The Lives She Left Behind (36 page)

‘Yes you do,’ Fleur shouted back at her. ‘You bloody well do. I’ve had enough of all this rubbish. I should never have trusted those two. You’re going to stop it
right now and you’re going straight back on the pills.’

Gally tugged the handle and tried to push the door open against the wind. Fleur lunged past her, the car snaking and a horn blowing behind her. The door slammed shut and she hit the central
locking button.

‘Why are you doing this to me?’ the girl cried.

‘I’m responsible for you. I’m doing it
for
you, not to you.’

She tried to reach the ignition key to turn the engine off but her mother slapped her hand hard. She flinched away, looked back, and there was the heart-punching sight of the receding ridge
through the back window. The village and him and love and safety and her future were all leaving her, disappearing backwards at eighty miles per hour, and she knew she could not stand it.

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ she said wretchedly.

‘No, I don’t. I need to get you home.’

‘But
that’s
my home,’ Gally wailed.

‘Home is where your family is. I’m your family, in case you’d forgotten.’

‘Can’t we just stop for a minute?’

‘I’m not stopping.’

Her mother accelerated again, pulling out to pass a truck. The speedo was touching ninety.

‘But I owe them.’

‘Who’s them?’

‘Ferney and . . . and Mike, for what I did.’

‘What did you do?’

Five miles back Gally could have answered that clearly, but they were still doing over eighty and her clarity was fading away at more than a mile a minute.

‘You saw, back there.’

‘I didn’t see anything that made sense. You tell me, what did I see?’

She couldn’t answer. Fleur glanced at her and she was frowning, her mouth working as if words were reaching her lips then turning back.

‘I don’t know any more,’ she whispered in the end, and all she did know was that something was dying inside her and she might never see him again and she didn’t even know
who it was she might not see again. Her head was full of ghosts and there was nobody to save her.

Fleur shot a quick glance at her daughter as she braked for the Ilchester roundabout, wondering if she would make another bid to open the door, but her eyes were closed. They opened again a few
miles further on and she jumped as her daughter screamed.

‘I killed him,’ she said. ‘I know I did. Edgar. I sent you off and you died. Sebbi, why did they take you? Ferney, don’t go. Keep away. You can’t have him. No,
don’t do that. It’s not your fault. It will be all right.’ Her mother looked at her in horror, seeing the girl’s head jerking from side to side and her eyes focusing far
away, then she dropped her voice as if talking to a child or maybe a pet. ‘Sebbi’s dead, poor Sebbi’s dead and Ferney too. Why should Gally stay? What’s to keep
me?’

‘Jo,’ said her mother. ‘Stop it. I don’t like this.’

‘Put it down, Rosie. Don’t be frightened, darling. Don’t be frightened. I’ll explain when you’re older.’ The girl began to sing in a harsh voice,

‘They can’t hurt us, brother,’ she called, and her voice was different again. ‘There’s only you and me. Leave him. Don’t hurt him.’

For the rest of that interminable journey, she alternated between eyes closed silence and sudden outbursts of what seemed to Fleur’s ears to be increasingly random nonsense, until at last
Fleur nosed the car into the garage at the Exeter flats and turned the engine off. Jo suffered herself to be led up the stairs by the arm, and when Fleur opened the door she went straight to her
bedroom. When her mother looked in five minutes later she was asleep with her clothes still on.

At eleven the next morning when Ali and Lucy rang the bell, Fleur beckoned them into the kitchen, holding a warning finger to her lips. ‘She’s in her
bedroom,’ she told them. ‘Can you go and see her?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Ali. ‘What’s she told you?’

‘Nothing at all,’ said Fleur. ‘She hasn’t said a word since she got back.’

‘What, you mean she’s refusing to talk to you?’

‘I wish it was as simple as that, but it’s more like she can’t talk any more. She looks at me as if she wants to but she just can’t. I don’t know what’s going
on, but you’re going to tell me, aren’t you? Right now.’

Fleur interrogated the two girls, making them describe the whole trip from the moment they left Exeter to the moment they came back.

‘Did anything else happen?’

‘Nothing that matters,’ Ali said. Lucy shook her head.

‘She didn’t bang her head or fall over or anything?’

‘No.’

