The hole was enormous and there was tape and plastic fencing round the entire dale now. It had stopped looking like an exploded house and begun to look like an archaeological site, with a digger arrested in motion and three suited-up assistants sitting on a bank with a flask.
Max and I stared into the hole. ‘We decided to clear right down to the foundation level,’ said Digger One, the forensics manager. ‘More to give the guys some experience at sifting for evidence than anything. Now your misper has turned up alive and well, there was no more need, but we’d got this far, so we thought we’d keep going and once we got the basement floor up… well. This turned up.’ He pointed with the end of a trowel at a glimmer right at the bottom of the hole.
‘And it’s definitely human bones?’ Max asked. He sounded a bit queasy.
‘Oh, yes. We reckon there’s a complete skeleton in there. We’re going back in, once the lads have finished their tea. You had to be notified, as the owner of the land.’
‘But it’s under the house, right?’ I found my voice. ‘As in “older than”?’
The forensic investigator, who, to my slightly disappointed eye didn’t look anything like the characters in Silent Witness and, in fact, bore more of a resemblance to a bank manager on his day off, looked at me appraisingly. ‘We’re not certain,’ he said. ‘Could have been buried down there, or could have been there when the house was built. He’s been there a while, certainly, we’re not treating it as a crime scene.’
I felt Max relax a little. ‘But the site is sealed off again, I suppose.’
‘Until we get your lad lifted and back to the lab, I’m afraid so.’
‘Oh, bugger.’ Max put a hand on my arm. I felt every finger pressure, every degree of the heat of his skin. ‘That’s the final ghost vigil written off then. It was going to be my concluding chapter too.’
‘Can’t you do it somewhere else?’ I tried to ignore the weight of his hand.
‘But the book is about the supposed haunting of the Fortune House. It’s going to look a bit bloody daft if I finish it somewhere else.’
The policeman who’d driven us over, having had to pick us up from Hatherleigh Hall as none of us had wanted to drive in case the champagne was still in our bloodstreams, shifted his weight. He was obviously expecting us to have A Domestic, and looked fully prepared to shove the pair of us into the big hole.
‘Why not change the focus? Make it more about the whole “who sees ghosts and why” than about the place?’ I asked, channelling Oliver Sacks and the half dozen other books I’d still got piled beside my bed, accumulating a library fine. ‘Not so much haunted house, more psychology.’
Max’s head came up, he stopped staring at the partly uncovered bone in the hole and gazed out over the moorland horizon. Several disgruntled sheep stared back. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh. Now that’s an idea.’
‘Look, shall we let this poor man drive us back? He’s clearly fed up with standing here, and we may as well be sobering up somewhere useful. If we’re allowed to go, obviously.’ I glanced towards Forensic Man, who nodded.
‘We needed your permission to excavate the skeleton,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You didn’t even really need to come over.’
Our driver took his hat off and wiped his forehead. I had the feeling he was swearing inwardly.
‘I wanted to see,’ Max said. ‘And take a few pictures.’ He raised his camera. ‘For the book.’
Besides, it had got us out of the house, where Jenna had begun wedding planning with a vengeance, and neither Max nor I had been able to stand more than ten minutes of conjecture over a suitable location for the ceremony. Not while we were hung-over, anyway.
‘Can you drop us in Pickering?’ I asked the driver, when we got back into the police car.
‘I’m an on-duty officer, not a bloody taxi,’ he muttered, but did concede to drop us outside my house, where Mrs Next Door Right took great delight in noting our arrival. By the end of the day, it would probably be all over the neighbourhood that I’d been arrested for whatever crime they thought I was capable of. I had no idea who they would assume Max was, in the dramatic story they would construct. My carer, possibly.
The house smelled hot and stuffy. I suspected I did too.
‘You can come and stay at the Hall,’ Max said. ‘Just for the rest of the week,’ he added quickly. ‘While you’re sorting the papers.’
I couldn’t think of a single reason why I shouldn’t. There was nothing to stay here for, and I had to admit that the champagne party of last night had been a lot more fun than my usual evening activities of TV and magazine reading. I wanted to make a protest, something to justify my solitary existence, but Max was currently looking at the way I lived. I didn’t think he’d believe that I had to come home to attend to my million admirers. ‘I’ll pack some stuff then,’ I said.
