The Lives She Left Behind (7 page)

‘Please?’

‘Oh, all right. He said you were . . . cute.’

‘How did he say it? Just like that? “She’s cute”? What did he look like when he said it? Was that all he—’

‘Look at your face.’ Lucy said, and she whipped out her phone and took a picture of Ali before she could compose herself. Ali shrieked. Lucy frowned. ‘My God,’ she said,
‘I don’t know why I’m being nice to you. I’ve just remembered what you let us in for.’

‘Oh, well, I—’

‘You volunteered us to tell the story tonight, didn’t you? “We’ll tell it,” you said, not “I’ll tell it.” You said “we”. Why exactly
did you do that? No, don’t answer. I know why. You were trying to impress Conrad.’

‘Oh, come off it,’ said Ali sheepishly. ‘That’s got nothing to do with it. I just thought we could—’

Lucy reached out her hands and covered Ali’s mouth. ‘Enough,’ she said. ‘I don’t like public speaking and I don’t have anybody to impress and I’m not
going to do it.’

‘Nor am I,’ said Jo, and they both looked at Ali.

‘All right then, I’ll do it by myself,’ said Ali. There was a silence. ‘I don’t mind standing up and speaking,’ she said in a smaller voice, ‘but I
don’t know what to say. Will you help me?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Please,’ she begged. ‘I need some ideas.’

Lucy pouted. ‘I said maybe.’

Jo relented. ‘I’ll help you. There’s nothing guys like more than a good story.’

‘Really?’ Lucy said. ‘Is that true? Oh, all right.’

They stopped talking and got busy with their trowels because Rupert was walking towards them with a man they hadn’t seen before – an older man with thinning hair and a drawn
face.

‘This is my friend Michael,’ said Rupert. ‘He’s joining us for the day. I like to make sure he gets out in the fresh air sometimes. Mike, this is Lucy, this one’s
Jo and this one’s Ali. Don’t stand for any nonsense.’ He smiled at the girls. ‘Mike’s a schoolteacher, so you’ve been warned.’

He walked away and the man shuffled uncomfortably. ‘Ignore him,’ he said.

‘Are you really a teacher?’ asked Lucy.

‘Not at weekends.’

‘What sort of school?’

‘King Arthur’s at Wincanton.’

‘That sounds posh.’

‘No, it’s a comprehensive. Where are you from?’

‘We all live in Exeter,’ said Ali. ‘My mother’s an archaeologist.’

Jo was staring at him, remembering the map and the name. ‘How far away is Wincanton?’ she asked.

‘Half an hour,’ he said and pointed vaguely. ‘That way.’

Jo was still staring at him, disconcerted by the disturbing feelings in her gut. Common sense told her this was another stage of the pills wearing off but it wasn’t the way she was used
to. Normally, she was nervous and frightened, feeling her pulse racing as everything looked too bright and sounded too sharp. This was a slower feeling, a deep ache more like sorrow and a further
disturbing something as if the pain written on this man’s face might be somehow her fault. She dismissed it as absurd. He was a stranger, and when he looked at her there was no flicker of
recognition.

‘What are we doing?’ the man asked.

‘Just scraping this down,’ Ali told him.

‘Anything interesting?’

‘Not yet.’

‘No,’ said the teacher. ‘I suspected that any trench Rupert let me into was unlikely to contain anything I might damage.’

‘Is that right?’ said Lucy. ‘That stinks. I’ll show him. I’m going to find something.’

He settled himself a few feet further down the trench and scraped away with his back to them. The girls talked quietly.

‘Come on then,’ said Ali. ‘What about this story, then?’

Fifteen minutes later they had the rough outlines of two different stories, one from Lucy and one from Ali, and they couldn’t agree which one was best, then Lucy squealed,
‘I’ve found something. What’s this? It’s metal, isn’t it? I think it’s silver.’

She had uncovered the curving top of something too smooth and regular to be natural. She rubbed away the dirt with her fingers and they stared at a thin grey rod, the thickness of a ballpoint
pen, emerging from the earth and disappearing back into it three or four inches further along.

Ali knelt by it, scraping, and more and more emerged until they had a foot showing with no sign of an end. The teacher was looking back over his shoulder curiously.

Lucy levered the pointed end of the trowel underneath it. ‘It’s like a cable,’ she said in disgust. ‘I think it’s modern.’

