The Lives She Left Behind (10 page)

He had neglected to breathe and now took in a long gulp of air.

‘Are you all right?’ someone asked. He had forgotten Michael Martin, forgotten he was in a car, and had no clear idea how long they had been driving.

‘Why do you ask?’ he replied and saw the teacher’s eyebrows rise. As he said it, he knew it was not the way the boy Luke would have answered and it surprised him that he no
longer felt quite like the boy Luke. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m fine,’ but the indrawn breath had turned around into a long sigh and left him heartsick. He turned back to
the window and tried to see the faces again but there were road signs instead. They were on the A38, slowing for the turn-off. He looked up and saw the ridge rising and the thing that was in him,
the thing that was pushing out the boy, rose with it.

The teacher stopped the car. ‘I’m up that way,’ he said, pointing at a small lane leading up the slope, ‘but I can take you home if you want. Cucklington, you
said?’

The sign to Cucklington pointed south. ‘It’s only two miles,’ the boy replied. ‘I can bike it.’

The teacher lifted the bicycle out of the car and drove away.

The boy laid it on the grass and sat down, looking after the car as it disappeared between narrow banks. He had been up that way before, but only once. Five, maybe six years ago? Primary school
– and he had friends then. The teacher had asked him about odd stuff, and if he had wanted to answer he would have said that day might have been the start of it.

There had been three of them, always three – Zach and Ryan and Luke their leader, bursting through the woods up there on the ridge, yelling and darting, legs pumping on bikes they knew
would fly if pedalled hard enough. They were ten years old and gravity held them lightly. The sun flashed green and blue in the broken roof of leaves as they swerved and leapt through a wild world
beyond parental eyes, a first visit to the scene of older brothers’ boasts. They wanted to be heroes too.

Passing a perfect hump where tree roots heaved up earth, they had skidded round, rear wheels locked. Zach jumped it first and landed shouting his exaggeration. ‘I got air. Wow! Did you see
that? Three feet.’

Ryan went next but barely hopped, fiddling intently with his gears all the way back as if thwarted by mechanics.

Their leader Luke attacked it last, taking the longest run-up to fulfil their expectations. Luke was a brave, inventive boy and they liked to see him set the standard. He rushed the ramp, jerked
head and shoulders back to make the jump, then froze, still staring upwards instead of at his landing point.

They saw the bike rear backwards, hurling him abruptly to the solid earth, and went fearfully to pick him up.

‘You really stacked it,’ Ryan said, avoiding looking at the blood flowing from Luke’s chin, but his friend was oblivious to the injury, searching up through the trees.

‘Where is he?’ he demanded. ‘Did you see where he went?’

‘Who?’

‘The man on the parachute. He’s come down. He must have done.’ Luke was standing up and staring into the woods. ‘We have to go and find him.’

He climbed the bank, questing through the trees, searching left and right. They followed, frightened by his sudden mania.

‘There’s nothing,’ Ryan said in the end. ‘There’s no one here. You banged your head.’

‘It was a yellow parachute. You saw the plane.’

‘There wasn’t any plane.’

‘Come on, you must have
heard
it.’

‘No.’

‘You couldn’t not have heard it. It was roaring and banging.’

The vivid image was still in Luke’s head. Straight wings, two propellers, one of them stopped, smoke pouring out behind, a greasy burning line across the sky, its belly pale green with
stark black crosses from a war that was no more than history.

They all looked up at a clear and silent sky, and that was when Luke’s friends began to think him odd.

Now he felt odder still, staring up the lane where the teacher had gone, pulled in two directions. Neither of them was the road that led to Cucklington. Montacute was tugging him gently back
– not the place, but the brief and shocking power that had travelled up his arm. The faces of three girls swam in his mind’s eye – vaguer, blurrier now, too far away. He felt a
sad and fading need to see them properly but the lane ahead called him too and that was stronger. It was the right and only way to go, more like the way home than the Cucklington road with its
cheerless, pointless bungalow at the other end. He pushed his bike in the wheel-tracks of the teacher’s car and every step he took felt a step nearer to something.