‘I’ll get Jen to come over and pick us up in a bit.’ Max began to walk around my living room. ‘After they’ve drunk a lot more water and maybe had a bit of a nap.’
I now realised that I’d given Max carte blanche to be in my house and looking at my things. It hadn’t mattered so much on Sunday night, when we’d all been too shaken by Grant’s sudden arrival to observe the niceties of checking the skirting boards for dust or only choosing the most flattering photographs to display. But now, in the cold light of a Wednesday, I wished I hadn’t brought him back here. He was looking at my parents’ wedding photo when I went upstairs to fetch a holdall and fling a few of my clothes in, in a way that was as unlike packing for a holiday as was possible, and consisted of all my clean underwear and the jeans that someone had once complimented me on.
When I got back downstairs, Max was still looking at the photos. ‘Are these your parents? You’re very like your mother.’
Mum had been eight stone two on her wedding day. I only looked like her if you imagined Mum after a decade of really good dinners.
‘Yes, that’s Mum and Dad. That’s my brother, Stewart, and his family.’ I pointed at the group on the bookcase. ‘They live in Aberdeen.’
‘He’s a lot older than you?’
I wished Max didn’t sound so interested. It meant I was going to have to explain my family set-up, and I hadn’t really had to do that since I was at school. ‘My mum and dad met in hospital,’ I said, trying to sound factual. ‘Mum had a degenerative illness and Dad had a form of cancer from where he worked when he was young. They got married but were told there was no chance of children. Stewart was a total surprise, and ten years later, I was an even bigger one. They both got insurance payouts for…’ I stopped. Max was looking at me with an expression that I didn’t want to analyse.
‘For terminal illness,’ I said, trying to be factual. ‘Dad died first. Stewart had already moved up to Scotland with Morag then. I looked after Mum. When Grant and I got married, we all lived here together for six months, then she died. I was left the house, Stewart got the money that was left from the insurance payouts. That’s why I own this house.’
I stopped. It had been ten years ago, but my voice still caught on the memories.
‘Ghosts,’ Max said softly. ‘There are always ghosts.’
‘I’m sorry?’ I went to straighten the curtains so he couldn’t see my face. Mr Next Door Left gave me a cheery wave as he passed, just his upper half and the dog’s tail visible over the top of the small wall at the front. He was probably on his way to pick up the gossip about my arrival from Mrs Next Door Right.
‘Oh, not in the spectral figure on the stairs sense. I meant ghosts in your head.’ He looked as though he was speaking about both of us now. As though my upbringing with frail parents, constant hospital visits and doctors’ appointments and never quite knowing what I would come home to was something he understood. ‘I’m so sorry, Alice.’
‘Memories. Just memories, Max. We’ve all got them. Some are good and some are – not so good. It’s the way we react to them that gives us the ghosts, I think.’ I looked down at Mum and Dad, all flowers and contented smiles. ‘I try to choose to remember the good stuff, which doesn’t always work, but it helps.’
There was a bit of a pause. Then Max said, ‘That sounds very sensible. Are they really not ghosts somewhere in your imagination? Watching you, trying to communicate?’
‘The only thing they’d have to tell me is that I ought to dust more often. Oh, and Dad would probably have things to say about the amount of gardening I don’t do. But that’s all. No ghosts. No need for them to hang around here when they could be—’ I shook my head and took Mum and Dad’s picture from him and put it back on the shelf, where a narrow groove in the dust revealed its exact resting place.
‘Our mum died when I was eight,’ he said, unexpectedly.
I remembered the photographs, that smiling young woman who’d looked like Jenna, the much older husband with Max’s eyes. ‘That must have been hard.’
‘Hard for Dad, yes. That’s why he sent me away to school. He couldn’t manage two young children on his own.’
‘Did you not have nannies and housekeepers and, oh, I don’t know, nursery maids?’ I suddenly realised that I ought to rewatch Downton Abbey and make notes.
‘Not really, there wasn’t the money for that. She was killed. Fell off her horse.’ Max was keeping his eyes on my parents’ photo, determinedly not looking at me.
I could see the motes rotating in the air around him, where the sun shone in and the disturbed dust was still settling. It gave him a shimmery outline, as though he were a ghost himself. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I echoed his words to me. They didn’t help, I knew that, but it was better than saying nothing.
