WALES 2022
CERI PLAYED ALONG WHEN we told doctors he’d fallen badly on to some farm equipment – though perhaps only because staying conscious required all his energy. After he was discharged with some sturdy painkillers and strict instructions to rest, Arden and I drove back to the farm in stilted silence.
I was driving next to Arden.
To anyone else, a moment of astounding normality. The dark hum of the road, paper coffee cups between us, some nameless pop song on the radio. His coat blanketing my shoulders, since the hospital waiting room had been far too cold. A low thrum between us, vibrating in the places our skin could’ve touched and didn’t. The blare of headlights, the sprinkle of stars, the bump of cat’s eyes beneath tyres.
Astounding normality – but with Arden .
We were together again.
The things I could say. The things I could do. I could reach out and touch his body, fingertips tracing over the rugged bridge of his knuckles. I could tell him that he was, in all meaningful ways, my home. I could reminisce about lives and experiences I’d had to keep buried until now: the salt-and-smoke scent of the Algerian streets, the dystopian beauty of coral-sharded Nauru, the existential despair of the Western Front. All the things we had shared, survived. The great tapestry of our love, and the new beadwork it had gained.
But I didn’t, because something had changed. Here he was not the snow-softened boy from the frozen taiga. He was still the cold-faced killer from El Salvador.
And I had no idea how to bring him back. Bring us back, quickly and deeply enough to make him want to keep me alive.
For now, it had to be enough just to exist together, suspended in amber, a brief but interminable peace.
Six days. No matter what, we had these six days. Hardly an infinity, and yet infinite nonetheless – in possibility, and in raw potential.
Mum was heating the oven for the lasagne when I walked back into the kitchen, leaving Arden standing in the hallway.
‘Hi, love,’ she said. ‘How was your date?’
‘Oh, it was all right. But, erm … I actually have something to tell you.’ I leaned on the island with my elbows, clasping my hands together to stop them from shaking.
She stilled a little, clutching a bag of salad leaves. ‘Oh?’
‘I really hope you won’t be upset.’
I was still wearing his fleece-lined lumberjack coat – a vial of sugar water tucked in the top pocket, in case he needed to save any wounded bumblebees – but she didn’t seem to notice the red plaid.
‘Great start, Bran.’ Her shoulders slumped in frustration. ‘Go on, then. What did you pierce? I do hope it’s not your nipples, because honestly, if and when you get pregnant, they’ll –’
‘It’s Dylan,’ I interrupted, before I could talk myself out of it. ‘We’ve been seeing each other. In secret. And, erm, we’ve been in love for a while now.’ An understatement. ‘We’re actually the same age, since he skipped a few years in school, and –’
‘Bran!’ She swivelled on her heel, a beam spreading across her face. She brandished a garlic baguette like a cutlass. ‘I think that’s bloody brilliant.’
I blinked in disbelief. ‘Really?’
‘Of course!’ She tossed the baguette and the salad bag on to the counter. ‘I trust Dylan, and I trust you.’ She cupped her hands to her suddenly rosy cheeks. ‘Oh, it’s so lovely. You and Dylan!’
‘I’m so glad you think so.’ Guilt cut through me. I hadn’t been expecting so much unbridled joy on the back of a lie – although I supposed the foundations of it were true enough. Love didn’t even begin to encapsulate what I felt for Arden. I just wished it were as straightforward as she believed it to be.
‘I’ve needed some good news this week.’ She sighed happily, leaning back against the white edge of the sink. ‘This has really brightened my spirits. Where is he? I want to give him a big old hug, I do.’
‘Just outside.’ I jerked my head towards the double doors. ‘With his ear pressed against the keyhole, no doubt.’
‘Dylan, you big idiot!’ Mum called, her accent broad and swooping. ‘Come in here.’
Dylan – Arden – peeled open the door, and from the bashful look on his face, he’d heard everything. Judging by the way he couldn’t meet my eye, he felt as terrible as I did for the mistruth we’d told my mother.
Mum crossed over to him and threw her arms around his neck, despite the fact he was a good ten inches taller than her. He rested his chin on her head in a way that was so subtly affectionate it made my chest ache.
‘Don’t break her heart, all right?’ Mum said, voice muffled in his woollen jumper.
‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ he replied roughly, a thousand emotions pulsing beneath the words.
Everything in me hurt.
If only this were real.
How many times over the centuries had I wished our love for each other was as simple as this? As simple as a mother’s soft approval, as firelight on our faces as we kissed by a hearth, as a thousand tiny pleasures and kindnesses adding up to an entirely ordinary love story?
But our love story was not like that. It was blood and pain and death, an awful cycle doomed always to repeat.
Desperate to quell the grief tugging below my ribs, I pressed on. ‘While you’re all overjoyed and such … can I stay in the cottage with him tonight?’
