Anarchy (29 page)

Was this all she had? An acorn?

“I can't even remember where it came from,” Iz said. “Did I say anything about it? It's all gone completely out of my—”

The stillness was heavy, thickened by the abrasive mutters of rooks coming to roost.

“You said it didn't look like much but it was the only thing you had to give and I should always keep it hidden. So I did.”

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“I gave Kat that jade good-luck charm my grandpa bought in China. Just a piece of crappy tat. I felt like you'd given me some amazing secret. The way you came downstairs with it. Everyone stopped talking. Even Mac stopped talking.”

She rewrapped the acorn and zipped it into the pocket of her jacket.

“I should get an early night,” she said. “I'll start early tomorrow.”

He closed the rickety door of the shed and put his hands in his pockets.

“I'm coming with you,” he said.

She had to bite her lip to stop herself smiling.
Oh, Iggy,
she thought.
I'd never have fingered you for a heartbreaker. I was the pretty one, remember?

“You can't,” she said. “You know that.”

“I can. I'm going to. You shouldn't go alone.”

“I have to.”

“Whatever you're doing,” he said, “it's important. I can feel it. I want to. . . . I'm supposed to follow you. I can tell.”

“There are people here who depend on you.”

“They can go to the camps in Okehampton. I've been thinking about it. They ought to have gone ages ago, they'd be much better looked after there. I've just been indulging them. And myself. I wanted so badly to be helpful, so I let their lives stay difficult so they'd need me.”

“That's nonsense, Greg.”

“It's the truth.”

“This is your home. What about your children? Your wife?”

“They're not coming back.”

The rooks swooped and fussed overhead. It was dark enough for them to disappear completely in the shadows of the trees.

“Lil doesn't want me to join her either,” he said. His eyes had gone watery.

Ah,
Iz thought.
You think that's unhappiness. You think life has turned against you. You have no idea.

“I was ashamed to tell you. God forgive me. We're so stupid about these things. Or I am, anyway. You're not.”

“Let's go inside,” she said.

“She said . . . She says I've made my choice. Which is fair enough, I suppose. Though God, I miss the boys. But we all have to . . . we have to . . .”

She left him sniffling and went back to the house.

• • •

She slept poorly that night. She was slightly worried that he might try to come into her room in the dark. But no, she thought, as another chill grey morning trickled into the valley, he was too nice; he'd suffer, nicely, in silence.

It turned out he'd done his suffering downstairs, all night long. She found him at the table, looking disheveled and blank-eyed. His hands were clasped around a mug with a thimbleful of cold tea at the bottom.

“Couldn't sleep?” she said.

He raised his head to her.

“You're not Jess,” he said. “Are you.”

She thought about sitting down, but in the end she just stepped behind him and squeezed his shoulder, once, before starting to gather up her gear. His anxious preparations meant that everything was already laid out, packed, dry, ready to go. She'd have liked a last cup of tea since she wasn't sure how long it would be before anything hot passed her lips again, but it was a small thing, really.

“I don't know why it's taken me so long,” he said. “Even tonight—last night—I didn't think of it until late. Even though you said. Sisters.”

Iz sighed a little, then sat down opposite him and started on her socks and boots and leggings.

“We were twins,” she said. “In fact.”

“‘Were'?”

“She died.” His shoulders sagged a little. “Fifteen years ago. I don't know exactly what happened, but when you people drove her out she had the baby by herself and it pretty much killed her.”

His head tipped forward onto his arms.

“You've been so kind,” she said. “Incredibly kind. I'll always remember you.”

“So.” He kept his back to her. “Who are you really looking for? If she's dead?”

“We had another sister. Younger.”

“And she joined Trelow?”

“No, she lived nearby.”

“Then you won't find her there.”

Lizzie,
the voice had called, twice.
Help.
“I will. Do you want me to give back these things? I have to take the boots and the backpack, but the rest—”

“No. They're yours.” He twisted around in the chair at last, desolation in his every movement. “I still want to come with you.”

“No one can come with me,” she said.

• • •

He stood in the doorway.

“So.”

“So.”

