Daylight Saving (11 page)

“You let me take a beating, though,” I said, trying to peer around the tree.

“You deserved one.”

“You made me look like a fool in front of them.”

“You
are
a fool when you’re in front of them.”

“But you saved me from any real damage, in the end,” I said. “Didn’t you?”

She paused. “Well,” she said.

I thought about the newspaper articles. Lexi, without any blemishes or scars. The man in the long coat. “Can I see you?” I asked.

“Apparently you can,” she said from behind the tree. “Although it might not be for the best at the moment.”

She walked out into the open. The wounds were livid. Both of her eyes were now blackened above the lids, and bruises marked her cheekbones like small dark clouds. Her hands were reddened and swollen, her left thumb bent back at a strange angle. One of her fingernails was ripped off. She wore her red hoodie and denim skirt, and she was shivering. “Ta-da,” she said sarcastically.

I knew I had to hold back my shock, so I forced a smile. “Hi,” I said.

She sniffed a little trail of blood back into her nose.

“I’ve brought you a present, to say sorry,” I said.

I had made a headdress from a white terry-cloth headband I bought from the tennis shop and a magpie feather. “I made this for you, because you did a coup on me. You touched me and ran off. I couldn’t find an eagle feather.”

She threw her head back and laughed, like in the picture from the newspaper. “That is the absolute height of Crow fashion, Daniel. Although I did get hurt, so we may need to paint the feather red.” She put it on, tucked some strands of hair behind her ears.

“There,” I said. “You can be my squaw.”

“I think, Daniel, that I can be your
chief.
”

“Yeah. You’re probably right.”

“Damn straight,” she said.

She ran down to the water and studied her reflection. “Oh, it’s perfect,” she said. “Just perfect to lighten up my rather dull complexion.”

“I went to the Internet café,” I said.

“Really?” she said.

“To look at newspaper archives,” I said.

She turned around slowly but didn’t say anything, so I continued. “You said that if we’re going to be friends, you won’t talk about yourself. I’m not sure that’s the way friends behave.”

She walked over to the tree and sat down. She patted the ground beside her. “OK, Daniel. Questions.”

“Are you, you know. Are you . . . ?”

“It’s best not to start off with your rudest question,” she said.

The truth was, I couldn’t say the word. I didn’t want to, as if saying it might make it real.
Dead.
“What happened to you?” I said.

She sighed and looked up at the tree nearest the water. It had a long, thick branch overhanging the lake. “I went out for my friend’s seventeeth birthday party. Jade. It was the last day of October, but weirdly icy. It was getting late.”

I remembered the statue of the ram on the front of the paper, the icicles. The big freeze. “A man came into the pub. It was a basement bar. The Vaults. He was handsome, thirtyish. He seemed a bit down on his luck. He’d slipped on the sidewalk, he said. The whole left side of him was wet, and he had a graze down his arm. He said he’d come in to warm up. Bought me a whiskey. He was nice. Said he couldn’t believe I was still in school. That old line.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I was in college. I’d never had whiskey before, but I didn’t tell him that.”

“Where were your friends?”

She tenderly rubbed the swelling on her left hand. “Most of them had gone home. Jade, the birthday girl, was drunk. But she was making out with my best friend, Tom. Me and Tom had a bit of an on-off thing.” She smiled and closed her eyes.

“You were jealous,” I said. “You left them.”

“No,” she said. “Well, yes, I was jealous, but I stayed. Obviously I didn’t sit
next
to them while they were snogging. I stood at the bar. This guy came over in his suit, half soaked, and it was nice to have someone to talk to. Flattering, actually.”

“What did you talk about?” I asked. I was trying to be brave, but also trying to delay the moment when she came to the end of the story.

“We talked about change.”

“Sounds profound.”

“No. Change — money. He said he once dropped his wedding ring in a nightclub, and while he was looking for it, he found twenty-four quid in change on the floor by the bar. So then we scouted around on the floor ourselves. It was funny. We found about five pounds. Filthy little coins, covered in that black stuff that ruins your shoes when you go to clubs.”

I had never been to a nightclub. “So he was married?”

“No. He said she’d left him for another man. It was probably a lie. I was ready to believe it, though.”

“Because of Jade and Tom?” I asked.

She nodded. “Anyway, he said he’d give me a lift home. Said he was going back that way. I didn’t even say good-bye to Jade on her birthday. Leave them to it, I thought.”

My hands were shaking. I tried to hide them. I thought I might be sick. If she’d have stopped talking then, I’d have let her and not asked another thing. But she didn’t stop.

“As I got into his car, I felt a cold shock on the back of my neck. He must have hit me.”

“Jesus. Why did he do that? What did he want?”

“What does any man want?”

I thought back to the video on Jack’s mobile phone. I wanted to tell her again that not all men were like that, but I had led those boys to her, after all. I was part of the problem.

“What time was it, when you left?” I said.

“That’s controversial,” she said.

“Why?”

“It was the night when the clocks go back — the last Saturday night in October. It was one thirty Sunday morning when we left the bar. But when I woke up, I looked at my watch, and it was five past one.”

She showed me her watch. “It’s radio controlled. When the clocks go back, my watch does it automatically.”

