Advent Read online

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You’ve never been?’

  ‘Not inside. Well, not since I was a baby, but that doesn’t count. There’s a kind of pool where they took me.’

  ‘A pool? Water?’

  ‘Yes, there’s a hollow with a spring. They built the chapel where the spring comes out. That’s the water that makes you well.’ Makes a well? Gav thought. But Marina’s voice was clear as birdsong; he knew what she’d said. ‘We’ll go and look this afternoon. If Daddy says it’s all right. Come on.’ She made to squeeze past him, back the way they’d come.

  He sighed. ‘Can’t we at least go to the whatsit? Lookout. Hey, you were going to show me something.’

  She pulled herself up short as if someone had yanked her invisible lead. ‘Oh! I forgot.’

  ‘Please? It’s right here, isn’t it?’

  She ran her hands through her hair, raising damp tufts. ‘All right, then. Just quickly.’ But her mood had clouded over. Whatever confidence she’d been about to share with him seemed to have disappeared. Gav couldn’t help catching some of her disquiet. The weird appearance of the boy with his mysterious apprehensions and nonsensical story had unsettled him, reminding him that Auntie Gwen was still missing. It had been a long time now, almost a whole day. Even she didn’t forget things for that long, did she?

  They went on in silence together, treading carefully as they traversed the slope. The land was slanting more sharply, right to left, and the track itself was little more than scars of mud. Looking up for an unwise moment to make sure he didn’t lose sight of her ahead, Gav slipped and fell with a squeak of surprise into the wet leaf mould and earth.

  ‘Gavin!’ He stumbled as he tried to push himself up. By the time he was upright again he was almost coated in fragments of twigs and strips of sodden leaves.

  She laughed, a smothered giggle that made her fold in on herself as if she were trying to disappear inside her oversized jumper. ‘You look like a woodwose. I should draw a picture. Are you all right?’

  He didn’t think she’d really said he looked like a woodlouse, but he wasn’t going to ask. He was so relieved to have lightened her mood again that he didn’t much care either way. ‘Fine. Just slipped.’

  ‘Hold my hand,’ she said. ‘Just for this last bit.’

  So he did. He blushed at being helped along by a girl two years younger than him and probably half his weight, or maybe for another reason, but she kept her eyes ahead as they negotiated a small upwards slope, and didn’t see. There was an odd stab of disappointment when she let go of his hand as the track levelled out again. He wondered whether maybe she’d felt it too, because she stopped, and they stood a few moments, just the sound of their breath together under the winter branches. Only when he looked around did he realise that they’d reached the spot.

  The ‘lookout’ was no more than a shoulder of bedrock sticking out from the roots and earth, a miniature cliff, its top barely wide enough for two small people to sit close together. A tiny stream dribbled down a cleft below it, and along the line of that cleft there was indeed a break in the mass of the trees, opening a narrow slice of the outside world to their view.

  Gav had managed to forget how close that world was. Being under the trees was as good as being behind a wall. Pendurra had felt like a separate country. Now he was looking across a wide river, rippled and silvery and tarnished. It was more like an arm of the sea than the sluggish silty water that was what the word ‘river’ meant to him, the river he knew from home. The far bank was a slope of green, stunted trees by the water, a field above.

  ‘You can see a lot more from the head,’ she said, ‘but out towards the sea. I like this view. It’s like looking through a window. More happens here.’

  There were mooring buoys in the river. The tide gently tugged at them. A cormorant perched on one, crooked wings open to dry. A breeze too slight to disturb the trees made patterns on the water like feathers.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ said Gav, more than half to himself.

  There was no one to call him inside, no one to disturb him. He thought suddenly of Marina’s naïve invitation: You can just stay. The idea of it welled up inside him with such terrible impossibility that his eyes misted. He sat down, wiping his cheek quickly on his sleeve.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She squatted down beside him, surprisingly close. He turned his head away.

  ‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ she said.

  To his utter surprise, he had to make a real effort to fight away another trickle of tears. He turned his shaky breath into a pretend gasp of sardonic laughter.