‘Jenna was only three,’ Max said, staccato. It sounded as if there were many, many more words that he wanted to say, built up around the experience in layers. I just needed to unlock them.
‘Max, sit down and talk to me.’ I touched his arm and he swung round to look me in the face.
‘I don’t know if I can.’
‘Well, if you move that magazine and those newspapers—’
‘I meant talk about it, not sit down.’ There was a tiny lift at the corner of his mouth. I only noticed it because I’d studied his face so closely. At least having a crush came in useful sometimes.
‘I know.’ I let myself smile in answer. ‘I’m trying to lighten the moment.’
Now he laughed. ‘Oh, I do like you, Alice! You really don’t let me get away with anything, do you? Including self-pity.’
‘Tell me what you need to and then I will decide whether or not a degree of self-pity is to be allowed.’ I spoke softly but tried to keep the tone of levity. Max seemed to respond better to being challenged than he did to sympathy. Maybe he’d had enough of that over the years; insincere sympathy, that artificially gentle pity that people put on to pretend that they understood, when how could they? How could they understand what it felt like to be a child who had to cook and clean for herself because her parents were too ill? Who couldn’t go out and play after school because Mum needed someone to go to the shop and pick up her prescriptions or needed help counting out her pills because her hands were bad that day, or Dad needed lifting and turning? I’d had to be sensible back then, and I’d got stuck in that persona.
It was an uncomfortable realisation.
Max sat and I perched myself next to him. ‘Jen used to see Mum, you know,’ he said. The words were casual, but the tone wasn’t. ‘She said Mum used to come into her room at night and kiss her and tell her to be a good girl. After she died, I mean. And part of me wants to believe that Jen was only three, she was at that age when dreams and reality aren’t always easy to tell apart, maybe she was dreaming of Mum? Or she was remembering and she didn’t have the language to explain that this was all memory, all things that used to happen. Of course, I only realised that later, once I was studying psychology. At the time, I was just angry.’
‘You were angry with Jen?’ I put my hand over his. His fingers were cold.
‘I thought – God, this is ridiculous, I’ve not even thought about this for years – I thought, why did Mum come to Jen and not to me? Didn’t she love me enough to come back and tell me to be a good boy?’ Max shook his head and then used his spare hand to rake his hair back. He didn’t move the one I was holding, I noticed. ‘So I took it out on Jen. I was horrible to her, Alice.’
‘She doesn’t seem to bear a grudge,’ I said.
‘I’m not sure she even remembers.’ Max looked at me directly now. His eyes were slightly red. ‘We don’t talk about it. But Dad sent me away to school. Oh, it wasn’t entirely because I was fighting with my sister, or because our mother had died, I mean, I’d just finished pre-prep school and Dad was obviously having to decide whether to keep me on there or send me on to boarding prep, but I made the decision easy for him.’
‘You’re talking posh-people talk again,’ I said, gently squeezing his fingers with a sense of amazement at how easy it felt to touch him, how comfortable to sit next to him with our shoulders brushing. He didn’t fidget further away or get up and head to the kitchen; we could actually talk, properly exchanging information in an emotional way and I realised, with a slight sense of shock, how I’d never had this with Grant. Any show of emotion to him had been met with a joke, a silly face pulled, a quick attempt to change the subject. Or even that ‘zoning out’ expression, where he’d stopped listening and started thinking about something else before I’d even got to the thing I was worried about.
Was this how it was meant to be? Was this what all those romantic books were on about? Was this what Dear Deirdre meant by ‘honest communication’? It felt – sad, yes, listening to Max talking about his mother, but also somehow as though these things had to be said. How could we have a relationship if we didn’t understand these things about one another?
Then I realised I’d thought relationship in association with Max and nearly dropped his hand. As though he’d felt me react, he curled his fingers through mine. ‘Sorry about that. But yes, Mum had just died and Jen was telling me that she’d seen her and then Dad sent me away – it all kind of curdled in my head into feelings about Mum not loving me as much as she loved Jen and her ghost not even bothering to visit me.’
‘I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.’
