True Love, page 2
Either way, it never makes her sad. She likes it, likes how it makes her think about the world and her life, a strain of magic that’s worth savouring all the more for how little she understands of it. She feels as if her da is no different from those early days, and yet she knows deep down that he must be. And she knows, even if it’s never been clear to her how, that she must be different as well.
Welty was too young; he has no memories of their mam at all, but he likes to talk about her, particularly on a night when they’re in bed. They share the same tiny room. Keg has a proper bed with a pinewood frame, but since they never have any money to spare, da and Gordon made Welty a bed from one of the old pallets left out in the camp, cutting bits away and lashing other bits together, and then finally painting it blue.
Even though he’s so much younger, Keg nearly always goes to bed at the same time as Welty. She likes to read a story to him, to see the way his face changes as the words reach him. Sometimes he’ll drift off right away, the day having taken its toll on his young, innocent body. Other times, he won’t appear tired at all but bright-eyed, restless, and he’ll spit out a volley of questions about their mam.
She remembers one night in particular. It was late, their da long gone to bed, but she could tell that Welty was still awake. She could hear him tossing and turning in his grey twist of sheets on the floor below her, and she’d reached over to the small bedside table between them and switched on the lamp.
Immediately he’d sprung up, resting on his elbow, his dark hair mussed and hanging over his eyes slitted against the light.
What’s wrong? she’d asked him.
I’m thinking about Mam, he’d said.
What about her?
A small crease between his eyes darkened at the question, and his lips had twisted to one side in the way he sometimes does when he’s thinking hard.
Did she have enough time? he asked.
Enough time for what?
To love me, he said. Did she have enough time to love me like she did you and Da?
He’d never asked this question before, and Keely wondered at his mind, at the thoughts which must swirl and pick at him, just as in her own.
Of course she loved you, she said. Mam loved you the moment you were born. That’s how it works. It doesn’t take any time to love your kid. It just happens.
Welty had lain down then on his back and looked up at the ceiling, at the two wings of damp that have been spreading incrementally each year.
Tell me about her, he’d said.
And she had – she’d told him all the little snippets she remembers about their mam, the same way she’s done time and time again. She never minds, never grows bored or frustrated, because she feels that with each telling she brings their mam a little closer to the both of them. Sometimes, when she’s speaking, she has the feeling that their mam is looking at them. Not down on them, as people always seem to say, but from behind something, or through something, and Keg believes in such moments that this presence, even though she can’t see it, is a kind of extension of their mam, the faint pulse of a wish that she’s making from wherever she is, asking her to keep Welty safe.
KEG CONSIDERS GOING BACK and telling her da that she can’t find Welty. Perhaps he’s already back there, lurking around the sheds and talking to Gordon, which he sometimes likes to do. Gordon is like an uncle to the both of them. He’s a quiet man with blond hair, pale skin and dark, nut-brown eyes. He’s younger than their da by a decade or so, but he possesses what people refer to as an old spirit, which Keg takes to mean he has something of the earth trapped inside him, something that keeps him grounded and true at all times.
It is a sight Keg and Welty know as well as any: Gordon and their da up to their waists in the water, working their long-handled shovels down and then up, down and then up, emptying the black blade into the cart until it’s heaped high with glistening chips which Immy can pull on to the beach.
Gordon was with da when he’d given her the instructions to find Welty, both of them sat around the table in the caravan, tapping their cigarettes into the large scallop shell that they use as an ashtray. Gordon had had his lean, sinewy legs crossed at the ankle, and stretched out so far that they nearly reached the curling lino of the kitchen. He takes his boots off by the door and his socks always have holes in them, so that Keg and Welty openly cry out in disgust at the sight of his toes, the yellow horn of his nails and the coarse twists of hair that sprig up out of cracked, greenish skin.
