4. Luckily, We Vaccinate for Tetanus
When they were both newly ten, full to the brim with the majesty of double digits, Briar and Seb decided to run away.
Seb had insisted. He didn’t need to tell Briar that his father was coming to visit that weekend - Briar just knew.
Under cover of darkness they pulled ancient rucksacks pilled with dust out of one of the Grove store cupboards and filled them with the essentials: playing cards, yellowing paperbacks, slabs of milk chocolate, a large bottle of Mrs Wolfe’s sparkling water, old-fashioned humbugs in twists of paper and spare woollen socks to stave off trench foot, which they’d just learned about in school.
Briar had been the one to add first aid paraphernalia, Seb’s thin merino jumpers, cans of beans, matches and firelighters pilfered from one of the drawing room hearths, and a torch with fresh batteries.
Farm life was very good for instilling a sense of practicality about some things, and a bit of gentle delusion about others.
Before the first pink of dawn, they’d crept to the limits of the Wolfes’ land and then kept going, breathless with daring, Briar reaching back to help Seb over the stiles, both of them laughing nervously at each other over the top of every kissing gate.
They quoted Samwise Gamgee and found sturdy branches to use as walking sticks.
To Briar it had felt exciting, just the right amount of dangerous, play-acting the first steps of the hero’s journey - they’d left a note on the kitchen table at home explaining the plan, and that they’d be back in time to microwave leftovers for dinner - and it took them too long to realise that even after a day of walking, a failed campfire they’d rechristened a dampfire, and a shared tin of cold beans, Seb wasn’t looking over his shoulder towards home.
His eyes were still firmly on the horizon as the sun set, and when Briar hesitated in the middle of high-stepping through a freshly planted field, Seb kept walking.
‘It’s pretty dark,’ Briar said uncertainly, body turned - left hand reaching back, right hand towards Seb.
‘Yeah,’ said Seb, drawing to a stop. He had a smear of mud on his forehead, nettle rash on his leg, a nasty horsefly bite already swollen to the size of a marble.
He’d always been an indoor cat, happiest curled up next to a fire or whispering nonsense in a blanket fort, indulging in his two-hour baths and eating five or six small dinners; the mildest wilds of rural England did not agree with him.
‘I left space in my bag for a tent but then I put two hardbacks in instead. What do they do in films when they’re shipwrecked?
Maybe we have to weave something. Leaves?
Weaf leaving. I mean - no, I mean weaf leaving. Can you weave?’
There was something frantic in his tone that hadn’t been there before, back when this seemed like fun.
‘Mum bought oven waffles, smileys and chips so we could do potatofeast this week,’ Briar offered. Seb loved potatofeast. ‘The real smileys. With preservatives.’ They both loved preservatives.
‘We can do our own potatofeast when we get there,’ Seb said. ‘You can get all that stuff at the supermarket.’ He started walking again, less careful, making Briar wince as he left dark footprints in the furrows.
Briar had to half-jog up the slope to catch up. ‘Get where, though?’
Seb didn’t answer. Briar realised that it didn’t matter that he was limping a bit, or that they were both starving, or that it was probably going to rain. The sun was gone, and he was going to find out where.
Briar had a doting tabby mouser asleep by the wood burner, a mum who smelled like lavender and was always trying to hug them, and a freezer stocked with full-price potato products to go home to.
Seb had a cavernous house that was cold no matter how many fires you lit, a mother who spent most of her waking hours drifting to and fro on the house phone barefoot in a silk kimono, and dinners of gazpacho and sour salads with fruit and walnuts in, even in the dead of winter.
There had briefly been a dog, much to Seb’s utter delight, a yellow Labrador he’d named Annabel - but she’d badly knocked over an elderly, visiting relative in her puppyish excitement, and had immediately and without ceremony been put down. Seb hadn’t spoken a word for two weeks.
‘You can go home if you want,’ he said now, ducking his head, eyes on his muddy boots. ‘I don’t care. Eat your potatoes.’
‘But I don’t want to eat potatoes without you.’
Seb reached the top of the field and plunged bullishly on through head-height nettles to get to the stile.
He hoisted himself up and over, and for a moment, seemed to dangle there on the crest of the hill - and then he was gone, and after a beat there was a loud, frightening sound of collapse, followed by an uneasy silence.
