Chapter 10
I ran all the way to the road, leaping over bramble snares and tearing through branch fingers so that all I could hear was my own breathing and the noise of ripping and snapping as I went.
As soon as I reached my car I collapsed half across the bonnet, gasping in air that sounded like sobs.
This was ridiculous! What the hell was I even doing, putting myself through this?
When something brushed against my shoulder and then moved to my arm all I could think was that the big black bird had followed me and was going to take my eyes out.
I jerked my arm backwards, felt my elbow connect with something and then turned, flailing as I went, to keep anything with untoward intent away from my face.
It was Ross. He’d been standing just behind me and now had one hand over his nose with blood dripping between his fingers. We stared at one another. Then we both said sorry, although mine came breathless and panicked and his was nasal and thick.
‘Don’t… ever… touch a woman… who’s frightened,’ I said, having another ‘teaching moment’ although I didn’t know why I was wasting it on Ross.
‘Getting that message now,’ he intoned. ‘I thought you knew I was here. My car is right over there.’
‘I did not.’ Slowly I slid myself away from my car and tried to look calm and in control. ‘I was thinking about other things not monitoring the parking situation. Keep your head forward and pinch your nose.’
I was good at stopping nosebleeds, random first aid was my ‘thing’. Ross leaned one arm against the car and tried to look nonchalant, while obviously shaken. ‘Ow,’ he said.
‘I thought you were a bird.’ I unlocked the car and pushed him down towards the passenger seat.
If he was going to pass out I’d rather he didn’t drop onto the tyre-tracked mud at the side of the road, someone might come by and assume I’d murdered him.
Although, if he was going to do things like tap a terrified woman on the shoulder, murder was probably too good for him.
I was trying very hard to ignore the warmth that seeing him had brought, a feeling as though I’d eaten a very large, toasted marshmallow and it had settled just above my stomach.
‘You’ve been to the house?’ Ross asked, leaning forward across his knees and obviously trying not to get blood on my upholstery, his shirt, his jeans or the ground. ‘Did you find your boots?’
Oh yes, the boots. I’d nearly forgotten about those. I patted my pockets, which bulged reassuringly full of yellow rubber. ‘Yes, I did. I had tea with Isobel,’ I added. ‘Why are you here?’
‘I own this place?’ Two dark eyes raised to my face now and reminded me of that bird and its sinister intent. ‘As soon as Isobel is out I need to move the construction crew in, so I’m keeping an eye on it.’
I looked up and down the silent road. A few leaves blew across its width but nothing else moved. ‘Are they invisible?’ I asked.
He snorted. ‘Ow. No. I’ve bought another couple of acres across the other side of the wood. I’m using it for storage for most of the stuff I need to get started, to save transport time.’
I looked down again at the huge tyre marks in the mud. ‘And they’re there now? Just waiting?’ I had a mental image of a group of men clustered in the forest, like Robin Hood’s Merry Men in hard hats and fluorescent jackets, hiding behind trees and discussing their boss.
Ross snorted again. ‘Just the equipment. The guys I call in when I need them; I can’t afford to pay them to wait.
I’ve got an old container with bits and pieces in and there’s pipes and other hardware stacked and ready to go.
I’m mostly going to reuse building material from Elm Cottage.
’ He sniffed. ‘It’s going to be ecologically sound and a carbon neutral home,’ he said, almost sadly.
‘If I ever build it. I have to get started by next month because the TV crew are coming to film.’
‘So you’ll be on TV?’ The reality of his situation was starting to sink in now.
I’d been thinking of Ross as just rather overstretched, the sort of person who lives on his nerves and cheap supermarket food, not unlike myself although for different reasons.
But he really was working to a tight timeframe, and if this was make or break for his business it was no wonder he was chewing his nails to the quick.
‘That’s the general idea.’ He dropped his head again and mopped at his nose with a scrunched-up bit of tissue.
TV. Part of me was racing through the memories.
