Breaking Light (9 page)

‘Good morning, Professor Askew.'

He had not noticed her approach and blushed for everything about himself that might be wrong when caught unawares.

‘Good morning, Mrs … ?'

‘Sarobi,' she answered gaily.

‘Oh, how do you do?' He might even have bowed.

Then they were quiet for a moment, not quite knowing how to proceed. She smiled at him and he remembered: ‘I saw you deliver the vegetables to Wilkinson's the other day – they looked beautiful.'

‘Wilkinson's? Oh, you mean the deli. Yes,' she confirmed, ‘I sell him most of what I produce and can't eat myself.'

He frowned. ‘But you can't grow it all here?'

‘No –' she laughed – ‘I've got a small garden with a greenhouse behind my cottage.'

‘Where's your cottage?'

‘At the bottom of Church Lane.'

‘Oh.' He did not want to know, all of a sudden.

‘You'd recognise it straight away.' She laughed again. ‘It's the only one with a pebble-dashed front – you know, that horrible gravel stuff.'

He tried to swallow.

‘Are you all right?' she asked.

‘Yes, yes, I'm fine.'

She looked at him closely for a moment before continuing, ‘I'd love to have a small croft but, until that happens, I rent the allotment. There aren't many of my kind farming the land around here – let alone owning it.'

This was more than she had ever said before and he tried to take it all in. ‘Your kind?' he mustered.

‘Yes, you know – aliens.'

‘Pardon?'

‘I'm only kidding.'

And so she was, because her laugh was real and the bright colour and merriness of it made him laugh too and then an unexpected warmth inside him made him laugh a little more. She didn't seem to mind, so he said, ‘I have a garden as well – but this allotment makes me feel particularly alive.'

‘Yes, I know what you mean.' She was suddenly serious.

He could see that she was holding the skeleton of one of last year's leaves in her hand. She must have picked it up along the lane, where large elms grew in stately rows. It looked so fragile; the way she held it made him think of the wing of a butterfly.

She noticed him looking and said, ‘Isn't it gorgeous? It reminds me of those Italian anatomical tables from the seventeenth
century, where the spinal cords and nervous systems of humans have been laid out on an oak board.'

‘Oh, yes! There are a couple in the Royal College of Surgeons in London.' He could not contain his enthusiasm. It was a place he knew well. He had often studied the anatomical boards and marvelled at how, in order to remove the nerves in one piece, those early physicians had placed the whole body on the board and dissected it slowly and methodically to leave just the nerves. At the end of the operation, the nervous system seemed to merge with the veins of the oak.

‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘You probably think they are disgusting …'

‘No,' he replied with emphasis, ‘not at all.' He thought of the way the nerves grew from the spinal cord like the branches of the tree of life.

They smiled at each other again.

‘Once, when I was a student, I was allowed to visit that museum alone, after hours.' He wanted to offer something back, for their sharing to continue. The building had been dark, he remembered now, but the display cases were vaguely lit from behind. He had stood there, and felt so reduced, in front of the bones of a giant. ‘There's this giant – do you know the one I mean? – it's this sad freak who had to stand and be displayed in both life and death.'

‘Yes, yes.' She nodded and he felt encouraged.

‘And then, in one of the galleries, I came across all those specimens floating in glass jars.'

There had been the ovary of a cow, a lamb foetus, the beak of a cuttlefish, the foetus of a walrus, ventrally dissected. He shuddered as he remembered them now, but they had meant nothing
to him then – nor had the embryos, tumours and placentas. But then …

‘There were these pickled punks – you know, bottled babies, neatly arranged in rows according to size, starting with the very small. The labels would say things like “A female foetus, estimated to be in the ninth week of gestation” or, even worse, “A female foetus, about the time of birth”. Quite hard to take, really …'

He had stood there, watching over them as they sank and sank in their drunken sleep. A still life of five siblings, two hundred years old and still floating blindly in their shared aquarium. Their tiny bodies gently bent as they slotted into each other – head to foot, back to front – like an imprint of the way they had lain together, nesting. Their doll's hands were softly gathered and their mouths were open, their eyes closed, unseeing, as if they were singing in chorus – and not drowning alone.