Max dropped his gaze away from me now and looked at our linked fingers. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. If I believe, then I have to acknowledge that Mum never came to me. If I don’t, then I can think that Jen was mistaken, that it was dreams and memory and not really understanding the situation – she was only a toddler.’ He gave our combined hands a little shake. ‘It’s more comfortable not to believe. To be able to disprove experiences; to say it’s all psychological and to do with expectation and priming and fantasy-prone mindsets.’ He gave my fingers a squeeze. ‘But do you know something? I can’t believe how good this feels. How right, somehow. To be telling all this to someone and for that someone to be you.’ His attention was back on my face now, eyes moving, scanning.
I had to look away. ‘Maybe I should make some more tea. This stuff will be cold.’
‘Alice…’
‘No.’ I stood up and gently uncurled my fingers from around his. ‘It would never work,’ I added briskly. I couldn’t even look at him, with his dark hair all tousled, the slight line of stubble on his cheeks, the curve under his lower lip – he was all my dreams rolled into one man and I couldn’t bear to be let down again.
‘Why not?’ He sounded genuinely curious.
I kept my eyes on my parents’ wedding picture. ‘Because it wouldn’t. We’re too different. I’m boring, sensible Alice of the size 16 jeans and the floaty tops that are supposed to make you look a size smaller but make me look as though I fell through the curtains. I’ve never been to boarding school – hell, I’ve never even been to France. I was born here and I’ll die here and I’m only cut out to organise window fitters and listen to Malcolm’s tales of walking holidays in Scotland. This is me, Max. And it always will be.’
There was a moment of silence. Then Max said, ‘I’m sensational in bed, you know.’
‘What?’ I couldn’t help myself, I started to laugh. It was so unexpected.
‘I am. Apparently. So I’ve been told. Just in case that influences your decision.’
When I let myself flick a glance his way, there was a deadpan expression on his face, but a tiny spark of mischief in his eyes. He was doing what I’d done, adding some humour to stop a situation from circling into doom.
‘In that case, I am sure you will have no shortage of women to relieve you of your no doubt phenomenally high sperm count.’ I tried not to grin. ‘You don’t need me.’
‘Oh, I’m sure I don’t need you.’ He picked up that wedding picture again. ‘But I want you. I want your way of looking at things, I want your intelligence and your down to earthiness and I sure as hell want your body, whatever you might think of it. It’s sex on legs from where I’m standing.’
‘But I’m…’
‘Remember the Boobie Room? All those gorgeous women? Not a thigh gap amongst them.’ Now he turned and gave me such a direct look that I felt that heat rising at the base of my throat again. ‘Maybe that influenced me at an impressionable age. But you are my idea of perfect, Alice, you’re clever and you’re kind, you have emotional intelligence and you’re funny. You’re also bloody gorgeous. If you don’t want me, that’s fine, I will live with your decision.’
I looked at the smile on my mother’s face, on her wedding day. Neither of my parents knew how long they had left, even when they’d married. I’d often wondered if it wouldn’t have been easier for them to never have met, never have had to suffer one another’s pain, never had to worry about Stewart and me being orphaned. But they had met and they’d gone for it. Marriage, and then the surprise babies, and, despite the daily treatments and the medication and the suffering, I knew they’d had a happy time together. ‘Seize the day’, wasn’t that how it went? And here was this amazing man who didn’t seem to see me as I saw myself and whose very presence made me feel as though even my more generously cut clothing was a size too small and heavily insulated.
‘I didn’t say I didn’t want you,’ I said slowly. ‘Wanting you is the least of it. It’s more that I’m… outclassed.’
‘I’m just a person, Alice. Okay, I’ve got an education and a big house. So what? I’ve also got a sister with an eating disorder, no money, a book that, despite my best efforts, isn’t writing itself, a study full of someone else’s shopping lists and your ex-husband as my incipient brother-in-law. Class has nothing to do with it.’
I looked again at Mum and Dad. Smiling at the camera, as though they had all the time in the world. ‘Well,’ I said slowly, ‘I suppose we could give it a try. But I want to take it gradually. See if it works out.’
‘As gradually as you like, Alice,’ Max said earnestly. ‘I’m good at taking things gradually. I’ve been painting that fence for three months already.’
