Hard Light (27 page)

“I don't get why you have to do it in here,” she said.

I made my way back into the garret. “I told you, because it's dark.”

“That's where they used to keep the apples.” She dogged my heels to the window. “A hundred years ago. Why does it have to be dark?”

“Shit.” I stared outside. “I lost the light.” I turned to her. “Do you even know what film is? Do you even fucking care?”

She stared at me with those hard black eyes. “My grandfather was a famous director.”

“He was a famous cinematographer. Did you know him?”

“No. He died a long time ago. Before I was born.”

I wondered if mastery of light was an inherited trait. I held up my Konica. “This is an SLR camera—single lens reflex. Not digital. There's film inside it—do you know how that works?”

Sam started to nod, stopped. “No.”

“It's a very thin piece of plastic with special chemicals on it. Different kinds of chemicals interact differently when they're exposed to light, especially silver salts, which is what you use in black-and-white film. I only use black and white, so no matter what I shoot, it comes out in black and white. You could scan it into a computer and Photoshop it or something like that, but the original product is good old monochrome.”

“That's weird.” Sam stepped beside me, transfixed, and gazed at the camera.

“Here.” I popped the lens cap and indicated the viewfinder. “You look through that. This is the shutter release, but don't touch it—I don't have much film left.”

I handed her the camera. She squinted through the viewfinder. “How do you make it bigger?”

“You don't.”

“It's all blurry.”

“There's no autofocus. There's no auto anything. You have to know how it works.”

“Can you teach me?”

I took the camera from her. “No.”

She appeared crushed. “Look, it's hard,” I said. “It takes a long time to learn how to use it, focus and depth of field and correct exposure time, what F-stop to use—that kind of shit. Then on top of that you have to know how to develop the film, how long to leave it in the processor and adjust for any imperfections in the contrast or…”

I looked at her: I might have been speaking in tongues. I sighed. “Don't you have a smartphone or something? A digital camera? They're supposed to be really easy to learn.”

“Then why don't you have one?”

“Because I have to do everything the hard way.” I slung the camera over my neck and picked up my bag. “I'm going to see if I can rustle up some grub.”

The doors to the other bedrooms were shut. Sam followed me downstairs, where the cottage was silent and very cold. The brown soccer ball now sat in front of the fireplace. I saw no sign of Adrian, but when I entered the kitchen, Krishna stood in front of the sink, washing her face. She straightened and eyed me suspiciously.

“Where you been off to, then?”

“Sleeping,” I said.

“Surprised you could,” retorted Krishna.

Sam glared at her. Krishna glared back, but her gaze softened as she took in Sam's frayed cargo pants and ragged hair. “Don't they take you out ever?” she asked.

“Fuck off,” Sam said, and opened the fridge.

I went outside to retrieve the other bottle of wine from the Land Rover, skirting chicken shit and puddles in the brick-colored mud. The cold made the scar beside my eye ache, but it was exhilarating, too—the wind bore the smell of the sea, the calls of birds skirling high overhead and a low, moaning cry from the broken towers of Carn Scrija.

Back in the kitchen, Krishna was gone. I raised an eyebrow at Sam. “You scare her off?”

“Take more than that,” she said. “She looks like a vampire.”

I took the bottle of wine from my bag, filled a chipped white mug, and drank. Adrian's backpack sat on the wooden daybed, where the blankets had been neatly folded. A brace of dead rabbits hung beside the stove.

“I was supposed to skin those for dinner,” Sam said. “Till I forgot.”

She set bread and Nutella on the table, along with a carton of milk, then dragged an old electric heater alongside her chair. Its cord was dangerously frayed. She switched it on: The grill glowed orange, and I held my hands in front of it.

Sam made herself a sandwich, took a bite, and looked at me. “You want one?”

“Yeah, sure.”

We sat across from each other at the battered kitchen table and ate. After a few minutes I asked, “Where'd Krishna go?”

“Krishna?” Sam looked puzzled, then scowled. “You mean that crazy sket screaming at my dad?”

