State of Grace (Resurrection) (2 page)

I closed my eyes briefly, trying to clear my head, and when I opened t
hem again it was to find his eyes staring deeply into mine – large, luminous, dark eyes, a swirl of emotion in their depths, fringed with lashes I would sell my soul for. I gulped reflexively, then my mood was thankfully broken as his gaze moved deliberately down my body. He smiled widely.

I glanced down to see what he found so amusing and shrieked. Naked?
Naked
! How the hell did
that
happen? And how could I only just have noticed! I know I was a bit distracted and all, one minute minding my own business out for a late night walk, and the next finding myself in the middle of a war zone with people being beheaded and disembowelled and stuff, but you would have thought I would have noticed something as fundamental as
not having any clothes on!
It was downright drafty for one thing! My first thought was that my brain was finally succumbing to the intruder within it, and my second thought was to instinctively hide my nakedness.

Before I could cover myself with my hands his sword
jerked at my throat and I was forced to stand motionless, letting him look at my body, unable to move. I had no doubt he would kill me if I so much as blinked. He stared. I could feel his gaze on my flesh. I knew what he could see: pale skin (no vestige of summer tan for me: too busy being ill from my final dose of chemo), small waist, narrowish hips, and breasts that were no more than a handful, peaked at this moment with rather erect nipples. I was suddenly cold. Unbearably, utterly, cold.

His glance grazed over the place between my legs wh
ere curly, dark hair grew and a flood of warmth surged through me as if his eyes projected heat. The contrast between the two sensations made me shiver, raising the fine hairs on the back of my neck. I fought the urge to run screaming from him and I knew his sword would find me before I could take a step. He focused on my right hip, then looked at my face curiously, searching for an answer, before returning his gaze to my skin. I realized he was looking at my tattoo: an exquisitely painted eagle in flight, about two inches in size. His eyes met mine again and I shuddered at the hunger I saw in them. He didn’t attempt to conceal the violence that emanated from him and I prepared for death.

He said something
but I didn’t understand. It was a language I was unfamiliar with. Not that I spoke any more than a smattering of Spanish, the same amount of French, and the only words I knew in Welsh was ‘dim parcio’, to my continuing shame. He moved even closer and, horrified, I read his intention. Sword or no sword, I couldn’t just stand here and let it happen. I could either run or fight.

I chose
to run, and whirled away from him, but my foot caught and I fell, sprawling on my front, the trodden, packed earth hard and cold beneath me. I lay deathly still, expecting to feel the hot stab of the sword as it pierced my back, and with eyes scrunched tightly shut and breaths coming in short, panicked gasps, I waited to die. And waited.

The shockingly loud trill of my mobile phone made me jump and I reached for it automatically, face still pressed against the
springy grass. It was then I realised I was wearing my jacket and it was grass I was lying on, not bare earth. Cautiously I sat up and twisted around to look behind me. All I could see was the darkness of the mountain slope and above that, the night sky: no huts, no fires, no man with a sword.

My phone sounded obscenely loud, demanding to be answered.

‘Hello?’

‘G
igi? Gigi? Where are you? Are you alright?’ My mother’s frantic voice brought me almost back to my senses.

‘I’m fine.’ I was still distracted, searching around for any
some idea of what had just happened. There was nothing to see and nothing to hear that was out of the ordinary. I was back on top of the mountain, but for one brief minute my mind appeared to have been somewhere else. I shook my head, still scouring the darkness for movement. Nothing. I drew in a deep breath to steady my nerves and a sharp bolt of pain shot through my head. I gasped and screwed my eyes shut, praying for it to pass.

There was no fooling my mother. She could either tell from my tone of voice that I was far from alright, or else she had heard my reaction to the sudden onset of pain. Or both. N
ot much got past her, to my constant dismay when I was smaller. I was a bit dismayed now, to tell the truth.

‘Where are you?’ she demanded.

‘Fan Y Big. Didn’t you see my note?’

‘Yes, but…’

‘Mum, I’m ok,’ I repeated firmly, the headache receding to a dull ache. I could manage a dull ache.

‘But anything could have happene
d,’ she wailed. My mother was nothing if not persistent.

Withou
t thinking I replied quietly, ‘It already has.’

The silenc
e on the other end of the phone made me feel guilty. She was trying so hard to be brave for me, and I hated the thought I had caused her any more anguish. She had enough to bear already, and there would inevitably be more to come – for both of us, for all of my family.

I sighed. ‘I’ll be home soon.’

‘Ok.’ Her voice was full of tears, and feeling like an absolute bitch, I headed back down the mountain. The walk home gave me time to reflect on what had happened. I knew from what I had read and from what I had been told by both my consultant and the Macmillan nurses that I might find myself getting confused or disorientated, but I was pretty sure they hadn’t meant
that
level of disorientation. The vision, or whatever I was going to call it, had been a little more than forgetting to put my shoes on when I left the house, or being unable to remember my name. The headache was nothing new; I had been having those for quite some time with increasing frequency and intensity. I pushed my worry to the back of my mind. It was probably a one-off, and even if it occurred again there was nothing I could do about it. Everything had already been tried, right? But I still worried about it all the way home.

