Time's Echo (19 page)

And it hurts. It
hurts.
I want to struggle, to push him off me, out of me, but I can’t breathe. The sprigs of rosemary are digging into my back and buttocks, their fragrance
drowned out by the stench of rotting apples. I am back in the orchard, the blackness roaring in my mind, and this time there is no Sybil Dent to rescue me. There is no Ned any more, either. There
is just a man, shoving into me, and I have to lie there and take it. I have forgotten that only moments ago I liked the feel of his mouth. Now I turn my head on the pillow. I concentrate on taking
small breaths and I endure it, because there is nothing else I can do.

My face was tight, my jaw clenched, and when I raised a shaky hand to my mouth, I felt the trail of a slow tear. Ned’s weight was no longer crushing me. I could breathe.
I was sitting rigidly in one of the box pews in the church. God only knew how I had got in there, or how long I had been staring blankly ahead. Long enough for dark clouds to swallow the brightness
of the morning, anyway. The puddles of sunlight on stone had vanished, and the light was gloomy and oppressive.

Shivering, still churning with Hawise’s distress, I leant forward and put my head in my hands. I pressed my fingertips against my forehead and slowed my jerky breathing. I needed help. I
couldn’t deny it any longer, and I found myself thinking about Drew Dyer. Drew with his cool eyes and cool mouth. Not like Ned at all, and yet somehow just the same.

That was even more disturbing.

Stiffly I got to my feet, wincing at the raw, bruised feeling inside me, and walked back to Lucy’s house. I didn’t go in, but rang the doorbell next door instead. When Drew opened
the door, I found I couldn’t meet his eyes.

‘I think I need to see your friend, the shrink,’ I said.

I peered at the intercom. Sarah Wilson lived in the shadow of the Minster, in a flat hidden away behind a nondescript door off the street. When she buzzed to let me in, I
followed a short alleyway and found myself in a courtyard of contemporary houses, their glass and wood and metal striking in contrast to the medieval cathedral looming behind them.

Sarah’s apartment was cool and calm and uncluttered, a perfect metaphor for analysis. She laughed when I told her that. ‘It’s interesting that you should think of it that
way.’

Immediately I was on the defensive. Why was that interesting? Didn’t everyone think that? I’d never talked to a psychiatrist before, and I was nervous. Drew had persuaded me that I
needed help, and I knew he was right, but I was frightened that I would end up shut in a mental ward, or at the very least labelled as mentally ill. I hugged my arms together as I prowled around
Sarah’s sitting room. It was intimidatingly tidy. Three perfectly aligned books on a shelf. A contemporary sculpture. Cream sofas. Not a speck of dust anywhere. How could anyone who lived in
this kind of order understand what was happening to me?

Sarah made tea, chatting to put me at my ease, but I couldn’t relax. I could feel Hawise lurking in my head. She didn’t want me to be there, I could feel it. I wasn’t sure
I
wanted to be there. But Sarah was gesturing me to a chair, pouring me a mug of tea.

I sat reluctantly. ‘It’s good of you to see me at home.’

‘Drew’s a good friend,’ she said. ‘I know he wouldn’t have asked if it hadn’t been important.’

How good a friend? I found myself wondering. Sarah was an attractive woman of about Drew’s age, as coolly poised and carefully groomed as her house. I could see how they might be friends.
They both gave the impression of being capable and in control of their lives. When I thought about my own – drifting around the world and now apparently between times, unable to control
anything – I felt depression closing in on me.

‘This isn’t a clinical interview, we need to be clear about that,’ said Sarah as she handed me the tea. ‘But I’m very happy to have a chat. Do you want to tell me
what’s worrying you?’

‘Well . . . ’ I took a breath, opened my mouth and shut it again, overwhelmed by the impossibility of explaining to someone as calm and rational as Sarah. I cleared my throat.
‘Well, I know it sounds strange, but ever since I arrived in York, I’ve been . . . I don’t know how to explain it. Time-travelling, I suppose.’

‘
Time
-travelling?’

Her brows shot up, and I flushed. Clearly Drew hadn’t passed on what I’d told him. Sitting in that ordered room, my story sounded absurd.

Immediately I started to backtrack. ‘Not literally, obviously,’ I said, embarrassed. ‘But it feels like there’s this other person from the past in my head, and sometimes
I . . . sometimes it’s like I’m her . . . I’m sorry, I’m not explaining this very well.’

