The Lives She Left Behind

by James Long

  ‘When did you lose her?’

  ‘This morning.’

  ‘Then she won’t be very far away, will she?’

  ‘Oh thanks,’ said Lucy as the car drove off. ‘That helps.’ She turned to Jo. ‘Shall I tell you something really odd?’ she said. ‘I did recognise that photo.’

  The way to the second castle was a muddy ordeal, edged by a honeycomb of overgrown craters spreading through the woods as far as they could see. Half a mile in, they left the track and climbed up the hill to their right. On the top, a steep mound rose amidst the trees. They scrambled up it to where a curve of stonework ran round its summit.

  Ali inspected it. ‘This is it. This is the motte, you see. Look at the stones. It’s wonderful.’

  Lucy cupped her hands and shouted, ‘Jo! Jo? Hello? Jo-oh!’ There was no answer. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘She’s not here either. That leaves one more.’

  ‘Let’s have a proper look at this one first – it’s interesting.’

  Lucy glanced around her. ‘No, it’s not,’ she said. ‘It’s a pile of earth. There is nothing remotely interesting about that.’

  ‘Can’t you imagine the Normans up here?’

  ‘No. I can hardly imagine me up here. I can imagine me down there and I can just about imagine one more castle, then I can imagine a hot bath and a huge meal. Which way do we go now?’

  ‘We’ve done Ballands. This is Castle Orchard. That leaves Cockroad Wood.’ Ali was studying the map. ‘It’s back the way we came, past the farm.’

  ‘More puddles. How lovely.’

  Half an hour’s trudging took them through a gate into a well-kept wood and a track which curved around the contour of the ridge’s western flank, the ground falling away to their left. They met a woman with a glad-to-be-alive Labrador.

  ‘Is the castle this way?’ Lucy asked to Ali’s annoyance, because the map showed it was.

  ‘Not far,’ said the woman. ‘Fork right in a hundred yards. It’s just along there. Down, Jessie.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Ali. ‘I can’t get any muddier. I don’t suppose you’ve seen our friend, Jo? Dark hair. Backpack, red jacket.’

  ‘Oh yes, I think I did,’ said the woman. ‘There was a girl sitting up on the castle mound just now. A girl and a boy.’

  ‘No, she’d be by herself.’

  ‘Well, the girl was definitely wearing a red jacket.’

  ‘A boy,’ said Lucy as they walked on. ‘She’s been gone for five hours and she’s found a boy.’

  ‘No, not Jo. She wouldn’t be in the middle of a wood with a stranger. That’s just not her, is it?’

  Lucy was thinking about the photo the policeman showed her, thinking and wondering. ‘Walking out on us isn’t her either.’

  Two hundred yards on they came to the fork. The carcass of a deer lay on the track right by it. ‘That’s funny, isn’t it?’ said Lucy. ‘You would have thought she’d have said “Turn right at the ribcage”, wouldn’t you? I mean you can’t just walk past something like that and pretend it isn’t there.’

  ‘It’s the countryside. I expect she sees things like that all the time.’

  Lucy prodded the bones with her foot. ‘That woman probably killed it. We disturbed her in the act of eating it. They’re like that in the country. She only just had time to wipe her face.’

  ‘Look,’ said Ali. ‘She was right. There’s Jo, up in the trees.’ A girl in a red jacket sat on the top of the mound, looking away from them. A boy in green sat close beside her.

  ‘Oh my goodness. It is Jo, so who’s that?’

  ‘He’s got his arm round her,’ Lucy hissed. ‘I don’t believe it. Let’s creep up on them.’

  ‘No, let’s not,’ said Ali. ‘Jo?’ she called. ‘Jo? Hello!’

  The girl above took no notice and for a moment they doubted it was her, but when they called again she turned slowly to stare down at them then turned back to the boy beside her. They dumped their backpacks at the bottom of the slope and climbed the steep bank.

  ‘Well, this is a surprise,’ said Ali somewhat crossly when they reached the top. She looked hard at the boy, who looked calmly back at her, then she looked at the girl next to him and looked again, harder. ‘What’s wrong with you, Jo?’ she asked, shocked, and swung back to the boy. ‘What have you done to her?’

