by Harper Fox
“What? Nothing.” He recoiled a little. “Nothing you ought to be able to... Oh, hell. I’m so fucking scared and tired, Gid, and I don’t even know why.”
Gideon opened himself up—arms, heart, big broad shoulder—to receive his tired fall. To make the catch with everything he had. His throat filled with hot salt, that Lee had finally confessed this, admitted to trouble in paradise. The trust was enormous, but Gideon wasn’t afraid. He was proudly, hotly sure that he could make it right. “I know why,” he rumbled, enfolding him in the deepest embrace he could, the one Lee had once described as consuming, a way of being joyously eaten alive. He kissed what he could of the damp face being pressed against his neck. “My stupid brother’s right for once. You have done too much, for Tamsie’s sake or for every hard-luck story from Land’s End to Launceston. But all that’s gonna stop now, isn’t it? You’re going to leave everything to me for a while. Going to rest.”
Lee nodded shakily. He untangled, flashing Gideon a tearstained smile. Tamsyn’s latest joy in life was dinosaur paper napkins: he wiped his eyes with a stegosaurus and blew his nose. “Bloody hell. What a mess. I’d better get that kid out of bed, or she’s gonna be late for school.”
The door creaked. Gideon restrained Lee’s raw-nerved jump. He didn’t want to start his day by yelling at one of his neighbours, but they had to learn to knock... “Oh,” he said, on an outbreath of relief. “Tamsie! Morning, my flower of the moors. Lee was just coming to get you.”
There was no need. She was dressed, from floppy straw sunhat to sneakers. The combination between them was eccentric: patchwork jeans teamed with one of Ma Frayne’s ferociously frilled handmade shirts, but perfectly acceptable for a school day, buttoned and zipped. “Wow,” Lee said, putting out an arm to invite her into the huddle on the chair. “Look at you. You did it all yourself.”
“Was easy, Lee.” She scrambled up to join them, planted a noisy kiss on each face. “Had a shower, too.”
“You... Er, okay, but next time call me or Dada, all right? Do I even want to know how you reached the controls?”
“Didn’t, Lee.” Her brow creased at his failure of imagination. “Used the attackment. On the bath.”
Gideon broke into laughter. “Oh, my God. The attackment? You are something else, Miss Tyack-Frayne. I thought you didn’t even like that shirt.”
“Don’t, but Gammar’s coming.”
“No, she’s not, sweet. We won’t see Grandma until Saturday.”
“Oh, don’t challenge her, Gid.” Lee stood up, depositing the little girl on his husband’s lap, wan smile gaining conviction as he looked down at the two of them. “I’m gonna put the kettle on, just in case. How long have you been up, honey?”
She dug in the pocket of her jeans. She seldom used words when an action or gesture would get the message across, and Gideon had noticed, with a puzzled, fleeting concern, that she seldom referred to herself, habitually dropping the I from her communications. With an otter’s unlikely wriggle, she extricated a handful of leaves. “That’s not really an answer,” he said, examining the latest offering. He glanced at Lee in mild alarm. “Or... is it?”
“Well, these are feverfew. Latin name, Tamsyn?”
“Tanacetum parthenium!”
“And this from a girl who can’t say shower attachment. The nearest clump of these is quarter of a mile away, in the lane behind Sarah Kemp’s house.”
“Saw Sarah. Saw Wilf. Waved.”
“And did they wave back, or were they too busy calling social services? Can you say government care order? That’s a bad thing to do, Tamsyn Elizabeth—wandering out of the house on your own like that. Dangerous.”
“Wasn’t alone. Had Zold.”
Yes, there she was, grizzled nose poked cautiously around the door, not prepared to commit herself until she saw how this confession went down. “Nevertheless,” Lee said. “I know you understand me. You mustn’t do it again.”
She listened carefully. Lee had been right, Gideon thought. Maybe she’d been doing this for months, and today was just the first time she’d been busted. She hadn’t known it was wrong because the moor was her oyster, her garden, her world, and nothing could touch her there. Now she’d found out that her journeys bothered her parents, though, she would stop—without resentment, simply accepting the limitations of their world, like a well-mannered alien tucking away its tentacles so as not to frighten the earthlings.
