Falling For You (16 page)

Man, this place is cold.

In a moment I’ll go out and drag in some more of that firewood I found stacked outside when I arrived here yesterday. That’ll be Marco’s stash, no doubt – he’s had my father’s permission to fell these trees for use in his solid-fuel burner for years. He won’t miss a few odd logs. I’ll do it before the light goes. I open up my rucksack which I’ve placed on the stone floor and peer at my stash of food. I purchased it yesterday when the HGV driver who I thumbed a lift from near Heathrow stopped for petrol. He took pity on me, gifted me the duffle coat his last hitch-hiker left behind in his cab before the weather turned, and I’m grateful for that. There were gloves still left in the pocket, a scarf tucked under the collar.  I only wish I’d procured a bit more food now. The snow hasn’t stopped since I got here. If I can’t make contact with my mother as soon as I’d like it isn’t going to be easy to get hold of more. Still - at least this place seems secure enough.  I swing my torch round, peering into the darkness of the chapel ruin. It’s all pretty much as I left it. There’s a small pile of rubble at one end where part of the internal masonry from some botched repairs has fallen down, but that’s pretty much it. The small workmen’s hut erected to the side of the chapel indicates there might have been intentions of having some work done up here at some point but it doesn’t look like much ever got done. Neither are there any broken bottles or fag ends or any indication that anyone’s been hanging out here. The old church pew is still there. It’s shoved up against the chapel wall, right where I left it.

I go and run my finger along the length of the wooden back-rest. The wood is damp, cold to my touch but it’s still intact. Still good to sit on. I let myself sit down.

I’m back, then. Really back, and that feels odd. I never thought I’d come here again. This old place - when I draw in a long, cold, lungful, it smells just the same. Musty, like old Roman baths in a museum. It smells safe. Nobody ever used to come and trouble me up here, did they? They won’t now. This is Macrae land. Nobody trespasses. Nobody comes here unless they have a legitimate reason to. Like me.

That’s why I’ll be safe. I won’t be disturbed.

In a moment I’ll go and look out over the edge of the castle ruins beyond the chapel and check on the state of play at Macrae Farm. It’s visible enough from here. I’ll see if the lights are still on in my father’s study or if he’s gone out, yet. With any luck, there’ll be no sign of him. He’s got to leave soon. He goes to visit his father every Christmas.

Normally he’d have gone by now. From the fact that his jeep was still on the drive when I looked earlier, he hadn’t left yet, though. I frown. He
should
be gone already. Why isn’t he gone?

I get up, feeling a sudden urge to be on the move, to pace the floor or take some action even though right now the only thing I’ve got to do is be patient. That’s all I need to do. Bide my time until my father’s out of the way and then I can go down to my mother and get the agreement I need from her to help with Sunny. She’ll be surprised to see me. Shocked, maybe. I’ll have to deal with it. But right now I can’t think of that. I need to keep focused. So few days left … I look at my watch, which I’ve been checking obsessively ever since I arrived here yesterday. Today is the 25
^th
December. The last Aid Abroad flight leaves at the end of the year. Dougie said they’ll need all the paperwork signed and delivered by the 28
^th
at the latest. Today is Christmas Day. 

I let that sink in, then I quicken my pace to the door of the chapel. I want to go and check out the farm again. I don’t want to spend Christmas with the family, whatever Arjuna and Dougie imagine. I just want to look at Macrae Farm and remember that I came from somewhere, once, even if that place is somewhere I have chosen to leave behind. I push the door open and the snow-flakes that are drifting down in huge chunks remind me of the carols they used to sing at school about Good King Wenceslas. It reminds me that I’m all alone without even a beggar to keep me company.

Truth is, if a beggar walked by outside now I’d have to mind my own business.

I can’t afford to be discovered. I’ve got to do what I came to do. That’s all. Up here, it shouldn’t be so hard to keep my head down. I’ll need warmth to get me through the night. I have a little food. That’s all I’ll need.

I drag in the logs, and shake the snow off them, tearing off the brown, drier undergrowth for use as kindling as I learned to do long ago. My fingers are already numb with the cold and the sensation is an old one, the contrast with the place where I have been, striking. Only a few nights ago I was sweating under a mosquito net. I woke to the sound of the rain pattering down against the forest and when I put my head out of my tent in the morning a haze of heat was already rising up from the muddy ground, people were about their business everywhere, hundreds of people.

Today I woke to an icy morning in
w
inter and I am completely and utterly alone.

As I work with the branches now, it dawns on me that I had forgotten the depth of the silence up here. How it can be deafening. How the mind rushes to fill it in with something,
anything
. The comforting creak of the wooden pew as I sit on it. The squeak as I
strip
the leaves off the logs I’ve pulled in. The sound of my own footsteps echoing against the stone floor.

When I hear the sound of that girl’s scream, long and terrified, ringing out into the dusk I tell myself she’ll be somewhere with her friends down in the valley, larking about in the snow. The sound has travelled up here unusually clearly because of the snowfall. That is all. Whoever she is, she won’t have been alone. It’s Christmas Day, and nobody is alone. But then without wanting to, I find myself straining to hear the reassuring sound of her calling out again, perhaps laughing this time, the sound of everything being okay, of things being as they should be.

