How I Wonder What You Are Read online

  So there was my choice. Pull myself together, flaunt my past experience and stand a chance of making a living or keep my head down and starve. No, not starve, Caro would never see that happen. She’d already offered to let me move into her place, work in the stables in return for my keep if I had to give up the cottage, and a tiny part of me was tempted.

  But another part of me wasn’t. The part that knew the whole of my life in Riverdale was only temporary. The part of me that was driven by the ambition to write, seriously write. To unpack facts that so many people would just ignore, to examine, understand. The part of me that had pricked up its ears when I’d heard that Phinn was an astrophysicist, and had surged to the surface when Link had thrown in his comment about the UFOs.

  The lights. Maybe he had seen them too.

  Stan stumbled and I almost rolled off over his head. Even given his total lack of temperament of any kind, this inattentive riding could be dangerous, so I pulled myself together and shortened up the reins. I forced him into an energetic trot until we’d circled the dale and were moving along the ridge overlooking Howe End, where, to Stan’s relief, I let him mooch back into his customary amble and then drew him to a standstill.

  Below us the farmhouse stood bathed in full sunlight. Although the front was screened from my view by the undergrowth that had concealed my approach that morning, the back of the house faced onto an open paddock, currently grazed by half a dozen sheep which had broken through the hedge from the next-door field. In this open space I could see two men standing.

  Their figures were indistinct at this distance but, since one was dark and the other fair, I would have taken any bets that it was Phinn and the mysteriously-named Link. A vanishing puff of grey showed that one of them was smoking a cigarette and they were facing each other, seemingly in serious debate. I strained my ears but couldn’t hear more than tones, changes in volume or the odd, staccato laugh.

  I let Stan lower his head to the grass and watched the men. Tall and skinny, short and slightly chubby, it looked like the number 10 having a falling out. There was clearly an argument going on, the cigarette trail came and went, accompanying upraised arms and the voices came more distinctly for a moment before descending down the register again. After a moment the shorter figure moved a few paces back and the streak of dark, which was obviously Phinn, disappeared into the house, punctuated a moment later by the bullet-like sound of a slammed door.

  Link stayed put for a minute. The smoke died away, I saw the bright flare of a lighter, and then Phinn was back. Smoke was replaced, voices raised again, then fell to a mutter, the figures moved closer together for a moment as though confidences were being exchanged and I saw Link reach out, whether the gesture ended in a blow or comfort I couldn’t be sure. Beneath me Stan moved and I had to gather the reins to turn him back around, and by the time I had him facing the right way again, the two men were gone. Back inside the house? Or had they walked around the outside and gone elsewhere? The sheep moved, jerkily, through the overgrown gardens, occupying the silence that had fallen, and I wondered what the men had been arguing about.

  * * *

  ‘Well … sort of spying, I suppose,’ I said, laying the table. ‘But they were out in the open, anyone could have seen them.’ I opened the oven and took out a stew, carefully manhandling it to the table wrapped in an overlarge tea towel. ‘I just happened to be passing.’

  Caro screwed up her face. ‘Yeah, anyone that happened to be on an old track that no one uses, whilst they were in a private garden – course you were spying.’ She plonked a jacket potato onto her plate and helped herself to a ladleful of the steaming stew. ‘This smells great, by the way. What is it, chicken? Mmm, tarragon in there too.’

  ‘I found a clump sprouting in the garden.’

  Caro went still. ‘Oh. Yes. Dad was a great gardener, I’d forgotten. Herb patch, everything. Funny how things like that slip your mind, isn’t it?’

  The cottage had belonged to Caro’s father, who had died two years before. She’d refitted the place, intending to use it as a summer let, and then I’d come along.

  ‘Hey. He’d be glad it wasn’t going to waste, I’ll bet,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Yes, he would.’ The sadness crowded onto her face, drawing her mouth down. ‘Still miss the old bugger, y’know. Lived in the village all his life. He’d have been able to tell you about the ghosts at Howe End. Born storyteller, he was. Every night he’d sit on the end of my bed and come out with some tale of a traveller lost in the fog or the mysterious noises from a deserted barn and then my mum would come up and slap him silly for scaring me so much I couldn’t sleep. He wrote a book once, my dad, about the folk tales of Riverdale, still got it around somewhere.’ Her eyes misted for a second, then she shook her head. ‘Ah, probably better off where he is now. At least he’ll be warm.’

