Tamar (40 page)

In the early afternoon of our fifth day, Yoyo and I found ourselves at the first bridge on the fourth and last map. The Tamar had dwindled to a thin blue line of small kinks and wriggles as if it had been drawn by a mapmaker with a bad case of the shakes or hiccups. Little bridges stepped across it every few miles as though it wasn’t there. This one, like most of the others, was narrow, ancient, made of grey mottled stone, and in the middle of nowhere. Silent level farmland stretched as far as the eye could see, interrupted here and there by small gatherings of trees. My river was now only a stream, and from above you could hardly see it because it was almost smothered by the reeds and slender trees that grew on its banks.

We stopped only because Grandad had marked the place. Leaning over the parapet, we saw that there was a shady patch of grass just big enough for two people to perch their bums and dangle their feet in the water. We found our way down there and were taking our shoes off when a big grey arrow exploded out of the low darkness beneath the bridge. The shallow water churned beneath it, and when it beat its wings, we felt the displaced air against our faces and fell back, alarmed. A heron. It lifted itself so slowly into the air that we thought it would stall, but at last it pulled its trailing legs into its body, folded its long neck, and drifted like a primitive aircraft towards a higher bend in the stream, vanishing into the silvery-green trees.

When we clambered back up to the road, we heard the sound of an approaching vehicle and pressed ourselves against the hedge to let it pass. It was a dark blue Land Rover coated in reddish dust. Sunlight flashed off its windscreen, making the driver invisible. We turned to walk back to the Saab but stopped and looked when we heard the other vehicle brake, its engine revving hard then falling to a soft chug. It had halted on the far side of the bridge. I thought that maybe it was the farmer who owned the land and felt a little flicker of anxiety. But no one got out. We could see that the driver had turned in his seat to watch us. I looked at Yoyo. He shrugged, and we got into our car. As soon as Yoyo started the engine, the Land Rover pulled away. By the time we’d reached the next turn in the road, it was out of sight.

Just when you’d expect the Tamar to disappear altogether, it swells, with a sort of
ba-boom
(if maps had soundtracks), into two big lakes. Lower Tamar Lake is a placid stretch of water where ducks trail ripples towards the bank, expecting picnickers to feed them bits of sandwiches. We left the Saab in the car park and followed the signs to Higher Tamar Lake. The footpath took us over a stile into a field where sheep complained about the heat; their cries were like sad people pretending to laugh. The field sloped upwards, and we’d toiled halfway to the crest when we stopped to gape, amazed. A vast sloping wall of brown-stained concrete reared up out of the valley to our left. It was incredibly, brutally out of place among the low hills and green and tawny fields. It was the dam that blocks the flow of the young river and turns the valley into a reservoir. We climbed the steps up onto it. The grey flagstones were hot beneath our feet. Halfway across we stopped to lean against the steel railings and gaze out onto the lake. The water level was low after those rainless weeks, but a number of small sailing dinghies were out, seeking scraps of breeze.

“Wow,” Yoyo said, opening his camera case. “What is that weird shit down there?”

I stood on tiptoe and peered over the railings. Where the wall of the dam vanished into the water, there was a jumble of rocks exactly the colour of milk chocolate. And lapping against these rocks, staining them, was a big slick of astonishingly beautiful scum. Yoyo took three pictures of it at different places along the dam. Looking at them now, they’re like abstract paintings — whorls and coils and long, drifting threads of pale blue, turquoise, white, and bottle green. They look like the grain in marble, swirls of molten glass, the whirling gases of a distant star. At the end of the dam there was a notice telling us what this stuff was, telling us what the photographs do not. The word
TOXIC
appeared more than once.

There was a picnic area and a café on the other side of the lake. We bought two tubs of ice cream and sat beneath a parasol in silence. I was happy — we both were — but I was also troubled. There was a question, or rather a small cloud of questions, hanging over the day. We had reached, you see, the last of Grandad’s marks on the map. Just three miles or so north of where we were sitting was the source of the river. At least, what we reckoned was the source. Poring over the map in our room the previous night, we’d found a spring marked just where the hair-thin line of blue finally disappeared. That had to be it. And when we found it —
if
we found it — that would be the end. But unless something miraculous happened, it wouldn’t mean anything at all. An end that didn’t end anything, a pointless destination. We’d found out nothing. I was sure now that Grandad had made this journey and that it had been very important to him, though God knows why. And it had been important to him that I made the same journey; again, God knows why. Unless it really was for the sentimental reason that Yoyo had suggested. But that just wasn’t good enough. Those damned things in Grandad’s box were all connected in some way, but we’d travelled all these miles without working out how.