  ‘She’s a bit upset. I’m looking after her.’

  ‘What upset her? She’s our friend. What did you do?’

  ‘Come to that, who are you?’ Lucy stood over him with her hands on her hips.

  ‘I’m called Ferney, I’m—’

  ‘Balls,’ Lucy said. ‘You’re not called Ferney. You’re called Luke and you’re the one who fell into the trench at the dig and now the police are looking for you. Jo, I think you should come with us, right now.’ She pulled out her phone and snapped a picture of him as if that might control him.

  The girl blinked and seemed to come back to them. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I know about that. Yes, his name is Luke but he’s always been Ferney to me.’

  ‘You already knew each other?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘How come? You didn’t say anything about him at Montacute. What happened – you just bumped into each other in the middle of a wood?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘How do you know each other?’ asked Ali.

  ‘From way back. Don’t worry about that now.’

  ‘What about the police?’

  ‘That’s not important,’ said Ferney. He seemed calm and assured.

  ‘Well, what now?’ Ali demanded. ‘It wasn’t very nice just to go off like that. We’ve been looking all over the place.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I suppose it wasn’t. Why don’t you both sit down?’

  ‘I don’t want to sit down,’ Lucy broke in. ‘I want to go. I’m tired, I’m hungry, I’m muddy, and I’m pissed off with fake castles which are just piles of earth. Well, okay, the last one had a rockery on top but I’m bored stiff and somebody should tell somebody to stop writing “castle” on maps when all they mean is “giant molehill”.’

  ‘Oh, they were deadly places once,’ said Ferney. ‘Imagine it. A big timber tower right where we’re sitting. Soldiers on watch, ready to kill. Stakes driven in all the way round for a wall. The bailey down there, where they all lived.’

  ‘Are you making that up?’

  ‘There’s an information board,’ he replied calmly, pointing towards the track. ‘See it? They’ve even done a picture – you know, like a reconstruction. You can go and read it.’

  ‘All right,’ said Lucy. ‘We’ll do that. Jo, would you come down with us? Just you. You don’t mind, do you?’ she said to Ferney. ‘We need a girls’ talk.’

  They clambered down to the board and Ali began to read it. ‘Oh, for goodness sake! Don’t bother with that,’ said Lucy. ‘That’s not why we’re here. Jo, what are you doing? Who is he? Where did you get him from? How could you just go off like that?’

  ‘I had to. I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  ‘Then this policeman showed us his photo. He could be a murderer for all I know.’

  ‘Of course he’s not. He’s the best man in the world, I promise.’

  ‘Man? He’s not a man. He’s our age. Anyway, you’ve never mentioned him once. I know everything else about you. How come I don’t know that?’

  ‘There are lots of things you don’t know about me.’

  ‘Oh really. Jo Driscoll, woman of mystery. I suppose you have a secret cave where you dress up in your cape. I know your bra size. I know you prefer Grape Nuts to Sugar Puffs, though I have no idea why. I know who you snogged first.’

  ‘Well, for all that, I do know him and I promise you don’t need to worry.’

  ‘Please, Jo, you’re going to come with us now, aren’t you?’ said Ali. ‘You’re not yourself. All that stuff about your name yesterday and now him. I think we should head for a station and get back home. There’s a bus from Zeals to Gillingham. The w
oman in the shop said so. I think there are trains to Exeter from there.’

  ‘Why do you want to go?’

  ‘Because of you going off like that. It feels like things are falling apart. Where’s your backpack?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry, I’m going to stay here for a while. There’s stuff I have to sort out.’

  ‘But we can’t leave you here. What will we tell your mum?’

  The girl facing them, who seemed so serene and certain of herself, suddenly faltered at that. ‘My mum? My mum.’

  ‘Your mum,’ said Lucy. ‘Your mum, Fleur. Remember her? Your just-ever-so-slightly-scary mum?’

  Jo ignored her, staring at Ali. ‘I don’t know. Let me think. She won’t be back for a few more days. I’ll write to her.’

  Lucy took Jo’s head in both hands, turning it and forcing the other girl to look at her. ‘You’ll write to her? Are we in the same century? Nobody writes.’

