Twenty Questions for Gloria Page 20

  “Are you up to walking to the hotel?” Uman asked.

  “In daylight?” We’d only ever raided the bins behind the kitchen after dark.

  “It’s either that, or we ‘borrow’ some more food from the shop.”

  I shook my head.

  “You sure, O famished one?”

  “Please. No more thieving.”

  “Okay, how about we amputate one of your legs with my Swiss army knife and grill it right here on the beach?”

  “Why not one of your legs? There’d be more meat.”

  “We could just slice off a calf, if you don’t want to lose the whole thing,” he said.

  I leaned into him, clutching my stomach because it hurt so much to laugh.

  We set off for the hotel together but I only made it halfway, I was so weak. So dizzy. I had to stop in the lane and puke into the verge, even though there wasn’t much to throw up. Uman helped me back to the tent, and once I was settled inside my sleeping bag, he headed off on the bread run by himself.

  I woke to find Uman stroking my hair, saying my name. It was still afternoon, judging by the light spilling through the open tent flap, although I felt as if I’d been asleep for hours.

  “Did you get any bread?” I asked, slowly coming to.

  “I did a bit better than that.”

  I pushed myself into a sitting position. He was rustling around in a carrier bag, pulling out two cans of regular Coke, two Mars bars, two apples, and a packet of crackers.

  “You stole from the shop?” I was torn between being cross with him and wanting to grab my share of the food and eat it right away.

  “Not exactly, no. I mean, they don’t give carrier bags to shoplifters, do they?”

  “What, then? You can’t have paid for—”

  “I took the money from the honesty box at the community center,” Uman said. “There was only a few quid or I’d have bought more.”

  “The box wasn’t locked?”

  “Not once I’d taken it to a discreet spot and smashed it open with a rock.”

  —

  After we’d eaten, we walked out to Great Par and sat on the rocks where we’d gone before to watch the oystercatchers. They weren’t there this time. Just the usual gulls. It was almost dusk, the sea turning honey-colored in the dying light of the afternoon.

  “Would it help if I apologized again?” Uman said.

  From the first time I’d set eyes on him, breezing into the tutor room without knocking, he hadn’t behaved how other people thought he should. It was one of the reasons I liked him as much as I did. Even so.

  “We talk about things,” I said. “That’s the deal. That’s always been the deal.”

  “We do talk about things. But sometimes—”

  “We don’t.”

  “Yes, sometimes we don’t. Nicely put.”

  “I’m so pleased we’ve sorted that out.”

  “Anyway, the important thing is…this.” Uman patted my belly.

  I wondered if his felt as bloated as mine. There hadn’t been much to eat, really, and I’d finished my half slowly, pacing myself to make it last, savoring each mouthful. Yet I still felt as full as if I’d been at a banquet. I lay on my back on the flat slab of rock, gazing up at the sky as the first stars appeared. It reminded me of that time on the bench at school, after we’d shared his pizza order. Uman lay back too. Rested his left hand against my right, the little fingers touching.

  “Why can’t I stay pissed off with you?” I asked.

  “Because I’ve bamboozled you with calories.”

  It was true. I was so grateful for the food I could’ve wept. “Bamboozled. I like that word.”

  “When I started at my last school, my father gave me a five-year diary to, and I quote, record my journey from childhood to adulthood,” Uman said. “But I only ever used it to collect new words. Each morning, I’d scroll through the dictionary and note down my Word of the Day—the more obscure, the better. Then, the rest of the day, I’d use it at every opportunity.”

  “I bet the teachers loved that.”

  “Frankly, the masters found my autodidactic displays somewhat ostentatious.”

  I smiled. “Do you still do it—write down a new word every day?”

  After a pause, he said, “The diary was in the house.”

  The house his father burned down.

  Neither of us spoke for a while. The slab was hard but not uncomfortable; the rock still held a faint residue of heat from the hours of sunshine it had absorbed that day. Or maybe it was my own warmth I could feel. I was about to ask Uman which was more likely when he said,

  “We have to leave, Gloria.”

