Page 53 of The Trouble With Love

‘No you won’t. You’ll be able to have a proper life, not always have to be looking after me. Like Cerys said, I’m thirty-two, you shouldn’t have to be looking after me, I can look after myself.’

‘No you can’t. Look at that time with the pigeons.’

‘No, I can. I should. I’ve done too much leaning, too much letting you cope when I should have been trying to manage everything myself. I know I’m not normal, that my mind doesn’t work the same way as other people and that I have to be careful and take the meds and not get overtired . . . but I still screw up, Holl, because I know you’ll pick up the pieces. If I go to Peterborough — well, I can’t lean on Cerys, she’s got her hands full, she will need me. I think that’s what I need most, Holl, to be useful rather than just the weird tit who talks to walls.’

He was right. Of course he was. It was just that . . . I’d spent the last twenty years looking after Nick. I wasn’t sure I knew how to stop.

We finished the pizza and he went back to his flat to start packing up his things. Since his things consisted of a duvet and pillow, two cardboard boxes of clothes and a stuffed badger that he’d found on a skip and refused to be apart from, I hardly thought it would take the next few days but, hey. I’d stopped interfering. And I couldn’t believe, really and truly that it could be that simple. That he could just decide to go, pack up, and leave, this man who’d needed me to remind him to change his underwear and brush his teeth until he was twenty-five.

I slept long and deeply, uninterrupted by a self-absorbed film director with a permanent erection. So many women, I mused, waking up next morning refreshed and unsticky, would have killed for a man like Aiden. I would have ended up killing Aiden.

I got dressed and got in the hire car that I was going to use while my car sat in the garage and got poked. A lot of men in boiler suits had sucked their teeth at it already, and come to what I was going to call an overall consensus that the axle was snapped. The hire car was smaller than my Renault but newer and didn’t have crisp packets all over the floor. I drove it across to Barndale on the squishily slushed-over roads, while the rain continued to wash at the edges of the snow, eroding it back gradually into lumps that looked like half-sucked sweets, discarded along the margins, and the banks of ploughed snow wore down to weirdly topiarised shapes, sculpted by the running water.

I struggled and waded up the hill like a simple, if somewhat masochistic, early morning sightseer. It was, after all, a lovely day. The dawn sky was Renaissance blue in the gaps between the rain clouds and apart from the fact that the ground was covered in a layer of rapidly liquidising snow, it could have been summer. Only cold, of course. Leaves, curled like ammonites, blew across the hilltop, somewhere a dog barked and a sheep coughed. Rooks cleared their throats overhead, their finger-wings combing the sky and the air was as clear as a mirror.

Hands in pockets, I sauntered to the bare hilltop. The snow still lay thickly up here, and footprints and tyre prints were translucent trails nibbled into it, showing where someone had been creeping around since we’d been up here performing psychological warfare on our sanity. The site of our ritual was bare, though, just a blank, white sheet of virgin snow which had blown around, so the surface was only inches deep, but drifts sulked around the trees like onlookers driven back from a juicy accident. Trying to look innocent and just-out-for-a-walk, I began to stomp and rake through the snow with my boots, stirring the smooth surface into a battlefield of tread marks and kicked-up piles.

The first candle turned up surprisingly easily. With an almost invisibly fast glance around to make sure no one was spying, I bent down and dug it out of its snow hole. It froze onto my skin, hard and oily like a dead man’s finger and I shoved it quickly into my pocket with a shiver. One down, three to go.

I kicked snow innocently for a bit, getting more vicious as I became more frustrated. Eventually I was sending torrents of snow from each boot cascading up over my head and I nearly sprained my ankle twice from kicking unexpected small rocks. I must have looked like the video-nasty version of Walking in a Winter Wonderland as I brutally belted another footfull of snow which fell in a frozen shower onto my head and shoulders. ‘Bloody bloody things, where are you?’ I muttered.

‘They’re here.’ A voice from near the treeline made me jump. ‘If it’s these that you’re looking for.’

Leaning against a tree and swinging the three remaining candles from one hand, stood a man. Something about his voice and arrogant stance were familiar.

‘Can I have them, please?’ I moved towards him, down off the shoulder of the hill and towards the wood, holding out my hand. ‘They belong to a friend.’

‘I know.’ The man came properly into view. He was quite attractive, trendily long-haired and nicely shaped under an unimpressive grey duffel coat. ‘The witch.’

Then I recognised him, but of course by then it was too late to back up. Of course, he would have known we’d come back for the evidence . . . He must have taken the candles almost as soon as we’d gone off the hill, and the snow had covered his tracks. ‘You’re the guy with the gun from the other day.’

An acquiescent tip of the head. ‘Which, I think you’ll notice, I never fired.’ His accent wasn’t local, more southern. Well-spoken but without the braying edge of the Ginge.

‘Bully for you.’ My teeth were clenched so I’m not sure he heard me, which was probably just as well. ‘Can I have my candles now, please?’

‘No.’ Now the voice did have an edge. I think it might have been menace, but I’d never really been menaced before, so I wasn’t sure. It could, of course, have been outright rudeness.

‘But they’re mine.’

‘Now, let me see. If I give you the candles, you’ll . . . hmm . . . what would I do? Well, I’d probably go round and blow the living hell out of anyone who’d got in my way, but then you’re not me, are you? No, I think, if I held these’ — he swung the candles again — ‘and if I were a woman, convinced of my utter rightness and permission to behave as I wanted, I would go to the police. Tell them that some nasty men scared me.’ He put on a stupid, simpering voice for the last bit. ‘And there was me and my black girlfriend, out for an innocent stroll. Am I getting warm?’ He raised his eyebrows and I fought my face not to let it react. ‘And then the plods would be stomping around, asking stupid questions, getting no closer to the real truth of the matter which is,’ he lowered his voice and now the menace was unmistakable, even to me, ‘that some bitches were playing with Satan on the hill. Dancing with the Devil. Conjuring evil spirits with the use of blood and offerings.’

‘That’s bollocks!’

‘No. That’s women for you. All tits and lies.’ He moved away from the tree, towards me. I didn’t know what to do, I was on the rising ground of the slope so he had to move uphill to get to me, but I didn’t think I could move fast enough to get away on the snow-packed ground. He was wearing big tyre-treaded boots and I’d only got wellies on. Leopard print ones. ‘And you did do witchcraft.’

‘It’s not witchcraft. It’s a bunch of women playing. Pretending.’ Despite myself I took half a step back.

‘So you didn’t do spells then?’

‘No!’

‘Drinking the liquid from the cauldron? What was that, just having a nice brew up were you?’

‘Yes,’ I seized on this. ‘It was tea. We came out for a picnic.’

‘In November? In the dark?’ He pretended to shake a leg. ‘Jingle jingle, my darling. Try again. Because I’ve got pictures, love, photos of the candles with the blood and everything, and pictures of you sweet little girlies sitting there doing your thing with them.’

Now my palms had started to sweat and I could feel my heart rising up in my throat. ‘It’s a free country,’ I started again, but he made a quick jump across the snow and grabbed my arm so suddenly that I couldn’t speak any more.

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