And I remember that, even if they are not, it is not my business.

‘Hello?’ Through a foggy distance in my mind I can hear a man’s voice. A young man. I must be dreaming because he doesn’t seem fazed at finding me here. He sounds exactly like an ambulance man would sound only he can’t be
that.

Can he?   

‘Hello Miss. Can you open your eyes for me, please?’ I would, too. I like his voice, it is steady and kind. I want to open my eyes but right now they seem to be glued tight shut. He pats my hand reassuringly when I whimper at that.
Why can’t I open my eyes?

‘Do you think you could tell me your name?’

‘Rose,’ I get out. That takes some doing, and the effort of it somehow makes me more conscious of the bruising all the way down my side, of the sharp stinging pain in my thigh.
Ow
.

‘That’s great. Thank you, Rose. Do you remember if you hit your head on the way down at all, Rose?’

I hit my head, yes. I think I hit my head, but right now it’s my leg that’s really bothering me.

‘Rose?’ I can feel him gently rubbing the back of my hand but there’s an unmistakeable urgency to his voice. ‘Stay awake for me, Rose.’ I’m trying but … right now that feels incredibly hard to do. 

 He crouches down until I can feel his face very near to my own. He is so near that I swear amongst the cold drops of ice that are still falling on my face I can feel the heat coming off of his skin. I can hear his breath close to my ear and his voice, when he whispers the next word is almost hoarse; ‘
Please?
’

There is something almost deeply shocking in that and it does the trick. My eyes snap open and he moves back immediately. I blink. In the light from the torch he’s wedged into the snow beside me I can see his face and he looks concerned, attentive. Perhaps a little relieved?  My rescuer is handsome, too. Dark, short hair, not much older than me I’d guess. I realise, with something of a shock,
boy, is he handsome
.

‘Do you remember if you hit your head?’ he’s asking again softly. My head.
Maybe I did and I’m
hallucinating you
, I think. Right now I am looking at the cutest guy I ever laid eyes on in my life.

 And here am I, flat on my back like an up-ended tortoise gaping like a star-struck fool. I can’t shake the feeling that there is something familiar about him.

‘I want to sit up,’ I say with an effort of will that surprises even me. I can’t know him. If I’d met him before I’d have remembered it, I know that I would.

‘Do you think you might be able to do that?’

 I have got to at least try. He wants me to stay awake for him doesn’t he? He just said so. It’s better than becoming a frozen corpse. It hurts when I try and sit. He helps me by putting his arm behind my shoulder, supporting me on the way up. I wince.

‘Sore?’ he says. ‘How’s your head?’

Gingerly, I move my head from side to side. When I put my hand to the back of my skull there’s no blood. Nothing is cracked.

‘My head is fine,’ I croak at last. My voice seems to be coming from somewhere else; as if I left it parked at the top of hill when I fell and my
bum
is really sore. I can’t mention that to this guy, though. ‘My leg hurts.’ He nods, but he doesn’t seem too bothered about that.

‘All the way up?’ he urges now. I hook my fingers into the crook of his arm and let him lift me into a standing position. I stand there, swaying for a bit and he doesn’t let me go. Where to from here? I look at him questioningly. Where’s the ambulance?

Because there must be one. Maybe I’m confused about timings because he couldn’t have materialised out of nowhere could he? He stands back a bit, still holding onto me but assessing the situation for a moment before he concludes;

‘You’re not going to be able to walk anywhere are you?’

My voice has deserted me again. Now my leg
really
hurts. I feel about four years old, in the hands of someone else who’s going to have to make the decisions, guard my life for me. I shake my head at him. He’s right. I’m not going to be able to walk anywhere. I feel too shocked .My body feels battered and bruised.

‘I’m going to have carry you myself then. Is that all right, Rose?’

He’s going to carry me. I nod. I should be feeling mortified but the strange dislocation from reality that I was feeling before has set in again. Waves of sleep are threatening to wash over me.  When he lifts me off my feet my head falls comfortably against his chest and I’d be happy to nod off, right here, but he keeps talking to me all the time, asking me questions. So many questions; w
here do you go to school, Rose? What’s your favourite TV soap? Do you have any pets?
I notice he doesn’t ask me what I’m doing up here all alone on this abandoned site so late on Christmas day. He doesn’t ask me if there’s anyone I’d like him to try and contact for me, anyone at all?

In the back of my mind, there is my lost backpack, Dad’s tablets, I know I should ask him to go look but he keeps asking questions.
What music do I like? What am I hoping to do next year …?
He even cracks the odd joke or two. I know he’s trying to keep me conscious, not to let me drift off and he’s given me the job of holding the torch for him now,
keep it
pointed forward, Rose, so we can both see where I’m going.
We seem to be going straight upwards, from what I can make out, directly towards the old ruin.
 
