Falling For You (38 page)

But I’d run, hadn’t I? I hadn’t waited to find out who he was. If I’d got caught I’d have done time for it, no question. After the years I’d spent being flung in the bunker, I couldn’t be banged up again. Not again. I could not be in a place where I could not walk out on a whim and see the sky. Where the smell of stale air mixed with the smell of fear in the darkness and the door - the door remained shut on you no matter how long or how loud you called out for. Where nobody was coming, no one was ever coming to save you… How could she - a girl like Rose - ever understand that?

Really, how could anyone?

‘
It was an accident, Rose
. I got the wrong guy.’ She wants his name. I do not have his name, but I know who it was I hurt that night. She knows it too, I can see it in the trembling in her mouth, in the way she’s still trying to hold it all in, all the horror of it, her hands clasped into tight fists, hoping and hoping with all her heart that I will say some other name, that it will be some other poor unlucky guy.

‘Marco begged me to stay and work it out but after that I knew I could never go back to Macrae Farm. I ran, Rose. I’ve been running ever since…’

‘Macrae…
Farm?
’

I knew the minute I said the word -
that word, Macrae
- that my whole life would unravel before me. That then she’d know, as clear as I did, where we stood with one another. That I am her enemy.  I am the son of the man who’s caused them the most aggravation.  I am the man who hurt her father, ruining his life and hers. Oh Rose, Rose... it was so many years ago and that’s not how I wanted things to be. You wanted to know me, and now you know me; forgive me, that is who I am.

‘I am so sorry, Rose. I’m so very ...’
T
he words threaten to stick in my throat and choke me but she isn’t even listening, anymore. She’s just standing there, staring at me with the most terrible distraught look on her face.

The moment stretches out. This moment where I have been thrown into the pit of my deepest shame and humiliation. The day grows darker outside. I can see it, behind her head. The light coming through the windows shrinks, as I wish I could shrink, it fades like a dot on a screen. I think now; maybe her mother was right,
that what we do to others, it comes back to us three-fold
, all the good and the bad and the indifferent, it all comes back to us. I have only been shown the joy of loving this girl so it could be taken from me. I have only been led to feel again so that I might feel the pain of losing her now.

And I do not want to lose her.

She steps up and for a moment all I can feel is shock, that she wants to come so close to me, shock that she is not running away, instead.

And then she slaps me; an open-handed, no-holds
-
barred blow, right across the face. She slaps me so hard, this small and fragile-looking girl, I don’t see it coming and I reel back with the force of it, put my palm to my cheek which is throbbing with the blow. Then she hits me again and the mug of tea she made me goes flying out of my hands. It lands on the stone floor with a clatter all the tea spreading like dark rain across the floor and the noise as it bumps and rolls across the flagstones echoes strangely in my ears,
clack-clack-clack
and it feels as if this is not really happening, not here, not now. I feel - as I have so often felt before - that I am not really here.  

‘
Rose
,’ my voice comes from somewhere deep within my throat, but she doesn’t stop. I’ve got my elbows up, protecting my head, fending off the blows that she’s raining down on me, her small fists are sharp and determined but none of it hurts. Strangely, it’s only the feral, guttural cries coming from her throat that tear at my heart.

I’m sorry, I never meant to hurt you like this, it was never supposed to have been him...

She keeps hitting me and hitting me. On my legs, my arms, my head. Pounding me with both arms wherever she can land a blow but I can’t feel a thing.

There is nothing I can say that she will hear right now, I know that. I can see it on her face, in her eyes that are shining with a terrible and inconsolable pain. I’m sorry Rose. I’m not who you thought I was, right? Not who you wanted me to be.

I wanted to be him, though.

That guy you fell so madly for. I wanted to be him. When I loved you earlier … that was like nothing I’ve felt with a girl before. I’ve never let my guard down like that. When I loved you, I wasn’t a wanted, violent criminal anymore. I wasn’t a coward who ran. I wasn’t a battered and abused child. I wasn’t my father’s son.  I was just … me, Lawrence. Fresh as the day I was born with no dark blots on my past and a whole clean page on which to write my future. Oh, Rose, I was just me. A man who a girl like you could really come to love.

I want you to love me
.

I lower my arms from my head and her next blow catches me square in the jaw, drawing blood as she opens up an old cut on the ridge of my cheekbone. I groan out loud. I put my finger to the cut and my blood is warm, I can feel the bruise that’s already swelling up just under my eye.

She stops.  I hear her gasp, and then she’s on her knees, facing away from me, but I can see her whole body shaking with sobs, her words muffled by her hands which she’s using to cover her face but after a time I think I can make out what she’s saying.