David had always wanted to be on TV. Oh, he’d had a few minor parts, been the sidekick to a villain in Doctors, had shouted, ‘Look out!’ to Inspector Barnaby in an episode of Midsomer Murders, but nothing big.
Not the lead role, front cover of the Radio Times, large amounts of on-screen time that he thought he deserved.
I, on the other hand, had to remain hidden.
If so much as one camera shot showed half of my shoulder I ran the risk that David might see, might recognise me. Might come looking.
Then I shuddered. I couldn’t run that risk. I shuddered again and Ross looked up, his face streaked with blood.
‘What? You’re not involved in some ongoing vendetta with a TV producer are you?’
‘Not… exactly.’
He stared at me for a moment longer. His expression was strangely opaque – at least, it seemed strange on him, when his normal expression seemed to be lodged somewhere between ‘obsessive worry’ and ‘total breakdown’. That look worried me.
‘It’s fine,’ I said hurriedly. ‘I’m only here to get Isobel to move out, I won’t be anywhere near by the time you start building.’
The look continued. It was accompanied by half a tissue dabbed against his nose and then examined for fresh bleeding, although that seemed to have stopped now.
A sycamore leaf rattled down between us and landed on his shoulder where it hung for a second, burnished and bright against the otherwise shaded day.
‘So you’re a single mum in hiding?’ he asked, sounding neutral, no undertones of condemnation or curiosity.
‘Look, it’s not as simple as that. You make it sound as though I’m doing something wrong. We’ve just moved away from where we come from to try to start a new life.’
Ross twitched a muscle in his face, as though my story had been sour or disagreeable in some other way.
‘I had therapy,’ he said, but sounding as though he were talking to himself not me.
‘I had therapy. Bloody expensive therapy, all those months of talking and yet… here I go again. What is wrong with me?’
‘If you’ve been in therapy you probably already know,’ I said, helpfully. ‘And your nose has stopped bleeding now so you can go and get on with whatever it was you came here to do.’
He was looking at his hands now, twisting the blood-streaked tissue between fingers that showed more blood where he’d bitten his nails so low and eczema was splitting his knuckles.
I couldn’t keep looking at him. He had an expression more torn and ragged than his remaining nails, as though he were about to be tortured, and it was hard to watch.
I looked instead towards Elm Cottage, where it hung as though impaled on the blackberry thorns in the middle of the thicket.
It was a little hard to tell because of the obscuring banners of remaining leaf, but it did look as though Isobel stood just outside the front door, unmoving and watching us.
‘Ow,’ Ross said more normally now. ‘Has it really stopped bleeding?’
I glanced down at him still patting his nose, and when I looked back up towards the cottage door where I had been almost sure I had seen that scarecrow-like figure, the whole of the front of the cottage was bleak and bare once more.
‘I think so.’
‘It’s sore.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry about that, but honestly, announce your presence before you start the laying on of hands, trust me on that. I was already terrified, and you were lucky I didn’t punch you.’
‘Would you have done?’
‘No,’ I said. My voice sounded tired and defeated and I wasn’t sure why.
Possibly because I knew that I didn’t fight back, knew that my natural reaction had become to freeze.
‘The nose was an accident. I was trying to get away and you were too close behind me. And now I have to go home, my daughter will be back from the park.’
‘Tilly.’
‘Thank you for reminding me of my own daughter’s name,’ I said sharply. I didn’t like him remembering; there were undertones of questions, questions that didn’t seem to have a right answer.
‘You might have more than one child,’ Ross said, reasonably. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, I haven’t. Just Tilly, and she’ll be round at Tia’s with Kiara and the pair of them will be driving Tia round the twist by now,’ I said, still sounding a little ruffled. ‘I’ll come back and have another word with Isobel next week, when Tilly is at nursery.’
I thought of Isobel, that bucket of water, her food in that mouse-proof metal box.
The air of self-contained loneliness that she seemed to have – she must be lonely to have invited me to have a cup of tea, surely.
Birds wouldn’t be a substitute for human company, and maybe she just needed someone to talk to.
‘Or I might bring Tilly over tomorrow,’ I said slowly.
