Gone out.
Liss put a foot on the chair, and rested her elbows on her knee and her chin in her hand, as she laid the slip of paper back on the kitchen table. It was the first time the girl had left her a note. Previously she’d been there or not, or gone up in the barn, without saying anything.
Liss tried to think, but thinking about feelings didn’t work; you had feelings. Sometimes more than one at the same time. Like now. The note was saying: I want you to know something about me. I’m not indifferent to what you think.
Liss didn’t know whether she wanted that. The torn-off corner of the newspaper, the pencil scribble in the thoroughly ungirly handwriting were also saying: I’m a thread that the girl has spun between the two of you, without asking. As fine as a cobweb, yet you feel a tug on it. One thread becomes threads and threads become cords and cords are woven into a net.
Liss straightened up, took the note and threw it into the cold kitchen stove.
Almost three weeks she’s been here now, she thought, and again she had two contradictory emotions that were hard to pigeonhole because she didn’t have the right words and things had probably always been that way.
A January morning, of blue cold. The grapevines numbed with black frost. The stream in the valley steaming with mist. A barge heaped with coal trekked silently upstream, the water parting lethargically, as if it were thick with the cold. On the other side of the valley, the sun stood red over the hills.
She waited, the heavy rucksack in grey-green canvas on her shoulders. She didn’t need to take it off. She was strong. She could hike all day with it on her back, if necessary. She’d taken it from the storeroom where he kept his army stuff. Years ago, when she’d been fourteen, she’d had the locksmith make a duplicate key. He didn’t know that she knew all his keys, all his hiding places in the kitchen drawer among the sealing rings and in the beams above the little window in the pigsty, and on a string in the cistern in the upstairs loo. She smiled bitterly. If you’re often locked in, you start to think in keys.
The rucksack felt good and heavy on her shoulders. No more, she thought. Nobody’s locking me in anymore. She hadn’t run away. She’d told him. She had walked into the kitchen where they were sitting, drinking the thin coffee with the milk skin that she hated so much. He smells like an old man, she’d thought, as she stepped into the kitchen, not even sixty, and he already smells like an old man.
I’m leaving.
Nobody leaves, he’d said. Then he was standing up, then the cup was in pieces and the coffee was dripping down the wall over the stove, and he was shouting. Nobody leaves. Nobody leaves.
And she’d picked up his rucksack, so he could see it. Had picked up the rucksack and said: That’s true. You two don’t.
Then she’d gone, and he’d followed her, and in the hallway he’d tried to pull her by the arm. She’d turned around and noticed for the first time that she was taller than him. Only a little, but taller, and she’d felt as though she’d leant down to him as she said quietly, very close to his face: I’m leaving, old man. You’re not locking me in any longer.
Up the hill.
She hadn’t needed to tell Sonny anything else. He always picked her up there. Up in the vineyard, where she’d taken his hand the first time, and he’d been so surprised that she’d almost let go again. But today wasn’t always. Today was for always.
She could already hear the unmistakable soft rattle of the VW engine, even though Sonny’s camper must still be way down in the valley, out of sight. A warmth spread through her stomach, dissolving the slight nausea that was there every morning she woke up in the house. Sonny.
She watched the camper as it crawled up the track between the vineyards. Good job there was no snow on the ground. Sonny didn’t have winter tyres on. But there’d be no snow on the ground in Italy, or in the south of France, or in Spain. They’d get over the Alps somehow or other. She’d never been in the Alps, but they’d manage it. Sonny and her.
The sound of the engine grew louder, the camper climbed up to her, came purring to a stop. She opened the side door and threw her rucksack in. Sonny turned to her.
Eight o’clock. You said eight o’clock.
She was a little surprised.
Nice to see you, too. I couldn’t bear it at home any longer. And I didn’t mind waiting.
I’d have come sooner, but you said eight.
She threw the sliding door shut and climbed forward into the passenger seat.
Italy, she said. Are you pleased?
Sonny turned. He laid his arm on the passenger seat as he twisted round to do so.
Yes. He pulled away. I really could’ve been here sooner, but you said eight.
She wound down the window. A touch of the nausea from earlier was back again. She breathed in deeply. The air was cold but fresh.
In Spain, she called out to Sonny through the wind rushing past the open window, they’re harvesting the oranges now.
