Chapter 13
Now
Relentless rain pummels down the orchard for what feels like an age.
The leaves have already begun to fall and the gaps in the branches don’t offer much in the way of shelter.
So, I sit curled up at the root of the tree, crying into the raindrops.
It doesn’t take long for it to soak through my clothes, my hair, my bones, until a cold coat clings to me and forces me to tremble.
Still, it’s not enough to make me want to go home.
Well, now that I have no home, it’s not enough to make me go back to the farm and face Mum.
Jacob and I used to sit for hours in the summer rain, sometimes sheltered in the treehouse, feeling a rhythmic drip on our faces as it leaked through the holes in the roof.
Or we’d be here, stealing the apples from the trees – they always tasted better when cold, crisp, and dripping from the elements.
It was Jacob that found that out, of course.
Sometimes we’d run across to another farm in the village and fill our t-shirts with their strawberries until they stained pink.
Lifting my head to the sky, I close my eyes and pretend I’m ten again, when my greatest worry was whether Granny was going to whip out the nail scrubbing brush at bedtime, or that the end of the summer would come too fast and it would be weeks before I saw Jacob again.
‘You’ll catch a cold.’ A voice startles me out of my daydream. I don’t open my eyes to see who it is. It is as though I have manifested him here, as though he heard my thoughts loud and clear from across the acreage and followed the call.
‘You of all people know that’s not true.’ I feel him sit down beside me, but I don’t turn to look.
‘Can you remember that one summer – I think we must have been eleven or twelve – when it rained for almost all of August?’ He is so close to me that I can feel the water drip from his hair and caress my shoulder.
‘And we tried our best to stay inside, playing games, drawing and God knows what else … and that lasted for what, two days?’ I’m scared if I open my eyes now, I’d be talking to a figment of my imagination, so I savour the rain on my cheeks and the warmth of his body beside mine.
‘Spent the next three weeks piss wet, though, and didn’t sneeze once.’
‘Well, apart from when Alfie shoved that dandelion up your nose.’ I laugh, taking a chance and opening one eye. I capture a glimpse of him, his dark hair soaked and almost touching his shoulders, the water puddling in his dimples as he smiles.
‘Yeah,’ he chuckles, ‘apart from then.’
We sit for a while, both letting the memory linger, both feeling the unrelenting raindrops on our faces, not worried that we’re soaked through.
‘So, are you going to tell me why we’re sat out in the rain like a pair of wet wellies?’ Jacob asks.
I rest my head on my arms that I have wrapped around my knees and watch him with a sad smile. ‘There’s no “we” about it. You gate-crashed my party.’
‘Looked more fun than what I was doing.’ He shrugs. ‘Want me to give you a lift home?’
Home. What is a home? Four walls and a roof?
A space in a cardboard box next to someone you love?
Or does it not really exist at all? My home was a person.
Now he’s unrecognisable. My home was a place where all of my family gathered to eat their dinner and talk about their days.
Now someone else and their family will eat at that table while mine is spread across the country.
My home was Granny’s garden, and that doesn’t bloom so pretty now she’s gone.
Everything I used to call home has changed, and now I don’t know where to turn.
‘No, thank you,’ I say, stubbornly. Despite spending God knows how long out here, I’m still not ready to face Mum.
I wish I never had to go back. I wish I could just disappear and all thoughts of university emails and broken homes didn’t matter any more.
‘We never did run away into the woods.’ I blurt, remembering all of the times we each promised the other we would.
After bad grades, or family arguments, or just on days where normal civilisation was too much.
‘There’s still time.’ Jacob doesn’t miss a beat. If this were even two years ago, he’d leave with me now, without another word, but these days, I can’t bring myself to believe him.
‘We can’t. You have Pen, and I have university.’ In all honesty, university isn’t holding me back, not now anyway, but I needed to remind us both of the beautiful, model-shaped elephant in the orchard.
‘You’ve been accepted to uni?’ he asks, ignoring the mention of his girlfriend.
‘I don’t know. I have an email from them that I can’t bring myself to open.
’ He looks at me like I’ve grown two heads.
‘I’m not sure I’ll be happy about either outcome,’ I confess.
Despite all of his changes, I still can’t seem to hold my thoughts in my head around him.
It’s like looking at him switches off the filter between my brain and mouth and it all just tumbles out.
‘Everything in my life is changing so quickly and I can’t keep up.
No decision feels like the right one at the minute. I’m so lost.’
‘You won’t know unless you look,’ he says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
‘Plus, what’s the worst that could happen?
If you get in, you don’t actually have to take the offer, and if you don’t, one: you’ll have escaped an institution that is quite clearly stupid, and two: you have the world at your feet.
One rejection isn’t the end of it all – there are more unis, more chances, so many more opportunities. ’
Jacob grows more and more animated the more he goes on, as if it his own future he is trying to convince me of.