  Briskly she sorted out her cutlery and cut a long swathe of butter to put on her potato. ‘So? What were they arguing about? And who was naked this time?’

  ‘Both dressed, I think.’ I gave her a quick rundown of the lack of events at Howe End. ‘Don’t you think we’re a bit weird getting so caught up in what really isn’t any of our business, Caro?’

  ‘Mmmmf.’ Her mouth full, Caro waved a knife at me. ‘Firstly, it is, kind of, our business, being as how you pulled him down off Blackly Moor without a stitch on, and secondly, is there really anything on television these days?’

  ‘Clearly not.’

  We ate silently for a bit, Caro obviously relishing a meal she hadn’t had to cook herself and me thinking.

  ‘You’re very quiet, Molly. Falling into daydreams about the gorgeous young men at Howe End? Because if you want any advice in that direction, you know I’ll be only too pleased to help you out, don’t you?’

  ‘I’m intrigued, that’s all. What the hell is a doctor of astrophysics doing squatting in a derelict farmhouse and having arguments with a bloke who has turned up out of nowhere?’

  ‘Mmmm.’ Caro chewed for a moment. ‘Particularly when said astrophysicist looks like an underwear model. Lovers’ tiff?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘Okay then. Why are you so intrigued by him?’

  I waved a piece of chicken. ‘Just as I was leaving his friend, Link, said something about UFOs, something that made Phinn twitchy. He’d been quite nice to me up till then, but he nearly shut the door on my head he was so keen to get rid of me as soon as UFOs were mentioned. That is intriguing.’

  ‘If you say so.’ Caro helped herself to seconds of the stew. ‘This is really very good, Moll. Where did you learn to cook like this? London?’

  ‘Yeah, Tim sent me on a residential cordon bleu course when we got engaged. Think he was sick of eating burned boiled eggs to be honest and wanted to be able to have dinner parties where the guests didn’t have to play “guess the meat”.’ I sighed. ‘So there were some good things to come out of that relationship, like an edible chicken stew, for example.’ Or maybe he’d wanted to get me out of the way. The realisation was new and made me grit my teeth against the current forkful of chicken. Bastard.

  ‘You don’t talk about him much. Does it still hurt? I mean, you broke up suddenly, it must have been hard, bad enough for you to run all the way to Yorkshire without knowing anyone here and bad enough for you not to want anyone to find out where you’re living.’ Caro dropped her eyes to her plate, almost as though she felt ashamed of probing so much. This was the most she’d ever asked me about the relationship.

  ‘It was … there’s nothing to say. We were engaged, we fell out. I came up here because he’d never think to look for me anywhere this far from a Waitrose.’ I tried to keep my tone breezy enough to prevent any more questions, but Caro was clearly on a roll.

  ‘So it was bad. Otherwise you’d at least have let him know where you were, in case he wanted to come grovelling back on bended knee with four hundred red roses and the entire diamond output of one large South African mine.’

  I tried to im
agine Tim grovelling, and failed. ‘It wasn’t that kind of relationship,’ I said.

  Caro gave a hollow laugh. ‘Believe me, sweetie, at base they’re all that kind of relationship.’ She dug deep into her potato. ‘So, what was he like then, your Tim, if he wasn’t the kind of man to beg you to come back to him?’

  Despite myself I smiled. ‘Clever. Funny.’

  ‘Older?’

  I flinched. ‘Oh, yes. Twenty years older.’

  ‘Weren’t they all though? Any bloke you’ve ever mentioned, you’ve given the impression that he had one foot in a cheap Ferrari and the other one in the grave.’ Caro chewed at me.

  ‘Have I? I suppose … well, yes, men my age never really appealed to me.’

  Caro grinned. ‘Figures. Your mum brought you up on her own, didn’t she? So, there you go, father-figure complex.’

  I swallowed a lump of something that made me start to cough and choke and it took Caro five minutes of patting, slapping and a half-hearted attempt at the Heimlich manoeuvre before I could speak again, and I managed to restart the conversation on less inflammatory topics.

