Her eyes, burning into mine, daring me, go on, speak.
I said, “I thought maybe…” And stopped. “I thought perhaps…” Stumbled on the words.
“Go on.”
“I thought maybe there was another kind of story here. I thought perhaps you had seen things or done things or things had been done — but that’s not it, is it? You destroyed Perfection because it needed to be destroyed. There’s no personal tragedy or ancient oath to be fulfilled. You saw a thing that was vile, and you took up arms against it. I think I could admire that, if things had worked out different.”
Silence.
The tea cooled in its cups, the wind blew off the sea.
Then, “I called Gauguin.”
Silence.
“Last night,” I added. “I told him everything.”
Silence.
“Why?” Incomprehension — I had never seen such a thing in her before, incomprehension, incredulity, barely contained, her fingers white, the veins standing out in the soft folds of her neck, her body shaking with its own stiffness. “Why?”
“Because… because…” I sucked in breath. “Because while I agree with you in almost every possible respect, about everything — Perfection, loneliness, freedom, power, choice — practically everything — I think there has to be a place where it stops. I think there has to be a moment when you turn round and permit yourself to be defined by the world that surrounds you. I am free. I choose to honour the freedom of those who live around me. I choose to honour them. I think your freedom does not do that.”
Silence.
Then she stood up, quickly, turned, poured the last of her tea into the sink, put the cup down on the side, turned, took a deep breath and exclaimed, in one fast burst:
She stopped, fingers shaking at her sides, hauling down air, as if those few words had sucked the oxygen from her lungs. I put my mug down, rose to my feet, my eyes never leaving hers, and replied softly, “Hey Macarena.”
Silence.
She put her head on one side, looked to see if her words triggered anything more — obedience, perhaps, an openness to command — and when she saw no sign of it, she simply smiled and shook her head and said, “Shall we walk by the sea?”
I raised my eyebrows.
“It’s very beautiful round here, I think. When the light is right — when you can see the stars. Sometimes it takes my breath away. Sometimes it’s vile. It changes, moment to moment. Like…” She stopped, caught herself before her words ran away, smiled a shaking smile. “Like the present tense.”
“Let’s go for a walk,” I said. “We’ve got time.”
“I’ll get my coat.”
We walked.
She wore large pale brown boots and a thick dark green coat.
“Made in Stornoway — forget the hi-tech stuff, the Scots got all-weather gear five hundred years ago. Only other people who know what they’re doing are the Scandinavians, and even they’ve gone in for polymer rubbish and polarised glasses these days.”
I said nothing, and walked by her side, coat pulled tight around my chest, hands buried in my pockets. The sky grew heavier and flecks of freezing rain, desperate to be snow, began to fall, biting with fat white teeth where they struck exposed skin, pattering on my back. The sea below exhaled like a troll, rattling stones as the water was sucked back into the deep, breaking breath where it burst against the cliffs. I could see the beauty in it now, the dark-on-dark-on-dark without end. Far away, a tanker crawled between the island and the mainland, heading north, towards Kirkwall and Lerwick, the Arctic Circle and the oil wells, belching fire across the sea.
“Gauguin said he wanted to marry you,” I said at last, raising my voice over the grasp of the wind.
She smiled. “He never asked.”
“But he was going to?”
“He never asked,” she repeated.
We kept walking, her cottage growing small and far away.
I said, “Are you going to run?”
“Run? From the Isle of Lewis, and John on his way? I suppose I could. There might be something to be done. But I doubt it. A refuge is a prison, by any other name.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“About three years.”
“How did you pay for everything? The equipment, the experts, the passports, the—”
“I stole,” she explained simply. “It was necessary.”
We kept walking.
Below, the sea dropped away beneath the cliff, the seagulls perched beneath our feet. The waves crashed and the clouds raced across the sky, running on to an unknown rendezvous. The long grass hissed and the short stones bumped, bumped back against the wind, a Morse code of currents disrupted and reformed, thump thump goes the sea, bump bump goes the earth, run run goes the sky and we, tiny figures in a vast and churning world, walk on.
We walked.
And for a moment, I was the sky.
I was the sea.
I was the grass, bending in the wind.
I was the cold.
I was Byron, walking by my side, and she stopped and turned to face the ocean, then raised her head to the sky, closed her eyes as rain flecked against her face, breathed the air deep through her nose, and counted backwards from ten.
I watched her count, and heard her say, with her eyes still closed, “If they find me, they will have a trial.”
“They won’t have much evidence — I imagine they’ll kill you instead.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she replied. “The press, the media, the internet — they’ll make the noise, make the screaming, the screaming all the time, and the truth and my voice will be lost. The blaming and the noise, human things, they’ll make it about human things, not the truth. How can anyone live with it? How can anyone live with so much screaming in their lives, all the time? Matheus Pereyra loved the screaming. I guess these days people love to feel themselves burn.”
“Siobhan,” I said, and hesitated, when she didn’t move, didn’t blink. “Byron,” I corrected. “We can find a better way.”
She opened her eyes, smiled at me, looked as if she would speak, hesitated, raised her head, looked up into the sky.
A sound, half lost behind the clouds. A whoomp whoomp whoomp against the roar of the sea.
A helicopter.
“Look,” she said. “They’re here.”
“Byron…”
She raised one hand, silencing me, and smiling, turned her face to the ocean, and with a little puff of breath, ran for the sea.
She closed her eyes, just before she reached the edge of the cliff, and if she made any sound as she fell, the roaring waters ate it.
Chapter 106
A body between the rocks.
A police car, driven all the way down the isle.
An ambulance, two hours later.
I sat on the edge of the hill, and watched it all.
Gauguin came running, fell to his knees by the edge of the cliff, half wails stuttering in his throat, an old man in an inappropriately light coat, his head in his hands, weeping.
I watched, but he didn’t seem to see me.
And when, in time, the policemen had forgotten and remembered my presence enough to grow confused, I picked up my bag, and walked away.
I walked north, along the edge of the sea.
I walked over grey stones and faded grasses.
I walked past the van that sold meat pies of uncertain provenance, to which the people came.