The Summer We All Ran Away

by Cassandra Parkin

  “That makes sense, actually,” said Mathilda. “It’s one of the nicest things about you, you know.”

  “What is?”

  “How kind you are.”

  He kissed her hand. “I won’t be long.”

  Twenty minutes later he was running madly through the woods, blazing with a rage so pure and incandescent it felt like a series of electric shocks.

  “This would be much easier to understand with the words,” said Davey.

  “Easy’s boring,” said Priss. “So, Jack and Mathilda are living together, Mathilda’s modelling for Isaac. Whoa.” Sprawling across a double-page, Isaac had drawn first the panther, and then Mathilda, both of them sleeping in a barred cell in the shape of a heart.

  “Prisoners of love,” said Davey.

  “He must have used half my pens on this one, the robbin’ little bastard,” said Priss gloomily. She turned the page.

  “What the fuck have you done!” Jack yelled. He slammed the veranda doors shut. “What the bloody hell have you done?”

  Mathilda looked at him blankly.

  “I don’t know. What have I done?”

  “The cage door! You let him out! You went into the woods this afternoon and you bloody well let him out! Why would you even do that? I know you don’t approve of me keeping him, but Jesus Christ, Mathilda, why would you do that? He’ll get killed out there, there are roads - ”

  “He’s miles from any roads,” said Mathilda, reaching for her glass of wine.

  Another white-hot stab of rage. “So you admit it? It was you?”

  Her face was smooth and blank as she took a considered mouthful from her glass. “I didn’t say that.”

  “Well, you might as well, because of course it was bloody well you!” His hand went to the chain around his neck. “Who the fuck else was going to get the key off me?”

  “How do you know you didn’t forget to lock up?”

  “Because I check. Always. That’s what you have to do when you’re keeping a - ”

  “Prisoner?”

  “He is not a prisoner!”

  “Of course he is. It’s disgusting to keep anything caged like that. Now he’s free. He can do what he’s meant to do.”

  “Which is what, exactly? Maul sheep? Get shot? Starve to death? Die of loneliness?”

  “He can live!” Mathilda’s sudden fury, as white-hot as his own, took him by surprise. “He can get out there and live his life! And yes, sometimes that includes getting hurt, and being hungry, and wishing you were somewhere safe and warm, and being lonely but that’s what makes the good times worthwhile! Life is painful sometimes! That doesn’t mean you should shut yourself away and hide from it!”

  “He was happy where he was!”

  “Then why,” said Mathilda, “did he walk out the door as soon as he got the chance?”

  “He was safe.”

  “Safe.” Her scorn was so huge and visceral that he thought she might actually spit. “That’s a worthwhile goal? Safe? What’s the point when you give up everything else to achieve it? You want to wrap everything and everyone up in cotton wool, don’t you?”

  “If you’d seen the state he was in when I found him - ”

  “Not everyone,” said Mathilda, “needs to hide from the past. Some of us can actually get better while living in the real world.”

  Jack looked at her in total silence.

  “Shit,” said Mathilda. “I’m sorry. That was unforgivably rude and cruel.”

  “If it’s what you think, you should say it.”

  “Is that really what you think? Or are you just saying that to paper over the cracks?”

  He felt a cold clutch of dread in his heart. “What do you mean, cracks?”

  “I’m sorry I said that, I am. But I’m not as nice as you are, and sometimes I can’t help being rude. You’re trying to shut yourself in here and keep everything that matters to you in here with you. You’re like a little kid building a fort under blankets. Well, I’m not going to live in your fort with you, Jack. I can’t. It’s time to call it a day.”

  “He’s not shy about drawing himself, is he?” said Priss.

  Isaac was removing a key from a drawer in the kitchen. He was shirtless, his hair tousled. Davey felt a tingle of desire. Now Isaac was wrestling with a huge, heavy padlock. The cage door stood ajar as Isaac lay in the grass above and watched, the panther walked out. It sniffed the air, then padded off between the trees. A high-angle view of two people glimpsed, arguing, through the veranda doors of the kitchen. Mathilda walking down the drive, not looking back. Jack hunched over a notepad. An envelope dropped in a post box. Jack, his guitar over his shoulder, putting a key under the porch doormat.