Briar couldn’t make sense of it as they scrambled to catch up, coppery panic in the back of their throat, and once they were over the top of the hill, it made even less sense: ten feet away from the fence, easily avoidable, a sudden and dangerous drop.
A strange quirk of the landscape, a sheer cliff for no discernible reason.
At the bottom, Seb, silent and unmoving, like all his strings had been cut.
Briar rushed around the long way, the safe way, calling out a steady stream of ‘okay don’t panic don’t move okay don’t move I’m coming’, and when they finally reached Seb he was definitely breathing, bleeding a little where he’d smacked his cheek on the ground.
He’d been caught in the unfriendly arms of brambles, just missing jagged rock, his foot wrenched at a painful angle.
‘Why did you do that?’ Briar kept asking, and Seb said nothing, and didn’t even try to get up, which was more frightening than if he’d sworn and howled and wept. ‘There’s a sign, Seb, it says there’s a steep drop. You must have seen the sign. You must have walked right past it. It’s yellow!’
Too late, Briar noticed the flaking barbed wire, which might have once fenced off the drop and now snaked through the undergrowth below, lying in wait.
When Seb finally moved his hands, one palm looked black with blood, the wound small but gaping.
Briar fumbled in their bag for the expired antiseptic wipes, cleaned him the best they could, tried to coax him up.
‘You need to get out of the brambles,’ Briar said. ‘And . . . and what about tetanus? Your hand might fall off. Get up.’
‘It doesn’t hurt,’ Seb said, so quiet and vacant that it made Briar feel strangely cold.
When they turned on the torch, Briar could literally see the thorns breaking his skin at the ankles, bloody dimples, like the trials of Sad Marble Jesus in the apse at the village church.
‘It really doesn’t. Don’t worry, Briar. It doesn’t hurt. ’
‘It does hurt,’ Briar insisted. Seb shook his head. ‘Seb, stop it. It hurts. It obviously definitely hurts. Come home. Home home. Mum won’t mind. We can do potatofeast and stay up and tomorrow she’ll drive us to the library. Please.’
‘You shouldn’t have come if you didn’t mean it,’ Seb said, still with that eerie calm. ‘I thought you were going to be with me all the way. I can’t go without you.’
Briar held up their hands helplessly. ‘But where are we actually going?’
‘Somewhere,’ said Seb, but that was all he had, and eventually he’d wiped his bloody hand on his sleeve and let Briar pull him from the thorns.
Briar remembered that blood so vividly, smeared across his hands and Briar’s, glowing brighter in their mind than it could have done in life.
It took forever to inch home on Seb’s bad ankle, but Briar already had baby farm muscles to hold him up, and they weren’t going to let him fall for anything.
It started to rain when they were halfway home, a fine humid mist that felt feather-light but soaked them through regardless, and when they arrived back at Cox Organic Dairy Farm, there had been no potatofeast; Seb told Briar’s mum, his voice raw and weary, that he wanted to go home please, and after smearing him in pungent, herbal remedies for nettle stings and plastering over the worst of his holes, she’d called Mrs Wolfe to collect him.
Mrs Wolfe had sent the housekeeper.
Briar had tried to make a game of Seb’s sprained ankle in the days that followed, waiting on him in his too-big room, bringing him trays of fruit squash and polenta cake, but Seb had hated it.
He’d just become smaller and greyer, spending all his time ensconced in his four-poster or sitting in the armchair by the window, the picture of a Bront? orphan.
Briar was extremely glad when Seb could walk unaided again, and the cuts on his palm faded to scarlet track marks, and eventually disappeared.
‘Jones?’ Seb says in the courtyard, the whole word round with shock, and even after seven years, he’s achingly familiar.
Voice deeper. Puppy fat melted from his face, leaving it fine-boned and delicate, his eyes too big, his mouth too soft under the long line of his nose.
He’s got thick, dark eyebrows and spidery lashes, and his grey-streaked hair is so much longer than it ever was when Briar knew him.
It looks like it’s just tumbling artfully down to his shoulders in serendipitous waves, but Briar suspects there was some styling involved.
They can’t imagine Seb using hair products.
Where would he buy them? A shop? That would mean he’d have to go to a shop. On purpose.