of them. Beyond the house a gate opened off the road into a sort of courtyard, like the stable yard but smaller and with the stables open-sided and haphazard. The side windows of the house were cracked with patterns like spiderwebs. Filthy greying snow filled the edges and corners of the yard. In the middle of it was a pile of charred things like an oversized half-finished campfire. The charring spread out from it too, burned scraps and fragments stuck in the snow or glued by damp to the buildings or snagged in the hedge by the gate. One of them caught her eye: a shred of paper with a picture on it, blackened and sodden and caught in the twigs but not yet completely erased. She noticed it because she saw a glimpse of a crumpled face. It pricked her eye with a minuscule jab of recognition. She bent down and poked at the scrap where it was buried in the hedge. Part of it disintegrated limply at her touch, but she was able to straighten it enough to see the face fully. In that ocean of difference she identified it immediately as the remains of a thing she’d seen before. Gwen showed it to her sometimes: the rectangle of blue-green colored paper with swirly patterns and portentous words and a big number five and the head of the old woman who was supposed to be a kind of pretend queen although she didn’t look even slightly queenly, despite the crown.
Marina didn’t like to think of when Gwen might have come this way, or why someone might have set fire to her piece of paper with all the other things. She didn’t like to think about what had happened to Gwe
n at all. Even starting to remember it hurt her, a very particular kind of pain, an involuntary twist and wrench as if the bad memory was a small beast that had taken up residence in her guts and attacked her unless she pretended it wasn’t there. She walked faster, leaving the empty house behind. The rain drummed an insistent rhythm. Her wet feet were beginning to rub.
• • •
Descending steadily, the new road went under taller trees. The familiar smell of wet oaks and alders swamped her so intensely that she wondered whether her path had turned her around and was about to deliver her back to the Pendurra woods. She pulled the hood of her coat forward to keep the rain out of her eyes and trudged on, glad to be going downhill, until an abrupt whoosh of heavy wingbeats made her look over her shoulder. A pair of swans came flying over the brow of the hill behind her and wheeled down behind the trees ahead.
Only then did she realize she’d been led to the bank of the river.
The road kinked around a steep corner and went right down to a creek mouth, a wood-fringed pocket of flat water opening out onto the tidal expanse beyond. She knew it was the river, the same one, even though it was far narrower than she’d ever seen it before and the shape of the land on the far bank was all wrong too. The differences melted away in face of its serene certainty. The water she was looking at through a screen of trees was flowing slowly seaward and would pass under the lookout where she’d sat a hundred thousand times, and then around the headland where she’d been on a hundred thousand walks and picnics. It was as familiar as a face.
She stopped and looked away, balling her fists in the pockets of her father’s coat.
For three months she’d refused to sit at the lookout or walk to the head or go anywhere in sight of the river.
Her heart was beating hot. She looked behind her, back up the steep hill. Apart from the rain and the thudding in her ears, everything was calm.
She remembered how the other road had always gone down and then up, dropping to the swollen streams and then climbing away from them. She told herself it would be all right, this one would be the same. She made herself look across the ribbon of water. Nothing stirred. The upended bows of two or three sunken boats stuck up out of the water, but otherwise nothing disturbed it but the pecking of the rain. She put her head down and carried on.
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