‘It's so sad when you look at these things without a scientist's mind …' She spoke very softly.

‘I'm sorry. I didn't mean to depress you. I have never told anyone before …'

‘No, no; I'm glad you told me. Somehow.'

He glanced at her and it was true: she did not seem depressed. There was a brightness around her and it made him feel lighter too.

‘Your English is very good,' he said, to change the subject. ‘Have you been in this country for long?'

‘No, only a few years … But I studied medicine at Cambridge in my youth.'

‘I'm sorry; I didn't realise that you were a professional.' He frowned again.

‘But I'm not. My father died while I was at university and I had to go back to Afghanistan to marry – and after that I could not practise.'

‘Is your husband in England too?'

‘No, no, I was widowed many years ago – my husband was a lot older than me.'

‘I'm sorry.' He bit at his moustache out of habit.

‘Not at all.' She laughed again but this time the sun did not settle in her eyes. ‘Are you married?'

‘Me? No, no …' he said, keeping it soft.

She nodded and studied his face for a moment, so that he had to look away. High above their heads, bands of cirrus rode in from the west, slicing the skies as they went.

‘Anyway,' she said, ‘I must get on with the weeding.'

‘Yes, yes, it's a good day for it,' he said, gratefully accepting her gift of escape.

*

That afternoon, Mr Askew walked down the hill and turned left at the old twill factory to follow the millstream to the river. He stood for a while at the top of the stone bridge, looking at the still waters. A carpet of white anemones pulled itself across last year's fallen leaves. There was a whisper of green in the trees and Mr Askew closed his eyes and trained his senses to the sounds and smells of spring. The song of a young warbler ascended and descended in the willows and a rodent fretted in the undergrowth, trying to get ready in time for it all. He walked on, following the lane up a small hill until he reached a hamlet. A dog barked from behind a fence but apart from that there was no indication that anyone was living in the cottages and barns, still farming the land and enjoying their ancient rights of
pasture on the moor. He continued along a path strewn with small rocks and wondered why it had not been better paved, as it was the main access to the commons. Just before the moor gate, he passed the remains of an old chapel that had once served as a comfort and warning to travellers about to leave the civilised world behind and venture out into the untamed wilderness. It seemed odd on a day like this that anyone should ever have been so terrified of the moors, he thought, as he lifted the latch of the cattle gate.

Back in the Middle Ages, people around the moor would have wondered at the unknown that lay outside the boundaries of the cultivated land. During the summer months, they would follow their stock on to the hills and downs in the morning and look at the remains of earlier settlers. But standing stones and ruined prehistoric settlements would mean little to medieval Christians who saw life as a journey in time and space, from the cradle to the grave. They would have little concept of history, and the monuments on the moor would have been unsettling. Uneasy minds explained them as the works of giants or saints, and chapels and stone crosses were erected along the routes around the moor to ward off evil and establish the good force of Christianity. How much braver the prehistoric settlers were, thought Mr Askew to himself as he started out towards the tor on the horizon. The coconut smell of the gorse sieved through the air and, in the distance, sheep seemed to grow out of the turf like champignons. He straightened his back as his feet found firmer ground again. It was an easy stroll on this high ground and he was soon at the foot of the rock. From this angle, the tor looked like an ancient stone fort of the crusaders in the Holy Land. But rather than being constructed by holy warriors, this pile had been shaped
by ice and storms over thousands of years – the forces of nature, coming together in a clash of wills.

The views from the summit on this spring day were of gently rolling hills and pasture, lush with fresh grass. Below him to the west the early-evening sun was resting in the ridge and furrow of a long-forgotten field. But Mr Askew knew only too well that, with a change in weather, the same view could turn into a lunar landscape of barren ground: a landscape that threatened and terrified.