Sonny smiled slightly.
Then open the window again in Spain, he shouted back, it’s cold here.
Finally, they turned off onto the motorway.
She looked out. It was pouring with rain, and she’d been able to see her breath when she’d walked across the yard earlier. A day that was pre-empting November. The girl would get wet. As far as she knew, she didn’t have a raincoat.
She shook her head and reached for the tobacco pouch on the shelf over the stove. It was at least two weeks since she’d smoked, but she felt like it today. She rolled the cigarette standing up, put the pouch back and lit a match. Then she opened the glass door onto the yard, looked into the rain, smoked and tried not to think at all. On the road, old Anni was riding up to the church on her bike, head bent; she didn’t see her because she was wearing a plastic cape made from an old fertiliser sack. A sudden sense of affection for that robust old woman washed through her like a warm little wave.
Rain. Smoke. Rain. She’d always liked watching the rain, listening to the rain and smoking; in the old days, sitting in the window at night once everyone else was finally asleep.
It had been a hundred years ago.
She threw the cigarette into the rain and went down into the cellar to check on the mash.
Even from the stone steps down into the cellar, she was hit by the overwhelming smell of fermenting pears. For two days, they’d harvested pears, passed hundreds of kilos through the fruit mill and then pureed them. Liss had to smile as she remembered Sally’s face the first time she’d seen the stick blender: Huh? That’s not a blender, that’s a power drill. Sally had enjoyed heaving the blender into the barrels, holding it with both hands and fighting the heavy mass of pears, weighing out the yeast and the sugar, and stirring them in. Liss had watched her tipping the barrels with her slender arms to twist them out of the way. It hadn’t looked as though she’d never done anything like that before. She’d generally had to show harvest hands how to do such things. The girl often knew where to take hold of a thing before you told her.
Liss inspected the barrels, checking whether the airlocks were seated correctly and were properly filled. She added dilute sulphuric acid to two of them. The whisper of the fermentation gases in the glass tubes mingled with the equally quiet rushing of the rain that she could hear through the half-open cellar windows. Liss stopped still. It was often surprisingly bright down here because the windows were well positioned, but the light that day was dull, and the long passageway that ran under the yard to the barn looked dark and unfriendly. She shrugged. It was a day when you couldn’t do much. The fields were sodden. The forest was wet. On days like this, she had been known to read from morning till night.
She took the wooden staircase at the other end of the cellar and lingered a while in the barn. She saw that her bike was still there. Sally had taken the other one. She stood in the door and looked into the rain. Maybe she should imitate the girl. Maybe you could spend half a day acting like your own life had nothing to do with you.
Determinedly, she strode across the yard to fetch a jacket, not avoiding a single puddle. It was good to feel the water splash up.
Sally was dripping. She’d wrapped her jumper in a plastic bag and jammed it onto the pannier rack, but everything else was soaked. She stood up on the pedals and kept a slow, steady pace. Her calves were burning, but they had been for quarter of an hour, and it was good not to give in. You could always do more than you thought, always. The hill dragged on, but there was no wind and the rain cooled her off. It was good to be alone outside. The bicycle was good. She’d got used to it by now, and it rode really well. She’d taken the narrow track that ascended between the vineyards. It was steeper than the lane. It took her a while to realise that it was the track where she’d first met Liss.
Ride out of the saddle. Don’t give in.
Still keeping an even pace, but breathing ever harder, she threw the handlebars from side to side, pulling up on the bars with every stroke, with all her strength, trying to get all her weight and more through the pedals. She found herself thinking about the potatoes that she hadn’t kept picking that first time. When she’d just jacked it all in. The memory burnt hot through her belly. Don’t give in. Change gears. Ride out of the saddle.
The dripping vines moved past her very slowly. She could see them out of the corners of her eyes. The track below her. Four turns of the crank for every concrete slab. Eight strokes. You could feel each gap between them in the wheels. Clack, clack. Eight strokes. Clack, clack.
‘Fuck!’ she screamed breathlessly. ‘Fuck.’ But it wasn’t a furious curse, it was simply a shout of exertion, assertive, driving herself on; or maybe it was furious, but laden with positive fury, the kind that makes you strong.
She gasped, riding in the smallest gear now, but she didn’t give up. Eleven strokes for every concrete slab now. Clack. Clack. It wasn’t far now, the ridge was ahead of her. Clack, clack.
