Chapter Ten
Megan had to take to her bed with a world-class case of diarrhoea and vomiting for the next two days but the spell seemed to have the opposite effect on me. I felt ridiculously fizzy, like someone had lit an adrenaline fuse deep in my chest, and found it hard to concentrate. Was it really magic? Or had Vivienne slipped something into the brew to make us all believe that it was? I tended towards the latter explanation, even though I couldn’t see how or what, because the idea that a mouthful of papier maché and incipient typhoid could make magic happen was too ridiculous for anyone less fluffy than Meg to believe. But. Still. Fizzy.
On the third day I went back to the Old Lodge. Guy had couriered over some paperwork and I wanted to pass it by Kai before we signed to anything, and to take a few more outside shots of the place.
‘He’s not here.’ Cerys leaned against the door. ‘Buggered off somewhere, God knows where, and here’s me feeling like I’d better avoid any sharp corners in case I go bang. Please come and talk to me, Holly. I can’t stand up for long, but that’s all right because I can’t lie down for long either, so it averages out.’
‘I brought some contracts for Kai to see, if he’s really going through with letting a film crew loose around here, and my camera.’
‘So this is a professional visit?’ Cerys gave me a ‘Princess Di’ coy look. ‘You two didn’t . . . um . . . get it together when I’d gone to bed the other night? When I woke up your car was still here.’
‘Went home by taxi. Kai brought the car back next morning.’ Not that I’d seen anything of him; he’d shoved the keys through the letter box and, by the time I’d got down from my office to the front door, he’d vanished. ‘And anyway, you’re his daughter. I wouldn’t tell you anything, it would be nasty.’
Cerys slumped on the edge of the kitchen table. ‘He and Mum split up when I was eighteen months old. She married Dad when I was three. So I’ve never known Kai as a father, he’s always been more like a distant family friend. Sometimes really distant.’
‘And he’s gone off and left you on your own? With, what, around three weeks before the babies arrive?’ I pulled a face.
‘Yeah, well, I can phone an ambulance like a bitch.’ She got up again. ‘Put the kettle on, Holl, will you? I’m gagging for a coffee but I’m busting for a wee first.’ She waddled off into the downstairs bathroom but carried on our conversation through the closed door. ‘So you can tell me anything about Kai. I won’t judge you. Well, I can’t, I’m the stupid bint who got pregnant with twins by a tosser.’
‘There’s nothing to say, Cerys, honestly.’
The flush sounded and she appeared again. ‘You’re not going to hurt him, are you?’
‘Hurt him? I’m more likely to damage myself.’
‘I’ve never really got what’s going on with Kai, y’know.’ Cerys weebled through the door towards me, hands pressed into the small of her back. ‘I know he and Mum had me very young, but I don’t reckon that’s what’s behind him being so totally weird.’
‘Is he? Totally weird?’ I spooned coffee into two mugs and tried not to think about what form this weirdness might take, whilst disturbing images of various sexual peculiarities tiptoed through my mind. This involved imagining Kai naked and more coffee sprinkled over the worktop than hit the mugs.
Cerys made a dismissive motion with one hand. ‘He’s always a bit . . . I dunno really . . . he doesn’t really relate like other people. It’s almost like he’s acting a part instead of living.’ She gave me a shrewd look. ‘Oh he thinks he’s so clever and so straight, but I can see through him like an ultrasound scan. Oh, God, listen to me, I’ve become completely baby-centric. Shoot me now, Holly, please, before I start talking about giving birth to the sounds of whale-song instead of the ninety-decibel screaming I’ve got planned.’
I rested a hand on the top of the kettle switch and fussed with the plug to occupy my hands and give me a reason to avoid her eye. Was that it? Was that why I felt so ambivalent about this yellow-eyed Welshman, because he wasn’t behaving in the ways I expected? ‘Aren’t we all, a bit? Acting a part, I mean, pretending to be normal and ordinary while we’ve all got stuff going on underneath — isn’t that the only way we can carry on without spending all our time in tears or therapy?’ I turned back around to find that Cerys had an eyebrow raised and her mouth twisted into a prematurely motherly expression.
‘Sounds like you and he are going to get along fantastically,’ she said, and the parental tone of irony was noticeable. ‘Just, you know, be careful. Of yourself, not just him. He’s a bit of a . . . not a bastard, not really, but a bit . . . careless, I suppose. He had this one girlfriend, Imogen, ’bout a year ago I suppose, and she was lovely, really sweet and she and I got on and everything, but that all fell apart accompanied by some fairly serious yelling.’ She shrugged. ‘She wanted him close, and he doesn’t really do close.’ A hand rubbed the bump in concentric circles. ‘He does screwing though, I’ve heard him.’
