Twenty Questions for Gloria Read online

  “D’you think it’s the same bird?” Uman asked.

  “I’m not sure they live that long.” The gull tilted its head to one side, as if listening to us. “Although it does look very similar, now you mention it.”

  The gull flew off, and Uman said he guessed it would remain one of life’s innumerable unsolved mysteries. As he watched the bird go, I studied Uman’s face. My first proper look at it in daylight since his shutdown. His eyes were watering in the breeze.

  “You’re starting to heal up,” I said.

  “I can still only breathe through one nostril.”

  “Headache?”

  “No thanks, I’ve just had one.”

  I couldn’t work out if he was back to his usual self or trying to be back to his usual self.

  The rain worsened. Neither of us wanted to return to the tent and we couldn’t sit in the island’s only café without buying anything. So we took shelter in the community center. It was unlocked, unstaffed; a collection tin sat on a table in the entrance, with the admission charges handwritten on a card beside it. We went in anyway. The only people in there were an oldish couple playing chess; they looked up, said hello, and commented on the weather. If they were curious about Uman’s bruising, or his bloodstained hoodie, or why we weren’t in school, they were too polite to say so. There were shelves of books, a table-tennis table, pool table, board games. The walls were arranged with black-and-white photos from Bryher’s past—a lifeboat setting out to sea, men mending fishing nets, women carrying huge baskets loaded with sheaves of daffodils, that sort of thing.

  Uman’s ribs were still too sore for Ping-Pong, but he could manage pool, if he didn’t bend too low over the table. After a couple of frames, though, we switched to Scrabble.

  —

  Over the following days, the weather improved—along with Uman’s health. His physical health, anyway. We acted as if we were on holiday: going for hikes, lazing on beaches, swimming in the sea. But, to me, rather than the start of a holiday it felt like the end, when the prospect of going home hangs over you. I didn’t ask whether Uman felt the same way in case he told me he did.

  DI Ryan cuts in. “How did you eat?”

  I don’t answer.

  “Gloria? By this point, you had no mon—”

  “We scavenged around the back of the posh hotel. In the bins behind the kitchens.” Mum tuts. In her worst nightmares about my eating habits, she can’t have dreamed of me doing that. “I thought they’d throw out loads of food,” I said. “But they didn’t. Stale bread, mostly.”

  Mum says, “You must’ve been so hungry, both of you.”

  “Absolutely bloody starving.”

  “Why didn’t you just steal from the shop again?” This is DI Ryan.

  I raise my eyebrows at her. “Are you suggesting we should have?”

  She laughs. “It did sound like that, didn’t it?” Then, serious again. “But?”

  “I wouldn’t do it. Wouldn’t let Uman do it either.”

  “But you’d as good as stolen the fares for the ferry by boarding without tickets—and you’d nicked from the shop once already. Why stop there?”

  “That’s exactly what Uman said.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I didn’t want it to be like that. I didn’t want us to be like that.” I shrug. “It was one of the things we quarreled about, toward the end.”

  DI Ryan looks at me. “One of the things?”

  It was all wrapped up in the same thing, really, I tell her. I don’t know what I’d been expecting when we went on the run together—an “adventure,” I guess, but nothing much more specific than that. For a while, that’s what it had been. By the time we were on Bryher, though, it had become something else. Closer to an ordeal.

  Having our cards swallowed by the ATM, Uman getting beaten up and robbed, his big shutdown, the lack of food, being so hungry all the time…it was as if our luck was running out. We couldn’t use the showers or laundry room at the official campsite because a warden had challenged us the first time we tried to and we didn’t dare go back. We stank. Our clothes stank. The tent stank, and was damp and muddy from all the rain we’d had. Any of these things on their own might have been bearable but, one after the other, they sapped my morale. While I’d got a buzz out of those boarding passes and the shoplifting, it wasn’t long before guilt kicked in. I felt ashamed of myself. Another low point.

  “I don’t mind being a fugitive,” I told Uman, “but I don’t want to be a thief.”

