Читать книгу Flowers for the Dead - C. K. Williams - Страница 11

Mist thickens into fog as dawn approaches. I am heading along Grassington Road after I turned off the A59 at Skipton. The narrow road dissolves into a milky grey mass. Houses are turned into shadows, rising and falling by the side of the road as I pass them. Trees seem to suddenly appear, gnarled branches reaching across the road, as if they were reaching for me. The steep slopes of the peaks are familiar even in the dark. The grass, grey in the morning, is glinting with dew. I even recognise the old stone walls, black blurry lines climbing up the bare slopes. My fingers are clenching the steering wheel so hard my knuckles hurt. Have been ever since I passed the sign: COUNTY OF NORTH YORKSHIRE.

The fog thickens and thickens as I continue down the A684, on and on. I pass through Aysgarth and along the Ure. This must be Worton. Then Bainbridge, this sharp bend to the right, past the low houses and the roses climbing up their walls, sprawling like spidery fingers in the fog. I am so very close now. On and on I go, turning off the A684 onto the single-lane side road leading to our village. I thought it would make me nervous, these narrow roads, not wide enough for two cars. But it is not the roads I am worried about. Nor is it the shadows passing me on both sides, the silhouettes of trees and walls and roadside heath.

I do not slow down until I see the silhouette rise on my right: the crippled old oak tree by our village sign. The village I know so well, even when I cannot see it. The narrow old bridge across the brook, the High Street where I used to play, the farns growing thick on the steep slopes surrounding us. The Dresden Dolls are filling the car with their disturbing sounds, louder and louder the closer I get to my parents’ old house.

It is far out of the village, sitting on a dead-end dirt road where farns and goatsbeard and marsh orchids grow, with only one neighbouring house, the Kenzies’. And even they lived a mile off before they moved away. They were friends, Mum and Dad and the Kenzies. Best friends. It was they who sent me the parcel – the Kenzies. In the letter that came with the parcel, they explained that they had moved out of their house, out of that village, not half a year after my parents’ death. They said that they were now settled in their new home in the East Riding, by the coast, and that they wanted to send me a few things of my parents’ they’d found as they’d unpacked their boxes. The dried nightshade, for example, which my mum had given to them for safekeeping. She hadn’t said what they were keeping it for, only that she didn’t want it to be thrown away, but that she no longer wanted it in her house, either.

That was Mum’s thing, drying flowers. They were all over the house. Even this one. Deadly nightshade.

The fog is so thick that I do not see the graveyard, either. Thank God. I know I pass it on the left. Know where it is. Know whose graves I haven’t been to see.

I do not slow down but drive on, drive on until the dirt road comes into view, sloping up into a forest before it leads to the two lonely houses. I turn.

At the crest of the hill, driving past the Kenzies’ old house, I take a glance, but the fog is still too heavy. I only catch a glimpse of the sharp gable and the uppermost window, emerging from the white, milky mass.

For a moment, I believe I see someone standing there. A slim silhouette. Dressed all in white.

Watching me.

The car stutters. Quickly, I push my foot down on the accelerator. When I look back up, the window is empty.

The Kenzies never said whether they had found a buyer. My begonias bob their heads up and down on the back seat, peeking out of the plastic bag as I keep driving. They make me think of our flat in Leyton. Make me glance in the rear mirror. Just to check.

As if I had to. This is the last place Oliver would expect me to go. On our computer, I’d checked websites for a few cheap places to stay in Brittany, in Norfolk and Kent, just in case. But wherever he would suspect me to be, it wouldn’t be here. Not after I didn’t even return for my parents’ funeral, twelve months ago.

My face turns hot as I think of it. There is something wet in my eyes. I blink rapidly as the road turns narrower and narrower, from a dirt road to a path in the woods, snaking its way back to the main road on the other side of the forest. It disappears amidst the pale stems of the sycamores and the winding branches of the ash trees, between the wych elms and bare rowan trees. I used to take my bike down that path, even when it was dark. It seems far too frightening now that I look at it, dwindling like a dying brook in the headlights ahead of me.

I nearly miss our drive even as the fog keeps clearing. At the last moment, I recognise the downy birch and the high hedge and derelict stone wall on my right. I realise my hands are shaking so badly that I cannot stabilise the steering wheel. As if there are climbing plants sprouting in my lungs, it is difficult to breathe.

*

Braking, I turn into our drive. Between the shreds of fog, the old house emerges: two floors, made of limestone, standing between hunched hawthorn and sharp holly and tall birches. There is an abandoned garden and a wooden front porch with a roof, damp and dark.

You can do this, I tell myself. You have to do this if you want to find out what happened to you. This house is a part of it. This house surrounded by woods, with a front porch and a set of chimes by the door that I gave to my mum when I was fifteen, the small bells still dangling in the wind when they left for the hike they would never return from.

The moment I come to a stop at the bottom of the drive, the moment I turn off the engine, I sink back into my seat.

I made it.

For a moment, all I feel is light. As if I am floating. I made it. I did the right thing.

A little unsteady on my feet, I get out of the car, the cold wrapping me into its cool arms. I open the boot and take out my suitcase. It’s heavy. Then I fetch the begonias from the back seat. ‘We made it,’ I whisper to them. ‘Well done, my darlings.’ I’m a florist, and let me tell you, you don’t pass your exams if you don’t talk to flowers.

The pot in my arms, I walk up the front porch, a rather eccentric addition of my father’s. I walk past the chimes on the front porch.

Wait.

I stop. Turn to the side, still on the wooden steps. I remember the chimes. Dangling onto the stairs, announcing every visitor. Remember their sound. Remember the doorbell. Remember the sweat and the noises.

But the chimes are gone.

Putting down the begonias carefully, I walk up and down the porch, then onto the dead meadow on both sides, looking for them. They must have been blown away by the wind. Or a cat came and … I don’t know. The Kenzies told me in their letter that the chimes were still here. But I suppose that happens. No one has been here since my parents left.

A hiking accident. That’s how they died. Here, too. Right here in the Dales.

Returning to the front steps, I take my begonias back up and look for my parents’ keys in my handbag, blinking rapidly, trying not to think about the Kenzies’ voices over the phone, stained with tears as they delivered the news. My hands are cramping, so are the soles of my feet. Instead, I think about having a bath, or a shower, after I have lugged the suitcase from the car into the house. A nap on the couch, even, once I’ve got the heating back up and running. Before I face my parents’ bedroom. Before I make a battle plan.

Finally, managing to fish the keys out of my bag in spite of the cramp in my hands, I bend over to put them into the keyhole. It is a bit rusty, I think at first, when I do not manage to turn the key.

Then I realise that is not the case.

I cannot turn the key because the door is already open.