Twenty Questions for Gloria Read online

  “You’d agreed on this with him, had you? That any decision to—”

  “I had to talk to him,” I say again. “If he said he’d had enough, then we’d stop. Give up.”

  “And if he said he wanted to go on?”

  I shrug. “Then we’d go on.”

  —

  The officer said the police would be back in the morning to speak to Fernando. She told me to go back to the holiday cottage with my dad when he arrived, and get some sleep. In the meantime, she needed a way of contacting me. I should have anticipated that. With no time to think, I gave her the number of the mobile phone we’d thrown away in Drop-Bear Woods.

  I spent what was left of the night in the waiting area at the hospital’s emergency department.

  They weren’t happy about it, given my age; if I was determined to stay (I am, absolutely—I’m not leaving him), I should have an adult with me. At the very least, they wanted to speak to my parents. My dad was on his way to the hospital, I told the woman at the desk. Not long after, there was a change of shift and a different receptionist came on duty. They forgot about me after that. Too busy. There’d been a big crash on the highway or something and all the staff were acting out an episode of ER for the next couple of hours. A teenage girl curled up on a seat at the back of a crowded waiting area was the least of their concerns.

  I snuck away once to look in on Uman, but he was asleep. Upsetting as it was to see him in that state, I stayed and watched over him as long as I dared.

  Held his hand. Stroked his hair. Whispered to him.

  I don’t know what I was thinking. To be honest, I’m not sure I was thinking at all by then—too tired, too stunned by what had happened. What next? didn’t even enter my head. All I wanted was to be with Uman—be near him, anyway—and wait for him to wake up.

  At some point, I must have dozed off myself.

  Someone’s hand was on my shoulder, gently shaking me. It’s okay, love, the ambulance is on its way. For a moment, I was back in the street, bent over Uman, with one of the women trying to comfort me…or, no, I’d fallen asleep at Uman’s bedside and a nurse or doctor or the police were trying to wake me. Or I was just dreaming.

  Another shake, less gentle. “Doria.”

  I jerked, blinked my eyes open. Where was I? In the waiting area, slumped forward on the seat, my head resting on one of the rucksacks. As I sat up, there was the sound of my cheek unpeeling from the rough fabric like a strip of ripped-off packing tape.

  A voice was whispering to me. It was too bright; my eyes were too gummy, unfocused.

  “Hey,” the whispery voice said.

  I found him then. His bashed-up face loomed in front of mine.

  “Uman?”

  He raised a finger to his lips. Beckoned me to get up. Said something that might have been, “We’ve got a ferry to catch.”

  QUESTION 18: Why are you still here?

  We walked right out of that hospital. No one challenged us, or called us back, or ran after us. The doors slid open and we stepped into the grayish light of a new day. Neither of us spoke until we’d left the hospital grounds and were following a road signposted for the town center.

  “How you feeling?” I asked.

  “Od a scale ob one do ded? Dought boint bibe.”

  “Naught point five,” I said. “That’s roughly point-five better than you look.”

  “Danks.”

  “You’re welcome. Good to see you, by the way.”

  “You doo.” Uman swore. Either that or he was telling me he’d just seen a bucket. He stopped walking and gingerly plucked the cotton swabs from his nose. “That’s better,” he said.

  I pulled a tissue from my pocket and handed it to him. “You’re leaking.”

  According to the clock on the wall, it was 8:00 a.m. when we left the hospital. The ferry was due to sail in an hour and a quarter. We didn’t even discuss how we hoped to get on board, we just aimed for the harbor, so glad to be reunited that nothing else mattered. His limp was worse, his lungs too, but what really slowed him down was the pain in his cracked ribs. Each step brought a wince and a hiss of breath as the weight of his rucksack shifted.

  Luckily, the hospital wasn’t far from the town center. After a few minutes, the road intersected with a pedestrianized street and I recognized where we were. The blue frontage of the cinema was just a hundred meters ahead and beyond that lay the place where Uman had been attacked. Even in daylight, with the bustle of people heading to work and some of the shopkeepers raising shutters and setting out displays, the street scared me. As if Ginger-Craig and the Dough Boys might still be there, lying in wait for us.