They were waiting for me when I walked into the kitchen, sitting at the old, scarred, pine table, trying hard to appear normal, playing at happy families. That made me feel even worse. If I had been healthy they would have shouted at me; actually, I amended, perhaps Ianto wouldn’t have. Just my parents, then. It didn’t matter I was a woman grown and that before I returned home they had no idea what I was doing. I guessed that from their point of view they couldn’t worry about specifics if they didn’t know about them, so they just did a blanket worry instead that was only partially relieved by a text or phone call, and only fully relieved when my mother could check me over with her own eyes during one of my sporadic visits. These were far less frequent than either parent liked; although they realised just because I had a day or two off it didn’t necessarily mean I was close enough to pop back home as I was often not even in the same country, or the same continent for that matter.

‘Enjoy your walk?’ my father asked calmly, taking another slice of toast from the plate in the centre of the table. My mother sat stiffl
y, a mug of tea in front of her, untouched. I got a glass out of the cupboard and filled it with water from the tap, then found some painkillers. I was aware of my mother’s concerned stillness and my father’s studious effort at normality. Both pairs of eyes followed my every move. My first thought was to hide my headache from them, but I realised I was being silly because my mother could always tell when I was in pain: she knew from the set of my shoulders or the creased line between my eyebrows. I couldn’t deceive her, and it would probably be cruel to try. The only person in the room who was unconcerned was my brother. I downed the tablets then grabbed some toast, slathering it in butter and marmalade. I was hungry. A four hour walk in the middle of the night tended to do that to me, headache or no. I nodded to my dad, mouth full. I couldn’t actually bring myself to look at my mother and see her expression.

‘How far did you go?’

‘Diving board.’

‘Cool,
’ Ianto grinned at me. My mother shot him a glowering look. He rolled his eyes and returned to his breakfast, wisely refraining from adding any further comment. Trust my brother to think that a terminally ill woman going for a hike in the middle of the night up a three thousand foot mountain was a ‘cool’ thing to do. Even I could see how dangerous it was. Unfortunately I couldn’t seem to stop my midnight rambles and that kind of danger no longer had much meaning. My walks up the mountain were the only things keeping me sane.

‘I wish you wouldn’t,’ my mother
said, her voice controlled.

‘I know.’

‘It’s silly and irresponsible.’ Her voice contained a little more emotion now.

‘I know.’

‘So why do you do it?’ This was said at a higher pitch, a definite sign my mother was starting to lose her temper.

‘I don
’t know.’ I did know but I wasn’t prepared to share that with my family right now. They didn’t need to know the depth of my misery. They had enough burdens of their own to carry.

Dad pushed his chair back and stood up, draining the last of his tea. He put the mug
down and stretched. ‘Right then,’ he said heartily, trying to gloss over the awkward silence which followed my last words. ‘Got to sort those barns out, ready for winter.’

Cyn Coed Farm dealt mainly in sheep, although we had a few head of cattle that we bred for meat, plus the usual compliment of chickens (for eggs and the oven), dogs (to work the sheep and cattle), a goat (no idea why we had that), two horses (my mother’s) and on
e unusually bad tempered goose (even for a goose) who had been purchased one year in preparation for Christmas lunch, but due to Ianto’s desperate pleas, had a stay of execution.  We’d had it so long now that surely it must die of old age soon.

I watched my father stomp out to the boot room: a tall man, with a mop of curling, dark
hair, like mine. In his late fifties, he was still strong with wide shoulders and a wiry body. I had inherited his grey eyes but not his ruddy complexion: that was a result of working outdoors every day of his life.

‘Don’t dawdle,’
he called to Ianto. My brother groaned and muttered ‘bloody barns’ under his breath. Ianto could have been my twin even though he was four years younger than my twenty-seven. He was a male version of me, in looks anyway. Ianto had the Llewellyn dark hair and our father’s grey eyes, framed with dark lashes. Actually, I conceded, his lashes were much thicker and longer than mine. How unfair: but not a patch on the lashes the man in my hallucination had, I thought, sourly.

We
both have creamy, ivory skin, with Ianto’s being more tanned than mine. Black eyebrows, straight nose, high cheekbones and full lips completed the ensemble. Even though we looked remarkably alike, our looks seem to sit better on Ianto than they did on me. He was never short of offers from the opposite sex. I wish I could have said the same.

He was
taller than me and heavier built, although still slim. I guessed this was partly to do to his being male, and partly because he did lots of heavy lifting and outdoor work. Also the chemotherapy had left me weak and skinny, a bag of bones. Thanks to our mother’s home cooked meals, I was starting to put some weight back on, and I was nearly back to my pre-diagnosis days. I had enjoyed my sojourn into a size eight, but not the reasons behind it.

I deliberately pushed all th
ought of bones out of my head: I was far too close to becoming only bones and nothing else, myself.

‘David,’ mum shouted. ‘I’m going in to Brecon this morning. Did you want anything?’ she followed him out to
the boot room, a sort of added-on porch that ran from the back door down the length of the rear of the house. We used it to store coats, saddles, spring bulbs and, of course, boots. The dogs slept there, too.