Falling For You (8 page)

‘The only thing I’ll
give
you is a kick in the goolies if you don’t let me pass …’ I glower at him, but it’s pure bravado. He’s got the upper hand because he’s stronger than me and he’s got the vicious dog and we’re all alone up here. He knows it, too. I can barely move. He laughs, and I know that logically, now’s the time to start feeling what he wants me to feel - scared - and to quit gracefully, but for some reason his stupid smirking only makes me feel madder.

‘You think … you think everyone in your family can do what they like around here. That you’re immune to any come-back for anything you do, but you aren’t. You think you Macraes aren’t ever going to have to
pay
for what you did to my dad?’
Shit – where did that come from? I didn’t mean to say that.
His face is about an inch away from mine and up to this point he is still smirking,

‘…
What
did you just say?’

‘Because you
will
pay for what you did to him. One way or the other, I promise you that.’

‘Oh! Rose,’ he laughs delightedly. ‘I like a little spirit. Thing is, my family were cleared … Ow! Dammit. My … my …’ He puts his hand in between his legs now as if he’s suddenly experienced a sharp pain in his privates. He jerks his head back up, looking at me in shock and horror, but it was nothing to do with me. I didn’t touch him. I wouldn’t want to touch him with a ten foot barge pole.

He steps back a fraction.

‘Steady on now, Rose! No evidence was ever brought forward to suggest we had anything to do with what happened to your dad that night …’

‘No it wasn’t. But
I know
your family had everything to do with it. People round here might carry on as normal, pretending that you Macraes are just a regular set of people, because it suits them to think like that. I know different.’ He’s breathing much harder now than he was a minute ago. He throws his lit fag down into the snow and crushes it in with his foot.

‘Oh yeah?’ He lifts his chin now. ‘What do you know, Rose Clare?’

I shrug, feeling my face flaming because he’s right. I can suspect all that I like but I have no evidence, nothing to bring them to book with. I don’t have to let on, though. Let him squirm a bit. I’m dicing with danger here, being reckless, I know I am - but what have I got to lose?

‘I’ll tell you what
I
know,’ he hisses into my ear. ‘I heard your mam was a witch. That if you looked at her the wrong way she reckoned she had the power to turn you into a toad,’ he sneers.

‘
Some
people already are toads.’ I give him a withering look. ‘She couldn’t turn them back into people, either.’

He stares at me blankly for a moment. Then;

‘Hell!’ He bends over double suddenly. ‘What the …?’
H
e looks up at me and there’s a confusion of fear and superstition in his eyes. ‘What do you think you’re doing, woman?’

I’m not doing anything. He’s drunk, clearly. I can’t account for his pain. His dog has stopped snarling and has started whining piteously now.

‘Nothing.’

‘ …because I’ve heard things about you, too.’ He turns away from me, wincing. ‘My dad used to watch you and your mam up to your shenanigans on them Topfields. You’re no regular girl either, are you, Rose Clare?’

‘What’re you talking about?’ What have I got to do with anything? He’s just a stupid drunk.

‘Look. I never had
nothing
to do with what happened to Jack Clare. Hear that? Nothing. So don’t you go taking your pay-back on me, understood?’

I stare at him blankly for a minute. What does he imagine I could possibly do to him, anyway?

Use the dark arts?

I slide out of his way while he’s still hunched over in pain and push aside the uncomfortable memory that I did threaten this man with a kick a moment ago. I didn’t touch him, but I’ve heard Mum say often enough that ‘energy follows thought’.

Huh, well - I glance up at the leaden sky - if this is power, Mum, it isn’t the kind of power I want in the world. My education’s the only thing that’s going to give me that.

I glance at him surreptitiously. Maybe I can get out of here? Leg it now, while he’s… indisposed? I would, but he sinks down into the snow, moaning, suddenly.

‘Get me an ambulance,’ he gets out through gritted teeth. Then he looks up, a beseeching expression replacing the angry demand on his face. ‘Stop it, Rose Clare. Leave me be,’ he says through puffs of breath.

‘I am leaving you be, you idiot!’ ‘My mum was a healer, not someone who hurt people,’ I throw at him, but he only puts his hands up over his face, as if to ward me off. Well, let him think what he will. I don’t
like
it, but it’s got him off my back usefully enough.

I’d laugh in his face except it really isn’t funny. It isn’t funny that we have to live on the doorstep of people who are so bigoted and superstitious and stupid and it
really
isn’t funny that - even after all this time - the legacy of misunderstanding my mum still lingers on.

‘Come on Rosie-red. See what you can see …!’ We’re standing on the edge of Topfields, Mum and me, gathering cowslips. I’m twelve years old and I don’t want to be here, too old for this already but her own enthusiasm never wanes.