I stumbled to a halt. Sarah took a sip of tea and put her mug down. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you start by telling me a bit about
yourself?’

So I told her about where I grew up and the fact that I was an only child, and of course it took her no time at all to find out about my mother dying. I was expecting that. I might choose not to
dwell on it, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that her death had had an effect on me. Not as much as some ex-boyfriends had claimed, mind you. I was never the most sweet-natured of
children and, for all I know, I might have been just as prickly if Mum had never had cancer.

‘So what brought you to York?’ Sarah asked when we’d been through all that.

I told her about Lucy, and how I had been working in Indonesia, but then she wanted to know what happened before that, and before that. Turning points, she called them.

She had a habit of stroking her chin and nodding thoughtfully. It began to irritate me. I didn’t see what working overseas had to do with what was happening to me in York, either. Any
minute now she was going to get to Khao Lak, and I didn’t want to talk about what had happened there. I couldn’t. I
wouldn’t
. I could refuse, couldn’t I?

But there was something implacable about Sarah’s patience. She went back and back – why was I there? what was I doing? – until, sure enough, we ended up in Thailand.

I shifted in my chair, fiddled with the piping around the arms. This wasn’t what I had expected. Shouldn’t we be talking about Hawise, about now, not then? Thailand wasn’t the
problem. York was.

‘You seem uncomfortable,’ Sarah commented.

I snatched my hand back from the piping as if she had slapped me, which is probably what she felt like doing. ‘It just feels all wrong to be sitting here talking about myself. It’s
not like a proper conversation. I feel as if I should be asking you questions. I don’t know anything about you.’ I knew I sounded sulky, but I couldn’t help myself.

‘What would you like to know?’

I really wanted to know how well she knew Drew, but I couldn’t think of a way to ask that without sounding as if I was interested in him, which I wasn’t. Not really. I was just . . .
curious.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It feels awkward, that’s all.’

‘I get the feeling you don’t want to talk about Thailand.’

She was right, I didn’t, but if I admitted that, it would imply there was a problem.

‘I’m fine about it.’ I shrugged, wincing inwardly as I heard that ‘fine’. ‘I don’t see what it’s got to do with what’s happening now,
that’s all.’

‘You said you were teaching English in Bangkok. How did you end up there?’

I sighed. ‘I went with my boyfriend. Matt was a teacher too.’

‘You’re not with Matt now?’

‘No.’ I looked back at the rain smearing the big window. ‘We split up.’

‘Whose decision was that?’

‘Mine.’

Sarah nodded slowly, as if that was precisely what she had expected me to say. ‘And why did you decide that?’

‘I just felt the relationship had run its course.’ I could hear myself sounding defensive and forced myself to sound relaxed. ‘These things happen.’

‘How long were you together?’ Sarah asked, and I relaxed some more. I didn’t mind talking about Matt.

‘Five years or so. We met as students, and then we travelled together. I always had itchy feet, and when I got a job teaching English in Bangkok, Matt came with me and got a job at the
same school. We had a great time,’ I remembered a little wistfully.

‘Sounds like you knew each other very well.’

‘We did. Matt’s lovely,’ I told her. ‘We’re still friends, although we haven’t seen each other for ages.’

‘So if you got on well, what made you decide to end the relationship?’

‘I told you, it was over.’ I was a snail, horns shrinking back into my shell as Sarah trod closer. ‘There doesn’t have to be a reason, does there?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘but when a couple really like each other and get on well, there usually is.’

‘We wanted different things, that’s all.’ I knew I was sounding hostile, but I couldn’t help myself. ‘Matt’s married now and lives in London. He’s got a
mortgage and a good job. I never wanted any of that,’ I told her. ‘The whole idea of settling down makes me twitchy. I think I’d suffocate.’

‘So it was Matt who changed, not you?’ said Sarah.

‘Yes, he—’ I stopped, seeing where this was going. I looked suspiciously at Sarah, who smiled faintly.

‘It’s not a test, Grace. I’m just wondering what happened, because clearly something did.’

