Just Before I Died. S. K. Tremayne
turn on to Princetown’s main road where it descends, literally and aesthetically, from Georgian coaching inns and the glossy new National Park offices, to the grim black outline of the prison, which broods and menaces even in sharp sun.
‘Here we go.’ Adam yanks the brake hard as he parks outside the school. He turns around, ignoring me, and addresses Lyla. ‘All right, Tate and Lyle. Give us a kiss, before you go.’ Lyla sits there, inert.
Adam tries again. ‘Come on, sweetheart, big kiss for Daddy.’
She shakes her head, and grimaces. This is unlike her. She and Adam are close; sometimes I envy their relationship, exploring the moor together, watching the birds of prey riding summer thermals over Blackslade.
Abruptly, she opens the door. Her hands clutch her Jungle Book lunchbox and school bag tight to her chest. ‘I’m going now,’ she says, without looking at me or at Adam, as if she is announcing this to the world, not to us.
‘It’s OK, darling, off you go. We’ll have a special tea this evening. Those fishcakes you like.’
She nods, blank-faced. Not really looking at us. Then she turns, and walks towards the grey school gates.
Adam puts his hand on the ignition key, ready to move off. But I put a hand on his. ‘No, wait. I want to watch.’
‘Watch what?’
‘You know. How it goes.’
He sighs. ‘You always do this.’ But he takes his hand off the key and the two of us watch Lyla entering the school gates.
For a second she hesitates.
I’ve seen this scenario before, so many times. She is trying to be normal. Getting ready to interact as best she can. Perhaps she is slowly improving? In the car, we are helpless observers.
There are lots of kids in the schoolyard, excited by the first day of the week. They are playing and scrapping, boys and girls, dark and blond; they are laughing, chasing, greeting each other: swapping stories and jokes.
Into the middle of them all walks Lyla. Solitary, unnoticed. She pauses and looks around, her pretty face pale and unsure. I know she wants to join in, but she is too shy, too socially awkward to begin a conversation.
And she doesn’t understand random play.
So she looks up and down, fiddling persistently with a button on her cardigan. I guess she’s hoping someone will simply come up to her, start something off. But the kids run right past her, ignoring her entirely.
‘Christ,’ Adam says, quietly.
Lyla makes a big effort: she walks back to the gate and looks directly and hopefully at some taller girl who is late arriving. I think I know this new girl. Becky Greenall. Popular, good at games, socially confident; everything Lyla isn’t. My pity and anxiety surge. Don’t do the smile, I think to myself, please don’t do that smile. Lyla walks closer to Becky and of course she does the smile, that strange rictus grin, that special silent monkey shout that Lyla thinks looks like a smile, but isn’t. She gives Becky a thumbs-up.
It makes her look utterly mad.
Becky Greenall stares at Lyla, and she puts a hand to her mouth, trying not to laugh, or sneer.
Lyla tries once more. She does a little jump, up and down, waving her hands like a bird.
I’m her mother, but I have no idea what she is trying to do – be a kestrel?
Becky is now openly laughing, she can’t help it; then she turns a sudden shoulder and casually blanks my daughter and shouts to some other girls who wave back. Together, these girls head laughingly for the school door. The day has begun. The whole class has sprinted inside.
Except for Lyla, who is the only one left behind in the schoolyard.
Alone and silent, she watches all the other kids disappear into the school. Only the slump in her shoulders betrays her emotions. The loneliness.
I desperately want to run out of the car and give her the biggest ever hug, to make it all better, but I can’t, there’s no use: she would push me away. Instead she walks slowly towards the school; and now she too is gone, in through the doors.
‘Jesus,’ says Adam. ‘Jesus Christ.’
I know exactly what he means. Sadness is deep in me, and for this I have no coping mechanism. I can recover from a car crash, my brain can heal, but there is no convalescing for Lyla.
We are silent. Adam starts the car, turns it and retraces 300 yards, towards the National Park office. He turns off the engine, as if he is prepared to talk. But before he can speak, I say, ‘We have to do something. This can’t go on. It’s worse than last year.’
Adam stares ahead. ‘But she laughs at home. She loves the moors. And she loves the dogs. So she’s isolated at school, so what? She’s a loner. It happens.’
I can see the pain on his face; I know Adam lives for Lyla. Would kill to protect her. He wants only what’s right for her. And I usually listen to him, I want to believe. But I think about Lyla and her wariness in the car, and that lonely walk into school, that humiliation in the yard. I imagine her now, sitting on her own in the classroom, not talking to anyone. I picture her during breaks: sitting by the wall in the playground; a strange, eccentric girl with a weird smile, who mutters to herself about ants and newts while her classmates all talk to each other about selfies and music.
I can’t pretend any more.
‘No, Adam. We can’t go on thinking this is acceptable, that she’s just quirky, it’s not right.’
The muscles in his jaw are flexing: he’s grinding his teeth. ‘So what are you saying?’
‘We have to be proactive, do something. Take action. Because I don’t think she’s happy, not really. The other day I found her arranging dead birds in a pattern. She’s never done that before. All those dead little birds. Why?’
Adam stares ahead. He is in his Ranger uniform: green fleece, green trousers, hiking boots. On most men it might be unflattering but Adam makes it look good. Masculine. I think of the sex we haven’t had in a while. I want it again, I want him to turn and kiss me, sometimes he still does that, he’ll suddenly kiss me, passionately – across a car, while we’re walking the moors – and I love it. But his fierce blue eyes are fixed on the far horizon, as if he is looking beyond horrible Princetown.
I can sense the violent yearning in him. He doesn’t want me: he wants to be out there, alone on the uplands. Striding the heights of the northern moors: standing on Great Kneeset, gazing at High Willhays, Black Tor, Hangingstone Hill, Cut Hill, Fur Tor, Great Mis Tor, the places he loves, the places he has known since he was a boy. A child of the moors, like his daughter. Unlike me.
‘Look at those bloody houses,’ he says.
‘Sorry?’
He tilts his head at a row of grey drab council housing: accommodation for the wardens in the prison.
‘My dad built some of those, when he was a brickie. Imagine that. Imagine if that was your life’s work? Building the ugliest fucking houses in Britain. No wonder he turned to vodka.’
His laughter is sour. Adam doesn’t get on with his father, who fought and drank and womanized, scattering children from Exeter to Okehampton. Adam loves his uncle much better, Eddie Redway, a tenant farmer near Chagford. That’s where Adam did his real growing up, on Uncle Eddie’s smallholding, escaping the boozy arguments at home. That quaint little farm was where Adam came to know and love the moor, with his tearaway cousins, scrumping apples at Luscombe, fishing for little trout in the Teign.
The Redways have been a moorland family for countless generations. They’ve been tenant farmers and quarry workers and turf cutters since there was a church at Sheepstor; they have shaggy cattle in the blood, and buzzards on the brain.
And I am glad my daughter inherits this