Twenty Questions for Gloria Page 18

  “Bryher’ll do for now.” He coughed, winced. “One…step at a time…and all that.”

  “That steward was right,” I said. “You really should see a doctor.”

  “Lie down and sleep is what I should do.”

  “Seriously, Uman, you might have a bleed on the brain or something.”

  “Not possible. Every milliliter of blood in my body is concentrated in my nostrils.” A couple of drips splashed onto his trouser leg as if by way of demonstration.

  I shook my head. “I can’t believe how stupid we’ve been, coming here when you’re like this. I shouldn’t have let you walk out of that hospital.”

  “We’re here, that’s the only thing that matters,” he said. “Okay, it’s not Andalusia, but we’re together. That’s the other only thing that matters.” I laughed, so pleased to hear him being more like his usual self. We sat in silence, just taking in the view. Then Uman said, “I wish we still had a phone—I could show you some YouTube clips of guys walking El Caminito del Rey.”

  “El what?”

  “The Little Path of the King. It’s this long walkway, high up along the side of El Chorro gorge. A meter wide and fixed to the cliff wall by metal posts—except, you can see in the YouTube clips that most of the safety rail has gone and there are loads of holes in the concrete. Some sections are missing altogether and the guys have to walk along the supporting girder.” He was so animated it was as if he was up there on that path as he spoke. “We’re talking a hundred meters high, in places.”

  “Seriously? You’re allowed to walk along it?”

  “Well, no, it was closed for years. Quite a few people died.” He dabbed at his nose. “But it wasn’t hard to climb over the barricades, if you really wanted to—loads of guys did. It was one of the ultimate death-defying challenges, to walk El Caminito del Rey.”

  “While filming yourself,” I said.

  “Of course. What’s the point in doing anything if you don’t post a clip on the Internet?” He was being ironic. I think. “This one guy, he walks the whole length of the path with a handheld camera, not even one of those things you strap to your head.” He laughed. “I tell you, your stomach flips just watching.”

  “So, that’s why Andalusia is one of your happy places, yeah?”

  “We went to El Chorro.” We. Uman, his parents, and his brother, I assumed. Their last holiday ever, perhaps. “We only walked as far as the point where the path was blocked off, but you could see it up ahead, snaking along the side of the gorge. Thoroughly stupendous.”

  I looked at him. “And, what, you’d like to go back there and walk it?”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what I’d like to do. I mean, they’ve reopened it now and it’s been repaired…but it still looks pretty damn scary. You could still die.”

  —

  “I should tell you,” I say to DI Ryan, “I committed a crime at this point.”

  “In addition to the one where you stole boarding passes for a free ride on a ferry?”

  I ignore this remark. I explain how I left Uman resting on the bench and went into the grocery shop, browsed the aisles while the young woman on the counter was busy with other customers, then paid twenty-five pence or something for a packet of painkillers and went back outside. Once we were a safe distance along the lane, I turned out the various pockets of my fake leather, fake pilot’s jacket to show him all the stuff I’d nicked.

  Biscuits, two cans of Diet Coke, a bottle of water, a tin of rice pudding, two Snickers bars, a big bag of Doritos (under my top), a packet of sliced ham, and two bread rolls.

  As I displayed them, Uman nodded, staring intently at each item as if I was a magician producing rabbits and colored streamers and he was trying to figure out the trick.

  “The Doritos,” he said when I’d finished. “Didn’t they have any barbecue flavor?”

  We made camp in the corner of a narrow field overrun with grass and weeds but still furrowed from where rows of daffodils had once grown. Our tent was hidden from the lane or any paths and tracks, nestled in the angle of two high, overgrown windbreak hedges and shielded on the other side by the gorse-thick lower slopes of Samson Hill.

  As soon as we’d set ourselves up, Uman went into some kind of relapse.

  —

  He hardly left the tent for the next forty-eight hours, apart from stumbling outside to pee. Most of the time, he buried himself in his sleeping bag and slept.

