Chapter 23 #4
She seemed happy that we were being still and not moving around.
I suppose she had more reason than I to be so terrified by the possibility of there being more Russians about.
The only thing I could hear apart from some crows close by and maybe a distant jackdaw was the wind, which was beginning to move through the trees as often happens at the end of hot days, when the evening breeze gets up, making a noise that Cat told me was like the waves on the sea when they slide in on a long slanting beach, kind of a low roar that says the world is still alive.
It’s what Cat said her dad used to say to her when he woke her in the mornings.
Wake up sleepyhead, he’d say.
And when she turned away to try to bury her head in the pillows to go back for a few more minutes sleep he’d say:
Listen to that. Can you hear that? That’s the waves on the shore, that’s the world saying it’s still alive and already up and about its business, just like you should be, little Cat.
And she’d say no! And he’d say yes! And then he would sweep the covers off, something she said made them both laugh a lot.
She used to do the same when I was small and she was bigger, except she’d say listen to the wind in the trees instead, because by then we knew death came from the sea and so we lived far away from the sound of any waves.
Or, if there was no wind, she’d say listen to the birds singing to each other.
It was a happy memory for me too, but right then I wasn’t thinking about the happy times.
I was thinking that the freshening breeze was creating too much noise, something that might drown the sound of the little goat’s bell to make it even harder to find him.
Come on, I said. Let’s just get our stuff and get looking.
No. We should stay still, she said. So they can get far away.
Can you see them? I said.
No, she said.
Then they can’t see us, I said.
Which of course wasn’t true as I knew well from the many hours of sitting very still and watching other things reveal themselves by moving.
But I’d had enough of her imagination and needed to deal with the real problem of finding the goat.
She followed me as I ran back to our stuff, she ran bent over keeping low as if hiding from the imaginary Russians, which irritated me because it slowed her down and made her drop back.
After all, her running at a crouch wasn’t going to make me magically become invisible.
It annoyed me and I suppose I shouldn’t have let it, but it did.
By the time I got my pack and bow and arrows on my back she was only just running in under the willows.
Come on! I said. I picked up her pack and lobbed it to her, definitely irritably. She caught it and at the same time I heard the tinny clatter of the goat’s bell.
Wait! I said. Shush…
Look, she said. I…
Shush! I said, straining for the noise that would lead us to the goat. I turned in a slow circle, eyes scanning the rough expanse of heath between us at the edge of the town.
When my back was to her I heard it again.
And then again, too close.
I turned to see Storm holding the pack and shaking it. Each time she did so the bell made a noise.
I’m sorry, she said.
The bell was in her pack, not around the neck of any goat.
I didn’t want it to draw attention in case anyone bad might hear it and find us, and it’s a good thing I did, she said. Because there really were people, the people I saw.
You lied, I said.
No, she said. Not really. I just didn’t tell you I hobbled him but didn’t put the bell on.
Still a lie, I said.
It all made sense. She hadn’t put the bell on, he’d wandered off and she’d probably made up the stuff about the Russians to distract from all the bad, stupid things she’d done or not done.
I really wanted to shout at her. Instead I took a deep breath and picked up my spear and headed for the overgrown edge of the town.
It was the right thing to do! she said. Except I shouldn’t have fallen asleep…
You lied about the bell, and you lied about seeing Russians to cover it up.
I did not! she hissed in outrage.
Somehow her having done such a foolish thing and lied about it, and then her topping that with her thinking was her right to be offended that I’d noticed made me angrier.
I don’t care, I said. For all I know you lied about hobbling the goat too. I’m going to find it. And if not, another goat. You can stay or you come with me. I could pick you up on the way back if you want to stay, but I don’t have time to argue with a liar.
I walked on, trying to calm down. When I looked back, she was trudging behind me face as red as if I had slapped her.
We moved into the town in unfriendly silence, walking silently through the overrun plantations of the suburbs.
The outskirts of towns and villages are always full of more interesting plants and trees than the open countryside.