‘I know his name,’ she’s crying into her hands, over and over. ‘Lawrence,
I know his name
…’

This is too much to take in. Oh God, I can’t. I can’t take this in! Too many emotions, too many thoughts all swirling round like the flashing lights on a fairground carousel and for the moment I can feel nothing but numbness, confusion. Even though I am very still, my heart is beating very fast. I can hear it whooshing in my ears. Nothing makes sense right now. What did I just do? I hit him. He told me things. I hit him, but...

 I don’t understand what’s just happened here. All these things he’s just told me about the dog that was tied up and the lack of light in the barn and how he’d wanted to get his family away. I hardly heard any of his words, just now; I was trying to follow him but all I could hear was that he was dying inside, telling me them. All I could hear was the beat of it, the stutter and the stumble of his words, strangling him with his own confession, and how he didn’t want to be around me anymore, telling me any of it. All I could pick up was the thud of his heart, running away, wanting to get away from me.

Wanting to run.

I don’t want it to be true.

But I know that it is true. He’s a Macrae. The thought creeps in, trickling like muddied floodwater under a farm gate; Lawrence is the man who attacked my father five years ago and destroyed his life.
Lawrence
is the man who has ruined my life.
The realisation is dawning, slow and sure as the sun coming up over the horizon. He has toppled all my dreams down like he toppled that house of those cards of his,
and then he ran away.

How could you be Him? Oh, God. Of all the people in the world that you could have been, how could you be Him, Lawrence? How could you do this to me? No, no, no. It cannot be him, my heart is crying out. That
coward
who crippled my father, he can’t be Lawrence. It doesn’t make sense; not the same man who held me so close
before
, and showed me that I was not the one responsible for my mother’s death; not the man who loved me so tenderly last night, and made that experience so much more than I had ever dared to dream it could be ...

I’ve just heard the faint
click
of the door shutting.

Has he gone out? Has he gone?

He’s gone out, left me. We could not be in here together anymore, I kn
o
w that. I could not bear to look at him, or
be
anywhere near him. The pain in my chest is too deep and wide, there is not enough room in here for it all, even though I’m still doubled up, still on the floor, trying to hold it all inside.

You ran, Lawrence. How could you do that? You
ran away
, that’s the bit I can’t deal with at all.

I couldn’t run from what you did, could I? Dad couldn’t. After the night you attacked him and left him for dead, my father has never been able to run since. He’s barely been able to walk. I don’t understand. How could you have done what you did and never stayed behind to see what damage you’d caused, never stopped for a moment to see
who
you’d done it to, even? Oh, I’ve sat here and listened to the terrible things that have happened to you and my heart has bled for you, Lawrence.

But shall I tell you what it was like for me in the aftermath?

I lift my face, now. My hair is covering my eyes but I can see the dark wall in front of me.  I know that he is gone. I can see the thin light from a high-up window making grey inroads into the chapel. I feel... very raw and very fragile. As if the slightest movement might break me; as if the slightest sound might split my head in two.

Shall I tell you what it was like to go down to the kitchen for a drink one evening and find my father wasn’t in the house anymore. To find only the note he’d left me?

‘Gone to Macrae Farm’ it said. He must have taken extreme care to close the squeaky front door quietly, not wanting to disturb me. He went out after he thought I wouldn’t be down again for the evening. I’ve always imagined he’d hoped I’d never know a thing about it till the morning. He went after I should have been asleep, after there was no chance of me trying to dissuade him, talk him out of it like I’d been doing all week.

I sat in the kitchen for over two hours waiting for him to come back. You won’t know that, will you? You won’t know what it could have felt like for me, sitting there in my PJs and an old jumper at one in the morning, scared out of my wits at what could have happened to my dad, fretting at why he was taking so long to come home. You wouldn’t have known or cared about any of that because you were too busy
running away
.

At quarter past one, I picked up the phone and I called the police.

I was surprised at how little time they took to get here. Half an hour, maybe? It didn’t seem very long. Maybe I’d sounded scared enough to worry them. Maybe it was the fact that I’d mentioned the name ‘
Macrae’
and that was enough to alert them?

I’ll never know. They came and they read Dad’s note and they went off to Macrae farm together. They told me to wait there, not to open the door to anyone. Not to go out. By quarter to three, one of them was back at my house. Only one of them. Not two. The lady. If there had been no trouble, they would both have come back. But I didn’t need to see her sorrowful face to tell me something bad had happened. I already knew that. I’d known it for hours, being the daughter of my mother that I am. I’d known it as soon as I’d seen his note. I’d felt it, that something really, really bad had happened.

That something that you did.

‘There’s been an incident,’ the kindly policewoman told me. An incident, not an accident. Even at thirteen, and in my muddled state, I’d been able to grasp that. She told me to get dressed.