‘It will get us out of the house and Isobel seemed to like Tils. As long as she promises to keep the birds out of the place while I’m there, anyway.
I can try to drop in more hints about her moving on while I’m there. ’
Ross nodded slowly. ‘That would be good. Time really is of the essence.’
I shuffled my feet, trying to get the fallen birch leaves off my toes, where they had stuck like transfers.
He continued to sit slumped forward with his legs on the muddy roadside.
Neither of us seemed to be in any real hurry, for all our words of moving on.
Beyond us on the road, a cyclist sped past, head down and pedalling as though desperate to get through the tunnel of trees.
I wondered if it was the same one as I’d seen yesterday; there was a certain Groundhog Day constant about this place.
Only the trees seemed to change as they dropped more and more leaves and their skeletons became more visible.
Then I wondered why I wasn’t hurrying this impromptu meeting to its natural close.
Was I actually enjoying this, in some bizarrely masochistic way?
The fact that Ross seemed so quietly accepting of me was undoubtedly refreshing and a little bit sweet.
It was certainly a change from David and the way he’d behaved towards me, at the end.
Perhaps that was it. Ross being so unlike David was making me feel as though some members of the male portion of the human race were not utterly evil and that there might be some pleasant people who were in possession of a penis out there.
They weren’t all controlling, stalkerish mind-fuckers who followed and tracked your every move.
Ross looked as though he barely had control of his own body, let alone the desire to control anyone else’s.
I shivered at the thought.
‘Look, you’re cold. You should go,’ Ross said, giving his nose a definitive last swipe with the tissue.
‘I know. I’ve been telling you that. But I can’t drive away with you sticking out of my car,’ I said reasonably. ‘It would make overtaking difficult.’
‘People used to walk in front of cars with a red flag.’ Ross gave his nose another pat. ‘I often wonder how they thought that would pan out. I mean, if you have to go everywhere at walking speed, then what’s the actual point of the car?’
‘Sitting down,’ I said pointedly.
‘Nobody walked in front of horse drawn carriages with a flag though, did they?’ he went on, clearly lost in his own wonderings. ‘A galloping horse can go quite fast, and they must have mown people down. So why the man with the flag for cars? I ought to look that up.’
‘You do that.’
He finally seemed to realise that I was waiting for him to move, and stood up. ‘Well. Thank you for the nosebleed and the… Thank you for seeing Isobel. Did you say you were coming back tomorrow?’
‘I might.’ I was cautious now. ‘I said I might. If nothing else presents itself. Why?’
‘Oh, nothing, no reason.’ Ross shrugged. ‘I just might be around, that’s all.’
I stared at him. ‘Don’t you have a home? A family? Something else to do other than wander around these woods like a weird vagrant?’
He sat down again. I sighed. ‘I’m hanging my entire future on winning The Great British Build,’ he said.
‘This is important to me. So the second Isobel is out of Elm Cottage I need to be ready to move. Of course I’m wandering round!
And, yes, I have a home, although no family, thanks for pointing that out. ’
When he stood up for the second time I whipped around and got into my car and started the engine.
I didn’t want to give him a chance to settle back in my passenger seat again.
‘Goodbye,’ I called out of the window as I drove away.
I didn’t want to acknowledge the chance of seeing him again.
I didn’t even want to think about that hot little burst of pleasure that had gone off in my chest when he’d mentioned it.
I did not want to fancy Ross Ventriss. I was too old for all that stupid crush-on-a-boy rubbish, and I’d been taken in by lust and soft words one too many times already.
I had Tilly to consider, and the whole getting us secure and settled and a proper job to think about, I did not have the time or brain space to start liking another man.
Ross wasn’t for me, anyway. He was a bloody architect. He had a vocation and, despite his chewed nails and terrible haircut, he was clearly good enough for a TV programme to want to film him carrying it out.
All these thoughts were sensible and carried me back along the road, back through the village where an absence of people continued, and out towards home. But they didn’t stop me smiling as I drove.