It all comes down to pissing and shitting in the end. That’s what Dad used to tell us about getting old and ill, or looking after those who were injured. He wasn’t wrong.
Now that things had taken a turn for the worse, I began getting more and more worried that Brand would arrive at his home and then leave before I got there. I resented the time I was losing by nursing John Dark. And I could have left her and gone after him at any time I suppose, but she wasn’t able to move off her bedding to take care of herself, so I would have been condemning her to dying in her own mess. I couldn’t do that.
Days passed in a blur of sameness. Feeding, helping her do what she had to do, cleaning her up when she did it while she was unconscious, again and again, day after day. It was harder because she either couldn’t or wouldn’t talk, and I began to worry she couldn’t see either because sometimes she squinted and sometimes she stared with wide-open eyes that didn’t seem to react to what was happening in front of her.
She wasn’t dead, but maybe she was just dying slowly. She certainly didn’t seem to be getting any better. I filled my days when she slept by reading books from the library, but the pleasure I normally took from it was damped, because I knew I should really be on my way to Brand and Jess. Too much time to think made me second-—and third- and fourth-—guess my belief that he would be there. I went back and forth over my reasoning as to why I had been so sure the marks on the map meant that Norfolk was his base, and every time I did I came up with more reasons that I had been a fool to set out on such a crazy quest on such thin evidence. I punished myself for chasing an illusion just because I had wanted to take action rather than accept the impossibility of my loss. I told myself I should have stayed home and looked after my family and been satisfied I still had Jip.
But I kept coming back to the same thing.
Brand had stolen my dog. I didn’t actually have a choice. He had to expect me to come after him. It was a matter of loyalty. Even if I never found her, I had to try. I had to give it my best shot. I knew in my better moments that I was doing this because I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself—or Jip—if I didn’t.
And so, on the principle of planning for a better future, even if it seemed unlikely, I kept my mind calm by keeping my hands busy. That worked better than just sitting and reading and living in my head with all the echoing doubts bouncing around inside it. I made John Dark a pair of crutches. Then I dug a hole just outside the door to the garden, as a toilet, and I knocked the bottom out of a sturdy wooden chair that had armrests and planted it over the hole. I filled a bucket with wood ash from the fire and left it by the chair.
I wondered about making her a chair with wheels, but none of the wheels I could find turned any more: they were corroded in their axles or the rubber tyres had perished to nothing. I started getting jealous of the attention Jip paid to her. That was stupid and mean-spirited, but I felt it. I began smoking meat in the large fireplace and when done I hung a good cache of it from the walls. I found as many pots and pans and bottles as I could and filled them with water, leaving them round the edge of the room.
I don’t know if she knew what I was doing. She watched me and her face gave nothing away. The bruising was fading to all the colours of a pale rainbow, and as it disappeared her skin was now always as grey and washed out as her hair.
I lived those days like I was slowly drowning in despair and a large part of that was because I didn’t know how to do two things I knew were the right thing to do, two things which cancelled each other out.
In the end, she showed me.
I woke to find her gone. The dawn light was watery and the fire was cold and long gone to ash. I sat up and looked around. The crutches were gone too. So was Jip.
She was on the seat over the hole in the garden and she was crying. I think it was partly from the effort to get there, and partly out of frustration, because one of the crutches had toppled away into the grass and she couldn’t quite drag it back into her reach with the other one. She looked away as I came out onto the dew-soaked grass, and I picked up the crutch and gave it to her without speaking. After a bit, I realised she was sitting motionless because she didn’t want me to see the effort it was going to take to get back on her feet. I went back into the room, but watched her from behind, through the window. She got shakily upright, and then swung herself precariously to the door, where she leant and panted for breath. The effort of keeping her splinted leg off the ground was exhausting. She was trying to use muscles she hadn’t used for many days, maybe even weeks. I had stopped counting because the mounting tally of wasted days felt like it was pressing down and slowly suffocating me.
She looked at me and nodded. I helped her get from the door to the sofa and she lay down and went straight to sleep.
She didn’t exactly get better then, but she got more mobile. I think she knew something was wrong with her head and something else was wrong with her body inside. I would see her wince in pain and hold her hands to her temples until whatever was hurting her went away. It made me think of Dad wanting to drill the hole in Mum’s head when she’d cracked her skull. I couldn’t see any fluid coming from John Dark’s nose though. And I certainly didn’t go looking for a hand drill.
