“Should we call for the others?” Jayne asks. “They’re not far.” She doesn’t know this but hopes it’s true.
Ruth wipes her eyes with the back of her sleeve. Jayne flinches as the barrel of the gun swings past her.
“Why did you bring this?” Ruth asks. She waves the gun dangerously. “What for?”
Be honest, Jayne thinks. However drunk Ruth may still be this morning, however untethered she’s become, she’s an intelligent woman. She’ll smell a lie. It’s time to be wholly honest. “Because I had an idea for something that Mark and I need to do when he arrives this morning. You know, the men are probably nearly here.”
“What do you need to do?” Ruth asks.
Even now, it’s painful for Jayne to share this. She hesitates, but feels she has no choice. “We both struggle with what we did whenwe were in the military. The deaths we played our parts in. The innocent deaths. I wanted us to dispose of the gun up here at the Neolithic burial chamber. It was an idea I had, for a sort of ritual. It seems very, very stupid now, but it was supposed to be cathartic. I thought it would help both of us to start fresh and put violence behind us.”
Jayne sees that Ruth is trying to decide whether to believe this, or not.
“I promise you, it’s true,” Jayne says. If not now, when? “I know you haven’t heard this before from me; it’s not something I’ve ever been comfortable talking about. I have a whole host of feelings about it that, frankly, scare me.”
A tear slips down Ruth’s cheek. Something is getting through to her.
“And I never imagined,” Jayne continues, “that you and I would end up out here with my gun in your hands. It’s loaded, Ruth. Did you know that? You could do some damage with it, to me, to yourself or someone else. Is that what you want? Really?”
Ruth looks at the weapon, as if she hadn’t truly considered its potential before. She’s drunk, still, Jayne thinks. Which makes her even more dangerous.
“If I thought bringing the gun up here would lead to you or anyone else being endangered, I would never have done it,” Jayne says. “You have to believe me.”
“I’m scared,” Ruth says. Her face crumples.
“You don’t need to be scared of me. I promise. I’m your friend, remember?”
Ruth stares at Jayne through her tears. The fog is still dense around them, as if only the two of them exist in the here and now, cocooned from the rest of the world.
“Let’s go back to the barn, shall we?” Jayne says. “And collect our stuff and go home. And after that, let’s talk, Ruth. Properly talk. I think we need to. I’m here for you. But right now, we need to get you out of here. You don’t look well. Let me help you. Please.”
The barrel of the gun is pointing at the ground between Ruth’s knees. Slowly, Jayne makes to stand up.
Ruth watches her, still wary, before a look of defeat settles over her, a moment of laxness, of sheer physical and emotional exhaustion. Her guard is down, and Jayne makes her move. She seizes the weapon.
Within seconds she has emptied the barrel. The bullets go in one coat pocket, the gun in the other. She is very angry. She has an impulse to strike Ruth across the face, to shout, “Do you know what could have just happened? Do you have any fucking idea how dangerous that was?”
As if reading her mind, Ruth cowers.
But Jayne controls herself and extends a hand to her friend.
“Come on,” she says. “Let’s get you somewhere warm and dry.”
Ruth looks at Jayne’s hand and hesitates at first but takes it. She lets Jayne help her up and support her as they make their way back to the barn and in the foggy distance, they tune into the echoey shouts of the others and whatever’s happening, it doesn’t sound good.
In the dark, intimate moments while she’s crouching among the brambles and wishing with all her heart for her mum to come home, Imogen hears, floating down from the embankment, from not too far away, a jaunty whistle and her blood runs cold. It’s him. She’s certain because of the tune: “Fly Me to the Moon.” He loves Frank Sinatra. He can whistle it very fast and used to if he wanted to make her laugh.
Now, the tune is slow, mournful, deliberate. It drags. Taunts. He wants Imogen to know that he knows she’s there and listening to him.
How he’s found her, she’s unsure. But he has.
She shrinks down and breathes as quietly as possible. There’s nowhere else she can run to. She’d have to go either left, or right, alongside the wall. It would be noisy. She’d give herself away.
The whistling gets nearer and louder. The sound cuts right through her, pinning her in place, before stopping abruptly. He’s close, but how close? She holds her breath for as long as she can, until she feels as if her eyes might pop out of their sockets, as if she might burst.
The whistling starts up again.Fly. Me. To. The. Moon.She exhales. It gets quieter. Is he moving on?
Shot through with pale veins, the whites of her eyes show as she tries to see through the tangle of bushes. She tracks the fading sound of the whistling until she can’t hear it any longer.
