‘You haven’t guessed?’ After surfacing from the warren of the London underground at Marylebone Station, we’re on a train to Buckinghamshire. The train carriage is empty. ‘You’ve been here before,’ I say.
‘Oh? I don’t recognise the destination.’ He stares out the window. An hour from Marylebone and London fades into countryside – fields, sheep, church spires, empty platforms. His suede jacket is on the seat beside him; he hasn’t worn it since we got on the underground. Instead, he’s opened the top window, rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. I glance at his wrists. The hives have gone down but their outline is still visible. More noticeable are the scratches, spreading across his veins like the drag of a blade. I feel a shot of power then. He has twisted me up but I have twisted him too, I have broken through his skin, driven him to that addictive stage where he cannot tell the difference between relief and pain.
‘Wait a minute, are we going to Wyatt? Where you went on that holiday camp? Where you went to school?’
I nod.
‘Wyatt School, Lady Margaret Road.’
I stare at him. ‘How do you know that?’
‘I wrote it enough times.’
His letters. He kept it up the entire time I was there, they each began, ‘Dear darling’. The first one that arrived in my pigeonhole, I slid into my bag like the secret it was but later, when the letters arrived like clockwork, I began to savour the ritual of destruction – the gleam of my scissors, the tiny squares I cut his fountain pen words into. The sound of blades against that thick, cream paper was so sweet. Now, as we travel towards my fourteen-year-old self, I feel her strength pulse through me. So young and I knew. How to draw a line against him. How not to let him in.
‘Are they expecting us?’
‘I called ahead.’
‘Why are we going to your old school?’
‘Things are easier to tellin situ.’ A breeze from the long window is cool against my shoulders. I pull out my clip, let my hair loose.
‘Extraordinary,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘These moments with you, they’re both ordinary and extraordinary. Like your hair. I don’t remember you letting it loose like that but now I see how it falls, it’s so familiar. Do you ever get that? Things you’ve forgotten but then, when you encounter them, you thinkYes, yes, I knew it all along.’
The shape of your mouth.
Your scent.
How you say ‘Lolly’ as if it’s the only thing you’ve ever wanted.
I clutch the fabric of the seat, fix my eyes on the landscape slipping away. ‘No. I don’t get that at all.’
42
DriftSeeds
Then
Iam on the cliff face. I’ve drawn all the different varieties of thyme in the field and I am at a tipping point: I want to be with Daniel but I am also bored. I’ve started straying to the edges of the field to draw the wildflowers of the hedgerows or the white sea campion and pink thrift on the cliffs. So, when the assistants come to eat their lunch and enjoy the sea view, they don’t see me in a cleft of rock nearby. I think of announcing myself when I hear Suzanna, she’s always so friendly, but, as their conversation progresses, the possibility of declaring myself vanishes.
‘David’s fit.’ Suzanna, with that distinctive European lilt.
‘You think everyone is fit,’ replies Imogen. ‘You’d do Phersie.’
‘There is a difference betweendoingPhersie andthinkingPhersie is fit. Phersie isn’t fit.’
‘He’s almost dead, Suz.’
‘I’d do him, just to tick it off the list. Prior on the other hand . . .’ Suzanna emits a low growl. I want to slap her. ‘He is another level.’
‘No one would say no to that,’ says Imogen.
‘What about you, Rach?’ says Suzanna. The tone is friendly but there is the slightest edge to it and I understand that Rachael is being invited not just into the conversation but somehow to redress a power imbalance between them that has thus far been heavily skewed in her favour. ‘Would you say no to Prior?’