‘Shut up. Enough.’ I poured boiling water onto the coffee. The rising steam made me think about the spell and I had to smile at the ridiculousness of it. Yeah, I’d wished for excitement. What had I got? An enormously pregnant young woman telling me about her father’s sex life, and a best friend who could heave for Britain. Oh, how thrilling.
‘Have you seen the weather forecast?’ Cerys took her mug. ‘Storms and snow and all kinds of stuff on its way, apparently.’
‘Oh, that’ll be my excitement for the year then. Nothing like getting trapped in your house for four days and then flooded out when all the pipes burst. Wonderful.’ I hadn’t, after all, specified good excitement, had I?
‘Yep. These babies had better hang in there, otherwise they’ll have to airlift me out. With a jumbo jet. Does it often snow up here? In Peterborough we really like snow because we don’t get much of it, but everything grinds to a halt if we get so much as a sprinkling.’
‘It does snow, but we’re used to it. And it’s not usually feet of the stuff, just enough to make life bloody awkward. Talking of which, I’d better pop outside now and do the pictures Guy wants.’
‘I’ll stay here. I’m drip-filling my bladder.’
I went outside and did some close-up shots of the front porch and some of the general location, then wandered out along the track until I could fit the whole of the Old Lodge in a single frame. As I locked off the last picture, someone spoke close to my shoulder.
‘You’ve been hanging around Dodman’s Copse haven’t you?’
Instinct increased my grip on the camera, but I turned around. ‘What?’
‘Hill on the far side. We’ve seen you.’
It was the ginger-headed bloke, this time seconded by a thin man with what looked like a joke moustache. They were both carrying shotguns, and the thin man had a brace of pheasants, dripping blood, by the feet.
‘It’s a free country.’ I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the dead birds. Their eyes were bleeding, surely shot birds don’t drip blood from the eyes? ‘And we’re not doing any harm or anything.’
Joke-moustache looked me up and down. ‘Depends what you are doing,’ he said. His voice was less classy-twit and more gravelly-bastard. ‘We seen you, all of you, sitting up there, chanting.’
‘Oh bollocks. Chanting’s not against the law. We’re a women’s support group,’ I added, keeping one eye on those guns.
The men exchanged a smile. ‘That’s what you’re calling it these days, is it?’ Ginger-hair took a step closer to me and I took an involuntary step back, which made him smile even more. ‘Look. She’s scared.’
‘She should be.’ Joke-moustache raised his gun, clicked it closed and fired into the sky. I’d never been so close to a discharged firearm; the noise was tremendous and I covered my ears, albeit too late. When I managed to unscrew my eyes and lower my hands, the men had gone. Melted away into the woods, leaving only the smell of cordite and a tiny patch of dripped blood staining the brown and yellow leaves of the trackway.
Cerys was at the door. ‘Holly? What’s happened? I heard shooting, are you all right?’
‘Yes.’ To my horror I felt the tears of shock begin to prick my eyes. ‘It was . . .’
‘Oh, Kai’s back.’ The Jeep jounced into view coming down the track towards us. I couldn’t hear the engine of the Land Rover and I could only hope that ginge and his skanky friend weren’t standing behind an oak tree watching his arrival.
‘Hi.’ The long legs unfolded onto the forest floor. ‘Holly? What’s happened?’
I managed to breathe through the desire to throw myself at him and blurt that I’d been scared of the big men with guns — it was a little too romance-heroine for me.
‘Someone fired a gun,’ Cerys supplied.
I could have mistaken the quick look Kai gave me, but I didn’t think so. ‘Was it our auburn-headed friend?’
I nodded. ‘And a thin guy with a moustache that looked like it came out of a cracker.’
‘ Fuck .’ Kai turned to go into the Old Lodge, slamming his hand down on the porch rail. ‘Thought I told you to stay clear of him.’
‘No. If you remember, you were staying clear of him, and I said that was all right with me. You’ve warned me off just about everything else, but you never mentioned him.’
‘Well he . . . what do you mean “just about everything else”?’ He turned back to face me, rolling his hand along the rail so that his rings tapped.
‘I’m going for a lie-down. This is all getting way too heavy for me, and being that I weigh roughly the same as Albania, that is going some.’ Cerys hauled herself into the hallway, pausing to give me a quick wink over her shoulder as she went.
‘Holly? What did you mean?’ Kai stayed where he was.
‘Well, the woods and stuff.’ My voice sounded a bit feeble and my eyes still stung.
‘Stuff?’
‘You.’
