Thin Air (24 page)

She tried to move and realised
then that she was not alone. A presence moved beyond her line of
sight. Her neck ached. She could not lift her head.

The girl from the church wafted
into view. She looked both concerned and excited, as if savouring
her guest’s vulnerability. Jay felt momentarily afraid, wondering
what the girl had done to her, why she couldn’t move.

‘You’re awake,’ said the girl,
and once again reality see-sawed into normality. Jay wasn’t afraid
at all. She didn’t even have to speak, explain herself. The girl
sat beside her on the bed, her hands laced demurely in her lap.
‘You need to rest. You need to eat. It’s all over now.’

What was all over? Jay tried to
move again and found she could. She struggled to support herself on
her elbows and a flash of light constricted her head once more.

‘Perhaps you shouldn’t sit up
just yet,’ said the girl. ‘Ida is making you some soup.’

Jay’s nose filled with the smell
of fatty meat; she retched.

‘Oh no,’ said the girl,
frowning. ‘Don’t be sick. I haven’t got a bowl or anything.’

Jay lay down again, blinking at
the ceiling, identifying patches of damp in the yellowed
wall-paper. When she spoke, her voice sounded scratchy and thin in
her own ears. ‘I’m not sure where I am, how I got here...’

‘You were lost. You found
me
in the church. I had to bring you home. You needed
looking after.’

‘Why are you doing this?’

The girl shrugged. ‘Someone has
to. You’re here now.’

‘And where is here?’

‘Journey’s end. Lestholme. Where
we live.’

Jay sighed, swallowed. She was
thirsty and touched the outside of her dry throat. She wanted to
submit to the sensation of illness, desiring pity and comfort, yet
some part of her fought against it. It seemed strange to her.
Hadn’t she given in, fallen backwards into the arms of fate, when
she’d walked away from her car? Why not simply flow with it now,
whatever happened to her? But no, wasn’t that someone else’s life?
She couldn’t remember. Memories were muddled.

‘What’s your name?’ asked the
girl. ‘I’m Jem.’

‘Jay,’ she answered.

Jem nodded. ‘You’re here
now.’

Presently, a woman came into the
room. She wore a frilled apron, like a character out of a Fifties
sitcom, and carried a steaming bowl of soup, from which the handle
of a spoon extended. Her face was round and smiling, cheeks rosy.
She was an archetypal mother. Jay experienced another moment of
disorientation. From beyond the open door, she heard the
unmistakable sound of a radio, a woman’s voice, shrill and
metallic. She was taken back to the time when her mother would
listen to women’s programmes on the radio while Jay played on the
floor at her feet. She could smell cold gravy, rancid greens. She
imagined a winter day outside, greying in on itself. Jay shivered
in the bed.

‘Cold, are you?’ enquired the
woman bearing down on her with the soup.

‘This is Ida,’ Jem said. ‘She
looks after me.’

‘Get on yer, saucy minx!’
exclaimed Ida. She put down the soup on the bedside table. Her arms
were huge, made for wringing out laundry and then pegging it out on
a line to flap in a stiff wind. Her body as she leaned forward was
mountainous; ancient mountains eroded into undulating hills of
flesh. Jay couldn’t help thinking of Ida striding along a hilly
sky-line trailing clouds in her hair. She forced her body upright
in the bed, her brain splashing around her skull. The tray was
placed across her knees. She looked down into the green gel of the
soup, wondered how she could eat it, yet the smell rising in waxy
steam from its surface was inviting, faintly redolent of
onions.

‘You’ll feel so much better
after you’ve eaten,’ Jem told her. ‘Ida’s soup is…’ She paused to
smile. ‘…life-giving.’ A woman much older than Jem seemed to speak
through her body, smile through her smile.

Jay felt unnerved again and an
involuntary question came out of her: ‘Am I dead?’

The woman and the girl looked at
one another, a glance difficult to interpret. It might have
contained sympathy or collusion. ‘No,’ said Jem. ‘I don’t think you
are.’

Jay rubbed her face with one
hand. ‘I feel so strange. I had an accident…’

‘You’ll feel right as rain in no
time,’ said Ida.

‘But I can’t…’ Jay shook her
head. She wanted to say ‘I can’t stay here,’ but realised there was
no reason not to. She was clearly more shaken by the accident than
she’d first thought. She needed to recuperate. Yet shouldn’t she
contact somebody? Who?

