How I Wonder What You Are Page 6

  Link sighed, flicking a hand through his hair, then letting it drop, heavily. ‘Bax,’ he said, and Phinn wondered about his tone. It was wary, almost scared. ‘You need help, man.’

  ‘What?’ Phinn could sense what was coming. ‘What do you mean? Link?’

  A slow, steady, appraising look. ‘What is it? ’Cos I’ve never even seen you smoke the regular; which doesn’t leave much. Tabs? You dropping the acid like a sixties boy? Because the way you hauled ass out here I was expecting, I dunno, some kind of Battlestar Galactica moment, and then we’re here and …’ An expressive hand and a backwards tilted head indicated that the universe had let him down in some fundamental way. ‘Nothing. Nowt, as they say round here.’

  Phinn felt his flesh creep closer to his bones. ‘But – the lights, Link …’

  A slow headshake. ‘Sorry. You’re tripping, man. Something in that voddy, I reckon, something that shouldn’t have been there, that or someone’s cut your coffee with mushrooms. You want to watch yourself, Bax, because if you carry on like this there won’t be a job for you to go back to when you’ve written your great masterpiece. Sod the Uni research programme, you’ll be lucky to get in as night security at CERN.’

  * * *

  The chilly breeze that came at me through the thrown-open window scoured my skin and whipped the curtains into dog-tail flapping until I struggled the catch into its hole and shut the night out. I sat back down on the edge of my bed with my eyes aching.

  My legs were shaking. Two nights ago I’d hardly believed my eyes when I’d seen them swooping and looping above the high moor, leaping like so many prismatic fairies. But today I couldn’t put it down to a vivid dream or a sleepy-eyed mistake. I was wide awake and vibrating with curiosity as to what they might be. Low flying planes? But those would have droned their way through the skies like a squadron of wasps at an open-air doughnut eating competition.

  These lights had moved silently and surely been far too agile to be any kind of aircraft. Party lanterns? But the way they’d grouped together and then wheeled in patterns, kaleidoscopic breaking and reforming of colours, it had looked far too purposeful to have been simply windborne candles beneath paper globes.

  What were they? The mysterious Alice Lights that Caro had mentioned?

  I drew the curtains, leaving a thin slice of night visible at the window, just in case they should come back and climbed into bed. As usual, the village was completely quiet. A dog barked somewhere down the road and my next-door-but-one neighbours returned from a late-night shopping trip in their car with the squealing fan belt, but apart from that there was no sound.

  I hunched under the duvet and pined for London for a moment. Not just the noise … in fact, not the noise at all … but the solidity of knowing who I was and what I was doing with my life. My neat little flat, where the sun sloped in through the windows early in the morning rather than being blocked until breakfast at this time of year by that claustrophobic threat of bog and fell which lay surrounding the village like a sleeping dragon around its hoard. Tim, coming to pick me up in his snappy Aston Martin, making me feel like a Bond girl as we headed out of town to country pubs and chalk downs. The lunches, the awards dinners, the …

  … UFOs.

  The initials snapped into my head almost as if they’d been said aloud. I fumbled for the light switch and sat up. UFOs. That’s it. Not that I subscribed to the little green men theory, of course – why would anything fly halfway around the galaxy for the fun and stimulation of anally probing humans? No. But these things, these lights in the sky, they had to be something.

  I got out of bed again and peered out of the window. It was past midnight, almost everyone in the village was in bed, although a dim glow at Caro’s bedroom window told me she was awake and reading. A few houses further down a bright pink glimmer showed that a Barbie-princess had her nightlight fully activated. Nothing moved. Not so much as a cat prowling through shrubbery broke the darkness, although somewhere distant an owl hooted and was answered.

  The strange lights in the sky were gone completely. But surely if they were UFOs there would be something, some residual oddness, wouldn’t there? Not this manifest normality of bedside lamps and hunting birds; an atmospheric change or some kind of meteorological abnormality – rains of fish, perhaps?