“Where did you wake up?”

“Don’t know. Somewhere in the forest.” Her eyes began to glaze over now. She seemed far away from me.

“
This
forest? Leisure World?”

“Yeah. Think so. He dragged me off into the thick of it, and . . .” She looked around her. Her breathing had quickened, and I could see that she was sweating, although it could have been the water dripping from her wet hair. “Well,” she said. “The rest is history. Except it’s not, of course.”

“What do you mean?”

She shook her head. “History’s a circle. He stabs me. In the chest, here.” She unzipped the hoodie slightly and pointed to a place on her swimsuit. I could see a dark purple stain on the black Lycra. “And — just when my watch beeps for two o’clock — everything goes black. The next day, I wake up. It feels like a dream, like one of those dreams where you’re drowning, but you’re trying to get back to the surface. And then suddenly I open my eyes, and I am in that lake, rising up through the water.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Neither did I, the first time it happened. Put it this way. I live each day forward, but my body goes in reverse. Tomorrow my hair will be shorter. And so — God knows — will my fingernails. All I ever wanted was long, elegant fingernails. My wounds will be less healed, more open. And this watch, which I was wearing when I first came here, will continue to tick backward.”

“When will it end?”

“Same time it always ends. On the night the clocks go back, I will wake up in the forest, with no wounds on my body, and he will pull me into the woods again. For that extra hour, this watch will tick forward. And then, again, he’ll kill me.”

She had said it. My mind was no place to be. I wanted out.

“How do you know that will happen?” I said. I wanted her to be wrong.

“Because it’s what happened last year. It’s a cycle. A loop. These wounds have been getting worse and worse for twelve months. Just like last time. I’m trapped.”

“But can’t you change it? Can’t you do something different when he attacks you?”

“No. That hour doesn’t belong to me. I’m conscious, but I’m just watching him and watching myself react. I can’t control myself.”

“Can you . . .
feel
what’s happening?” I asked.

“God, yes.” She looked away. “It’s like purgatory. Hell’s waiting room.”

“But you didn’t do anything wrong,” I said.

She did not reply.

“Why don’t you just leave, before the clocks go back? Why don’t we go now? There’s holes in the fence, and we could —”

“I’ve tried everything. I can’t leave.”

“How many days do you have left?” I said. “Until it happens again?”

She looked at her watch. “Clocks go back on Saturday night. Two days,” she said.

I closed my eyes tight, to stop the tears. “Aren’t you scared?” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

I would like to say that I held her. That I was a comfort. But in truth I was just as frightened as she was, and we clung to each other. “I didn’t want you to be involved,” she said. “When I saw the gash on your leg, I knew it was a bad sign, that you were getting dragged into the loop.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were changing the future. You were choosing a different path, choosing to follow me into the woods on the night of the attack. Those wounds you had . . .
he
made them.”

I felt a biting chill of realization. “That’s why you wanted me to go away,” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“But why did my injuries disappear?” I said.

“Because we fell out. We argued. And that meant you wouldn’t go after me.”

I thought about what she’d said. I thought of the different paths, each decision I made taking me into an alternative future.

“But you know that I can’t leave you now, don’t you?”

She closed her eyes and gave the faintest of nods. I could feel her body shaking, although it wasn’t a cold day.

“You’re freezing,” I said.

“Yeah, that happened last time, too.”

“We need to get you some more clothes.” I took a deep breath and tried to raise my spirits. “Come on, let’s make a night of it.”

She sat behind me on the bike and hung on. I could feel the vibrations of her shivering. I tried not to think of the things that she’d told me as we headed toward the shopping center. There was a part of me that was resigned to what was happening. If we had two days together before it happened again, then we should enjoy them. But there was another voice inside me.
You have to do something,
it said.
You can’t let this happen again.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

There was that green tinge to the air again. The lights of the shopping center blinked behind the waving branches. “Nothing,” I said. “Let’s go shopping.”

A family cycled toward me, and I waited for them to move over. They didn’t. The dad — a big macho man on his mountain bike — just kept coming straight for us. I swerved away at the last moment. “Moron!” I shouted. He slowed his bike and looked up at a tree, but he didn’t respond.

I parked the bicycle and we went into the center, the floors shiny and squeaking, the escalators like huge metal caterpillars. The shopping center was on three levels, all built in rings around a central core. The last of the daylight was coming through a glass roof, which looked like the roof of the Dome, except that it was covered in bird muck. A helium balloon in the shape of a tiger was stuck up against the glass. I felt small within the huge curves of the mall. There were plenty of shoppers, but they didn’t pay any attention to us. “People can’t see you,” I said.

“Most people can’t.”

“How come I can?”

“I don’t know. It takes a special sort of sensitivity. Toddlers can sometimes see me, and people who are feeling particularly sad.”

“Well. It should make nicking stuff a lot easier,” I said. “They can’t see your clothes, can they? I’m not walking around with a hoodie and a demin skirt, am I?”

“No. When I’m in contact with an object, it disappears. When I let it go, they can see it again. That’s why those folks didn’t get out of the way when you were cycling. They couldn’t see us or the bike.”

“So I was invisible?”

“Yep. The dad thought a squirrel had called him a moron.”