Out of a Clear Sky Read online

  I had Tom to thank for it, this getaway, this transformation. He had taken me in that night, calmed me down, explained that Zannah had let herself into the house to try and find out where I might have got to. He put me up in his spare room without complaint and let me stay there, treating my fears with a gentle scepticism that never quite broke through into words. I slept that night in the narrow spare bed and woke to a green light filtering through the trees, the forest loud with birds. Tom was up already, looking at the van. He had unblocked its fuel line and changed the filters, and when I ventured out to find him, he was looking at the interior with an assessing eye.

  He said, ‘Last night you were terrified. But yet you want to live alone in this thing, and take it halfway round the country.’

  ‘I need to get away from here. From him.’ Easy to be brave now, deep in these enclosing woods, hidden away from the world.

  ‘You can stay here.’ We were standing, facing each other. I looked into his face, but he betrayed no emotion. A breeze stirred the trees and stilled the birdsong for a moment so that there was no sound but that of a million leaves, whispering against each other, the sound building and then passing until the woods fell quiet. So easy to stay. So easy to feel safe here. Tom was watching me, waiting for an answer. ‘No strings attached.’

  I shook my head, closing my ears to the whispering entreaties of the leaves. ‘I can’t, really. Not now. Not yet. Let me get away and clear my head. Let me think, Tom. After that, who knows. I may even come back.’

  I smiled, and my smile was a weak affair, knowing my words made no sense. Tom smiled back, the same flat insincere smile that I had given him.

  ‘Who knows indeed,’ he said. And then, as though he had come to a decision, a little jolt passed through him, galvanizing him back to life, and his smile became a real one. ‘Well, then, in that case, there’s lots to be done.’

  First, I had to sell the house. I found an estate agent and set to work clearing it out, carting out my possessions box by box, taking them down to the garden and burning them there, as though that could cleanse the house of its memories. Inch by inch I stripped it down back to the carpets and the bare boards. Hard work brought exhaustion and exhaustion brought sleep, but neither managed to still the fears I felt, for even as I slept I dreamed of being chased, of being watched. I knew David was out there, lurking, biding his time, watching me. In the garden I caught myself constantly checking, looking over my shoulder. Out on the streets I thought sometimes I saw him – rounding a corner and hurrying away before I could look again, a face at a window, a figure in the distance or just something glimpsed and then gone, no more than a flash of movement in my peripheral vision. He had stopped the direct harassment, at least, or there was nothing I could really pin down. He had become more cunning now, perhaps, or else he was frightened.

  Tom humoured me and stayed around while he could, helping me carry things out, rescuing books and other oddments from my cleansing fury. The last things to go were the contents of the attic. We spent a long hot Sunday working together in the stuffy air under the roof, shifting boxes. It was getting dark as Tom handed me down the last box, the one crammed into the furthest recesses of the eaves. I blew away the dust as I took it down to the bottom of the garden and started putting the contents onto the fire. Tom followed me down.

  ‘You can’t burn that, Manda!’

  ‘Not much use to me now.’ The Field Guide to East African Mammals curled in the flames. Page after page of plates caught with a blue flicker from the coloured ink, and some rose burning in the breeze, swirling in chaotic spirals upwards on the heated air.

  ‘You’ll set fire to half of Berkshire.’

  ‘Not much chance of that.’ I raked up the remains of the fire into a white-hot centre and emptied the last contents of the box into the middle. The letters were bound with bands and didn’t fly loose as they burned. Instead, they curled inwards on themselves, each layer giving way reluctantly, my father’s handwriting darkening first before the thin onion-skin paper caught and crackled.

  ‘What’s in those?’ Tom asked as I poked at them to make sure the last remnants were destroyed.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I shrugged. ‘I never read them.’

