Chapter 14
I fell asleep instantly, but, of course, I didn’t stay asleep.
First came the nightmare. The dream of being buried alive under tonnes of earth, slowly suffocating, unable to move, until I jolted awake with my face pressed into the pillow. I turned over, only to fall into dreams of pursuit. Faceless creatures were chasing me over an unknown landscape, my legs were heavy and I couldn’t run faster than a slow walk, with my enemies gaining all the time…
‘Are you all right?’ The voice startled me from the dream. The room was completely dark and I was disorientated. Was this one of the pursuers? Where was I? What was that noise?
Slowly the shadowed shape beside the bed resolved itself into the outline of Ivo, rumpled and with his hair unusually vertical. I was in the cabin room and the noise was the sound of the trees below, frenzied in the passing wind.
‘Yes, I…’
‘You don’t sound all right. You sound as though you’re dreaming your way through what happened today, which is perfectly natural. And that bang on the head is probably not helping.’
‘Nightmares,’ I said blearily through lips dried out with too much breathing through my mouth. ‘Did I wake you up? Sorry.’
‘Oh, bless, you think I sleep. No, I just hang myself up in a convenient spot and do Sudoku until morning.’ He sat on the edge of the bed. Rain spat against the little window and I had a flashback to being very young, Mum perched on the edge of my bed reading me stories like Little Grey Rabbit, nothing too stimulating, and I felt a momentary grief that I’d had to grow up. ‘I don’t sleep a lot when things are stressful, Cress,’ he went on, in a more normal voice. ‘Brain won’t turn off, you see. Bit of a curse, but it’s great when you really need to get some work done.’
‘How aren’t you dead?’ I elbowed myself up against the pillow and he crouched up to allow me to move, then sat back on my feet.
‘I crash every now and then. And anyway, it’s not all the time. I can keep perfectly sensible hours if I have to. Plus, I have tablets.’
‘Which you said you don’t take.’
I looked at his profile as he perched. So good looking that he was almost an illustration in a book about dream men, with his classically straight nose, big blue eyes and flopping blond hair. He’d got a good chin too, and a jawline that looked as though it could cut granite. My brain accepted that this was Ivo, scatty, random Ivo of the peculiar conversations and the sudden arrivals and leavings, but my heart told me that this was a new man. Not the tolerated, humoured one that we made slightly irritated allowances for, but a man who had realised I was in danger and hunted for me, then pulled out the stops to rescue me. Okay, much of the actual work had been done by the man we weren’t allowed to call Droney, but I had absolute faith that, should Tony not have been around, armed with a flying machine and a Band of Brothers who knew their way around mud, Ivo would have found another way to save me.
‘You are brilliant as you are, Ivo,’ I said. ‘I’d love to say that you don’t need the tablets, but you can also be an absolute pain.’
He laughed. ‘Tell me about it.’ Now he swung himself round, kicked his legs up onto the bed and sat beside me. ‘I’m a gift to journalism though, admit it. Shame about the stories of lost bikes and shed thefts, this whole thing has given me a taste for running around the country hunting men with dubious intent.’ There was a moment’s pause, and then he shifted to look at me. ‘Actually, no it hasn’t,’ he went on. ‘It’s been bloody terrifying.’
I bumped my head against his chest. ‘You won, though.’ His chest felt nice, so I left my head there, and he raised a hand and began stroking my hair.
‘Not really. Well, yes, in that you’re safe and not an unidentified corpse under a landslide. Incidentally, the island is earth over clay, and when the water gets right down to the clay level, that shifts, which is why it’s so prone to movement.’
‘Thank you. I needed to know that.’ I could feel his heart beating a regular rhythm under my ear and the stroking of the hair was nice. I was back in Little Grey Rabbit territory again.
‘It’s all parents, isn’t it?’ Ivo went on, sounding almost as though he were slipping in to sleep himself. ‘We blame them for everything.’
‘Unless you have a whole background you haven’t told me about, I don’t think we can blame the parents for a bunch of guys drug running.’
‘No, no, I mean – here’s me, trying to compete with my father in a weirdly Oedipal competition…’
That made my drooping eyelids jerk open. ‘Hang on, hang on. Where is this going, exactly? I’m not sure I can take much more in the way of startling revelations.’