I’d stirred the last of my ice cream into a slush, mulling all this over. I looked up, and Yoyo was watching me. He reached over and laid his hand on mine.

“Problem?” he asked. “Something is bothering you?”

“No,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m happy, honestly.”

Which was the truth and a lie at the same time, because my ridiculous happiness was itself part of the problem. I was afraid it would end when the journey ended. The plain fact was that by the evening — or the next day, at the latest — there would be no reason not to go back to London. Then what? The rest of the school holidays, a part-time job, then A levels maybe, then the rest of my life. And no Yoyo. He’d go back to Holland. The End. The future loomed over me like the blank wall of the Tamar dam, and I didn’t fancy it at all. In five days I’d become someone else, and I liked being her.

I knew that this feeling, the feeling of things coming to an end, was affecting Yoyo as well. I knew it because, without saying anything, we’d agreed not to talk about it. Neither of us had spoken a sentence that began with “When we get back to London . . .” They were the taboo words that would shatter the spell. We were sitting with empty ice-cream tubs in this rather boring place because we didn’t want to say them. Sooner or later, though, one of us would have to say “Shall we go?”

It was Yoyo.

“Sure,” I said, as though I’d been waiting for him.

We gathered up our stuff. I’d gone a few paces before I realized that he hadn’t moved. I looked back at him. “What?”

He was staring at the car park next to the boathouse. Parked in the shade of a tree was a dusty blue Land Rover.

“Is that the same one we saw at the bridge?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. No, probably. It’s what farmers drive, I think. There are perhaps hundreds of them around here. It doesn’t mean anything.”

We walked back over the dam, pausing only briefly to look down at the beautiful gunge that polluted the water.

I’m not sure what I’d thought the “spring” that was the source of my river would be. Something like a natural fountain, maybe, a bubbling-up of crystal-clear water cupped in a niche of ancient mossy rocks. Needless to say, it isn’t like that at all. It’s in a bog. Not what you’d normally think of as a bog, though. Not a low, swampy place. Quite the opposite. In the summer, that is. It’s a high stretch of moorland covered in tall, sharp-edged yellow grass and prickly stuff. According to the map, the spring itself is snug up against a country lane, but when we stopped there, we realized there was no chance of getting to it. Between the lane and the moor, there’s a dense hedge of thorny wind-tilted trees and spiky yellow gorse. You’d be ripped to shreds if you tried to get through it. So Yoyo reversed the car until we got to a place where there was a gate and a track.

The sky seemed lower here and was as white as paper. The heat was moist and nasty. We climbed over the gate and walked down the track until we figured we were more or less opposite the place where the spring should be. A small cloud of gnats kept us company, spiralling above our heads. We saw now that the harsh yellow grass and brambles and low spiny bushes concealed a labyrinth of ditches. In winter they’d be little streams, but in that hot dry summer not one of them contained the trickle of water that would guide us to the spring itself. We stood baffled, flapping our hands at the insects zeroing in on us. We looked down at our bare legs and skimpy trainers.

“Shit,” Yoyo said poetically.

I can admit, now, that all the way up the river I’d secretly nursed the foolish idea that when we reached its source we’d be given some kind of answer. I can’t remember how I’d pictured it. A magical document, a scroll of time-stained parchment in a lead casket, jammed under a rock? A letter from beyond the grave, sealed in plastic behind a veil of falling water? Something as childish as that, probably. Something from an adventure novel in which everything is revealed and tidied up in the last chapter. A key to the code. But when I stood there and saw that the end of the journey was as vague and unreachable as the beginning had been, I realized I didn’t care. No, more than that: I was relieved. I didn’t want an ending, didn’t want to get to the full stop of our story.