‘Did you take any drugs? I won’t be angry. I just need to know.’

‘We drank wine round the fire at the dig. We had a beer in a pub when we were walking,’ said Lucy. ‘We looked old enough because of the dirt. She ate some mushrooms.’

‘Magic mushrooms?’

Lucy flinched. ‘No, the ordinary kind.’

‘I would say Jo’s psychotic,’ Fleur said. ‘She’s never been as bad as this before. It must be drugs of some sort. Come on. You have to tell me.’

‘I’ve never taken any drug,’ said Ali indignantly, ‘and I’m sure Jo hasn’t.’

Fleur swung round on Lucy, who turned pink. ‘What about you?’ she asked, and Lucy said, ‘I haven’t either,’ in a small and unconvincing voice. She was pink not
because she was lying but because she had recently tried to give her friends the impression that she was dangerously sophisticated in that direction.

Fleur immediately forgot her promise and became angry. Drugs were the only explanation, she said. She was going to get to the bottom of this. Did they have Jo’s backpack? she asked,
because she wanted to search it.

They had no idea where Jo’s backpack was. It was still sitting, quite forgotten, in the hayloft over the old barn.

‘Have you talked to a doctor?’ Ali asked to try to deflect her.

‘I’m going to,’ said Fleur, ‘oh yes, but that will have to wait until this afternoon. Then there’s the other thing – this boy Ferney and the man, Michael
Martin. You’ve hardly said anything about them.’

‘There’s not much to say. We only met the boy for ten minutes.’

Fleur thought of telling them about the arrest but decided to keep that to herself for the moment. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘I need you two because I can’t stay here all day.
I’ve got a site meeting to go to and the architect’s coming all the way from Bath.’

‘We can stay with her,’ said Ali.

‘No,’ said Fleur. ‘Definitely not. You will have to come with me, all three of you, then you two can look after her while I’m at the house. It’s down near the sea
so I can drop you at the beach. She can be as crazy as she likes on the beach. She’s in bed. I get her up but she goes straight back there as soon as I’m looking the other way. Can you
try? We need to go in half an hour.’

On the stairs Lucy hissed, ‘What a bitch. She thinks it was our fault.’

‘She’s just worried, that’s all.’

‘The only person she’s worried about is herself.’

They stood outside Jo’s bedroom door nervously until Lucy plucked up her courage and knocked lightly. ‘Jo,’ she called, ‘it’s only us.’

There was no answer so they pushed the door open. Neither of them wanted to go in but neither of them wanted to go back downstairs to face Fleur. Jo was lying on her bed, flat on her back with
her hands together in an attitude of prayer as if modelled in marble. She sat up when they came in and looked at them with hardly a hint of recognition. There were shadows under her eyes.

‘Jo? How are you feeling?’ Ali asked.

‘I killed him,’ said Jo in a tired voice.

‘You didn’t kill anybody. Come on, let’s get you up.’

‘You don’t know.’

‘I do know. I’ve known you for a long time.’

‘No you haven’t.’

‘I have to say you’re freaking me out a bit,’ said Lucy. ‘Can we talk about something else?’ But Jo shook her head.

Ali thrust clothes at her, orchestrated with a false and cheerful chatter, helping her put them on. Jo was clumsy in her movements. They led her downstairs, out to the car park, and with great
difficulty, because it was a two-door coupé, they persuaded her into the back of the BMW, next to Ali. The girls made brittle conversation and she showed no interest while Fleur drove in a
grim silence out of Exeter and south-west on the A38. At last they came to a narrow road, undulating south through gentle hills. Fleur kept looking at the time and was driving fast, braking hard
when they met anyone coming the other way.

‘They should widen this road,’ she complained.

‘My father says it takes sixty years to drive down here,’ said Ali, ‘because you have to go back to 1950. He says it’s the land that time forgot.’

‘Does he? He’s full of that sort of thing, is he?’

A long hill took them down to Slapton. The first few houses were a modern rim around the village, then older cottages crept inwards to a width intended for horses. A church stood on the right,
down the slope of a wide graveyard. Ahead, a dark stone tower thrust up from the trees. At the sight of it, something inside Jo seemed to switch on. She turned and leant over, staring at the tower
through the side window. The road passed into a narrow canyon of high stone walls, then twisted through right-angle bends. Jo turned and gazed at the tower through the rear window as it came back
into view.