A sign pointed left to Pen Selwood and he stared at the name, pulled by it, but the other road had a stronger pull so he ignored it, went straight on, curving around a bend until he came to a
gap in the trees and a gate on the right and a cottage beyond it and knew this was what was calling him. He pushed the gate open, wheeled his bicycle through as if dreaming, stood staring at the
front door and the low windows, and was amazed when that door opened and the teacher came out to stare at him in matching amazement.

‘What are you doing here?’ demanded the boy.

‘Me? I live here. What are
you
doing here? You followed me? Why did you do that?’

‘No. How could I? You drove off.’

‘Luke, why are you here?’

‘When did you buy this house?’

‘What an odd question.’

‘When?’

The teacher frowned in thought. ‘It was nineteen ninety,’ he said, and looked hard at the boy who took a few steps back from the porch and scanned the front of the house from side to
side, frowning as if it was lying to him.

‘What was it like then?’

‘It was a complete ruin. Why?’

‘I remember it like that.’

‘No, you couldn’t possibly. You weren’t born.’

‘I know you from before.’

‘Before what? Before today? Of course you do.’

‘From back then, from when you first saw it.’

The teacher was shaking his head. ‘Oh Jesus,’ he said.

The boy saw a hint of fright in the teacher’s face. He repeated it urgently as if he had to get through to the older man. ‘I tell you I knew you then.’

‘Stop it, Luke. You fell. Are you feeling ill?’ But the boy found the familiar name was no longer so familiar. It glanced off him.

‘I’m taking you home,’ said the teacher. ‘Get in the car.’

As they drove away, three images spun, swirling and colliding in Luke’s head – the girls, the cottage, the teacher’s face. He could get no purchase on them. They wouldn’t
stick but when they were approaching Cucklington they drove past the remains of an ivy-clad barn and the sight of it altered the teacher’s cottage in Luke’s mind’s eye. The ivy
spread up the gable end beside the road. The roof sank, the glass splintered away, and a man was standing outside it. Then that man changed too and merged into the teacher in the seat next to him,
but younger – no grey in his face nor in his hair.

‘Where do I go?’ the teacher asked him at the village sign but the boy just gazed at him. The teacher looked back in blank bewilderment.

‘Luke, where’s your house?’

‘I don’t think I’m Luke. I’m not, am I?’

‘Of course you are.’

‘No.’

‘I’m taking you home. Will there be someone there?’

‘Don’t.’ The boy was rubbing his head as if he could massage Luke away. ‘I can’t remember my name.’ He stared at the teacher again. ‘You have to tell
me.’

‘I have no idea what you mean.’

‘I think you do. What was I called when I met you?’

‘Today?’

‘No. You
do
know what I mean. I’m sure you do. Way before that. At your house. When you first came.’

All the teacher could do was shake his head in mute distress but the boy went on, pitiless, unstoppable now as other fragments surfaced. ‘You were poking around. Your car was parked in the
lane.’ His voice sounded far away and his face was screwed up, concentrating fiercely, ‘It was a dark blue car. You’d gone inside where you had no right to be. No right at all. It
wasn’t yours. Not then. I caught you looking in the cellar.’

‘Someone’s told you,’ said the teacher faintly.

‘I caught you there. You know I did.’

‘
You
didn’t. That wasn’t you. That was an old man. Who told you?’

‘What was the old man called?’

The teacher found he didn’t want to say. ‘That’s not the point.’

‘It’s the whole point,’ said the boy. ‘You have to tell me his name.’

‘Why?’

The boy stared at him and all Michael Martin could do was flinch away as if a snake was coiled in the seat beside him, and the only explanation came to him and it was worse than having no
explanation at all. Across years of sadness he was back there again, back at the cottage she had found by chance, poking around in the ruins. All those years ago, before this boy was born.

‘Because it’s
my
name, don’t you see?’ The boy was shaking. ‘Tell me my name.’ He was shouting now, roaring his distress. ‘You must help me. I
can’t remember. Please tell me. Please.’

And of course Mike knew the name which filled his head – the name of the old man who had caught them in the cottage, the old man who destroyed his life, the old man who was dead before
this boy was born. He could not say it.

‘Stop it,’ he said and reached out his arm, not sure if he was trying to keep Luke at bay or to comfort him.

The boy glared at him, jerked the car door open, shouted, ‘Get away from me.’