I mull his words over in silence, but he takes that as more hesitation.
‘Kitty, you’ll be just fine wherever you end up.
And the woods will always be there, any time you need to disappear. ’
My heart thumps in my chest and the pressure on my ribcage makes it difficult to breathe. For the first time in weeks, I see a little glimmer of home in Jacob. It’s not much, but it’s enough in this moment where everything else feels so foreign.
The rain still persists as I pull my phone out of my pocket, finally with enough courage to open my emails. With one last look at Jacob’s grin, I slide open the mail app. I’ll always have a back-up plan: I’ll always have Jacob. I’ll be Kitty and he’ll be Wolfie.
I refresh the app once, twice, then on the third I deflate.
No service. I thrust the phone towards him and he rolls his eyes, though still smiling.
‘Ah yes, the joys of living in the middle of nowhere.’ He mutters, getting to his feet, and wiping his hands on his sopping jeans before offering one to me.
I take it without hesitation and he pulls me out of the boggy earth. We head for his truck. ‘I’m filthy,’ I say before climbing into the seat, ‘and soaking.’
Jacob shrugs. ‘I had one of the sheep in here last week. Escaped out at your grandad’s farm and I had no other way of taking her back. I’m sure it will survive a five-minute journey with your wet arse.’ I flush, but climb into the seat anyway.
As though he can read my mind, we head for Hope Farm.
Neither of us says a word for the duration, either from suspense, or comfort, I can’t quite figure out, but only the sound of the heater pumping out hot air on full blast floats between us, and I don’t bother to hide my smile.
A rainbow hangs in the distance, one village over, where the sun is beginning to re-emerge. Jacob notices it too.
Pulling into the driveway of his family home, he is the first out of the truck, before he runs around the other side to help me down too.
‘What on earth happened to you two?’ Sian Thorogood calls from the kitchen door as she ferries us in with a look of shock. ‘I’m having flashbacks to when you two horrors were ten.’ She covers her face with her hands and throws us each a tea towel.
‘Sorry, Sian,’ I say with a cringe, dripping onto her kitchen tiles. ‘We got caught in the rain.’
‘I can see that, duckie.’ She shakes her head. ‘Stay here, I’ll get you some spare clothes.’
We both do as we’re told, Jacob’s leg tapping underneath him as he waits. It isn’t long until his mum returns with a stack of clothes.
‘Now, as I am sadly only blessed with boys—’ she gives the same pained expression that she always gave me when she’d beg to plait my hair before dinners at Hope Farm ‘—you’re going to have to wear a couple of Jacob’s bits, if that’s okay?
’ I flush again and look to Jacob for permission.
He doesn’t look at me but nods, his neck turning red.
It is very warm in this kitchen; the Aga must be on full whack.
Slipping off into the downstairs loo, I peel off my clothes and replace them with the t-shirt and jogging bottoms. They fit almost perfectly, except I have to roll up the legs of the bottoms so they don’t drag on the floor.
The smell of Jacob lingers in ever fibre, hay mixed with aftershave into a heady cloud of him, and I have to emerge from the small cubicle before it overpowers me completely.
Jacob waits for me outside, his fingers drumming on his now dry thigh, his eyes searching across my face for any sign of emotion.
When he allows his eyes to wander, they scale my body up and down, as though he’s only for the first time seeing his own clothes.
I cough before plonking myself down at the dining table as if it is my own.
My phone has connected automatically to their wi-fi. The password hasn’t changed in all of these years, and as silly as it is, there’s something comforting in it.
Ignoring all of the messages finally pinging through from Mum, I go to my emails, refresh the page, and click on the email without wavering for a second.
Congratulations is all I need to read in the first line before the look on my face gives it away, and Jacob is at my side, my head pressed against his torso so tightly I can feel his heart hammering in his chest almost as quickly as my own.
When Sian sets down two mugs of tea on the table in front of us, Jacob releases me with such speed that it wouldn’t be silly to assume that the embrace had sent an electric shock through him.
Coughing awkwardly, he looks between me and a spot on the floor, his mind evidently racing over what has just passed between us.
Is he thinking about Pen? Would she be annoyed to see us so friendly? So intimate?
Not wishing to fuel his guilt or mine any more, I get to my feet. Thanking Sian for the tea, I try and make my excuses: ‘I should probably head home, Mum will be worried.’
Jacob nods, but doesn’t meet my eye and all of the progress that today had brought in our friendship fizzles out on the kitchen tiles between us. We are back to this awkward inbetween.
Waving one last time, I scurry out of the kitchen, ‘Kitty?’ His voice reaches me as I swing open the door. ‘Congratulations.’ He smiles, genuinely, before turning on his heel and hurrying out of the room.