  Chapter Six

  The nights were the worst, Phinn mused, tipping the dregs of the bottle down his throat, feeling the burn numbing into acceptance. Nights were shitty when you were on your own. He bent his knees up until he could rest his elbows on them and scooted along the floor until his back rested against the bare plastered wall behind him.

  The house was quiet. Link must have taken off again. Or found himself a room to sleep in, bloody place was big enough. Phinn tipped the bottle again but it was definitely empty this time and the mouth of it clattered against his teeth.

  ‘Bugger.’

  He climbed to his feet using the wall as a support and stood there for a second, breathing heavily. He’d taken his glasses off so the room was all rounded edges and tucked in corners, with the alcohol making things a fizz and blur of shadows and he swayed for a second, fighting the urge to walk out.

  Here is where it happens. Here is where the answer is.

  Phinn Baxter hated himself. But he figured that was all right because he hated pretty much everyone else too, and huge chunks of the planet with small exceptions. Scarborough. Scarborough was nice, his parents had taken him there on holiday once. Mauritius. And that girl with the blue eyes, Polly … no, Molly. Molly put the kettle on. She was nice too. Nice. Was that all he could say these days, that some things were nice?

  He whirled away from the wall and stomped over to the low-ledged window sunk into the stonework like a deep-set eye. He crouched down and leaned his arms against the sill looking out over the blackness of the moors behind the house. Nice. When once things had been magical, stupendous, astounding, breathtaking, now they all blended, swirled and sank into the greyness of ‘nice’.

  He rested his forehead against the glass. Cool. Outside the window, the March wind whipped through the branches of the elder trees, flapped the bushes like a careless hand but left the distant hump of dark moorland untouched. He imagined the wind passing over its hunched surface like a caress, stroking the timeless contours like a lover and then cursed himself for his rising erection; useless, unwanted.

  The sudden bang of the door made him jump and turn awkwardly back into the room.

  ‘Oy, Bax mate, what you doing in here?’ Link came in and stared at him, head on one side. ‘As if I didn’t know.’

  ‘I’m … nothing. Leave me alone.’ Phinn’s mouth felt thick, his tongue too wide. ‘’M thinking.’

  ‘Yeah, I can see that.’ With a sigh Link subsided onto the reinflated air bed, which gave a farty groan and lost another few pounds per square inch. ‘Bax, look, I thought we had this out this afternoon. Drink solves nothing. You’ve already found that anti-Ds solve nothing. Have you forgotten everything I’ve taught you these past few months, young Padawan?’

  ‘Knock off the Star Wars refs, Link. Astrophysicist, not freak.’

  Link shook his head. ‘So. One screwed up relationship and you take to the bottle like vodka’s going to save you? You really think drinking yourself stupid is the answer to anything?’

  ‘I am not,’ enunciated Phinn carefully, ‘an alcoholic.’

  ‘I know that. If you were, you wouldn’t get pissed. Not on half a bottle of voddy, anyhow.’

  Phinn could feel Link’s stare through the darkness. ‘I don’t know what else to do,’ he said finally. He could feel the alcohol draining from him, its effects slowly falling away to leave his brain heavy and his heart solidified in his chest. ‘Everything … everything hurts.’

  ‘That’s how you know you’re alive, Bax.’ Link stood up, ostentatiously brushing himself down. ‘You just need something to live for, that’s all.’

  ‘I’ve got something.’ Phinn’s voice sounded wrong, even to his own ears. Sounded sulky, self-justifying. ‘I’m working here, Link. Research.’

  ‘Research.’ The disbelief in Link’s voice was so strong it should have burned like acid through the air.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Into …?’ Link waved a hand. ‘Deaths from boredom? Rising incest rates? The fact that everyone living in the countryside has evolved an inability to digest Starbucks coffee?’

  ‘I’m going to write a book.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? And what might this mythical “book” be about? Because there’s not a lot of quantum theory going on in rural Yorkshire, as far as I know. Not a lot of dark matter being investigated, unless it’s the locals poking shit with sticks.’

  ‘Actually there’s a dark matter lab at Boulby mine. Went there on a trip when I was taking my A levels.’