  He followed her out of the kitchen and up the stairs. She opened the door to the annexe and rummaged through drawers for the few clothes she had brought with her.

  This can’t be happening, he thought. This is just another row, like the one we had this afternoon.

  “You’re not serious,” he said.

  “Of course I’m serious. I should be in London anyway. I’ve wasted the whole summer here.”

  “But you’ll come back.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You can’t mean that. You can’t. I love you, you love me. That can’t disappear because of one stupid argument - ”

  “I do love you,” she said. “Are you listening, Jack? I do love you. And I know you love me. And it’s been a wonderful summer. But it’s not going to work.”

  “I’ll come to London,” he said. “I’ll sell this place if that’s what it takes.”

  “Will you warn the buyers that there might be a wild beast loose in the woods?”

  He bit back the spasm of fury. “I’m serious. If you need to be in Hollywood I’ll come with you there too. Whatever you want, I swear, wherever you want, I’ll marry you tomorrow if you’ll have me - ”

  “No, no, no,” said Mathilda.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’ve got your own career, and it’s a good one.” Jack started to protest, but she held up a commanding hand. “I can’t ask you to traipse around after me all over the world. I’m just starting out, I might never get anywhere. We might as well face it, Jack, two artists together are a recipe for disaster.”

  “Don’t decide now,” he begged. “Don’t write us off. Give it a few months and see how you feel then. I’ll wait for ever, Mathilda, I swear - ”

  “Don’t you dare,” she told him. “Don’t waste your life waiting for me, okay? Find someone who’s unselfish enough to put you first.”

  “This can’t be how it ends.”

  “I’m afraid it is.” She kissed him gently on the cheek. “Isaac left that painting of me in the living room. I’ll understand if you don’t want it, but don’t burn it or anything, okay? He’ll be very famous one day, I think.”

  “Please don’t do this.”

  “I have to.”

  “How can I get in touch with you?”

  “Why would you want to?”

  “Because - ”

  “It’s like ripping off a plaster,” she said. “This way hurts like hell. But doing it slowly only prolongs the agony.”

  He thought he heard a tremor in her voice. “If you ever want to come back,” he told her, “the door will always be open. Always, do you hear me? I’ll leave the key under the mat for you - ”

  “Will you do one thing for me?” she asked.

  “Anything, you know that.”

  “Don’t try and catch that panther. Leave his cage door open too. The world’s more interesting with a wild beast roaming around in it.”

  “Are you fucking nuts?”

  “That’s better. I’d rather have you furious than brokenhearted.”

  “How dare you try and manipulate me? I’ll feel however the hell I want to feel - ”

  “I know,” she said, and walked out of the room.

  “So whose body is in the woods?” demanded Priss. “And who did it? Some
one killed somebody, we know that much.”

  “About that,” said Davey. “I wanted to tell you - ”

  “There’s Evie again,” said Priss, pointing. A woman with soft dark hair walked down the drive towards the door.

  “Remember that letter we found? She did come back after all.”

  Jack had heard it was usual not to remember the times of deepest grief; that the days passed in a blur. Instead, he lived each day with a dreadful clarity that trapped each moment in amber.

  He slept in a different bed every night, hoping this might vary the content of his dreams, which were all wish-fulfilment fantasies so banal and predictable he got angry with himself even while he was still asleep. Mathilda appeared around every corner he had ever known in every house he had ever lived in, emerged from cars he had owned and cars his mother had owned and the buses and trams of his childhood, speaking the words he longed to hear. I’m so sorry, I made a mistake, I’ll never leave you, I swear, never again, oh God, I’ve missed you. He awoke thinking of how she’d have laughed if he’d been able to tell her.