‘Plus it might all be an illusion. You may be trying to convince yourself that you… that we could… because of this whole thing with Grant. Crisis bonding or something, I think they call it.’
He turned round and stared out of the window. A small knot of neighbours had collected at the end of the road near the paper shop, and I knew they’d be talking about me. ‘That’s actually a little insulting, Alice,’ he said to the smear on the pane. ‘You’re implying that I don’t know what I want. That I’m free-floating, looking for a woman to attach myself to and any woman who drifts into my orbit will do. I have quite high standards, in fact.’
‘I don’t mean it to be an insult,’ I said quietly. ‘It’s nearer disbelief. Nobody has ever really wanted me, not like that. There was only Grant, and he only married me because he was too lazy to do anything else. Oh, and a few teenage fumbles with the boys nobody else wanted to go out with, and I thought we were going to the cinema but it turned out that they thought “cinema” was a code word for “sex in a Vauxhall”. I’m not really the stuff dreams are made of, you see.’
Max turned round and came in close. ‘You’ve got beautiful, creamy skin. Your eyes are a kind of greenish gold and your intelligence shines out of them. Your lips are, I have to say, very inviting, you’ve got curves in all the right places. You’re not afraid to challenge me, you’re not rendered mute by looking at my house, you’ve got a down-to-earth attitude that I find most attractive and, all round, I really enjoy your company. Please don’t insult me by telling me that I’m wrong because, despite frequent indications to the contrary, I know my own mind.’
‘You’ve gone all posh again,’ I observed, trying for a neutral tone.
‘Sorry. Hugh Grant possesses my body when I’m trying to sound romantic.’
‘Well, at least you aren’t talking about mating dogs. I was a bit worried for a minute there.’ We looked at one another solemnly, then his lips twitched and I couldn’t suppress the giggles any longer. ‘Sorry, but you are posh and you have shown yourself liable to drop dog-breeding references into perfectly ordinary conversations.’
‘I can assure you that nobody has ever stood over my mating attempts with a watch and a set of kennel club forms.’ He was laughing now. Properly laughing, and it reassured me that he was honest; that this wasn’t all some huge wind-up to set me up on a date and then spend the evening telling me how I’d be prettier if I only lost a few stone, wore nicer clothes and put enough make-up on to render my actual face invisible. It had happened and had made Grant seem positively gentlemanly and an absolute catch in comparison.
‘Leaving our possible mutual attraction aside for a moment,’ I said, ‘we’ve now got the little matter of a body under the Fortune House.’
‘Mutual attraction. Yep, I’ll take that.’ Max gave me a tiny wink. ‘But you’re right. Although I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it. Even the police say it’s not considered a crime scene, which means the skeleton could be centuries old. There’s loads of Bronze Age barrows and things dotted all round the moors.’
‘That was not a Bronze Age burial,’ I said sternly. ‘But the body could account for the stories of hauntings.’
Max sat up suddenly on the sofa, which let out a small puff of dust on contact. ‘I know,’ he said, and he sounded as though last night on the champagne was catching up with him. ‘Folk memory of a death or a burial ground might make people more prone to building perfectly normal occurrences into something supernatural.’
‘And did the Fortunes know the skeleton was there when they built the house?’
He gave me a stern look. ‘Would you build a house if you knew there was a grave underneath it?’
‘Depends how old the grave is. I mean, Britain isn’t very big and it’s been occupied since the early Palaeolithic, there really can’t be very much of it that hasn’t had someone buried on it at some point.’
‘God, you’re amazing.’ There was a gleam in his eye.
‘I just have a robust approach to things. Besides, I’ve had a lot of experience with death. My dad…’ I nearly stopped, but the way Max smiled made me want to go on. ‘My dad used to say that death is the one thing we’ve all got in common and being afraid of it is like being afraid of rain. You might not like the fact that it’s going to happen, but you may as well dance in it when it comes.’
‘He sounds like a laugh a minute.’ Max was gauging my reaction, I could see. Checking to see whether I’d take the joke or be offended or upset; he was working out my attitude, my relationship with my father.
‘Dad could be a touch lugubrious, yes. But spending the greater part of your life terminally ill will do that to you, I guess.’ I kept it light. Death had been a release for Dad, welcomed like summer rain on a parched garden. He had, I liked to think, been dancing when it came.
