Twenty Questions for Gloria

by Martyn Bedford

  He’s left the tent behind. I remember thinking that. Registering it as a sign of…something. Hope. The sudden flare of hope that, if Uman hadn’t taken the tent, he couldn’t really be leaving the island without me. Or leaving at all.

  Another of the lies I told myself.

  He’d abandoned the tent because he couldn’t take it without waking me, without telling me what he was doing. He’d abandoned the tent exactly because he wanted to leave without me.

  How quietly, how carefully, he must have snuck out to avoid disturbing me. To avoid having to ask, You coming with me?

  To avoid having to say goodbye.

  Tears were leaking down my face by the time I stumbled through the scrub and the hummocky dunes at the back of the beach. I came to a halt, hands on hips, panting, scanning the shoreline. There was no sign of him. No shadowy figure crossing the sand, or wading into the shallows; no suggestion of movement on board any of the boats anchored offshore; no sounds of a paddle splashing the water. If it wasn’t for the lapping of the waves, everything would have been utterly still and silent.

  I wiped my face on my sleeve. Went on looking for him, listening for him.

  “Uman!” My cry sounded obscenely loud in the dead-of-night hush.

  No response.

  How long had he been gone when I woke up? I had no idea. For all I knew, Uman might already have been halfway to France. Or still breaking into the shop.

  Another lie: that was where he’d be, for sure.

  All I had to do was turn back and follow the track to the shop and I’d find Uman there, or intercept him on his way to the bay. Even as I was thinking it, I heard what sounded like a chain saw starting up somewhere behind me, on the island. In the quiet, the noise made me jump. It might have been coming from ten meters away or a hundred. As I tried to locate it, the sound became higher-pitched and more intense, then dipped again, settling to a steady drone. Which was when I realized what I’d heard behind me was its echo in Bryher’s hills, and in fact, the noise was coming from the opposite direction. From the channel of deeper water beyond Green Bay. I realized, too, that it belonged to an outboard motor.

  His name made it as far as my throat, but this time it stuck there.

  What was the use? No way would he have heard me calling to him above the thrum of the engine, when he was so far out.

  I never saw the boat, the dinghy, or whatever it was he’d taken. Never saw Uman at the controls. Backdropped against the inky sea and the long, black streak of the neighboring island, all I could make out—the last I saw of him—was a grayish line of wake that scarred the surface of the water for a few seconds before dissolving into the darkness.

  Uman wouldn’t have seen me, either.

  Wouldn’t even have known I was there, unless he happened to look back at the shore at that exact moment and spot the flashlight laying a pale disc of light on the sand between my feet.

  ONE LAST QUESTION

  These are the Days of Next. They’d seemed impossibly far off when Uman and I shared the Days of Now and an unending life of fugitivery was imaginable.

  It’s a month since they found the boat.

  They still haven’t found whatever remains of Uman Padeem.

  Tomorrow, we fly to New York—Mum, Dad, my brother, and I. Later than planned, but even so: ten days in New York City. I should be excited. I am excited. Just nowhere near as much as other people expect me to be. Uman is dead but I should look forward to something?

  Tierney’s hyper enough for both of us. She keeps saying how lucky I am, putting on an atrocious American accent, asking if I like my eggs over easy, telling me which shops I should visit (even though she’s never been there).

  “You have to take a selfie outside Central Perk,” she tells me.

  “Central Perk doesn’t actually exist, Tier.”

  She pulls a Rachel-style what are you talking about? face. I can’t help laughing.

  We’re sitting on the rocks above the disused quarry at the Hangingstones, watching the climbers. At least, that was the plan. But there are no climbers today. We sit here even so, talking, drinking Pepsi Max, pretending things are the same as they always were between us. It’s a school day, but we’ve ditched—me because I’m “special circs” and can get away with pretty much anything at the moment (not that I push it too far); Tier because she doesn’t like to think of me “mooching around” on my own. I’ve pointed out to her that being alone isn’t the same as being lonely, but you’d think I’d said a lizard is a type of vegetable.

