How I Wonder What You Are Page 7

  His fingers slid out from under mine and clenched back into pockets. ‘Yeah, well. It happens. I just wasn’t expecting it, that’s all.’

  I slid myself a little further away along the stone worktop and pursed my lips. ‘Would it have been any better if you had?’

  A sigh. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’ His voice was quiet. Almost dangerous. A light year from the man who’d hugged me in relief. ‘Suddenly another planet looked like a good bet.’

  ‘Wow. Little green men, all that probing?’

  A flash of smile, not aimed at me. More as though he was smiling at the memory of a memory. ‘If there is anything out there, it’s more likely to be a super advanced kind of pure intelligence than some bipedal life form with a fascination for shoving bits of metal up unguarded orifices.’

  ‘So you don’t believe in UFOs.’ I felt suddenly betrayed. All his effusiveness when he knew I’d seen the lights too, and it turned out that he didn’t believe in them any more than, say, Link.

  ‘Molly, I don’t even believe in humans right now.’ Phinn glanced at me and seemed to see something in my face, my disappointment perhaps. ‘Hey, UFOs aren’t called that any more either, it’s UAP now. Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, which, for the record, definitely exist. The term covers everything from earthlights to meteorological abnormalities – anything in the sky that can’t be easily recognised.’

  Ah. It hadn’t been a comment on my gentleness the other night, then. He’d been saying ‘UAP’, not ‘you ape’.

  ‘Is that what our lights are? UAPs?’

  He chewed the side of a finger. ‘Do you know what they were?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Neither do I. Think that makes them UAPs and brings them right up under my area of interest.’

  A sudden smatter of rain struck the window and made us both jump. ‘I suppose I ought to get back,’ I said, surprised at my own reluctance. Howe End was cold and draughty, and we were sitting on a freezing granite slab because of the lack of furniture. Phinn wasn’t exactly Mister Chatty, and yet I was dragging my feet over leaving. I must have been more relieved than I thought to finally be able to discuss those mysterious lights.

  ‘Okay.’ Phinn hopped off the worktop. ‘Thanks for the bacon and eggs.’

  ‘If I see the lights again, should I …?’

  ‘Get pictures. An ordinary camera will do, but try and get something in the foreground so we can make an assessment of scale.’ He was moving around the kitchen, distracted, looking for something. ‘Or a video recording, if you’ve got the technology, but put a timer on-screen, just a clock would be fine.’

  ‘Why?’ I slithered rather gracelessly onto the flagstones of the floor and the cold immediately bit through my boots to my toes.

  ‘Because we’re going to be accused of faking it,’ his tone was matter-of-fact. ‘Harder to fake if the pictures are sequential. Ah, there they are.’ He hooked his glasses out of the dark corner and pushed them on, instantly gaining a layer of insulation against the world. His eyes still had a slightly haunted expression but it was milder and more quizzical than it had been when they’d been darkly naked.

  ‘But I wouldn’t fake pictures, that would be stupid. Why say I saw lights if I didn’t?’

  Phinn leaned against the hideous iron range and looked me up and down. ‘Innocence. I so rarely see it, sometimes I don’t recognise it when I do.’ Then his gaze travelled down to his own feet. ‘Bugger, this floor is cold. I need some clothes on.’ And without another word he walked out of the room and I heard his bare feet stepping slowly up the wooden staircase that led from the hallway to the first floor.

  I stood awkwardly for a few seconds, then slipped out through the still partially open front door and breathed deeply of the rainy air outside.

  * * *

  Phinn watched her go. From his room above the porch he had a pretty good view all along the side of the house, so he saw her stop and turn and frown up at the gable end, almost as though she could see him poised there in the dusty darkness. But then she shrugged and her slight figure was swallowed by the shadows behind the overgrowth of elder. He blew out a breath that made the cobwebs swing and shoved his hands into his pockets.

  There was an emotion moving around in the back of his brain, he didn’t know what it was, didn’t even know if it had a name, but it was burning its way through enough synapses to make him suspect that his eyes might be glowing. She’s seen the lights.

  The untidy woman with the reckless hair had shared something he thought was his own madness. When she’d described her experience, he’d had the unnerving feeling that they were the only two people in the world who had understood some fundamental truth; that magic had happened, the world had changed just a little, and they were the only ones who’d seen.