  Some of it was physical—his ribs, his face, his headaches; I’m not saying he didn’t need to rest, to allow his body to heal. But his withdrawal was psychological, too. Whether it was a delayed reaction to getting beaten up—a posttraumatic “dip”—or the fact that we were stranded on a small, quiet island with hardly any money and too little to eat, I don’t know. Maybe Bryher had been so full of promise, but also so seemingly unattainable, that the reality of being there was an anticlimax. Whatever the reasons, we barely spoke over those two days. At least, he barely responded when I spoke to him. Sometimes, I wondered if he was actually asleep inside that bag or simply pretending to be.

  Talk to me. How many times did I say that? Please, Uman, just let me in. Nothing. It was as if Uman had unplugged. As if he’d given up on himself, on me, on our fugitivery. On everything.

  The contrast with his mood when he’d been talking about El Caminito del Rey couldn’t have been starker. I thought he’d had some kind of death wish, wanting to walk that path, yet he’d sounded so full of life. Like life was only worth living if it was worth risking. It fitted with how he had been on the moor above Litchbury that time, watching the tightrope walker cross the quarry at the Hangingstones. Exhilarated by seeing someone flirt with death, putting his mortality—literally—on the line, but in a way that was life-affirming, not life-renouncing. It was the same when he mocked Ginger-Craig; like he actually wanted the guy to give him a kicking, if only to prove Uman’s aliveness to himself through fear and pain and the rush of adrenaline.

  Now, it was almost as if living was too much bother. As if he just wished he was dead.

  “D’you think it all stemmed from the fire?” Mum asks, when DI Ryan calls a loo break. We’re standing in the corridor outside the interview room, our voices echoing. “His mum and brother dying, his dad taking his own life. For Uman—for any teenager—to lose his family like that, to be the only one not to die that night…Well.”

  Survivor guilt, she means. I shrug. “I asked him about that one time.”

  “What did he say?”

  “What’s this, Mum? You sound like you almost care about him.” I try to sound teasing, not snide. I like the fact that Mum is showing an interest in Uman rather than just blaming him.

  “I care about you,” she says. “And you obviously cared—care—for Uman.”

  I nod. Start to speak but have to stop. I want to ask if she believes he’s dead but I can’t bring myself to say it.

  Anyway, I’m afraid of her reply.

  Instead, I answer her question. “He said the worst of it wasn’t ‘why me?’ or ‘why them?’ but ‘what does life even mean if it can be snuffed out so easily?’ Uman was still trying to figure it out.” I pause at the door to the loo; Mum has hung back by the snack machine, searching her purse for change. “Actually,” I say, “I think he half believed he was indestructible—that, if he’d got out of that burning building alive, he could survive anything.”

  —

  I went out quite a bit. I hated leaving Uman alone, in that state, but staying in the tent for hours on end with someone who’s blanking you was more than I could handle.

  I didn’t know what to say or do. I didn’t know how to help. What to think.

  Although I’d seen glimpses of Uman’s capacity to be down, he’d never been anywhere near this low or for this long. Not with me. I recalled all those days he’d failed to show at school and wondered if he had been like that then. Please be yourself again, I caught myself wishing. But, of course, he was being himself. This was part of Uman, too.
If you love someone—and I did, I do—you have to love all of him, the down as well as the up.

  It’s hard, though, when he shuts himself off from you.

  So I distracted myself by hiking around the island. It takes an hour to walk the length of Bryher, from Rushy Bay to the rocky headland at the northernmost tip. Longer if you follow the coastal paths and beaches. There wasn’t a part of the island I hadn’t explored as a child, and I revisited them all again, desperately hoping Uman would have come out of hibernation by the time I returned to the tent. When I tired of walking, I headed for a beach; skimmed stones, searched for unusual shells, or just sat and watched the waves and the seabirds and the coming and going of the boats. I must have cut an odd, solitary figure to the locals and holidaymakers. If they smiled and said hello, I did the same; but mostly, I avoided them whenever possible.