When she reached the top, she rode on another three, four metres, before stopping, right out of breath; laid her head on her arms for a moment, exhausted; and felt the blood flow back into her calves as they relaxed. Then she straightened up, stretched her back and looked down. The river lay grey and heavy in the valley. Above it, despite the rain, hung a fine mist. She licked the rain off her upper lip. Her breathing calmed. The wind turbines stood motionless. Was today the first day of autumn? It was strange that, after the last hour, which had been solely movement, exertion to the edge of exhaustion, after that breathless morning she suddenly wanted to stand so still.
No movement.
But yes.
It was as if she could feel the Earth carrying her off. She and the vineyard and the river and the turbines and the entire greyish-bright, rain-soaked landscape. She spread her arms out a little, the bike still between her legs, let the rain fall on her and the drips run down her face. Why didn’t they do this stuff in the clinics? In the clinics, they had pouring rain on CDs and you sat around in circles of chairs and were meant to shut your eyes and imagine being out in the rain. They were sick. Not her.
Gradually, she started to cool off. The rain was still pleasant, but she needed to move again.
Another minute or two. It was so rare for things to be in balance. Without either happiness or sorrow. Or, to put it another way: happiness and sorrowfulness in one, in such a state of limbo, in such a perfect balance that you didn’t want to move. Maybe that was how tightrope dancers felt when they were that high up, in the one moment when a straight line ran through the very centre of their body and through the very soul of the rope and down to the ground and then into the Earth’s innermost core; in that one motionless moment of centredness.
I’m not going into another clinic. I’m not anorexic. I’m not sick!
Sally was yelling. She didn’t actually want to yell because she knew that it only made everything worse, but she was still yelling. As if she’d be understood better if she raised her voice.
They were in the living room. Since they’d moved into the new house – another new place – the living room had been the room that made it clearest to her that she and her mother lived in two worlds that just happened to touch at the edges. Tasteful. That word was everywhere, an invisible label hanging from vases and stuck to the bottom of the carpet, on the back of the leather sofa that her mother was currently sitting on, next to the modern paintings on the wall and the waist-height wooden sculptures. It was etched invisibly into the oversized windowpanes, which looked out onto the useless garden with the Japanese ornamental cherry and the blood-red acer. A perfect combination, intended to add a dash of colour to the pocket handkerchief lawn in spring and autumn alike. It wasn’t there on her mother’s brow. It wouldn’t have been necessary. The worst thing was, she didn’t do it on purpose. Perhaps it was in her nature to be tasteful and elegant and sophisticated. Sally didn’t know. She only knew that she wasn’t like that. When she stood in this living room, like now, she felt a stranger to herself.
Her father was sitting on the windowsill. It was as though they were both being very careful not to stand, so as not to give her any feeling of inferiority, of helplessness. Even though she already knew perfectly well that something wasn’t right, seeing that her father had come to the house, and it wasn’t Christmas or her birthday. He had turned towards her, his hands folded between his knees, almost humble.
We think you are, Sarah.
She just couldn’t believe the way they could still run her life, send her away, have her looked for and fetched back. It wasn’t even that they hated her or anything. But they just couldn’t put up with her any longer. How was it possible to be the child of parents who were just wrong for you, right from the start?
She grimaced with a sudden, malicious thought. Of course. They’d mistaken her for somebody else on the maternity ward. And then when they’d found out a year or two later and told her parents, Papa would definitely have sued them. Because that kind of thing didn’t happen to him. Not to him. She could have been clearly not his – black, or Chinese maybe – she grinned to herself, and he’d still have kept her.
Her father was speaking quickly, understandingly, lovingly. It was difficult to resist that voice and, when she’d been little, she’d loved it when he talked like that to her. She’d felt bigger, taken seriously. Today she knew that he always used that voice when he wanted to get something done. She’d bet her mother had fallen for that voice, once upon a time, and for all her rage, she’d almost laughed. She guessed that made two of them, Mama and her.
You’re self-harming. You aren’t eating. You go running till you almost keel over. That might seem normal to you, but it isn’t. It really isn’t.
Who says I’m not eating?
Her mother looked up at her. Sad eyes. Now that was something she was pretty good at. Papa’s soft voice. Mama’s sad eyes. Her parents were a dream team. But sadly, only for a dream daughter. Not for her.