‘I’ve been here,’ she said in a voice croaky with disuse.

‘Of course you have,’ said Ali encouragingly. ‘We had a picnic on the beach before exams. Slapton Sands, remember?’

‘No, I mean here. I’ve been here.’ She stared back until another gentle slope took the village out of sight, then slumped into her former torpor.

They came down to the junction with the coast road, into the great sweep of Start Bay. Fleur slewed to a halt in the car park where the American war memorial stood.

‘I’ll be an hour,’ she said. ‘I’ll pick you up here. Be ready.’

Jo opened the door by herself and the girls smiled as if a child had just learnt a new trick. Her mother drove away, back to the village.

‘Come on then,’ Lucy said. ‘Race you to the sea.’

They plunged down through the shingle towards the waves, Lucy out in front, then Ali shouted, ‘Wait! She’s not coming.’

It took them longer to scramble back up the steep shingle bank. They stared along the beach and couldn’t see her anywhere, then Ali turned to look inland. Jo was already far away, walking
fast back towards the village and the tower.

‘What’s she doing?’ Lucy asked in exasperation.

‘I haven’t a clue, but we’d better go after her.’

They had to wait for a line of summer tourists’ cars to go by, then run to catch her up, but even then she wouldn’t slow down or respond to them. At the outskirts of the village she
stopped dead and stared up. The black wreck of the massive tower loomed ahead above the walls, haloed by a dozen rooks wheeling and rasping.

‘It was new,’ she said in a tone of wonder.

‘What was?’ asked Lucy.

She pointed at the tower.

‘Well, of course it was, once. Everything was new once. I weighed six pounds three ounces once.’

Jo was looking all about her. There was no obvious way to get to the tower. She walked up a short drive to locked gates and rattled the handle, then she came back down to where the two girls
stood.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’s further up.’

‘What is?’

‘The way in,’ was all she answered and they followed her along the road.

‘What’s she doing?’ Lucy whispered.

‘I don’t know,’ Ali whispered back, ‘but she sounds different, more like she’s making sense.’

Jo turned into a narrow entry. A whitewashed pub stood in a yard at the end. Its name, The Tower Inn, was lettered in a gap between the upper windows. The tower itself hulked over it on the far
side of a high wall. Round turrets ran up its four corners. One still rose to its full height above the main walls but the other three had crumbled, broken off level with the ragged top of the
parapet. An elderly couple were sitting at a wooden table outside the pub.

‘It was here,’ said Jo.

‘What was?’

‘The Chantry. This was the guest house. We stayed here.’

‘Who did?’

‘Ferney and me.’

‘Ferney? The boy from the village? When?’

‘For the opening.’

‘Did they used to open it?’

The elderly couple had stopped drinking and were taking an obvious interest in the girls.

‘When it was new. When he built it.’

‘Oh, ha ha,’ said Lucy. ‘It must be at least three hundred years old.’

‘More like six hundred,’ said the woman at the table. ‘We’ve just been reading about it. This man Sir something or other built it in thirteen something.’

‘Thank you,’ said Lucy. ‘It’s always nice to get precise information. See, Jo? Thirteen something.’

‘It was an honour that he invited us. He let Ferney read it out. Ferney could read, you see.’

‘I should hope so,’ said Lucy. ‘If you came here with Ferney, why doesn’t your mum know? She’s never heard of him,’ but Jo just frowned and turned away.

Ali put her mouth up to Lucy’s ear. ‘Be gentle,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t put her off.’

Jo turned back to them. ‘He read it well,’ she said. ‘I was proud.’

‘What did he read?’ Ali asked in her encouraging voice.

‘Would you like to hear it?’

‘Yes, please.’

Jo looked at the ground, concentrating, then turned to stare back at the tower again and delivered her words to the stones.

‘Old men who stay behind, do not inflame the young with words of war,’ she began, and her voice had a rich depth and an intonation that was entirely unfamiliar to them. ‘The
ruin that you risk should be your own, not theirs. Young men take care. To make you fight they first must make you fear, then out of that shape hate.’