He dipped his head slowly and looked at me. It was like being stuck in a binary system, those twin-sun eyes. The stubble had renewed itself, but looked artful, as though by a freak of nature his beard had some kind of designer pattern. ‘Get in the Jeep.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
He twitched his head towards the olive-grey vehicle. ‘In.’
‘What, get into a car with a bloke who seems to think ordering women around is the way forward for polite society? I don’t think so.’ The shock was draining from my system, leaving me feeling a weakness I would never show. The anger covered it up nicely.
Kai closed in. Put a hand on my elbow. ‘Look. My daughter is up there.’ Eyes traced a way through the open door and up the stairs, then returned to mine. ‘And if I know Cerys, she’s listening to every word we say. You don’t want to have this conversation thrown back at you any more than I do. So get in the Jeep.’
‘Why? What are you going to say?’
‘Get in the Jeep and find out.’
I finally complied, and he got in after me, starting the engine with a sudden, ferocious amount of throttle. The wheels spun, gained purchase and then hurled us forward, narrowly missing a tree which probably qualified for Ancient status. ‘Where are we going?’ I’d barely managed to get my seat belt done up.
‘What do you want me to do, Holly? Throw you down on the ground and have sex with you?’
‘God. Way to be cold-blooded about it, Kai.’
‘I sent you home in a taxi instead of taking you into my bed, was that what you meant? That was warning you off me? You’ve clearly not been on the receiving end of many real warnings.’ He jolted the Jeep around in a semicircle. We were off-road, deep within the forest, parked at the bottom of a deep depression filled with birch and oak leaves like snowdrifts. ‘So, you fancy me and you reckon I should reciprocate?’
‘It felt like reciprocation the other night.’ I kept staring out of the windscreen at the sporadic leaves that floated from above like broken kites.
‘It . . .’ he bit off whatever the end of that sentence might have been. ‘We were playing, that was all. Teasing. I’m sorry if you read more into it than was intended.’
‘Look, forget it. I’ve just had a guy set off a shotgun next to my head, I’m not thinking straight.’
‘Too right you’re not.’ To my surprise he sighed deeply. ‘Did Cerys set you up for this? Holly, my daughter knows nothing about my life, whatever she might think and whatever she might have told you. It’s . . . difficult. I’m not . . . I like women . . . I like you, but I’m not in the right place for anything right now. We had a bit of a game going that night and, yeah, okay, I admit it, it did cross my mind that the evening might have ended differently but . . .’ His accent strengthened for a moment, then he gave another sigh and leaned back in the driver’s seat, using one hand to push the hair off his face. ‘Wrong time, wrong place.’
‘I wasn’t looking for a proposal, Kai. A good time would have done.’
A steady stare and a shaken head. ‘It felt . . . yeah, wrong, that’s all I can say. Like — jeez, can’t believe I’m saying this — like something would have been spoiled if I’d taken you to my bed.’
I remembered him chasing around his house looking for spell items for me. He’d been fun then, charming and outgoing, no sign that there had been anything awry. Now here, he seemed locked-down, wary.
‘I think you’re scared.’
‘Really.’ Fingers tapped the wheel. ‘And what of?’ He was doing that calm, listening thing that he’d done the other night, too. Waiting for me to show myself.
‘Well, you seemed to be quite happy to give me the come-on right up until I asked you about yourself, and I think it freaked you out. So maybe you’re afraid because I asked, after all, if you never give anything of yourself, then how can anyone actually get close to you, hey? Like . . . yes, like friends. Do you have any friends, Kai?’
He turned towards me and slowly closed his eyes. ‘Well. Score one for the apparently superficial woman.’ When he opened them his pupils were huge. It turned the golden irises into pale rings around the darkness, like eclipses. ‘Holly.’ The chill of his ring bit the warm flesh under my chin as his fingers touched my face. ‘ Holly .’ His voice was a whisper now, very Welsh, my name brushing against my own lips as he brought his mouth to mine.
I knew I was being played, knew this was to keep me quiet, almost to buy me off, but as soon as the kiss started I didn’t care. He tasted of cucumber and mint, his teeth grazed across my upper lip and I could hear nothing but his breathing, feel nothing but the heat rising in me. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the kiss was over, he pulled away and put his head on his arms, resting on the steering wheel. ‘And that’s all you get.’
‘Wow.’ I said, when I could trust my voice. ‘Well. That’s one hell of a waste of a sexy body.’
‘Yours or mine?’ Now he sat up, shaking his hair off his face, and I started to laugh. He joined in until we were both rocking with laughter, steaming up the windows of the Jeep with it and probably disturbing every hibernating creature for a hundred yards.