In the far distance, a growl sounded in the sky and almost simultaneously, the hay stalks became agitated; their hissing rose to a rattle as the wind started up.
I can’t stay here. I’m being moved on.
She clambered to hands and knees, reached through the gap in the hedge with blind fingers, her eyes closed. It was as if a hole opened up and sucked her through, scoring her body with thorns.
The field beyond was cut roughly, like an over-sized lawn. Its prickly length led to the half fallen wall of a graveyard, which encompassed the old grey church. It was a plain building, devoid of gargoyles, yet ivy had been allowed to swarm over its walls. The graveyard was full of high ancient trees in full leaf. The green of the foliage was so intense, it burned her eyes. The barks of the trees were soft with moss and a mass of flowers sequinned the lawn between them. Behind the church, a careful gout of lightning scribbled across the sky. The air was full of the smell of ozone and the echo of long dead choristers. All was the present moment. No past. Nothing moved at all. It was like a gold-tinted photograph.
She staggered towards the church like a drowned thing cast up by a storm. Religion had never interested her, yet she had once been afraid of the idea of God. Now, the walls of the church seemed comfortingly solid. She craved permanence.
Inside, the church was dark, yet some freak break in the storm clouds outside allowed a few diminished beams of light to filter through the high stained glass. She felt she must be like a stooped revenant at the doorway, gazing into the house of God. It was a bare, functional place, smugly pious in its simplicity. She saw a figure by the altar; a young girl, arranging white flowers in a tall brass vase. The girl’s legs were bare; her dusty fair hair hung lankly over narrow shoulders. As Jay watched, the girl became aware of her presence, her scrutiny. The girl’s thin body stiffened; gradually, she straightened up. When she turned her head, it was sudden; a flickering movement. Lightning lit up the nave, rendering her child’s face horrible. It was like a scene from a film; a director could not have composed it more concisely. Jay staggered down the aisle, leaning on polished pew backs for support, expelling belches of perhaps blasphemous laughter. The girl watched her warily, flowers in her hands. Her skin looked green, lightning washed. Jay knew the girl was afraid, but felt too weak to reassure her. She must only see a cackling form lumbering towards her, like something from a bad movie. Inside, Jay wanted to stop herself, but her limbs worked independently, their strength draining, even as they propelled her forwards.
Before she reached the altar, she fell to her knees, unable to feel her legs, never mind move them. Laughter turned to sobs. A cool inner self observed these excesses of behaviour with disdain. The girl took a step away fastidiously. One of her flowers dropped onto the cold flagstones between them, bleached of colour like a funeral bloom. She appeared to be one of those intense, humourless children; her face pinched into a maturity beyond her years. She would bolt away now, Jay was sure of it.
But no. The girl seemed to summon her courage and approached. She held out one paw-like hand over Jay’s head, her face solemn. Then she nodded and hunkered down, peering intently into Jay’s face. Jay could not speak, although clichés fought in her throat to express themselves. ‘Help me.’ ‘Where am I?’
The girl reached out and touched Jay’s tears lightly, then grabbed one of her arms with both her hands. ‘Come on. Get up.’
Jay scrabbled around like a crippled dog in the girl’s hold, as if her spine was broken.
‘Get up!’ the girl repeated. ‘You must come home with me.’
Somehow Jay found the strength, but maybe it had been there all along.
Outside, it had begun to rain, hard, the water coming down in rods; it seemed to bruise her skin. The earth had released an ecstasy of smells; damp soil, hay, animal musk, ripped petals. A horse galloped across the field beside the church, its rider erect upon its back.
The girl came up beside her after carefully closing the church door. She wiped her hands on the front of her thin, cotton dress, then eased her fingers through Jay’s right elbow. ‘Not far,’ she said. ‘One step after another. Not far.’
Chapter Two
Jay woke up to a sound like whale-song that ebbed from her conscious mind even before she opened her eyes. A white flare of light bleached the world, just for a second. It cleared and she found herself lying in bed in a strange room. The next thing she noticed was the ticking of a clock. Everything resolved itself as ordinary. The furniture looked old, and reminded her of childhood weekends spent at her grandmother’s while her parents had lived their social lives of minimal debauchery. There was a smell associated with old women; lavender powder, a kind of damp, soapy undertone. She did not like the room. It was cramped and dark, and when she moved, the bed creaked beneath her. She was lying under a wad of blankets, her arms lying by her sides outside the covers, resting on a cold eiderdown. She had had sunstroke once, while staying at her grandmother’s. She had been confined, like this, to bed in the afternoon, feeling light-headed and unreal. From the quality of the light, she could tell that outside it was still raining. The summer trees would be vibrant and refreshed by the water; a chaotic palette of greens. The leaves would be precise against the bruised sky, fluttering. Somewhere, a rainbow arced. But where had the rest of winter gone, the spring that followed? When she’d left her car behind, the world had been cold and bare. What had she been doing?
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 w
oman’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.