“That would be her.”

“Dunno. Ran off. She'll be in a bog out there. Dead,” she added with relish.

I refilled my mug with wine. Sam opened the milk, sniffed it, and poured it down the sink. She got a jelly glass and picked up the wine bottle.

“Hey,” I said, “how about asking?”

“Can I have some?”

“Aren't you kinda young to be hitting that?”

“No.”

“What about your dad?”

“He doesn't care.”

I shrugged. “Knock yourself out.”

She filled her glass to the brim, and I grabbed the bottle back from her. “Christ, you really
are
gonna knock yourself out. Pacing, kid.”

We finished our sandwiches in silence. Sam drank most of her wine, pushed her empty plate away, and walked, a little unsteadily, toward the bathroom. I drank what remained in her jelly glass and stuck the bottle into my camera bag. Adrian was right. The bag was starting to get heavy.

After a few minutes Sam returned and sat. When she saw her empty glass, she shot me an accusing look. “Did you throw out my wine?”

“No. I drank it. I don't want you puking. How old are you, anyway?”

“You can drink here when you're sixteen.”

“That's not what I asked.”

“I'm twelve. I'll be thirteen in January.”

“Wow, only two years and eleven months till you're legal. What's the deal with your grandmother?”

“She went to Penzance a few days ago. She got caught in the storm.”

“How far's Penzance?”

“About ten miles. But it takes a long time because of the roads.”

“You've been alone here all this time?”

Sam dabbled a finger in some spilled wine on the table, drew a circle. “I like to be alone.”

“Don't you have school?”

“I don't go to school. I used to, when I was with my dad in Islington. He was living with a bunch of anarchists from Occupy. Some of them got arrested. My dad wouldn't let me go.” As she spoke, she kicked the table leg distractedly. “My school, everyone there was a cunt. They beat me up and said I was a freak.”

“Why?”

“Cause I look like a bloke.”

“So? Who gives a fuck?”

“My dad went in and got in a fight with my teacher. They called the police, they were going to take me away, so we came back here so I could stay with Tamsin.”

I grabbed her foot. “Stop kicking, it's driving me nuts. How can you live here?”

“Same way I lived in London.”

“I mean, how do you pay the bills? Buy food, stuff like that.”

“Tamsin sells stuff. She knows a dealer in Penzance—she brings him things and he sells them online.”

I looked around. Nothing even remotely resembled an antique that might be worth more than a few pounds. “What kind of stuff?”

“Things that get plowed up in the fields. Flints. Beads. Broken pots.”

“You can survive on that?”

“It's getting harder to find things.” Sam kicked the table again, then stopped. “The ground's been so worked over for so long. You can still find things on the moor, but you have to be lucky. I had a metal detector, but it broke. We never found any metal, anyhow, except once a bronze ring. Tamsin says it used to be you couldn't kick a rock but you'd find an ax head or a little statue.”

I feigned surprise. “Really? What happened to them?”

“People stole them from her.”

I looked around. “You'd have to be a pretty hard-up thief to break in here.”

“It was people she knew. I don't know how they stole them, but they did. It was a long time ago.”

I nodded and stared out the window. The clouds had lifted. Beyond the dour granite compound, the open moor stretched green and gold beneath an azure sky. On the western horizon, slanting rain fell from massed charcoal clouds onto the ruins of a building atop a towering hill.

“Is that the manor that burned down?” I pointed, glancing back to see Sam's nod. “Can I go there?”

“I'll take you.” She jumped to her feet. “Wait while I get my coat.”

I didn't want a kid tagging along, but I was afraid that if I left, she'd wake Adrian and I'd have someone else dogging me. I stepped outside and took a shot of the hillside while I waited for Sam. She came running out, wearing a black anorak way too big for her skinny frame, and knee-high Wellingtons.

“This way,” she said.

