Chapter Seventeen
Later, after leaving the folder in the kitchen—it felt contaminated now that she understood it was part of such a Faustian
pact—Petra lay on her back in the pitch-black bedroom, her eyes glued to the invisible ceiling. “Whatever this—thing—is,”
he had told her. And now her mind kept repeating his words on a death loop. “Whatever this thing is,” “whatever this thing
is . . .”
What was this “thing”? What was it to Ross? Friendship? No. If he thought it was just that he would have said so, which indicated
it was more . . . Which was good, because if Petra asked her heart what her relationship was with Ross, she would call it
more than friendship too.
A lot more.
But then he had solemnly announced that if she represented him “it” would end. And that was fine, she tried to reassure herself,
because she definitely, definitely wasn’t going to represent him. Especially now that she knew the deal. So . . . all good.
No?
Petra groaned. Sleep was impossible. She picked up her phone. Just at three o’clock. She had to get up in four hours. Despite that, accepting the impossibility of rest, she snapped on the light and went off to the kitchen to fetch the folder.
When her alarm went off, Petra discovered she had been staring sightlessly into space for some time, the individual pages
scattered on the bedspread, the final scenes of the manuscript he had given her still held loosely between her fingers. Although,
of course, they were not the final scenes. Not quite.
The gray dawn had warmed fully into daylight now, with a watery yellow sun casting its cool rays across the rooftops. A perfect
late spring day, chilly and bright. The dawn chorus had died away, leaving just a solitary thrush serenading, its quicksilver
notes rising and falling through the air.
Petra looked down at last, struggling to persuade her strained, gritty eyes to focus on the manuscript. She rubbed her face
and sighed before rolling her head to try to iron out her stiff neck.
It was good.
It was more than good; it was superb: Sweeping but intimate, elegant but raw . . . She had decided to re-read the beginning before continuing
with the new pages Ross had given her and—despite the story being familiar, of course—the reframing of it with Caliban as
protagonist was totally convincing.
Even better than that, the narrative drive was somehow also irresistible, which was a tricky feat to pull off in a retelling.
Of course, he had smashed it, on this and every other point.
As before though—when she just had the opening chapters—the story stopped abruptly.
It was perhaps sixty thousand words in total—a full-length literary work—but it was not yet complete.
The critical decision of whether Caliban’s ending was a happy or a tragic one was still to be made it seemed, although any reader, however dull of spirit or hard of heart, would be longing for an uplifting finish.
The two unanswered questions—which had been posed and explored with exquisite skill—were whether Caliban’s release from Prospero’s domination would feel like freedom or abandonment, and whether his seemingly hopeless crush on brave, inspiring Miranda was reciprocated or ultimately rebuffed.
Petra couldn’t remember a time when she had cared more about how a book ended.
Later, in the shop, Petra’s lack of sleep, and the horrible quandary she now found herself in over her relationship with Ross,
had left her strung out and exhausted. She sat crouched on the chair at the cash register, numb and devoid of rational thought.
She was completely unable to rouse herself to do any of the tasks she would normally be doing when not serving customers.
Even escaping to the kitchen to make herself a really strong instant coffee was like scaling Everest. And it tasted vile.
She was just wincing over the dregs in her mug when the doorbell clanged and Freya rushed in, looking as adorable as usual,
with her face prettily flushed, and tufts of her bright blond hair sticking up at all angles where it had escaped from her
ponytail.
“Sorry,” she stage-whispered as she trotted in, nearly at a run. “I’m sneaking out to grab Finn a birthday present,” she confided,
glancing guiltily over her shoulder. “I’ve left it horribly late, and I’m worried you’ll have to order it in . . .”
“What did you have in mind?” asked Petra dully, relieved that she wasn’t being asked to come up with suggestions.
“I was thinking that going wild book—it’s, like, a memoir, I think?—about encouraging diversity by letting farmland revert to the wild? They are thinking of giving it a whirl at Hollytree Farm,” she told Petra. “It’s by Isabella somebody?”
“Isabella Tree,” furnished Petra, faintly astonished that her dulled brain had managed to come up with the facts. “Nominative
determinism, I suppose you’d call it.”
“I have no idea what that is.” Freya laughed. “But do you have it in stock?” She bit her lip anxiously.
“Um, I actually think we’ve sold the last copy; it’s on order, but I suppose next week is too late?”