  “We can go a different way, if you’d like,” I said.

  Uman shook his head. He didn’t look bothered at all. When we reached the spot where it had happened, he paused to study the ground for bloodstains—disappointed, it seemed, not to find some, or any sign of what had taken place there. The rain overnight had erased everything. Not quite everything. Two halves of a blue plastic bangle lay a little way apart, like brackets with the words in between deleted.

  “I could’ve won that fight,” he said. “If the other guy hadn’t beaten me up.”

  He was talking normally now, apart from a lisp due to his damaged lip.

  “Taking the piss out of him wasn’t such a good idea, was it?” I said.

  “He would’ve done it anyway. Guys like that, they’re looking for a fight—and I just happened to be there, wearing the wrong skin color and a silly hat.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Gloria, it’s what I do. He has his fists and feet, I have my words—my devastating wit and, frankly, genius-level intelligence. And, you know what, in those few seconds before he hit me, I really, really enjoyed showing him how stupid he was.”

  “Can I say ‘yeah, but’ again?”

  “No, you can’t. And my final point is, my injuries will heal—but he’s going to remain a stupid, violent, racist bastard for the rest of his life.” One or two passersby glanced at him. Uman pressed the tissue against his nose, which had sprung a fresh leak. He held the tissue for me to see. “Look, the bloodstains have formed the exact pattern of the Indonesian archipelago.”

  —

  At the harbor, a queue had already formed on the quayside and the first of the passengers were boarding the ferry. The system was the same as I remembered from family holidays. You lined up at a tiny booth to exchange your ticket for a boarding pass, before carrying on to a loading area, where two guys stowed your luggage in a metal container. Then you walked up the ramp and handed your pass to a steward as you stepped onto the deck.

  Easy. If you had a ticket to begin with.

  Dad always let me and my brother hold the boarding passes; two each. The first time, I cried when the steward took them off me and she smiled and let me keep them.

  “I suspect we’ve missed our opportunity to stow away in the dead of night,” Uman said.

  “Never lets you down, does it? That genius-level intelligence of yours.”

  “What if we create a diversion?” He coughed, then spat a mixture of blood and saliva onto the ground. “Set fire to one of the boats in the harbor and, while everyone’s distracted—”

  “Uman, I know he kicked you in the head but there must be some brain function left.”

  “Fair point, actually. I think I’m still concussed. How many fingers are you holding up?”

  “I’m not holding any fingers up.”

  He shook his head. “God, it’s worse than I thought.”

  “Can we stay focused, here?” I said, trying not to laugh.

  “Okay…I got mugged and the guy beat me up and stole our tickets.”

  “No, they’ll just check on the computer to see if we’ve made a booking.”

  We fell quiet; watched what was going on. The quay was wide enough that there’d be no problem bypassing the queue, the ticket window, and even the luggage guys; but, without boarding passes, we’d never make it past the s
tewards at the top of the ramp. Maybe Uman’s diversion tactic wasn’t such a crazy idea after all.

  “I’ll go and buy some matches and a can of paraffin,” I said.

  As I spoke the words, a solution came to me. I didn’t think it had a hope in hell of working…but, twenty minutes later, we were aboard the ferry.

  “Whoa, hold on a sec,” DI Ryan says. “Can we back up a little, here?”

  I play dumb. “Oh, right, you want to know how we did it?”

  She laughs. “That would be good, yes.”

  I tell her what she wants to know. How I fished some coins from my pocket and bought a coffee from a kiosk near the harbor entrance. (I hadn’t told Uman what I was up to, just that he should wait where he was.) How I joined the check-in queue, not drinking the coffee. How, as I neared the head of the line, I removed the plastic lid. At the ticket window, I tell DI Ryan, I stood the cup on the ledge and pretended to search my jacket for the ticket while the woman at the desk waited with an air of patient boredom. She snapped out of it, though, when my elbow caught the cup and sent coffee all over her desk, her lap, her computer keyboard.