 

33

We walked past the barn, along a rudimentary path that climbed a steep hillside covered with stones and rubble. The snow was gone, save for a few white pockets between the rocks. A broken plow blade thrust out from the underbrush, along with a pitchfork, its wooden handle rotted to a black nub. A tire swing hung from a dead tree near a trampoline folded in half like a giant taco.

“So is it just you and your grandmother?” I asked.

“Tamsin.” Sam shot me a quick look. “She doesn't like being called anything else. Yeah, just us.”

“Don't you get lonely?”

“Not really.”

“Even when she goes off and leaves you alone?”

“We have a shotgun; she taught me how to use it. Tamsin collects guns.”

“I thought you English were gun-shy.”

“We hunt rabbits with them. And this is Cornwall—we're not really part of England. More Celtic. We used to have our own language.”

“Yeah? Can you speak it?”

“No.”

She stopped in front of a barbed-wire fence surrounding a small garden plot. A few corn stalks rustled in the wind. Everything else had surrendered to weeds. Several ratty bundles hung from the barbed wire, spaced a few yards apart. I stepped closer and saw they were dead crows, skulls picked clean, wings dangling like empty black gloves.

“Sends a message,” said Sam. She reached between the barbed wire to pluck a sprig of something, lavender-gray with dry, teethlike leaves, and handed it to me. “Heather. For luck.”

“Thanks. I could use it.”

We continued on. After ten minutes we neared the top of the hill. Shreds of high white cloud raced across the sky like gulls. Gorse rattled ceaselessly in the wind. I stopped to catch my breath and looked back.

I didn't think we'd climbed that far. Yet from here the farm compound appeared impossibly distant, its buildings toy sized. Something moved outside the stone cottage, but I couldn't discern whether it was a person or animal, or just a shadow thrown by the clouds.

Sam stood beside me. With her anorak's hood pulled up she resembled a young monk. “Looks like you could just jump down onto it,” she said.

“We must've walked fast.”

She shook her head. “Everything here always looks closer or farther away than it really is. That's how people get lost. That and the mist and wind.”

She lifted her face to the sky so that the hood fell back. “The wind, the wind,” she sang.

“The wind, the wind, the wind blows high

Ash comes falling from the sky

And all the children say they'll die

For want of the Golden City.”

Her voice was high and sweet, slightly out of key and weirdly bloodless; more like a bird's song than a girl's. I shivered. “Where did you learn that?”

“Don't remember.”

“A woman named Poppy Teasel sang it. Do you know her? She was friends with Tamsin a long time ago. And your father.”

“No.” She began to walk across the moor, head down against the wind. “I wasn't here a long time ago.”

I hurried to keep up with her, the camera bouncing against my chest. She walked fast for such a skinny kid. We passed a midden composed of old tires, a chest freezer, and snarls of barbed wire. A raven picked at something in the shadows. It lifted its head to stare at us impassively before it opened its wings and took off, a black ribbon trailing from its beak.

“That song—it was in Leith's movie,” I said. “Your grandfather.
Thanatrope.
Have you ever seen it?”

“Only about seventy times. Yeah, that's where I heard it—I forgot. But that's Tamsin's movie, not his.”

“What do you mean?”

“He filmed some of it, but she was the one did all the real work. He had to be sectioned, so she finished it. All the editing. He didn't shoot enough film to make a proper movie.”

“Who told you that?”

“She did. Tamsin.”

“Not exactly an unbiased source.” I kicked at a stone and sent it tumbling downhill behind us. “But you're not the only one who thinks that. A film critic named Nicholas Rombes wrote about it online a few years ago. You should read it.”

“I don't need to read some online shite. It's true 'cause I know it's true.” She picked up a rock and threw it after mine. “We don't have Internet anyway.”

“Then how'd you watch
Thanatrope
?”

Sam looked at me with pitying disdain. “On a proper screen. There's a projector in the barn.”

I mulled this over as we approached the top of the hill. The revelation that a woman—a socialite, at that—had been the creative force behind an obscure underground movie might not be groundbreaking news. Still, it was interesting enough that some feminist film historian might get an article out of it.