WALES 2022
THE NEXT MORNING – after another nightmare-ridden night – Arden and I had breakfast in the farmhouse with my mum. I hadn’t told her about my therapy session with Dr Chiang, and the omission made me uneasy, trepidatious. A gnarled root in the soft ground between us; one I had to be careful not to trip over.
With an almighty sigh, I slumped into my usual seat at the worn oak dining table. Arden slid into the chair next to me. The kitchen smelled of creamy porridge and strawberry jam – the same breakfast my mum had eaten ever since I was little.
‘Morning, you two.’ Mum seemed chipper, buoyed by the sight of us entering the kitchen side by side. ‘Coffee?’
‘Please,’ we both said at once. I pulled my sleeve down to disguise the reddened area around my wrist where I’d yanked against the cuff in the night.
‘Lovely. I’ll do a pot.’ She started clattering around with a steel stovetop kettle. ‘Did you sleep well?’
‘No,’ I groaned, rubbing my eyes furiously, woozy from sleep deprivation. ‘Dylan snores.’
He bristled next to me. ‘And Bran sleep-talks.’
Mum chuckled. ‘You both look rotten, right enough. The things you put up with for young love. Toast all round? Or shall I do some croissants?’
‘I don’t mind,’ said Arden, at the same time as I replied, ‘The more pastry, the better.’
Mum turned the oven on with the toe of her slipper boot. Once the kettle was on the stove, she busied herself arranging croissants on a baking tray. ‘What are you two going to do today? Are you working, Bran? Or are you out on the farm again?’
‘Working.’
Arden finally spoke as he poured our coffees. Mine first, always. ‘Actually, I was wondering if I could have the day off? I’ll go out and spray the crops right after breakfast, but after that –’
‘Of course.’ Mum waved her hand. ‘You know, I don’t think I’ve heard you ask for a day off in the entire time you’ve been here.’ Her eyes twinkled, and she looked at me with a knowing grin. ‘Was there someone you wanted to stick around for, hmm?’
Arden gave a tight smile. ‘Something like that.’
If Mum noticed the subtle change in her beloved farmhand – the unceremonious dropping of the golden retriever act – she didn’t mention it. Maybe she wrote it off as simple exhaustion.
We ate our croissants, slathered in sweet jam and salty butter, and chatted for a while about Gracie, who messaged me throughout. Overnight she’d been assigned a new nurse, and had fallen swiftly and irrevocably in love with her, as fourteen-year-old lesbians were wont to do.
she’s an absolute ten Bran, even though she’s ancient.
like twenty two at LEAST. a veritable hag
but I have caught feelings for real, mary on a cross
and I can’t tell if it’s that I like being taken care of???
it’s the mummy issues for me
jokes our mum is okay really
as long as she’s not trying to, you know, make jokes
Though it was a light conversation, it made me ache.
The third item on my dream list: watch my sister grow up.
I could see it so clearly, how our relationship would shift and mature without ever really changing . We would visit each other’s houses and chat about our jobs over a bottle of wine (or mead, in her eccentric case), walk our dogs in the park on a Sunday morning (hers a Great Dane called Tiny), and when she fell in Big Love, I would make her wedding dress – or wedding tuxedo – myself, stitching my pride into every seam (though she would punish me severely if it wasn’t sufficiently ugly).
I supposed that even if I didn’t survive this encounter with Arden, she might still find another donor, and I could keep tabs on her from a distance in my next life. Technology had made it much easier to watch someone lovingly from afar. No more fraught journeys through snow-bleached Scandinavia only to be marched to a pyre – I could simply follow her on social media.
The thought was both laughably mundane and profoundly comforting. The absolute absurdity of modern connections; a spider’s web with so many strands you couldn’t quite see the real world through them. The internet was a Russian doll, gifts tucked inside curses tucked inside gifts, no way of knowing which formed its core.
Swallowing hard, I stood abruptly and grabbed one of the croissants left on the plate. ‘One for the road, if that’s all right?’
Mum smiled. ‘Of course. I’ve got to run a few errands in town.’ There was a rosiness to her cheeks as she watched Arden and me, and I couldn’t bear it. ‘Love you, Bran. And you know where I am if you need me, okay?’
Arden sensed my melancholy as we left the house into the brisk March morning. The sun of the previous week had succumbed once more to a bitter wind-chill, and a low mist had drifted up from the valley. Glittering frost speckled the rosebushes and the flowerbeds wrapped round the foot of the farmhouse. He pulled his checked lumberjack coat tighter around himself, kicking at a jagged stone on the forecourt.