  It’s hard to convey to someone who wasn’t sent away to school as a child the emotional kick of the letter home, of the letter from home. Sunday mornings were letter-writing time at school. Zannah wrote yards, pouring her heart out, her head bent over the paper as her hand flowed endlessly on. Mine were a less fluent affair. I would write the date, and the greeting on the top of the block of airmail paper, and then stop, waiting for the next line. It was my father I was writing to, always, in my mind. And it was he who wrote back mostly, his neat hand filling one or two bare pages of flimsy onion-skin paper. His letters seemed as painfully stilted, as hesitant, as my own, the long hard pauses between the sentences as apparent on the page. As I sat, pen in hand, watching the other girls scribble away, or staring down at my own few inadequate sentences, stretched out to fill the paper, I could imagine him doing the same thing, sitting at the desk in his study, his tea cooling beside him. I wrote little because there seemed to me to be little to say, little that would interest him in the narrow world of the school. And he may have felt the same thing: that after he’d told me of Juma’s news, and what Mattie was doing, and how the weather had been, that there was not much left. My mother’s news, or non-news, filled the next paragraph, dutifully set out, in more and more detail as I got older and more able to understand. And then the longest pause as the ink dried visibly on the paper while he searched for the next phrase.

  I didn’t care. Just getting the letter was enough. We’d get a letter each, Zannah and I, and I’d squirrel mine away as soon as it arrived, not wanting to read it among the bustle and rush of a dining-hall breakfast, saving the moment. A letter from home needed peace and quiet, a sunny spot, if possible, somewhere I wouldn’t be disturbed. The paper smelled of home. The words took me back there, just for a moment, bridging the gap, holding us briefly together for the minute it took to read it through, read it and reread it, until the words were sucked dry of all meaning.

  After the funeral, the letters still came, but I would no longer read them. I would have burned the old letters, eight years of them, bundled in a shoe box and crumbling with age, had Zannah not stopped me. The new ones piled up unopened. They followed me from school to university and onwards, through every move. I don’t know why he kept on writing them, what he thought he could say, who he even thought he was writing them to. Outwardly they were unchanged – the same stamps, the same envelopes, the same neat backwards-sloping hand, but yet they were utterly different. I kept them only because I couldn’t throw them away.

  ‘Why don’t you just read them?’ Gareth asked, but I couldn’t explain. Just to put my thumb under the flap of the envelope and ease out that paper so evocative of the past was too much, too painful to contemplate. I boxed them up in the attic and did my best to forget they had ever arrived. This last clear-out seemed to be my chance to obliterate them for good.

  It was Zannah who brought them. It had started the summer after my A-levels, when she had tracked me down to the flat I’d found to fill the gap before university. I came in from my temping job and found her sitting on the doorstep, drenched by the rain. Zannah was nothing if not manipulative. I let her in reluctantly, hunted down a towel, made tea when her teeth started to chatter. A few months later she turned up in my room at university while I was out. I found her there gossiping away easily with Gareth while they both waited for my return.

  ‘You never said you had a sister,’ he complained later. I took the letter from Zannah and put it aside. Gareth had already made her tea and she sat and chattered brightly while I waited for her to go.

  Throughout university the visits settled into some kind of a ritual. Zannah always started off by handing me the letter, which I would set to one side. Then she would sit and stay until politeness compelled the offer o
f a cup of tea. No amount of moves – from halls to student digs to rented flats – could shake her of her determination to track me down. She never told me how she did it, and I never asked. Every move would give me a few weeks or months of respite and then she’d be there, just waiting, the letter in her hand, as though this was the most normal thing in the world. After a while it seemed easier just to give her my forwarding address each time we moved. She seemed to need the fiction that we were a normal family so much more than I did.

  It took them less than ten minutes to burn. I threw the box in after them for good measure, and leaned back on the rake and watched the flames falter and die in the rain. Afterwards, Tom and I walked through the house together. Even now it was empty, I couldn’t shake off the feeling of dread I got walking from room to room. Such an ordinary house, modern, suburban, identical to the ones on either side of it, but the walls seemed to close in on me. I shut the front door for the last time and hoped I could lock away the feeling forever.