  And then, as though the possibility of oddness drew him to mind, I thought of Phinn Baxter. He had something to do with UFOs. Was it coincidence him turning up here when these lights were appearing overhead? Or was it pure fluke, just an accident that he’d arrived in the village now?

  I snuck back under the covers where it was warm and tucked my feet up under the hem of my pyjama trousers to thaw them out, turning the whole thing over in my head. Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe the lights were something normal, something so everyday that anyone who did see them simply brushed the sighting off. I’d heard of UFO sightings being put down to marsh gas and, well, it was certainly marshy up on the high moor that the lights had appeared over.

  Marsh gas. Yes. Even though I only had the sketchiest idea of what that was, it was comforting to think that what I had seen had some normal explanation, and I snuggled back into the pillows and turned the lamp off, only to switch it back on when another thought struck me.

  Maybe he wasn’t here because of the lights – maybe they were here because of him.

  Chapter Seven

  I prepared carefully for my visit to Howe End. Bacon, check. Some fresh eggs – only slightly stolen from Caro’s bantams – check. A packet of shortbread biscuits that had languished at the back of my cupboard since Christmas but, hell, never mind, these were men weren’t they, and since when did men worry about things like ‘best before dates’ when they lived in a house that looked one step away from typhoid-central.

  I brushed my hair and put on a pair of black jeans. Even with my romantic track record and current aversion to anything with a penis, I still felt I owed it to my ego to appear presentable in the face of Phinn and Link’s above-standard looks. After a last mirror consultation, which reassured me that I still had my face on the front of my head, I pulled on my boots and headed along the street towards the farm.

  Riverdale village ran along both banks of the River Dove. It lay several miles from the nearest town, on an outflung arm of no-through road that cut into the moors then looped back onto the main A road. Narrow, one house wide on either side, and crowded together at the end nearest me, where the continuous run of what had been farm workers’ cottages were crammed together. The majority of the village was hemmed in, corralled at one end by the sheer rise of moorland and at the other by the medieval bridge that spanned the occasionally vicious river.

  Between bridge and moor lay a half acre of village green, more grey at this time of year. It housed the maypole, which rose from the grass mound like a huge, priapic excrescence with a weathercock on the top, a metal fox which swung with a rusty, grating noise to indicate wind direction. Beyond the bridge the houses spaced out more, were larger and more expensive and finally petered out altogether, leaving a stretch of fields between them and Howe End. The houses were all similar in style, if not in design, silver-grey brickwork presenting a stolid front to the world and eaves straight out of the gingerbread school of architecture; central front door and small windows all the better to keep out the wicked east wind.

  Howe End broke that mould by being made of red brick and set at a different angle to the rest of the buildings, as though trying to sidle through the village. It meant walking almost all the way around before I reached the door, moving beneath the elder and blackcurrant bushes whose branches hung with moisture and newly emerging leaves and where the air smelled of crushed greenery with a faint whiff of muck-spreader.

  In the absence of a knocker I pounded with a fist on the door. I heard the echoes dying away and wondered why anyone would choose to squat out here. There must be empty flats in York, or some old warehouse somewhere, and anyway, wasn’t squatting desperately out of fashion these d
ays?

  In the absence of any reply, I stepped out of the porch and shouted up at the front of the house. ‘Phinn! Link!’

  There was a sound above me and I looked up to see a window open squeakily slowly and a tousled dark head emerge. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s me, Molly.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s why I didn’t ask “who are you?”. I can see it’s you.’

  I stood further away from the porch so I could see him properly. He was leaning out of the window with both arms on the sill, hair careering around his face in the breeze and another day’s worth of stubble on his chin. It was annoying that he could look so good and so rough both at the same time. ‘I wanted to ask you something.’

  ‘All right.’ He showed no sign of movement other than to settle himself more comfortably against the window frame and to try ineffectively to swipe his hair from his eyes. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Can I come in?’ I jiggled my carrier bag. ‘I brought you some breakfast. Bacon and eggs?’

