Chapter 21 #2
But as usual – to start with at least – Cat proved to be right.
Once the dog had gone and it became clear after a few days waiting that it wasn’t going to return, Freya seemed to relax.
She even began going for walks that took her further and further away from the safety of the Bunker, sometimes with both the babies, sometimes with just one strapped to her front with a shawl Cat had knotted for her, other times on her own.
She admitted it left her feeling better, moving around again in the fresh air.
And so things definitely began to improve for all of us.
Even Storm now smiled more than she scowled, and once or twice I even caught her laughing at something in one of the books she was now never without.
She took to reading really well. I found her in the book bunker one day, and she was crying, holding a book about blobby creatures who looked a bit like white hippopotamuses.
I asked what was wrong and she said nothing was wrong, she was just happy because even though their mother could not really read she had used the pictures in these books and made-up stories that fitted them to entertain them when they were small, and now she could read them to the babies when they were older.
She then went off and showed Freya, and later in the small hours of the night I heard Storm reading to her from the books by candlelight as she fed the babies, all sitting quietly together.
Even Freya, who was normally made entirely out of sharp edges, seemed softened by the strange simple stories about these imaginary creatures and their friends.
I think it was partly because it reminded them of their earlier life, but also because the landscape of the stories was so full of those book-friends who they had sort of grown up with in their minds, if not in reality.
And once, when Cat was being especially itchy-twitchy about something that Storm and Freya didn’t think was important, they laughed at her and called her Little My, and I laughed too because I’d listened along in the dark enough to see that Cat was just like the character in the book, small and fiercely opinionated and doing what she knew had to be done before anyone else agreed.
And of course she didn’t like us laughing at her and trying to explain it, which only made it worse.
I think she didn’t like me laughing with the others any more than I liked her going off and having private talks with them.
Neither of us had any practice at being outside a group, I suppose.
But being Cat, and not actually a character in a book, she didn’t stay huffy for long, and all in all these were, in their own way, the happy times.
They might have even got happier if Freya’s walks had taken her in any direction other than the one she took when she expanded her loops around the bunkers and finally crossed the M-way.
At first I was worried she might find her way to the quarry again, but she took off in the opposite direction.
I happened to be watching her from the ridge where the goats were cropping the grass beneath the hazels, and I suppose I watched longer than normal because of it being the first time I’d seen her walk that way, over the old road and beyond.
I wasn’t especially worried because her walks had become commonplace events most afternoons.
They really seemed to be doing her good.
She looked healthier, less waxy and pale, and her mood was definitely better.
It wasn’t so much that she’d formed a closer bond with the babies as that she seemed to resent them less, which was all tied up in there being much less of the negativity and doominess about her.
She’d stopped bursting into tears all the time too.
I’d mentioned this to Storm a few days earlier, while we were riding the horses along the old canal.
I felt almost at home on the swaying back of a horse after all the months of practice, but not enough to ride side by side with her with a hedge to her left and the canal to my right, so I was trailing behind.
She stopped her horse and turned to look at me.
You think she’s better? she said.
I decided I better think before I spoke, because she said it as if the opposite was true and she was surprised and disappointed I couldn’t see it. There was a glint of the old, spikier Storm in her eyes.
I hope she is? I said.
Except I said it with a hesitant question-mark in my tone, so I sounded unconvincing, even to my own ears.
You don’t even know what’s wrong with her, Mouse, she said. So how can you know she’s got better from it.
So tell me, I said. You think I’m wrong because of something I don’t know, tell me. Don’t leave me in the dark. Tell me and then I’ll be a little less stupid, right?
I don’t think you’re stupid, she said. I mean I know you’re not a bit stupid. And I don’t think you’re soft, like Freya says.
She was just lashing out, I said. I understand that.
No, she said, and her smile changed, something almost like mischief washing the glint of the old Storm’s scorn out of it.
No, she definitely thinks you’re soft, Mouse.
But I know you’re not. But you’re not us, either.
So you don’t know. You don’t know what happened, not like we do because it happened to her and not you, and now?
Now it’s worse because she’s in the grasp of something terrifying and dark, darker than the fucking Russian and what he did.
She took a deep breath, as if she needed to gather extra strength for what she needed to say, because it was so heavy.
She’s not better, Mouse, she said. Not a bit.
Those babies are just lovely to us, to you and me and Cat, but to her they feel like she’s always running, running to keep up, running to get ahead, but she never gets anywhere except for somewhere she doesn’t want to be, because it’s a place that should be familiar but isn’t any more.
Because the only thing she’s actually getting away from is herself.
She feels she’s actually losing herself.
And I, and you, and Cat can all help look after the babies and they’ll be fine and themselves, but even I don’t know how to stop her losing herself. Do you understand that?
Yes, I said. I see that, I see it’s tiring but—
Storm cut in, slicing the end of my sentence clean as a knife.
But? she said. But? OK. Here’s the but, Mouse: But pain wears away at sleep until there’s not enough of it to get you through the next day’s waking hours, so then you don’t even have time for nightmares, which means you have daymares instead.
She thinks she’s dropped, or hit, or shaken the babies, but she hasn’t.
She’s just thought of it, because everything is too much, and even thinking it is terrible enough for her to be scared of herself.
So there’s nowhere to rest easy, even inside her head with her eyes shut.
She goes for those walks, even though she’s tired, even though the stitches your sister did are still really sore, in order to get away from those bad dreams, those dark thoughts that drip away at her, making her less and less of herself, just like the pain erodes the sleep in the first place. You can’t understand that, and I can’t—
She abruptly ran out of words for an instant, then took a great breath, as if gulping them back in.
And I can’t help her, she said.
She had such a lost sound in her voice as she said this that I wonder, if we hadn’t been on horses, if I would have reached out and hugged her, just hugged her the way I did with Cat, being a tree, grounding her, being the thing rooted to the earth.
I certainly remember the impulse, and thinking how it would be a clumsy, awkward thing to try and do when we were both in the saddle as we were, and so I never did, and that is probably a good thing because she might have not liked it or understood it.
I expect she wouldn’t. At best she’d have agreed with her sister that I was being soft.
At worst, well, she might have thought me touching her was something other than kind.
You’re right, I said. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m seeing something that isn’t there because I want her to be better, and maybe that makes me imagine good things that aren’t there, but I do know one thing.
That it’s lunch time? she said.
She tried to smile normally, to signal that the intensity was too much and we should go back to talking about nothing. I smiled back.
That you’re a good sister, I said. And you’re kind too, under all those spikes,
Spikes? she said. Are you saying I’m spiky?
Not as much as your sister, more than mine. I grinned. Just.
Cat is quite spiky, she said, and nudged her horse back into a slow walk.
She’s just in a hurry, I said. She’s always in a hurry.
What for? she said.
Don’t know, I said. I asked her once.
She stopped the horse and looked back at me. Her smile was real now, not too much, not too little, just an easy smile which said we’d weathered that last word-storm and were now back to normal.
What did she say? she said.
She said she wasn’t sure, I said. But—
But? she said.
This time she said it like a shared joke, with a slow grin that lifted one side of her mouth to balance the raised eyebrow on the other side.
It was a goofy, lopsided face, and it’s the one I remember most when I think of her now, all this time later.
It was a glimpse of the other lighter, funnier Storm that might have been before the Russians came and tore their lives apart.
But she said she’d know it when we got there, I said.
Whyever Cat was always in a hurry, whatever we were either hurtling towards or she was preparing for, it wasn’t what happened.
We couldn’t have known that.
After all, we thought we’d buried the Russian.