He shrugged. “Good luck. God be with you.”

“Thank you. For everything.”

He took his glasses off, polishing them ineffectually with his fleece sweater. “I feel like my life just turned completely upside down.”

“My sister always had that effect on people.”

“Jess . . .” He squinted upward, blinking. “She was amazing. I had such a crush on her. I probably made that rather obvious, didn't I?”

“She had that effect too.” Sometimes.

“What . . . What did actually happen to her? Before she came to Trelow? We all knew there was some big story. I've wanted to know for fifteen years.”

“I don't know.” Iz hitched the pack on her shoulders, adjusting the straps. “She and I, we went our different ways. After university. It was after the Wall came down, she went to Romania, I think. She was going to save all those orphans.” And I met Nigel with the City job and the sports car and the wife he dumped because I was young and fit, and you despised me, and you were right, Iggy, you were right. “She wrote to our sister from different places. Bulgaria. Greece. She was traveling with gypsies, something like that. Then the next thing we heard she'd arrived in Cornwall and turned Christian.”

Greg winced.

“No offense,” she added.

“She was afraid of something,” he said. “Jesus was her refuge. We all had our different reasons for ending up there but she . . . she was happy at Trelow, but it was almost like relief. Like she'd got away. She always said she felt safe with us.”

“That's good to hear.”

“I assumed it was a family thing.”

“We didn't reject her. She rejected us.” Us? Me. Mum and Dad too, but me, mostly.

“Was that true, that thing about her skin?”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“About the sun. Not getting the sun on her. No, I always thought there was something strange about it.” Her blank look had obviously confirmed a suspicion. “It was more like she was terrified of the sun. Like a phobia.”

“Not that I ever knew.”

“She wouldn't go anywhere near direct sunlight. All summer long she'd only work at night. You didn't . . . ? No. It never really made sense that it was a medical condition. She got twice as much done as the rest of us anyway, so no one minded.” He laughed his weak, rueful laugh. “She was amazing. When I drove around that corner and saw you . . .”

She had a sudden dread that his disappointment was a bad omen. She too was looking for someone lost, after all. She thought she'd better get away before he infected her.

“Good luck to you too, Greg.”

“Yes. Better let you go.”

Their breath steamed between them.

“Her real name,” she said, “was Ygraine. Everyone called her Iggy.”

“Not surprised she changed it, then.”

She turned.

“Back up to the corner,” he said behind her, “and then the other road leads over to the bridge.”

She raised a hand and waved.

Twenty minutes later, as she forced her way through the deep, undisturbed snow banked between walls of low stone, she thought she heard the waters of the Tamar trickling softly somewhere under their three-month mantle of ice.

• • •

She walked, rested, walked, hid herself, and slept. Time passed in a slow trance of sweat and solitude, her breath the white cloud ahead of her, the blots of deep bootprints behind. She saw vehicles abandoned or burned, birds picking over things half buried in the fields, barricades of broken gates stacked between hedges. Now that she was no longer dragging bicycle panniers and chafing in clammy clothes, her slowness was patience and steadiness instead of struggle and exhaustion. The ten miles she'd promised herself every day were a fantasy, but even the distance she managed around dawn and twilight each day marked out visible gains along the pencil line on her map. She stayed hidden during the full light, resting. Illness had sapped her. The slightest hint of the presence of another person made her take cover and wait. But mostly when she walked it was through a wasteland, an obliterated kingdom.

On the third day the wind picked up, turned southwesterly, and took on the smell of the sea. It tore pale blue gashes in the clouds and let the sun in, so dazzling on the snow it was impossible to go on westward in the evenings. The hedges sparkled with meltwater and she sank halfway up her calves with every step. Then the rains began.

A world of silence became a world of noise. It was as though the landscape she'd been crossing since entering the grip of the snow had been asleep and now woke up screaming. She sat out a whole day and night on a pile of tires under the corrugated-iron roof of a dairy barn. Its roof made a tinny thunder louder than she remembered sound could be. When the rain moderated enough for her to leave her shelter, she heard the noises farther afield, a sound like a low angry wind from valleys below the moor.

