More and more I found myself thinking of Jonas.
I felt light when I thought of him, in my head, in my heart.
When he visited I’d watch him as he talked in the flickering firelight and find myself wondering how the small scar above his lip would feel under my fingers, or against my lips. I had to concentrate to stop myself reaching out and taking hold of his wrist, feeling the beat of his pulse beneath my fingertips.
I mean yes, that’s slightly weird, Mischa said. But that’s just how physical attraction is, babe.
Don’t, I said.
Don’t what?
Say ‘physical attraction’ to me ever again.
Okay, she said. Would you prefer sexual desire?
I would not.
Mischa laughed her dirtiest laugh. Oh, I think you would, Clemmie.
I caught myself imagining conversations with him… as I washed our clothes in the basin Shaun had brought now it wasn’t safe to visit the house so often. As I hung them out on the branches of trees where they would grow cold and fail to dry. When I boiled water over the gas stove. I thought of clever things I’d say to him that would make him laugh or think I was interesting.
At night, in the dark, I’d find I was remembering him looking at me, the intensity of it, so that I felt the heat of his gaze on my skin. I imagined him touching me, the response of my body to his touch.
Pure filth, Mischa said approvingly.
I ignored her.
I tried not to think about him.
The thought of him made me happy and I couldn’t be happy. I didn’t deserve to be happy.
I’d tell him to stop visiting. Next time.
Or the time after.
Still, I waited for him.
‘Is that what you still feel?’ Polly says. We’re not in her office today because someone’s in there fixing a leak in the ceiling. Instead, we’re in a room with no windows that smells faintly of cheese and contains a piano, a bike with no front wheel and a hatstand.
‘What?’
‘That you don’t deserve to be happy?’
I shake my head. I don’t feel it. I know it.
‘Am I allowed to play?’ I say, nodding at the piano. I don’t particularly want to, but it’s better than answering questions.
‘Sure,’ Polly says, smiling. ‘I didn’t know you were a pianist.’
‘I’m not,’ I say. ‘I mean, I can play a little bit. My grandpa taught me when I was a kid. We used to play duets together and he’d get the notes all wrong on purpose. I wasn’t very good. My mum was really good, I think. Like, Grandpa said she could have been a professional player if she’d stuck with it.’
Polly looks interested. ‘You remember her playing?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘We didn’t have a piano.’
I wonder now why that was, and if she minded.
I wonder if she has a piano wherever she is now.
I decide maybe I don’t want to play the windowless-cheese-room piano after all.
Shaun arrived late one evening. When I heard him coming through the trees I’d hoped it might be Jonas as neither of them had been for a few days. But as soon as I saw Shaun I could see something was wrong.
Things were worse in the village. Much worse.
There’d been another wave of house searches and this time everyone they found had been arrested and detained, even kids. They were all relatives of people from the village, or friends, or friends of friends. People like us who’d been unsafe in their own homes, or who’d been threatened with deportation or arrest like Claudia. The people who’d been hiding them had been arrested and detained too, no matter who they were or how long they’d lived in the village. Some of those arrested were pregnant women, pensioners, people who were sick or disabled. Imogen Glass wanted to make an example of them, Shaun said, to show her strength and to show people they needed to be on her side if they knew what was good for them. He’d found out through his network that they’d been taken away to a disused army barracks a few miles away that was now being used as a detention centre. He knew someone who worked there, who passed him information, who said the camp was chaotic – so packed and dirty that people were getting sick.
I felt cold when he told me. Claudia could be in a place like that. Dad too.
‘Why’s she doing this?’ I asked.
‘She’s getting edgy,’ Shaun said. ‘Knight’s in trouble. People I trust are telling me the army might split. Some of the senior military have turned on him.’
‘But that’s good, isn’t it?’
‘In the long term, I hope so, yes. But for now it means things are more dangerous. We could end up with two armies fighting each other.’
‘You mean, like a civil war?’
‘It may not come to that,’ Shaun said. ‘Things may get better not worse. But for now, you need to stay hidden.’
He didn’t need to tell me. I wouldn’t risk Grandpa ending up in a place like that, not because of me.
