Just Before I Died Page 3

  And yet I’ve got myself lost in the assignment.

  ‘What’s up, Kath? Having too much fun?’

  It’s my boss, Andy, he must have heard me sigh. He’s a nice guy, blond, younger than me, newish. Been here two years. I sometimes wonder if I should resent him, that I didn’t get the promotion. But I don’t. I like my more varied employment. Usually.

  ‘Sorry, Andy. Was I sighing a bit loudly?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Well, I’m updating the rules on campervans in car parks, out of season. Perhaps I’m overexcited?’

  I hear him chuckle. He’s the only other person in the large, open-plan office today. He is framed by the windows, where the Princetown sky is now as dark and sombre as Dartmoor granite. The winter sun can be so painfully brief.

  ‘You should pity me, Kath. I’m doing Section 211 on Tree Preservation Orders, it’s practically better than sex.’ He clicks something on his computer. ‘Jesus, I hate January. What we really need is a massive accident to liven things up. Like, a bus could drive into a lake, up at Meldon, that would help.’ He stops, and turns my way. ‘Hey, sorry, ah, Kath, I—’

  ‘No. It’s OK. I want people to forget, Andy, I’m bored of being The Woman That Had That Accident.’ He listens as I go on: ‘In fact I want to go back to regular work soon, working proper shifts, doing my job as before, I mean: it’s nice you’re giving me half days, letting me work from home, but I’m OK now. Can we get back to normal?’

  ‘Abso-bloody-lutely. If you really feel you’re up to it, that’s great. We’ll put you back on normal shifts in a few weeks.’

  He returns to his work. I gaze at him as he concentrates.

  Why won’t he let me do proper shifts now? Sometimes it feels as if everyone is tip-toeing fastidiously around me, scared I might break. They’re not treating me like someone recuperating, they’re treating me like something odd. Unusually fragile.

  Returning to my work, I scan the words on my own computer. The official Dartmoor Tourism website.

  Dartmoor constitutes the largest area of granite in Britain, with about 360 square miles stretching across central Devon, making it the only true wilderness in Southern England. Much of it is covered by marshy peat deposits, in the form of bogs or mires. The moorland is also capped with many characteristic granite outcrops, known as tors (from the Celtic ‘tor’, meaning tower) that provide varied habitats for wildlife. The entire area is rich in archaeology, from the Neolithic to the Victorian …

  I want to edit this, make it flow better, liven it up: but the words blur in my eyes. Sphagnum. Carboniferous. Wassailing …

  I hate this new, enduring haze in my mind, I despise this peculiar sensation – since the crash – that my mind has become one of those vast cupboards in my mum’s old kitchen, in the big Victorian house, down on the coast at Salcombe. Those cupboards were dusty and chaotic, and every week my hippy-chick, eco-sensitive mum would reach in and find some pot of organic mustard, or jar of Manuka honey, that she’d clean forgotten, and she’d say, Gosh I didn’t remember we had this, and sometimes she’d have to throw it away, wasting more of the dwindling Kinnersley cash, and sometimes the jar would go back in, only to be forgotten and retrieved and thrown away all over again … and that’s what my brain feels like, since the accident. I don’t quite know what’s in there, and when I put things in there they sometimes get lost, and when I find things in there they are often useless, past their sell-by date, actively unpleasant.

  My brain is hiding things from me.

  And now it’s 3.15. So dark the office lights are on.

  I try to relax. Perhaps I am being hard on myself. The stress about Lyla doesn’t help, the tensions with Adam, too. Perhaps we all need more time. That’s what the doctors repeated from the start: Be patient, don’t expect instant miracles. And remember, they said: remember that you are relatively lucky: because you will heal over time. I was classified with Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, nothing worse; I was apparently unconscious for less than six hours; I was 13–15 on the Glasgow Coma Scale.

  Any longer than that, and I’d have been upgraded and they would have taken away my driving licence, for at least a year. At one point in my unconsciousness I was technically dead, flatlining for a minute or so, but the machines flickered into life and I got through. So I was ‘Mild’.

  MTBI.

  As for my retrograde amnesia, the stuff I’ve forgotten from before the accident, that is expected to recede over the coming weeks, and the misplaced memories will return like ‘hills emerging after a flood’ as one of the psychologists put it, and eventually the whole landscape will be revealed as the obscuring waters drain away.