That sound was water seeking the coast. She was lucky she'd reached higher ground before the melt took hold. The small streams draining the moor were overwhelmed. The ground beside them turned as porous as moss, shedding suddenly uprooted trees down to the valleys. Roads were buckling under the floods, bridges breaking. But in the open heathland where Iz was, the slopes were still gentle. The meltwater around her boots was in no hurry yet.

Nevertheless, there were long hours when she could make no progress at all. Even the best gear couldn't keep her dry in that kind of rain. As her progress stalled she began breaking into the low-slung slate-roofed farmhouses that went with the decrepit barns. In one of them she found the farmer thawing too, going soft, hanging by a noose of tied sheets from a rafter above his staircase.

Wading as much as walking, she completed the half circuit of the moor marked out by Greg's pencil, and looked down one evening across the valley on its western side. On the map, the river there was a tidy blue ribbon. What she saw instead was a great brown smear, churning and frothing at its nearer edge, dull and deceptively tranquil beyond that, making islands out of trees and houses and hedges. The flooded ground stretched all the way north to the sea.

It took her all the next day before she found a place to cross. Downstream of a half-submerged hamlet a huge tree had toppled over and jammed itself against shallow banks on either side of the current. She picked her way along its trunk. The flood looked murky and sluggish from above but turned out to be savage at close quarters. While she stood clinging to a branch to catch her breath, she watched flotsam spinning past. It was as though the sea had opened its throat to swallow the world, piece by piece.

She had to wade waist deep along the drowned lane beyond the river channel before it rose at last out of the floodplain into modest hills. After she'd reassembled the clothes she could still use, mopped out the inside of her boots as best she could, and set off again, she discovered an astonishing change. The snow was all but gone; the floods cut her off from any risk of encountering anyone else; for the first time in weeks, she could go fast. Miles suddenly began to disappear behind her. She felt as light and swift as thought. She walked all day without noticing it. The drizzle cleared eastward as the evening came on, the cloud cover frayed thin, and an intermittent moonlight appeared around her; she kept on walking. After the punishing weeks of trudging through snow, it was like a dream of motion. Halfway through that night she realized she was in ecstasy. The punishment was over: it was all easy now and she was almost there, ridiculously close. She thought she heard whispers echoing her footsteps, as if she were being shepherded along by good angels.

She slept the next day in a roadside bus shelter in the middle of nowhere and set off again as a damp dusk fell. Only the smallest traces of moonlight filtered through the clouds, but that was as much as she needed. She came that night to the road she'd been so afraid to cross, the single main road running down the spine of Cornwall, linking this wasteland to the unimaginable rest of the world. Greg had warned her it would be patrolled and constantly traveled, and marked out one of the rare places where it was narrow enough that ordinary country lanes still fed in and out of it, but at three o'clock in the morning it was nothing, just another trickle of debris-spackled grey, though miles off to the west she caught a glimpse of the flare and sweep of headlights. When dawn began to break she unfolded the map and looked in giddy astonishment at the ground she'd covered. She'd come so far in one night, she thought she must have made a mistake. There were perhaps fifteen miles to go.

As she rested the next day, holed up in what remained of someone's bungalow on the edge of a peculiarly dismal village, she heard an engine go by. The sound plunged her into an instant panic. She'd forgotten that the retreating winter had cleared the roads for other people as well as her. The thought of being stopped now was so hideous it made her take the penknife out of the pack and zip it in her jacket, right beside Iggy's acorn, so that she'd be ready to cut her own throat rather than be forced to turn back. She couldn't sleep. She kept trying to imagine herself walking into the house where Gwen lived, seeing her sister and her son there, right in front of her. She remembered that they almost certainly wouldn't be there, they'd have had to leave like everyone else; then she remembered that Gavin—no, Gawain, she should give him his own name now—wasn't like anyone else. She couldn't think at all. She wanted to start walking but she knew she had to force herself to wait for darkness, full night, when no one could possibly see her. She passed the time memorizing every branching and turning of her route so she wouldn't even have to get the flashlight out to check the map.