The Calling (22 page)

The hard edge of a white morning hung over the little lake. Its grip choked the colours of summer from the trees, leaving the beech and horse chestnuts like faded sentinels huddled around the far bank.

The surface of the lake rippled, but 6 a.m. was still too early and too cold for any substantial activity.

A blackbird tried a burst of song, which died away to be replaced by the hum of a car on the Spine Road.

A maroon taxi cruised from lake to lake, slowing each time it approached a gateway and then spurting forward to reach the next. Marlowe sat directly behind the driver, hunched in the corner with her right hand stroking the armrest. ‘This is definitely the one,’ she assured him.

He swung in through the gateway, before parking alongside the fence.

‘Here’s fine,’ she said.

‘Are you sure? It seems very deserted.’

‘Bird watching,’ she muttered in explanation. Her fingers fumbled with the once familiar catch on her purse. ‘How much do I owe you?’

‘Fifty-six quid, I’m afraid.’ He watched her through the corner of his rear-view mirror. She pushed her dishevelled hair back from her face as she fiddled with the change.

He heard her tut to herself. She clicked her purse shut and opened another compartment instead. She then reached between the front seats and passed him three twenty-pound notes. ‘That’s fine, thanks,’ she exclaimed, and hurried to open the door.

He glanced at her in his mirror as he drove away. She loitered, playing with her bag and pretending to be busy. But it was none of his business.

Marlowe waited until the taxi had curved away out of sight before she moved. Then, sure she was alone, she turned to face the lake.

Her gaze flickered dimly over the water; she’d expected to feel something. She’d thought her heart would race and her hands would tremble, at the very least.
But what do I know?
she reasoned.

She leant on the gate. Its wood sweated cold dew, coming alive in the morning air. A shred of blue and white police tape caught her eye.

It crackled and fluttered, in contrast to everything else around it, calling for attention as it writhed from its impaled position on the fence, despite the lack of breeze.

Marlowe reached towards it and clutched it for a moment between her thumb and forefinger. It felt sacred to her, like a marker to take her to the Holy Grail. It was the only sign that this was Kaye’s lake. She let it go, and it hung limply from its tack.

How was it for Kaye,
she wondered, and tried to imagine her lying there in the cold, night after night.
If it had been me, would I have lasted as long?

She shuddered as though last season’s intense cold had caught up with her.
And if Kaye had been me, would it have all gone this far?

It didn’t help to wonder; thinking too much had only driven her mad. Why did she ever think anyone would believe her? Julie did, she reminded herself.

The gate was padlocked; she tugged at it but it stood fast. However, she needed to be on the other side. She moved to the end nearest the hinges and stepped on to the second bar. She swung her leg over the top and, as she straddled it, she noticed that the fence next to it was broken, fractured long ago under some impossible burden, no doubt. She knew there was irony there somewhere.

She dropped to the ground on the other side.

Enough
, she told herself.
No more Julie or Helen, Stephanie or Kaye, bloody wrists and nightmares
. She trudged across to the edge of the dew-damp grass, where it gave way to a gritty slope descending to the water.

Peace had eluded her for far too long, but now it stood, cold and elegant, in front of her.

Just for a moment the sun tried hard to prise its fingers between the layers of early-morning mist. Even its rays felt icy as they retreated.

Marlowe shivered as the cold reached down inside the back of her jacket. She headed towards the water’s edge, with the gravel grinding beneath her walking boots, which left only indistinct scuffmarks.

She faced the lake directly. It spread before her like a pool of mercury, cool and deadly and fascinating. She had hoped it would be like this, deserted and silent.

Marlowe stepped forward and the shallow water lapped at her ankles, spilling inside her boots and seeping up the hem of her jeans. She waded in fully clothed, focusing only on the shingle bank in the distance.

She didn’t flinch as the cold water lapped ever higher against her bare flesh, soaking her knickers as it reached her thighs.

She tipped forward as it oozed over her waistband, and she began to swim a slow breaststroke towards the centre of the lake.

Her fingers soon tingled, and turned as purple as her scars. Her breath furled out from her damson-painted lips, clipping the surface only inches from her aching eyes.