It’s Friday, so there is already a small army of empty cans arranged on the table. Neither of them are drunks, not in the way some people from the camp are, going at it every night and sometimes not even sleeping before starting work again. With drink, her da never becomes angry but distant, vaguely melancholy, and Keg can see an ache in him that rises up to the surface, that sits in his eyes and hangs from the corners of his mouth.
For a long time, she has wanted to ask about this sadness of his, so shyly rearing its head and then ducking back into the shadows the instant she fixes an eye on it. It’s just that she can never seem to find what words to use. The precariousness of language has occurred to her before, how one moment it will appear so strong and robust, and the next so brittle and distant from the feeling or act it’s been tasked to scaffold. Will there ever be anything she can say to him that will bridge this gap between them? Or will it always be here, this span of time and space flickering in the half-light, that they can only glimpse each other across?
But her da and Gordon had been in fine spirits in the caravan – it had been a good day, they’d worked hard, and now they could relax, eat something, drink some more and then retire to their beds and fall asleep the moment their heads touched the pillow. But first she needed to go and find her nuisance of her brother.
He’ll be up and down the dunes, her da said. Fetch him back or you’ll both bloody starve.
Keg looks down the track at the sea again. Still no sign of him. Welty knows that he isn’t to go down to the beach alone. He has his moments of stupidity, but he’d never be so foolish. Keg has had to drag him out of a number of messy situations: the time he’d climbed up on to one of the corrugated sheds and become snagged on a rusted nail, dangling like a puppet with its strings cut; or when he’d badly burned his hand after gripping the exhaust of their da’s truck not a minute after they’d returned from a trip into town. He’d been planning to place his lips against it, to blow down it as he’d seen a saxophonist do on the music show they watch on TV, with the expectation that it might make a similar noise. It was Keg who’d had to run cold water over it while he cried, then take him over to see Evelyn and have her bandage it up with some aloe vera.
Keg moves off again, steering Immy on, her hooves picking their way between the sere grasses, punching the arch of her shod hooves into clots of damp sand, weeds shooting greenly through along the berm. The wind tries to shunt her off but she rides Immy without a saddle and leans in close, so that her crotch is pressed against the hard warmth of her back, and her legs lie snug against her flanks, feeling the sprung cage of her ribs, the shift and slide of her muscles. She rides her no other way. A saddle is no more than a separation, an interference between her and Immy. They should both be able to feel the other, know the contours of the other’s frame and mood.
Immy’s eyes are so dark that Keg has spent minutes at a time just staring into them. Horses are sacred around here. Always have been. They’re used every day, and without them they’d all be lost. Without Immy, Keg feels as if she would be a lesser, more muted version of herself. There are certain qualities, qualities that language once again fails to assist her with, that horses have. It is their quiet alertness, the way they seem attuned to certain forces beyond their control, that Keg swears she can feel bleed into her own being, helping bolster her passage through the world, so that she doesn’t feel quite so vulnerable to the unknown or the unnamable.
There’s a trodden path that cuts through the roll of brown dunes, dipping and rising up so that sometimes the sea disappears, and at others the full acreage of it stretches out. She crests a small rise and pulls Immy to a stop again. She watches the sea, sees how it roils and thrashes beneath the low sky. Its colour: the green of verdigris and the purple of a fresh, smarting bruise. The waves, rising and slapping down, rising and slapping down.
She moves Immy on and calls for Welty again, but there’s no use: the wind is too strong. She scans the dunes, hopes to see his dark head of hair spring up somewhere, or see his body crabbed low with his back to her, too busy studying something he’s found to know that he’s late, that Da’s cooking dinner and will be working up a mind to give him a clip round the ear.
She feels it then, a little worm of unease that struts queasily around her stomach. She turns and looks back to the camp again. The dirtied chassis of the caravan has smudged into darkness, but Da or Gordon have flicked the light on, a little square of which glows out from behind the muslin curtain. Everything else – the sheds, the vans, the crates and carts and heaps of wheels – is falling into darkness. Welty isn’t normally out this late, isn’t normally so hard to find. She should ride back there. She should dig her heels into Immy’s side and canter along the trail until she can knuckle the window and warn them of what is unfolding.