That was nonsense, of course. She was just a little girl. And the idea that nothing could touch her was purest fantasy, a father’s wish-fulfilment dream. “Hoi,” he said, trying to sound halfway like a responsible adult. “Did you hear your dad, you monkey? What do you say?”
“Won’t do again, Lee. Promise.”
“That’s a good girl.” Gideon rumpled her curls. “What’s this latest offering for, then? What does feverfew do?”
She seemed disinclined to answer. She was watching Lee with unsettling silver-eyed attention. “Feverfew’s good for all kinds of ailments,” Lee said uneasily, after a few seconds. “Toothache, infertility, labour pains. I don’t have any of those things, sweetheart, not as far as I know.”
She stretched up her arms to him. He bent to meet her embrace, but she planted one little hand gently on either side of his skull, drew his head down and rested one ear against his brow as if listening. “What’s this about?” Gideon asked, a scrape of laughter in his voice. “Are you trying to hear the cogs whirring?”
“Feverfew’s good for headaches too. In fact that’s its main application. I don’t have a headache either, though, chick.” He looked up at Gideon, face a picture of amused mystification. “It’s almost as if she thinks I should. Oh, Tamsie—what’s up?”
He hoisted her into his arms. “Crying,” he whispered over her shoulder, in response to Gideon’s alarmed glance. The poor kid didn’t like to be caught short, preferring to deal with her problems than weep about them, knowing she had staunch allies to help her get the job done. “Oh, dear. Is this about yesterday, when you knew I’d had a bad day at work and you were worried? All that’s over with, my honey. Lee’s gonna take the summer off, spend all day with Tamsie, go work on uncle Jory’s crackpot old boat at St Wylloe. No headaches, no nosebleeds. No ghosts.”
That was an odd old lapse, too. Gideon surveyed his husband and kid. Gone were the days of Tamsie, Dada and Lee: all three of them had conscientiously worked past the baby-talk third-person in order to meet school and the adult world halfway. We say “I”, we say “you”. We take responsibility for ourselves and each other.
Ah, he loved them so much. Love for them rushed through his blood like Sennen surf. He got to his feet in the joy and anguish of it, hauled them both into his arms. “Lee’s right,” he growled. “Nobody is to worry about anything, okay? Dada will take care of it all.”
The doorbell rang. Isolde sprang out of her guilty half-crouch in the doorway and began the huffing bark which meant friend, not foe, even though she still felt obliged to make a point. Gideon let go of Lee and Tamsyn and took a big step in front of them. But even the dog had more sense than that: was dancing and waving her tail in the hallway. He drew a steadying breath and went to answer.
He pulled back the door, and Ma Frayne tumbled over the threshold in a welter of fragrance and lace. Making up for lost time, was Ma, and she now possessed an eye-popping wardrobe and an array of the perfume samples bestowed upon her by her many friends in Boots. “Don’t worry, boys,” she cried, patting Isolde, waving to Tamsyn and dropping a large paper bag on the floor. “I know it’s early, and I’m not here to disturb you. Mrs Harle took us out to Torquay Dinosaur World yesterday—I wouldn’t have gone, seeing plenty of dinosaurs as I do in the living room at Roselands every day, but I was thinking of Tamsyn Elizabeth. And they had such a gift shop!”
Gideon retrieved the bag. “What have you got in here, Ma? A baby T-rex?”
“A stuffed one, yes! As cute as could be. You pull a string in his back and he roars and bellows lik
e anything, and then he sings a song.”
“Oh, great.”
“And some napkins—I know she likes those—and a backpack, and a lunch box, and... Oh, she’s wearing that sweet blouse I frilled for her! She looks lovely. Did you put it on her specially? But you couldn’t have done. You didn’t know I was coming.”
“Her choice, Ma. She dressed herself this morning.”
“Did she? But she’s rather young to do that, dear. You couldn’t manage your buttons until you were—”
“Ma, please.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” She beamed unrepentantly. “I mustn’t embarrass you, must I, not when you’re in your nice uniform. My, when I see you together with Ezekiel in his Sunday best, I could just about pop, I’m so proud of you both.”
“Church and State. That’s us.”
“And Lee just looks lovely whatever he wears. Good morning, Lee, dear.”
Lee blew her a gallant kiss across the top of Tamsyn’s head. “Morning, Ma.”