‘And your mum?’ Max stood up and moved in closer. Away from the window, although the sun still sheeted him in gold.
‘She’d fought it and fought it all the time I was young, but once Grant and I were together, it was like she could relax. I was employed, I had the house and a husband, and it was like she – stopped trying.’
‘Alice.’ That was all he said. Just my name. And all of a sudden, all the grief and the fury and the years and years of having not much of a life hit me somewhere underneath my heart and I burst into tears that wouldn’t stop. All those years of being practical, of being sensible, they’d weighted me in a way I hadn’t realised and now all that weight was bobbing to the surface like a corpse in a lake.
Max wrapped his arms around me and pulled me against him and that reminded me of Mum too, so I sobbed harder. Nobody had held me since she’d become too frail. Grant would occasionally drape an arm around my shoulders and give what had always felt like an awkward hug, and then change the subject, try to get me laughing. Never this all-encompassing embrace, feeling as though my unhappiness was shared.
There were no words. Just the feel of Max’s shoulder under my cheek, his arms around my back and his face against the top of my head. That orangey scent, that seemed to come from his skin, and the slight movement as he breathed, that was all. I cried myself to a standstill, then sniffed heartily. I didn’t, I noted, even in my grief, move away.
‘Better?’ The word thrummed up from his chest, I felt it more than heard it.
I nodded.
His arms loosened slowly, and he took half a step back. ‘My lovely, lovely Alice,’ he said softly, which I thought was very gallant of him because I had snot streaming down my lower face and my eyes felt like golf balls.
‘Why do you smell of oranges?’ It was all I could think of to say. I wanted to distract him, to stop him thinking about loss and death and sadness, yet this feeling of actually being held and comforted was so wonderful and unusual that I wanted it to go on forever.
‘Oh. Penhaligon’s. It’s a mandarin cologne.’
‘Posh git. You could just sit and eat oranges, like us poor people.’ I sniffed again, hoping that there had been the right amount of ‘subject changing levity’ in my tone, and he wouldn’t take it the wrong way.
‘Oddly enough, I don’t really like oranges, only the smell.’ Another half step back, but a lighter note in his voice. ‘And I’m not that posh.’
I indicated my living room. ‘You’d probably stable your horses in here.’
‘No horses. Not any more. Dad got rid of them all, after Mum…’ He moved further back and I took the opportunity to scrub furtively at my face with my sleeve.
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s fine.’ It didn’t sound fine but there was more than enough emotion in here already, hanging in the air with the dust. ‘I think it’s why Jenna turned to motorbikes, she was deprived of the pony experience in her formative years.’
‘Max…’ I didn’t know what I’d been going to say. I think I wanted to divert his attention from my swollen and grot-covered appearance but there was a heaviness to his tone that stopped me in my tracks.
‘No, it’s really fine, Alice. It was twenty-five years ago, I’ve worked through most of it now. It’s just the ghost thing left, just that tiny question in the back of my mind. Did Jenna see Mum or was it a child’s interpretation of a memory? That’s all.’ He took a deep breath. ‘And talking of Jenna, it’s time I gave her a call and got us a lift back to the Hall. They should be sober enough and have had enough shagging time, surely.’
He slid his phone out of his pocket and moved away out into the passage by the front door. A politeness, a courtesy I wasn’t used to – my fitters would whip their phones out and bellow imprecations to their partners practically under my nose. It made me wonder, again, if the gulf between Max and me was really one that could be breached just because we wanted it to be. But then the tactile echo of the feel of his arms around me, the warmth of his body and the swell of his breath, came roaring back in. Any man who held me like that had to be worth a bit of pretending that our class differences didn’t matter, surely? Plus, if my piecemeal memory was anything to go by, he could cook – at least, we’d eaten the risotto; he was practical enough to paint fences and sort out the icehouse, to keep Hatherleigh Hall ticking over. If there was a downside to Max, it seemed limited to his desire to write a book outstripping his ability to organise writing a book, and that was only a downside if he was going to take up a career as a full-time author.
And there was always the compensation that he was absolutely bloody gorgeous. I’d overlook quite a lot of lack of material coordination for that dark gaze, the long legs and the smile.