‘My car,’ she said.

‘Don’t you go worrying about
that,’ Ida said.

‘Will someone get it for me? Can
you do that? Can I give you the keys?’

‘All’s taken care of,’ Ida
murmured. ‘You just stop your fretting and eat your broth.’

Once she had eaten the soup, Jay
was overwhelmed by tiredness.

‘You’ll sleep now,’ Ida said,
patting the eiderdown with plump motherly fingers. Her voice,
though soft, contained a command. She seemed the Mother of
Sleep.

Jay welcomed the approaching
cloud of slumber. She could almost see it rolling towards her;
white, thick, enveloping. Before it claimed her, she experienced a
brief recollection of how she had felt before she’d come across the
church. The hotel room, the bourbon. She was sure now those
impressions had been images of Dex’s life, and the way he’d felt as
he’d walked away from it. She had experienced
his
journey,
his
turmoil. Did that mean he was also here in Lestholme?
Perhaps this was the place Julie had spoken of. For just a moment,
Jay was enveloped by warmth. After all her searching, she had
finally experienced some kind of bond with Dex.

In the evening, Jay went
downstairs. She did feel refreshed, though tender throughout mind
and body. She wandered dark passages, floored by tiles that were
covered by thin runners of faded Persian carpet. In an overstuffed
living-room, she came across a man, whom she imagined must be Ida’s
husband. He sat in a cracked leather armchair in front of the
television. His face was heavy-set and melancholy, his body huge
and inert. The picture on the set before him looked old somehow, a
transmission from the past. Footballers ran back and forth across a
field, grainy imps of grey and white. The air in the room was
solid, slow-moving, gravid with aromas of yesterday’s meals. Heavy
chenille curtains of orange were drawn against the evening sun,
which would otherwise intrude across the man’s line of vision. On
the table, linen-draped, a cracked bowl was filled with
soft-looking apples. A wasp, antennae absorbed, climbed over the
aged mound, round and around.

Jay noticed an old woman,
dressed in black, sleeping in another arm-chair near the window.
Her wispy white hair flapped a little as she exhaled, and her
marbled hands lay along the chair arms, the nails astonishingly
well-shaped and smooth. Apprehension came with a serpent slide up
Jay’s spine. These people were eerie.

Jem came into the room, and
brought life and energy with her. She bounced up to the man’s chair
and leaned upon its back where the man’s hair had left oily stains.
‘Arthur, this is Jay,’ she said. The heavy-faced man in the chair
glanced round, stared at Jay through oyster eyes for a moment, then
twitched his loose lips and resumed his scrutiny of the TV
screen.

‘This is your family,’ Jay said,
her voice lame.

Jem was still bouncing at the
back of Arthur’s chair. ‘Yes.’ It was said with defiance, as if
challenging Jay to make an uncomplimentary remark.

I can’t stay here, she thought.
Whatever Jem thinks, whatever she meant by what she said upstairs,
I don’t belong. I must move on. I have to find Dex.

Ida came into the room, bearing
a tray laden with small, dry-looking sandwiches and slabs of
Madeira cake. A smell of fish paste filled the air. At Ida’s
injunction, Jay sat down at the table beneath the window, across
from Jem, and nibbled at a sandwich. Its taste took her back to her
own childhood again. Uncannily, these people strongly reminded her
of her grandparents; not particular individuals but a kind of
composite aura, as if Ida, Arthur and the old woman in the corner
were somehow the essence of her memories. As Jay bit into a moist
hunk of cake, someone scored a goal on the TV, and a thin roar
erupted from the televised crowd. She had lived this moment before.
The only thing lacking was the deep red jelly, cold from the
fridge, that her grandmother Ruperts, her mother’s mother, would
always lay out for tea on Saturdays. Perhaps this was all
coincidence. She was looking for her childhood, because then she
had been ignorant and therefore happy. Those gilded days, filled
with rich, imaginative games, seemed like some lost Arcadia now.
This place, and these people, might exist only in her imagination.
Perhaps she was lying in a drunken sleep in her car at the lay-by,
only dreaming she was here. It might be that she was looking for
Dex only in the labyrinth of her own mind, and her inner wandering
had brought her here. But how could she wake up? It all felt so
real, while at the same time illusory. She laid down her half-eaten
cake on her plate, rubbing soft crumbs from her fingers.