But she doesn’t.
She feels she knows exactly what her da and Gordon will say. Her da will probably be doing the chips, the peelings strewn around him, standing in his socks at the one gas ring and swaying slightly to a song that’s on the radio; Gordon will be slumped at the table, his legs stretched out even further, a can rested in the shallow of his bony chest. They’d not care for any theatrics on a Friday night, not when they’re enjoying a bit of relaxation, and she imagines they’ll tell her to get back out there, and to hurry up if she and Welty don’t want to go hungry for the night.
The uneven click of grit and stones beneath Immy’s hooves. Her ears are almost hidden beneath the knotted heap of her mane. She needs to be brushed. She’ll get Welty to do it when she finds him. He can stay outside in the cold and the wind and do it while they eat their dinner. He’ll whine and moan but she won’t let him in until it’s done, until he’s put Immy back in her stable and fed her as well, and he’s promised never to stay out so late again.
The trail dips between two dunes. Keg has to lean back so as not to topple over Immy’s head. There’s a place at the end of the trail that she knows Welty is very fond of. It’s not a cave as such, but that’s what Welty calls it, more of a hole that’s been carved out of the dunes by the wind and the rain. She’ll go to it, and no doubt he’ll be there, and his pale face will stare up at her, and he’ll say: What? as if he’s completely unaware of the darkness that’s gathered all around him.
They climb up out of the dip and the sea is there again, thrashing darkly. The wind skirls around Immy’s fetlocks, flings sand in her face so that she tosses her head. The first drops of rain start to fall. They strike the backs of Keg’s hands, the nape of her neck, and as she looks out over the sea, at the thin line of the horizon, she can see grey shoals coming down from the low clouds, a twisting curtain that is being pulled across the last of the light.
It’s then that she knows Welty isn’t in the cave. She knows he’s not anywhere on the trail or in the dunes. It’s one of those feelings she sometimes gets, that she’s had for as long as she can remember – bright, almost blinding pulses of knowledge that strobe through the dark and tangled briar of her thoughts. The shock of it now, her body held and wound tight by this force, this force that has no right to the mastery of her but that she can’t help but heed, a weathervane fixed and pointing in one direction by a confluence of screaming winds.
Welty is down on the beach.
She knows it with a terrible fierceness that makes her stomach knot. Her vision dims and flickers like a bulb about to blow. She wheels Immy around, catches a glimpse of both the sea and the smeared flare of light from the camp through the gauzy weave of rain. For a moment, she feels caught between them, trapped in amber, as if she might never move again. Everything will remain as it is, and she finds that she wants this; she wants the world to come to a halt, for time to cease its endless march. But then her heels are nipping into Immy’s flanks and they are cantering back along the trail the way they’ve come.
The rain starts to slant down heavier. It plasters her fringe to her forehead, runs down her cheeks, drips in a pendulous thread from her chin. She drags the sleeve of her coat across her eyes. She can taste salt. Her hands are cold, the tips of her fingers feeling numbed and yet still burning with a vague, fuzzy pain. Her bottom lifts clear of Immy’s back, comes down hard and then is jolted back up again. Taller grasses whip at her boots and shins. The rain is hard and painful, like a scoop of gravel dashed in her face, pinging against her cheeks, her eyelids, her temples.
The lights of the camp are barely visible now through the twist and blur of cloud. No fires lit, no thin pipings of smoke, no groups huddled or sloping off toward the pub. Everyone is inside, buttressed by warmth and sound and light, some faces no doubt peering up at the sky and alive with the dark augurings she is now living. She hopes that one is her da’s, that he’s searched the darkness of the camp and sensed what she senses, that there’s danger in the air.
