Twenty Questions for Gloria Page 12

  “Me? Yeah, I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “The quote from your mother.”

  Uman was right; it had been turning over in my mind. The thought of what they were going through, Mum and Dad. Seeing her name in the paper—my name, my picture—made it all so real, so full-on. People all over the country were reading about us. Looking for us.

  “D’you think they’ve been on TV?” I asked. “You know, making an appeal.”

  “Your parents? Probably.”

  I pictured them flanked by police officers in front of a bank of microphones, camera crews, photographers, answering one question after another. Trying to keep it together. They’d be holding hands, blinking into the flashes like a pair of startled deer.

  “Shit, Uman.”

  “D’you want to phone her?”

  “I can’t, can I?”

  “If you really want to, though.”

  I shook my head. “We’d have to move on if I did. And I like it here. Anyway, I already called once—so they know I’ve not been abducted or anything like that.”

  Uman studied my face.

  A thought struck me. “My brother. He might’ve come home from uni because of me.”

  He took my hand, pressing it between his. “If this is getting too off-the-scale serious, just say the word and we can pack up and walk right into the nearest police station.”

  I could see he meant it. He really did. “But why, though?” I was almost pleading.

  “Why what?”

  “Why should we? Why can’t we just take off like this if we want to?”

  “Because we’re fifteen,” he said.

  “So?”

  “So until we’re adults, we belong to other people.”

  “Belong. I don’t belong to Mum and Dad. I don’t belong to anyone.”

  Uman shrugged. “It’s the way things are, though. Parents, teachers, police—they make the rules. Not us. We just do as we’re told.”

  “You don’t believe that,” I said. “You wouldn’t be here in this tent if you did.”

  “No, I don’t. And, no, I wouldn’t.”

  “Then why are you suggesting we quit?”

  “I’m not. I’m just saying I will quit, if that’s what you want.”

  “You’d do that?”

  “Gloria, I wanted to make you happy. For us to be happy, doing this. If you’re not happy, then what’s the point?”

  “But I am happy.” I half laughed, half cried. “That’s exactly the point.”

  We snuck into Church Stretton that evening and treated ourselves to fish and chips. I bought them while Uman waited on a bench in a moonlit churchyard. Our first hot meal since we’d become fugitives. It was the best food I’ve ever eaten.

  —

  We settled into a routine. First thing in the morning, we’d spread the sleeping bags to air while we had breakfast, then pack up and head off to a new site. We’d pick a likely spot on the map—several kilometers away, ideally—then check out the lie of the land when we got there. After setting up camp, we’d have lunch. In the afternoons, we walked around gathering materials to decorate our campsite. Twigs, berries, leaves, tufts of moss, pinecones, feathers, bits of sheep wool (a sheep’s skull, once), snail shells, gorse petals, sprigs of heather, to be fashioned into a kind of art installation—all very pagan—and which we left the next morning to mark the spot where we’d stayed. Not that anyone would know who’d done it.

  We are leaving beautiful mysteries in our wake, as Uman put it.

  It reminded me of making dens with my brother when we were little. Ivan would build the den—in the garden at home, or on holiday—and I’d painstakingly decorate it. With Uman, there wasn’t a boy-girl division of jobs. And I felt more adult, not less, while we made camp and prettified it—so I’m not sure why childhood memories of my brother came to mind just then. It was the adventure, maybe. I associate my younger self with adventurousness, and my adventures, back then, would’ve involved Ivan—with me, the kid sister, running in his slipstream. A couple of times, at least, Mum or Dad had to track down our den and shoo us out of there for teatime or bathtime or bedtime, and we’d receive a telling-off for hiding ourselves away like that.

  “Did you and your brother ever go camping?” I asked Uman one time.

  “No,” he said matter-of-factly. End of subject.

  Anyway, I loved creating those decorative…shrines, I guess you’d call them. Those beautiful mysteries. Uman always included a circle of pebbles in honor of our hike to the Twelve Disciples back in the Days of Then, as we referred to them. This was Now, the time before going on the run was Then, and the days before we met were Before Then.