  ‘Hey. Is that your new car?’

  Startled from this introspection, I look up. Andy is gesturing out of the window: I can see Adam’s cousin Harry, standing by a blue Ford Fiesta, parked right outside. The car is a bit battered and scratched, but that’s fine, nearly every car on Dartmoor is a bit battered and scratched. And so am I.

  Harry waves at me. He has the Redway looks: a handsome young man. They all have these looks, the Redway cousins. The eyes and the cheekbones, they are so distinct. Harry does odd jobs all over the moor, when he’s not making a few quid from car dealing. He is a bit of a lad.

  But he’s also very likeable. He reminds me of a younger Adam. But then Adam, in the right mood, reminds me of a younger Adam. I think I desire my husband as much today as the afternoon I first met him.

  Andy says, ‘You must be chuffed to get wheels again, don’t know how you’ve been coping without a car.’ He flashes me a smile. ‘Go on, Kath, go for it – I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  My kindly boss is making my shortened working day even shorter. I can get my new car, collect Lyla from school, go home to Huckerby, and everything will be fine. My brain will be fine. Lyla will be fine.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, ‘You’re a superstar,’ and I grab my raincoat, and step out into the wintry afternoon. The cold has abated, which means it is probably about to rain. Harry and I sign the documents and he hands me the keys and he says, ‘It’s not a Ferrari, but it’ll give you a couple of years.’

  And I offer my thanks as I climb in. And when he strolls off to a pub, I sit here in the driver’s seat, holding the cold, hard keys in my hand, suddenly scared that I have forgotten how to drive. I haven’t done it since the crash into the reservoir. Since the dark waters tried to turn me into moorland mud.

  Key. You put the key in the ignition. You turn it. Then the engine starts. Remember? Come on, Kath Redway: you’ve done this a million times. You got your licence at nineteen. You’ve done this virtually every day for eighteen years. It’s called driving.

  I turn the key. I press my foot down. I steer away. I do not crash into the saloon bar of the Plume of Feathers, I do not smash into the leaded windows, crushing off-duty prison wardens in a clatter of stained wood and beer-bottles. I am driving.

  From the anxiety of the afternoon, I feel a kind of elation. I CAN DRIVE. It’s another sudden mood swing. I get more of them now. Since the accident.

  Happy, even giddy, I collect Lyla from school. She looks a little bemused: she thought she was going to After School Club, to be alone in a whole new place, but she also looks content to be going home early, where people will talk to her, where she can play with the dogs in front of the fire.

  Or make cryptic patterns with dead birds.

  I CAN DRIVE!

  But as we aim for the turning that leads to the open moor, to the wild emptiness, I realize I have left my bag in the office. I was so excited by the car, I quite forgot.

  Hastily, I park, once again, outside the Dartmoor NP Office. The day is wintry and dimming, a faint drizzle speckles the windscreen.

  Lyla pipes up as I swing open the door, ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Nowhere, darling. Just the office. Forgot my bag.’

  ‘No! Don’t go!’

  ‘Lyla?’

  I turn, surprised, a little sho
cked. Lyla is trembling in the back seat.

  ‘Mummy, don’t go. Don’t.’

  This is strange. Lyla worries about odd things, shapes, sounds, or the wrong kind of prickly vest, but she rarely worries about being left alone.

  ‘Darling—’

  ‘No. Mummy! You might not come back! You might not come back!’

  ‘Lyla, this is ridiculous. I’ll only be gone a second, really, I promise.’ I put out a hand to calm her but she waves it away. She does, however, seem a little soothed. She turns and gazes at the wrinkles of rain on the window, the black shape of the prison.

  I seize the opportunity. Scooting out of the door, I run into the office, past my surprised boss. ‘Forgot my bag!’

  He grins. ‘Ah.’

  Grabbing the handbag, I head back to the car, but as I do I notice something on Andy’s desk. It’s a row of roundish grey stones, about the size of large golf balls, or wild apples. They might have been there all day.

  They’re half hidden by his computer.

  All the stones have holes in them. And I’ve seen this sort of stone before. I know the type. And it makes me quietly shudder.