I’m just thin. Maybe you can’t get this into your heads, but some people are fat and some people are thin. I’m thin. I’m not sick.
You self-harm, her father reminded her. Soft voice. A touch of sorrow. Sometimes Sally thought the two of them were learning from each other when it came to her.
Why are you self-harming? Why aren’t you eating. You don’t know.
It’s part of the illness.
Her mother did stand up now.
It’s part of the illness that you can’t see that you need help.
Sally couldn’t help it. She shouted. The living room needed you to shout in it.
I’m not self-harming. I cut myself. There’s a difference. And I do it because it feels right. I’ll stop when it stops feeling right, OK? It won’t kill me. Other people get tattoos. Or smoke. Or drink. I don’t do drugs, I don’t smoke, I don’t drink. I exercise. I’m not going to mess myself up and mainly: I’m not going into another clinic.
We don’t want you to collapse. You’re chasing an ideal that—
Sally interrupted him incredulously. She was so surprised that she spoke in an almost normal voice.
Do you guys think I’m thin because I want to be beautiful? Do you really think that? Don’t you understand … that it’s… She was searching for words. Then she stretched out an arm and turned slowly in a circle, to take in everything that there was. The living room and her parents and the whole house, the city and her whole life.
She whispered.
The only reason I don’t eat is that nothing can taste good here.
Sally grinned, and before she could fall off balance, she raised herself up on the pedals and rode.
She paused briefly where the track came out onto the country road. In the distance, she could make out the contours of the village church through the rain, blurry and grey. She didn’t actually want to go back yet, but she was gradually getting cold and she’d already done over thirty kilometres.
It was no fun riding on the lane in this weather. The water pooled in the ruts and made her wheels sluggish, but if she rode further into the middle of the road, the cars passed her so close that she could feel the slipstream, on top of which she was soaked every time by a dirty cloud of spray, thrown up by the wheels. It shouldn’t bother her, seeing as she was wet anyway, but the inconsiderate way they all overtook was just so annoying.
‘Arsehole!’ she screamed after a black Mercedes that passed so near her she swayed in the turbulence and had to grip the handlebars. She stuck her middle finger up, even though there was no way the driver would be able to see her through the spray. On the opposite side of the road, a VW camper braked.
‘What?’ Sally yelled furiously at the driver, giving him the finger too. The window was wound down and there was a second’s delay before Sally recognised Liss. She smiled slightly.
‘Want a lift?’
‘Is this yours?’ asked Sally once they’d stowed the bike inside it. The middle row of seats had been taken out so there was loads of room. Sally had taken her T-shirt off and swapped it for the dry jumper from her plastic bag. She’d kept her wet trousers on. They’d dry by themselves anyway.
‘The camper belongs to Gerhard. The man with the big house with the slate roof behind the church. He sometimes needs a tractor, so I let him use mine. And in return, I get to take this. He’s got another car anyway.’
Somehow, Sally had always thought Liss had no friends at all. She hadn’t seen any visitors since she’d been staying with her.
‘Uh-huh,’ she said.
Liss gave her a brief glance that she couldn’t interpret.
‘What?’ Sally asked loudly. ‘What?’
‘You think I don’t like people much.’
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. Sally felt seen through. She didn’t like the feeling, especially because other people always went and thought they knew everything about her just because they’d got something right for once.
‘It’s not so hard to guess, is it?’ she retorted. ‘Where are you going anyway?’
Liss didn’t answer right away. Despite the rain, she was driving fast and not at all like someone who only borrowed a car occasionally. Eventually they turned onto a road that led down to the river. Sally could see a solitary barge, chugging through the grey. It was an image that spoke to her somehow. She didn’t know exactly what it was saying, but it spoke to her. In the city where she lived, there was no particularly big river. In the city where she lived, nothing large could move.
As they arrived in the valley, Liss turned off again, and now they were following the river upstream, parallel to the water. To their right, the vineyards climbed, sometimes steeply, sometimes more gently. Sally opened the window on her side. The wind spat the smell of rain and greenery into her face.
‘To an ossuary,’ Liss said loudly. Sally didn’t understand.
‘What?’
‘We’re driving to an ossuary.’
Sally shut the window.