A man and a woman were walking down the lane. The woman ran to him. ‘Lukey,’ she said, staring through the windscreen at the white-faced teacher, ‘is something wrong?’
and the man said, ‘What the hell’s going on?’

In the kitchen Luke’s mother pinned him in a corner and roasted him with angry concern. ‘You trying to tell me nothing happened? You screaming at him in the car and
him sitting there like he’d seen a ghost?’

‘I went to a dig, that’s all. He gave me a lift back.’

Barry, lurking in the doorway, stepped forward into their business. ‘What do you mean, a dig?’

‘You know – archaeology.’

‘So you’re suddenly an archaeologist, are you?’ Luke saw fat triumph in Barry’s face as he made himself the man of the house. The boy resented that deeply.

‘What did he do?’ his mother asked.

‘Nothing. He gave me a lift home.’

‘Where from?’

‘The dig. I told you. I went to this place where they were digging.’

‘Why did you yell at him?’ demanded Barry.

‘I was tired.’

‘Oh, come on. Was I born yesterday?’

‘Barry’s right to ask,’ put in his mother more gently. ‘You don’t yell at people, Lukey – not without a reason. You’re sitting in some strange
man’s car, shouting at him – something’s happened, hasn’t it? If he was trying something on, you need to tell us. It wouldn’t be right, and anyway you should have
asked us before you went. These teachers might not always be very nice people. You and him, alone and all that. Barry reckons he’s a poofter. Said so after he saw him at parents’
evening.’

Barry’s not my parent was what Luke wanted to say, but all he did say was, ‘That wasn’t him. That was Mr Jellicoe.’

‘Was it? Maybe it was, but if they’ve let one poofter into the school, who’s to say there aren’t more? Shouldn’t be any,’ said Barry.

‘It wasn’t anything like that,’ said the boy, but then Barry got going all over again and it went on and on, and of course he couldn’t begin to explain.

When they finally ran out of words, he took refuge in his bedroom while they watched television with the sound turned up next door, then as evening came, he opened his window and slipped out
through the back garden. He walked to the place he went to whenever it got bad – to the steep hillside with a sheer view westward over the drained marshland.

The evening sun was half an hour from the horizon and he settled down, his face towards it, to think in the peace that place offered. The high ground he was on ran away north, curving back,
hiding the teacher’s village. Until today the name had meant nothing to him but now Pen Selwood filled his head and with it another name that he could not quite find. He searched that way in
his mind, seeking the name that hung out there along the ridge.

As he waited for the sunset, his gaze wandered across the lower ground below, casting around for something to take him out of the here and now. He looked down at the farms scattered over the
lowlands, Baskets Farm and Frith Farm and the one they used to call the Redhouse Farm, and was thrilled to find he knew that. He saw the late sun paint the crown of the little hill above Stoke
Trister and he also knew that the tufts of woodland left on its summit were all that remained of a great swathe of trees.

Now the sun was down on the horizon and the sky put on a fine evening ocean swell of clouds in line after line, purple above, orange below, growing brighter as the sun dipped. He watched,
cooling to a state nearer peace in that vast proof that only the earth’s thin crust was within the spoiling reach of man. He knew that he had missed something enormous at Montacute, something
he would have found if he had been allowed to stay just another hour. He knew he had to go there again, west where the sunset was calling him.

He got up at eight the next morning, heard his mother and Barry snoring in Sunday unison, and cycled away. As he left Cucklington, it seemed absurd to him that his name might
not be Luke, but as he grew steadily nearer to the rise of the ridge he passed through a no-man’s-land to a point where it seemed absurd that he ever thought it was. He slowed down as he
approached Bagstone Farm and he knew that was the name of the house Michael Martin lived in even though there was no sign on it. Now that he could feel its vast gravitational pull, he was
astonished that it had been hidden from him.

He pushed open the gate, relieved to see no sign of the teacher’s car, needing time alone. The house stood end-on to the road. He walked slowly through the yard in front of it, noticing
the encroaching brambles, minding the decay, then came to the far end where the roofline sank lower and fought his way through the dense undergrowth round to the back of the house. The ground fell
away into a stream valley but he knew exactly how the path had run, though little trace of it was left and the trunk of a fallen tree lay across it. Returning to the yard, he leaned to look in at
all the windows, shading the glass with his hand, then stood back, staring at the front of the house.