‘Don’t do that,’ said Ali urgently. ‘You have to scrape round the edges.’ But she was too late. Lucy had hooked her fingers underneath it, got to her feet and
yanked hard upwards. It was immediately clear that she was right about the cable and entirely wrong about the correct way to behave in a trench. The cable ran close to the exposed earth surface all
the way down the long trench to where Rupert was working with some of the others twenty feet further along. It ripped up in a spray of earth, past the startled teacher and on down, all the way to
Rupert who reared up on his haunches and turned with an expression of complete astonishment to look back to the culprit, caught red-handed and red-faced with the cable still in her hand.

Rupert beckoned to them and the three of them, followed by the teacher who seemed as embarrassed as they were, walked slowly to the far end of the trench.

‘What on earth have you done?’ said Rupert.

‘Sorry,’ said Lucy. ‘But it’s just some sort of wire, isn’t it?’

Rupert looked at the damage she had done to the even surface of the trench and shook his head. ‘I’ll get Mike to explain a few things to you,’ he said. ‘You have to be
more careful.’

Dozer had walked over from his trench, drawn by the fuss, and he broke in. ‘Hey, Rupe,’ he said. ‘You know what? This is lead sheathing, old electrical stuff, and it’s
got the jolly old broad arrow stamped all along it. War Department stuff. And guess what? It’s heading straight towards our hole.’

‘Five-minute break,’ Rupert said. ‘Let’s have a think. Everyone – take a breather.’

The teacher joined the group standing round Rupert discussing the cable. The girls walked away into the trees and sat down on the grass. They were silent for a long time then Ali said, ‘I
wish you hadn’t done that. It makes me feel like a complete idiot.’

‘You? Why’s it about you? I did it, not you.’

‘But you wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for my mother. I feel responsible.’

‘Do me a favour!’

‘Let’s talk about something else,’ Jo suggested quickly. ‘What about these stories?’

There was a further long silence before the other two took the olive branch. In the end Lucy said, ‘Let’s tell both of them. I’ll tell mine and you tell yours. They
needn’t be very long.’

Ali got to her feet. ‘They’re all going back to work. Come on.’ They walked back to the other trench, where Dozer was peering at the surface of the earth. ‘I’ll get
stage fright if I’m doing one by myself,’ she said.

‘You’ve done school plays.’

‘I was dressed up as someone else. I can do it then.’

‘All right, we’ll dress up.’

‘In what?’

‘We’ll find something. Old rags.’

‘What old rags? Anyway, what about Jo?’

‘I don’t mind,’ said Jo. ‘I can’t think of anything to say.’

‘Could you help me, maybe?’ Ali asked. ‘You could be there to remind me if I go wrong.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jo. ‘I’d rather just . . .’ but that was as far as she got because there was a loud gasp from the cliff above them and the dark shape of
a body, arms spread out, crashed down into the trench right next to them in a shower of leaves.

Miles away and hours before, a boy blinked awake from a warm dream of love to find himself in an empty bungalow, momentarily unsure of his name. The room’s sour smell
drove his dream away in tatters. He stared at the wall facing him, pale blue and streaked white where water had leaked down. His pyjamas were too short for him and the polyester slither of the
sheet across his bare ankles filled him with a revulsion that drove him out of bed. Barry’s car battery stood on the hall table, casually dumped on top of his photography project, and when he
strained to lift it off it left wide black marks across the folder. He remembered it was Saturday, then that his exams were over and his holidays had started early. The thought gave him no
pleasure. A note on the kitchen table said ‘Luke, gone to the boot sale. Back later.’ With the last tendrils of the dream still twitching, that did not feel like his name, nor did this
thin and flimsy house feel like his home.

He dressed and went out to the garage, feeling a sudden magnetic pole-to-pole repulsion from this place where he had lived his sixteen years of life, knowing he wanted to get away, right away.
He pumped up his bicycle tyres and every rubbery push of the pump handle injected escape magic until the bounce of the bike told him it was ready to go with him. The road led east or west, and west
seemed the obvious chance with the morning sun behind him.

