Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel (25 page)

“I’ve got a better idea,” he said. He still had hold of my hand, and with it he pulled me back up. “Let’s cross on the tree trunk.” It remained jammed into the bank on either side, but most of its bark had been stripped away, revealing the smooth and pale sapwood underneath. “Hold your arms out and don’t look down,” he said, stepping onto the trunk. He walked confidently along it; one, two, three long strides and he was across.

Reuben faced me. “Easy,” he said.

I lingered on the bank, my fingertips sweating and my mouth dry. I looked up at him and down at the trunk. I stepped forward—it was barely wider than my
feet. I took another step, and my centre of gravity shifted out over the gill; I compensated, moving in the opposite direction, too far. I tried another step, too fast. Reuben was bending toward me, his arms outstretched, but there was no grip on the slick surface of the trunk. And I fell. I heard myself cry out, and there was a smack of pain as my hip and chest hit the rocks a few feet below.

“Punzel!” he shouted; then he was sliding down the side of the gill and helping me to my feet. “Christ, have you broken anything?”

My hip burned and the hand which had been under me felt crushed, but I said, “No, no, I’m fine. Really, I’m OK.”

He held my hands in his and looked me up and down. “Your dress is ripped,” he said. There was a tear through the beige fabric.

“It’s just an old thing. It doesn’t matter.”

We were balancing on the damp boulders in the bottom of the gill. I pulled my hands away from his to brush the mud and bits of moss from my dress and so I could look down while I worked hard at not crying. I couldn’t cope with being the centre of his attention.

“What was it you wanted to show me?” I said.

“Are you sure you’d still like to go? We could see it another day.”

“Which way?” I said, starting off up the bank, trying not to limp or wince. At the top, I went left, weaving through the bushes toward the mountain, aware of Reuben following.

“Across the scree,” he said, overtaking me. “This was why you needed your shoes.”

Behind him, I lifted up my dress to examine my hip—the skin was ragged, the area over my hip bone already reddening.

The ground underfoot shifted and moved, sliding us backward even as we climbed. Every year, winter frosts chipped away at the side of the mountain and the loose fragments of rock crept downhill like a grey lava flow. We scrambled up the slope for five or ten minutes until right against the escarpment the angle of the land flattened off, and we stopped to catch our breath and look back. The view carried us out over the frilly tops of the wintereyes and down to the spiked firs in the valley bottom. There was a flash of the silver river, and a green hillside rising up from the water, and, finally, the naked line of rock at the edge of the world.

“That’s where you live, isn’t it?”

“Come on, the sun’s moving,” Reuben said, and led the way along the side of the mountain, loose stones spinning out from under our feet and clattering off the
mountainside. We came to an expanse of heather covered in a drift of purple flowers, similar to those I had found the grubs in many winters ago. In the shade of the mountain, Reuben crouched and pulled me down beside him. “Now we have to wait.” And he sat staring straight ahead at the bushes. I thought it was a joke, but he didn’t move; he didn’t look at me or say anything else. So I crouched there too, until the sun crossed our backs onto the heather, which trembled in the light, lifting its flowers toward the sunshine. As we watched, the heather flexed its petals, purple and pink with black-eyed spots. Like a ripple on a still pond, the flowers fluttered in the sun’s warmth and, in a chain reaction, they lifted, a flock rising and fluttering in the air around us.

“Butterflies are cold-blooded,” Reuben said. “They can’t move until the sun warms their flight muscles.” We sat until the sun had reached them all and just a few remained dancing about our heads. “They only live for two weeks. A short but beautiful life,” he said.

When the butterflies were all gone, Reuben asked, “Are you hungry?”

I was always hungry, but I shrugged. We continued walking along the side of the mountain, the narrow path disappearing after we left the scree, and the ground becoming grassy and uneven, lush tufts sprouting over
hidden rocks and dips. I could hear water trickling beneath us, seeping out from the mountain, small rivulets which would gather themselves together in secret, amassing, joining forces until they found their way into the gill. When the incline became steeper, we headed downhill. I picked my way with care, holding my skirt and hopping from one grassy mound to the next, my hip complaining with each step. I tested the ground before I trod, wary of catching my foot in a hole and tumbling all the way down. Reuben, ahead of me, at first inched downward in the same fashion, but then stood up and with a whoop started to run. He leaped from one hillock to the next, his arms whirling, his body leaning out at an alarming angle as if he might spring off into the air. Well before me, he reached the grove of wintereyes and wasn’t even out of breath when I caught up with him. He stood under a tree, peering up through the leaves, and then shimmied into the branches monkey-style and came back with two eggs clutched in one hand.

“Afternoon tea,” he said, offering them to me. The eggs were balaclava blue, speckled with brown.

“I can’t eat them,” I said. “I can’t eat baby birds.”

He laughed. “There aren’t any embryos in these.” He held each up to the sun. “See, no veins—infertile. Don’t drop them,” he said, putting them in my hand, “we’re going to have mushroom omelette.”

We climbed the mountain and looked down on die Hütte with its chimney smoke rising sleepily into the air and, as always, beyond it, the land across the river.

“Do you live over there alone?” I tried again, but Reuben jumped up to collect kindling for a fire and then produced the means to light it from his satchel, together with a cooking pot, knife, and a pile of oyster mushrooms wrapped in leaves. We sat on the wide lip, our legs dangling over the drop, and ate with our fingers, watching my father, a pocket man, chopping wood, walking to the river with the buckets, watering the garden. We saw him lift his head and heard him call for me, and we scooted back from the edge into the shadow of the mountain, laughing.

That evening in die Hütte I hid the dress from my father, rolling it into a ball and stuffing it down the side of my bed. I knew that the rip in it and the purple bruise that had flowered across my hip would make him angry.

