Falling For You (24 page)

According to my phone, it’s now nearly midday. Lawrence has fallen asleep again by the fire. It seems a good time to try phoning home for a brief check-in. Find out if Dad’s okay. By now he must have had his breakfast and the first tablets of the day. Even if he hasn’t got the ones I went to fetch, he still needs to take the other ones. As I wait for the call to connect, I wonder if he’s remembered to tell the family about the cocktail of tablets he takes or if they’ve realised about it themselves? The call fails and I ring again. I’m not getting enough of a signal in here, that’s the trouble. I hold the phone up towards the light from the fire; no, not enough bars to signify there’s any signal in here … I’m going to have to go outside, darn it. And it’s so
bloody cold
out there. 

Once I’m muffled up, I push the chapel door open again, peeking outside to see if anything has changed in the last hour or so. The door sticks and jams at first, with the ice underneath it. I push it slowly so it won’t make a dragging sound and disturb Lawrence. Outside, the path he cleared so recently has already got a covering of snow lying softly over the top of it. But at least out here I am getting one bar of signal, two bars …

‘Hello.
Hello
?’ I say as Dad picks up his mobile but he can’t hear me. I need to move a little further away out into the open

‘Hello Dad, it’s Rose.
Rose!’
 I say again, louder. I move a little further down into the courtyard.

‘Rose,’ Dad says. His voice sounds croaky and confused to me - but maybe that’s just the bad connection? ‘Where are you?’ He sounds sad.

‘Safe and sound,’ I reassure. ‘I’ve got your tablets, too. I just can’t get to you yet. I’m stuck.’

‘Rose is stuck,’ I hear him saying to someone at the other end. ‘She’s safe and sound, though.’

Of course she is
, I can hear a female voice saying to him,
she’s at Shona’s remember, we told you?
Oh dear, my little white lie, I think. Fingers crossed they don’t think to ring me at Shona’s at any point
.

‘How are you holding up, Dad?’ There’s a long pause while he seems to take his time configuring what I’m saying. My heart sinks a little, recognising that already he’s slower, he’s taking longer to process things; I know this is because of the missing tablets.

‘I’m having a good time,’ he says after a bit
,
‘
c
atching up with Ty.’ Well if that’s true then it’s a result. If uncle Ty is actually being forced to spend time with his brother maybe he’ll come to see how things really are with Dad. And Dad will be getting the time that he needs with his family instead of them shooting off to do
more important things
like they usually do.

‘I hope they’re looking after you well, Dad?’

‘Oh, yes.’ His voice sounds distracted and far away. I feel a tug of worry at the thought that Dad’s got people there with him, sure, but they aren’t people who know anything about him and his needs. They won’t know that he forgets to mention when he gets cold. You have to put a rug over his knees if he looks like he needs it. He doesn’t feel thirsty so you have to make sure he gets a drink. He doesn’t like water, though, he likes tea. I wonder if anyone’s remembered that the soya milk that’s in the fridge is what I have to put in his tea because he can’t tolerate dairy..
.

‘I miss you, Rose.’

‘I’m sorry I left the way I did, yesterday, Dad.’ I rush out. ‘I’m sorry I can’t be there right now.’ This is the first Christmas he’ll have been on his own without either me or Mum there, the thought dawns. This emptiness, this loneliness I hear in his voice - it’s going to be like this for him when I leave, isn’t it?  I bite my lip.

‘Dad, are you sure you’re okay? I’ll be back as soon as the weather lets up. As soon as I can …’ As I speak to him, I make my way carefully
down
the cleared path to look out over the valley for the second time this morning. 

And for the second time, it really takes my breath away. It’s like everything has just … gone. My house is gone. The hill down to the rest of the village is gone. The neat row of bungalows by the infant school is gone and the school is pretty much gone too
and
the shop-cum-post office … I can see the spire on top of the church steeple but only just. Even the tall trees surrounding Topfields are so laden with snow you can barely make out any of the branches underneath. A solitary crow flies off to the West, disappearing into a blur behind the back of some trees. Apart from that bird, there is nothing to focus your view on, nothing but a fragile stillness that is so large and so quiet that it feels like the whole world’s been enclosed in icy bubble-wrap. Out here, the signal is at least a little clearer.

‘I’m okay,’ Dad says, but his voice sounds so strange, so distant as if he’s not really talking to me at all, as if his attention’s been taken up by something on the telly or something else going on in the room. I don’t know if he really is okay.

When I leave home, it’s going to be the same. I stare out over the battlements, the strange glary whiteness I see in front of me seems to fill up the whole earth and the entire sky and pretty much everything else in the middle. It looks, I think, like a blank page. It’s the unknown; it’s what’s going to happen to Dad once I leave here and it’s my future. It could be anything - everything or nothing.  As I stand there, looking at it, the cold seeps in under my coat and onto my chest so all my muscles start juddering. My leg starts to ache, now, the stitches feeling pulled tight as my skin contracts with the cold and yet stubbornly, I want to see how long I can withstand being out in it. I have to imagine tolerating it, because sometime in the next day or so, it dawns on me, we are going to have to. Three tins of tuna and some packet soups aren’t going to last forever, are they?