‘Okay, she’s on her way. Are you packed and ready?’ Max came back through, hands in pockets and shoulders set. ‘I need to get back to the icehouse clearing and Jen says she’ll sort you a room so you can stay. Although, I warn you, she’s just given me thirty seconds of wedding plans and I only rang for a lift – there may be a degree of dashing about with magazines and I fear the words “mood board” may be uttered once or twice.’
‘I don’t mind,’ I said, zipping up my holdall. ‘If Jenna wants to distract me from the enviable task of working through several lifetimes’ worth of shopping receipts, paint swatches and grass seed sales booklets, I will bear it manfully.’
‘I thought you might.’ He swung away to watch Mr Next Door Left return, the dog setting a good pace along the far side of the pavement. ‘Jen doesn’t have all that many close friends,’ he said more quietly. ‘She may want to offload on you. Her last boyfriend did a real number on her, alienated her from a lot of her old friends, and she’s still building up a new base.’
‘It’s fine,’ I said gently. ‘I really don’t mind.’
‘Only I thought, what with her marrying your ex-husband, it might get – awkward? Helping plan a wedding that may be a bit – well, obviously, I don’t know how you… but there’s going to be bells and whistles brought out here and…’
‘Registry office and fish and chip suppers probably won’t feature,’ I finished for him. ‘No, honestly, Max. I am so over Grant that I don’t even want to kill him any more. He and Jenna really look happy together, much more made for one another than he and I ever were.’ Which made me wonder whether difference of class and upbringing really made that much of a difference. If they could do it, then why shouldn’t Max and I?
I made more tea and we waited for Jenna without feeling the need to say much of anything. Max sat and flipped through Prima whilst I made a desultory attempt at dusting and wished I could have at least invested in a pile of Cosmopolitan or some feminist tracts. The Prima subscription had been Mum’s that I’d not got around to cancelling because it felt too final, but Max knew me and wouldn’t judge. He’d have seen that I wasn’t really a casual flipper-through of magazines about sex and hair or polemics on the Male Gaze. I was ordinary. Plain, large, sensible Alice. But he genuinely seemed to like that.
There was the descending roar outside of a motorbike pulling in against the kerb. Max and I looked at one another.
‘I’m not going to have to piggyback you home, am I?’ He got up and looked out of the window. ‘No, it’s fine. Jenna’s on the bike but Grant’s driving my car.’
Grant, looking oddly manly in bike leathers, got out of the Range Rover, while Jenna took her helmet off and shook out her hair. They exchanged a few words, then Grant rapped on the front door, dropped the keys into Max’s hand, took a helmet from Jen and got on the bike behind her. They’d roared away down the street before I’d even got myself and my bag onto the pavement.
‘They’re going up to Whitby,’ Max said, slightly weakly. ‘For a run out. Apparently.’
I watched the two black-leathered figures vanishing into the distance on the shiny black bike. A run out. A motorbike. Whitby. Leathers. Grant really wasn’t the man I had known any more.
Maybe he really had been hit on the head with something.
Report via email, unnamed third party, story as told to him by experiencer.
It was 1986 and a bunch of us from college had heard there was a rave up in an old barn on the moors. We got lost on the way and Martin, who’d been on the vodka, got thrown out of the car for being a prick. We were going to let him walk.
We couldn’t find the rave and we were all arguing cos some of us wanted to park and have our own party, cos we’d got the booze and the Es and it would be a waste otherwise, and some wanted to head down into town and pick up some girls. And while we were parked at the side of the road, bickering, Martin comes running up.
And, man, he was white! Looked like he’d pissed himself too, and he just ran straight into the car, like, jumped from the road right onto the back seat, where there was about six of us already sitting, and he was ranting. We calmed him down, figured he’d taken some bad stuff and was tripping, but when he could talk, he said that he’d sat down on some rocks out on the moor and, while he was sitting, this hand had come up from between these two boulders. Just the hand, he said, kind of pale and smooth, sticking up and kind of ‘patting around’ like it was looking for something.
And Mart, he’d taken off running and he hadn’t stopped until he saw the car. He said he didn’t care who it was, police, gamekeeper, he’d have jumped in with a serial killer if it would get him off that moor.
We’re all a lot older and wiser now, but, to my knowledge, Martin has not, and will not go back up onto the moors.