Ivo laughed and my head wobbled around on his chest with the movement. ‘I just mean, I went into journalism because, subconsciously, I thought I could be better than my father, trying to win my mother’s affection probably. Trying to be top dog, all that stupid competitive stuff that happens in families. I’ve no idea how Ru got out of it.’
‘Conforming, probably,’ I said. ‘He’s neurotypical to his fingertips, I presume?’
‘He had a worrying childhood thing for construction vehicles, but he seems to have grown out of it.’
For some reason my brain had a momentary flash of tonnes of falling earth, the sound and smell of it, accompanied by the terror as Sally and I had hung onto our temporary piece of ground. I caught my breath.
‘You just have to work through it,’ Ivo said placidly. ‘It will get better. And you hold your mother responsible for so much of your life too, don’t you?’
It helped. It really helped. I wasn’t sure how, but switching my mind back to thinking about my mother, about our penny pinching, saver-seeking, restricted life in the scruffy flat, where Angel Delight was a luxury, pushed the intrusive terror thoughts into the background.
‘Not really,’ I said, untruthfully.
But Ivo’s thoughts were running. ‘If she’d married that Guardsman that your grandparents wanted, she’d have lived a life of untrammelled luxury and her parents’ approval.’
‘But then I wouldn’t be me. I’d be some willowy girl who studied Interior Design and features on Instagram,’ I said, trying to keep up with him. ‘I’d talk about colour drenching and upcycling and I’d be all eco-friendly, while throwing out a perfectly good kitchen every five years.’
‘Perhaps.’ He shifted his weight. ‘But tell me you don’t hold it against her, just a little bit? Otherwise, why else would you use your excellent degree to go off and work in wildlife rescue, rather than go into research or the preservation of documents or something? Were you trying to prove a point?’
I wondered why Sally had gone into squirrel work, what her upbringing had been like, and I hoped she wasn’t sitting somewhere in a cell worrying about the finances of her unit. The memory of her terrified eyes and the coldness of her hand gripping mine when we thought we were going to die out there on that landslip…
‘Just breathe,’ Ivo said, steadily. ‘The more you let it run now, the faster it will lose power over you.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It’s just therapy-speak. My parents put me through an awful lot of therapy. No idea why, I suspect they thought they could make me slow down a bit through the medium of CBT and raffia-work.’
There was another long pause. I began to drift into sleep. It was surprisingly comforting having Ivo stroking my hair while I lay with my head against his ribcage and listened to the weather frothing angrily against the house and the trees. Eventually, and very quietly, he said, ‘Cress, I can’t be like other people, but, actually, I like who I am. That’s why I don’t take the tablets. I don’t want to be medicalised into being what other people think of as normal.’
I wanted to tell him that it was fine for him, he had money and well-known parents and a ferociously upper-class upbringing on his side. If he’d been at school with me he’d have either been known as ‘that little bugger who can’t sit still and can’t concentrate’, or he’d have been put into a class with the other kids who threw chairs and climbed out of windows. Nobody would have been quite as understanding about his desire to be himself, or quite as tolerant of his uneven timekeeping and forgetfulness.
But I was too drowsy, and really, there was not a lot he could do about that now. It wasn’t his fault he was posh, just like it wasn’t my mother’s fault that I wasn’t. Ivo was wrong, I didn’t blame my mother for my upbringing. She’d lost her brother to war at a tricky age. All the money and class in the world couldn’t have saved her from the awful emotional turmoil that must have caused, and running away from home was probably the only way she could express that. The getting pregnant with me was collateral damage.
No, I blamed her parents. Who could have welcomed her back, illegitimate baby and all. They could have let her make her own decisions about who to marry, rather than having her potential future mapped out. And cutting her off and moving away when she needed them, needed to raise her baby in a safe and secure place? Well, that had just been cruel.
My mother had read me Little Grey Rabbit. She’d done her best.
When I opened my eyes again, convinced that I hadn’t slept another wink, daylight was coruscating outside the window in sunlight reflected off sea, and the trees were back to their whispering shivers.
I still had my head on Ivo’s chest, and, from the feel of it, he had his head resting on top of mine as he’d toppled slightly sideways. Seagulls were squawking and stamping about on the roof above, and my entire body ached. I shifted slightly and the weight of Ivo’s head moved away.