“Anyway, I must be off. I’m helping out with a counselling session at the Pink UK community centre in Liskeard this morning, so I just had my taxi bring me up here on the way.” She paused for breath, lifted one hand to shield her eyes from the sunlight blazing through the kitchen’s southeast window. “But she’s crying, Gideon! What on earth have you been doing to her?”
Chapter Five
A Day in the Lives
Lee saw Ma Frayne off in her taxi. Gid followed rapidly in the police truck, revving and bemoaning his lost paperwork hour. Ma, for all her good intentions, had lingered helplessly over her grandchild, causing the cabbie to beep and tap his watch until Gid had gone to glare at him through the kitchen window. Thereafter he’d sat frozen like a rabbit in headlights, huddled behind the wheel.
Tamsyn waved gaily from her perch in Lee’s arms. She’d recovered her equanimity with a thoroughness that was typical of her. Dinosaurs and a change of subject usually did the trick, but there was more to it than that: as if, although tossed about in life’s teacup storms like anyone else, she could see beyond them into a broad blue ocean where everything would be all right. Lee set her down, and she took his hand and towed him indoors to resume their morning routine.
He set out twenty minutes earlier than he needed to, allowing her to botanise to her heart’s content along the verges of the lane, Isolde snuffling at her heels. The morning had risen to a perfect moorland stillness—barely a breath of wind, the gold of the gorse giving back the sunlight until the whole landscape seemed ready to melt and dissolve, a single lark holding position directly overhead to pour out her song. Lee’s body wanted to sing back to her. Right or wrong, Gideon’s push into his dream had made him come like a spring tide with an onshore gale behind it. He felt like... Striving for a comparison, a way to describe to himself what his husband had done to him, he shivered with laughter. He felt like Truro cathedral, that was it. In the moments just after a thundering organ recital had stopped. Empty but sanctified. Vibrant. Last note still shaking the air.
He walked Tamsyn into the village and up to the school gates, where headmistress Prynne intercepted her, then he watched in pleasure as she was borne off among a chattering crowd of her teachers and friends. Now his working day should begin. Hard to find shadows on a day like this, but he could set up his camera gear in Chy Lowen’s attic space, stand against the wall with the most cobwebs and crumbling plaster, and record an atmospheric outtro for Anna. After that he’d drive across to St Wylloe to see Jory’s boat, check out the scale of the work and give him an estimate. He had a load of laundry to do, some hoovering, beds to make. Gideon was good about splitting the housework, but if Lee took him at his word about a total break from all labour, the place would be a wreck within a week.
The lane back up to the house was empty. Without his kid to distract him, he set off briskly, determined to steal a march on his tasks and enjoy a vigorous swim in the stream of life prepared for him. He was almost at the top of the hill, Chy Lowen’s orchard treetops broaching the horizon, when the campions and long grasses stirred in the verge by his feet, and an unmistakeable cat shot out and across his path: Bill Prowse’s, of all unlikely visitants, a beast once black but marked with a landscape of bald patches after an outbreak of mange, missing since Bill’s decease and presumed dead too. Half a tail, one eye. Nothing much had thrived in the Prowse home, though Gideon had occasionally trapped this occupant and dragged it off to the vet with much the same weariness as he’d collared the children and steered them in the direction of doctors, social care and school.
Bill’s house was inhabited again. Nature, abhorring a vacuum even more than she did a Prowse, had just provided a replacement—Bill’s cousin, who rejoiced in the improbable name of Marple, eerily like him except twenty years younger and with that much more time to plague the life out of his neighbours. Lee supposed that the cat, like the unknown Prowse ancestor’s obsession with names from Agatha Christie, was a curse coming home to roost. What had Bill’s middle name turned out to be? Poirot?
He considered texting Gideon to tell him the Prowse moggy was back. Their days often contained weirdly parallel experiences: if Lee had encountered a cat, maybe Gid would too. A good subject for their one-a-day exchange, that would be; would make him groan and laugh among the parking tickets and petty crime of his beat. Lee knew it wasn’t all car chases and heroism, although Gid had never looked back since discounting CID from his career path, as if he’d seen into the dreamworld of plainclothes, alternate history, a terrible outcome of grief and disaster in the streets of...