  He blew out again and an irritated spider rotated in its web, spinning its way up and down a single thread like a machine running on liquid silver. She saw them too. He found his mouth pulling itself into a grin, an expression so unaccustomed on his face that his cheeks literally ached with the effort. Whatever else you might be, Baxter, you aren’t a nutjob. Or, if you are, then she’s one too and at least you’ll have company in that padded room.

  ‘What are you smirking about to yourself in the dark, Bax?’ Link’s voice made him jump. The grin fell away, leaving what he feared to be a surprised grimace. ‘Your psychiatric ward called, they want their straitjacket back. Did Molly come by? I noticed two plates in the sink down there, so either you had a visitor or you are beginning to externalise your inner geek to a dangerous degree.’

  ‘Thought you’d gone back to your collection of Pot Noodles and alphabeticised joints-through-the-ages.’

  ‘Bax, you underestimate my capacity for self-punishment.’ Link came over to the window and leaned against the wall next to him. ‘I got the bus into Pickering. Well, I say a bus, it’s more like a trolley powered by a large dog and run by Hobbits, but, hey, it got me into the town.’

  There was a moment’s silence which contained the ghost of a conversation in which Link apologised for calling Phinn a junkie and Phinn, in his turn, apologised for getting so shitty about it. ‘Why the bus? You’ve got a perfectly good, if rather ostentatiously over-priced car, haven’t you?’

  Link gave a sideways nod, acknowledging the overt fact, as well as the unspoken apology. ‘Yeah, with a petrol tank the size of a fifty pence piece. She’s sitting in the red, and I didn’t want to get out there and find that the nearest petrol station is in Doncaster. Thought I’d suss things out on the ridiculously expensive public transport first – hell’s teeth, Bax, you could run a Bugatti for the price of those bus tickets!’

  ‘I remember Pickering. Nice little place, got a castle, yes?’

  ‘Oh yeah, I was forgetting you used to hang here when you were … I was going to say “a kid” but you were never really a kid, were you? Just smaller then. Yep, still got the castle, I guess eight hundred years of history doesn’t go down easy. I bought some food. Oh, and there was this camping shop, so I bought some torches, proper sleeping bags, stuff like that. They didn’t have any solution to the shower problem though.’ Link wrinkled his nose. ‘And, I hate to say this my friend, but you are beginning to smell a bit ripe.’

  ‘Molly saw the lights.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  Phinn turned to face his friend. ‘Last night. Molly saw them too.’

  Link put his hands up. ‘Oh, hey, man, you didn’t … you know, persuade her, did you? Don’t forget that I’ve seen you in action. One flutter of those eyelashes and the girls will say they saw Bigfoot and ET getting down and heavy.’

  Phinn simply raised an eyebrow and waited.

  ‘Okay, so there were lights. Invisible lights that mysteriously only you and the hot chick down the road could see. I don’t know how you did it, and I hope she’s not a serious screw-up, but …’ and Link slapped Phinn on the shoulder, ‘… gotta hand it to you, man. Way to get the girls.’

  Phinn opened his mo
uth to reply but Link was already walking out of the room, heading for the staircase. ‘If you’re determined to keep playing the Hermit of Nowheresville, then at least we can do it in a bit of style.’ Link continued talking, Phinn suspected so as not to give him a conversational opportunity. ‘I got some very funny looks bringing this lot back, but then there was a guy on the bus holding two chickens, so I guess they kind of do funny looks by default around here.’

  Phinn gave up. Even stretching his memory back as far as it would go he couldn’t remember a time when he and Link hadn’t been friends and it looked as though it was going to take more than a nervous breakdown and a lack of mod cons to shake him off. ‘Yeah, all right,’ he said wearily. ‘How the hell did he get two chickens on the bus anyway?’

  ‘One under each arm.’ Link passed him a box. ‘Dynamo torches. Get winding.’

  Chapter Eight

  I scanned the subject matter of my bookshelves in search of inspiration. ‘Walks around the moors – done it. The old lime workings – done those; the wildlife of North Yorkshire – done the bits of it that stood still long enough. Bugger it, there must be something I haven’t written about already.’