  He spent hours in the library, that sanctuary they had all three instinctively gravitated to, writing ferociously, savagely, desperately. Oddly, he found the music flowed easily now. It didn’t stop his pain, but it gave it shape and dimension, turned it into a structure he could step back from and look at and think to himself, Yes. That’s what happened. This is how you describe love, and brokenness. That’s what it is. He had the feeling sometimes that someone else was in the house with him – bringing small food items like loaves of bread and bottles of milk, taking pens and the occasional item of clothing in return – but it was a big house, and he had often had that feeling before.

  At least once a day, he went to look at the portrait Isaac had left in the annexe. It was painted on the back of one of the old plywood doors he’d had torn out and replaced; if he looked closely he could see the places where Isaac had carefully adjusted the perspective to take account of the dents and scrapes in the wood. It was a beautiful, haunting painting.

  Every evening he swallowed the fear in his throat and went down to the cage to see if the panther had come back. There was no obvious sign. Perhaps it had already died. Occasionally he found minute scraps of rabbit flesh and fur, but foxes could just as easily have left these. Besides, surely such a huge creature couldn’t just live off rabbits?

  After four weeks, six days and thirteen hours, the letter arrived, airmail, the address typed.

  It was from Evie. As he read it, he felt the stirrings of life again. He had glimpsed a prospect even more terrible than staying here forever on his own.

  In Priss’ notebook, Evie picked her way through the rhododendrons. The panther lay on a branch and watched her.

  “How does he know?” Priss muttered. “Look at that, that’s fucking unnatural, no-one should be that good with a biro. Or is he making it up?”

  “He saw it,” said Davey, turning the page. “Look. He was in that tree. That candelabra tree.”

  Isaac had drawn himself in back view only. He was very small, as if he was reluctant, even now, to confess to his part in Evie’s terrible death. Davey didn’t like touching the paper where her blood soaked into the earth.

  Had Isaac cried out to try and warn her?

  Jack took Evie’s letter upstairs to the annexe, trying hard not to notice the disorder in the deserted bedroom, the half-opened drawer, the bedspread that lay on the floor after that last time they had made love. He put it carefully with the others, although he could not have said why he was keeping them; he had no intention of seeing Evie ever again. Perhaps, he thought, it was because he had finally come to understand the pain of unrequited love.

  He kissed Mathilda’s portrait.

  “I mean it,” he said to her. “If you ever need to come back. Ever.”

  Alan was out, so he left the message with his secretary: You win. Fifty dates, wherever you want, worldwide if you can get them. No babysitter.

  In the kitchen, he wrote the final draft of the letter, taking his time, concentrating hard, determined to get every word right. With his guitar over his shoulder, he took the long walk down to the village to post it.

  On the train, he took out his notebook. To his surprise, the notebook was almost full. To his even greater surprise, he liked what he read.

  He made a few amendments, a word here and there, a chord, a flourish; but the structure felt right, the melodies were good, it was falling into place. Scraps of music drifted through his head. He scribbled frantically in the margins. People watched, and smiled, but he was oblivious to their attention.

  “I really thought Kate was Evie,” Davey admitted.

  “You dozy twat,” said Priss, staring at the next page. “You utterly dozy twat.”

  “Why?” said Davey hotly. “She’s got the same coloured hair, it’s not that stupid an idea.”

  “Not you,” said Priss. “Well, not just you, anyway. I can’t believe I didn’t recognise her.”

  The left-hand side of the woman’s face was a copy of the exquisite painting they had found in the annexe, of the woman who now had a name, Mathilda. The right-hand side was a photograph of the same woman, torn from a copy of a newspaper, older and with her hair dyed red and worn in a long bob, exposing the lines of her cheek and neck, subtly representing her features into an eerie re-coloured resemblance of the woman who had welcomed them both into the house. And the third part was a headline, torn from a gossip magazine:

  KATE: HEARTBREAK AS MARRIAGE COLLAPSES

  Tragic Kate Mathieson has abandoned her five-year marriage to toy boy Anders Johns after rumours of infidelity, close friends have reported.