  “What about the time after our fugitivery?” I asked, when we were deciding these matters.

  He thought for a moment. “Let’s name them the Days of Next.”

  “The Days of Next.” I smiled. “Yeah, I like it. Before Then, Then, Now, Next.”

  In the evenings, we ate tea (“supper,” according to Uman) and played cards or listened to music on my iPod (until it ran out of charge), or played twenty questions. Last thing, we’d take turns telling stories; true ones from our childhood, or made-up tales of ghosts and demons. One night, we acted out scenes from favorite episodes of Friends, with Uman as Chandler, Joey, and Ross; and me playing Rachel, Monica, and Phoebe. Uman’s Ross was so funny I almost wet myself.

  When it rained, which it did one day that week, we pulled on waterproofs and stuck to the same routine. As for washing clothes, we rinsed them in a stream (we always camped near running water) and hung them to dry on the lines that fixed the tent to the ground. We washed in streams, too, as best we could. One time, we came upon a waterfall where a brook spilled from a rocky overhang about three meters high. Uman and I didn’t even discuss it. We just swapped glances, set down our rucksacks, stripped off, and soaped ourselves from head to toe beneath the freezing water, gasping and squealing with the shock. By the time we’d finished we were bright pink and shivering and too teeth-chattery to talk, but it felt so good to be properly clean again.

  —

  I see Mum and DI Ryan exchanging looks. While I’m recalling the exhilaration of taking an outdoor shower, they’re picturing me and Uman naked under the water together…and how casual we were about it. They’re imagining, I’m sure, all those intimate nights in a small tent.

  “Go on,” I tell the detective. “Ask me. You know you want to.”

  “Ask you what, Gloria?”

  “If we were having sex.”

  She flicks another glance at Mum, then back at me. “Well, were you?”

  “What if we were?”

  “You’re fifteen,” Mum says.

  “Yeah, both of us.”

  “What difference does that make? You’re still underage, Lor.”

  Mum looks upset, so I bite back what I was about to say and go with something else. “We got undressed and washed under a waterfall in the middle of nowhere.” Speaking calmly. Softly. “Wasn’t there a time when you might’ve done something like that?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  We’re all quiet for a moment. I expect DI Ryan to press me on the did-we-didn’t-we-have-sex thing, now that I’ve opened the door for her.

  “If you liked it around there so much,” she asks instead, “why did you move on?”

  We wouldn’t have, I tell her. If things had worked out differently, we’d have stayed in the Stretton Hills for weeks. Months. It’s a lovely area. It suited us as a hideout. I’d never had so much exercise and fresh air and I felt great. I’m not usually a sound sleeper, but those nights in the tent, I slept well and woke refreshed every morning. Invigorated.

  —

  “I don’t ever want to sleep in a bed or live in a house again,” I told Uman.

  “Let’s not, then,” he said.

  Easy as that. All things were possible for us in those days and I couldn’t imagine them coming to an end. Of course, deep down, I knew they would—so
mehow, sometime. But for the moment, we lived in the Days of Now and let ourselves believe the Days of Next were no more than a wisp of cloud on a distant horizon. Literally over the hills and far away.

  Seven nights, though. That’s all we had there.

  On the day it happened, we woke early as usual. We spread our bedding and washed at a nearby stream, then fixed ourselves some breakfast. The art installation had been mussed up a bit by the breeze during the night, so Uman and I spent a few minutes tidying it. It featured a dead crow that we’d come across the previous afternoon—curiously undamaged, so perfectly intact it might have been asleep. Its bluish-black wings shimmering, it lay on a flat stone surrounded by twelve pebbles at the center of a display of ferns and heather, arranged so that the bird seemed to be floating on a raft on a green-and-purple sea. A mythical creature on its voyage to the afterlife.

  It was this that drew attention to us.