‘Oh, thanks. That’s helpful,’ she snarked back. ‘I have no idea what an ossuary is.’
Liss twisted her lips into a thin smile.
‘I think you might like it. We’re nearly there.’
Sally didn’t answer, but wound the window down again, leant out and held her face to the headwind. She’d always liked doing that. Liked how it made it hard to breathe. Liked the way air suddenly had weight: if you didn’t turn away, it became an invisible fist, soft yet firm, that punched you in the mouth and lungs.
They reached the pukeworthy outskirts of a small town: ugly petrol stations, ugly DIY store, ugly supermarket. But Liss turned off again and they drove up a steep hill, and then suddenly through a gate and over cobblestones, up and up on ever narrower lanes. They stopped on a small square. Liss got out without waiting for Sally. She didn’t turn around and left the camper unlocked. It was almost as though she were in a hurry all of a sudden. Sally slipped off her seat, slammed the passenger door and followed her. The cobbles shone dull and grey. All the houses around the square were on the wonk. One of them had sunk so much over the centuries that the half-timbered crossbeam on the right of the house was almost half a metre lower than on the left. Probably people had kept having to change the windows – it looked as though the row of them shrank from left to right. Sally had to grin. How did you live in a house like that, where the ceiling at one end was fifty centimetres lower than at the other? You probably had to nail down the tables and cupboards on the first floor, like on a ship, to stop them sliding towards the righthand wall. It must be really dire to come home drunk to a house like that. You’d probably keel over right on the doorstep. But maybe there were times when it was just funny.
They’d stopped. Liss was waiting on the other side of the square, at the mouth of a little alleyway leading further uphill, but she didn’t walk on until she saw that Sally was following her. It was only after a hundred metres or so, when the little lane widened out again into another square, that Sally saw the church. It was far too big for such a small place.
‘A church?’ she called, disappointed. ‘That’s it?’
‘Come on.’
Liss walked past the church towards a gate in the churchyard wall. Sally caught up with her, but her expectations were suddenly muted. What? she asked herself in the silence. What? And as she walked behind Liss, she realised that it was because she expected more of her than just a church. Not that she gave a shit. If the woman was a fan of a dog kennel, that was fine by her. Nobody else had to like it. But Liss had said that Sally might like what she wanted to show her.
Yeah, great. So now she was expecting Liss to really know her tastes? Why did she keep falling for it? People weren’t like that. Everyone was alone. Nobody really understood anyone else. So why should this woman suddenly get it? After three weeks?
‘In here,’ said Liss. She bent and walked through a low, doorless entrance into a kind of chapel that was leaning against the church wall, but apparently built deeper into the hillside.
OK, not a church. A chapel. Sally couldn’t help it, she was still disappointed as she followed her into the windowless passage.
Liss switched on the light and Sally involuntarily caught her breath. She was facing a wall of skulls. A proper wall. At least three metres high and ten metres long. A thousand empty eye sockets were looking at her. A wall of holes where there’d once been noses. A wall of a thousand soundless smiles.
Row upon row of skulls were stacked between layers of … What were they … thigh bones? There must be tens of thousands. And it was only now that she noticed that the pillars of the arches to her right and left were … They were made of thigh bones too. But overlapping like brickwork. The pillars were built out of bones. The arches too. And then that wall of skulls … She knew it would probably sound stupid, but she couldn’t help it, she had to ask.
‘They’re real, aren’t they?’
Liss nodded. ‘It’s an ossuary. A charnel house. When there’s no more room in the graveyard and the graves have to be vacated, they bring the bones here. You can’t just throw them away.’
Nothing like that had ever even occurred to Sally before.
‘But there are so many,’ she whispered.
She couldn’t hold back. The thousands upon thousands of bones exerted a strange fascination. She took a few steps forward and touched one of the skulls. Smooth. As if it had been polished. Sally suddenly thought of how often she’d touched somebody else’s head, but never without skin and hair. She grasped her own. Felt the warmth. She laid her other hand on the skull. Cold. That was it. That was how far you were from death. Arm’s length. She heard Liss laugh quietly.
‘What?’ she asked, but without any aggression.
‘I did that exact thing the first time I was here,’ said Liss.
Sally stroked the skull then stepped back and assimilated the image.
‘How many are there?’
Liss joined her. ‘About twenty thousand.’
