As Jayne walks through the storm, she asks it to purge her of her fear.
She faces up to the lightning, doesn’t let herself recoil from the thunder and vows that she’ll stay out here until she’s hollow inside, reduced to a shell of herself, every cell in her body dedicated just to staying upright in the middle of this onslaught of weather, and she prays that the effort will obliterate the terror she felt.
If she doesn’t succeed, she may disassociate. For years she didn’t know what disassociation was, didn’t understand what was happening to her when she spontaneously clocked out of a situation emotionally. She had no answers to questions about why she lost periods of time and memories, why she entered a kind of fugue state sometimes.
The therapist she saw after leaving the army put a name to it, which was a relief in a way, but also alarming. Now Jayne is desperate to avoid it happening. A few things can trigger it for her, and the sight of blood is one of them. Fear and potential loss of control of a situation are others.
Gradually, as she walks, battling the elements, the image of the scarecrow and the bloody entrails fades, and she feels as if she might be able to stay present, to go back inside and be helpful to Ruth, but the effort exhausts her.
She slows until she’s trudging rather than pacing. She feels utterly depleted, physically and emotionally, frightened for Emily and afraid of the state she might find Ruth in, but she’s also scared for herself and of herself. Of her own mind.
And just to be sure, even though she’s desperate to be inside, to confess to her friend that she, too, is frightened, she walks on until she doesn’t think she can keep going any longer.
John guides the young woman down to the farmhouse. It’s not easy. She has collapsed onto him and she moans if her bad ankle has to take any weight. John feels a stab of remorse every time it happens. A strong sense is building in him that he’s done a bad thing and that this young woman is hurt as a result and could have been hurt worse.
How will Maggie react if it’s true?
The guilt he feels is tremendous though its exact source still remains vague.
What has he done?
“Can you tell me your name?” he asks.
“Emily.”
“Come on, flower. Come on, Emily. We’re getting there. Maggie’ll see you right.”
When they come to the flooded area of the lane, he climbs the wall first and helps her over. She falls into his arms on the other side. Sheep loom out of the darkness and surround them. She flinches when he shouts them away and trembles in his arms.
He is wholly focused on keeping her close, on picking a saferoute. The darkness doesn’t bother him. The rain rolls off him. She has no choice but to trust him, he knows that, but he likes that she doesn’t question him, or panic, that she’ll let her weight fall heavy on him when she needs to. She is totally helpless.
But he feels the same way he does when one of his ewes is injured or struggling to lamb. He knows what he has to do. His mind doesn’t wander.
As they descend into the valley, he pieces together that she’s not properly dressed for outside. Her wellington boots are flat-soled and pink. The jacket she’s wearing might hold off a shower in the city but in this rain, it’s soaked through. No wonder she’s quivering, and her hands are white with cold. Where he’s touching her skin, he feels as if it might dissolve.
Ahead is an oak tree, very old, its trunk split. He is pleased to see it. It means something, but he doesn’t know what. He stops. Another flash of lightning illuminates the tree’s silhouette, and it appears animated for a moment.
She looks up at him, sensing his hesitation. “What is it?”
He doesn’t reply. How can he tell her that he recognizes this tree because it’s been there all his life, was already hundreds of years old when he was born, and he recognizes the fork in the path beside it as well as he knows the path of veins on the back of his hands, but he can’t remember how either of them relate to the route back to the farmhouse.
Emily’s grip tightens on his arm as he prays silently, to the land, to all it is home to, real and unreal, solid and magical, to help him get her home safely. He has never prayed so hard.
Ruth wakes. She has no idea how much time has passed. Her head is a ball of pressure, her limbs stiff. She stands, awkwardly. The room spins. Her bladder is urgently full. She pees, gratefully,and fights off a surge of nausea and dizziness before she can stand up again.
The small bathroom window is a blank square of darkness. She stares at it and has the impression that what’s beyond it is hostile. Lightning flashes, making her jump and as she braces herself for thunder the memory of the letter crashes into her consciousness, and with it, the rest of the evening.
I lost it, she thinks. I drank too much. What did I say? She’s acutely embarrassed that she got so drunk in front of Jayne and Emily. She has been slipping more and more like this, lately. The drinking is no longer a matter of having one too many glasses of wine in the evening. Her colleagues made that clear to her. Toby did. Flora, her mother. She didn’t listen to them, in fact she resented them for it, and now this.
She feels a heavy, maudlin sense of shame. A drunken shame. I’m still pissed, she thinks. She unbolts the bathroom door with difficulty. “Jayne,” she calls from the landing. No reply. “Emily?”
Her headache is bad. A vise. She locates her bedroom and empties her bag, in search of pain relief. That would be a start. She can’t find any. Back in the bathroom she uses the tooth mug to drink water and opens the cabinet over the basin. Empty.
The headache feels like the thing that’s stopping her from functioning, from regaining sobriety so that she can grovel, apologize, make amends. Depending on what time it is, she thinks, with a flash of hope, and if I can get the pain under control, I can maybe go down and serve dinner. It’s hard to remember whether they had reached that stage of the evening, or not, yet.
It occurs to her that it’s ironic that she hasn’t brought with her this most basic first-aid supply. She, who doesn’t leave the house with Alfie without packing everything he might need, hasn’t attended to her own needs. She resists the urge to sink into self-pity. The inside of her mouth tastes metallic, her saliva is tacky. She spits, washes her mouth out, brushes her teeth. Leans her headagainst the mirror for a while to try to absorb the cool temperature of the glass and realizes she can’t hear any noise from inside the house.
Where are the others?