  I couldn’t apologize enough, I really couldn’t. I even tried to help her mop up. And, would you believe it, I’d just realized my boyfriend must have had the tickets all along. I’d go get them from him and rejoin the queue, I told the woman. Who was still cleaning up and checking that her PC was working and trying not to get too cross with a customer about the state of her skirt. I apologized again. To her, to the family behind me who were waiting to check in.

  Then I stepped away from the window and walked back along the dock to Uman.

  “What was that all about?” he asked.

  “That was all about these,” I said, showing him the two boarding passes I’d snaffled from the desk while the woman was surfacing from the coffee tsunami.

  —

  It was a while after we set sail before we stopped grinning at each other, before we stopped high-fiving, before I stopped saying I couldn’t believe we’d gotten away with it, before Uman stopped telling me I was the most brilliantly cunning dweaver in the history of dweaving.

  Before we stopped taking turns saying things like, Hah, we are so going to Bryher!

  The only tricky moment, as we’d flashed our stolen passes, had come when one of the stewards—alarmed by Uman’s bashed-up state—was all set to radio the onboard medic to come and examine him. But Uman had lost none of his skill in out-insisting people. He’d just left the hospital, as it happened, and they’d given him the all-clear to travel over to the islands.

  “I have an appointment to see a doctor when we get to St. Mary’s,” he assured her.

  “Okay, well, you make sure you do,” the steward said. Then, gesturing at his face, “What happened, anyway?”

  “Oh, my horse pitched me headfirst over a hedge. Damn fox got clean away.”

  That earned him a long, hard look, but finally, she waved us aboard.

  “You just can’t help yourself, can you?” I muttered once we were out of earshot.

  “It certainly seems that way,” Uman whispered back.

  We both burst out laughing.

  On a chilly, damp morning, almost all the other passengers were inside. But we stood on the upper deck, at the stern, watching Land’s End drift by. Gulls followed, zigzagging in the air above the ship’s wake, shrieking at one another. Or at us, maybe. Like they’d missed the boat and were yelling at us to slow down so they could catch up and hop aboard. Cooking smells reached us from the café on the deck below. Bacon, specifically.

  “Let’s celebrate with a slap-up breakfast,” Uman said, the breeze snatching his words.

  I kissed an undamaged part of his face. “Will you be able to eat it?”

  “You can mush it up for me. Be good practice for when we’re old.”

  It wasn’t until we’d loaded the tray with food and reached the till that Uman discovered his wallet was missing from his jacket. That, far from stabbing him while he was lying semiconscious on the ground, Ginger-Craig had been robbing him. And that, between us, we had a crumpled five-pound note from the back pocket of my jeans and a little more than that in coins.

  “How much is the boat trip from St. Mary’s to Bryher?” Uman whispered.

  “I’m not sure.”

  He nodded. Apologized to the girl on the checkout and told her we weren’t hungry after all. Then he set the tray down and we went back up on deck.

  —

  As a young girl, I’d always arrived at Bryher in a state of the-holiday-starts-here excitement. That’s how I remember it, anyway. At Church Quay, Ivan and I would be first off the boat, skittering down to the beach while Mum and Dad grappled with luggage and greeted the snowy-haired owner of the cottage we always rented. As they loaded his trailer for the four-wheeler ride up the sandy track to “our” cove, my brother and I would already be turning up our first cowrie shell or cuttlefish bone or crab claw of a two-week holiday that, for us, stretched ahead into infinity. It was always, always sunny.

  “You reckoned Bryher might have been designed by Enid Blyton,” I say to Mum.

  She smiles a happy-sad smile. “We had some lovely holidays there, didn’t we?”

  “I wanted Uman to see it the way I did. To fall in love with it.”

  The sky above Church Quay was overcast as we disembarked that day. After paying the fare for the short hop from St. Mary’s, we had just over three pounds left. We were hungry. Uman’s nose wouldn’t stop bleeding and his vision was blurred, he said. His head ached, and if he breathed too deeply, the pain in his ribs brought tears to his eyes. All the same, my mood lifted as one of the boat crew ushered us ashore and swung our packs onto the quay. Even in the dull light, the long arc of the beach glistened, and the gorse on Watch Hill was as vibrantly yellow as I remembered, beckoning us to race to the top, as my brother and I had done so many times. A residue of childhood joy bubbled up, despite everything.

