He walks halfway down the garden and peers into the nothingness between the straggle of trees. He can see it being lovely here in the summer. If he had the inclination, he could put down some jaunty flagstones at the edge of the little stream. Could give himself a place to hit, his toes in the gurgling water, rubbing his soles over moss-slimed rocks. He can almost picture himself here, leaning back on his palms, gazing up at a sky of gold and blue.
A low growl erupts at the back of his throat. He curses, pissed off with himself. Each time he ends a relationship he promises himself the same – that he won’t let fantasies undo him; that he won’t spurn reality in pursuit of some idealised daydream. He keeps telling himself to focus on the here. On the now. He can’t help thinking that being an early reader did him no favours. He grew up a Romantic, retreating into the pleasures of fiction even as the facts of his reality became harder and harder.
“Uncle Rowan! She’s done yelling! She wants to talk to you!”
Rowan walks back towards the house. Snowdrop is in the doorway, holding out her phone. She’s wincing. Serendipity is a magnificent interrogator. She doesn’t do shouting or swearing or very much in the way of telling-off, but she has a way of sounding let-down that could cause the most hardened of political prisoners to denounce their ideology and declare they had acted without thinking.
“You okay, Sis?” he asks, as brightly as he can.
There is a pause. Wherever she is, it’s windy. He can hear the rushing of wind past the mouthpiece. “I’m not having a go, Rowan …,”
“No.”
“But I’m not sure I’m happy about my daughter becoming a Fleet Street hound.”
Rowan laughs. “Sorry, is this 1978…?”
“I encouraged her to do creative writing. Maybe some poetry. I don’t know if journalism is a career I could encourage …,”
“Nor me,” says Rowan, dropping his voice. “Look, we’re just helping the day pass by. I’m healing. She’s my helper. It’s a game, really. I want to show her how the job actually works – or how it used to.”
He glances at Snowdrop, holding his glass of whisky and staring at the different patterns held in the ice. Rowan has lost whole days to such a pursuit. She gives him a thumbs-up, tells him he’s doing well.
“Look, it’s nothing anyway …,” begins Serendipity.
“I told her as much. That’s why we’re workshopping this particular story. It’s educational. I’m just showing her how to check some facts.”
“I suppose …,”
“So, she said there had been a kidnapping …,”
“No. No I never said that. I mean, maybe I said ‘abduction’ but it’s not that I know anything. Not really.”
He hears her start to attune herself to the right frequency. Prepares himself for answers to questions he hasn’t even asked.
“Look, Violet has been having some problems, that’s all …,”
“Sorry, Violet …?”
“Oh, well it was Sheehan then but it’s Rayner now.”
“Ha! Yeah, that’s it, that’s what we had. So, you said she’d been having a hard time …,”
“I don’t know the ins and outs of it,” she says, louder now, as the wind whips up around her. He can imagine gulls and spray.
“But the abduction, after what she went through, she was always going to have difficulties …,”
“No, that was it,” protests Serendipity. “She was great for ages. She was fine with not remembering. She was happier not to know, I think. She’s such a riot of a girl when she’s doing well. I don’t know, things just started coming back to her. I didn’t read the story in detail.”
Rowan stays silent, not wanting to break the spell. “Read?” he asks, at last.
“Yes, that’s why I know she’s been having a hard time. She did this piece of writing for her group. About how hard it was to live without knowing what had been done to you. With fragmented memories. It was quite powerful, apparently. “
“And this said what had happened to her?”
Suspicion creeps into her voice. “What do you actually know, Rowan?”
He grimaces. Game up. “Enough to make a start …,” he mumbles.
She growls down the phone, frustrated. “Look, there’s no drama here. I just mentioned to Snow that one of the articles she’d put aside for your scrapbook ..,”
“Portfolio,” he corrects her, amid demonstrations of appreciation from Snowdrop.
“Yes, portfolio. I said that one of the girls who the mountain rescue man was talking about might have been Violet, who I only know a little bit. She wrote a piece saying she’d never known what had happened to her when she was a kid but how she thought she was ready to confront it. Jo told me about it. It was on the wall at the library, in a display. I thought I might be able to help.”
“Go on,” prompts Rowan.
“And I told Jo to tell her about some alternative practitioners who might be able to help if she wanted to work through bad memories…,”
Rowan smiles, pleased with his sister. She’s always desperate to help and there’s never a price to be paid. She wouldn’t think twice about contacting a virtual stranger and offering to help them find their light.
“So Jo did that, and said I knew some people, and gave her the number of the house phone and she got in touch. We aren’t friends or anything, but she’s a nice lady ….,”
Rowan crosses to the table and leans over his niece’s head. Painfully, he jabs the tip of his bandaged right hand at the keyboard, thumping in a name. “Google that,” he whispers to Snowdrop. “Then Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, anything new and funky I haven’t heard of. Use ‘Sheehan’ too.”
She looks up at him in dazed bafflement. He’s talking to her like she’s a senior reporter on an editorial team. He waves an apology. Gives his attention back to his sister.
“You’re saying she was remembering?” He sounds dubious. “You’re saying she doesn’t know what happened to her way back when? That she’s no memory of whatever it was? That’s hard to swallow, sis. Weren’t there another two girls? Couldn’t she just ask them?”
“I don’t know the ins and outs,” says Serendipity, and now she has to shout over the gale.
“Bloody hell, could you shout up?”
“I mean, everybody’s friends with everybody here…,”
“You’d never do the wrong thing, sis. Whatever you do, it’s always the right thing.”
As she waits, he wonders what she might be up to. He presumes she’s out doing good deeds. Whenever he asks how she’s spent the day it has invariably been on some lost cause – saving old sycamore trees from the council chainsaw or demanding better play facilities for the park in some dying fell side village. She spends a lot of time at meetings, munching cheap biscuits in her fingerless gloves and trying to inject some compassionate liberalism into agenda items. He’s amazed she hasn’t yet thrown herself into the sea.
“It’s not going to appear anywhere, is it Rowan? You’re not going to actually write anything?”
“Sis, it’s just a little game. I’ll make sure she does the spelling and punctuation all the way through. And you said she had to be my hands for a bit. This is what my hands do.”
“I suppose it’s not like the confessional,” she mutters, talking to herself.
“I don’t want to set her off on the wrong foot, Dippy,” he says, using his childhood nickname for his beloved big sister. She gives in.
“Look, Rowan, you know how it is round here. People can buy into a lie or a story that crosses generations. People can look at new-born babies with an Afro and swear they look the very image of their blonde-haired, blue-eyed dads. I don’t think Violet told me anything that wasn’t already public knowledge but it’s not my story to tell …”