  ‘We can’t just abandon you,’ said Ali. ‘She’ll think we’re completely irresponsible. What can we possibly say? You decided to stay in a tiny little village with someone none of us has ever heard of who’s wanted by the police?’

  ‘Ali’s right,’ said Lucy. ‘Listen, Jo, I never thought I’d be telling you to be more responsible but I have to say this is completely mad and I’d rather not be eaten by your mother who, as we both know, can be a bit extreme.’

  ‘I’m staying here. It’s as simple as that. I’ll sort out my mum.’

  ‘But there isn’t even anywhere we can contact you.’

  Jo frowned. ‘Yes there is. There’s a house called Bagstone Farm. It’s the far side of the village. There’s a man there called Mike. I’ll make sure he knows where I am.’

  ‘Mike? Who is Mike?’

  ‘Mike Martin.’

  ‘How do you know him?’

  ‘He’s a teacher.’

  ‘The teacher from the dig? That Mike? Did they brainwash you when we weren’t looking? How come you’ve only just realised you know this place? You never said so yesterday. One minute you’re in the tent with us and the next minute you’re called Gilly or Golly or something weird and you know a boy called Ferney, which doesn’t sound at all like a real name either, as well as a man called Mike and a farm called whatever it’s called, not to mention an entire village.’

  ‘Please believe me. I’m fine. I’m not in any trouble and you don’t have to worry about me, okay?’

  ‘Have you got this man’s number?’ demanded Ali and Gally found, somewhere amongst the most recent shards of her memory, there was a number that she still knew. She wrote it down for them, thinking as she did so that there didn’t seem to be enough digits and realising, too late, that this was a number from 1990.

  ‘Keep your phone charged,’ said Ali. ‘Have you got it on you? No, of course you haven’t. I bet you’ve left it in your backpack. Get it out. Switch it on. Listen, Jo. You’ve got our numbers. Lucy’s phone is flat but you can call me.’

  They had one last go at persuading her but she wouldn’t budge, so in the end the two girls walked reluctantly away, looking back frequently until they were out of sight. Gally climbed back up the slope to Ferney.

  ‘That wasn’t easy,’ he said.

  She didn’t answer and he realised that she was crying silently.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  It was a while before she replied. ‘I’m not their friend any more, am I?’ she said quietly. ‘I’ve lost them and the person I used to be. It’s like she’s dead.’

  ‘You’re still her but you never were just her. You’re Gally. That’s much bigger than just her.’

  ‘Jo. I was Jo.’ She gripped his hand so tightly that he tried to pull it away and his eyes widened in surprise. ‘That’s my life walking away from me down there. Those are people I care about.’

  ‘But we’ve got ourselves back. That’s everything.’

  She relented a little then. ‘Yes, of course we have, but give me space to grieve.’ She let out a shuddering sigh and put her hand to her mouth. ‘They’ll tell my mum.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When she gets home. A week maybe.’

  ‘We’ll sort something out. A lot can happen in a week. Let’s live for now. Please don’t be sad. You are my lovely Gally who is finally back where she should be.’

  ‘That’s not all of it, is it? There was Mike and there still is Mike.’

  ‘He’s not important in this.’

  But Gally was remembering the distraught look in Mike’s eyes and her acute uneasiness at the message in the stone and feeling a tangled net of responsibility and guilt. ‘You can’t say that,’ she said. ‘He seems so hurt. Why do I feel so terrible? Isn’t it because of Edgar and Sebbi?’ She said the names as if they were children only just lost.

  ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘That’s all far too ancient. Yes, it ate away at your soul for a very long time, five or six hard lifetimes, but you were cured of that. Someone helped you recover. We’ll come to that.’

  She shivered and Ferney felt it. ‘You don’t like it here.’

  ‘It’s just a grassy mound,’ she said. ‘I like the way the grass has covered it and softened it and taken away its teeth, but I know it used to have teeth and I still hate the castleness of it.’

  ‘You always have. You’ve never had any time for armies. The land soaks into us and we soak into it and all that happens there gets stirred up and dissolved in time and we’re just on the end of all that. Did you hate Montacute too? I bet you did. I think something led me there, not just you. Montacute matters.’