‘How’s Grandpa?’
Shaun smiled. ‘He’s fine. He’d be happier if you were there but I’ll tell him you send your love. Talking of which, I’d better get back to him.’ He got up to leave. ‘That cough of yours sounds bad again.’
‘I’m fine.’
He looked at me. ‘No you’re not. Your breathing sounds laboured. Does it hurt to breathe?’
‘No,’ I lied.
‘I’m going to see if I can get you some antibiotics,’ he said. ‘I expect Jonas can get hold of some. He said to say sorry he hasn’t been able to visit, by the way, but we’ve got to be more careful than ever with Imogen how she is at the moment. If she finds out about him…’
‘Sure,’ I said quickly, and hoped he couldn’t tell how much I minded.
The evenings stretched out long and dark without Jonas. I had nothing to do but sit and think. I would get out the SEREN box but I could never bring myself to open it. Then one night, when Billie was asleep, and I couldn’t sleep because I was coughing so much, I took the box out by the fire.
Why was I so scared of opening it?
I’d let Mum go. I didn’t need her any more. I didn’t want to let her back in.
But it was natural to be curious. What harm could it do? Before I could think too much about it, I opened the box.
There wasn’t much inside. Folded neatly was a baby’s sleepsuit and a pair of baby shoes. I felt strange looking at them. There were some cards and postcards, which I read eagerly, but quickly realized they were all to Mum rather than from her. Mum remained as invisible as ever.
Under the postcards was a small black velvet ring box. Inside was a silver ring with a tiny green stone in it. I recognized it at once as Granny’s engagement ring. I’d loved the ring as a child and loved hearing the story that went with it. I’d heard it many times, Grandpa loved telling it. How he’d spotted Granny taking out a copy of The Mabinogion at the library in Edinburgh and how he’d fallen instantly in love with her. And how it had turned out she was actually getting the book out for her American boyfriend who was studying a module on Celtic Literature because he had thought, wrongly, it sounded easy and how she was planning to go to California with him when she graduated. And how Grandpa had persuaded her to meet him on some spurious pretext at a café on the Grassmarket and, as a result of this meeting, the American boyfriend went back to California heartbroken, without completing his module in Celtic Literature and without Granny. And three years later Grandpa had taken her to that same café on the Grassmarket and given her an emerald ring that he’d started saving for the very night they first met there. Because emeralds were Cleopatra’s favourites, he told her, and only a jewel good enough for the most beautiful queen that ever lived was good enough for Granny. And because they were magic, and legend said that if you put one under your tongue you could see the future, and the future that Granny would see if she tried that, he’d explained, was them, happily married with a load of kids and dogs and books and whatever. ‘Three billion years old, the oldest emeralds are,’ he’d said. ‘Just think of all the years this one’s been waiting to be put on your finger.’ It’s a good line, you’ve got to admit. And it worked. Granny hadn’t put the ring under her tongue. She had taken Grandpa’s word for it. And six months later they were married.
I found a piece of string and looped the ring onto it then tied it round my neck. It was too precious to leave lying around the hut.
There was a photo in the box, of Mum with Grandpa. At first, I thought it was me. She must have been almost my age from the date Granny had written on the back. I hadn’t realized I looked so much like her. She was standing with Grandpa, her head thrown back, laughing, and he was looking at her with that expression, the one I’d always thought was just for me. Before that, before Grandpa was mine, he was Mum’s. I stared at the photo for a long time, trying to work out why it made me feel whatever it was I was feeling. Why I was crying. Then I folded it into the pages of my notebook.
The last thing in the box was a book of Grimms’ fairy tales, which I saw from the inscription that Grandpa had given Mum for Christmas a long time ago.
I put everything back in the box except for the book. Whatever I’d hoped – or feared – I might find, it hadn’t been there. I didn’t want to examine too closely what that thing had been. Now I just felt disappointment and the familiar nagging anger that Mum remained as invisible and distant as ever.