  For the rest of the month of April we worked side by side in the cramped confines of the van, fitting it out. Tom was meticulous, did most of the design and planning, while I handed him tools, took measurements, cut wood to order, held things in place while they dried. We built up a rhythm of silent communication as slowly the shambles of plywood and torn foam was replaced with the neat interior of an ocean-going yacht for one. Straps held anything loose in place, and everything else could be folded or tucked away or stowed in any number of ingenious ways. Tom came home from his work in the forest every lunchtime and evening and went straight out to inspect what I’d been doing and correct it.

  As the days wore on I began to wonder if Tom were weaving a spell with this van, hemming me in with a coat of wet varnish here, a problem with the paintwork there, finishing and refinishing jobs, refining what was already perfect. It was as though he knew that with each day that passed I felt a greater reluctance to leave the haven of the forest and venture out into the world. It took an effort of will to leave it at all, even for a few hours. Driving out on the simplest errand – an appointment with the solicitor, dropping keys off at the estate agent – filled me with dread. The minute I turned onto the open road and the forest fell away behind me, I felt exposed and vulnerable. In town it was worse. There were too many people around, too many places for someone to hide and watch unobserved. I hurried past mirrored-glass windows feeling the creeping sensation of unseen eyes, watching, waiting. I rushed through my business and fled back to the refuge of the car, counting the moments until I could turn off the road and back into the shelter of the trees, feeling the tension lift from my shoulders, knowing that I had got back safely, and alone. The cottage was my refuge now. The van beside it left me with a vague sense of unease, the reminder that sometime I would have to summon the courage to leave forever.

  Once in the cottage, though, I was restless. Tom and I spent the long evenings together in the kitchen after the light had faded and we could no longer work on the van. I couldn’t settle to anything. Tom was a brooding, watchful presence. We could work for hours together, at ease with each other in the cramped space of the van, but as soon as we were released into the kitchen, I felt his eyes on me again, felt the growing strain between us. His head turned as I passed and re-passed his usual spot in the chair by the fireplace, his eyes never straying from me. The clock ticked down the hours until it was decently possible to go to bed. We cooked and ate, and occasionally talked about unrelated subjects, a few words exchanged before we lapsed back into silence and that quiet watchful gaze of his sought me out once more.

  Every night, after I had gone to bed, I lay there still awake and listening. Every night I heard him come up the stairs and pause outside my door, as though waiting for something, some signal, some invitation. I wondered if he knew I was awake as he stood there, separated from me by no more than a few thin planks of wood, secured by a flimsy latch. I wondered what he was thinking as he stood there in silence. And I wondered what I would do if he ever knocked, or if I ever saw in the dimness of the darkened room the latch lift and the thin crack of light grow wider as the door swung open. I didn’t know. He never tried. And in the morning, I never mentioned it.

  My world was narrowing, funnelling down, circumscribed by the forest, the van, Tom, Zannah. If Tom still saw Jenny and Alan and Will, he never mentioned it and they seemed remote to me now, part of someone else’s life, people from the distant past. Zannah rang, or showed up briefly at the weekends, picking her way along the track in narrow shoes, peering into the forest with suspicion. When my phone burst into life with a text message, I was startled and fumbled for it, surprised it was even on. I was working with Tom, sanding a cupboard door, the air heady with varnish and sawdust. The message said, ‘Oi, I warned you. Not Tom.’ His number was still in my address book, unchanged. Gareth. I was annoyed with myself for the start of pleasure I got when I saw his name, and with him for sending it, knowing or guessing what the effect would be.

  ‘It’s not what it seems. And how did you know?’

  ‘Little bird told me.’ Despite myself, I laughed and shoved the phone back into my pocket, not bothering to respond. Tom looked up curiously.