  The remark came out of nowhere. Yet, the moment he said it—so casually—it was as if the entire conversation had been leading to this.

  “I know,” I said.

  “We can’t stay here like this.” Starving, he meant. Falling out with each other.

  “I said I know.”

  I heard him exhale. “I really am sorry. I’ve spoiled your happy place.”

  “Uman, you don’t have anything to be sorry for. It was a good idea at the time, coming here—then it turned out not to be. That’s all.” I hooked my little finger in his. “Anyway, places aren’t happy. You have to carry happiness around with you—or make a fresh batch wherever you happen to be.” I laughed. “God, how pretentious am I?”

  He rolled onto his side toward me, his face looming over mine with a kind of wonder in his eyes, as if he couldn’t believe he’d found me lying right there beside him.

  “What you are is extraordinary.” He said it with such feeling I couldn’t help blushing.

  “I am, aren’t I? Extraordinarily extraordinary.”

  “No, but you are. All day I’ve been not quite saying it—the we-have-to-leave thing—and then, when I do, you’re like, Oh, yeah, that. It’s like our thoughts are synchronized.”

  I poked him in the chest. “So, I’m extraordinary when I agree with you?”

  He leaned in for a kiss. He tasted of chocolate and Coke. I don’t tell Mum or DI Ryan about the kissing, or how long we kissed for, or any of that stuff. Or about my suggestion to Uman that we could simply lie there on that rock, kissing, until the police eventually found us. In fact, the kissing stopped when Uman had one of his coughing fits.

  “You have to carry happiness around with you—or make a fresh batch,” he said, once he’d recovered. “I wish I’d thought of that.”

  “I’m not sure I’d have thought of it before I met you.”

  “Oh, I reckon you would.”

  We let that idea settle over us. We were sitting up by now, my palm still tingling from where I’d massaged his back while he coughed. After a moment, Uman pulled the deck of playing cards from his jacket and set them down between us.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “These are the Cards of Destiny. Frankly, I thought you’d recognize them by now.”

  I looked at the cards, then back at Uman. “We have options, plural?”

  “Yup. Plan A and Plan B. There’s always a Plan B.”

  “So, I’m guessing Plan A is we give up. Turn ourselves in.”

  “Exactly. Plan A in a nutshell.” He didn’t say any more. Just sat cross-legged, rubbing his hands so vigorously on his knees I was sure he’d get friction burns.

  “I, um, might need some help figuring out Plan B.”

  “Oh, right, of course.” Nodding at the playing cards, he said, “Plan B is we steal a boat and skedaddle to France like a pair of desperadoes.”

  I laughed. Then I saw he was deadly serious and I laughed again. “Uman—”

  He had it all worked out, though.

  Once it was late enough for everyone on the island to be asleep, we would break into the shop, force open the till, and help ourselves to a wad of cash (and some food while we were at it). Then we’d head down to Green Bay and wade out to one of the boats lying at anchor. We’d climb aboard, raise the anchor, and paddle the
boat into the channel between Bryher and Tresco. As soon as we were well away from the shore, we’d start the engine. Then we’d sail to France. From there, all of Europe lay before us—a vast adventure playground of dodging and weaving.

  “Vive les dweaveurs!” he said, eyes shining. “Je dweave, tu dweave, nous dweaverons.”

  “Okay, setting aside the fact that we are not breaking into the shop and smashing open the till…what if the shop’s alarmed?”

  “This is Bryher we’re talking about. It’s still the nineteen-fifties here.”

  “Anyway, how are you even going to start the engine?”

  “Grocery shops don’t have engines, Gloria.”

  I just fixed him a look.

  “Okay, one of the boats out there.” Uman waved a hand toward the other side of the island, in the vague direction of Green Bay. “It’s a souped-up dinghy, really—but substantial. Seagoing. And it looks like the same model my father had before he upgraded to something bigger. The ignition is dead easy to override if you know what you’re doing.”