Freya looked crestfallen.
Then Petra had a brainwave. “Hang on,” she said, scurrying as fast as her leaden limbs would take her, quickly returning from
the stockroom waving a large, slim hardbacked book with a beautiful woodcut of a hare on the cover.
“Now, this is the children’s version,” she warned, handing it to Freya doubtfully.
“That’s perfect. Finn’s just a big kid,” said Freya. “Wow, it’s beautiful!”
The two women looked at the book together, exclaiming over the spectacular illustrations, a mix of sketches, watercolors,
and woodcuts, featuring the re-wilded estate at Knepp, the farm where the whole experiment had started.
“Perfect,” declared Freya, putting it on the table and reaching for her wallet. “I think he’s going to love it—wowsers, you
look terrible,” she exclaimed, looking Petra full in the face for the first time as she handed over her card. “What on earth
is the matter?” She placed her hand gently on Petra’s forearm, her face a picture of concern.
How to explain? “Oh, it’s nothing,” Petra said, dropping her gaze so Freya wouldn’t see the sudden tears. “I didn’t sleep. I’ll be fine.”
“Come over for supper,” said Freya decisively. “On the house. As soon as we open. Before, even, and then—as soon as you’ve
eaten you can go straight off to bed.”
“That’s so kind,” said Petra, “but—you know what?—I think I’ll just skip the food and hit the sack as soon as I close.”
“Sure?” Freya screwed up her face anxiously.
“Yeah, totally,” Petra insisted. If she was desperate for sleep, she was even more desperate to get away from people. All
people. Not even just Ross . . . Although she definitely wanted to get away from Ross.
When the longed-for closing time finally arrived, following an afternoon that dragged so badly she had started to feel stuck
in a complete paralysis of the space-time continuum, Petra was sure she would crawl straight upstairs to bed, but then—arriving
in the flat at last—she found she couldn’t settle.
The horrible double bind Ross had put her in—a quandary she had been pushing away from her thoughts all day—immediately swamped her consciousness again, followed by repeated waves of physical anxiety.
She found herself wandering twitchily around the little flat, utterly preoccupied, sweating but cold, making tea but forgetting to drink it, scrolling on her phone but then chucking it down in despair as even the mini-dopamine hits of Instagram and TikTok failed to amuse.
The pink walls of her west-facing bedroom were glowing like copper with the falling sun, but dark was still some time away.
It was barely six o’clock. Going to bed before darkness fell was a complete impossibility, she realized.
What she needed was profound physical fatigue.
A tiredness of the body so overwhelming that even her mind would be quiet.
Deciding in a moment, she shrugged on her thin waterproof coat and—not even stopping to change her sneakers for something
more robust—she locked the door and strode up the hill to the churchyard. She remembered halfway up that she didn’t even have
her phone, but that was fine. Phones were for speaking to people, and the point was to avoid that. She could watch the sunset
in solitude from the bench at the top of the hill.
Their bench.
Getting into her stride felt good. She found herself counting “1, 2, 1, 2” like a mantra as she walked, the hypnotic rhythm
and effort driving out all thought. Instead, she concentrated on the physical sensations: her breath, the rocky ground beneath
her feet, the feel of the increasingly cold evening air sharp on her cheeks and nipping her nose.
She arrived at the bench, panting, and sat down—right in the center—to watch the sunset paint the sky, its rays grazing the
rooftops of Portneath far below. As a meditation to replace the walking, she focused her gaze on the golden orb dropping lower
until it touched the sea on the horizon. It wasn’t enough. The thoughts intruded again, swirling and coalescing: their friendship,
their connection, the exhilaration of reading his work, but then the lurch of fear she felt every time she replayed the moment
when he asked her for representation.
It was impossible. Going back to that world? Unthinkable . . . and to have to face doing it without even this “thing” with
Ross to sustain her? Even more unthinkable.
She pined for a return to their easy banter, the freewheeling conversations, the laughter, and the excitement of lighting upon yet another shared love, be it poem, novel, or even a piece of art.
They were soulmates.
And, of course, he was so beautiful, and she no longer meant just on the outside. Was it any wonder she had allowed herself
to daydream that the two of them might one day share something deeper?
Ridiculous.
It even struck her then, with a physical wail of pain, that he might even have fostered their friendship with a view to what