There’s the sound of the handset being handed over to someone else now and Sam comes on the line.

‘Rose,’ she says solicitously. ‘Everything all right?’
S
he sounds as if her teeth are chattering - haven’t they even got the fire lit at home?

‘I’m all right,’ I defend. ‘You?’ Then; ‘You sound cold, Sam.’ She shouldn’t be cold, she’s at my house.

‘Dad’s out back getting some more logs in. These solid fuel fires are a bit pesky aren’t they?’ she complains. ‘The one in the living room keeps going out and the central heating doesn’t work very well here does it?’

‘It’s temperamental,’ I admit. As long as they’re keeping Dad warm … ‘Listen, my
d
ad, is he …?’

‘He’s fine,’ she comes back immediately, a little impatiently, even. ‘We found the box with the medicines in. We gave him his morning ones. He says he feels a little bit wobbly today because he doesn’t have those other ones - the ones you went to fetch. But given the weather conditions don’t come rushing back till it’s safe. Dad says he’d rather you wait till he can fetch you, now, or till Shona’s dad can bring you back.’

Shona’s
d
ad? My heart sinks a little as I remember. They’ve actually got a reason to be in contact with him, haven’t they? As soon as he gets onto fixing the car again
,
Uncle Ty and the rest of them will realise I’m not at Shona’s. I
haven’t
been at Shona’s.  Bugger. Still, I’ve only told them a lie to save them worrying, not for any other reason
.

‘Once this clears I’ll make my own way back, honestly …’

‘No, you won’t,’ Sam warns. ‘Dad wants you to keep safe. You
have
seen the news, I take it?’

‘Of course,’ I fib. ‘Weather warnings etc …’ As I talk, I make my way back towards the chapel entrance, stamping my feet as I go.

‘Not that,’ she says impatiently. ‘The
other
local news. You know - that man the police want to question
-
he’s still on the loose. Somewhere around Merry Ditton, they have reason to believe. He’s a violent criminal …’

‘And no one must approach him,’ I say wearily. Okay this is just using up my phone battery uselessly now. ‘I won’t approach anyone, I promise. I can’t. I’m stuck indoors like everyone else, aren’t I?’

Do they think I am a complete moron?

 Before I even reach the chapel door, I can clearly see that it’s
o
pen. I frown. I’m sure I closed it. I was thinking about conserving heat, I remember that. Has Lawrence woken up, gone out and I didn’t notice? Almost involuntarily, I slow my footsteps right down, treading softly as I come up to the door, Sam’s recent dire warnings about ‘a man on the run’ still ringing loudly in my head. But Lawrence hasn’t gone anywhere.  When I peer cautiously inside I can see that he is still in there. Only now he’s sitting, for some reason, by the open door, and he’s being very, very still.

What’s he doing?

He isn’t meditating or doing some kind of yoga, which was my first thought. I can tell, even from here. Something about the way he’s holding his whole body so tautly, tense as a spring, tells me that much. His face is at a slightly uplifted angle, facing the light. My God. He looks - he looks so very sad that just to see him brings a lump to my throat. 

I halt. I don’t know what to do. It doesn’t feel right to go in and disturb him but I don’t want to stay out here in the cold, either. I’d hoped, secretly, that he might be awake by the time I got in. I’ve got so many things I want to ask him. Whether he thinks we’d be justified calling out the emergency   services because we’ve been trapped or whether we should just weather it out, leave them to deal with the real, genuine emergencies? I wanted to ask him if he thought there was any chance at all we’d make it out tomorrow. I wanted him to open up and to tell me more about his protégé back in Jaffna, Sunny.

Is it … maybe because of Sunny that Lawrence is feeling so upset right now? A whole host of scenarios run through my mind; he’s heard that Sunny’s taken sick; he’s learned that he can’t bring Sunny over for some diplomatic reasons and they’ve decided to amputate …?

Is that why - even though there are no tears running down his face - he looks as if he might be crying? It must be something like that, something bad, because in the short time I’ve known him he’s only ever come across as resilient and strong; the sort of guy who’d take all of life’s troubles on the chin. He’s a coper. I don’t think he’d want me to see him so vulnerable and so raw, but - if there was any way I could help …?

God, what best to do?

I’ve never seen a boy cry before.
I’ve never seen a lot of things,
the thought echoes straight back, like a ball lobbed over a net,
I’ve never seen a boy naked before either.  I’ve never let a boy see me
. The thought embarrasses me, because I don’t know the guy, I shouldn’t be thinking like this. He’d think that too; that I’ve walked in on a very private, guarded moment. He wouldn’t want me to catch him like this, I know.

I clear my throat a little and his eyes flicker open instantly. He looks straight at my phone and I see him register that I must have been
calling
home. With his eyes open, his expression is drawn and spooked. He doesn’t look like the catnap he just had has done him very much good.