  “And you reckon you can drive it to—”

  “Sail.”

  “Sail it all the way to France. In the middle of the night.”

  “We have our trusty compass,” he said. Then, indicating the sky and the sea in turn, “We have the stars, a three-quarter moon…The water’s calm.” He coughed. “The hardest part will be finding a safe place to put ashore without anyone spotting us when we get to France. Not to mention the amount of garlic they put in their food over there.”

  “Uman, this is so crazy it’s beyond crazy. Even for you.”

  “Good-crazy or bad-crazy?”

  “Bad-crazy. Like, we’re going to end up dead at the bottom of the sea bad-crazy.”

  “I could sail that mother with my eyes shut. Not literally, obviously. Do you know how hard it is to capsize one of those things?” With a shake of the head, he went on, “Worst-case scenario, the coast guard intercepts us—we spend a few hours in a French police cell and come home in a blaze of glory.”

  After a moment, I said, “Sail that mother?”

  “Sorry, I go all urban when I’m excited.”

  I laughed. “Okay, delete ‘crazy’ and replace with ‘unbelievably stupid.’ ”

  “So, you’d rather just stick with Plan A?” Uman said. “We tell someone who we are and ask them to call the police to come fetch us. We go home. How unbelievably, crazily unexciting.”

  I kept my voice steady. “We’re not going to France.”

  “All we’re doing is consulting the Cards of Destiny. They might choose Plan A.”

  “I don’t care. I’m not doing Plan B.”

  “Glor—”

  “Look, the last couple of weeks have been brilliant—the best time of my entire life by a million miles. Even the rubbish parts. And I love you so much. I really do.” I studied his face in the moonlight to see if I was making any impression. His glazed eyes reminded me of Tierney’s, when I talk to her before I realize she’s plugged in to her iPod.

  I placed a hand on his knee, willing him to focus. “I mean, it’s not like giving up stops us from being together, is it?”

  “But this is what we are now,” he said. “This is what we do.”

  “It doesn’t have to be the only thing. We can be anything we want.”

  Uman didn’t respond. He simply picked up the cards, tapped them out of their box. Shuffled them. “D’you remember the Arabic proverb about living like a river?” he said. “ ‘Never standing still or turning back, but always flowing onward.’ ”

  I said I did. Said I’d always remember that story, and the morning he told it to me—just before that guy appeared and brought an end to our time in the Stretton Hills. In that moment, though, there had been only the beauty of a new day together and the tale of a river that reached the edge of a desert.

  “Gloria, this is our desert.” He meant the sea between Bryher and France. “We can stop. Give up. Go back to what we were before. Or we can become clouds and float across the desert…” He fluttered his fingers in the air. “…and fall as rain to form a new river on the other side.”

  In that instant, I imagined myself saying yes—a grin spreading across my face as I flung my arms around him and told him what he hoped to hear.

  Yesyesyes.

  But, gently, almost whispering, I said, “This is real life, Uman. Not a proverb.”

  He carried on even so, his hands a pair of pale birds in the moonlight as he shuffled again, split the pack, and set the two stacks down on the rock. One for him, one for me. Although, for all the attention he paid me, I might as well have not been there. The evening chill made me shudder and I drew my jacket tighter. I just wanted to hold him, to make him stop.

  “I’m not doing this, Uman.”

  “Your top card is Plan A: we quit,” he said. “Mine is Plan B: France. Highest wins.”

  “Are you even list—”

  “If it’s a tie, we go to the next two cards. Agreed?”

  “Not agreed, no.”

  He indicated the half of the pack closest to me. “Go on, you first.”

  The easiest thing would have been to stand up and walk away; refuse to play his game. What did it matter, though? I wasn’t going to obey the cards in any case.

  My fingers were cold and clumsy as I turned the top card over.

  Five of clubs.

  Uman nodded. “Only a five to beat,” he said.

  I thought he would draw it out, crank up the tension by taking an age to turn his card. But he did it right away—quick and neat, like he was ripping a bandage off his skin.