  Against all odds, Uman and I had set foot on the island, my happy place.

  I squeezed his hand. “Come on, let’s find a spot to pitch the tent.”

  There’s an official campsite in a field beneath Watch Hill, before the land rises again to the rugged finger of headland at the top of the island. When the drawing of lots picked Bryher, I’d imagined Uman and I would camp there. But, with no way of paying the daily fee, we’d just have to fly-pitch somewhere and sneak into the official site now and then to use the showers.

  “Bryher’s only five and a half kilometers long, with seventy-odd people living here,” I told Uman. “Just two roads—well, lanes—and no vehicles, apart from tractors and four-wheelers. Oh, and a Land Rover at the hotel at the bottom of the island, to carry all the posh folk and their luggage to and from the boat. We used to treat ourselves to a meal there once every holiday.”

  “The Land Rover?” Uman asked.

  “No, the hotel.”

  We were following the lane that runs down the center of the island, past the straggle of houses, their gardens lush with brightly colored flowers and shrubs and the occasional palm tree. I told Uman some of the island’s history—how they were mostly fisherfolk in the old days, how they also used to grow daffodils here and ship them over to the mainland.

  “But it’s mostly tourism now—holiday cottages and boat trips to see the seals,” I said. Then, laughing, “Sorry, I’m banging on a bit, aren’t I? It’s just, it’s all coming back. The stuff Mum and Dad read out to us from guidebooks that Ivan and I thought was so boring.” I laughed again. “God, I’m turning into my parents.”

  “I could do with a rest, actually,” Uman said. He’d been wheezing most of the way.

  We’d reached the brow of a hill, where the lane curves toward the bottom of the island. The grocery was there and a shop selling arts and crafts. We sat outside, Uman needing my help to remove his rucksack and giving a small grunt as he lowered himself onto the bench.

  “Is it much farther?” he asked. We’d
walked only a few hundred meters.

  “Another five minutes, that’s all. There are some disused daffodil fields beneath Samson Hill,” I said, pointing along the road. “We’ll be out of sight down there.”

  He nodded. “Sorry to be so useless.”

  He had nothing to apologize for, I told him, stroking the back of his neck. His hair was growing back, scruffy and uneven. Uman hadn’t worn the Rasta hat for long but he already looked odd without it. It had been left behind when the ambulance came and was no longer there the next morning. People still gave him funny glances—on the boat from St. Mary’s a young boy had stared at him the whole time—but it was his battered face that drew attention now, rather than strange headgear. Other passengers, the crew, the folk we’d passed walking up from the quay—they looked at him like he was a yob.

  “This is my favorite view on the whole island,” I said.

  Scattered with wildflowers, the meadows sloped down to a kidney-shaped lagoon and a ragged line of dunes. Beyond them, the Atlantic—studded with uninhabited rocky islands, some as big as castles while others barely broke the surface. Waves broke against the rocks, sending up great clouds of spume. On a sunny day, the whole scene would have been glazed with gold.

  I gave Uman a sidelong look, trying to read his expression. Willing him to appear happy.

  “You can’t quite see it from here, but there’s a beach just over those dunes,” I said. “Me and Ivan made a sand octopus there when I was about six. A huge one. We used shells for the suckers on its tentacles and seaweed for the hair.”

  “Octopuses don’t have hair.”

  “Ours did. I wanted to build a mermaid, but Ivan insisted on an octopus. The hair was part of the deal to keep his kid sister from blubbering, or stropping off to Mum and Dad.”

  Uman just nodded. Shifted into a more comfortable position on the bench.

  “I can see why you wanted to come here,” he said neutrally. I couldn’t tell if he was being polite or was simply too unwell to muster enthusiasm for anything just then.

  “Would you rather be in the mountains of Andalusia?” I asked, putting a smile into my voice. Teasing him. “Or gazing out over Niagara Falls or the temples of Kyoto?”