  I expected her to hate me. But the day after the police had run out of questions, Tier returned my call and asked if she could come over.

  “We still have photographers outside,” I warned her.

  “I know. Why d’you think I want to come by?”

  Tierney with an i-e, I heard her call out to them from the doorstep. Best friend since primary school. Inside, I’d barely shut the door when she wrapped me up in a hug and burst into tears. We were both in a state, to be honest. For the next two hours, we lay on my bed—head to toe, like we always did—and just talked and talked.

  The awkwardness took a little longer to find us. It’s still here, at the Hangingstones.

  “I came here with Uman one time.” I nod toward the mouth of the quarry. “A guy walked across on a tightrope. No safety clip or anything.”

  Tierney seems only half attentive. For all that we’ve talked since I came home, she has shown surprisingly little curiosity about Uman or my time on the run with him. It’s as if she and I were a couple and I’ve cheated on her—and now that we’re back together, she’s trying to forget it ever happened.

  She edges toward it now, though. “Is that the real reason you wanted to come up here today?”

  “No.” I can tell she doesn’t believe me.

  The school counselor thinks it’s “unhelpful,” my visiting the places where Uman and I hung out. The riverside park, the Twelve Disciples, the bench where we ate pizza. I even called at his grandmother’s house, but she didn’t understand me or have any idea who I was. I never got to see Fatima, either, because the old woman had shut her in the lounge before opening the front door—I heard her yapping, scrabbling to be let out, but that was all. The other day, while Mum and Dad were at work, I took the train to Shipley and walked along the canal to Drop-Bear Woods. In the clearing where we’d camped, I found a bent tent peg among the leaf litter at the base of a tree. It’s on a shelf in my bedroom.

  “It’s like you’re torturing yourself,” Tierney says. Kindly, not harshly; all the same, there’s the faintest trace of criticism in her tone.

  I just shake my head.

  It’s breezy. The cold gray of the rocks has seeped into the sky. We shouldn’t have come. At least, I should have come by myself.

  “He isn’t here, Glo-Jay.”

  “I know that.”

  “So why, then?”

  It’s not about “finding” Uman, or being close to him, or anything like that. It’s not about being in denial or refusing to let go. I’ve tried to explain it to the counselor. I try explaining it to Tierney now.

  “He never said goodbye.” I pick at the cap of the Pepsi bottle. “This is my way of saying goodbye to him. Place by place.”

  Tier doesn’t understand. She nods like she does, but she doesn’t.

  “New York’s exactly what you need,” she says.

  Somewhere that holds no memories of Uman, I presume she means. But I remember what he said on the beach at Bryher—about how we can make footprints ahead of ourselves on the sand, as well as leaving them behind. Besides, Uman (or my “Uman episode”) is the very reason we’re going to New York. How can I not carry him there with me?

  I wonder how far it is from New York City to Niagara Falls. One of his special places; from the Canadian side, anyway—although I don’t see how one side of a waterfall can be any different from another. That didn’t occur to me before. Now I’ll never be able to ask him about it. And he’ll never g
et there.

  I won’t go to Niagara Falls while we’re in New York.

  “He had all these places he wanted to visit, all these things he wanted to do,” I say.

  Tierney doesn’t respond.

  “After the fire, it was like Uman had so much…life bursting out of him. Too much, maybe. Is that possible?”

  “I don’t know,” Tier says quietly.

  I try to explain it better, but the words catch in my throat. I half turn away so she won’t see the tears in my eyes. We fall silent.

  After a bit, Tierney reaches out to run her fingers through my hair. “The blond will almost have grown out by the time you come back,” she says. “You going to dye it again?”

  “Probably not.”

  She’s still stroking my hair. We used to do this a lot—groom each other like chimps. I consider kissing her on the mouth but shut the idea down right away. I don’t really want to kiss Tierney; I’m just curious to see how she’d react if I did. And to see how I would.