Leaving the house behind felt better and at the first junction he hesitated, tried one way then another then the third, which seemed the happiest choice in a way he could not have precisely
described. So it was at each turning and he made his choices faster and faster, feeling a need to keep going. An hour’s pedalling on empty lanes and thundering roads and then lanes again took
him further from home than he had ever strayed before. A second hour wiped the signposts clean of familiar places. His legs were aching but the unknown cheered him on from somewhere far ahead and
he even enjoyed the idea that he might not find his way back.

What stopped him was a conical hill, wrapped in trees, presented like a sudden invention of the earth as he laboured up out of a fold. The small tower rising from its summit snared his eye and
the moment he saw it he knew he had to climb it, as if this had always been his destination. He thought he might see anything from the top: the sea or lions on a plain or a purple city or his
future. On the edge of a village, he chained his bike to a fence and followed a beaten path to the base of the hill.

Where the trees started, the earth angled sharply upwards, and although a zigzag track offered an easier approach the boy scrambled straight up, using roots for handholds as the dry dirt sent
his feet skidding. The trees ended before the summit plateau, circling the tower like a monk’s tonsure.

Through its open doorway a hundred stone stairs twisted upwards, spiralling him to a cramped room right at the top where patches of wall-plaster were scored with the scratched spoor of visitors.
He ran his fingers over some of the deep-cut words. ‘Riga Latvia’ said one, then below it ‘F & G’, and a heart surrounding the two words ‘Angels –
Daisy.’

Square openings barred with iron showed him quarters of the surrounding land and he looked through each in turn, hoping something might be revealed. He saw trees and fields and the distant misty
hills and despaired that this might be all there was to show for his efforts, leaving him to pedal all the way back to that loveless house. He felt a scream rising in him and let it out, yelling at
the sky in an abandonment that amazed him, yelling at two dots that came from those misty hills and grew into jet fighters coming straight at the tower, hurdling his hilltop wing tip to wing tip.
His yell was soaked up into an immense noise that arrived at the same moment they did and persisted long after they had gone. When it diminished it had silenced him and the whole land seemed
quieter, as if they had muscled all other sound out of the way.

In that new peace a twist of wind lifted the smell of early summer to his nose and carried with it a gentle murmur of human voices. They drew him back down the stairs and at the bottom he heard
laughter, a call, the ring of metal, beckoning him to the far edge of the plateau. He saw red and white tape down below in the black mass of trees, a plastic barrier stretched between their trunks.
The sounds came from beyond them in the darkness and they drew him on down. He picked his way, cautious and silent, intending to spy from cover, but the tape marked the start of an even steeper
drop and a dead branch, shrouded by leaves, tricked his feet. They shot from under him so that he tobogganed over the edge under the abrupt violence of gravity, feet first and head back.

He fell for long enough to know fear and his lungs flattened as he met the earth below at full length, still on his back, all the air forced out of him. For a moment the world was changed by the
concussion. Where there had been trees above, all he could see were purple spheres filling his vision. The shock of impact overwhelmed him and he closed his eyes to concentrate on the fight to fill
his lungs. When he opened them again there were faces bent over him with expressions of alarm – three girls’ faces focused on him like a fantasy.

‘Where did
you
come from?’ said a blonde girl, close enough to kiss, and he tried to say sorry through the head-to-toe hurt but there was still no air to make the words. The
purple shapes had gone and he would have searched for them but didn’t even want to move his eyes.

‘Give him space,’ growled a man’s voice. The girls’ faces vanished and a huge head with white hair strapped back in a ponytail took their place. Luke felt unbearable
regret and his eyes grew damp with all sorts of pain.

‘Just twitch both feet for me,’ the man said, then, ‘All right, matey, let’s get you on your side.’ Large hands turned him gently over. ‘Pull your knees up
all the way. You’re winded, that’s all. You’ll be all right in half a mo.’

Just when he knew he would suffocate he drew a little air, then more, until he was gasping it in.

‘Now,’ said the big man. ‘Where does it hurt?’

‘My back.’ He felt fingers gently exploring.

‘Just a scratch. You landed on my trowel. Lucky it’s made of strong stuff. Can you move everything?’

The boy tried. ‘Yes.’ He lifted his head and saw that he was lying across a strip of bare earth and all around were buckets, shovels and plastic trays. A ring of people surrounded
him.

‘Show’s over,’ growled the man with the ponytail. ‘He’ll live. Back to it, you sorry lot.’