Yoyo put his arm round my shoulders, and I leaned into him and put my hand on his chest.

After a while I said, “Home, then?”

And it didn’t seem so terrible a thing to say after all.

We walked back to the car. I was leaning on the gate, gazing back, when Yoyo nudged my arm and gestured with his head. The blue Land Rover was parked about twenty metres in front of the Saab. The driver’s door swung open, and a man stepped out. He stood and watched us for a long moment and then walked towards us. He was wearing a faded denim shirt. He had the face of an old man but didn’t move like one.

I heard Yoyo speak my name, but his voice seemed to come from a long distance; I had that thickness inside my ears that you get on aeroplanes. And I couldn’t look at him, because I was watching the other man’s face and he was watching mine. He stopped just beyond the reach of my arms.

He said, “Tamar?”

The edges of my world melted.

I heard myself say, “Dad?”

Time doesn’t heal, not really. I’m no longer that fifteen-year-old girl whose world changed shape on a desolate country road. Even now, remembering her at that moment, it’s as though something physically shifts inside me, pulling at a wound.

My father put his arms around me, and I held him, because it was impossible not to. We may have stood like that for some time. I couldn’t get into the Land Rover with him, though. I just couldn’t. So Yoyo and I followed in the Saab. Poor Yoyo; it was hard for him to drive, because I couldn’t let go of his left hand, even when he had to change gear. He must have been searching through his languages, desperately looking for something to say. I could only breathe in long shaky gulps, and there was nothing I could do to stop my tears. They ran down my face like rain down a windowpane. All the tears I’d never shed, all at once. A bloody river.

We drove for no more than ten minutes before the Land Rover turned off the road through a pair of immense iron gates. A tarmac driveway curved through parkland ahead of us, and I caught a watery glimpse of a large and complicated roof. We didn’t go towards it. Instead, we turned left again and parked beside a gatehouse, a quaint cottage of grey stone and fancy white-painted gables.

It’s funny, isn’t it, that at times of crisis we do the most ordinary things. Dad just walked to the back door of the gatehouse and said, “Come in.” Then we were in a small tidy kitchen with Dad filling a kettle as if we were familiar visitors who’d popped in for a cup of tea.

If there are words for what I felt, I don’t know what they are. I was so full of questions that I thought they would choke me before I could tug them out of my throat. The first one I managed was truly stupid.

“Do you live here?”

“Yes. The big house — did you see it? — it’s a language school for business people. Residential. Lots of Germans, a few Japanese. I take care of the grounds and do maintenance jobs around the house. It’s a beautiful old place. I’ll show you round later, if you like.”

He said all this very quickly, in one breath, knowing, I suppose, that if he paused I’d ask other, harder questions. I realized that I wouldn’t have recognized his voice if I hadn’t been looking at his face. I’d forgotten it.

The kettle built to a roar. Dad was opening cupboard doors blindly as though he didn’t know where his things were kept.

“Dad?
Dad?
”

His shoulders fell. My fists were clenched; my fingernails dug into my palms. I felt Yoyo’s hands on my arms.

“Dad,” I said, or wailed. “Dad, for God’s sake!”

He turned to face us. His eyes were wet, and he couldn’t seem to make up his mind what to do with his hands. In the end he stuck them under his armpits and clamped his arms tightly to his chest. The kettle clicked off, leaving a huge silence.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you . . . I know you must have so many questions. I don’t know where to start.”

Nor did I. I was shivering, and I couldn’t control it.

Dad said, “I think you might be in shock. Wait.”

He took three small glasses and a bottle from a shelf and poured shots of brandy. As soon as I smelled it, my mouth filled with salty saliva.

I managed to say, “Bathroom.”

Dad pointed to the hallway. “Through there. Top of the stairs.”

I got there somehow. A clean, almost sterile room. A bath with a plastic shower curtain. I lifted the toilet lid and threw up, twice.

When I went back down to the kitchen, Yoyo and Dad had gone. I looked around the room. Nothing in the sink, no washing up on the drainer. Tea towels neatly folded and hung on the rail of the electric cooker. A cork notice board with a few bills and business cards pinned to it, but nothing handwritten, no postcards, no photographs. A small square table, and just one chair.