  ‘Mmmm. Bribery. I think I like it. Kick the door hard, it’s not locked, it just sticks.’ And the head vanished back inside the room to the squealing sound of the window being refastened.

  By the time I’d kicked and forced my way into the kitchen Phinn was coming through the other door, yawning and bedraggled in jogging bottoms and fleece top. ‘What time is it, anyway?’ He stretched, the top rode up to reveal a couple of inches of flat stomach with a sketching of hair covering it, and I suddenly became very interested in the contents of my bag.

  ‘About ten.’

  ‘Early call then?’ He wasn’t wearing his glasses, and I suddenly noticed his eyes, very black and slightly amused.

  ‘Phinn, this is farming territory. Around here ten is nearly lunchtime. Anyway here’s the eggs and bacon, I’m no good with naked flames, so you’d better do the primus thing.’

  He raised an eyebrow but lit the primus and hauled around in a few cupboards until he found a frying pan. It looked a bit sooty and we both stared at it for a moment.

  ‘Anything you’ve not caught as a result of sleeping on the floor in this place is probably something you’re immune to by now, so I say go for it,’ I said and laid the bacon in a single layer over the base of the pan.

  He rested both arms behind him on the worktop. ‘Okay. Bacon is cooking, therefore now is a good time.’

  ‘Good for what?’ I wiped both hands down my jeans and left smears of bacon fat on both thighs.

  ‘You said you had something you wanted to ask me?’ There was something arresting in the way he tipped his head to one side and looked out at me from under the resulting flap of hair. ‘Or was that a false pretence to get into my house? Because, you know, bacon on its own would have been enough.’

  ‘I wanted … last night … the lights …’

  It was as far as I got. Phinn’s face went very still as though he was inwardly processing information, then his eyes flickered and went to my face, scanning it slowly.

  ‘You saw them?’ He almost exhaled the words.

  ‘Yes, I was looking over …’ But I got no further before Phinn dragged me against him and hugged me so close that I could tell he wasn’t wearing underwear beneath those joggers and that his arms were surprisingly strong.

  ‘Thank you.’ He spoke almost into my ear. ‘Thank you, Molly, you amazing woman.’

  My nose was squashed into his chest bone and there was an almost obscene amount of bobbing about going on around my navel but I stood still and let myself be hugged. It was rather nice, even given that he smelled of dusty damp linen and I could see from the wrists that protruded from his sleeves that his arms were covered in goose pimples, not at all like being hugged by Tim had been. Phinn was taller, skinnier, it was like being embraced by a plank of wood covered in knotted ropes. But still oddly pleasant.

  ‘Does this mean you did see them?’ I managed to get enough air between us to ask. ‘Or am I just generally amazing?’

  ‘Oh, I think yes to both.’ He raised his head so that he no longer spoke directly into my skin and the tiny, impatient little hairs that had spiked along the back of my neck relaxed. ‘Above the moor over there, yes?’ One arm let me go and pointed towards the high peak. ‘Although, if there were two incidents, I might have to go for a lie down.’

  Trying not to make an issue out of it, I slid a slow step back. ‘About midnight. A load of tiny lights, moving through the sky. Like … like they were checking us out and then heading over to the coast.’

  ‘And the coast is …?’ He let me go, unresisting.

  ‘East of here. That way.’ I pointed now.

  He nodded slowly, pushing both hands up to snatch his hair out of his eyes. ‘That’s what I saw too, but Link couldn’t see anything.’ His expression was distracted. ‘And you said “again”. The lights came again. When did they come before?’

  ‘A couple of days ago … the night before I found you up on the moor.’

  ‘Yesssss!’ He jumped and punched the air and the front of his jogging bottoms bounced around as though he’d got a couple of water-filled balloons down there. ‘Oh, Molly, this is fantastic!’