  Water was easy enough to get hold of. I salvaged plastic bottles from a recycling bin and refilled them at the washbasins in the public toilets by Church Quay or from the standpipe at the official campsite. Hunger was a constant drag, though. I didn’t have the nerve to steal again in case I got caught. And we’d finished the stuff I’d shoplifted before, apart from the biscuits; for about twenty-four hours they were all we ate. In the end, I returned to the shop and blew most of our remaining money on bread. It was our second afternoon there. Or maybe the third. On the way back to the tent, I swung by a cottage I’d passed earlier and helped myself to a jar of homemade honey from a stand by the garden gate. I hadn’t planned to pay for it but my conscience won out. I rummaged in my pocket for the last few coins and dropped them in the honesty box.

  That was it. We had no money whatsoever.

  The bread and honey were delicious, even without butter. I made Uman eat as well. I wanted us to sit outside—it was dry and there were scraps of blue sky—but it was as much as I could do to coax Uman into a sitting position inside the tent. With the sleeping bag pulled up to his armpits, he reminded me of his Turkish grandmother, in her smoky, overheated living room.

  I could’ve given him his share of the bread and taken mine outside. But I sat and ate with him—grateful that, for once, he wasn’t asleep or hiding inside his bedding.

  I opened the flaps as wide as they’d go to at least let in some light and air. Even so, it was dingy in there, and the tent reeked of body odor and stale sweat and unwashed clothes. I didn’t speak. I’d learned not to. Just sat cross-legged beside him and ate; slowly, to make it last, although it was all I could do not to bolt it down. It was cramped; our knees and elbows bumped. I heard him chewing, swallowing, heard the snuffle of each breath, so close it was hard to distinguish between his breathing and mine.

  I’d never felt more lonely in my life.

  “Uman—” I began.

  At the same moment, he turned to me and said, “Why are you still here?”

  —

  “He wanted you to go away?” DI Ryan asks.

  I shake my head. “He couldn’t understand why I hadn’t left him.”

  QUESTION 19: What did you think would happen?

  Uman told me about the other time. The girl before me. The real reason why he’d had to leave his boarding school.

  This was after he’d asked why I was still there and I’d said, “Because I love you.”

  I shouldn’t, he said. He wasn’t worthy of it after the way he’d shut me out. His moods—deep, dark troughs, he called them—made him unlovable; knowing this side of him, why would I want to hang around for the next one? I deserved better.

  “How can I make you happy when I’m still figuring out how to be happy myself?”

  “You do make me happy.”

  Having withdrawn for so long, Uman finally reemerged that afternoon, in the stinky, gloomy tent. We talked for ages. He talked, mostly. The shutdowns—the troughs—had begun after the fire. Sometimes they’d last an hour or two, sometimes a whole day, sometimes longer. He would retreat to his bed. Or just take off somewhere—go missing for a while.

  “You’ve done this before?” I said. “Gone on the run.”

  “Never for this long—but, yeah.”

  “By yourself, though.”

  Uman shook his head. “One time, there was someone else.”

  That was when he told me about Dominique. She was in the year below. They’d become friends through the school drama society and she’d developed a crush on Uman. A serious one. “They called her my groupie,” he said. “Not that I did anything to encourage her.”

  “No?” I teased.

  “No. Gloria, you only have to catch their eye or smile at them or talk to them.”

  “Tell me about it. I can’t move at school without tripping over one of my groupies.”

  Uman laughed. It had been so long since he’d laughed I had forgotten how it sounded. I noticed he didn’t wince, or hold his ribs. The bread was all gone and we were passing the half-empty jar between us, spooning honey into our mouths. My fingers and lips were sticky. I knew I would never eat honey again without thinking of Uman in that tent.

  “Anyway, one evening, I could feel I was about to hit another trough,” he said.

  Shutting himself in his room and hiding under the duvet wasn’t an option. He’d tried it two or three times already and they had simply unlocked his door, roused him out of bed, and packed him off to the school counselor for more therapy.

