Ross twitched a muscle in his face, as though my story had been sour or disagreeable in some other way. ‘I had therapy,’ he said, but sounding as though he were talking to himself not me. ‘I had therapy. Bloody expensive therapy, all those months of talking and yet… here I go again. What iswrongwith me?’
‘If you’ve been in therapy you probably already know,’ I said, helpfully. ‘And your nose has stopped bleeding now so you can go and get on with whatever it was you came here to do.’
He was looking at his hands now, twisting the blood-streaked tissue between fingers that showed more blood where he’d bitten his nails so low and eczema was splitting his knuckles.
I couldn’t keep looking at him. He had an expression more torn and ragged than his remaining nails, as though he were about to be tortured, and it was hard to watch. I looked instead towards Elm Cottage, where it hung as though impaled on the blackberry thorns in the middle of the thicket. It was a little hard to tell because of the obscuring banners of remaining leaf, but it did look as though Isobel stood just outside the front door, unmoving and watching us.
‘Ow,’ Ross said more normally now. ‘Has it really stopped bleeding?’
I glanced down at him still patting his nose, and when I looked back up towards the cottage door where I had been almost sure I had seen that scarecrow-like figure, the whole of the front of the cottage was bleak and bare once more.
‘I think so.’
‘It’s sore.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry about that, but honestly, announce your presence before you start the laying on of hands, trust me on that. I was already terrified, and you were lucky I didn’t punch you.’
‘Would you have done?’
‘No,’ I said. My voice sounded tired and defeated and I wasn’t sure why. Possibly because I knew that I didn’t fight back, knew that my natural reaction had become to freeze. ‘The nose was an accident. I was trying to get away and you were too close behind me. And now I have to go home, my daughter will be back from the park.’
‘Tilly.’
‘Thank you for reminding me of my own daughter’s name,’ I said sharply. I didn’t like him remembering; there were undertones of questions, questions that didn’t seem to have a right answer.
‘You might have more than one child,’ Ross said, reasonably. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, I haven’t. Just Tilly, and she’ll be round at Tia’s with Kiara and the pair of them will be driving Tia round the twist by now,’ I said, still sounding a little ruffled. ‘I’ll come back and have another word with Isobel next week, when Tilly is at nursery.’
I thought of Isobel, that bucket of water, her food in that mouse-proof metal box. The air of self-contained loneliness that she seemed to have – she must be lonely to have invited me to have a cup of tea, surely. Birds wouldn’t be a substitute for human company, and maybe she just needed someone to talk to. ‘Or I might bring Tilly over tomorrow,’ I said slowly. ‘It will get us out of the house and Isobel seemed to like Tils. As long as she promises to keep the birds out of the place while I’m there, anyway. I can try to drop in more hints about her moving on while I’m there.’
Ross nodded slowly. ‘That would be good. Time really is of the essence.’
I shuffled my feet, trying to get the fallen birch leaves off my toes, where they had stuck like transfers. He continued to sit slumped forward with his legs on the muddy roadside. Neither of us seemed to be in any real hurry, for all our words of moving on. Beyond us on the road, a cyclist sped past, head down and pedalling as though desperate to get through the tunnel of trees. I wondered if it was the same one as I’d seen yesterday; there was a certainGroundhog Dayconstant about this place. Only the trees seemed to change as they dropped more and more leaves and their skeletons became more visible.
Then I wonderedwhyI wasn’t hurrying this impromptu meeting to its natural close. Was I actually enjoying this, in some bizarrely masochistic way? The fact that Ross seemed so quietly accepting of me was undoubtedly refreshing and a little bit sweet. It was certainly a change from David and the way he’d behaved towards me, at the end. Perhaps that was it. Ross being so unlike David was making me feel as though some members of the male portion of the human race were not utterly evil and that there might be some pleasant people who were in possession of a penis out there. They weren’t all controlling, stalkerish mind-fuckers who followed and tracked your every move.
Ross looked as though he barely had control of his own body, let alone the desire to control anyone else’s.
I shivered at the thought.
‘Look, you’re cold. You should go,’ Ross said, giving his nose a definitive last swipe with the tissue.
‘I know. I’ve been telling you that. But I can’t drive away with you sticking out of my car,’ I said reasonably. ‘It would make overtaking difficult.’
‘People used to walk in front of cars with a red flag.’ Ross gave his nose another pat. ‘I often wonder how they thought that would pan out. I mean, if you have to go everywhere at walking speed, then what’s the actual point of the car?’
‘Sitting down,’ I said pointedly.
‘Nobody walked in front of horse drawn carriages with a flag though, did they?’ he went on, clearly lost in his own wonderings. ‘A galloping horse can go quite fast, and they must have mown people down. So why the man with the flag for cars? I ought to look that up.’
‘You do that.’
He finally seemed to realise that I was waiting for him to move, and stood up. ‘Well. Thank you for the nosebleed and the… Thank you for seeing Isobel. Did you say you were coming back tomorrow?’
‘I might.’ I was cautious now. ‘I said Imight. If nothing else presents itself. Why?’
‘Oh, nothing, no reason.’ Ross shrugged. ‘I just might be around, that’s all.’
