The worst of it was what was missing. Sally had had no idea of how much she’d got used to in such a short time. Surfacing slowly from sleep, an occasional cockcrow or the gentle clucking of the hens coming through to her, always sounding so peaceful. Everyone assuring each other that everything was as it should be, time and time again. The soft tones of the bells chiming in the church tower across the barn. Although she now knew how powerful that sound could be, it had always sounded soft. On the farm, waking up hadn’t been bad.
She sat at her desk and arranged things. Her phone precisely in the top right-hand corner. Her parents had brought it back from the clinic. She still hadn’t charged it and switched it on. Her laptop parallel to the bottom edge of the desk. Ten centimetres. She took the ruler from her pen pot and measured it out. The new schoolbooks for her final year stacked in size order to the left of the laptop. Fifteen centimetres, she determined, and placed the ruler down. I could get a calendar too, and cross off the days. Days until exams and university and getting married and going nuts and kicking the bucket. Calendars with that many pages don’t even exist.
She laughed quietly. I can always stick a few together.
Finally get your life in order.
Try to get to grips with reality for once, just for once.
That’s simply how life is. Nothing is simple. You need structure.
Yeah. Thanks a bunch, Mama. Thanks a bunch, Papa; nice of you to have stayed here overnight for once, so that I could see you over breakfast when it wasn’t even my birthday. I’ll order my life now.
She laid her right hand on the desktop and used the black Edding marker pen to draw around the contours of her fingers. Now her hand would know where it belonged. She hurled the metal pen at the window with her full strength, hoping that it would break, but it just bounced back and hit her on the forehead. It was surprisingly painful.
‘Sarah? Everything all right?’
Her mother’s voice sounded wobbly.
Everything all right. Sure. Could she really be that thick? Did she really think everything was all right?
It was just that she hadn’t known where else to go. And she hadn’t managed to go on anywhere else. What would she have done there? There was only one place where she’d wanted to be. And she couldn’t stay there anymore.
She looked out into the rain. It wasn’t cold, but forlorn and gloomy. Thanks, weather. A bit of sad background music too, perhaps?
She hadn’t been able to tell them anything. When she’d got home, Papa had still been there. It made her yearn to just run away again, right away.
What did you do why didn’t you call we were so worried you could have oh God we were so scared scared scared worried why why why. None of them were real questions. It was dumping rubble. They knew where she’d been.
She dabbed black dots on her fingernails. School was the same as ever. The teachers all acted like she’d got cancer. Careful. Lots of pleases and thank-yous. If you need anything. If you ever don’t quite feel. You can always. Why did they never finish their sentences? And people in her class were curious, but they barely spoke to her. If you want, you can copy from my book. I can give you the economics worksheets. We’ve started stochastics in maths. That almost made her laugh. The subject matter. That had never been her problem. Her problem had been just not understanding how the others could be so slow. You just had to listen. You didn’t have to do a thing. Just listen. She’d liked listening to Liss. Even when she wasn’t saying anything. She’d liked watching her do things, all of which had a purpose. Picking up a hen to see why it was limping. Splitting a log to make a wedge to go under the sagging barn door. Or, right at the start, turning the tractor so that the drawbar on the trailer slipped perfectly into the coupler. Precision.
She propped her chin into her left hand. With her right hand, she used the marker to draw a frame around the display on her phone.
Most of all, she missed the smells. The pear mash in the wine cellar. The smell of the cows, which sometimes wafted up from the barns in the village towards evening. The smell of the potatoes that you dug up from the ground, and their smell once you’d boiled them and were eating them with salt. And the ancient smell of straw and hay in the barn, all sunlight and dust, when you sat on the floor in the open doorway in the afternoon, reading.
The woman tried to kill her husband. The words her father had repeated so often rang in her ears. The woman tried to kill her husband. She’s dangerous.
Sally thought about the day she’d forgotten to write the letter. She thought about the deer they’d run over. She thought about the pistol that Liss kept in a metal case on the tractor. Then she snapped the cap carefully back onto the pen and let her head drop onto the desk.