As we walked past the stables, he shot the low building a furtive glance. ‘I wonder how Ceri’s doing.’
My breath plumed in front of me. ‘The doctor seemed confident he’d make a full recovery. God, I feel awful about it. I know I was just trying to save my sister, but …’
‘Love can make a villain of anyone,’ he muttered, looking out to the mountains, low as an incantation, deep as a litany.
With his profile outlined in the ethereal mist, he was almost infuriatingly handsome. Then again, I was yet to meet a version of Arden I wasn’t attracted to.
‘So you’re coming to hold down the fort at the bookshop with me?’
He nodded. ‘Remember when you actually held down the fort during the siege of Tenochtitlan? Took the Spanish days to break through.’
‘To be honest, no. I don’t remember.’ My stomach cramped painfully. I always felt horribly exposed when Arden could remember something I did not. As though my past were being studied from behind a one-sided police mirror, and all I could see in return was my own reflection.
When we got to Beacon Books, Mr Oyinlola was away at an independent booksellers’ conference in London, so it was just Nia and I on the shop floor.
‘You don’t mind if my boyfriend hangs around, do you?’ I asked her, gesturing to Arden, who stood awkwardly by the non-fiction. ‘We hardly get any time together.’
She shrugged and adjusted the shoulder of her rust-coloured cardigan, which she’d draped over a corduroy pinafore dress. Her nose was firmly notched inside a book on modern chess openings, and it made me think of my brief suspicion that she was Arden. It still could have fitted – quiet, bookish, a little odd but in an endearing way.
‘In fact, why don’t you go and read your book in the back?’ I suggested, warm and casual. ‘I’m happier out here, talking to customers, and you’re happier back there, ignoring the world. If anyone asks, I’ll say you’re doing a stock check.’
For a split second, I thought this might be a mistake – it was her father’s shop, after all, and I was encouraging her to bunk off – but a grin tore across her face, revealing a row of pearly white teeth I rarely saw. ‘Amazing. Thanks, Bran. You’re a real one.’
She hopped off the stool behind the counter and traipsed through to the back, face still so buried in the book that she stubbed her toe on the doorframe and didn’t seem to notice.
Arden and I continued the talk of sieges and wars throughout the rest of the day. He spent most of it loitering by the historical fiction section, fact-checking every blurb he read.
‘What’s the worst battle you’ve ever been in?’ I asked him, in a gap between customers. I had taken Nia’s spot at the counter, flipping through a catalogue we’d been sent by a publisher detailing their upcoming releases.
His eyes scanning the back cover of a book about the Napoleonic Wars, he puffed the air through his lips. ‘Siege of Jerusalem.’ Something dark and grief-shaped flashed over his face. ‘I was so young, but I remember so much. We poisoned the wells and cut down the trees surrounding the city, but nothing we did could hold back the tide of Crusaders. Seeing so many of my people slaughtered – so many of the children I played with …’
Given the haunted expression on his face, I felt grateful, for once, that I had no memory of the time. He had lived with those gruelling mental images for nearly a millennium. The thought made me want to hug him tight, but I didn’t want to be the first to instigate any intimacy in this life. Another matter of pride. He couldn’t bind me to a bed like an animal and expect me to want to embrace him, kiss him, to cup his jaw in my hand and gaze into his eyes, to press my soft body against his hard planes, to …
‘Have you ever killed anyone?’ I asked him, keen to quell the heat pooling low in my belly. ‘Except me, of course.’
‘Several times.’ He clenched his jaw. ‘To save loved ones, mostly, but in battle too. When I had to. History was a brutal place. You?’
I shook my head, thinking of what he’d said out in the fields a few days ago: If a hero is someone who will give up love to save the world, then a villain is the reverse. Someone who will give up the world to save love.
‘Never?’ He gaped at me now, the flap of a dust jacket pressed between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Not even on the Western Front?’
‘Not that I can remember, anyway.’
There was a reverent silence, like there always was when one of us brought up the trenches. I looked around now at the quiet, orderly bookshop and felt a distinct pang of gratitude for my life as Branwen Blythe. Jam-slathered croissants and warm baths. The flip of soft, new pages. Clean bedsheets and a snoozing dog. A big, brilliant sky over pristine hills. If I were an artist, I would consider it an exercise in contrast; the way the darkness made the light seem so much brighter.
Just as I was pondering the meaning of existence, the door chimed for the first time in nearly an hour. At the sight of the customer’s livid face, the brief peace evaporated.
Ceri.
With a face like thunder.