She closed them and kept going.

The lake had always been too wide for her to swim right across. As she neared the middle, her heartbeat slowed and the only sound she could hear was the blood pulsing against her eardrums.

Marlowe felt at one with the water lapping against her face. At one, too, with the world. She trod water until hypothermia embraced her and she slipped into unconsciousness.

The water of Kaye’s lake closed over her and she drifted beneath the surface.

There is no fast road from Cambridge to Sheringham, just a ninety-mile chain of battered A-roads that become swamped with tourist traffic during the summer months.

Before the morning rush hour, it is possible to enjoy the spurts along sections of dual carriageway and the inevitable crawl along the smaller winding roads, with little interference from other travellers. Pete Walsh had left at 3.30 and had skirted around the edge of Fakenham by 4.45, snagging nothing more than a single set of lights that made him wait for two minutes at a deserted junction.

He kept to a steady fifty from there to Sheringham, and pulled up eventually at the dead end of the Drift Way, where the assortment of cottages stop and the coast path starts. He checked his watch and it read ten past five. Pete switched off the engine, unclipped his
seat-belt
and stretched. He felt good for someone who’d missed his night’s sleep. Good as in alert, that is, but not any happier.

He ached: ‘in his heart and in his soul’ sounded too dramatic, but that was how it felt.

He couldn’t put his finger on the cause.

No, that wasn’t true. He just hadn’t been able to admit that whenever he found himself awash with this gnawing emptiness, his thoughts always gravitated back to Marlowe.

He pressed the
on
button of the radio and tried to think of something else. Anything would do; after all he had vowed to fight it this time. But the DJ had selected a bad choice of love song, and Elvis merely crooned salt into the wounds.

Pete turned the volume up. Here he was, watching the sunrise over Sheringham. Didn’t that mean he’d fought it and lost? Couldn’t he just admit that she’d meant more to him than he’d realized at the time. Perhaps he’d feel better by admitting to everything he missed.

Early morning reminded him of Marlowe: the beauty of the new day. Everything so pale, shrouded in the veil of morning mist, tinted with subtle shades picked out by the early light.

In the distance, grey clouds hung over the hills. He thought of Marlowe then, too, so pretty and bright up close but always hinting at a gathering storm.

Two gulls flew overhead, circling and swooping. They looked as though they were flirting with each other, but he guessed they were more likely competing for carrion. Nothing was ever the way it seemed.

A scrappy patch of hedgerow decorated with an occasional flower marked the start of the footpath. A clump of long-stemmed dandelions sprang from its base and swayed gently, with beads of dew clinging to their leaves.

Clinging
: an invention of Nature.

For a moment Pete could have believed himself to be all alone in the world; insulated from everyone outside. He didn’t mind that, because solitude brought him comfort, but he also knew that there were few places where it was possible to be totally alone, and he watched as a murky silhouette on the coast path gradually materialized into a human form.

For his own amusement, he imagined that he was watching Marlowe coming towards him through the mist. Amusement – he winced at such a poor choice of word. Amusement, yes, but not as in pleasure or entertainment, just as in passing time.

As in filling the void.

The figure solidified into a girl.

Pete became aware of another distraction as the light, rapid clicking of a bicycle freewheeling along the road disturbed the morning quiet.

A paper boy.

He stopped his bike at the head of the footpath, and waved to the girl.

Pete had never himself done a paper round: too much hard work before school, for his liking.

The boy ditched his bike and darted back towards the third and fourth houses from the end of the row, and posted copies of the
Daily Express
and the
Sun
through the first and the
Guardian
through the second. He’d probably be finished in time to do a second round, if he didn’t dally too long with the girl.

She reached the bike first, and the pedal rasped the ground as she dragged it upright; the only sound to intrude on Pete and his car radio. He watched intently. A joke, a smile, the brushing of lips. Romeo and Juliet?

Another giggle passed between the pair and the girl tugged on his sleeve. The boy pulled her in tight and they nuzzled each other, exchanging private words.

Pete sighed and sank back in his seat. He dropped his gaze as his thoughts returned to Marlowe.