  ‘You haven’t,’ he said. ‘Trust me.’

  ‘Gwen did say you were very unhappy underneath.’

  He bit his lip and bowed his head. A gust of chill air stirred the trees above them into unsympathetic whispers.

  ‘We should go back now,’ she said, after a while.

  ‘Marina?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What I told you before? About being different?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said cautiously.

  ‘I never told anyone else that either. That’s the first time I’ve ever told the truth about myself.’

  There was another long pause. When she answered at last, she sounded strangled with embarrassment.

  ‘Remind me what it was again?’

  Gav let out a slow breath, then shook his head. He couldn’t stop himself chuckling bleakly as he pushed himself to his feet. ‘Never mind.’

  ‘No. Wait, sorry, I got in a muddle with Horace and everything. Sorry!’ She stood up beside him. ‘It was . . . That’s right, that special woman you see. I do remember.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Let’s go back.’

  ‘Now I really have upset you. Please, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Nah.’ He looked around for the muddy track and began scrambling back without waiting for her. ‘Some things you just can’t really talk about.’

  ‘No. You can. Or you and I can. I was going to show you, but I forgot that too.’ He heard her slipping along behind, but he kept striding as best he could. Back to the adults, back to the real world, back to normal. She pursued him like the memory of everything he’d spent the past four years trying not to say. ‘Sometimes when I go and sit there she comes out of the river and watches me. At least I think she’s watching me. No, I’m sure she is. So I was hoping she’d come today and I could show you. Gavin!’

  Was there any point even asking her what she was talking about? She was just weird, a weird girl who didn’t know where China was and had never heard of swear words. Auntie Gwen was weird and had got herself lost somewhere. There was some weird Chinese kid wandering around in the woods. All just pointless, nothing to do with him, nothing to do with the nightmare he was locked in.

  ‘Slow down a bit! Please don’t be cross. I was listening, I swear. Maybe it’s the same. I mean, the same woman. Gavin? We’re like cousins, aren’t we? So it could be the same. Sort of white, with greeny hair? Gavin, wait for me, please.’

  Gav stopped and spun round.

  ‘She’s nothing to do with you. She’s nothing to do with anyone else. She just follows me around.’ Her jaw hung open and her eyes were round with shock; he might as well have been shouting and jabbing a finger at her like an angry teacher. ‘She’s not sort of white and she doesn’t have greeny hair. She doesn’t have anything or look like anything because she’s not real. Get it? She’s not real. She doesn’t exist. She’s nothing. She’s just the curse of my fucking life, that’s all she is. That’s it.’

  And now I’m shouting at Marina, he thought to himself, in the horrible silence that followed. The one person I’ve ever met who looked like she might have listened to me and I’m swearing at her. Nice one, Gav.

  Marina swallowed and looked down.

  ‘I don’t think that’s right,’ she said.

  What he would normally have done was turn round and march away. He didn’t.
>
  ‘You were telling the truth before,’ she told his toes, in a barely audible mumble. ‘But now you aren’t.’

  When she looked up again, he was the one who had to look aside.

  ‘I’d better go first,’ she said after a bit. She slipped round him. ‘Come on,’ she called over her shoulder, and led on through the wood, her stick-thin arms waving like antennae to balance herself, her leather slippers skidding on the wet ground.

  He followed in silence. After a few minutes he’d decided he ought to say sorry again, but he didn’t know how. He opened his mouth a few times to try it and failed each time. She didn’t look back until the path returned them to the edge of the garden, its alleys of limp grass and its tumbledown borders, its stranded barren trees. The house loomed up behind it like an antique prison.

  ‘You should probably get yourself tidied up a bit,’ she said.

  He looked down at his filthy clothes and hands.

  ‘Yeah. Um, Marina . . .’

  ‘What?’

  He saw the words in his head and said them aloud, like a line from a play. ‘Sorry I shouted at you.’

  ‘That’s OK. Horace does too, sometimes.’

  ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

  But he couldn’t say what he didn’t mean, or did mean. That was his problem. He’d lost the power to say what he meant.

  ‘Do you have some other clothes?’

  ‘Yeah. Up at Aunt Gwen’s house.’

  ‘I’ll wait for you here, then.’

  ‘OK.’ And to his shame he found he was glad of the excuse to jog away without another word.

  Ten

  He had a quick look behind the lodge before he went in, to check the rosebush. Its flowers were still shockingly pink among the withered greens and browns. He traced them with a fingertip, feeling the night’s rain lingering on the petals’ impossible softness. He thought for a moment about plucking a bloom and taking it to show Marina, but what was he trying to prove? He’d had his chance to tell her about himself, about Miss Grey, to unburden himself, and he’d blown it.

  His bag was right inside the door where he’d left it, which was a good thing: the silence of the house had become eerie and he had no wish to go further in. He dropped his damp clothes on the floor and changed as quickly as he could. The only other motion within came from the tealights he’d lit that morning. They were failing now. One sent up a sooty curl as he watched and guttered.

  Marina was waiting for him in front of the old house. She examined him, arms folded. To his relief, she seemed to have cheered up. He’d noticed that his absence tended to have that effect on people.

  ‘Now you look like a dressed-up woodwose. You know, you can tell that you and Gwenny are in the same family. Bits of your face are the same as hers.’

  ‘She always used to say I take after my mum.’ He remembered (a memory he’d forgotten he had, until that moment) Dad scowling at her once when she mentioned it. As if there were some competition over which of them Gav resembled more, and he’d lost. ‘Her sister. Good thing too. Dad’s side all look like hippos with freckles.’

  ‘I know hippos. I’ve seen a picture.’

  He decided that it was time to stop sneering at Marina’s bizarre conversational habits the way his father would have. ‘Good for you.’

  ‘I’m more half and half. Gwen says my mother was the most beautiful creature she’s ever seen.’

  ‘Oh. That’s, um—’

  ‘Don’t talk about it with Daddy around, though. Gwen says it hurts him too much to remember. OK?’

  ‘No, right. So where is she now?’

  ‘She died a long time ago.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, I’m sorry.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’ She sounded perfectly untroubled. ‘I was just a baby.’

  He looked around for a way to change the subject. ‘So, how long has your dad lived here?’

  She cocked her head. ‘Always, I think. My mother did too, before she died.’

  ‘Ah. You mean . . . your family’s always owned all this?’

  ‘I’m not sure. You could ask Daddy. He knows all about it. He’s interested in history. I know he went away for a while. He was on a ship. He was in some kind of battle. They said he could come back and stay for ever.’

  ‘That’s great,’ Gav said, a little bitterly despite himself. He couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to be fond of one’s parents.

  ‘Gwen says he and Mummy were more in love than anyone. You know what that means? It’s when—’

  ‘Yeah,’ he interrupted hurriedly. ‘I know. So, um, what’s a woodwose?’

  ‘You don’t know? It’s a wild man who lives in the woods. Not near here. Other woods. I’ll dig out a picture of that for you too. We’ve got one somewhere.’ She bounced on her heels and scrunched over the gravel towards the rain-streaked front door.

  The only child of a place like this ought to have been pale and silent, Gav thought, as he followed her inside. Flitting around like a ghost. Her mother dead, her father an aged recluse. But instead she’d come out as implausibly bright and shiny as the pink rose in the dead vegetable patch. He wondered what she’d be like in a couple of years, whether the discrepancy between her world and everyone else’s would catch up with her, as it had him, and crush the colour out of her and tarnish the shine.

  He wondered when he’d see her again after this week, or if he ever would.

  Her father was standing at the far end of the hallway. His back was to them. He was gazing out of the window Gav had looked through before, still leaning on his walking stick. You could easily imagine he’d been there since they’d left.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, turning stiffly. ‘There you are.’

  Gav hung back as Marina slid out of her weird shoes and trotted down the dim hall. The presence of another person instantly made him want to avoid having to make any sort of conversation.