  ‘It’s a powerful place,’ she said. ‘When I was there, I told a story round the campfire. It came to me and took me over.’

  ‘I know. Dozer told me when I went back to look for you.’

  ‘You went back?’

  ‘Of course. Anyway, that wasn’t about Edgar. That was Sebbi.’ He sighed. ‘Edgar was already dead. I buried him myself, a long way away. I’ll tell it all when I get it straight, but not now. Listen, we don’t carry these hurts with us any more. They would overwhelm us if we did. That first time it took years and years to get beyond it. We learnt that lesson.’

  ‘So why do I still feel so bad?’

  ‘We’ve been buried all over that graveyard, you and me. There’s hardly a spot in it we haven’t occupied. You were looking at the old grave but there’s a newer one on top of it and I think that’s what makes you want to cry. It says Gabriella Martin on it. That was you, you know that.’

  ‘And I was married to Mike,’ she said, as if that part still made no sense. ‘You’ve seen it. Who was Rosie?’

  ‘That’s the bit I don’t quite know yet,’ he said. ‘We will have to remember exactly what happened. Fears are easier to fight when you can name them but right now I think we have to move on. There’s good and bad in every place round here. Look around you now. Let’s try and get back to the good. Forget the castle. Remember later on.’ He pointed down to the flatter mound of the bailey below. ‘Do you remember the woman with the pigs?’

  ‘What woman?’

  ‘See if I can help you get there. The palisades. Imagine the stakes still there but pretty rotten. Lots of them broken and lashed together with twine, bits of branch filling the gaps, anything she had lying around. Okay? She kept the pigs in there, rooting around. She lived up here in what was left of the old tower. She stretched pigskins over the beams to keep the rain out.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Gally, looking slowly around with eyes focused eight hundred years away. ‘Was there a skull on top?’

  ‘That’s it. A stag’s skull with only one antler, up on the roof peak.’

  ‘Yes. Let me get it.’ Gally stared down, imagined the gap-toothed wooden poles, caught a shred of them and pulled them into focus. ‘She was the wise woman. She was Freya or . . .’

  ‘Freda? Is that right?’

  ‘Freda. I liked her. She showed me how to use cowslips.’

  ‘You showed her more than she showed you. You j
ust did it so she never knew she was being shown.’

  ‘I don’t remember that part.’

  ‘Things come when it’s time for them. It’s time for us now. We’ve found our way back and we’re the right age.’

  She held both his hands in hers and stared into the deep familiar comfort of his eyes with huge joy unfolding inside her. ‘Yes. I know how good that is, even if I can’t quite see the edges of it yet.’

  ‘It doesn’t have edges.’

  ‘But what do we do now? We can’t stay sitting here forever. Where do we go?’

  ‘We have to ask him to let us use the house.’

  ‘Bagstone? How can we do that?’

  ‘It’s your house too.’

  ‘Be kind, Ferney.’ Gally sighed. ‘If it’s my house too, then I’m his wife. How do you think that will feel? It was me and him, wasn’t it? You were an old man.’

  ‘That was a mistake, no more. You married him when you had forgotten about me. You were far away. We know what that’s like when you’re far away.’

  Gally went on exploring the growing knowledge and growing disquiet within her. ‘That’s no excuse. You have to face it. For quite a few years he was the centre of my life. I married him. I’m afraid I am still the centre of his. I can’t be hard on him.’

  ‘We need somewhere to be, you and me. It has to be there. It’s not just a house. It’s our root.’

  ‘The village is our home. We’ve lived in other houses.’

  He looked at her with eyebrows raised.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Only when we had to, but it is possible.’

  ‘Imagine trying to move into somewhere else. Two sixteen-year-olds. Have you even got a bank account? I haven’t. That’s not the point though. Bagstone is the only place where we fit. You know that.’

  ‘How’s this going to work?’ she asked. ‘I haven’t got much money left.’

  ‘I’ve got money. You remember?’

  She screwed up her eyes. ‘Remind me?’

  He pointed down the hill. ‘See that tree? See my mark on the trunk? Six feet this way, two feet down, a box with something in it. I never know exactly what until I dig them up. Sovereigns, often. All over the place – here, the Pen Pits, the woods by the house. Stuff from the good times.’