Shall I tell you what it was like for me, waiting in the hospital corridor that night with no one but the porter to keep me company? The automatic doors kept sweeping back and forth letting the odd person in here and there. I kept looking up at first, half-hoping that some responsible adult might be coming in for
me
, someone to help me. I don’t know who I expected; the Clares were abroad when the Police tried to contact them. Mrs P hadn’t been with us too long at that point. There wasn’t anyone left, was there? The policewoman stayed as long as she could. The receptionist came away from her desk for a bit and held my hand. Everyone was so kind. You’ve never known much kindness, have you?

But the truth is, there are times when kindness can be a terrible thing. When you see it in other people’s eyes and you know it springs from a deep well of compassion and pity for you and you don’t want to see that pity, you don’t want to see that ‘Oh God poor girl, look’ because it can only mean something really bad.

Do you know how long the hours between three-thirty and seven-thirty am can be when you’re thirteen years old and your one surviving parent is in intensive care fighting for his life? An eternity. That’s how long. At least as long as it took every time for that shit of a father of yours to open the door of that World War Two bunker and let you out. I don’t understand. How could you have done what you did and never stayed behind to see what damage you’d caused, never stopped for a moment to see
who
you’d done it to, even?

Why didn’t you beat
him
up, Lawrence? Why didn’t you look your persecutor in the eye before you laid into him and then you’d have seen that you had the wrong guy
?
  All you were creating was another victim - another set of victims -  oh, God,
why didn’t you check?
How the hell could you have done that to someone and not have checked you’d got the right person? It doesn’t make sense....

 What also doesn’t make sense - I sink my head into my hands now, berating myself - what doesn’t make sense is that I could have had such strong feelings towards a man who was capable of doing what Lawrence did. What doesn’t make sense is that there were so many signs and signals that all was not well - he kept telling me himself, he told me over and over, didn’t he? - and I never paid any attention to any of them!

I imagined that I loved him
.

To think I felt sorry for this… this coward. I just made him a cup of tea. I held his hands and listened to his story, even though it was hard, because I wanted so desperately to make him feel better.

What a fool, what an easily-duped, stupid, naive little fool you must have taken me for. And you were right. You had me routing for you. You had me totally on your side, charmed out of my senses, trusting as a small bird who’d come to eat out of your hand, didn’t you, Lawrence? All the while you knew
you
were the one the authorities must have been looking out for. You must have known it was you. The one everyone was being warned against - ‘…
don’t approach any strangers’
. You.  And instead of heeding that warning I let myself fall for you, hook, line and sinker.  Idiot, stupid, little fool that I am. How could I have been that naive?

And how...
how
could you have been so tender and caring towards me? How could you have
pretended
to be such a loving person when it is clearly plain that you cannot be?  Nobody that has an ounce of feeling towards another human being could ever have done what you did. Oh, yes, you thought you were attacking your own brutal father -
great
- that makes it okay, does it? It’s not okay! It will never be!

Now I think about it - I don’t even know if I can believe what he’s told me about his Dad. Rob Macrae is a complete and utter bastard - everyone round here knows that - but would he really have tortured members of his own family in that manner? Word would have got out, surely? People round here talk about everything because for the most part they have nothing to talk about and yet…

I put my hand to my forehead which has begun to throb with a deep and terrible pain… what if it’s true? What if Macrae did abuse his family and there were people around here who knew but turned a blind eye to it?   Gossip-mongers or no, people round here don’t always fall so readily to the side of the truth, the facts of the matter, do they? There were plenty of people willing to stick up for the Macrae’s side when it came to the business of Topfields. Plenty of folk willing to put expediency before the facts.

Well, maybe Macrae
did
torture them. Maybe at fifteen - sixteen, whatever he was, Lawrence had a good reason to want to save his family the only way he knew how.

Maybe he made a mistake, went for the wrong man. My dad was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But still...  Lawrence shouldn’t have run away like that. If he’d stayed to face the music - how much better might things have turned out for Dad, I think painfully now. Dad wouldn’t have spent all these years feeling so scared. It’s the fear that was put into him that’s done the real lasting damage. God, all those nights he used to wake up screaming - I run my fingers through my hair, pushing away the memory - that was
fear
, pure and unadulterated.  Fear that I remember Lawrence has felt, too.

But my thoughts return to my own father.

There were treatments he was offered, things he could have tried at the beginning, that Dad never even wanted to try because after he was hurt like that - some part of him fled. Something left the centre of him. I don’t know what it was - I haven’t the words - but I suspect it was the part of him that would have stood up and made him fight for himself. The police were never able to bring charges but everyone suspected he’d been attacked over the dispute at Topfields. If only he’d
known
that he had never been the intended victim and we were safe - that would have made such a difference to my Dad. I swallow down the pain of knowing this, that this revelation has come all too late, because five whole years have passed since the damage was done. Five winters, icy and wet; five summers, when the flowers all straggled up in the remains of the flowerbeds in our garden and the earth kept on spinning like it does, from season to season but me and Dad had somehow got disconnected from it all. Our lives had got spun off their course, and we had no way of knowing how to get them back on track again.