  ‘But why couldn’t Link see them? They were – well, not clear as day, but pretty clear. And you couldn’t mistake them for stars or anything, they were moving.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He was back to pushing his hair around again, rubbing the back of one hand over his cheek as though gauging the stubble depth. ‘I don’t know, Molly, but I sure as hell want to find out.’

  A sudden crackle from the direction of the primus made us both leap across the kitchen to rescue the charring bacon. While Phinn piled it onto plates, I fried four of the bantam eggs, tipping the lot on top of the bacon. Two rather tinny looking forks came from a drawer and we perched ourselves on the worktop to eat.

  ‘Where’s Link? Isn’t he going to want some of this?’ I spoke with my mouth full and gestured with my fork.

  Phinn gave a one-shouldered shrug and carried on shovelling egg and bacon down like a starving waif, saying nothing. His hair fell over his face and hid his expression.

  ‘You’ve not killed him and buried him out in the paddock, have you?’ That got me a half-smile.

  ‘Apparently he’s hiding out here from some woman. Silly sod’s probably got himself engaged to another reality TV star and he’s trying to lie low until it all blows over. He’s done that before.’ Phinn looked around at the bleak kitchen. ‘Although this is lying so low that it’s practically subterranean. But we had a bit of an argument last night. When he couldn’t see the lights, he accused me of … I dunno … doing drugs, I guess, simplest explanation.’

  I thought back to our first meeting, his shaky grasp of reality, his near transparency. ‘I’m assuming you’re not.’

  He raised his head and looked at me, a stern, direct look. ‘Reality got a bit harsh for me and my doctor prescribed me antidepressants. I stopped those, and started drinking more than was good, but that does not make me some kind of substance abuser, Molly. All I’m doing is blunting the edges, making it easier to sleep. Definitely not shooting junk or smoking crack, all right?’

  ‘You don’t need to justify yourself to me, Phinn.’

  Another direct look, which was quickly dropped back to the rapidly clearing plate of bacon. ‘I know.’ He scraped the last of the egg onto his fork, licked it, and dropped the plate into the sink. ‘Okay, so. Lights. Tell me what you know.’

  I gave him a brief rundown of my experience so far with the lights in the sky. ‘I asked Caro and she just muttered something about Alice Lights, which sounds like some folk story. I did try asking the people in the shop but … well, they’re a bit odd and they tried to sell me a packet of cream crackers. So no one else in the village seems to have noticed anything. Except you?’

  I let the question hang in the air between us for a second. Phinn was staring over my head out of the kitchen window. Marks against the walls showed where blinds had once hung but, like the furniture, they w
ere now nothing but shapes of brighter paintwork and scraped woodwork. Eventually he dragged his eyes from wherever they were focused and back into the room to meet mine.

  ‘That day you found me …’

  ‘I was riding up there because I wanted to see if there was any trace or in case they’d left anything behind. Nearly wet myself when I found you, I thought you might have been …’ I let my words trail off – he could tell what I meant. I could see it in his face.

  ‘You thought I might have been some alien invader that they’d left behind?’ A hollow kind of laugh. ‘That’s quite funny, y’know, Molly. Because that’s why I went up there. I mean, okay, I was blasted out of my skull, but I knew what I was doing. I wanted …’ Now it was his turn to tail off, a gentle blush creeping up his pale skin, tinting his cheekbones with the first signs of healthy colour I’d seen on his face.

  ‘You wanted them to take you.’ The sudden realisation made my heart hurt. He’d wanted to be abducted. ‘So why did you take off your clothes?’

  A sudden spreading of long, curled fingers along the granite top, a digital shrug. ‘Thought they might … that it might persuade them to pick me up. I was very drunk, after all.’

  My insides squeezed and I touched his hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Whatever happened to you to make you like this, it must have been dreadful for you to want to leave the planet.’

  A slow headshake which made his hair brush against the collar of his fleece with a soft sweeping sound. ‘A usual story. Wife left me, I didn’t handle it well.’

  Now I could see the faint tracery around his finger where a wedding ring had once seated itself against his flesh. ‘I’m sorry.’