  Most of the books had belonged to Caro’s late father, but the rest were mine, dragged with me from London in the back of my old Micra, whose wheels had almost grooved the tarmac all the way, weighted down as it was with my possessions and my heart. I hadn’t even known where I was headed, I’d just pointed the car at the first motorway I’d found and kept driving until darkness forced me off the road and I’d found myself in Riverdale. A September evening, with the dusk lying thick and heavy in the dale, the air sodden with the smell of old leaves and peaty water and no sound but that of the river scouring its way towards a distant sea.

  I’d parked up, walked into the pub and almost instantly fallen into conversation and then friendship with Caro. A cottage, a horse and a sort-of job writing articles for Mike had all followed, and I’d never questioned any of it, apart from the pathetic level of income.

  I felt, I had to admit to myself, a little bit like one of those bugs trapped in amber. Fossilised in beauty, fixed in a setting so unbreakably lovely that it made my heart ache to look at sometimes. But still trapped.

  The phone rang and I glanced over at the caller display with the usual pang that caught me in the back of the throat. Mike. I picked up.

  ‘Just callin’ to ask if you’ve settled on an article yet?’ Mike’s ‘Norf Lundun’ accent was completely assumed because he was from Weybridge and had been to Oxford University. I think he did it to ‘put people at their ease’, which really only worked if you were at ease in the company of cockney wide-boys and the cast of EastEnders, but still made me momentarily homesick. He was a bright and eager magazine publisher who also ran a shop for extreme sports enthusiasts, survival courses in the wildernesses of Hampstead Heath and had a long-suffering wife and three, equally hyperactive, children.

  He’d expressed disbelief when I’d first mooted the idea of writing ‘outdoor’ articles for him but, thankfully, hadn’t asked questions and had bought said articles regularly and without fuss. ‘Only I’m ’avin’ a bit of a crisis ’ere, love.’

  ‘What sort of crisis?’ I felt my heart start to sink. Times were hard, I knew that, and the circulation for Miles to Go wasn’t exactly stratospheric. Was Mike about to fold the magazine? I held my breath.

  ‘Advertisers mostly. Bastards, all of ’em. Also, Derry’s bust ’is leg, laid up in ’ospital in traction, so ’e won’t be turnin’ anythin’ in for a bit. Any chance you could come up with a real cracker for me, love? Fill a bit of space? I could get some other freelancers to chip in, but I knows your work and you never gives me much to do, edit-wise. Well, I suppose you wouldn’t would you, you bein’ an award-winner an’ all.’

  And then I felt it, the stabbing pain somewhere underneath my heart. The agony of knowing that there was so much more than this, this column in a magazine no one read, this tiny cottage in a village no one had heard of. This tiny life. It had once been so much bigger, reached so high that I thought I could touch the stars.

  ‘There’s always UFOs,’ I said, hopefully. ‘Very popular. And I’ve got some first-hand experience.’

  A pause and I heard Mike sucking his teeth. ‘Got any pictures?’

  ‘Well, no, not as yet, but—’

  ‘Y’see love, what it is, the Fortean Times ’ave all that guff sewn up. Not really our brief, see.’

  ‘Oh.’ I let my eyes roam the shelves again. ‘I don’t suppose we cover busty blondes being saved by dinner-jacketed heroes either, do we?’ Caro’s father had had a very seventies blockbuster approach to literature, it seemed.

  ‘Not this month, no. Unless it happens up Snowdon.’

  ‘Hm. Usual six month lead time?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Something autumnal, then.’

  I heard him sigh. I was keeping him talking and he knew it. ‘You got anything, Moll?’

  Then suddenly I saw it. A plain, off-white spine, slightly bent, with simple lettering. Traditional tales of Riverdale – old stories from an ageless village by Jack Edwards.

  ‘Folk tales,’ I said, my voice rising in excitement. ‘Traditions and ghost stories and old legends and stuff like that. It’ll be Halloween for this edition, won’t it?’

  ‘Hey, yeah. Sounds good.’

  ‘I can write up a lot of stuff from this village and the surrounding moors. North Yorkshire is awash with spooks and smugglers, all kinds of stories.’

  ‘Bloodcurdling?’

  I crossed my fingers. ‘Oh, yes. Lots of gore and mystery.’