  The timeless Hollywood star – who turned 51 last year and whose real name is Mathilda – left their home in exclusive Oriel Springs after a

  “Oh my God,” said Davey in wonderment. It was like suddenly seeing the other side of an optical illusion. Now he saw it, the previous condition of not-seeing was unimaginable. Kate’s bold, arresting features had stared out at him from cinema posters and DVD covers for films good and bad, art-house and commercial, Hollywood blockbusters and clever British classics and Shakespearian remakes. He had seen her in Hamlet once, a starry remake with Kate in the title role, and a woman rumoured to have been her lover playing opposite her as Ophelia.

  “But she’s got brown eyes,” he said.

  “So? She had green eyes in Starburst and blue eyes in Sons et Lumieres and cat eyes in Practical Cats. She’s an actress. Looking like other people’s what she does for a living.”

  “I suppose,” said Davey dubiously.

  “Christ,” said Priss. “I’m losing the plot here - so the panther did it. And Isaac buried the body.” She shook her head. “Do you think we saw the same actual one?”

  “How can we have done? This was decades ago. Maybe it was its descendant.”

  “Or its ghost.”

  “Sorry?”

  “If I can’t be in a murder mystery I’ll settle for a ghost story. What’s this?”

  “You know, you actually - ”

  “No!” Priss screamed, clutching a long cardboard wallet. “See what he’s given me.”

  With some difficulty, Davey pried the wallet from her hand.

  “I’m going to New York,” said Priss, dazedly. “I’m going to New York. Isaac paid my plane fare.”

  “Have you got anything to sell when you get there?” asked Davey.

  Priss waved the notebook. “I’ll sell this. I’ll write the script for it, it’ll be fantastic - ”

  “It’s got real people in it.”

  “So? I’ll get someone to redraw them a bit, no-one’ll know. Let’s see the ending.”

  Davey was looking out of the window. He had never been in Priss’ room before. She had a fantastic view, straight down the long expanse of gravel drive to the entrance, guarded by the two stone pineapples. They were too far away to see, but he remembered them with a vivid clarity, and the way the stone wal
l had felt against his cheek as he made his drunken circuit of the outer wall the first night he arrived.

  He thought he could see someone in the distance, walking slowly down the driveway.

  Jack was in New York when the packet from Alan caught up with him. In an age of electronic communications, the notion of sending a physical object thousands of miles to communicate one’s wishes and desires seemed like a charming whimsy from a forgotten time. He let it lie on the bureau for weeks, knowing it would be Alan’s semi-regular selection of Jack’s most obscene, amusing or baffling fan mail. He finally got around to opening it one boring, sticky afternoon when the outside world felt like an armpit and his room like an air-conditioned cell.

  He was always amazed by the inventive banality of the human race. If a teenage boy could make a copy of the Landmark cover from clippings of his own pubic hair, what would that same boy be able to achieve if he really put his mind to it? At least Alan had taken the time to put it in a plastic wallet first. The blank envelope was the last thing he found. Alan had scribbled a note in the corner:

  Classic of the genre, this one. Apparently it’s for you. Apparently. Hand-delivered to the office. I had a look, it’s not a letter bomb. Fuck me, mate, but your fans are strange little boys and girls.

  He opened it, expecting another pubic-hair picture.

  Inside was a blank sheet of paper.

  Ten minutes later he plunged into the angry, sticky New York heat, and frantically flagged down a taxi to take him to the airport.

  The figure walking down the drive was coming into focus; a thin man with grey hair and a lived-in face, travel-worn and unsuitably dressed, a guitar slung over his shoulder.

  “I need to tell you something,” said Davey desperately.

  “I might have to rethink the ending, though,” said Priss. “It needs more violence, this story. A proper murderer would have gone down a treat.”

  “There is a murderer in this story,” said Davey. “Well, there might be, anyway. I’m not really sure but, um - ”