The book was an old hardback. I opened it carefully and turned the pages, remembering Mum telling me these stories when I was very small, not from a book but her own versions of them. As I turned a page, a postcard fell from behind it. I picked it up and looked at it. There was a picture of a castle on a hill on the front. I turned it over and realized I recognized the writing as Mum’s. It was an address in Edinburgh. Beneath it was simply written:
My address. Sx
I looked again at the postmark. It was from last year.
For the first time since Mum had left, I knew where she was.
She wasn’t on the other side of the world with oceans between us, as I’d imagined.
She was in Scotland.
Somewhere I could get to.
Somewhere safe.
The next thing she knew, the girl found herself in the banqueting hall of the palace being welcomed as the guest of honour by the old king and queen.
‘We’ve been waiting for you,’ they said.
They gave the girl a fine gown to wear. Then there was food and dancing and, for a time, the girl forgot all about her sister and the island and the blood-red flower.
At the end of the evening, she fell into the softest bed she had ever slept in. That night she dreamt her sister came to her as the bird the colour of the blue summer’s sky.
‘Don’t forget me, sister,’ the bird said.
‘I never would,’ the girl replied.
But the next day the feasting and dancing started again, exactly as before, and, exactly as before, the girl forgot all about finding the blood-red flower. The days went on like this, and days turned to weeks, and weeks to months, until one night, instead of dreaming of her sister, she dreamt of the robin.
‘Remember the key!’ the robin said.
When the girl woke up, she looked in the pocket of the dress she had been wearing when she first arrived at the palace and found the tiny golden key. When she looked at it closely, she realized it was a key for winding a clock.
That evening, instead of joining in with the feasting and dancing, she searched the palace for a stopped clock.
Shaun didn’t visit. Jonas didn’t visit. At first I didn’t worry but as the days went by I started to. What if Shaun had been arrested? What if Jonas had? What if something had happened to Grandpa?
My cough got worse, especially at night. Billie slept through it, but I lay drifting in and out of consciousness, waking dripping with sweat then shivering with cold till my teeth chattered. My breathing got more painful. I became so weak I could hardly stand.
‘Are you okay, Clemmie?’ Billie said. ‘You look bad.’
‘I’m okay,’ I said, trying to catch my breath. ‘Don’t worry. I just need to sleep.’
More days and nights passed then that I remember only for being so hot or so cold, so heavy and in pain and fighting for every breath, and Billie saying, ‘It’s okay, Clem, I’ll look after you,’ and singing her made-up songs to me.
And then sometime later I thought I heard Shaun’s voice, Christ, Clem, can you hear me? Taking my pulse. Giving me water and medicine that tasted so bad I tried to spit it out but he made me take it. Time drifted by, Shaun appearing, giving me medicine. Billie humming in the background or the sigh of her breath at night.
Until one morning I woke up and I could breathe again, I could even stand again and I walked slowly to the door of the hut and looked at the trees, bars of thin sunlight sloping through their branches, and it was so beautiful that I cried.
Because I knew we couldn’t stay here.
A few days later I got up one morning and found the robin’s little body, cold outside the hut. I was surprised by how upset I was. I didn’t tell Billie. I scooped him up carefully and carried him to the wishing tree and cried as I buried him there. I made a wish in the frosty dawn, but I knew it couldn’t come true.
Late that night when Billie was asleep I heard footsteps coming towards the hut. I tensed, waiting. Was it Shaun? It was later than he usually came.
‘Clem?’
It was Jonas. I threw open the door and we stood grinning stupidly at each other. I’d missed him so much.
‘You took your time,’ I said. ‘I nearly died since you were last here.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
I smiled. ‘Don’t be. I didn’t want you to come. I mean, I did, but I knew it wasn’t safe. And I didn’t really nearly die. I just had a chest infection or something.’
‘Shaun said it was pneumonia.’
‘Well, whatever. I’m fine now as you can s—’ I was overwhelmed by a badly timed coughing fit.
‘Yes, so I see,’ he said, but he was smiling now too. ‘I can’t stay long, but my mum’s out at a meeting till late so I thought I’d take my chance.’
‘I’m glad you did,’ I said. I couldn’t stop smiling.
‘Come on,’ he said.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Not far,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. Just to the clearing.’