‘Jem, I’m looking for
someone.’

Jem looked up at her, her face
both wary and enquiring.

Is she me? Jay wondered, the
person that I was?

‘His name is Dex. I think he
might have come here before me.’

‘Lots of people come here,’ Jem
answered. ‘What does he look like?’

He’s tall, and quite slim. About
my age. Dark brown hair. Dark eyes.’

‘A lot of people look like
that.’

‘It would have been a few years
ago now. He disappeared, and I think I might be here because of
him.’

Jem shook her head. ‘You’re only
here because of yourself. That’s what happens.’

‘Perhaps, but I still feel he
might be here too. I have to look for him.’

Jem shrugged and pulled a wry
face; a weirdly adult gesture. ‘I don’t know everyone here. How
could I? I’ve never heard of anyone coming here to find someone
else, though.’

‘I have to look.’

‘You should rest. Eat, sleep,
relax. There’s plenty of time. I’ll take you out into the
garden.’

Jem led Jay out of the room. Jay
felt almost blind in the passage-way beyond, but then the light was
dim. From the kitchen, came the clatter of pans, the sound of
slippered feet on bare tiles. Jem steered her out of the front door
into the evening, where the aromas of grass and carnations rose in
a wave and enwrapped her body. She expelled a sound, ‘Aaah,’ her
head thrown back.

Jem’s small hand pushed firmly
against the small of Jay’s back and she stumbled onto a square of
lawn, precisely groomed, where a bird-bath on a pedestal stood
empty of water. The garden hugged the house in an L-shape. A strip
of narrow lawn and a path led down to a shaded area beyond, where
bean plants seethed up sloping poles. What would it be like to walk
beneath that arched green walk-way, surrounded by the smell of the
creeping tendrils? Once, she must have done that. One of her
grandfathers had grown beans in his garden.

‘You will feel better soon,’ Jem
said.

Jay smiled uncertainly. ‘I feel
better already.’ She looked around herself, feeling oppressed by
the gigantic beech tree that spread fluttering arms over the lawn.
She had been here before, long ago, yet she hadn’t. It was all
wrong. She had to find Dex, but she also had to find out what had
happened to her, where those lost months of winter and spring,
perhaps years, had gone.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’
Jem said.

Jay glanced at her. ‘I need to
use the telephone.’

‘We don’t have one.’

That didn’t really come as a
surprise. ‘It’s very kind of you to look after me, but I need to
make contact with people. I left my car somewhere. After I’ve
looked for Dex, I’ll have to go back.’

‘But where to?’ Jem danced
around the lawn, came to a standstill with the bird-bath between
them. It was too small for any but the tiniest of birds to flutter
there. ‘You came here. People only come here when there’s nowhere
else to go. It’s such a long way to anywhere from here.’

‘Look, I need to find
out...’

Jem’s sighed interrupted her.
‘This is your home now. The place of all rest. You must stay, Jay.
You wouldn’t have come here if you hadn’t wanted to.’

Jay shook her head. ‘I didn’t
know what I was doing. I was lost.’ She could walk away now, step
by step to the garden gate and beyond. Jem was only a child; she
couldn’t stop a grown woman from doing what she wanted to do. The
others, in the house, seemed only part of its structure, to have no
life beyond its walls. This place could not be real, or perhaps her
senses were still playing tricks on her, making strangeness where
there was only normality.

‘It’s very simple,’ Jem said.
‘You called to the town and it pulled you to it. That’s what
happens to everyone. It’s a special place.’ She looked fearsome in
the sunset, a mad child. Jay saw then that Jem had assumed
responsibility for her, perhaps simply because she had found her,
rescued her. It was a game, and Jay must not collude in it. She
must get out of here, find a bank, find a phone. She could call
Gina, or Julie. She was afraid of discovering how long she’d been
away, but realised it was essential to snatch reality back. She
must deal with whatever happened next. With this resolve, she went
back into the house, leaving Jem on the lawn.

In the kitchen, she found Ida
carrying pans from cooker to sink and back again, seemingly without
purpose. ‘Is there a hotel in the village?’

Ida looked at her blankly, as if
she’d spoken in a foreign tongue. ‘Have some soup,’ she said,
smiling roundly.

Jay shook her head. ‘Thanks, but
I don’t want any. I need to find a hotel, a cash point…’ She heard
a sound and turned to see that Jem was slinking into the
kitchen.