  “I’m going to miss you,” she says, letting her hand drop back into her lap.

  “Same here.” But, really, my capacity for missing people is pretty much used up just now.

  I missed you so much. That’s what she said, between sobs, when she hugged me in the hallway. I’d been missing. I’d been missed.

  In all the hundreds of questions I’ve been asked since it ended, no one—not one single person—has thought to ask: do you miss him?

  What’s strange, though, is that whenever I return to the places we visited together, Uman’s absence is more of a comfort than a torment. They were happy times, these were our happy places. Nothing can erase that. He is gone but he was here, with me, and nothing can erase that, either.

  The media leaves me alone now. I did the press conference, the interviews—throw them a few bones and they’ll stop barking, as DI Ryan put it—and after a couple of weeks they moved on to the next story. It all flared up again for a day or two when some tabloid reporter tracked down that girl from Uman’s posh school—Dominique—and she admitted she’d made up the whole thing. Uman hadn’t abducted her, or held her hostage, or done any of the stuff she’d accused him of. How did I feel about that, the press wanted to know. I didn’t feel anything about it, apart from wishing she’d said it while he was still alive. I’d known all along that Uman wasn’t what they thought he was.

  None of it will be news again until his body washes up somewhere.

  DI Ryan phoned the other day.

  “It’s not about Uman,” she said right off, no doubt picking up the anxiety in my hello.

  She just wanted to know how I was doing. Which was good of her. I think she’d stopped disliking me by the end of the second day of questioning. We spoke for a couple of minutes, that’s all, the phone becoming warm and clammy in my hand. Her voice took me straight back to the interview suite. As though reading my mind, she finished up by saying, “Gloria, I’m sorry I gave you such a hard time.”

  I replied, “I was just about to say the exact same thing to you.”

  At the Hangingstones, I tell Tierney, “I’m searching for myself.”

  She gives me a puzzled look.

  “When I come to these places…if I’m searching for anyone, it’s not Uman. It’s me.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she says.

  Me either, I think. The words have spilled from my mouth while the thought is still forming in my head. “I’m not the same person I was before all of this.” I set the half-empty Pepsi bottle down on the rock beside me. “I’m just trying to figure out how I’ve changed. Who I am now. You know?”

  Tier looks like she regrets coming up here with me.

  I laugh. “We don’t do heavy, do we?”

  She laughs too. “Not if I can help it, no.”

  “It’s true, though, isn’t it? I am different.”

  “Are we still doing heavy?”

  “Seriously, Tier.”

  She exhales. “You’re not different. Not really. Not deep down inside.”

  “You think?”

  “Look, when you fall for a guy you become a bit like him.” She shrugs. “Then, eventually, you go back to being yourself again.”

  —

  I’m turning this over in my mind a little later. We’re eating ice creams at the tables outside the snack cabin in the car park just below the old quarry. We’ve been discussing the school holidays, our plans for the summer. I don’t have any, after New York, so Tier has been taking me through hers. Getting an all-over tan seems to be high on the agenda. Her phone pings and she breaks off from what she’s saying to open the message. I watch her as she taps out a reply. She sneezes twice and I wonder if her hay fever is kicking in, despite the cool, dull day.

  My Danish friend. Are we even friends anymore, or is this just habit?

  The breeze stiffens, cracking the flags on the poles by the entrance to the car park. The red-and-white of England, the white rose of Yorkshire. An Italian flag, too, because that’s where the cabin’s owner comes from. Tier has the hots for his son, who helps out here sometimes. He isn’t working today.

  When you fall for a guy you become a bit like him.

  That was true: I had fallen for Uman; I had become a bit like him. But I’d become a bit like myself, as well—the carefree spirit I used to be as a young girl, anyway. With Uman, I had rediscovered that earlier version of myself. I’d forgotten how much I liked that me.