Marlowe with those deep, grey-blue eyes and such fragile pale skin. He had told her it was over and she’d vanished like vapour. He’d seen her once since, a chance encounter in the street. She’d recoiled like a frightened deer bolting from the hunt, and he realized then how much he’d hurt her.

But, as he’d told himself so many times, some things are over for ever. You can’t go back.

She would have been with someone else by then. Wouldn’t she?

He closed his eyes completely, rested his head back against the door, and imagined his lips pressed against hers.

The memory of their kisses made him tingle, as it always did during one of these spells. But today his senses were heightened, and his nerves jangled with the sensation that she was there.

He flexed his fingers, reaching for her skin, for its velvet texture and gentle warmth. His nostrils succumbed to a memory of apple shampoo and rose soap, and for a fraction of a second he
felt
her again.

That shook him and he jolted upright; he must have been dozing.

He glanced around. Had he been spotted while lost in his
wishful
thinking? No, no one had witnessed his foolish puppy-dog expression.

The only people in view were the boy and girl – Romeo and Juliet – now going their separate ways for the day, their backs towards him and their thoughts only on each other.

He inhaled a deep breath, but the car smelt of pine air-freshener and dewy morning instead of Marlowe.

He managed to conjure up an image of her china-blue eyes, but this time they reminded him that it had all been spoilt.

Spoilt by her weakness, by the dark side of her personality that had drained him, had sapped his own energy.

He had had to break from her before she broke him.

The final bars of the Elvis song rolled from the speakers like the last ribbons of honey pouring from an empty pot, and Pete clicked it off before the DJ spoke again.

He knew he’d hurt her, but she had hurt him too. And he still missed her.

And that was why he’d never been able to settle with anyone since. He found himself continually making unfavourable
comparisons
. And, as a result, he always found himself feeling let down, and returning to the same inevitable feeling of empty desolation.

By 6.15 the morning gloom had cleared, and a flotilla of fluffy storybook clouds skimmed across the pale blue sky. Pete drove back through Thetford Forest, picking small B-roads flanked by a disarray of new growth and bare dead wood. He opened his window, so the fresh smell of the woodland enlivened his senses. This was the proper England: twisting roads and medieval scenery.

The smaller roads were darker and the daylight barely flickered through the branches. A wild deer grazed in a clearing; a muddy bay colour and hard to spot in its native home. The sky didn’t seem so endless now, but the forest did; a long way from Sheringham in so many ways.

Pete parked in a gravel lay-by and sat there with the door ajar. For ten minutes he soaked up the silence, then he stepped from the car, to be met by the light rustle of trees.

His head had cleared, as he slammed the boot. A faint path cut through the undergrowth, no more than a scrape through the soil
traced by a giant fingernail. He breathed gently with the evenness of a man content with the world.

A man on top of the world. He smiled.
Something along those lines, anyway.

With the whole world at his feet?
Better
.

A dizzy, giddy buzz tingled in his head as he enjoyed his own good humour.

The whole world in his hands.
That was it.
Not his whole world of course, but someone’s.

He didn’t know her name, no doubt he’d see it in a newspaper soon enough, but to him she was just Juliet. Beautiful and ill-fated.

He placed
Juliet
in a grassless patch at the foot of a tree. Not a pretty tree. A deformed tree buckled by old age and slow growth. It hung at a precarious angle from a forty-five degree slope, its roots digging like cats’ claws into the ground, holding it in place. Its stunted limbs stretched upwards, trying to overtake the taller trees, trying to find some sunlight.

At the bottom of the bank, a ditch lay deep with fetid water, motionless except for the flies.

She looked up at him, doe-eyed, shuddering, whimpering. They did that sometimes.

So what?

He felt a familiar surge of excitement; it fed his omnipotent high.

He looked back down at her. His fingers twitched again. Her skirt was hitched up by the rope binding her wrists and ankles.

He could see her smooth thighs and wondered about her underwear. Wondered about removing it.

And then what?

No, that wasn’t his game. Not at all. He straightened and moved away.

He never looked back, but he thought about her on his way to his car. He paused to wipe his mouth. He had to, it was now watering so much.