It’s not possible to judge distance travelled on a forested and erratic dirt road, so our girl has no sense of how far she is from the main highway. The truck bounces across a low, rickety bridge over a noisy river and, not long after that, swerves into a driveway concealed behind a curve in the road.
Our girl has a plan. As soon as the truck stops, she’s going to jump and run.
She feels a little bit foolish, but more afraid of where this stranger is taking her than foolish, so…She’s secured both of her backpack straps over her shoulders, and has even clicked together and tightened the chest strap that runs between the two. She’s braided her hair. Tied it into a thick bolt at the base of her neck.
The driveway falls into shadow under shaggy, closed-in hemlocks, and at the end of it sits a tidy white house. Unexpectedly perfect as a toy. A stalk of sun shines down on the house and on the lupins and hydrangea that grow in abundance in well-kept beds.
Some kind of leggy, wire-haired dog comes cantering out of the open front door, barking hoarsely. The truck pulls up in front of the house and before its wheels stop turning, our girl is hurdling her body over the tailgate. Right leg over first, and then left. But what she doesn’t know is that, as she raises her left foot, it hooks into a loop of yellow nylon rope. When she throws her weight over the back of the truck, the loop tightens on her foot and instead of a clean catapult to freedom, her body seizes like an emergency brake has been pulled. Then she is dropped, hard, to the ground. First, her right palm and then her forearm skid across the packed dirt, leaving behind a microscopic trace of skin and blood; then her chin pangs into the ground and her teeth clack percussively. As she pushes herself up, dazed and tasting blood, her left knee collapses because of the awkward twist enforced on it. She limp-runs down the driveway, shaking the fall out of her head, pushing the back of her hand against the raw welt rising on her chin. Her braid uncoils and flumps against her shoulders, a dead weight.
Two wet paws land on her shoulder blades and scrabble down her backpack. Humid, meaty breath on her neck.
‘Dog! Get the hell off her!’ Our girl turns around and sees a woman about her mother’s age coming across the lawn, clapping her hands at the dog, which is now running in slanted circles and yapping its tiny head at nothing.
This woman, of clementine-orange hair with silver roots, wears a housecoat over thin pyjama bottoms. Her feet are bare. She is apologizing for the dog, saying he’s just a big old love-bear, as our girl continues to back down the driveway, now unsure as to whether this is comedy or horror.
The driver, the man with the soft face who could be twenty or could be forty, is unloading the electrical equipment out of the back of his truck.
He calls over his shoulder. ‘Figured I’d offload some of this stuff,’ he says. ‘So you can sit up with me. Thought you might be getting cold.’
‘I don’t need the ride any more,’ our girl calls to him, almost tripping on her own feet as she walks backwards.
He stands there with his arms cradling an indeterminate black box, which has wires noodling from its exposed back to the ground. His bready face has collapsed a little. ‘Course you need the ride,’ he says. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you. I just wanted to…’ He lifts the black box to illustrate what he just wanted to do.
‘You didn’t scare me. I just don’t need the ride any more.’
‘Well, that’s no good,’ he says. ‘I’ve left you worse off than I found you.’
‘You want some breakfast?’ asks the woman, coming towards her, her hand proffered for a shake. She introduces herself, gives a name that our girl doesn’t bother to register. Says something about nettle tea, kippers and homemade cheese scones. Her eyes are very blue—sun-on-the-water glinty blue.
‘I don’t eat breakfast,’ she says. At this point, the only move seems to be to turn and keep walking. She can’t run: all she can do is create distance between herself and this house. The dog accompanies her down the darkened, hemlock-lined driveway back to the road, ignoring completely the calls of his mistress. He stops at the spot where the driveway meets road, and gallops back.
Ears cocked for the rumble of the truck coming from behind (which doesn’t happen, and won’t, because the driver is now ensconced in his mother’s sunny kitchen with a plate of cheese scones lathered in butter, having refused the kippers and the nettle tea), she continues down the road, now patched with more sun. As she walks, the screw of pain in her knee tightens. At the bridge, she crabs down the bank to the noisy river and washes the blood and dirt off the palms of her hands, finger-tweezes the few minuscule stones embedded in the skin. She can’t be seen from the road here, and feels safe.
She cups cool water into her hands and splashes her face generously, and leans back against the bank, resting her head on the ground. Scratches the mosquito bite behind her ear. Up through the thickly coated coniferous boughs (some branches as stiff and orderly as soldiers, others like the soft, drooping arms of her father’s old parka) there are geometric fragments of blue sky. The water caresses her face on its journey down her cheeks and over the border of her jawline to her neck, and continues to soothe her in this way until it warms and runs out of itself.