Kerdrolla. Lee stumbled to a halt, breath catching in his throat. He pushed his fingers into the moss on the top of the drystone wall. He had to hang on to this world, not that hellish dream. Gideon didn’t remember, and that for Lee was the whole point. If he ever did, if he recalled John Tregear, firelight and fever and a burning church, Lee would lose him. Simple as that. Because Gid could bear all the world’s badness, would put on his uniform every day and go out to set it right, but his whole faith depended on his belief that he himself was a good man. Beleaguered sometimes, hot-tempered and horny around the full moon, but deeply, essentially human and good.
Ah, Lee had stuck his head in the sand just as much as Gideon had last May! He’d pushed Kerdrolla onto a back shelf in his mind along with Dave Rawle, and Rufus Pendower’s crush, which had turned from a joke to a dangerous obsession, and Lee had been glad to set the poor stricken sergeant aside because Rufus remembered Kerdrolla too.
He didn’t want to take any of it down from the damn shelf now. He was suddenly, overwhelmingly tired. Aftereffects of the mickey his kid had slipped him? If so, he was almost grateful. The deathly streets of Story-town faded out into sunlight. The children had lived, and Gideon had run with the bomb the length of the harbour at Falmouth and pitched it out into the sea. Lee’s shining saviour cop, who up until this morning had grumpily discouraged all mention of his heroism!
He let himself in through the garden gate. Poppies with heads the size of Gid’s fist had opened since yesterday alongside the path into the orchard. Somniferum, those were, as Tamsyn probably knew. Dorothy would’ve struggled to get herself stoned amongst the pretty little red ones in the Wizard of Oz: These were what you needed, pink and purple silk with ripe pods that wept white sap like semen. Maybe Lee was irresponsible to let them grow in his garden, but Tamsie was far too advanced in her wortcunning to come to any harm.
Wortcunning? Smiling, Lee made his way through the sunlit shade of the apple trees. He and Gid had run the risk of leaving out a pair of old deckchairs overnight, inviting Bodmin fogs and creeping damp, but the weather had stayed fine. Where had he picked up an outrageous old witch-word like that? From Mrs Coulter, probably, that nice old lady Elowen had discovered in the village and who brought his little girl books on botany and comparative religion. Tamsie was off with her after school today, for a reading session or whatever they got up to, so he didn’t even have to worry about getting done with his
chores in time for the half-past-three run.
Maybe everything could go on hold for an hour or so. What had Gideon told him to do? Sit in a deckchair and watch the apples ripen. “Sorry,” he whispered, yawning, pulling the message close to himself so it wouldn’t reach through their link and disturb Gid at his desk. “Can’t even manage that much, love. The deckchair part, yes, but...” He sank down into the gaudily striped canvas cradle, tipped his head back and stared at the leaf-dappled blue until a veil seemed to cover it, a darkness. The apples will have to look after themselves.
***
Gideon spent his morning amongst the good, the bad and the bewildered of Dark and Bodmin town. He was rostered for a morning shift in the village every Tuesday and Friday, usually long enough to mop up any small villainies there, especially now that Bill Prowse was gone and Ross doing time in Exeter jail. Darren, too—off to a shady new job in London, Lee had said, an unlikely escapee from the far-west poverty trap.
Gideon missed his lanky, conniving presence with an unexpected pang. In his absence, all he had to do to discharge his duty of guardianship was help Mrs Waite fit her new security alarm, and retrieve Kate Salthouse’s prized ragdoll cat from the culvert drain under Cros-an-Wra lane. The creature hissed and spat at him tremendously as he squeezed his bulk through the tunnel. He took her as gently as he could by the scruff and squeezed back out. Once in his arms, her pedigree kicked in and she flopped like a swooning debutante, leaving a silken imprint of herself in long white hairs all over his uniform shirt.
His utility vest—they were encouraged not to talk or think of it as a stab vest these days—covered the worst of that damage. Not, alas, the lipstick kiss-mark planted on his face by the grateful Kate, which he failed to notice before Jenny Spargo pointed it out with a whoop in Bodmin car park. He fended off the flak from her and the half-dozen other officers sent to form a thin blue line against three hopped-up boy racers tearing up the tarmac amongst the grannies and kids. A flying fender missed his kneecap by half an inch. He chucked a stinger to Jenny, who was better placed to deploy, and she tossed out the strip with a matador’s grace just in time to spike the Subaru’s next charge.