I let out a long breath that sounded like defeat. ‘Matt and I decided to go to the beach for Christmas,’ I said. ‘We went to a place called Khao Lak and were caught up in the
Boxing Day tsunami. We were lucky,’ I added quickly. ‘We both survived, but I guess it made us realize that we wanted different things out of life. Matt was keen to come home and settle
down to what he insisted on calling “real life”, but to me that felt like jumping deliberately into a great big rut, so we agreed to go our separate ways.’

Memories were a dead weight, pressing me back into the chair. I could hear my voice thinning, tautening, under the pressure and I swallowed. ‘It was no big deal.’

Sarah did more thoughtful chin-stroking. ‘What do you remember about the tsunami?’

‘Why?’ I said rudely. Her calm voice and her calm manner and her calm, cool house were getting on my nerves. ‘What does it matter?’

‘You’ve just implied that the tsunami was a major turning point in your life.’

I banged down my mug and got to my feet. I half-expected Sarah to tell me to sit down again, but she didn’t. ‘I survived it,’ I said, going over to the window. The Minster
towers were blurred and watery through the rain. ‘I wasn’t even hurt.’

‘Tell me about it anyway. What were you doing when it happened?’

I blew out a frustrated sigh. ‘We were on our way to the beach. We’d felt the tremors earlier, when we were in bed, but we’d laughed about them. We used to laugh a lot,’
I remembered, then squared my shoulders, hoping that Sarah hadn’t noticed the embarrassingly wistful note in my voice. She would be bound to make too much of it.

But when I glanced at her over my shoulder she just nodded, and waited, and then I had to go on.

‘Matt gave me a jade pendant for Christmas the night before, and I’d just realized I hadn’t taken it off.’ My hand went unthinkingly to where it nestled in the base of my
throat. ‘I loved it, and I didn’t want to lose it, so I said I’d go back to the room and leave it there. We were quite near the beach,’ I said. ‘You could see it
through the coconut palms. There was a little boy digging in the sand, in our place.’ I made myself sound casual. ‘You know what it’s like when you go to the beach. You find a
favourite spot, and that was ours. Anyway, we agreed that I would go back to the room and leave the pendant somewhere safe, while Matt bought some water, and then we’d meet under
“our” tree.’

I turned back to the rain. ‘Sometimes I think, if I hadn’t been fretting about the necklace, we’d have been together,’ I said slowly. ‘They say that makes a
difference, doesn’t it? But then we might not have survived, if we had just kept on walking together. We’d have been in a different place when the wave hit. It would all have been
different.’

Sarah let a beat or two go by. ‘Then what happened?’

‘Then it was just . . . chaos. It was so fast, so strong.’ I hugged my arms together and kept my eyes on the Minster. ‘One moment I was walking along this track in flip-flops.
I could feel the sand under my toes. It was warm and very fine. I could feel the sun on the back of my neck. I’d tied up my hair, and the clasp on the chain was getting hot.

‘I was happy, I remember that,’ I told Sarah. ‘I could smell coconuts. There were dried husks scattered under the trees, but I think it was probably from my suntan lotion. It
might have been that.’

I’d forgotten I was in York by then. I’d even forgotten Hawise. I was looking at the Minster, but I wasn’t seeing it. I was remembering the way the fringed leaves of the
coconut palms threw a jagged pattern of shade across the track. I remembered how I had thought: I’ve never been this happy before.

‘And then?’ prompted Sarah after a while.

‘Then there was shouting, screaming. Suddenly people were running.’ I lifted my hands in a helpless gesture and let them fall again. My skin was shrinking from the memory. I had to
brace myself against it. ‘I turned and there was this wall of water coming towards me.’

I hadn’t even recognized it as the sea. The day before it had been a perfect serene blue, but this water was brown and boiling and savage, gobbling up everything in its path like some
ravenous monster.

‘I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing,’ I told Sarah, ‘and I didn’t have time to make sense of it anyway. I was staring at it, and then it just . . . ate me up.
It was like being tossed around in some washing machine. I was tumbling round and round, and there were trees and poolside chairs and beach umbrellas and God knows what else . . . ’

I trailed off. How could I describe the force of the water, the
power
of it? The noise and the horror of it? What it was like to choke and fail and drown?

‘What happened next?’ Sarah asked quietly after a moment.

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I said.

Sarah said nothing. After a moment I went back to sit in the chair. I looked at my shoes. I looked at her three perfectly positioned books. I looked at the cold tea. I shifted the mug so that it
was sitting on a mat.