  ‘Aged about eight.’ Link sounded sour. ‘Come on, you’re a sodding genius, we both know that. And you’ve decided the best way to use all that brainpower is to hole yourself away in this … this … swamp and write a book? You could be, I dunno, curing cancer or developing star-drive or something and you’re here, drinking yourself into a fog every night. If you’ve knocked off taking the anti-Ds, replacing them with the fun juice isn’t exactly cleaning up your act, you know. At least the pills just made you boring, alcohol makes you slur and boring. Suppose I should be grateful though, I don’t have to listen to it if it all comes out “fnnfffnnnn”. I can just nod and smile.’

  Phinn turned back to the window again. ‘I’ve taken leave. Giving myself twelve months to write a book and after that …’ He rested his forearms on the ledge again and gazed deep into the night. ‘After that I’ll go do something worthy, all right? Cut me some slack here, Link, it was a bad time, and I never asked you to come looking for me.’

  ‘Yeah, I know that but—’

  ‘So why are you still here? You’ve found me, you’ve seen I’m alive. What more is there? Are you waiting to see whether I’ve finally learned to juggle?’

  ‘Hey, don’t flatter yourself. I’m not just here for you. I’m lying low for a bit. Woman trouble, you know the kinda thing, and this place is on the map as “here be dragons”, so no bunny boiler’s going to come looking for me round here. It’s like compassionate leave.’

  Phinn glared at him. ‘From what? You haven’t got a job to take leave from!’

  ‘Hey, millionaires need compassion too. It’s not my fault I’ve got a trust fund, is it? I’m taking leave from women. No more women for me.’ He looked down at his watch. ‘Right, now that’s over, where are the women?’

  Something caught Phinn’s eye and he twisted his head to look sideways, where the shoulder of moor slumped down, curving into the dale. A light. A bright speck, almost like a star but brighter, moving. Moving fast. ‘Where’s the camera?’

  ‘There’s one on my phone if you—’

  ‘No, the video camera. We’ll need it, and the Canon with the 50mm lens. It’s over there in that box. Come on, hurry.’

  There was a knot in his stomach, that tight, wound feeling as though he was somehow connected to the light in the sky by an invisible thread and it was tugging at him, pulling him out into the darknes
s to follow it.

  His ankle wrenched as he missed his footing but the alcohol prevented any pain messages getting to his brain. Rationally, he knew that he was tearing his hands on bracken as he used its tough stems to haul himself up the hill behind the house. His nails split and his boots slid on the peaty soil but he didn’t care, wasn’t even aware of the pain, keeping his eyes on that spot high in the sky where the lights were merging now. Dancing, swooping, then breaking off and moving away as he dragged the camera from its box and tried to focus.

  ‘Get the video on them, Link!’ he shouted. ‘Try to get the house in, for scale! They must be bloody enormous!’

  Beautiful. So serene and lovely, riding the air like messages from deep space. He found he was lowering the camera to watch as the lights separated, whirled once more then formed into stately constellations before waltzing decorously away behind the curve of the moorland. The knot in his stomach had moved to his throat, his eyes stung with tears and he had to fight the urge to lie down on that heather covered mound and sob like a child, although whether with relief that they’d returned or disappointment that they’d left again, he couldn’t have said.

  ‘Come on, Baxter,’ he whispered to himself, using the newly felt pain from broken nails and bleeding palms to pull himself together. ‘Objective. You are objective. You are a scientific observer not a teenage girl. So for goodness sake, don’t cry.’

  ‘Bax?’ Link’s voice floated up to him from somewhere down in the field below. ‘Where’ve you gone, man?’

  ‘Here. Hang on.’ With an effort Phinn swung himself around, noticing that the track where he stood was broken and torn with hoofmarks, and that the churned peat had covered his jeans to the knee with crumbly smears. ‘Coming.’

  He threw himself back down the path of bashed bracken that he’d ripped on his way up. ‘Did you see them? Did you get film? It’s incredible, just …’ He arrived between two stunted rowan trees which delineated the edge of the Howe End property, bursting from between them and making Link jump, ‘… incredible,’ he repeated, trailing off as he noticed the way Link stood, camera trailing from his hand, the ‘standby’ light not even winking in readiness. ‘Link?’