  ‘Zannah,’ I said casually, not sure why I felt the need to lie about it. Tom nodded and returned to his work, but I couldn’t dispel the little glow of pleasure or shame the exchange had brought and for the rest of the day I worked with a new will, remembering I had to get away, that I couldn’t bury myself here forever.

  The next day he texted again while Tom was at work, picking up the conversation where we had left off. I felt a guilty rush of pleasure at the sight of the message, knowing I shouldn’t be encouraging him, unable to quite let go.

  ‘So why Tom then?’

  ‘He’s fixing the van.’

  ‘You’re really going?’

  I looked up from the phone and gazed at the sky. I was alone, except for the swifts which had arrived that morning, announcing the last phase of the spring migration. Swifts are the last of the common migrants to arrive in this country after their long journey from their winter feeding grounds in Africa. They filled the air with their shrill screaming cries, their speed incredible as they chased their prey, feeding frantically in the late-spring warmth.

  ‘Yep.’ I answered.

  ‘Better hurry. Swifts are here already,’ Gareth responded after a pause. I imagined him sitting as I was somewhere in the sunshine, looking up at the birds, smiling to himself as he thumbed in his message. He loved texting, would go back and forth for hours, long after the point where simply picking up the phone and having a conversation would have been cheaper. ‘Like passing notes in class,’ he’d said and the secrecy appealed to him. I wondered where he was, whether he could even see the same birds I was seeing as they spiralled high up into the sky, almost disappearing, no more than specks against the blue. I wondered also who was with him. I shook that thought away.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Got them on your list yet?’

  I didn’t respond immediately. My list was gone, sunk into the bottom of the gravel pit lake on a CD-Rom, along with everything else on the computer. My notebooks had gone up in flame. I would have to start from scratch.

  ‘My list needs a little work,’ I admitted.

  I looked up again at the swifts, listened to the many sounds of the forest birds. How long since I had been out watching them? Too long, I realized. The phone added a warble of its own. Gareth again.

  ‘Then what are you waiting for?’

  That night I was more restless than ever. The kitchen couldn’t contain my pacing. I roamed through the whole ground floor while Tom, abandoning his usual spot, hovered in the doorway, still watching. The solicitor had rung. The house was all but sold, the papers ready to be signed. Her voice had been blandly reassuring, matter of fact, something from another world.

  ‘Just pop in and we can get everything sorted tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll transfer your share of the proceeds into
your nominated account.’ The sum she was talking about seemed ridiculous, even after the mortgage had been cleared. Months of freedom. Years if I were frugal. There was nothing keeping me here, nothing at all. In daylight, leaving seemed possible, sensible even. At night, I wasn’t so sure.

  Tom finally broke his silence as I stood once more in the kitchen, peering out through the uncurtained window at the glimpsed shape of the van in the dark.

  ‘Zugenruhe,’ he said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Zugenruhe. Migratory restlessness, it means. In caged birds. Even those reared in captivity for generations. When spring comes, when autumn comes, they start to get restless. Hopping round the cage. The migratory instinct is built in.’

  ‘I know how they feel, then,’ I said lightly, forcing myself to sit down at the kitchen table and unroll one of the maps, the one we’d planned my journey on with Tom’s usual meticulous care. But even as I did so, I knew that caged birds don’t always fly the coop. Even with an open door, even with the great wide beckoning skies in front of them, they don’t escape. They come to prefer the gilded cage. They choose safety over freedom.

  That night I lay awake after Tom had passed and paused and moved on and my mind was with the swifts, asleep on their great swept-back wings, high in the sky above me. We had sat on the steps of the cottage and watched them climb, seeking the lift of the day’s thermals, spiralling upwards to gain the height they needed to sleep in safety on the wing. Tighter and tighter they turned, dwindling upwards into the deep dusk blue. These were the birds that never came to rest except to breed, single-mindedly built for flight and flight alone, pared down, stripped to the essentials.