  ‘Well, all right then. Can you make it a double for me, Moll? Take up some of Derry’s slack? I’ll get some stock photos in, all dark and moody shots, ‘it the ’Alloween thing running.’

  I heard him smile and I relaxed a bit. ‘Are you sure you don’t want UFOs? Very trendy right now, very “happening”.’

  ‘Nah, you’re off base with that one, babe. Get a draft off to me soon as you can, will ya?’

  With my eyes still fixed on the warped spine of the book at the top of the bookshelf nearest to the window, I agreed and hung up. Then I walked the length of the room, not daring to move my eyes in case the book evaporated. I banged my shins on a stool and hardly noticed.

  ‘Now that,’ I said, reaching up on tiptoe to pull the book towards me, ‘is what I call a close one. How long has that been there?’

  It wasn’t completely surprising that I’d not noticed it before. It was a smaller than average book and had got pushed between a dog-eared Jaws and an Ian Fleming novel with a missing cover that still managed to give the impression of being full of over-endowed women being patronised by over-endowed men. The spine of Jack’s book was only visible because of the angle of the sun, which had illuminated the recess in which it lay.

  ‘It’s like one of those murder-mystery things that are solved with a clue that can only be seen at midsummer, when the sun shines on a certain brick.’

  I clearly had also got a touch of seventies blockbuster.

  I tipped the book into my hand and took it over to the table to read. I’d just pushed back the cover when there was a cursory single-knuckle rap at the back door and Caro came in. ‘Hey, it’s a nice day, wondered if you and Stan fancied an outing?’

  ‘Look.’ I held the book up, cover first. ‘I found it on the shelf.’

  ‘Gosh. Dad’s book.’ Caro sat and gently took the book from me. ‘I knew I’d seen a copy over here once, but I didn’t think it survived the redecoration. Wow.’ She turned it over and ran a finger over the name printed on the cover. ‘He had them privately done. Sold a few in local bookshops but … I thought they were all lost.’ Her eyes were swimmy and she was biting her lower lip. ‘This must have been his copy.’

  Caro was lost in a world of memory, tracing the letters on the cover with the tip of a well-worn finger. ‘Mum died when I was very young so it was only me and Dad. He bought m
e my first pony and supported me while I was doing my BHSI qualification to teach people to ride. And then, when I’d just qualified, he made Moor Farm over to me and bought this place for himself to live in. All done just for me.’ Her voice firmed up and she looked at me. ‘I wish you’d known him, Moll, he was a lovely man.’ She flipped some pages. ‘An incorrigible old bugger, of course, but still a lovely man.’

  ‘Can I keep this for a while?’ I indicated the book. ‘I’ve just told Mike I’m going to write about folk tales, and this is my entire source material.’

  She grinned. ‘Course. Just give the old sod a credit, would you? It’ll probably be the biggest exposure this book’s ever had, he was hardly in the J K Rowling league as a writer. Anyhow, you up for a ride? I want to find out what you were up to raiding the banty coop at stupid o clock this morning, and don’t think I didn’t see you heading out to the old Haunted Homestead down the road there, swinging your carrier like Shirley Temple.’

  I realised suddenly that I didn’t want to tell Caro about the lights. She’d pretty much taken the piss last time I’d mentioned them, all that ‘ghoulies and ghosties’ stuff, and I didn’t want her practicality brought to bear on this. There was something about the way those points of colour had swung about the night sky that had been unbearably intimate somehow. As if they’d been meant for me, and me alone. Although where that left Phinn Baxter I wasn’t quite sure.

  ‘I took them some bacon and eggs. Thought it would be a neighbourly thing to do, and you are always complaining that you’ve got too many eggs now the hens are in lay.’

  ‘Sure, yes, I don’t mind, obviously.’ Caro raised her eyebrows. ‘So, you and that scientist banging yet?’

  ‘What? No, of course we’re not! Caro! For the record, in fact, he is so rude that he walked out on me in the middle of a conversation this morning. So I don’t even think a gentle tapping is in order, let alone … what you said.’

  ‘I saw that other bloke heading in there this morning. Looked to have got off the bus.’ Caro held the door open for me. ‘You coming, or what? Only Stan’s chewing his way through another rug in that stable, so it’s either get him out for a hack or give him a crossword to do.’