Chapter 39 #2
She starts by clearing up the broken bits of radio by the window and works back into the room, tidying as she goes.
It takes her nearly three hours to clean the space back into something she is happy to close the door on, everything square and clean and in its right place.
She pulls her bedding clear of the billiard table and goes to the mud room where the camping equipment is stored.
She takes down her red sleeping bag and unrolls it flat beneath the table.
The tiny part of her that still watches herself do things notes the bag’s mummy shape, and how she carefully places the shotgun alongside it with the same precision with which, as a small child, she had laid out her bears on top of her carefully made bed each morning before going to school.
“Right,” she says. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back.”
She drags the mattress and the soiled bedclothes out and on to the midden fire beside the garage and sets fire to it and all the mess she’d let pile up through the long winter.
She stands and watches the flames take everything, using a rake to keep it all piled in the centre as it burns itself to nothing.
She looks up at the plume of dark smoke reaching into the sky above her.
She doesn’t worry about it giving her presence away, because she now knows there’s no one out there to see it.
“It’s OK,” she tells herself, and is fleetingly pleased to note the calmness of the acceptance in her voice.
She returns to the house and stands looking down at the sleeping bag and the blued steel of her cold final bed-mate. It would be very easy to follow her plan now and get under the table with them both. But the room is now so clean that she balks at it.
Anyway. There’s no hurry now the decision has been made. She shivers and feels her forehead. Clammy. She probably hasn’t quite shaken off the fever. Or maybe she has. That also doesn’t matter now.
“OK,” she says again. “It’s OK.”
What isn’t OK is the rank smell of herself she notices as she stands there. She strips out of her clothes and goes back outside wearing nothing but her hiking boots against the sharp stones on the driveway and tosses them on to the fire.
Back in the house she walks through the untravelled rooms and makes sure each is as tidy as she remembered leaving them.
She straightens furniture here, smooths a counterpane there, but she’s only been living in the kitchen, the billiard room and one of the bathrooms throughout the long winter that she now has to accept has passed.
The stone walls seem to have retained its cold and damp though, and so she takes an oversized fisherman’s sweater from the hook on the door of one of the bedrooms. She is about to put it on as she walks into the bathroom when she recoils from the wild haired madwoman lurching towards her from the mirror.
She confronts the truth of herself, turning back and forth in front of the glass and wondering at the hollowness of her cheeks, the bruises beneath her eyes, the sharpness of her clavicles, and the starkly outlined ridge and groove of her ribcage. And she definitely smells.
“OK,” she says. Her voice still sounds relaxed. Unworried. Calm, even. It is, after all, somehow too late to mind.
But there is still sun outside and she has a sweater that is his and which will keep her warm enough for long enough, so maybe she should clean herself, just like she cleaned the house.
If it is too late to mind, there’s no harm taking her time.
On instinct she almost picks up her swimming towel from the chair by the back door as she passes, but then leaves it. She won’t need it.
It was too early in the year for the full glory of spring to have strewn the landscape with its annual carpeting of wild flowers but there was enough untamed beauty and hints of the colour to come to buoy her spirits and make her ignore the light-headedness that seemed to be coming over her.
It’s the fever, she thinks. Or not enough to eat after all that spring cleaning. Again. No matter.
Clover, vetch and early thrift are beginning to speckle some colour against the rich variety of greens carpeting the machair around her. She leaves her boots neatly on top of the first stile and walks on barefoot through the softness towards the beach.
She hangs his sweater on the shovel that has defied the winter’s storms by staying upright on the ridge of the dunes, still marking the straight path home.
She doesn’t break step as she does so and she strides past and on down on to the soft shell-sand below.
She knows a straighter way home than the shovel indicates.
It’s high tide, so she is spared the indignity of a long walk out into the sea.
Still, she pauses ankle deep and looks around her.
Pete Boggarty’s island still sits in the middle of the bay, but there are no ghosts staring back at her now.
There’s nothing in the whole three-sixty degrees that speaks of man.
No houses, no road, no telegraph poles, no boats on the water or contrails in the sky.
A Stone Age human would have seen the same landscape, felt the same wind on her skin, noted the same chill icily manacling her shins, smelled the same sweetness coming off the land.
She finds that there’s a comfort in that.
The sea is cold, but once she stands neck-deep long enough for actual numbness to take the edge off, she relaxes and feels the familiar softness and the one-ness of it all – the water, the land, the air and the light working together.
This.
This was what she had missed. This was what had always nourished her.
This, almost as much as him, is what had kept her sane when she had worked in the troubled corners of the world, before the accident, before the tyre blew, before losing the baby and the hospital in Ayvalik and everything that had spooled downwards from that.
This, just floating in this water beneath this sky, this secret gentleness that hid in such an often hard-looking place, this was what she had known she would always be able to retreat to, to always draw solace from.
The lucky heart can have many homes, and if she could not return to him, she would have—
“This,” she says, feeling the sun on her upturned face. “This is good. This is cleaner.”
Everything is cleaner than a gun, she thinks. But as she had told herself earlier, there’s no hurry now that it’s too late. She’ll float here for a while.
Lost in this.
And then she will swim for the ocean.
But for now, especially since the cold is so bone-deep it now feels quite as warm as the sun above her, for now she’ll just lie back on the gentle swell that hints of the abyssal depths beyond the bay, and maybe it will rock her to sleep, and maybe she will dream, and maybe – since he will never now be here – maybe he will be waiting there, in that dream, and then maybe the softness of this other heart’s-home will gentle her away before she wakes and they can remain in it for ever.
Maybe.
So many maybes you could drown in them.
She smiles and closes her eyes.
Maybe that’s OK.