Keg reaches the little track that she’d looked down only minutes before and steers Immy between its slick banks, her hooves showering sand and stones. Then the grind of the coal on the beach, the sound so crisp to Keg’s ear even with the wind that she imagines sparks knifing brightly beneath her. The sea is flinging itself, hissing and foaming and groaning, suddenly all around her: a seductive, implacable beast that will gladly drag her and Immy into its depths.
Immy rears up, flicks her head this way and that. Keg grips the reins, tries to soothe her, looks up and down the beach. She calls for Welty again and again. She stops and leans into the wind to see if she can hear his reply, the soft rising of his voice. But there’s nothing. Nothing but the wind, the sea, blood thrumming in her ears. She decides to move up the beach. She doesn’t canter but trots. The tide is coming in, washing up the black shore so that Immy’s hooves kick and splash through the froth of the surf, through the rubbery sticks of kelp and the knots of seaweed.
Keg’s eyes narrow to cut through the gloom. Coal chips are scattered everywhere and there’s a large mound of them up ahead where Da and Gordon have unloaded a cart but have left it for the morning. Rocks, their humped and nightmarish shapes, rise up out of the sand and gleam darkly.
Immy’s becoming restless. Her eyes rove wildly, showing their whites when she cranes her rain-slick neck. Keg has never known her be like this, so skittish, snapping at the air, sending her tongue looping wildly to lick at the salt caking her nostrils. Even in the failing light, her coat has a greasy, mottled shine to it, like oil sitting on water. By this time she’s normally in her stable, dry and warm and expecting her feed. She doesn’t mind the rain; she’s well used to being wet. It’s the wind and the spreading darkness that has her heart hammering so quick and hard that Keg can feel it along the lengths of her shins.
She calls for Welty again but this time she doesn’t stop. He has to hear it. There’s a small, stubborn flame at the back of her mind that’s trying to keep her body calm, that the surge of adrenaline in her bloodstream is threatening to extinguish. It could be that he’s already back at the caravan, that he’s faffing about at the other end of the camp, playing with Mick and Evelyn’s border collie, Axle.
She tells herself these things. She tells herself that she’d be better off turning back now or it’ll be her that ends up in trouble, tossed from Immy’s back when something spooks her for good and swept out to sea.
But she can’t rid herself of that feeling she’d had up on the dunes. That for all the eight years of his life that she’s been caring for him, it’s never felt like this: he’s never been out on his own in weather this bad, in light this poor, with the sea this wild. She’s always been able to feel his presence, and has never before known him to stray beyond the compass of her care.
But this feeling isn’t inside her anymore. Instead, there’s a cold rush of something unknown to her; or it’s a sensation that she might have felt once a very long time ago, when she was still small and her mam was in the hospital. When she and her da had visited and seen her in the bed, her face pale and sunken, her eyes shut and her hair all but gone. Keg had had questions to ask her da, so many of them that she’d felt fit to burst; but what had stopped her was the same feeling inside her now, a cold boil at the back of her throat, warning her that whatever she did or said would make no difference, that whatever was happening was beyond her control.
If Welty could just appear, if she could see the small white dial of his face, the dark eyes and the sharp tips of his ears poking out through the mop of his hair – then everything would be all right, the coldness in her throat would vanish. She wouldn’t even be angry, wouldn’t make him comb out Immy’s mane. She would just squeeze him to her, take in the raw, animal scent of him, and then lift him up on to Immy’s back, where he would sit in front of her, and she would wrap her arms around his waist, whispering in his ear of all the chips that Da was cooking, that were waiting to be sprinkled with salt and showered in vinegar and red sauce.
Because this is what they’ve always done: talk to each other. Day in and day out. Even though there’s four years between them, there’s no one closer to her. No one feels to be an extension of herself in the same way that he does. She loves her da, knows him to be a good, honest man that would do anything in his power to make her happy. But she loves Welty in a different way. There are some days when she looks at him and she’s so aware of the way he moves: his body, tight and lithe, is running on the same blood that she has inside of her, and he becomes in these moments a kind of miracle, a kind of saviour. She is him and he is her, and they must be together, always.