  Two of diamonds.

  We were going home.

  Uman stared at that card for the longest time, then gathered them all up—the whole pack—and scattered them high in the air like they were scraps of bread for the gulls.

  —

  “You won?” DI Ryan asks.

  “Didn’t feel like it,” I tell her. “It felt like we’d both lost.”

  —

  Since that night, I haven’t stopped asking myself the question: what if?

  What if I’d called best of three, best of five, best of seven? What if I’d told Uman to ditch Plan A, that we should just go for Plan B and to hell with the Cards of Destiny?

  What if we’d set off together in that boat?

  After two weeks on the run with him—saying yes to everything—I’d become the sort of person who might have said yes to that, too.

  Might have. But didn’t.

  When it came to it—when it really mattered—I wasn’t as daring, as transgressive, as I’d imagined myself to be. I’d taken a few steps on the high wire. I’d felt it sway beneath my feet. I’d looked down at the ground way below. I’d retreated.

  I think Uman always suspected things would turn out that way. That, at some point, he’d have to go it alone. That I wasn’t quite the pink-and-purple-stripy girl he had hoped I’d be.

  How I hated him for what he did that last night on Bryher.

  Ending it like that. Leaving so much unsaid. After all we’d been through together I didn’t understand how he could do that to me. Part of me still does hate him, even though you could say that he saved my life. Because the answer to the question What if, I know now, is that I would be “missing, presumed dead” as well.

  Or one of two washed-up bodies on a French beach.

  I didn’t know it then, though. That night, if he’d asked me again—if he’d told me what he was going to do—I’d have said yesyesyes for sure, if the alternative was to lose him right there and then. But Uman never said a word. And by the time I discovered Plan C, it was too late.

  —

  In my sleeping bag, I dreamed we were walking along a glass path that hovered above the ground, winding through dark forests and snowcapped mountains, across grassy plains and fields of wheat, past vineyards, olive groves, and orchards of trees weighed down with fat citrus fruit, beside fast-flowing streams and vast, placid la
kes, through toy-town villages where tiny plastic people lined up to wave us by and offer us baskets of fresh-baked bread. At some point, the path turned to gold and I realized I was dreaming of myself as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.

  The dream changed again, into a nightmare. Or maybe the nightmare came later.

  It woke me, anyway. We’re sailing across the desert when a sudden sandstorm whirls up and dashes the dinghy to pieces…and I’m thrashing about, half blind in the dust—coughing, yelling Uman’s name—desperately searching for him in the wreckage. But each ghostly shape I crawl toward, each arm or hand I grab hold of, turns out to be another piece of boat.

  Uman! Was that in the nightmare or had I shouted his name for real?

  My whole body was slick with sweat. I opened my eyes, but it was almost as black as when they were closed—just the faintest hint of moonlight beyond the tent’s dark-gray skin. When I tried to sit up, the sleeping bag was twisted around me like rope and, in my still-sleepy state, the more I struggled the more entangled I became.

  By the time I’d wrestled free, I was breathless and panicky.

  “Uman?”

  No reply. Nothing. Not even the wheeze of his smoke-damaged lungs or the shape of him in the dark or the musty, yeasty, sleepy warmth of him lying beside me.

  I reached out to touch him but he wasn’t there.

  Even as I fumbled for a flashlight and hurried out of the tent, calling his name, I knew I was lying to myself. He’d gone outside to pee, that was all. He’d gone outside for some fresh air. No—he’d gone outside to think, to contemplate our last night on the run before we turned ourselves in. I would find him sitting on a wall, or a rock, or in the middle of the old daffodil field, cross-legged like the Buddha, bathed in moonlight.

  None of these things was true.

  And I knew it.

  I’d been so frantic, pulling on my boots and yanking at the laces, tying them any old how, that one boot nearly came off as I sprinted toward Green Bay. I had to stop, refasten it. Each wasted second beat like a pulse in my brain. Come on! Running again, dabbing at the ground with the flashlight, the breath burning in my throat.