‘But why … Who does that? Builds … builds a wall of bones. Layers them up like…’ She didn’t know what she was trying to say.
‘Better than throwing them all on a heap, I reckon.’
Sally didn’t answer. Maybe Liss was right. She walked along the wall, running her finger smoothly along the bones and skulls. When it caught in an eye socket, she suddenly remembered a scene in a boring play they’d read at school. With the prince holding the skull in his hand and droning on about death. If that had felt like this … then. OK, then … it wasn’t boring. You couldn’t do anything else after feeling something like this.
The light went out.
‘Wait,’ said Liss. She heard her feeling for the switch, shut her eyes and laid both hands on the cold wall of bones. What a wild feeling.
‘Why do you come here?’ she asked, eyelids still shut.
The light went back on. She stared into the empty eyes of a lost face and waited, without turning round. And noticed that Liss was hesitating.
‘Have you ever been in love?’ she asked slowly.
A hot emotion rose up in Sally, but it was as though it immediately ebbed away through her hands into the cool skulls, leaving nothing behind but a strangely chilled curiosity.
‘What kind of a shitty question is that?’ she answered, almost calmly. ‘Of course I’ve been in love.’ She emphasised the in love as if it were meant ironically, which it wasn’t. ‘And it’s none of your business.’
‘No,’ said Liss, ‘I know that.’
She stepped up to Sally and also touched one of the skulls with her fingertips. Very gently, she traced the contours. Sally shoved her hands in the pockets of her still-clammy trousers.
‘Well,’ said Liss in an almost light-hearted tone, ‘at any rate, I was in love the first time I came here. I was a bit older than you, twenty maybe.’
‘Who was it?’ Sally asked. ‘The guy with the bike?’
‘And that’s none of your business,’ Liss answered impersonally. ‘At any rate, I was unlucky in love. Very unlucky. At that time, I hitchhiked a lot. So I ended up here by chance one day. I didn’t want to go into the church either, by the way,’ she added with a very slight smile. ‘But I’ve always liked churchyards. That’s how I found the ossuary. On an incredibly hot June day.’
She fell silent suddenly. Perhaps she had the feeling that she’d already said too much. Sally knew that one. It really was always better not to tell people anything. Liss put her hands in her pockets now too, leant back, relaxed, on the wall of bones and turned to her.
‘And then coming here, full of unhappiness and romantic fantasies of what it would be like if you were suddenly dead because you’d jumped off a bridge or had an accident or only had six weeks to live – all the stuff people imagine to force other people to love them in return.’
Sally suddenly felt strangely as though someone had caught her doing something forbidden.
‘Then standing here, facing twenty thousand dismembered skeletons, facing this wall of skulls that’s so weirdly beautiful, you suddenly know that your so-called unhappiness doesn’t mean a thing. That, actually, nothing really means anything at all, because everything passes.’
The light went off again. This time it was Sally who looked for the switch. It gave her time to find the right words for the furious emotion that had found its way into her mouth and wanted to get out. She felt along the wall for it. Then she turned to Liss who was still leaning on the wall of bones.
‘What a load of shit,’ she said very loudly. Her voice echoed a little in the ossuary. ‘What a massive pile of shit. There’s no way you’re that empty. I know people who’re that empty, totally empty. People like that … honestly, I know enough of them. But what you’re saying there, that’s just a huge pile of shit. Everything means something. Just because you’ll be dead one day, that doesn’t mean…’ She was lost for words.
Liss said nothing.
‘What?’ cried Sally, in a similar fury to the one she’d felt earlier while cycling – that good fury that drove you on. ‘What? Just because one day you’ll be just … bones,’ she pointed to the wall, ‘you reckon that makes you dead inside before that? That’s not you. Not you. That’s just a load of shit what you’re saying.’
She turned and walked out of the ossuary into the rain. It was quite a while till Liss came after her, but Sally didn’t walk away. She stopped when Liss came to stand beside her in the rain.
‘That’s how it felt back then,’ she said calmly. ‘It’s a good place for me.’
Sally needed a little time. It was kind of true. It was a good place. But what Liss had said didn’t fit with it. And it didn’t fit with Liss. But she didn’t know how she could say that without sounding stupid.
‘Here,’ she said spontaneously, turning around and pressing her rain-wet hand onto her brow. ‘Here. You’re warm. Warm, get that?’
