Finding You (28 page)

38 - Julia

‘You sure you don’t want to just go back home?’ Naseem asks. He’s been sad ever since I told him the true state of affairs between me and Charlie. I think maybe he wishes that he’d never offered to let us come out here with him, but it’s too late for regrets. 

I shake my head, turn a little in my car seat to gaze at my son, sleeping now, in the back. It’s seven p.m. already.  I’ve lost count of the hours we’ve been travelling for, but when I recall that our flight left Gatwick at nine this morning, it feels like a very long time indeed. The traffic heading along the coast in front of our hire car slows right down again. It’s been like this for the past two hours, stop-start-stop, ever since we came off the motorway at San Roque, heading towards Campamento, making our way slowly down the coast.

‘No,’ I tell Naz when he still seems to be waiting for an answer. ‘I want to keep going.’ Even though there’s a part of me that’s also screaming,
Yes, just take us on to the nearest airport. Forget all about this. Let’s go home.   
    

‘You see this?’ Naz shoots me the ghost of a smile, indicating the line of vehicles stopped up ahead of us. ‘Ever since we discovered the location of LaPiedra. You think the universe is conspiring to keep us away from her, maybe?’

‘The closer we’re getting,’ I agree, ‘the slower it seems to be going.’ I shoot my friend an apologetic glance. ‘Sorry for putting you through this, Naz. I imagine you had slightly better plans for your weekend abroad pre-work.’

‘Hey, the Gaudi exhibition will come round again, no doubt. What
you
need comes first, Jules. You know that.’

Is this really what I need, though, to go meet up with Illusion? Is this what any of us need? A memory of Charlie comes into my mind now, of that night when I’d first put it to him how very real my concerns for Hadyn had become. We’d got back from our interrupted evening out, all that fuss over how the windows had gotten open and how Hadyn had been found standing beside them and then, for the first time, Charlie had really heard me when I’d mentioned to him about all the other things that had been troubling me, how he’d reacted.
I can’t lose him, Jules
. He’d sat bolt upright on our bed, his hair falling over his face. He’d looked so much younger suddenly, like someone who was very vulnerable.
I can’t lose him again
. And I remember how I had held Charlie’s hand and promised him that we wouldn’t, that everything would be all right.

But I don’t know how anything will ever be alright again after tomorrow. I just don’t.

‘You
scared,
Fearless?’ Naz asks softly. He brakes, suddenly, veering the car over to the right as he sees some signpost by the roadside.

Is this it, LaPiedra? Are we nearly there
?

‘Of course I am scared,’ I admit for the first time. ‘Hell, yeah.’ For a hundred different reasons. ‘This woman—she’s an unknown entity to me. She’s ... a wild card. She could really be ... as horrendous as they’ve led me to believe all this time.’

‘She could be,’ he mutters, concentrating on the steep angle of the bend but already, we’re taking the dirt track off the Costa road, down a long curving path into some other little village, a beach, a row of houses and shops. Past those, he continues down some dusty road even further out, lined by stunted orange trees and the encroaching sounds of the surf, and by the time he stops at last, parking abruptly up against some wild sea grass, a place of stark beauty and ragged boulders, I already know exactly where we are.

How could I not know? I’ve seen this place a dozen or more times, in different ways and guises, have I not?

‘Let us hope Illusion is not like that, though. 
Bien venido a LaPiedra
,’ Naseem says to me, quoting the sign that we passed along the way. He sighs, sinking his head back against the headrest and turning to look at me again.

‘Coming out here, looking for her ... I was always taking that risk.’ I pull out my bottle of water now, place the tip to my lips. Suddenly, I am aware of how dark it is, that the night has drawn in all around us like a shroud. I shiver.
What am I doing here? What am I even doing here?
 

Further out, to the right of us and maybe ten miles or so away, we already have a very clear view of the Rock of Gibraltar. Tomorrow, after we do what we came here to do, I tell myself that Hadyn and I will cross over the Spanish border. We’ll walk the few minutes it takes to get from there to Gibraltar International Airport, and we’ll be catching the next flight home.   

