Sunlit Shadow Dance (32 page)

Surprisingly for the next week
it was only a l
ocal story and he thought it would all die down. Susan was
named but of minor interest, he was the one talked about, the boy
from the Australian Outback, a true bush hero.

After a week someone joined the dots. This
story was front page on a London tabloid and he knew that tomorrow
it would be front cover of all the papers and lead on the TV
news.

He waited anxiously for the
next day to come, expecting the worst. But instead,
now that he was a
national hero there was no space for any bad story about Susan.
Even though the first tabloid had made the connection and tried
some hints about Susan’s past life it was howled down by all the
other papers and programs the next day, with stories
like

HELICOPTER PILOT HERO AND HIS REMARKABLE
WIFE.

Despite rumors in our
disreputable competitor we can report that both Vic Campbell and
his delightful wife Susan are true heroes, she for surviving the
ordeal of months in jail for a murder she had now been pardoned
f
or, he for
first having made an extraordinary journey to escape from his own
helicopter crash in one of the remotest parts of Australia and then
having performed a second extraordinary feat to rescue others in a
similarly terrifying situation. As modest people they now just want
to be left alone to enjoy their beautiful little baby and so we
should respect their wishes.

The only comment was a
s
ingle
interview with her father. He simply said he and he and his wife
were incredibly proud grandparents and asked all to respect the
privacy of his wife and son in law.

Within a week it was just another story,
barely mentioned. In another week it was gone, with no appetite
remaining for sensation. It seemed to pass Susan by. They did not
deliberately hide newspapers from her and for the first day or two
she had proudly read about Vic. By the time she became a character
in the story she had lost interest. So these papers stayed
unread.

Susan found little Vic a
delight, he was an easy baby, full of life when awake, but happy to
feed and settle for good long sleeps. His eyes were now open and
she loved to
meet his eyes. She thought he was beginning to recognize
her and give her tiny smiles as his dark eyes gazed at hers
intensely.

She was also full of pleasure
as she watched Vic hold his child, him trying to talk in an overly
grown up way, telling
the tiny boy of the first ride he would have in a
helicopter, how they would play football and other things they
would do together in the future, while the baby looked up at him
with dark serious eyes.

On the day she brought him home she felt no
anxiety, she had done this before and that time she was alone. Now
she had helpers by the score and it really was not hard.

As she settled back into life at the farm
she found it almost too easy, and for the first time she could
remember she felt strangely restless. It was an unfamiliar feeling.
She wondered why, now when everything was so perfect.

She felt a sense that she
needed to bring order to her life, that she needed to do something
more constructive than just mind her baby and
now and then her other
children, when not with the many other helpers.

She decided to organize their room,
re-arranging the furniture, bringing in bright pictures from the
hall, buying exotic imported flowers in the town.

As she was sorting through all her things
one day, putting aside the clothes from her late pregnancy when she
had grown large, she came across a book wrapped in cloth which she
had forgotten about. As she unwrapped it the memory came flooding
back. It was the gift of Vic’s uncle from a couple weeks before
they got married. She had promised to try and find someone to
decipher the strange writing within it and comprehend its
contents.

At that time she had photographed it on
Vic’s phone and meant to seek out someone who could make sense of
it. However in the activity of wedding preparations it had been
forgotten, the pictures left on the memory card of Vic’s phone
which now sat at his sister’s house in Alice Springs, and the book
put into the bottom of her suitcase. There it had stayed while it
accompanied her across the world.

She decided that this would be her new
project, something to keep her busy in the free time of which she
had plenty right now. So she needed to find someone who could read
what it said. It was unlikely that anyone in this small community
would be able to do that. So she needed to go to a city to find
someone who could do this, perhaps Edinburgh or Glasgow, where
University scholars abounded, perhaps down to London. She
remembered that her mother worked at Reading University, in a
medical field, and her brother had also attended there. Between
them they may know someone who could help.

She had promised her Mum and Dad she would
come and stay with them with the baby soon. She had a half formed
plan to go next week, to catch the train down and stay for three or
four days, do it while Vic was away in Aberdeen on one of his
flying trips. Perhaps she could fit it in then.

She wanted to keep the old book
safe; it was after all a family heirloom of Vic’s family, entrusted
to her for a purpose. So
, while in due course, she wanted to show it to
various people to get their opinion, she did not want to hand it
over to others lest it got lost or damaged. So she must photograph
it again before she showed it to others. That way she could pass
over a digital copy while retaining the original. Her Mum and Dad
were always taking photos of their grandchildren on a fancy camera.
She could borrow this from them while visiting.

The following week she was on
the train with David,
Anne and little Vic.

Vic dropped her at the station en route to
Aberdeen for four days. He would collect her on his return which he
had timed to fit in with her travel. David and Anne were thrilled
with the train ride, looking out of carriage windows at mountains
and lakes and then, as the highlands fell away, at rolling green
fields with sheep and cattle. However, as the novelty went, they
were just two ratty toddlers, hungry, restless and endlessly
complaining as boredom overtook them.

She was glad to arrive at
Reading after several long train hours and pass her children
on to her mother.
They soon came to her old house.

As she walked inside she felt the weight
of memories flood in on her. It had been her home for most of her
life and, even though she had no memory of it since little, there
was so much of her life from before then which came pouring into
her mind again.