It wasn’t until she took her hand away again that she realised it was the first time in three weeks they’d touched each other. They’d never taken the other’s hand or anything. Sally inhaled deeply.
‘Yes,’ Liss suddenly replied, loudly and in a surprisingly light tone, ‘it’s OK, I’ve got it.’
She smiled a little and Sally sighed with relief.
‘Café or church?’ she asked.
‘The deer,’ Sally answered very firmly, ‘let’s drive home and you can show me how you prepare the deer.’ Home, thought Liss. She said ‘home’.
Up the old tower in the ruined castle above the town. The door was actually blocked, nailed shut, because the steps were unsafe. Sonny had broken it open the first time they’d been there.
Sonny! What if somebody comes?
Nobody’ll come, he’d laughed. She had to laugh too because he was so carefree. In the motorbike panniers, he had a crowbar; it made such short work of the bolt that the screws went flying. And then he shoved it under the wooden door and skilfully jemmied it right off its hinges.
We’ll put it back later. This can be our tower.
Our tower. How wonderful that had sounded. Around them was nothing but the castle’s ruined walls, and down there was the well; a maid had been thrown down it during the Thirty Years’ War, to poison it. Every time she stood there, she found herself imagining that. If you threw ten pfennigs into a machine there, the light in the well went on for two minutes. There was a thick iron grid over the top, through which you could see down into the depths. The water glittered a very long way down. There was a cup chained to the edge; you could use it to scoop up water from a little basin and then pour it down the well. The falling water looked beautiful. It fell and fell, and after a while you heard it hit, and the black surface of the water there below suddenly rippled silver. What would it be like to fall that far?
Our tower. An early summer day under a wind-tattered, gloomy sky, the first time they’d stood up there together. It had been such a strange, tingly feeling to be in the middle of an autumn day, yet to know that it wasn’t winter on its way but summer. The wind was cold and rough in their hair, but they enjoyed its coarse tenderness. Round here it was rare for the wind to blow really hard. On an impulse, she jumped onto the tower’s broad wall.
Hey!
Sonny came over, wanted to hold on to her legs.
Don’t. I can stand better alone.
The whole countryside below her, and she was like a queen over the depths. Seen from up here, their village almost vanished among the fields.
You look hot, standing up there.
When he said stuff like that it really was like a sudden heat shooting through her body. He thought she was hot.
She jumped off the wall. There he stood. Easy-going, his long hair tousled by the wind too.
You think?
He nodded.
Very hot, even.
She let him pull her to him and felt his mouth on hers, always a bit rough, like the wind, but full of energy and desire.
I wrote you a song.
Now he was out of breath too.
Really?
He’d hidden the guitar up here on the tower. He’d been that certain she’d come here with him.
Arrogant bastard.
She gave him a playful slap. He laughed and held her hand tight.
That’s what you like about me though.
And you? What do you like about yourself?
Money and possessions, he laughed. He picked up the guitar.
Now listen up.
She sat cross-legged on the wall. At her back was forty-five metres of nothing. In front of her was Sonny, tuning the guitar with a few deft movements. Around her was the wind, setting the tattered flags rattling. It must be unusual for the old fabric to be moved so fast and so hard. Liss had to smile. Rip it to shreds, she thought. ‘There swirls the storm, a rearranger…’
Then Sonny sang. His voice, which she loved so much, was rough and sounded like yearning as he began.
Come a long way, looking for you, heading up north, searching for you…
The wind was suddenly cold as the notes went through Liss, and she recognised what he was singing.
Pretty. Does Caro know that you’re singing that to me?
Sonny stopped.
What?
You wrote that for me? Huh? For me? Hmm … Well, at least you’re playing it live for me: you only taped it for Caro.
Liss!
No.
She picked up her denim jacket and headed for the steps.
Liss, bloody hell, you know that Caro … that it’s been over for ages. I was thinking of you when I wrote the song. Honest. Even then, I was thinking of you.
Bullshit.
Liss!
She ran down the stairs, hot with rage at her own stupidity. Hot with shame and hot with the pointless wish for what Sonny had said to be true, that he really had been thinking about her even then. She ran across the grass in the castle courtyard without turning around, and thought about the well. So that was what it felt like to fall forever.