Ross was already at the little roadside car park, leaning his head back against his seat as though he knew that one was supposed to relax, he just hadn’t the faintest idea how to go about it. When he saw my car approaching, he smiled and I parked nose to nose with him.
‘Keep your boots on, Tils,’ I said for the fourth time. Tilly kept trying to peel her wellies off just, I thought, to hear the thump they made hitting the floor of the car. ‘It’s wet out there,’ I finished, scooping her out of her seat, tucking Brass inside her coat and plonking her down on the muddy tracks of the verge. Ross was unfurling from his own car like an untidy umbrella.
‘Hello, Tilly,’ he said, gathering his coat around him, possibly in case she was about to fling another handful of disgusting detritus at him. In fact she had her thumb in her mouth and her other hand clutching at the bulge which was Brass, buttoned into her little red jacket. ‘Hi, Libby.’
He looked tense. His lip was bitten again, his hair was at crazy angles and he hadn’t shaved.
‘What’s up, Ross?’ I tried to keep down the backwash of embarrassment. I’d cried all over him last time we’d met, and he’d heard all about the sheer awfulness that my life had become after Tilly’s birth. I took a deep breath and reassured myself that at least I hadn’t gone into biological detail aboutthat. I hadn’t really had a chance to talk about the sheer wondrous effort and bloodstained amazement of delivering a baby; David had kept me isolated and alone and I had no idea whether the complicated feelings I had were normal or strange. Tia and I had briefly discussed childbirth, but she’d been out of her head on meth when all hers were born so it wasn’t a particularly satisfying chat. Ross, it dawned on me, was the first person I’d reallytalkedto since I’d come here.
‘I’ll show you. Come on.’ There was a confusion of hands and arms for a moment, as though he’d thought about taking my hand, moved on to grasping my sleeve, withdrawn, put his own hands in his pockets, pulled them out and then folded his arms in order to deal with not knowing what to do with them.
Tilly blinked at him over her thumb. ‘Ice cream?’ she asked, hopefully.
‘Probably not, no.’
Her lower lip trembled.
‘Isobel might have some juice though,’ I added swiftly. ‘Let’s go and see.’
We stepped away from the cars and were enfolded by the trees, as though they had been waiting for us. Man, woman and child walking off between the bare ribby trunks and reaching branches – we must have looked like the opening titles in a horror film, I thought briefly. Twigs snatched and grabbed at us and overhead the birds whirled in their terrifying dance of potential. We could only be seconds from zombies rising up from the leaf litter and biting our throats out. I clutched tighter at Tilly’s hand. She, unconcerned by mood or threat, was humming something that sounded like thePeppa Pigtheme and kicking out randomly at the sticky leaf drifts and I doubted that there was a zombie in the entire pantheon of literature that couldn’t be overcome by cartoon theme music as hummed tunelessly by a two-year-old.
‘Oh,’ I said, as we broke free from the trees and walked into the clearing. ‘That’s… unfortunate.’
Ross stopped and held out a dramatic arm. ‘You see?’
‘Bloo— I mean, gosh.’ I self-edited for the presence of the toddler. ‘Is she still in there?’
He glanced at my face. ‘I don’t know. That’s why I need you. I daren’t go in alone, just in case.’
I stared at the collapsed roofline. Half the house had given in to entropy. The ivy-clad roofline now only made up half the silhouette, the other half having broken and tumbled so that the upper rooms were open to the sky and the cottage was surrounded by shattered tiles and broken timber beams. Isobel’s room and the roof above it still seemed to be intact but now lacking the protection of the rest of the building. ‘At least the walls are still standing, so she’s not under a load of rubble. Shemustbe all right, but look at the state of the place. It looks like it secretly wants to be a bungalow,’ I said weakly.
‘What it’sgoingto be is a two-storeyed timber and glass eco house,’ Ross said tersely. ‘Whether it wants to be or not. But you see?’ His expressive face was distorted with a kind of horrified impatience. ‘Isobelneedsto leave. The place isn’t safe, and I daren’t go in without a witness, just in case, even if it’s only to drag a body clear of the wreckage.’
There was a slow pause into which the outstretched branches dripped and the birds cawed ominously. ‘Well, thanks for that image,’ I said briskly.
‘Oh, I’m pretty sure she’s still alive. When I came by early this morning there was a light on at the back there. The roof must have gone in the night. There was quite a bit of wind,’ he added, almost as a question.
I shook my head. I’d gone to sleep with earplugs in because of Don and Tony beginning an all-nightWe Are Not Your Kindmarathon. The combination of silicon plugs and Slipknot had been enough to block out anything less than Ragnarök.
Overhead the birds had settled into a rhythmic call and had begun to flutter into the treetops like huge black flags. The bright streak of a magpie hurtled past, making me jump and put my hands in front of my face in alarm.
‘We’d better go in,’ I said, glancing up at the host of avian threat perching above us. ‘Do you think it’s safe?’
Ross ran his eyes over the cottage. ‘As safe as it can be,’ he said. ‘I reckon everything that was going to come down has done it now and it’s probably sound enough until the next storm comes through.’
I hesitated, but the crowd of birds was blossoming on the trees like dreadful growths as they flew in and settled. Inside definitely looked preferable to outside, so we stepped over the threshold, squeezing through the split door into the hallway, where we were met by Isobel.
Ah, there you are. The birds said you were out there.
She turned and led the way into that cramped room at the back of the house. It didn’t appear to have suffered too badly from the storm that had wrecked the rest of the place, although there was a smear down one wall running from the ceiling to the floor, as though water had got in.
‘Seriously, Isobel,’ Ross said as we went in. ‘You need to get out. This place isn’t structurally sound any more.’
It wasn’t exactly Fort Knox to begin with.
‘Balls,’ Tilly said and the three of us looked at her. ‘Balls!’ she said again and I realised she’d seen the black velvet bag that contained the crow diamonds. ‘Balls please.’
Isobel handed her the bag and the old tray and Tilly tipped the stones out with the most amount of noise possible, while saying, ‘Bump, bump, bump,’ in a worryingly inexact way. The diamonds rattled onto the silver, a thousand dowries bouncing and scattering the light.