‘Nearly back in blighty, Jules?’ Naz says, following the train of my thoughts, but a sadness washes over me when he says that, as if some period of time that I have been allotted is coming to an end. ‘You met Illusion once or twice before, though?’ he persists, and now that we are here, I can feel that he’s curious, too. Is he wondering why there’s this ambivalence in me? All my life, he’s always been my protector, hasn’t he, whenever I asked him to be there for me and sometimes even when I didn’t. Is he wondering whether he’s going to need to step in now, stop me from doing something that it really wouldn’t be wise for me to do?

‘In the park,’ Naz is still prompting. ‘You told me you picked Hadyn up from where she’d been staying at Arenadeluna, too?’

I give a small, high laugh and my friend looks at me uneasily.

‘Yes. I met her. If I close my eyes at night, I can sometimes still hear her screaming, do you know that? I can still hear her screaming in my head, all those things she said the day we came with the police, to take him away.’

‘What was it like there?’ He asks softly. He turns his face briefly to look at my son, who’s finally worn out, sleeping peacefully in the back. 

What was it like? For so long, I have not really been able to remember, but for some reason this evening, it is trickling back. Is it the colour of the last rays of the sun against the Spanish mountains in the distance that brings it back to me? Is it the sea salt smell of the air, all the sights and sounds of Spain, the stalls full of melons and fish cooking at the road cafés we’ve passed that has jogged my memory?

‘We had to go up a long, narrow alleyway to get to Illusion’s place,’ I tell him now. ‘It was very dark, the tenement buildings rising up high on either side of us.’ I shoot my friend a small smile. ‘Charlie said it was the kind of place you hope you never have to enter if you’re being chased by a big dog or a man with a knife. He complained that it smelled. That it stank of wee and yesterday’s stew and damp clothes and cats.’

‘Did it?’

‘I don’t remember that, Naz.’ I give a little, hollow laugh. ‘I remember other things, though. The stew she’d had on the hob, cooking for him, that day. I saw his banana, neatly chopped up into small pieces on a plate. I saw his arrangement of toy cars in the corner. Charlie was so put out at how there’d only been room for one bed, but she’d put a child’s blanket on Hadyn’s side.  His pillow looked nice and soft, everything laundered fresh. It was a poor location in a poor area but, everything seemed to me well looked after. Well cared for.’

‘As you feel she cared for him?’ my friend puts it to me now. ‘And ... you believe that Hadyn also cared for her?’   

‘He
does
care for her,’ I swallow. ‘Tomorrow, when we take him to find her, I have this vision in my head about how it will be, Naz. I already know how it will go.’ I shake my head and a wave of sadness mists up my view. ‘When he sees her again, his face is going to light up in a way that it’s never done for Charlie or me in all these months. He’s going to open up his arms and just ... run to her. And you know why? Because he’ll be back where he wants to be. The place he thinks of as his
home.’

‘Hey. You can’t be sure about that.’ For the first time today, I notice that Naz looks tired, too. All this driving must have taken its toll and I feel sorry for him, that I’ve dragged him along just to look out for me when this isn’t even anything to do with him.   

Later, at the tiny pension where we book our rooms, we order two glasses of wine with our meal before bedtime and sit for a while out on the balcony overlooking the restless bay. Hadyn is sitting with us, still groggy but woken up enough to have a snack before he goes down.

My friend leans forward, taps the table with his finger. ‘We don’t
have
to do this, you know,’ he says at last. ‘Seek her out, or anything like that.’

‘We do,’ I tell him quietly. I know that we do.

‘Okay.’ He lifts his chin. ‘But remember what we’re here for, Julia. We’re here on a recce. To get info, that’s all. We’re here to find out if Hadyn’s formed an attachment to this woman.’ He glances over at my son, who is busy sucking the sugar off his biscuit. ‘And find out if he’s pining and if there’s anything she might help you with,’ Naseem concludes.

I look up at him, my eyes dull. ‘Yup.’

‘So why the glum face?’ Naseem doesn’t let it go. He wafts his hands over the plate of vegetable rice in front of him, scattering the flies before he tucks in.  Why indeed? I pick up my water bottle and unscrew the lid slowly. I take a slug of water.   

‘This isn’t easy for me, Naseem.’