  “What did you think would happen? We were bound to run out of money eventually.”

  “I didn’t think. Not about that.”

  “So what do you suggest—we starve?”

  No, of course we couldn’t just let ourselves starve. But the alternatives were to steal food from the shop again—or give ourselves up. Even though most of the fun had leaked out of our fugitivery, I wasn’t ready to go back to what I’d come to think of as my old life. The time Before Then. Wasn’t anywhere near ready to face Mum and Dad, Tierney, school, the police, the media, and all of that—the consequences of what we’d done. An avalanche that would engulf us the moment we stopped being on the run. Most of all, though—and despite everything—I wasn’t ready to stop being with Uman, just the two of us.

  So we made believe we were on holiday. Acted like nothing was wrong, as if we could carry on indefinitely, living on stale bread and water. If Uman tried to discuss money, or food, or the Big Question (“what next?”), I refused to go there. Or I went there and we bickered. In the end, he stopped talking about it. I think we were both in denial by that stage.

  —

  One blustery morning, we went to the small cove overlooked by the cottage where I used to stay on holidays. Hundreds of hours of my childhood I’d spent there—paddling, beachcombing, scrambling on rocks, skimming stones, building sand castles, flying kites, eating ice creams or sand-encrusted picnic food. My happy days. Somewhere along the way, our family had forgotten how to be like that. Or I had. As Uman and I played noughts-and-crosses with sticks in the wet sand, I gazed along the windswept curve of the beach and it was as if the place was haunted by the ghosts of those other times. My seven-year-old self, kneeling near the water’s edge, a red plastic spade in hand, scouring out a channel to direct the incoming waves into the hole I’d dug with my brother, then fetching pretty shells to decorate the rim of our “lagoon.”

  The pictures seemed so real I couldn’t quite believe they were only memories.

  “Your turn,” Uman said, indicating the noughts-and-crosses grid.

  “D’you think people leave impressions of themselves in a place?” I asked.

  “After they’ve died, you mean?”

  I scored an X in a square. “No, after they’ve been somewhere.” I told him about the flashback images of my childhood. “It’s happened a few times while we’ve been on Bryher. Like the island is covered with traces of me from the past.”

  “Maybe it is.” Uman made an O, won the game.

  “Wouldn’t it be weird if we left millions of shadows of ourselves wherever we went?”

  He seemed to give it some thought. “Or what if there are millions of shadows of us in all the places in the world we haven’t been to yet?” he said. “Just waiting for us to make them real?”

  I frowned. “How would that work?”

  “Oh, and your idea does work?”

  “Yeah. I mean, if you walk along this beach”—I gestured at the wet sand—“you’re going to leave a trail of footprints behind you—but you can’t leave footprints ahead of you.”

  “Not literally, no.” He’d scuffed out the game and was marking the grid for a new one. “But in here”—he tapped his head—“you can leave footprints wherever you like.”

  Before, differences in attitude of this kind created a middle ground where our minds could meet, or at least draw closer. Lately, though, neither of us seemed quite to get what the other one meant. I tried to tell myself it was
because we weren’t eating properly. Our constant hunger made us tetchy, that was all.

  We played the last game of noughts-and-crosses more or less in silence.

  Thoughts of family holidays brought Mum and Dad back to mind. That message I’d left on Dad’s answering machine seemed an age ago. Several times, I’d come close to phoning home again—in Church Stretton, Bristol, Penzance. Each time, I hadn’t made that call. What was I putting them through? Ivan, too. I knew how I would feel if my brother had gone missing, yet I’d done that to him. Was still doing it.

  “I’ve been so selfish,” I said.

  Uman looked at me. “How come?”

  I told him what I meant.

  “If you were selfish,” he said, “you’d be too selfish to realize you were being selfish.”

  It was the kind of thing Uman sometimes came out with: clever and funny and wise, at first glance, but not quite so profound once you took a closer look. I let it go, though.

  The wind had really strengthened, so I suggested walking out onto the headland. On blowy days, it was impressive up there, I told him—watching the big waves rolling in from the Atlantic and crashing against the cliffs.