  A Monday morning; the previous day had marked the end of our first week. Uman and I had been discussing it—how the time seemed to have passed so quickly and yet that first night in Drop-Bear Woods already felt like a distant memory.

  “I don’t feel fifteen anymore,” I said as we cleared breakfast and bagged the rubbish.

  “I know what you mean,” Uman said. Then, “Actually, I’m not sure I do know.”

  “This. Being here, with you—this past week, it’s like I’m twenty years old or something. Like we’re university students on a gap-year trip.”

  Uman sealed the remaining crackers in their Tupperware box. “If you keep aging at that rate, in two months’ time you’ll be about seventy.”

  “No, listen.” He could be annoying like that; joking when I was trying to be serious. “I just want to do so much with my life—and it’s as if I’ve started already. Right now.”

  “Right now.” Uman nodded. “That’s a good place to live your life.”

  I studied his expression to see if he was making fun of me again. He wasn’t. “It’s what you do, isn’t it?” Since the fire, I left unsaid. “It’s one of the things I really like about you.”

  “Just run through all the others for me.”

  “Uman.”

  “Okay, okay—serious.” He screwed the lid back on the Nutella and passed it to me for stowing in my rucksack. “D’you know what my father used to say?”

  “What?”

  “ ‘Live as the river does, never standing still or turning back but forever flowing onward. If you should reach a desert, transform yourself into cloud and float across it, then fall as rain on the other side to become a river once more.’ ” He shrugged. “It’s an old Arabic proverb.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “He was full of crap, actually.” He said it without spite or bitterness toward the man who’d killed his mother and brother and, very nearly, Uman himself. “My father lived his life for money and possessions—the more he had, the more he wanted.”

  “Was he always like that?”

  “Not when he first came to this country, no. It was an adventure, a new life—that’s what my mother says. Said.” He paused. “But Dad had to prove himself, to have some measure of his success. The immigrant done good, you know? It wasn’t enough just to ‘live as the river does’—he had to become the biggest, most powerful river he possibly could.”

  We were gathering the sleeping bags from where we’d spread them to freshen up in the morning air. I was conscious of hanging on his words. Uman rarely talked about his dad—even when we told tales from our childhoods, he kept his father at the margins.

  “Funny, isn’t it?” he said, with something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “If he’d had his way, I’d be dead. And here I am, quoting the advice he gave me about how to live.”

  He coughed two or three times. Bad ones. The coughing had been less frequent in the days we’d spent in the hills. Uman’s limp had improved, too, despite all the walking, although he had taken to sitting with his bare feet in a stream after each hike.

  “You okay?” I asked, and he nodded.

  We started to dismantle the tent. I imagined his dad as a young man, leaving his homeland for a new life in a strange country. His dreams and hopes. Had it been the same for my folks when they quit England and traveled halfway around the world to America, years before I was born? Before their rivers reached the edge of the desert. Before they stopped and turned back.

  “We don’t have to become them,” I said.

  “What?” Uman looked up from what he was doing, tugging pegs from the ground.

  “Our parents. We don’t have to live the way they did. Or think like they do.”

  “No. I know that.”

  “They’ve had their turn,” I said. “It’s ours now.” As soon as the words were out, their insensitivity struck me—the fact that his parents were both dead, their “turn” quite literally over.

  But Uman just flashed me a grin. “Well said, Ms. Inexcelsis.”

  We were folding up the groundsheet when we heard the crunch-crunch of boots on the stony track that followed the course of the stream. Usually, we camped well away from footpaths, but there the options had been limited, short of pitching the tent on a steep slope. It was still early—surprisingly early for someone to be walking in such a remote spot.

  Uman and I looked at each other. No words passed between us but we knew the drill. Be friendly. Act naturally. Watch what you say.

  The guy appeared from behind a spur of rock. He was almost as colorful as Uman: red fleece jacket, blue trousers; the orange laces in his boots were practically fluorescent. In one hand he held a green plastic sack; in the other he carried what I’d mistaken at first sight for a ski-pole walking stick but now saw was a litter-grabber.

