Falling For You (25 page)

‘Hey,’ I say. ‘You okay?’ Then, when he doesn’t immediately respond
,
‘You’re sitting by the open door,’ I offer. ‘You’re not cold?’

‘I wanted to sit by the light,’ he says.

‘By the light?’ He watches me as I come in and push the door closed behind me. Now there will be no more daylight coming in. Nothing except the thin morning beams which are filtering through the high windows at the sides, and the light from the fire. ‘I’m sorry,’ I remind him. ‘We’ve got to conserve the heat.’ He nods, rubs his face with his hands.

‘Bad dreams?’ I ask.

‘Bad dreams,’ he agrees. He wanted to sit by the light, he said. I glance at him sympathetically. He must
really
hate the dark if he’s prepared to put up with these temperatures in order to get a little bit of light. It isn’t just that, though is it? I wonder what his dreams were that they have made him go like this, his shoulders so hunched, his head bowed but he must sense my interest.  He clears his throat now, changing gear.

‘Family all okay?’ He indicates my phone.

‘They’re as okay as they could be,’ I tell him cautiously. I’m burning to ask if everything is all right
with him.
‘My uncle and aunt and my cousin are only staying over because the weather hi-jacked them - a bit like us staying up here, I guess. Anyway, they haven’t quite got the hang of how to use the wood fire and they’re cold. And Dad … he could still do with his meds which I was supposed to bring him, of course.’ I’m rambling, I know I am, talking about any old thing that rolls off my tongue when I wish,
I just wish
I could ask him what the matter is?

‘They’re okay with you being away, though? With where you are, right now?’

‘They’re okay with where they
think
I am,’ I remind him.  He nods, acknowledging what I’ve just said. I could be mistaken, but I think I saw a flash of relief on his face at that. Now he looks as if he really badly wants to ask me something but he won’t. Maybe it’s the dreams he was having, still bothering him? After a while;

‘You just asked me if I was having bad dreams,’ he looks a little abashed. ‘Did I … was I calling out in my sleep, Rose?’

‘A little.’ I switch my phone off to save the battery, and he watches while I put it away safely in my pocket.

‘I’m sorry. I do that sometimes, call in out in my sleep. I hope I didn’t scare you?’

‘Nope.’

‘Did I say anything intelligible?’ he asks in a croaky voice.

‘Like what?’ This is important to him, I realise. But it’s a delicate situation. If I show too much interest he’s going to scuttle away like a startled deer in the forest. I’ve got to make like I didn’t see that look I saw on his face when I came through the door. I go over and check the jeans I rinsed out earlier, see if they’re getting any drier, hanging over the back of the pew which we’ve pulled closer to the fire.

‘Like …
anything
.’

I smile at him. ‘Nothing important except … you called out where you had hidden the treasure map, I’m afraid. And I now know that X marks the spot.’

‘Ah. You see now why I don’t have a girlfriend
.
’ He makes an attempt at returning my joke but he’s still looking anxious. ‘They value their beauty sleep too much.’

‘I wouldn’t worry. That calling out in your sleep thing - I’m used to it,’ I admit. ‘My dad’s been doing that for years.’

‘He has?’ Lawrence settles down by the warmth of the brazier, stretches out his fingertips.

‘Sometimes Dad calls out in his sleep as if … as if the very hounds of hell are after him.  The nurse who used to visit told me that it’s a common occurrence after people have suffered from some sort of trauma. They dream, and in those dreams revisit whatever’s terrified them and often they call out. Half the time they don’t even know they’re doing it.’

I shoot Lawrence a sideways glance, ‘You knew you were calling out though, didn’t you?’ I wait to see if he’ll elaborate on his own situation but he doesn’t seem inclined to.

‘When Dad calls out in his sleep, I sing to him, sometimes.’ The jeans are drying beautifully in the heat from the brazier. I turn them round to even out the process, giving my exaggerated attention to my task as I speak.

‘Does it make it any better,’ he asks softly now, ‘
w
hen you sing?’

‘I don’t know if it makes it any better
.
’ I look up from flattening the damp jeans with my hands. ‘I don’t know if anything can, to be honest. I know it quietens Dad. It soothes him when I sing, that’s all.’

‘You sang to me too, just now, didn’t you?’

I nod, feeling immediately and chronically embarrassed. Hell, I didn’t realise he was actually
listening
to me. Earlier, I sang Lawrence the song Mum used to sing to me when I was very young and couldn’t sleep.

It seemed to calm him down. He opened his eyes and looked at me at one point when I went over and put the sleeping bag over his shoulders. I sat there with him for a little while. I don’t know how long. I remember I put my hand out tentatively when he began to whimper. I rubbed the top of his shoulders again, very gently, very softly as if I could soothe all his worries away as easily as rubbing his troubles off a blackboard.

‘Thank you for that. I guess I’ve got too many memories that I don’t want. I’ve got no place to put them because I don’t want them …’ he says cryptically.

‘From the war, you mean?’
Damn
, If he realised I was singing, I think uncomfortably now, did he also know I was rubbing his shoulders while he lay there, too?
I thought he was asleep!