Pulling away from Dylan again, Mum turned to me and raised an eyebrow, but there was a hint of amusement to it. Then she shrugged. ‘I suppose there’s no point in saying no. I was having sex in car parks at your age.’
‘Mum! Jesus!’ I pleaded, but couldn’t help a bark of surprised laughter. After seeing her so cowed and frightened for so long, the unexpected banter was a balm – the flush to her cheeks, the dimples bracketing her smile, the twinkle in her eyes. It was a flash of the mother I’d known before Gracie’s diagnosis, and it warmed me through like a cup of hot tea. And I would do anything to make it last.
Resolve steeled inside me like a freshly forged blade.
I had to win Arden round.
The farm cottage was warm and clean, but haphazardly messy. There was a pokey living room with two tweed armchairs and six overflowing bookcases, discarded jumpers and loose sheets of paper strewn over the furniture. The galley kitchen’s walls were hung with frames filled with rare flower pressings, and pencil sketches of botanicals and herbs. House plants on every available surface, fronds and ferns spilling on to the floor from hanging baskets. Leather-bound volumes of poetry pressed between vases and terracotta pots, pens and notebooks stacked on top of the microwave, every inch of the space filled with carefully curated life.
Now I understood why he’d never invited me inside. The space was so stuffed full of his love for the natural world and the written word that I would’ve known instantly it was Arden.
It wasn’t late by the time we arrived at the cottage – only just after nine – but the day had been long and fraught, so we headed straight up to his bedroom. My heart pounded with every step on the staircase, the beat so heavy and fast I was sure he would hear. But he said nothing as I traipsed behind him, watching the muscles ripple in his back as he moved. If he was cold without his coat, he didn’t show it.
The bedroom had a double bed pressed against the far wall, a scuffed writing desk set up in the bay window, an oak wardrobe with two matching bedside tables, and a Persian rug over the faded cream carpet. On the walls were more framed flowers and botanical sketches, plus several sepia-stained letters from famous poets.
The room was nothing spectacular, but it just felt like Arden. Like stepping inside his very soul and curling up next to the fire. Intimate and familiar.
‘This is nice,’ I said, the statement so laughably mundane, and yet it was all I could think to say into the silence. I laid down my overnight bag next to a tall potted fiddle-leaf.
He flipped on a bedside lamp, washing the room in a soft golden light. ‘Thanks.’
There was a copy of Ten Hundred Years of You on the bedside table. ‘When did you hear about it?’ I asked, gesturing to the well-thumbed volume.
‘Heard a news segment on the radio,’ he said, the words like a too-tight belt round his chest. ‘I don’t know how it’s allowed. How can they profit from something a dead boy wrote, without permission?’
‘I suppose the colonizers have been looting and pillaging to fill their museums for centuries. Why stop now?’ I laughed bitterly. ‘I guess they’re just gambling that nobody’s still alive to sue them.’
He nodded, then averted his gaze. ‘Have you … Have you read it? I saw the display in the bookshop.’ He looked all of a sudden boyish, insecure, a kid showing a painting to a friend for the first time.
I nodded and swallowed hard, feeling at once as though I’d betrayed him, like I’d breached his privacy in some fundamental way. ‘It was beautiful.’
He pressed his hand to his chest, took a steadying breath, but said nothing. I remembered Mikha, the brown leather notebook clutched to a snow-tipped fur coat. The tears frozen to his cheekbones as we died. My heart felt like an ice pick had been thrust through it.
‘Do you write new poetry in every life?’ I asked, not wanting to pry, but at the same time desperate to know more about this facet of him he’d always guarded so closely. ‘Or do you transcribe all your old work from memory every time you’re respawned?’
‘It’s all new,’ he mumbled, gruff and suddenly embarrassed.
The thought was rich with promise. Littered all over the world – scattered through history like confetti – were notebooks full of Arden’s love for me. How many more had been discovered? Discarded, published, tucked away in dimly lit museums? Our love preserved behind glass, taken out and polished by a neatly gloved hand, positioned between the Gutenberg Bible and the Diamond Sūtra. The idea made me feel immortal in a whole new way, like I existed outside of myself.
‘No photos of your family,’ I noted, pointing at the frames on the wall.
‘Easier that way.’
He’d been like this since at least the turn of the twentieth century – with the possible exception of Siberia – but I knew it hadn’t always been so. He used to live and breathe for his family. I just couldn’t say for certain when it had changed – whether there even was a fixed point, a clear axis, or whether the walls had been constructed slowly over time, brick after brick, stone after stone, until one day he’d looked up and they were impenetrable.
Impenetrable but for Gracie. And that meant something.
‘You didn’t kill me,’ I said slowly. ‘Back in the stables, when I freed Ceri. You said you would, but you didn’t. Or couldn’t.’
His whole body stiffened, but he said nothing.