  “All I wanted was to be alone—just sink into my deep, dark place until I was ready to come out again. But they wouldn’t let me.”

  So, he slung a few things in a bag and took off into the grounds (“we’re talking twelve square kilometers”), hiding out in an underground air-raid shelter dating from the school’s use as an army base in World War II. There were several shelters around the site, each long since boarded up. But, taking a shortcut on a cross-country run a few months earlier, he had come across one where the boards had rotted and worked loose. That time, he’d done no more than peer inside.

  This time, he crawled right in.

  “Dominique followed me. She must’ve seen me leave. Or been stalking me, more likely.”

  Uman had barely scrambled into the shelter when he heard her voice, asking to come in.

  “And you let her?”

  “She said if I didn’t she’d go and tell them where I was.” He shrugged. “Anyway, you’ve seen what I’m like when I go into shutdown. I just wanted to lie down and not wake up. I didn’t have the energy to argue or make her go away.”

  So Dominique joined him—stretched out beside him on a single mat, with an unzipped sleeping bag spread over them. Thirty-six hours they spent in there, surviving on water, crackers, and sleep. Uman lay with his back to her the whole time and reckoned they didn’t exchange more than twenty words. It wasn’t hard to believe, having seen the way he’d been with me.

  “She seemed content for us just to be together,” Uman said. “Then, when I surfaced again and we went back to school, Dominique told them I’d tricked her into going to the air-raid shelter with me, that I’d held her hostage in there, that I’d threatened her with my Swiss army knife, that I’d made her do things with me.”

  “Uman. Why would she say all of that?”

  “Because I told her I didn’t love her or even think of her in that way. Because I said she shouldn’t hang around me anymore—that she creeped me out. And because, when she tried to stop me from leaving the shelter, when she tried to kiss me…I shoved her away. Harder than I meant to.” Uman looked at me, as if trying to gauge my reaction. “They saw the bruises from where she fell. They found the knife in my pocket. They’d seen the way I’d been since the fire. There was only one side of that story they were going to believe.”

  The school hushed it up as best they could, he said; Dominique’s parents reluctantly agreed not to press charges, under the circumstances (Uman’s tragic bereavement). Not too long after that, he moved to the north of England to live with his grandmother, changed his name to Uman Padeem, and started at Litchbury High.


  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked, when Uman had finished. “Why now?”

  “Because, when this is all over, you’ll hear about it. I wanted you to hear it from me first. The truth of it.”

  When this is all over. My head was spinning so much with the rest of what he’d told me that the significance of Uman’s remark didn’t register at the time.

  —

  It was the next morning before he felt ready to leave the tent and see some of the island with me.

  Things were awkward between us. On Uman’s part, he was ashamed of having blanked me over those two or three days, I think, and embarrassed that I’d seen him in that state. As for me, I had to adjust to this version of him. I had to relearn how to be with him. Also, if I’m honest, I was upset that he’d taken so long to open up to me about what happened before. I believed him. It didn’t cross my mind to doubt his side of the story; but, when we’d supposedly shared everything, it hurt that he’d kept back something so important.

  Did it bother me that he’d hurt that other girl, even if he hadn’t meant to? Yes. Even when I’d heard the reason, it still bothered me.

  Bothered him, too, I could tell. That he’d done it.

  But also that I knew about it and might think less of him as a result.

  It rained that morning. We went out anyway, our waterproofs rustling. I think we were both hoping the fresh air and exercise would help us click back into place.

  Uman wasn’t up to a circuit of the island just yet, so I took him on a short walk up the track to Great Par, where I’d seen a pair of oystercatchers along the shoreline the previous day. They were there again and we sat and watched them from the rocks at one end of the cove. I named other birds for him: sanderlings, terns, a pair of shags flying low over the water, a huge black-backed gull that landed quite close to us. I told Uman about the time one had swooped to snatch a shortbread from my hand on another of Bryher’s beaches, and how Ivan had given chase, leaping in the air to try to grab the cookie back even when the gull was way too high.