He started scrambling around the rocks, his mottled hands smoothing their rough surfaces, until suddenly he found what he was looking for: a large rock basin, perfectly eroded out of the granite. It was filled with rainwater that darkly mirrored the torn fleece of scattered clouds. To any observer, the stone bowl would appear bottomless – an opening into the underground or a well of the unknown. He shivered as he looked at the still surface and remembered a distant day, so very unlike this one – a day in autumn when the summer had already died and low clouds of Atlantic mist stroked the hills and downs, removing the skies.

*

Some might have expected that mending the wrong would take away the evil. Anyone would have thought so; it was like when something was killed it went away forever. And it was, after all, what everyone had been taught. But Gabriel knew better. Or, if he didn't know, he had come to realise – a bit like how, now that he was nine and a half, he understood certain things that he hadn't understood when he was only seven, say, or eight. Yes, he knew that mending was just mending, a simple fix of the
physical, or a new set of clothes, or a stupid sailing boat with a red keel. Mother didn't realise this, nor did Uncle Gerry or Mr Bradley, who could afford. Not even Michael, whose face was the dearest thing.

But, when school started again, Gabriel knew that nothing had changed and that he still had to run.

And so he ran with the blood taste in his mouth. His plimsolls were black with bog water and muck, his sunburnt legs streaked with dirt. He knew no one would follow his run through the bull's paddock, where hooves had pitted the turf into mud and puddles. Panting, he reached the firmer ground of the commons, the landscape pulsing in his eyes as he looked towards the summit of the tor. He was treading on his own shadow now and slipped once on fresh sheep dung. He hurried up the slope on hands and knees, the scree cutting into his palms. The great rocks of the tor were like a band of awful giants, resting at the close of the day. He found the solid embrace of one and settled in the crook of its arm. Pulling his knees towards his chest, he felt in his pocket for comfort. His hands were shaking as he pulled out a sticky wand of liquorice. Gradually, his breathing settled and the blaze in his eyes dwindled. His shoulders loosened and his legs stretched out on the kind grass. Far below, the village, as small as a world, made the shape of a swallow's tail in the newly harvested fields. He looked west, towards the high moor; chafed by the ice sheet and polished by wind, it was smooth as fur. He touched the granite at his back. It was not altogether cold, although the sun was no longer strong enough to heat it during the day and put that lovely smell in it. He knew these rocks by heart: the strange piling of stone, the nooks that were large enough for him to hide in but small enough not to be found, the large rock basin,
perfectly eroded out of the granite. It was filled with rainwater, the surface as blank as a mirror.

‘You're still a freak, you know,' they'd told him, so that the rock basin, when he looked into it, threw back Gabriel the freak.

And yet he loved this place, perhaps more than any other. It was his castle. How could he have known that it would all start to go wrong when he agreed to bring Michael there one day after school?

*

It was a sodden day in autumn. The mist heaved. Michael was leaning over the rock basin, his dark fringe falling like a curtain in front of his eyes and his right hand, the damaged one, reaching for the gloomy pond.

‘Careful, you wouldn't like to fall in.' He could hear his own unnatural voice in the misty void.

‘C'mon, Gabe; this is terrific.'

Gabriel leant over the basin and peered at the blank disc of water. Both their faces were reflected there, side by side. They looked remarkably alike.

‘I can hardly tell which face is yours and which is mine,' he said, and stretched out his hand, as if to touch each of the faces in the pool. ‘Apart from my scar …'

‘Yeah, well, we are the same, aren't we?' Michael laughed and continued, ‘If we had a long stick with a hook at the end, we could fish out all sorts of things.'

‘What things?'

‘You know, sacrificed stuff, like virgins and chopped-off hands.'

‘Virgins?'

‘Yep, they'd be in there.' He knew that for sure.

‘What, like the Holy Virgin?'

‘No, stupid! Other ones like … Well, you know – naked ones with silky skin.'

‘Wow!'

‘Yeah, I keep telling you.'

‘But why would they be in there?'