You see things you haven’t seen somewhere else.
That’s because people back before the end grew stuff in their gardens that was more exotic and colourful and it all now runs riot beyond the limits of those original gardens.
We pushed in past a looming thunderhead of rhododendrons that had engulfed a pair of houses on a small slope on one side of what had once been a street but was now a mostly overgrown channel through the blown hedgerows and long banks of willowherb that seemed to like whatever the soil was made from.
Nettle patches punctuated the willowherb, all fringed with clumps of dock.
Every now and then an exotic shrub would survive, announcing itself by an unusual waxy leaf or a bright and unexpected colour.
I was edging round a vibrant blue flowered shrub that Cat called see-and-note-us, the pretty blue so intense that it almost seemed to vibrate, so you’d note it, and noting it was good because you know to avoid pushing past it because the branches that supported the waxy leaves and the twigs were sharp and in their own way as fickle and unforgiving as yew trees.
Yews were our least favourite of all the big trees, sharp, brittle and carrying a bad attitude or mind of their own when it came to scratching you.
I was giving the see-and-note-us a wide berth and looking down at my feet to make sure it wasn’t going to snag my ankles when I saw the hoof marks in the moss and stopped.
What? whispered Storm.
Hoof marks, I said.
I told you! she said.
Goat hoofs, I said. Not horses.
I turned to look at her; she almost seemed disappointed and then I watched her take a breath and allow herself to see the bigger picture. She nodded.
OK, she said. That’s good. Sorry.
When you see someone actually in the moment of conquering their fear and doing what they know is right despite it, it’s hard to stay angry with them. So I decided to take the lead and forgive her.
I dropped to one knee and pointed at the tracks.
I’m going to have my eyes down trying to follow these tracks, I said.
The goat will follow the existing animal paths so we’ll be extra careful every time one crosses another one so we don’t miss it turning.
Your job is to keep your eyes up and around.
You watch the bigger picture so we don’t run into animals that might startle and run off and spook the goat into running as they do so.
Despite the breeze it was muggy pushing slowly through the vegetation, trying to think like a goat and not lose contact with the animal track in front of me.
Every now and then I’d think I heard Devil’s bell, and then remember he wasn’t wearing it.
And the further we went, the less confident I was that Storm had taken enough care with the hobbling.
The point of a hobble was to tie one front leg to the one on the back on the other side, which made it hard for the goat to run or travel far.
But as the distance mounted up I began to wonder about Storm’s competence, or if in fact we were fruitlessly following a wild goat’s track instead of our own goat’s trail.
A goat’s hoof prints are like two commas facing each other, with the sharp tails of the commas pointing in the direction the goat is going.
They’re easy to mistake for deer tracks, but the deer have two sort of back-toes that leave an extra pair of dots in the ground, so the commas look like semi-colons instead.
Deer track criss-crossed the muddy path, so I had to keep my mind sharp and focused so as not to get mixed up.
It was hard work and it began to give me a headache.
The thing was, I really wanted to find Devil.
Everything we had planned seemed to hinge on it.
Sometimes you can want something so badly that you see it where it isn’t. That’s how I nearly made the mistake that might have meant I never saw Cat again. I don’t think I’d have made it if I wasn’t so tired and angry with Storm.
Cat said we always want what we haven’t got because of course if we had it, we wouldn’t need to want it.
And she said that what I want, what I’d always wanted, because I don’t remember ever having had it, is a family.
I thought she was wrong about that because I’ve always had her as my family, but she said that wasn’t the kind of family she meant.
She was talking about a real family, bigger than her and me, not just an only-one.
She said that was why I stubbornly carried on trying to get Storm and Freya to like and trust us, even though it was clear as anything that they didn’t because they just couldn’t.
They can’t trust anyone except each other, she said.
Because of everything that’s happened to them.
It’s not personal. We should just be friendly enough and back off.
Maybe in time they’ll come forwards into the space we leave them.
But you can’t keep wanting it so much. You can’t keep crowding them. Being too—
Too what? I said,