  ‘Hey,’ I say, trying to hide the tremble in my voice. ‘Where did you get those?’

  He glances up at me, the blue light of his computer shining on his spectacles. ‘These rocks? Ah.’ He picks one up and turns it in the light. ‘They were arranged along the window ledges this morning, outside, so I brought them in. Kinda odd, right? Guess some hiker made a collection? Left them here overnight.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t think so.’

  His grin is edged with perplexity. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘These aren’t any old stones.’

  Leaning close, I pick up one of the bigger rocks. It is surprisingly heavy: probably it has some metal ore inside. The hole is naturally weathered, which is crucial to its identity. But of course, Andy wouldn’t know the identity, the significance of these stones, because he doesn’t know the folklore and the mythology of Dartmoor: because all that stuff is my job. I did the archaeology degree, I’ve read the folklore books, I write all the leaflets. ‘These are hag stones.’

  His grin is entirely gone. ‘You what?’

  ‘Hag stones.’ I have a burning desire to throw the stone away. To take all of these stones and bury them far from here, in Cornwall, Ireland, America. I try to disguise my irrational fear. ‘Moorland people used to put them on windowsills, or hang them from ropes over doors. You can still see them on Dartmoor farms, in really remote places. They’re a kind of joke, but I suspect some people still believe.’

  He looks at me, frowning. ‘Hags? Old women?’

  I turn the stone in my fingers, calming myself. ‘They also called them hex stones. Because they were thought to be apotropaic.’ I don’t wait for his question. ‘Apotropaic means they were used to ward off evil, to thwart black magic. People placed them by windows and doors to stop witches getting in.’ Even as I replace the stone, very carefully, next to its sisters, I can’t help glancing at my desk. ‘Or … or to stop them from getting out. And somebody arranged these stones, in a line on our window ledge, overnight? That must have been deliberate.’

  Andy stares at the stones. The rainy light outside is almost entirely gone. But I can see Lyla in the back of my new car. She is sitting up rigid, and gazing straight at me. Unblinking.

  The Lych Way

  Tuesday morning

  Adam had been walking this path for ten minutes, deep in thought, before he realized he was on the Lych Way. The old corpse road, named for when the Dartmoor villagers were forced to carry the coffins of their dead to the official parish church, right across the moor at Lydford.

  In the lee of a biting wind, beside a stand of dark pines, he paused, imagining the scene – a dozen ragged peasants hefting the wooden box from Bellever Tor, over the Cowsic brook, up and down the bleak, shaved hills, Lynch Tor, Baggator Clapper, the Cataloo Steps.

  And when the river was running high at Cataloo, what did they do then? They must have waded waist-deep into the freezing water, holding the coffin over their heads, before heading up Corpse Lane to Willsworthy. All so they could deliver their dead to the decreed resting place.

  Twelve miles they carried those corpses. Twelve bloody miles.

  Walking on, Adam scanned the horizon, watching for wildlife, seeking solace in the landscape. As he topped a rise, a kestrel caught his eye, hovering in the white winter sky. Instinctively, he stopped to admire the tremendous skill of the bird, that delicate trembling of the tips of its feathers, exquisite, masterful.

  Windfuckers, his uncle used to call them, kestrels were windfuckers, because when they rode the wild air it looked as if they were fucking the wind – possessing it, owning the breeze, followed by that sudden climactic rush of a dive, a frightening swoop on some prey, then gone.

  He paced on, still following the Lych Way, the old way of the dead, guessing that the cross should be along here somewhere, near the Iron Age settlements.

  We saw a stone cross had been vandalized, on the road by Sittaford, that’s what the hiker who called it in had said.

  But it was difficult to focus on the job. His mood was darker than the pines. He was trying his hardest, but today he couldn’t lose himself in Dartmoor. The human world pressed around him, the unfurling, uncontrollable emotions he felt for his wife, the sense of resentment he tried to hide for the sake of sanity, for the sake of his daughter. But how was he meant to hide this kind of emotion? What she’d done, and what she’d said, and what she had so conveniently forgotten. How was he meant to cope with that and pretend it didn’t matter?