  ‘Where did you get to? Caleb said you were coming straight back.’

  ‘I wanted to show Gavin the lookout. Sorry.’

  ‘As long as you’re here now.’

  ‘What’s wrong? Where’s Caleb?’

  ‘Wrong? Goodness me, nothing.’ Her father touched her shoulder. Gav thought he didn’t sound very convincing, but perhaps that was just his manner. ‘Caleb has gone out for a while.’

  ‘Where’s he gone?’

  ‘I’m not certain. Would you like anything to drink, Gavin?’

  ‘Oh, um—’

  ‘I would,’ Marina announced.

  She took him through to the kitchen. He looked around more thoughtfully this time, now that he felt less like an intruder. In almost every detail the room failed to correspond to any meaning of the word ‘kitchen’ he recognised. There was no fridge. There was no cooker. There were no right angles at all, no ambience of whiteness and stainless steel and order. There was no kettle or toaster. There were no spaces in which such things could have gone, or sockets to which they could have been attached. There weren’t even any lights, he realised. In the high and vaulted ceiling, narrow iron-framed windows opened by arrangements of pulleys and dangling ropes. Their sooty panes grimed the already grey daylight. Marina ducked through an arched opening and returned with a bottle of some sort of juice. She’d pulled the sleeves of her sweater over her hands, as if the bottle were hot to the touch. She got a couple of glasses down from a shelf and twisted off the cap, still with muffled fingers.

  They went back to the table where he’d sat before. The fire had been stoked into a big, raw, crackling thing, for heat rather than show. He thought he recognised the drink as elderflower juice, in some cloudy and bitter version, slightly unpleasant in the way expensive organic things always were. It wasn’t hot, of course.

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  He was, but he remembered the peculiar stuff in the teapot and shook his head, promising himself handfuls of Auntie Gwen’s biscuits later on.

  ‘Daddy?’

  Her father was still out in the hall, by the big wind
ow at the foot of the stairs. ‘Yes, my love?’

  ‘Have you found out when Gwenny’s coming yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Oh.’ An unhappy little sigh. Gav recognised the signs by now – the droop of her head, the wrinkle of her thin eyebrows – and tried to think of a way to change the subject, but Mr Uren continued, coming into the room.

  ‘There’s a good chance that Reverend Jeffrey will track her down soon.’ The reassurance was directed at both of them. ‘It sounds as if she was looking for him for some reason. That’s probably where she went, up to the village. I’m sure something’ – and he gestured vaguely with the hand that wasn’t holding the stick – ‘must have held her up.’

  ‘I told you she wasn’t here,’ Marina murmured to Gav, leaning across the table.

  ‘It hardly excuses her failure to meet your train, Gavin, but no doubt she’ll tell the whole story when she arrives.’

  ‘No problem,’ Gav said. ‘Least I got here.’

  Mr Uren nodded pensively. ‘Perhaps you should stay in the house until she comes. She’ll be anxious to see you as soon as she arrives.’

  Gav was sure her father had another reason for his suggestion, though he couldn’t have said why. Maybe it was just that he’d spoken a little more firmly than usual. Marina, of course, didn’t notice anything.

  ‘Oh yes. Yes. I was going to show Gavin around later, but we should stay in, shouldn’t we?’

  ‘I think so.’ He smiled half-heartedly. ‘We’ll find you some lunch in a while. I shall read quietly in my study and keep out of your way.’ Gav cheered up at once. ‘Come and get me if you need me.’

  ‘All right, Daddy. Caleb thought we should stay indoors too.’

  Something unreadable flickered over Mr Uren’s expression, a deepening of the shadows of his face. ‘He has a habit of caution, but . . . Never mind.’ He picked up a book from the edge of the table. His hand was deeply wrinkled, an old man’s hand. Much more like a grandfather than a father, Gav thought. He was certainly old enough.

  ‘You don’t mind staying here till Gwen comes, do you?’ Marina asked him, as her father left the room through a door on the far side. ‘I was going to show you around the house anyway.’