She asked for things by pointing. I brought her the dictionary and I brought her a pencil. She pointed at the record player and I put music on. Then she waved me away, wanting to be alone.
I went hunting with Jip. He caught a rabbit and I shot two, though I missed another and spent an irritable half-hour searching for my arrow in the middle of a tangle of brambles.
When I came back, she was sleeping. She woke and ate and then went back to sleep. I read until it was dark and then went to bed myself.
Dawn came with a poke in the ribs.
She stood over me, jabbing with her crutch. I sat up and she handed me a note. She must have spent all the time I was out hunting stitching the words together from the dictionary. She didn’t know how verbs work in English, but it was painfully clear what she meant. As I unfolded it, she swung herself out into the garden and made noisy use of the hole in the ground.
I know this is exactly what she wrote because I have the note still, folded into the book I am writing in.
YOU TO GO TO FIND YOUR DOG NOW.
I HURT ME NOT TO BE BETTER.
I NOT TO WANT TO BE SEEN LIKE THIS.
I TO BE HAPPY TO LEAVE ALONE WITH MY MEMORIES.
WATER. MUSIC. FOOD. HOLE IN GROUND. THANK YOU, GRIZ.
TO GO QUICK. NOW. IMMEDIATE.
BEST WAY TO SAY GOODBYE.
TAKE HORSES.
If she believed she was going to get better, she would have said take one horse. It was telling me to take both that made me wipe my eyes.
But she was right about a fast goodbye. There was no point lingering or arguing. She had given me permission. She had solved my problem for me.
She came back and stood leaning in the doorway.
Bon? she said.
I nodded.
Veet, she said. Allay veet.
I left her the saddlebags full of stuff from the packhorse. I dragged them inside and put them close to the sofa. She nodded. It wasn’t just useful things she had collected, there were memories in there she had brought through the tunnel from France. Then I picked her a basket of pesh and took a bag for myself and saddled the horses.
I gave her the basket when I went back in to say goodbye. I caught her scratching Jip behind the ears, which he was enjoying, though she pretended she hadn’t been as soon as I entered the room. I found I didn’t know how to say goodbye properly. She beckoned me closer and suddenly hugged me so tight I think she wasn’t just hugging me but all the ones she had lost.
Or maybe she was making the most of her last moment of human contact.
Then she spoke English. She must have learned it from the dictionary. Her voice was ragged and raw, and the words sort of twisted in her mouth and came out with a French flavour, but it wasn’t hard to understand.
Griz, she said. Griz. Thank you, friend.
I squeezed her back and said “friend” too, then the rest of the words I wanted to say got choked up and stuck and we both stayed like that until we had composed ourselves. Then she let go and pushed me back firmly. She held out another folded piece of paper.
Not to read now, she said carefully.
And then she kissed me on both cheeks and sat back down on the sofa, avoiding my eyes and waving me away with a hand gesture as imperious as a queen.
I rode away with that familiar unswallowable lump of loss stuck behind my breastbone. As I did so, I heard the record player start to play the fast and happy tune we had laughed and danced to, and I knew she wasn’t dancing but putting a brave face on what was to come and trying to cheer me up. I heard it three times and then either she got too tired to wind the player again or we had got too far away to hear it any more.
Jip kept looking up at me and then stopping and looking back at the house, and then running to catch up and look at me again, as if asking me a question I had no good answer for. Once the sound was gone, I picked up the pace, moving faster than we had before. Now the decision was made, there was no good to be had from taking any longer than necessary.
We got many klicks beyond the hogweed field before night fell, and found ourselves on the edge of a more varied terrain that stretched away flat and featureless ahead of us.
I watered the horses in a pond and hobbled them for the night.
Only when I had eaten and laid out my bedroll did I take out the note. It was too dark to read by then, but I poked the fire back into a blaze and turned myself so that I could read it. It didn’t say much, but in a way it broke my heart and made me feel terrible about leaving her all over again. I still have it here in my other hand as I write this.
YOU TO LIE TO ME, GRIZ.
IT OK. I TO UNDERSTAND.
BUT I TO KNOW WHY YOU ARE SO STRONG.
YOU TO REMIND ME OF MY DAUGHTERS.
And yes, my eyes were stinging as I closed them to start chasing sleep that came in unsatisfactory fits throughout a long cold night. And no, it wasn’t because of the woodsmoke.