‘Why?’ I prodded.
Quiet seconds rolled out before us like the golden rise and fall of the desert, the silence wholly alive.
Then he all but whispered, ‘Because I’m …’
He trailed off, and never picked the sentence back up.
‘Because you’re what?’ I urged.
He shook his head. ‘Never mind.’ Before I could ask him anything else, he gestured jerkily towards the landing. ‘Bathroom’s that way.’
I recoiled at the dismissal. ‘Aren’t you afraid I’ll climb out the window?’
‘There’s no window,’ he replied humourlessly. He looked entirely wrung out.
In the tiny, clean bathroom I shrugged off his coat, brushed my teeth, ran a tortoiseshell comb through my hair, and scrubbed at my face until the skin was pink and raw. I changed into a pair of red flannel pyjamas, then headed back into the bedroom. The curtains had been drawn since I’d left.
Arden was sitting on the edge of the bed, stony-faced. Beside him on the patchwork blanket was a pair of steel handcuffs.
I stared at him in disbelief. ‘You’re actually going to cuff me to the bed?’
Elbows on his knees, he sank his head into his hands, his silence a terrible confirmation.
‘That seems wildly unnecessary.’
‘I have to sleep sometime,’ he said into his palms. ‘And when I do, it’ll be too easy for you to flee. Or knock me out and tie me up like you did Ceri.’
‘Why do you even have those?’
‘Same reason you carry a knife. Just in case.’
I sat next to him on the bed, mind and pulse both racing. The tension between our two bodies was palpable; an electric crackle. I held out my wrist, and he closed the first cuff around it. Then he reached over my lap and fixed the other round a slat of the wooden headboard, turning the tiny key in the lock with a metallic click.
Panic bolted up my spine, the feeling of being trapped, helpless, small.
Finally, he crossed to the writing desk and shut the key in the top drawer.
Trying to make myself comfortable, I climbed under the covers and rested my head on the pillow, grunting as the cuff pulled awkwardly at my wrist. A shudder wracked me from head to toe. In a second I was back in that awful asylum, restrained like a feral beast, prodded and dehumanized and humiliated, frozen and starved and drugged. Arms strapped to waists in starched white straitjackets, patches of drool on the collars.
In my darkest moments, I regretted going back to save Arden. Would I have lived a full, normal life if I hadn’t? Would I have broken this curse forever?
That stark and terrible vision might have been just that: a vision. A work of imagination.
But from the white-haired, black-nailed woman’s appearance in the trenches, I knew it had rung true.
If we turned eighteen, it would ruin us.
And so maybe it was too much to hope for, that Arden might keep me alive this time. Maybe I’d be better off searching for the why , at long last. Not just a vague outline, but every dimension of the truth, every nook and cranny of our fate. The full, unabridged story.
But god, I wanted . I wanted so much.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Arden said, finally turning to look at me. His eyes were rimmed with tired pink.
‘Are you?’ I snapped, if only to give the desperate emotions in my throat somewhere to go.
He looked pained by the question, no matter how rhetorical. ‘Do you really need to ask that?’
When I didn’t respond, he knelt down and pulled out a thick beige blanket from beneath the bed. Rolling it out on the floor, he grabbed a cable-knit jumper from the wardrobe and bundled it up as a pillow. Finally, he flipped off the lamp on the bedside table, and the room was plunged into darkness.
I heard the unbuttoning of his jeans, and the clink of his belt buckle as both fell to the floor. Another brush of fabric as he pulled his soft marl jumper over his head.
After a few seconds, my eyes started to adjust. I made out the silhouette of his body, the way his shoulders swept wide, the way he narrowed at the hips, the way his muscles corded in his back. A similar build to Henri, back in the trenches. My breath caught in my throat. He curled up on top of the blanket, tucking his knees to his chest.
‘Aren’t you cold?’ I asked, my voice somehow louder in the dark.
‘If you’re uncomfortable, I should be too.’
My cuff scraped against the headboard as I adjusted my position. ‘And I’m the martyr.’
He said nothing.
The silence was taut and fragile. I could almost hear the frantic whir of his brain; almost feel the tensed muscles in his body. A gust of wind rattled the window in its frame, shaking it by the bones.
‘Let me in, Arden,’ I whispered. ‘Two heads are better than one. Maybe we can find a way out of this together.’
I knew he would resist, but I had to try. I thought back to Siberia.
No. No, no, no, no. I need to undo this. No. I won ’ t let you die this time. We ’ ll … we ’ ll just have to figure the rest out.
There was the white-haired woman, the diamond-clear vision of ruination, but if he’d relented back in Russia, maybe there was something we could do.
For the briefest of moments, he’d let himself believe as much.
But now, in this chilly farm cottage at the foot of the Brecon Beacons, he simply said, ‘There’s no way out. Goodnight, Evelyn.’