  “Come on, then,” he said. “Where you go, I go.”

  We scrambled up the rocks at the far end of the cove and through the broken-down fence above them. Uman held the strands of barbed wire apart for me and, once I’d ducked under, I returned the favor. But he still couldn’t bend too well and his sleeve caught.

  “Keep still, you’re making it worse,” I said, easing the metal barb from the rain poncho and the sleeve of his hoodie underneath.

  “Thanks,” he said, when I’d freed him. “I could’ve been stuck here for days.”

  We were right in each other’s space, pressed against that fence. I’m not sure we’d have kissed if it wasn’t for that. But we did. Carefully, on account of his lip. Nervously, too. Like it was our first time. Or like we’d forgotten how.

  Afterward, as we followed the rough uphill track that would take us to the top of the island, Uman surprised me with a question.

  “Do you wish we hadn’t come here? To Bryher.”

  “No, why?”

  “All these memories.”

  “Yeah, but they’re good memories.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Uman said. “This is your happy place. Maybe it would’ve been better to leave it that way.”

  “Is that what you think—that it was a mistake coming here?”

  We’d climbed out of the cove, reaching the brow of the steep slope that led to the rockier terrain of Shipman Head Down, stretching ahead like a long knobbly finger. Up there, on the higher ground, the wind was stronger still, threshing our hair and buffeting our faces. One of the plastic toggles on the cords that fastened my poncho kept whipping against my cheek.

  “We should be doing new things, not old,” Uman said.

  “This is new. Being here together.”

  “We had an opportunity to do the things we’d always wanted to do.”

  “You were the one who suggested drawing one of our happy places out of a hat.”

  “It was a cup, actually.”

  A sudden gust caught me side-on, making me stumble on the stony ground. “You don’t like Bryher, do you?” I said as I regained my footing. “It’s too quiet for you, too boring.”

  The conversation went on like this, never quite becoming a full-blown argument. It might simply have been that wherever we’d gone after he got beaten up, his dip in mood would have turned him against the place. But, if you ask me, his problem with the island was that it was mine, not his—that he felt excluded by all my memories and associations, my tales of childhood holidays. We were there together, but it could never truly be ours. Despite my telling him no, he was right: I was beginning to wish we hadn’t come to Bryher.

  Whatever, we were stuck there. Broke, ravenous, and stranded. Quarrelsome.

  —

  Shipman Head silenced us. Literally, with the roar of the wind in our ears ripping away our words—our breath—if we opened our mouths to speak. It was all we could do to walk without being blown off our feet. It was stupendous. And scary as hell.

  Up there on the headland at the very end of the island—perched on its fingertip, as close to the cliff edge as we dared to go—we were almost completely surrounded by the sea, exposed to the full force of the gale that raged from the west. One after another, great waves reared up a few hundred meters offshore and surged toward us before smashing themselves to a trillion pieces on the rocks below, sending explosions of spray so high into the air that the water arced above us, then fell to earth like a sudden burst of rain. Uman and I were drenched in an instant. Barely time to recover from one soaking before the next, then the next.

  We clung to each other, legs braced, feet planted on the rocky ground, flinching at the fallout from each wave—so frail against the onslaught of the wind, it was as if it might lift us into the sky at any moment, like a pair of kites, and whisk us out to sea.

  We shrieked, we whooped, we yowled…and we laughed and laughed and laughed.

  It was as if standing on that headland—wind-blasted, scoured by sea spray—had stripped away all the crap of the previous few days to leave us bright and fresh and zingy. I’ve never been more alive than I was up there, with Uman, and the feeling coursed through me for the rest of that day and most of the next. Our final hours on the island.

  Same for him. I saw it in his eyes.

  Same for us. Like we’d been blown to pieces and put back together again.

  “It’s just so empty!” Uman hollered on the cliff top, mouth pressed hard to my ear but still having to shout to make himself heard.