‘No.’ His eyes train on mine, sympathetic. ‘I know it isn’t. But it’s not ... the tragedy you seem to feel it might be, either.’ He taps my arm.  ‘You’re not
leaving Hadyn there with her
, Jules.’ He leans in a little, smiles at me, and we both give a small laugh, acknowledging this. ‘Eh?’ he nods. ‘That’s better. You need to put this back in the proper perspective, my old friend.’

I busy myself collecting up some of the crumbs from Hadyn’s biscuit that have fallen onto the table, gathering all the bits in my hands.

‘You’ll think I’m silly ...’ I begin.

‘I’ve known you ... how many years?’ he interjects airily. ‘Nothing you say is going to surprise
me
, Jules.’

I smile again, folding the crumbs into a tissue. ‘The thing is, I’ve dreamed about this. All this ...’ I look around me at the place where we are, encompassing it all. ‘Coming back here, with him. I’ve dreamed it, Naseem. So many times.’

‘Anxiety dream.’ He lifts his shoulders. ‘It’s expressing what you fear, that’s all. I still dream I’m taking my A Levels and I haven’t studied for them.’ He shoots me a smile. ‘I do. To this day, I dream that, sometimes.’

‘It isn’t that kind of dream, though,’ I admit. ‘It’s more ... the other kind.’

‘The Jules kind?’ He stops eating and smiles at me, teasing. He knows about me and my weird dream world. How all my life I’ve had these ... dreams that aren’t always just dreams but feel like something more. Like when I lost Hadyn. How I dreamed I’d find him. How I knew, I believed so strongly and never stopped believing because I
dreamed
it, that I would have him back.

‘You dreamed you’d bring him back to her?’ he prompts. That’s right. I nod, slowly, and I hear my friend sigh.

I chew my lip.

‘In my dream, I take Hadyn to her and I just ... I always end up leaving him there, Naseem.’ I haven’t told anybody of this, have I? No one. Not until this moment. Because I’ve never wanted to give it shape, roll the dough of my imagination into words, words that can then translate into what comes to pass...

‘Do you think I would ever let you do that?’ My friend smiles sadly. ‘Whatever happens tomorrow, I promise you, it will not be that.’

‘What if ...’ I look at him painfully, and all the horrid little thoughts that I have never wanted to think, they come tumbling out of some corner of my mind, scattering like the breadcrumbs in the tray under the toaster and I can’t stop them. ‘What if we see that he’s
happier
with her than he’ll ever be with me? What if I take him away from here and keep trying and trying my best to help him only to realise, too late, that nothing I do will ever be enough?’

‘Do you mean like your dad?’ Naseem says softly and I frown, not understanding where he’s dredged that up from. ‘Do you mean like all those years when you tried so hard to help your dad to give up the bottle but you never could make any difference? Is that what you think’s going on here, Jules? That you’re not enough somehow, for Hadyn or even for Charlie?’

‘What do you ...’ I can hear my heart thumping when he says those words, not believing him for one moment in my head, but my heart keeps thumping ...

‘It’s
bollock
s, you know,’ Naseem tells me fiercely. ‘You are bigger and stronger and braver and better than anyone in this lifetime will ever need. I know you. I’ve known you for forever and I wouldn’t tell you a lie.’ His eyes are shining in the darkness out on our balcony, only the one little tea light on the table to cheer us, but I can see that he really means what he says. He means it. And Naseem would never tell me a lie.

‘I don’t have any of the answers, though,’ I tell him painfully. ‘If I am enough, then ... why is it my son won’t respond to anything I do to try and normalise him? Why is it Charlie didn’t want me there with him in Yorkshire?’     

‘I don’t know. But I do know that the answer is not that you are not enough. Because you are
more
than enough.’

I shake my head, wanting to believe it, but there is still something else, isn’t there? ‘And all my dreams about this place?’ I throw at him. How does he explain that?

‘Dreams can also be metaphors,’ my old friend points out. ‘Maybe it means that there is something else precious that you are going to need to give up on. Who knows ...’ He leans in and gives me a rare Naz hug, and when I look over his shoulder past the sprawling concrete of Campamento, the blue-grey rock of Gibraltar looms large and imposing but also incredibly beautiful in the fading evening light.