  You can’t stay seven, eight, nine, ten years old for the whole of your life, though, can you? You can’t run away, either. Not forever or even for very long. Not when you’re fifteen. Maybe not at all. The world Uman had shown me was a false one, I saw that now. False hope. False promise. I couldn’t burst with life like he did—I couldn’t be that full-on, that transgressive, that reckless about whether I lived or died.

  Okay, so we’d been happy together for a while, but that happiness had nowhere to go.

  “You’re seeing everything in black-and-white just now,” the school counselor told me at our latest session. “Rebellion or conformity, freedom or constraint. Total adventure or total lack of adventure.”

  In time, she reckons, I will see that there are shades of gray. Shades of pink and purple was what she said.

  In time, I will be old enough to color my life any shade I choose.

  In time, I will plot a route between the black and the white. And it will be my route—not Uman’s, not mine and Uman’s.

  “You don’t need Uman to liberate you, Gloria.” (She calls me Gloria, the counselor. I asked her to.) “You don’t need anyone. Only you.”

  She has an uncanny knack for telling me things I’ve already worked out for myself.

  Tierney shuts off her phone and places it on the table. She’s nearly finished her ice cream, but I’ve barely touched mine. I pick off a strip of the chocolate coating with my teeth and let it dissolve on my tongue. It’s quiet up here today; only one other table is in use—a young mum breaking off pieces of sausage roll and feeding them to a curly-haired toddler in a buggy. On the path that rises past the old quarry, two elderly hikers pause to consult a map in a clear plastic holder. For a moment, I’m back in the Stretton Hills with Uman, planning our next campsite.

  “Shall we go back to my house?” Tierney asks. “Watch a film or something?”

  “I should pack,” I say. “We have to be at the airport at stupid o’clock in the morning.”

  “I have cinnamon bagels. I have triple-chocolate brownies.”

  The boy in the buggy is staring at me. He has a flake of pastry stuck to his top lip, like a moth has settled there. I smile at him but he doesn’t smile back.

  I won’t go to Tierney’s.

  She’ll be pissed off with me. There was a time when that would have mattered.

  By tomorrow, I’ll be thousands of miles away. New York suddenly seems very real and very imminent and yet impossibly remote and unbelievable. But then, everything is like that. The places I go (or don
’t), the people I’m with (or not), the things I do (or don’t do). Each moment of each hour of each day for the rest of my life hovers on the turn of a (make-believe) card—held in perfect suspension between that which happens and that which doesn’t. Between the questions I say yes to and the ones I say no to.

  I am the sum of my choices. Did I read that somewhere, or hear someone say it, or have I just thought of it for myself?

  We are the sum of our choices.

  When you think of it like that, it’s possible to be anyone you want to be, to live any kind of life you please. More or less.

  I had a choice, that final evening on Bryher, when Uman spoke of stealing a boat. All I had to do was say the word he hoped to hear.

  Yes.

  I had a choice—later, in the night—as I stood on the beach, listening to the engine noise and peering into the blackness for a last glimpse of him. All I had to do was raise the flashlight. Aim it across the water. Signal to him before it was too late.

  Come back for me. Take me with you.

  Those choices are gone. But there will be others. Thousands and thousands of them.

  —

  At the end of the footpath where Uman tricked us that time, Tierney and I hug and say our goodbyes and go our separate ways.

  “Eggs, over easy,” she calls after me.

  “Sunny side up,” I call back.

  Now it’s just me, heading up the street, up the drive, up the steps, tugging the key from my pocket and letting myself into the house.

  It’s dead quiet and still. Mum and Dad are both at work and my brother won’t surface from his bed till at least midafternoon. I’m thinking homemade waffles. I’m thinking a long soak in a hot bath so deep the water slops over the side when I slide in. I’m thinking Van Morrison on the iPod.

  I shut the front door behind me and stoop to gather the post from the mat. The usual glossy junk mail and flyers and boring banky credit-cardy stuff, along with a free newspaper and a charity collection bag. I stack it all on the table in the hallway.

  Which is when I notice a postcard, half hidden between two pieces of junk.