  The ocean, he meant. Anywhere else on Bryher, you can see the neighboring islands, the offshore rocks, a lighthouse or two, even the faint gray line of the mainland on the horizon. But from the tip of that headland, there’s nothing but sea in all directions, unfurling for hundreds of kilometers, thousands of kilometers—to Ireland, to France, to Greenland, or all the way to Canada and the United States. All the way down to South America and Antarctica.

  “This is the very end of England!” I yelled back.

  Just then, though, it felt like the beginning of everything. As if all possibilities opened out before us across the surface of that ocean—as if, far from being stranded, far from having reached our final destination, we could do anything we pleased, go anywhere we wished to, be anyone we wanted to be.

  For the best part of a day and a half, I let myself believe it.

  QUESTION 20: You coming with me?

  The next day was glorious. The wind had died down, the sky had cleared, and the island sparkled in the morning light. We ate breakfast outside—the last of the stale bread we’d scavenged from the hotel the night before. In my fresh, zingy mood, even that tasted okay. From the direction of Great Par, the shrill cries of oystercatchers drifted across the abandoned daffodil fields as if the birds were calling to us, inviting us to pay another visit.

  “The good thing about this ‘artisanal’ bread,” Uman said, inspecting his piece, “is that the mold might just be bits of walnut or olive.”

  “Don’t be down on mold,” I said. “It’s our only source of protein.”

  He shot me one of his grins—even more lopsided now that one side of his mouth had healed quicker than the other. At least the stitches had dissolved, so he no longer looked like he had a zip in his top lip. His nose was less swollen, if still red and a little crooked, and the bruising beneath his eyes had faded to pale greenish-yellow. I’d taken to stroking his injuries, brushing my fingertips over his face as if to magic away the last traces of damage. At night, as we lay together, drifting off. In the day, too, sometimes. I did it then, at breakfast—reaching out to caress him.

  “It’s like my face is covered in Braille and you’re trying to read it,” he said softly. “Or trying to commit my features to memory in case you forget what I look like.”

 
; “Shhh,” I said, pressing a finger against his lips.

  It was our last morning, although we didn’t realize it. At least, I didn’t. If Uman already knew, he hid it well. Or maybe I just wouldn’t let myself notice the difference in him.

  We spent the next few hours swimming and sunbathing at Green Bay. We had the beach to ourselves, pretty much. The bay was speckled with boats of various sizes. Some crisscrossed between the islands or headed out to sea, while others lay a short distance offshore, bobbing at anchor. During what would have been our lunch break, if we’d had any food, Uman pointed out some of the boats, identifying them by type and telling me their “specs.”

  “What’s funny about specs?” he said, when I failed to keep a straight face.

  “Nothing.”

  “It means specifications.”

  “I worked out what it means,” I said. “I just wish you’d told me you were a geek before I agreed to go on the run with you.”

  “A geek? Gloria Inexcelsis, when they were handing out geek genes, they’d run out by the time I got to the front of the queue and had to give me extra cool genes instead.”

  “How come you know so much about boats, anyway? Oh, wait, don’t tell me, your dad owned a yacht.”

  “Two, actually. One for family holidays, the other for tax purposes.”

  Uman said he learned to sail when he was eight years old. I thought he meant boats with sails but he was referring to ones with engines. Like some of those anchored in the bay. Looking back, it’s obvious where he was heading with this; but at the time, it was just one of the things we talked about on the beach that day. Besides, I spotted a Frisbee just then, half buried in the sand. It had been bleached from red to pink and a bit was missing from the rim, but it worked okay. Well enough to take my mind off boats altogether.

  —

  “Look,” I said, “my hands are shaking.”

  Uman took my hands in his. “Low blood sugar.”

  I was wiped out by the Frisbeeing. My stomach had started to cramp, and I had become so faint we’d broken off from the game to sit down. My whole body was in a cold sweat. Uman said he felt the same, although he looked in better shape than me. We drank the last of the water we’d brought with us; it was tepid, even though we’d kept the bottle in a shady rock pool, and there wasn’t enough left to trick us into feeling full.