‘Come on,’ she urges, pressing more flowers into my palms but my hands are already full. She wants me to make a cowslip flower ball, a totsy. I look down at the sorry bunch of flower stalks we’ve gathered, their drooping heads of golden bell-shaped flowers already wilting in the heat of my palms.

‘Look,’ she says, her deft fingers opening up one of the tiny yellow flower-heads. She shows me the profusion of ruby-red seeds underneath, laughing with delight at it. It’s pretty in its own way I know that but I don’t care. Doesn’t she see I am growing up? I think; I don’t want to play with these weeds any more. I’m only here because I want to talk to her about the skiing trip that’s being organised at school. How all my friends are going and that’s what I’d really like for my birthday next spring and how you need to think about these things in advance … 

‘Make a totsy, Rose. Let’s find out who your true love will be.’

‘No.’

‘Come on, don’t be scared.’ She’s standing in front of me, her long black hair billowing out in the breeze behind her and she’s laughing, confident because all this is her arena; the fields and the open air and all the small flowers of the earth, this is her playground where she runs free and I wish that she would stay here, that things could go back to being the way they used to be but I’m growing older and she’s moving on and I don’t think things can ever be the same.

In a few days she’ll go back to her friends and continue with the woodland vigil she’s been keeping for the past four weeks in underground tunnels they’ve dug out in the land under Topwoods. Like badgers in a burrow, she says to me. I tell her that sounds dark and smelly and muddy but she only laughs. Some of them have made houses up in the trees too. They do it to protect the woodland because as long as they’re there the trees can’t be torn down to make way for development. She wanted me to go and spend some time there with them, understand what it is they’re trying to do but I won’t so she came back home for a few days instead.

But she won’t stay.

Even now she’s got me doing things I don’t really want to do, being places I don’t want to be, like up here. Mum doesn’t worry about other people, but all I ever think about when she drags me up here is how close we are to Macrae land. How we shouldn’t stray over the boundaries because I’ve seen Rob Macrae looking over at us often enough. He parades up and down sometimes with his gun, shooting at pheasants, glaring at us. I don’t like it but all Mum will say is not to worry, she’s put in protection. That’s all she ever says. None of these people are ever going to hurt you, my Rosie, she says.

‘Titsy Totsy tell me true,

who will I be married to?’

She laughs, and her laughter is deep and open. It seems to me that it rings out over every blade of grass in the flower meadow beneath us. I am sure it echoes in the topmost branches of all her beloved trees, and then … her open hands fly up underneath mine. She forces my hands up, pushing them so fast that all my flower stalks go sailing merrily up into the air. They go so much higher than I thought they would.  My face turns upwards to watch them, the sky is full of powder puff clouds, a momentary backdrop of deep, cold blue and then my flowers are scattering all over the ground like golden raindrops and she’s standing there, watching me, an intent look on her face.

‘What did you see, Rosie-red?’

‘Nothing.’ I fold my arms, drawing an exaggerated sigh but we both know that I saw something. I know she saw it too. I saw… something that was nothing, a shadow so fleeting it could have been only a fleck in the corner of my eye.

‘Let it settle,’ she says softly. I don’t want to speak to her about this. It feels as if she is intruding in a place that should be mine. Step back, step back … I feel an upset deep in my stomach now, a sadness I cannot place. I don’t want to go to these places she goes to, even if it’s true what she says; that she could teach me to go there, that I could. I don’t want to be a hedge witch, Isla. I don’t want to. Leave me alone! I turn my head away from her.

Away from her prying gaze, I run through what I know I just experienced in my mind.

I saw a man running through Topfields. A man with dark hair. He was running for his life. Shall I tell her that? I hardly saw him, but I felt … I felt him, I felt all his sadness and his fear and all his goodness rolled into one. Quick as the flick of a switch, as the flowers rained down all around us, titsy totsy, I knew that he was the one who should be mine.

I am twelve years old, only twelve, but there’s a place in my heart that’s far older than that. I didn’t properly see him. But in those few fleeting moments I recognised him. My mate. My companion. My love.

He should be, but … but what is it that I didn’t see? I couldn’t see it. There was something else, I know that, but it was veiled from me. I’m not sure I want to know, either. 

‘What did you feel?’ She knows. I can hear it in the compassion in her voice. And I sense that she knows even more than I do; she knows what will become of him, too.

‘I didn’t see him,’ I tell her stubbornly. ‘Titsy totsy - it didn’t work. It wasn’t like I thought it would be.’

‘Magic never is,’ she says softly. She comes and pushes the hair away from my eyes, holds my face so gently in her hands, so tenderly. Then her eyes narrow, as if she’s seen something, realised something, her voice gets thinner and I get the feeling her next words are the saddest thing she’ll ever have to say to me;