‘You’ve seen too many things and now you can’t forget?’ I prompt. He seems to be shivering and yet his face looks very hot, a fine sheen of sweat glimmering on his skin in the firelight, his short hair plastered all over his forehead. Poor Lawrence, my heart goes out to him. What can he have been through in all those troubled places he’s mentioned that causes him so much distress? He doesn’t say much but I’m picking up he might have seen some pretty gruesome things…

‘Not from the war,’ he surprises me. ‘It’s this place.’ What on earth can he mean,
this place
? It reminds him of somewhere else, that’s what he must mean, but;

‘Don’t ask. You don’t want to know about me, Rose,’ he looks at me candidly.

I do, though. I come and sit down tentatively beside him.

‘You don’t.’ He grabs hold of the ends of my fingers suddenly as if to emphasise his point. ‘You really don’t. I’ve seen the way you look at me, and...’ I make to protest but he doesn’t let me out of it, presses my fingers a little tighter. ‘And - I’m not what you see on the surface. You need to know it. That person who you’ve already made up your mind I am - I’m not him.’

‘I don’t care who you are.’ I don’t know what makes me say it but the moment the words are out, I know it to be true.

‘A girl like you ...?’ He turns his face away, cut up by his own thoughts.

‘Believe me, you would care.’

‘Maybe I care about
you
, Lawrence?’ I breathe softly, daringly.

‘That would be a mistake,’ he begins but I pick up the struggle in his eyes and I persist.

‘Tell me. What is it that makes you call out in your sleep like that?’

‘It’s this place,’ he repeats after a while, his voice barely audible. ‘This place brings back a lot of memories ...’

‘Oh?’ I move in a scooch closer, waiting for him to explain. In the long silence that follows a cascade of uncomfortable thoughts crash through my mind. How could this place -
this ruin
- be the source of so many unhappy memories for him? He already hinted earlier that he’s familiar with the area - he mentioned those stone angels, didn’t he? But what reason could he have had before to come up here and do anything other than sight-see? And even
that
he’d have had to have done with caution. It’s on Macrae land, isn’t it, and they don’t like people wandering around on their territory.

‘What kind of memories?’ I urge, though I’ve got a pressing feeling that maybe I should be leaving well alone. I’ve never liked this place. As I wait for Lawrence, clearly struggling to come up with some sort of a reply, it dawns on me that it really is rather dark in here. I hadn’t noticed before just
how
dark.  It’s the kind of closed, stagnant darkness I remember from that time Shona and I missed the last bus home and took the shortcut over the old disused cemetery. I feel a small shudder go right up my back.      

‘I had a -
mishap
,’ he says the word carefully, feeling the sound of it in his mouth, trying out the taste of it as he comes back to me at last, and I get the sense he has not shared this with many people.

I brace myself.

‘I was running away from someone, and I came up here. I’d come here many times previously ...’ He looks around him as he speaks and I get a sense of his familiarity with the place. This is not the first time the chapel has been his sanctuary, is it? I didn’t realise he was local. I feel a small knot of unhappiness in my stomach at the thought.   

‘Running away from
whom
?’ Why would a guy like Lawrence have to run away from anyone?

‘My father.’ He says the word ‘father’ like it’s something out of a foreign language. A word he doesn’t in the least like the sound or meaning of. A word he’s not comfortable using.

‘You were running away from your father,’ I say. Is he going to tell me
why?

He doesn’t.

I’m putting two and two together. He fell out with his father. Is this the reason why he hasn’t seen his mother in a very long time, like he told me before? The reason he left home so early, too, I’m guessing.

‘You came up here and you had a mishap, you say? Something
bad
happened?’

He takes in a deep breath and I get the sense that there is more to come.

‘See that big plaster patch up there?’ I follow his gaze.

‘That was where the chapel ceiling had to be fixed after a huge chunk of it came down during a storm. The whole place had been weakened because of the digging works …’ he trails off.

‘You know this place well, then?’ He’s
definitely
local.

‘Better than I should, Rose.’ His voice goes very quiet now. ‘One time I got trapped up here. They’d brought the bull-dozers in to tear down some work that was never going to be completed
.
’

‘The Macraes, you mean?’ I look at him disbelievingly. That must have been back when they recanted on their promise to restore the castle.

‘But what were you even …?’

‘They didn’t know I was in here,’ he continues. ‘Nobody knew I was here. I shouldn’t have been. When the walls first started caving down on me I was asleep. By the time I realised what was happening it was too late to get out. Can you imagine that? The noise … cutting through my sleep, the impact as the stone and timber structures they’d erected started falling all around me, it was like - it was like the end of days.’ He bites at his short, short fingernails as he says this and for the first time I see that he’s already bitten them down to the nub.

‘You must have thought you were going to
die
?’ I look at him, stricken.

‘I thought I’d be buried alive.’

I hear myself gasp.

‘Is that what the bad dreams are about? You’re re-living the memories?’ My hand goes to my throat.

‘I don’t remember a lot of it. The truth is, I don’t want to remember. In the end, I was trapped under the fallen masonry for three days. If it hadn’t been for my dog going berserk …’
H
e shakes his head.  ‘He knew I was in here. One of the workmen got me out in the end.’