I play along with him, answering in monosyllables but the crunch of his footsteps against the snow is mesmerising. The sound reminds me of when I was a kid and I’d crack the ice on the duck-pond at Shona’s then shatter it like a window-pane of ice against the yard floor. It’d splinter into a thousand shards, but that sound of the ice cracking … it’s the sound of danger being near but in a place where you know that you’re safe.

How do you know that you’re safe, Rose
? The sensible part of my mind is asking. The part that speaks in Carlotta’s voice.
Why isn’t he heading down the hill, taking you back to the place where you’ve come from? Who even knows who this guy is, or where he’s from?
These are questions I can’t answer but I know, somehow, that this man is safe. 
He could be the fugitive guy that the cops are after,
Carlotta’s voice is saying but I put her on mute …  My foggy brain just can’t take in anything else at the moment. I’m going to have to trust him.

Then I get a light-bulb moment. Of course! He must be the locum - on his way home from delivering Dad’s meds to the post box. The realisation sends immediate relief flooding through me. He’s got to be the locum, hasn’t he? How else would he know to ask all those health-professional sounding questions?  Maybe the way down via the other side of the hill is clearer than the one I’ve just come up? ‘I dropped the medicines,’ I confess to him. ‘They were in my backpack. Did you see it on your way down?’

I see him blink, taking this in.

‘I’ll look for it in a minute,’ he says.

We’ve got up as far as we can go. Beyond the entrance ramparts the inner bailey walls are much lower than I’d always imagined them, the half-broken arches end suddenly, desolately, in the air.  All is still and dark, the hill-top remains surrounded by fog and all the while the snow keeps on falling. I blink, forcing my eyes to keep open, look at him curiously. His dark duffle coat is wet. The light from the torch he’s given me to carry shines momentarily on his damp hair, picks out the concern in his eyes as he looks down at me.

‘Thank you,’ I tell him and it’s heartfelt. ‘You’re the locum, right? Can we get to the village if we go down this side?’  I see him suck in his bottom lip. His shoulders rise in what appears to be a sigh. He gives the smallest shake of his head. 

‘That way will be blocked by now. I’m sorry, but there’s no way we’re getting to the village in this.’

‘No?’

‘I’m afraid we’re going to need to shelter in here for a bit, Rose,’ his voice is measured and reassuring as he bends down to turn the metal handle of the chapel door. The wooden door creaks open - strangely, it opens outwards, like a shed door - and when he takes the torch and trains the beam off the inner walls it’s immediately apparent that the rumours about the chapel being the only stone structure still standing intact around here are true.

He puts me down on a wooden pew near the entrance, while we both take the measure of our surroundings. My immediate response is to recoil; it’s
dark
and as cold as you’d expect and it smells musty.
Ugh
. When he says we have to stay here for a bit I hope he doesn’t mean a very long bit. I mean, I hope it’s not going to be for more than a couple of hours. I rub my hands together in my gloves and I can barely feel them. I’m not feeling too good right now. I watch as he flickers the torch over the walls so we can take in the shape of the chapel; it’s maybe twenty feet across, fashioned in a roughly-hewed semi-circle, with a step up towards what might once have been the altar at the North end. He shines the torch upwards and high up on the walls some narrow stained glass windows are admitting a meagre amount of muted moonlight from outside.

‘I’m going to fetch that backpack of yours now, Rose.’ He smiles softly and as I watch him disappear through the door I think - I don’t
want
to stay here overnight. Even with this doctor who’s got the looks of some kind of soulful film star, and who’s so attentive and kind and ... everything you might imagine or want a guy to be if you were going to be stuck in an abandoned ruin for several hours. I remind myself there are girls from my old sixth form who would die for an experience like this; on paper, anyway.

In reality it doesn’t feel so good. I don’t want to be here. I’m frozen and everything hurts and
it’s Christmas Day
and Dad needs his medicines
.

‘Oh,
thank you
.’ I look up as he comes back holding my backpack aloft a few minutes later. ‘You found it easily then?’

‘I picked out the dark straps as I trained my torch over the snow. I was lucky.’ He places it in my lap and I double-check that everything’s till in there, that the tablets and my phone at least haven’t fallen out. When I look up he’s watching me curiously. I zip up the bag and put it to one side, a little self-conscious.

‘Will we be stopping here for long, do you think?’ He looks surprised. ‘Before … you can take me home, I mean?’

‘I don’t know how aware you were of those weather conditions out there Rose, but I wouldn’t suggest either of us have much chance of making it out of here tonight.’      

‘
Tonight
?’ He’s kidding me. We’re going to be stuck in this dismal place
the whole night
? I cover my face with my hands and inwardly groan.

‘You’re saying there’s really no way we’re getting home?’

‘We won’t, Rose.’ He’s taken off his coat and he’s shaking the snow off it. ‘There’s no electricity but there are plenty of logs from the felled trees stacked up outside.  No reason why we shouldn’t have some warmth and some good light. Then I’ll take a look at that injury on your leg, if that’s all right with you?’ 

‘What injury?’ It was hurting before but my leg’s feeling pretty numb now.