During that summer, Reuben and I met every afternoon. We hid from my father and walked the familiar paths, sat on the boulders in the rock forest, climbed the mountain, but we never crossed the river.

“Becky and I had a saying whenever something unexpected happened,” I told him one day when we were
picking blackberries on the other side of the gill. “It was: ‘We used to say it was so dull, nothing happening like in books. Now something
has
happened.’”

That summer was a good one for blackberries. The bushes were taller than Reuben and covered in sweet ripe fruit, so that with one squeeze they slipped off the stalk that held them. I was meant to be taking them home, but as many were going into my mouth as into my basket.

“Unexpected like what?” he said, his lips stained dark from blackberry juice.

“Just silly things, like our teacher sneezing in the middle of a lesson, or realizing Jill Kershaw, in front of us in the dinner queue, had got the last serving of mashed potato.” Reuben had a crease between his eyebrows. “It was a joke,” I said. “They weren’t really unexpected things, not like this.”

“Like this,” he repeated, “picking blackberries?”

A heat rose up from my neck and I looked away, reaching farther into the bush. “It’s a line from
The Railway Children
. Don’t you know it? I had the record, in London. Becky and I used to listen to it all the time.”

“No, I don’t think I do,” he said.

“Didn’t you have a record player when you were growing up?”

“No, there was no record player.”

I wanted to ask him more questions, I wanted to know everything about him, but instead I said, “You would have liked Becky.”

“Oh, and why’s that?”

“I don’t know. She was funny, interesting, clever,” I said, extricating myself from the brambles.

“Aren’t you all those things?” He came toward me, a pile of ripe berries in the cup of his hand.

I could feel the blush rising again.

“Here you are.” He tipped them into my basket. “Blackberries for supper.” He reached out and wiped the corner of my mouth with his finger. “Wouldn’t want your father knowing how few made it home,” he said, and smiled.

“What about at the cinema, maybe you saw
The Railway Children
at the cinema?”

“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “Did you know, the blackberry can be distinguished from the raspberry not simply by its colour but because the blackberry keeps its torus, the white stalk, inside it, whereas the raspberry leaves it behind when it’s picked.”

“Daddy! My daddy!” It was my best impersonation of Roberta on the station platform.

Reuben shook his head.

“What did you watch, then?” I asked.

“Not much. I was never really one for watching television.”

“What about the book? You did read books, didn’t you, wherever you came from?” We were walking through the forest, the basket of blackberries slung over my arm.

“Sometimes, not very often.”

I tried to remember the shelves in my bedroom in London. There had been rows of books, but only
Alice in Wonderland
came back to me.

“But you’re always writing. In that little book of yours that you won’t let me see.”

“You are the nosiest girl I’ve ever met.” He laughed, but I knew I had been warned off.

We walked in silence until we reached the trees at the edge of the clearing. I stepped out into the sunshine. When I looked behind me Reuben had already gone.

A week or so later, I showed Reuben the nest. We had been to pick blackberries again, but already they were turning—so ripe that when we touched them the soft ones fell and were lost amongst the thorns. Rain started, large droplets, sucked down by the thirsty forest floor, making the air smell of damp summer soil. When he saw the nest he was at first surprised and then seemed angry that there was a place in the forest which he knew nothing about.

The day before, I had carpeted the nest with fresh moss and woven flowers into the walls and roof, telling myself that it had needed a good tidy-up, pushing away thoughts of other reasons. With Reuben squeezed in beside me, what had seemed a large space was now cramped. He had to prop up his head at an awkward angle and bend his legs behind him; he reminded me of Alice after she had drunk the potion and grown too large for the rabbit’s hall. We were inches apart, but I was conscious of every movement I made so we wouldn’t touch, and yet his breath—smelling of blackberries—and his body, his presence, filled the overcrowded nest.

“How did you know my name,” I asked, “when we first met?”

“I don’t think I did,” he said. “You introduced yourself. Thank you for asking me round, by the way.”

“You’re welcome,” I said, trying to remember if he was correct or not. “I only did it so I would get a return invitation.”

Reuben made a vague “hmmm” and shifted to avoid a steady drip which was coming through the fern roof.

“I’m sorry it’s not very big. I was thinking of building a glasshouse, south-facing to catch the winter sunshine.”

“Then you could grow ferns all year round.”

“Orchids and grapes.”

“With birds of paradise showing off their tail feathers.”

“Pooping on the cane furniture.”

“Lovely,” he said.

We were quiet. I plucked a thistle head from the ceiling and pulled out the strands bit by bit, letting them float between us.

“What’s it like where you live?” I asked.

“Similar to this. Trees, forest, river.”

“But is it a cabin, or a tent, or what?” I tried not to let my irritation at his evasiveness show.

“It’s below the ridge, amongst the trees.”

“I’ve never been up there. Except when we arrived, before . . .” I trailed off.

“Do you want to?”

I had imagined the Great Divide many times. It still came to me in dreams. I would stand teetering on the brink, my feet tipping pebbles into the dark, pebbles that never reached the bottom. Or I would fly above our patch of land, the mountains like cupped hands with the river running through the valley they made. But as I flew higher, I could see that we floated in an infinite black sea. I searched for other islands of life but saw nothing.

“I could take you,” he said, shifting onto his back, stretching his legs and hitting the woven sticks at the bottom end.

“Maybe.” There were strands of moss in his beard.

“Now.”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re always too afraid to do anything,” he snapped. “You’re going to end your days in that tumbledown hut with your weird father without having done a single thing for yourself.”

“Die Hütte is not a tumbledown hut,” I said. It was the only answer I was confident of.