  “Morning,” he called, as bright and cheery as his clothing.

  “Hi,” I called back.

  Uman, for some reason, saluted him. I hoped he wasn’t in one of those moods.

  The track missed our tent by about thirty meters and it looked as if the guy might pass by with no more than a greeting. No such luck. I saw him register the dead-crow art installation, then pause and leave the path to take a closer look.

  “This is rather smashing, isn’t it?” he said.

  I returned his smile. “Thank you.”

  What I could see of his hair beneath a blue peaked cap was mostly gray; his wispy beard, too. His teeth were too white, too neat.

  “We call it ‘Dead Bird with Flora,’ ” Uman told him.

  So he was in one of those moods. I widened my eyes at him, willing him to be normal—that is, most people’s version of normal, as opposed to his own interpretation. The guy seemed unfazed, though. He’d set the plastic sack down and had removed his cap, wiping his brow with the cuff of his fleece. His hair stuck up in a silvery quiff.

  “I’m a countryside warden,” he said, indicating the sack. “Volunteer.”

  “What’s in there, then?” Uman asked. “An enemy parachutist?”

  The old guy looked at him.

  “D’you want us to clear this up?” I cut in quickly, meaning the art installation.

  “No, no, not at all. Just…well, don’t go uprooting any more heather, will you?”

  “Oh, okay. Sorry.”

  He pointed to the ferns. “Now, the bracken, rip up all you like. Too much of that bloody stuff—kills everything else, given the chance.” He made a swiping motion with the litter-grabber. “Last weekend, ten of us were up here, beating the living daylights out of it.”

  “Sounds like enormous fun,” Uman said.

  The guy fixed him another look. “So,” he said, “what brings you two young pups here?”

  Young pups? I answered before Uman could. “Just hiking around, camping and all that.” I conjured up my best smile. “It’s so beautiful in these hills, isn’t it?”

  “It is. It is indeed.” He put his cap back on. Picked up the litter sack. Good, I thought, he’s moving on. Then, “Tell me to mind my beeswax,” he said, “but shouldn
’t you both be in school?”

  “Yeah, but this is for an outdoor award. We were given permission to skip a day.”

  “By the Duke of Edinburgh himself,” Uman said. Jesus.

  The old guy just nodded. No hint of a smile. “Which school d’you go to? My grandson is about your age—you might know him.”

  “Oh, we don’t live around here,” I said. “We’ve come down from Manchester.”

  Another nod. He adjusted his grip on the sack. While we’d been talking, his gaze had been drawn repeatedly to my red hair. He was staring again now. In disguising my appearance, had I just succeeded in making myself look like a girl who had disguised her appearance?

  “Well, I should be off.” He looked at Uman, then at me. “Nice chatting with you.”

  “Yeah, and you,” I said. “Have a good day. And sorry about the heather.”

  After a couple of steps toward the footpath, he turned and said, “By the way, you do know you’re not supposed to camp here? This is all National Trust land hereabouts. Nature conservation and all that—actually, it’s a designated site of special scientific interest.” I told him we hadn’t realized and he said, “If you’re planning on staying any longer, I’d suggest you go to an official campsite before one of the rangers gets wind of you.”

  “Thank you for that information, sir,” Uman said. “We’ll certainly bear it in mind.”

  “You can be such a dickhead sometimes,” I said, once we were alone again.

  “Double bluff,” Uman said. “If we were really a pair of runaway teenagers, we wouldn’t have drawn attention to ourselves by displaying such brazen impudence.”

  “We?”

  “He liked our artwork, though. In my experience, people with artistic appreciation very seldom report fugitives to the authorities. In fact, I can’t think of a single example.”

  And so on. It was pointless arguing with him when he was like this. We finished breaking camp and repacking our gear. Usually, this was when we would open out the map to identify a likely location for the next night. That morning, I suggested we quit the Stretton Hills altogether.