Chapter 30
30
FIVE DAYS AFTER I LEFT HER
I go back to the cottage. I’m wired. I change, tie my feet into my runners, and slam the door behind me.
I run through the past. Taking myself further into the hills. I try to shut it all out. Instead, concentrating on the burn in my legs. The sun is now hidden away behind a vast expanse of lard-coloured sky, widening the higher I go. I run through memories with Alan, the man I have called Dad all my life: the way he would pick me up if I fell, his gentle manner as he put magic cream on my grazed knee. Alan would let me go first if we were playing a board game too. Because Alan is a good man. A good father.
The sky swirls above me, cream mixing with slate-grey like a paintbrush has been dipped into an artist’s water pot. Rain starts to fall in sharp needles as I push my way further up into the wilderness. Higher and higher. All signs of manmade life fall away so it’s just me, and my memories, and the mountains, and spasms of shame.
With each mile I run, old memories that I have folded away open and flutter in front of me. The day I found my birth certificate. Twelve years old. Me and my brother looking for hidden Christmas presents. He’d been the one to read it first, his eyes flashing towards me, his hand shaking as he passed it me. Name of Father: Connor McDonald. Old McDonald did indeed have a farm.
I let my feet take me higher and higher into the hills. Bright greens sink into sage, and army greens. I breathe in through my nose. Out through my mouth. My breath hot in my throat. I can feel his arms around me: it doesn’t matter, we’re still brothers. Mum had walked into the room, looked at us, at the paper in my hand. She dropped the laundry in her arms, snatched the paper. It had left a paper cut along the inside of my palm. I’d picked and picked at it so even now there is a pale scar, a reminder of that day.
‘Connor McDonald left us,’ she began, his name like a hiss. ‘Like the spineless man he is. And good riddance. He’s corrupt, immoral, the worst of men. He is a man who you are never to see, do you hear me?’ She’d held my shoulders tightly, nails digging into my skin. ‘You are not to bring that man back into our lives. Or so help me God…’ She looked up as though God himself was nodding, giving her permission to speak. ‘Just leave it be. For all our sakes.’ She’d walked out of the room.
The rain is coming down heavily now. I push on through. I push past the night I told Liv, the way she had held me telling me that just because he didn’t want me, didn’t mean I wasn’t good enough.
I’ve reached the top. I’m surrounded by space, rocks and fields; the view stretches out, forest green hills, burnt-lemon-coloured grass. Below the cliff edge and in the distance there is a lake, the surface pewter, the sky now bruised and angry, the rain pummelling against its surface. I rest my hands against my knees. The memories are compressing inside my chest. I scream into the air, tears running down my face. With the sound escaping my body, I feel a small sense of relief since the morning I left Liv.
The morning of our wedding.
The morning Kit came back.