He
r Mum called out she was taking David
and Anne to visit a neighbor who had promised a cake. She should
follow over in half an hour when they were invited there for
afternoon tea. Baby Vic had fed shortly before arrival and was now
sleeping soundly so she placed him on a rug on the floor and asked
her father if he would keep an eye on him while she set out to
explore.

She found her old bedroom, not
so large and grand as she remembered, but with her familiar
favorite teddy on the pillow. She picked
it up and hugged it to herself. As
she did more memories came back, some fully remembered. Others were
little more than shadows that teased at the edge of her mind. Today
she felt her mind was a place of sunshine and shadows, the
remembered happy memories were like bright sunlit spaces. Alongside
these were other places where she knew she should remember but saw
only shadows with vague glimpses of things that had been. For the
first time she felt her curiosity piqued, wanting to know about all
that had gone to make her life from before, particularly in those
missing years.

She started rooting around in her drawers,
looking at the clothes. None were what she remembered, tight denim
jeans with a bright sparkly top, floral summer dresses, make up and
accessories. None of these had belonged to a twelve year old.

She opened the bottom drawer,
searching for something that may be familiar. Instead under jumpers
she found an expensive looking camera. It tore at her memory
strings but with no clear knowledge that it had been hers.
Still
, as
she picked it up, she instinctively knew how to use it, the
controls familiar in her hands. She flipped the power on button.
Surprisingly it still worked. She thought the batteries would be
flat from years unused. The battery warning light was on but it
still showed a bright back screen.

She pushed the buttons to display the
photos on the camera. One by one they flashed up. There were photos
of her with friends and family, at home and on holidays. Apart from
her family the only other person she knew was Anne. She saw photos
of herself in a pale shaded bikini, holding the hand of a handsome
blond tousle haired man; he must have been a past boyfriend though
she could feel no trace of him left in her mind.

It came to her that this camera
would provide a solution to tak
ing photos of the old book she needed to
translate. It had lots of space on the memory card, just a new set
of batteries were required and she could get to work. It would take
a few hours tomorrow to photograph all the pages. Then she could
print off some sample pages and go looking for someone to translate
what was written.

That evening she talked to her parents about
her plan. After dinner her mother suggested she show them the book
so they could think who might best be able to help her with
deciphering it.

Her father looked at the
complex curls of the characters on each page and said,
“I think it looks a
bit like Arabic, so I think we should start there. If it is
something else from the Middle East or India there is a good chance
that they can direct us.”

Her mother slightly knew a
Professor of Arabic Languages at the Reading School of Literature
and Languages. He had helped her with a project some years past
about Arabic medicine from the time of the Moorish Empire. She took
a few photos on her phone
, saying she would show him these tomorrow and
seek his advice.

Her father found her some new
batteries for the camera and it now showed fully charged. Susan’s
other
grandmother, who lived nearby, agreed to come over tomorrow
and mind the children so Susan could have a few undisturbed hours
to take photographs. She found she was looking forward to the
challenge of doing something that felt important and
complex.

After breakfast next day she
got to work
.
Her Gran was there early and the older children were keen to go
with her to a nearby park, then on visiting neighbors while Susan
worked away. Vic had just fed and she would have several hours of
solitude to work.

So she opened the book and
began at the front, doing it page by page
, checking the quality of the first
few photos was acceptable on a laptop her father had lent her
before she continued. They were fine.

As she returned the memory card to the
camera she was seized by a powerful sense of déjà vu. It felt so
familiar, using this camera to photograph this – the word ‘diary’
came unbidden into her head – she wondered where it had come from.
It may in fact be a diary, but equally it could be something else
like a religious book of devotions or transcribed
stories.

She told herself, no it is not
a diary, it is a book. Yet, every time she turned the page and took
another photo, her mind said,
Now you have captured another page of the
diary.
She
had a sense now it was not one book but two, this book in a strange
language in her hand, and another book, a diary in neat but cramped
English, with a bit of French thrown in. She could even picture a
page of lovely flowing French cursive script though her mind did
not have knowledge of its meaning.

She shook her head to clear this complexity
of layered pictures; it was like two sequences of images had got
overlaid in her brain, one from now, one from some other time. She
made a conscious effort to block out the extraneous thoughts and
just concentrate on the task at hand – turn the page, focus, click,
check image on back screen of camera, begin again.

An hour passed and then two. Now she had
all the pages captured. She just needed to check their quality in
detail and label them on her computer, cross checking the accuracy
of the sequence with the original book as she went. She began at
the outside – Label - Outside Front Cover – correct. Inside Front
Cover – correct. She clicked to the next image on her screen and
reached for the book to open its cover again and compare. But now
this dark brown cover with a few curly symbols transposed in her
mind to a red brown cover with the words Mark B in clear hand
writing.

She shook her head. This was seriously
weird.

She pushed on, it was hard to
concentrate
.
Each time she turned the page another image, different from the
book in front of her, jumped into her mind for a few seconds before
it faded.

She forced herself to ignore these unwanted
images and go on. As she was getting towards the end she saw a
transposed page with the word Kate written on it. She tried to
think of any Kate she knew but could not. A few pages later the
word, Susan jumped out at her. Somehow she knew this half seen page
in her mind was a page about her.