‘Fine.’ Tucking the bag under my arm, I reached into my coat pocket. ‘Then could you tell me where to find Ashton? I need to thank him.’
‘What…’
He trailed off as I drew out my hand. I was holding a two-inch black feather, which I twirled in the air before his face. ‘Pretty, isn’t it? I’m fairly sure it’s from a starling. Impressive birds, honestly. They’re more mysterious than you’d think at first glance.’ I gave a guileless smile, but I knew he could hear the provocative note in my voice.
For a few seconds, I was sure he was about to slam the door in my face, but he simply shut his eyes for a moment. Then, in one fluid movement, he grabbed his jacket and scarf from a peg by the door and stepped outside. ‘Let’s go, Pica.’
* * *
As we left the town centre behind us, we drank our lukewarm coffee in silence. The November light was growing softer and brighter as the day went on, its silvery shimmer washing over us with ever-greater intensity. Every now and then, my eyes darted to Blake: the open coat, the dark brown woollen scarf around his neck, the quiet vigilance in his gaze as it ceaselessly scanned the world around him. I knew I was under his watch as well, but he didn’t actually look at me until I held out the bag. He reached in and took out a pastry without hesitation.
I nibbled the edge of a cinnamon roll as I watched him take a cautious bite of his own pastry, then his mouth twisted.
‘Not great?’
‘I don’t like raisins.’
‘Then why did you take the pain aux raisins?’
Blake examined it wistfully. ‘Because I want to like them.’
I couldn’t help laughing. ‘You’re one of a kind, you know that?’
A faint grin flitted across his face, just as mournful as the rest of him. ‘I wish. But I’m afraid appearances can be deceiving.’
I could only stare at him. He was the strangest person I’d ever met, but perhaps because of that… the most intriguing. My gaze wandered down his arm, snagging on his wrist. I had to take a second look to be sure I wasn’t mistaken.
‘Your watch. It’s stopped, hasn’t it?’
Immediately Blake grabbed his sleeve and tugged it down over the dial. ‘Yeah, it stopped working ages ago.’
I wanted to ask why someone with his bank balance didn’t buy a new one or get it repaired, but he was obviously uncomfortable, so I didn’t push. ‘Don’t worry, I wasn’t planning to nick it,’ I teased. ‘You can call me Pica if you want, but I’m not that much of a magpie.’
It hadn’t taken me long to find thatpicawas the Latin name for the common magpie–and even less to remember that he’d asked me the night we met if I was planning on stealing anything.
Blake said nothing, but I saw a smile of approval creep into the corners of his mouth.
We’d been walking along the Cam for a while, and as we reached a bend, the path led us onto Stourbridge Common, one of Cambridge’s oases, where the noisy city seemed further away than it really was. I moved to let Blake walk nearest the river, while I kept to his right.
‘Why are you afraid of the water?’ Seeing my blank look, he smiled. ‘You’re being careful not to walk right by the bank. Either you’re planning to push me in or you’re scared of falling in yourself.’
I hesitated, but steeled myself. Zoe had already told this part of my story to Ashton anyway. Plus, if you wanted someone to be honest with you, you generally had to give them something of yourself first. Even if it was the kind of truth you’d prefer to keep under lock and key, the kind of truth that let slip too much. Talking about what you’d been through always meant revealing who you were. In the end, a personality was nothing but a pane of glass smudged with the fingerprints of experience–and this particular smudge was the size of a hand, placed directly over my heart. ‘When I was seven years old, my cousin and I were playing hide and seek, and I climbed into a boat. It came unmoored somehow and drifted away from the shore. I was in there for hours before they found me, and by then it was the middle of the night.’
‘Did anything happen to you?’
I shook my head. ‘I was a bit dehydrated, that’s all. But all those hours by myself, nothing but black, unfathomable water all around me… it felt like something was looming out of it. There was no way out, you know? No escape from what was closing in. There was this sense of… being trapped. Powerless against the universe. It made me realise it’s impossible to ever fully be in control.’
‘So that’s why you’re always trying to control everything.’ It didn’t sound like a question, more like an answer to something he’d been wondering for some time.
I wanted to contradict him, but suddenly my therapist’s voice popped into my head.Emotions can never be fully controlled, and that’s okay, she’d said when I couldn’t stop crying after my mother died. I cried at the supermarket, on the bus, at school. In ordinary, everyday moments it would hit me out of nowhere: nothing was ordinary anymore, because the core of my everyday life was gone. Without it, you lost your balance. I’d lost it–I’d lost myself. And no matter what my therapist said, itwasn’tokay. It was awful. It ripped the ground out from beneath my feet and the sky from my mind. No down, no up: only a terrible nothingness, and I fell and fell. So I tried to find a new midpoint. A core made up of routine and security, something to brace myself against, something unconditional.
I found it in books, which allowed me to concentrate on nothing but concentrating. Except for my aunt and my cousin, I didn’t let anyone get close enough to be a supporting column in my life, let alone the core. Until I got to Cambridge, and on the very first night this girl came knocking at my door, walked in unasked and sat down on my bed to share a bag of wine gums. Zoe came, and Zoe stayed, and ever since then Zoe has been…present, in a way I haven’t allowed anyone to be in a very long time. She was never a question mark. From the very beginning, she was an exclamation mark, and I never doubted her. She was a mistake I made yet never regretted.
‘Yeah, I suppose I tend to stay furthest away from things I have the least control over,’ I replied hesitantly.From people like you, for instance, I added in my mind.And yet–here I am.‘How about you?’ I asked, trying to shrug it off. I was only here for research purposes. For Zoe. ‘What are you scared of?’
He inspected the pain aux raisins in his hand, tore off a corner and crumbled it between his fingers. I hadn’t noticed the ducks in the steel-blue water before he tossed the crumbs to them and they came swimming over. ‘I haven’t felt fear for a long time.’
It was strange: Blake kept saying things that would have sounded self-aggrandising from anybody else, but coming from him they only felt resigned and weary. Like he was reciting the lines of a role he’d memorised but never wanted or understood.
