I had no mobile phone signal, but they let me use their landline.
I made one phone call, brief and to the point, thanked them for their hospitality, and went to bed.
I woke with the sun, because my hostess did, marching up and down beneath my window quacking furiously at her ducks.
The ducks quacked, and she quacked back, and they swarmed around her as she threw down feed, declaring quackquack! Quackquackquack, singing along with their clamour. I went up to her and said, “Hello, I’m new here. Can I buy some breakfast?”
A lazy cat sat next to the stove in the kitchen, folded in the solitary rocking chair, one eye open, daring anyone to even attempt to depose it from this, the warmest part of its domain. I steered clear, but the woman scowled and it leapt away, sensing a battle lost before it was begun.
“Eat, damn you, eat!” she exclaimed, seeing me hesitate, and I ate homemade bread with homemade honey, collected from the hives before the bees died back for winter, and she put on the radio loud and did the washing-up and we did not talk, and I didn’t see her husband.
At the end of this meal, as I headed towards the car, she asked, “Where are you heading?”
“To the bottom of the island.”
“Holiday, is it?”
“No. Seeing a friend.”
“Friend, is it?” she tutted. “Well, they do say.”
What they said, and whether it was good, I didn’t ask, but thanked her for the breakfast and turned the heater on inside my car, before getting in and driving away.
Grey sky becomes one.
Grass becomes one.
Abstract painting, colours melt together.
Motion with the paintbrush, they blur, right to left with travel, left to right with the wind off the sea.
Feet on pedals, hand on steering wheel, I never passed the test but I can drive, a survival skill, a discipline, my dad would be furious, breaking the law, a child of mine, but my mum would understand.
You do what you must, when you cross the desert, she says. The rituals you make, the devotions you perform, they are what binds you to yourself. If you do not have them, if you have not found them within you, you are nothing, and the desert is all.
I’m proud of you, says Mum from the passenger seat, smiling at the blurring sky. I’m proud of you, Hope Arden.
Thanks, Mum. Hey — Mum?
Yes, dear?
When you saw the edge of the desert, what did you feel?
Honestly? I felt sad to be leaving the desert behind. But I kept on walking anyway.
A cottage on the edge of the sea.
I parked at the top of a track, too thin to get a vehicle down. How did you get furniture into this house? I wondered, as I picked my way towards the sounds of the water breaking on a stony beach.
You carried it, I replied. You asked your friends down to help, and together you got it done.
Two storeys to a stone house, slate tiles on the roof, yellow-lichen rounded stones in the wall, tiny square window frames, eaten by salt, the glass within coming loose. A white front door. A ceramic cat was stuck to the wall above the knocker, ancient and malign. A few weeds grew between the bricks. Lace curtains hung in the windows. A light was on in a room upstairs. A manhole fifty yards away suggested that at some point recently, pipes and electricity had been run underground, away from the raging winter wind.
I knocked with an iron knocker that grinned beneath my fingers.
Knock knock.
Waited.
A light turned on in the hall, though it was daytime, morning, but the skies were thick enough to cast shadows that grew thicker indoors.
A shadow passed across the spilling glow around the wooden frame. A bolt was lifted, a chain slid back.
The door opened.
Byron peered at me from within a warm, wood-smoke glow and said, “Yes?” Her accent, Scottish, thickened by her time on the isle; her face, curious, open, unrecognising.
“Hello,” I said. “My name is Hope.”
A moment.
Memory.
She does not remember me, but she remembers perhaps
a mantra repeated: her name is Hope her name is Hope her name is Hope her name
remembering the act of trying to remember.
She looks at me, at my face, my bag, my travel-worn clothes, my overgrown hair that I haven’t had time to weave into something self-contained, my stolen car parked up the way, and though she can’t remember, she knows.
“Oh,” she said. Then, “You’d better come in.”
I stepped inside, and she closed the door behind me.
Chapter 105
She made tea. She left the teabag in hers, and barely dribbled any milk.
I sat at her kitchen table, watching her work, filling matching green mugs from a calcium-clad kettle, before setting the cups down on knitted round mats and taking a seat opposite me.
“Thanks,” I said, and drank.
“You’re welcome. I’ve got biscuits, if you…?”
“I’m all right, thanks.”
“If I’d known you were coming I’d have brushed up on my homework. As it is, I feel like I don’t know anything about you.”
No effort to disguise her accent, not any more. One leg folded over the other, one hand across the other, her body at an angle in the chair, turned towards me, but with room to rise, to move, to fight, if she needed to.
“My name’s Hope,” I repeated. “I’m a thief. We spent some time together in America.”
“I know I spent time with someone I can’t remember — I have months of notes and recordings in the loft. Did I stab you? There’s a note saying I stabbed you.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I’m very sorry about that. I assume it was necessary?”
“I was about to stop you committing mass murder.”
“Ah — right. How are you now?”
“I healed.”
“I went looking for you in the hospitals. I remember that. Didn’t find you though.”
“You found me. You didn’t keep the recording.”
“Why not?”
“I think you didn’t want to remember its content.”
“Why, did I say something stupid?” A flicker of doubt, a sudden thought. “Did I tell you how to find me?”
“No, no, nothing like that. But you seemed to want something from me which I was unwilling to supply.”
“You can’t be cryptic, not about things like that.”
“Are you recording this conversation?”
“No — like I said, you caught me by surprise.”
“Then what does it matter? You won’t remember.”
“Then what does it matter,” she replied, “if you tell?”
I drank another sip of tea.
Silence a while, save for the whistling of the wind from the sea, the promise of rain yet to come.
“Are you here to kill me, Hope?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why are you here?”
I didn’t answer.
“How did you find me?”
“Your glasses.”
“My…”
“I went to every optician in Scotland.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“How long did that take you?”
“A few months.”
“Why Scotland?”
“Your history. The way you described your home. The telephone from Wapping, the signal came up here. Sometimes it’s dangerous to cross international borders; stick to familiar territory. Had to eliminate possibilities.”
“And someone remembered — no, of course they remembered. It’s a dilemma, when you need to disappear. If you try to vanish in a large city, blend with a crowd, you increase your chances of being detected by technology. Cameras, cards, chip and pin — data is hard to avoid, these days. So you move somewhere remote, somewhere the cameras haven’t come yet, and of course…”
“People remember.”