‘Hey. Morning. Gosh, I slept well, I sleep better with you, that’s a point worth noting.’ He hauled himself upright and my head bounced. ‘How are you feeling today?’
‘About a hundred,’ I croaked.
‘Out of how many?’
‘Years old, Ivo. Please tell me we can get off the island today.’
He laughed. ‘I could tell you that, but I’m not sure it would be truthful. The police need to interview us both, there’s an awful lot of admin goes along with drug smuggling, apparently. And don’t you want to say your final goodbyes to Fred? Plus, we owe the mud boys a crate of beer and I think Drone… Tony wants to see you too.’
I wriggled. ‘What’s going to happen, Ivo?’
‘Entropy, decay, sun goes supernova, eventual heat death of the universe. Oh, you meant to us. No idea, I’m afraid. I can ask Ru about the likely outcomes for Sally if you like. But I doubt we’re in any trouble.’
I swung myself out of bed. I hadn’t really meant what would happen to us. I didn’t exactly know what I had meant. There was a whole lot of future out there, stretching away to the horizon in all its multiplicities, but one thing I did know, it would include Ivo. My future would always include Ivo.
‘I can’t guarantee that I won’t get really annoyed with you,’ I said, continuing my train of thought.
Ivo was straightening the bed. ‘What? I mean, annoyed with me, when? Oh! This must be what it’s like having a conversation with me – when half of it has already happened in your head and the rest is just infill. Wow. Being on the other side is horrible.’ Then he grinned. ‘Of course you’ll get annoyed. I am a very annoying person.’
‘You are.’
Now he grabbed my hand. It was the one with the sore knuckle, but I tried not to wince because he had an intense expression on his face. ‘But I am also loyal unto death and I am crazy about you, Cress. I truly will do whatever I can to not annoy you beyond that which you can cope with. I’ll even start taking the tablets to calm me down, if you’d like that.’
We stood for a moment, both of us ruffled and slightly stiff from an uncomfortable night. I also suspected that I had garlic breath from the food last night, so I hoped he wasn’t going to kiss me.
‘No,’ I said eventually, watching his expression clear. ‘I don’t want that. I want you as you are, Ivo, because that’s the man I – well, I suspect that I have fallen in love with.’
A pause that lasted a heartbeat. Then Ivo closed up against me, swept his arms around me and we were off, dancing around the small room in a half tango, half waltz. Held against him I could feel the energy crackling from his slender frame, feel the strength of the muscles that held me.
‘Ditto, Cressida,’ he said quietly against my cheek. ‘Ditto.’ Then he stopped, looked into my eyes. ‘I mean the bit about falling in love, not all the stuff about the tablets. I’ll take those if I need to. If… if everything I am gets a bit much for you. They don’t make me normal, if normal is really a concept we can embrace when talking about neurofunctioning…’
‘Shut up,’ I said, equably. ‘And your phone’s ringing.’
It was the local police. We needed to get to Newport and be interviewed. There seemed to be a seriousness to the phone call that I hadn’t expected, when really all we’d done was get caught up in events that were nothing to do with us. Surely we only needed to give a statement?
‘Yes, it is rather worrying, isn’t it?’ Ivo frowned at his phone after he’d finished the call. ‘Unless they think that… you don’t think they suspect that we were bringing stuff back, with Fred?’
We stared at each other, wide-eyed.
‘No. Given what happened, they must know that our involvement was all coincidental, surely. And your brother’s in the police,’ I said.
‘That’s no guarantee of anything,’ Ivo muttered. ‘But they can’t. I mean, Sally…’
We looked at each other again. ‘They would have arrested us.’ I blinked at him. ‘If they thought we really were a part of all this.’
‘Why? They knew where we were. We weren’t going to get off the island, unless we fancied rowing, and in that storm we’d have capsized twenty metres offshore.’
This made me think. ‘If we couldn’t get off the island, then do you think Mr Polite and Mr Thug might still be here?’ I asked.
‘Who the hell are Mr Polite and Mr Thug? Weird names.’
‘Says the man who tried to call Sally’s assistant “Droney”. No. They’re the two men who tried, rather ineptly, to get geology to kill Sally and me. We should be a lesson: never leave a geographical fault line to do a man’s work.’ I thought for a second. ‘Get a piece of paper, Ivo. I think we may be able to do something useful before we go to Newport.’