Christ. I can’t take this all in. He just said three days …
has he really just told me he was once stuck under the rubble up here for three days?
That’s horrific, really horrible. If it’s true, how come I never heard about that - surely the village would have been buzzing with it, if a local boy had disappeared for that long?

‘You were …hurt?’ I venture at last.

He shoots me a wry grin. ‘Physically, no. Scratches, that’s all. Those little Angels must have been looking out for me, Rose.’

‘Thank God.’ I’m still trying to work this out. He wasn’t injured, he says, but there are mental scars. There must be. He was trapped for three days. Under the rubble. Alone, and in the dark. Is that why he’s so unhappy in the dark? I shoot him a compassionate look.

‘Thank God that your dog knew you were in here and led them to you. Bu
t
how
old
would you have been, Lawrence? I’m still grappling a little with the discovery that he’s a local boy. I used to commute to the nearest all-girl’s Grammar so we’d have been at separate secondary schools. He’s older than me, too. I don’t know him. And yet ... a faint memory edges to the front of my mind as I watch his face now. I thought I recognised him when I first laid eyes on him, didn’t I? I thought then that I had seen him somewhere before ...

‘Fifteen, going on sixteen.’

‘Lawrence … are you seriously saying that no one had missed you at home?’ I look at him disbelievingly but he just gives a small laugh.

‘Let’s just say - they were used to me disappearing when I felt like it. Nobody would have raised any questions.’

 
Nobody to look out for you, Lawrence?
I lower my eyes to the floor.

  ‘Heard enough?’ he says. Not nearly enough. I know he’s just told me something
huge
. He’s hinted at a past, precarious and ensnaring as a spider’s web, teetering out in all directions around him; the place he ran from, the place he’s run to, all dangerous places, no safety and no respite in any of them. Some of the things he told me earlier this morning when I thought he was talking about his job, filter back to me now;
boring means that you are living a normal life,
he said;
one where you need not fear what each day might bring, what you might have left at the end of it.
  I suspect I know more about this man right at this moment than many might who have known him a lot longer. He’s opened up, told me things he’d normally keep hidden.

And yet ... he feels more of a stranger to me now than he did a moment ago.  All the things I had assumed about his past - a stable home, a loving family - they shrivel up and disappear.  He’s someone else after all, isn’t he, just like he said? A small shudder goes through me, I should leave this alone, leave well alone, something inside me says and yet an insatiable desire to learn more is there, too. Even though I know I should be afraid to learn more. Something tells me nobody goes through the kind of trauma he’s just hinted at and comes out unscathed.  I shake my head a fraction,
no, I haven’t heard enough
, but whatever
I
want, he clearly feels he’s said enough. 

‘Tell me,’ he says after a while, ‘do you believe in Fate?’

‘
Fate
?’ I frown, shake my head a little. What does he mean? 

‘Do you believe in Fate, little Rose?’ he asks again. ‘Kismet?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I say at last. His question has made me remember where it is I thought I knew him from. He’s put me in mind of the day Mum took me up to Topfields and we picked all those cowslips along the verge,
Titsy-totsy, tell me true ...
I take in Lawrence a little more closely and suddenly, it’s like a burst of sunlight beaming down through a break in the clouds and I can feel all my limbs trembling with a certain recognition. Dear God, it’s him, isn’t it? The man I saw that day in my mind’s eye, running through the woods, towards Dead Men’s Copse. I
think
it’s him.

Titsy-totsy, tell me true

Who will I be married to?

This man is the same man I saw that day when I was twelve and Mum promised to show me my soul-mate. But we can’t be together. From what I felt that day on Topfields with Mum, we won’t be.

Only it
can’t
be him.

I frown, rubbing at my face because this has all begun to feel too surreal. It’s the lack of sleep and the strange place, the terrible things he’s just told me and being in here under circumstances of duress; I’m imagining things.

What I saw that day up on Topfields - that was all just the over-active imagination of an adolescent, being encouraged by a mum who should have known better. I don’t want to remember it and I don’t want to believe it.

 ‘Do you think we can ever avert our fate?’ he says quietly, urgently, and the nudge of his fingers just contacting mine sends a tingle right into my hand, right the way up my arm.

The answer seems really important to him, but the truth is, I don’t have any answers. I don’t have any words in my mouth right now, even if I did have an answer.  He gazes quietly at me for a little bit and the late morning light coming in through the high-up chapel windows seems to brighten for a moment. I take in the gentle features of his face, the slightly blunt brow of his nose, his short hair that curls at the nape of his neck and I see how easily it might be possible for me to love a man like this. How it might be possible for him to love me.         

‘I hope we might avert it if it’s not a good fate,’ I say at last. ‘I hope so, Lawrence. Why?’

He shrugs, ‘I’m back here now because I have to be. But I’ve always felt …’ he looks around him warily – ‘This place could be the death of me.’

‘If you felt that,’ I look at him seriously, ‘And you’ve already had one very bad experience up here… maybe you should never have come back?’