  All he’d ever wanted was to live his life and love his family, and be happy in his job, tending the moors, repairing the hedges, helping the tourists, watching the buzzards above Sourton Down, and normally he was happy. They had all been so happy. Yet now his family was crumbling.

  Approaching a stile, Adam paused, vaulted, and took a deep cold breath, before striding on, the squared green conifer plantations falling far behind him. He was trying not to think of his family, trying not to surrender to despair, or to this growing dislike, whirled with guilt. Even as he loved and desired his wife, he felt a surging fury towards her.

  Lyla. What was all this doing to Lyla?

  He closed his eyes to steady his surging emotions, then looked across the landscape once more.

  He could see the greener, emerald turf of a bog to his left, the faint sparkle of soggy acid grass, flashing in a break of winter sun. A memory returned: he was eight, or nine, with his Uncle Eddie, crouching to watch a snipe, right here, performing its nuptial display, the bird rising fast and steep in the air, then abruptly stooping and diving with its wings scarcely open, the tail delicately flared, making that strange noise. That sad, thrumming sound of the outspread tail feathers, vibrating in the dive. Once heard, never forgotten.

  And on the way home from these days of learning about the birds and rocks and streams, his uncle would teach him the old moorland words:

  Dimmity, meaning twilight. Owl-light, a darker kind of dusk. Radjel, a pile of rocks. Spuddle, to mess about. Tiddytope, a wren. Gallitrop, a fairy ring.

  Appledrain, a wasp. How beautiful was that?

  Moor-gallop: wind and rain moving across high ground. Drix: brittle wood. Ammil, a fine film of silvery ice that rimes the leaves and twigs and grass when a hard Dartmoor freeze follows a deceptive Dartmoor thaw, like an ice-storm, but more delicate. That was how precise the farmers had to be: they had to have words to describe the most beautiful and unusual states of frost and thaw and ice. Because lives depended on this precision: knowing when to gather the cattle, shelter the ponies, tend the struggling crops, nurse the suckling lambs.

  Another, bigger, stile. Catching his breath before he clambered over, Adam stopped, and gazed to the horizon.

  Every inch, every square mile. He’d seen it all so many times, and still he loved it. The grouse over Steeperton in the autumn, feeding on ling,
and whortleberry. The glades of Deeper Marsh, with its alder buckthorns, where the yellow butterflies come to feast, heralding the late Dartmoor spring. The caves of Cuckoo Rock, where the smugglers once cached their brandy. And the great empty spaces of Langcombe, where he would tramp on a summer day: out there where you could imagine you were the only person in the world, with a featureless expanse of wafting grass and sedge all around you, mile after mile of nothing, no one to be seen, nothing to be done, the sun beating down, and all you could hear was the whirr and murmur of insects: that, and the silent moving clouds, and your own beating heart.

  Those were probably his happiest moments; those, and when he was out with Lyla, teaching his little girl about the ravens and rock basins, the damselflies and purple orchids. She loved the moor as much as him. They spent endless sunny hours, walking the Abbot’s way, down to Rundlestone, or looking for the old blowing house, by the King’s Oven, or hunting for blackberries, up by Dunstone, and Shilstone, their lips and fingers purple, their teeth bright pink, and laughing – and then, at the sweet weary end of these days, they would drive home to Huckerby, and Kath would have passed by a supermarket, and they’d all sit and have tea, and a plate of fruitcake, and they were all happy. And Lyla would make clever patterns with the pretty petals she’d collected, arraying them on the kitchen table. Beautiful, complex patterns that only she truly understood. Or patterns she made for Daddy.

  They were once so very happy.

  And now it was all different. Now Lyla was confused and scared and sad, and often she wouldn’t let him – her own father! – hug her like he used to. These days Lyla sometimes gazed at him as if he’d done something wrong, all because of Kath, that Kinnersley family. All of them. And yet at other times – before bed, before sleep – Lyla sometimes hugged her dad so very close, so desperately close, it was like she was scared he too would disappear in the night – like her mother.

  This was no good. Adam tried to drive the spiralling, dangerous thoughts from his mind. It was as if they were all being sucked into a Dartmoor mire: Dead Lake, Fox Tor, Honeypool: the more they struggled to get free, the deeper they sank into frustration, and anger. The best thing was to calm yourself. Not make it worse. Not to do anything rash.