S. K. Tremayne - Just Before I Died

‘Hey, Ron. Call me Kath?’

‘Nah,’ he says. ‘Doesn’t feel right. What would your mum think?’

We’ve probably had this conversation six hundred times. It is comfort food for my soul, right now.

‘How are you, Kat? I heard about the accident.’

‘Oh, OK. Recovering. Wouldn’t mind the odd holiday in the Maldives, you know.’

He ponders. ‘Isn’t that the place that’s, like, sinking underwater?’

‘Bit like Dartmoor in January, then.’

He chuckles, and turns to serve another customer, lifting a glass to the optic, draining a shot of Gordon’s. I look at him as he works, his weatherbeaten, grog-blossomed face. He probably kissed me as a baby, when I was called Katarina Olivia Mirabel Kinnersley, not Kath Redway.

I am shortened. Abbreviated. Truncated. I have fallen off a social cliff. And I don’t mind. Because all I wanted was an ordinary life, with ordinary happiness, and my ordinary and handsome husband and my extraordinary and beautiful daughter, and the happy dogs and the ancient house, and yet I tried to throw it all away? To damn them to a kind of hell, without me?

I must not crack. I must keep a grip.

I wonder if Ron knows the truth about my ‘accident’. I wonder how many people know that it was actually a suicide bid. I don’t think it appeared in papers, I suspect the local police did Adam a favour, a Dartmoor favour for Dartmoor people. Because Adam is popular, the handsome Chagford boy, one of the Redways, a National Park Ranger, and the moorland people are so tight-knit.

And I am not quite one of them. I’m a well-spoken girl from the coast, with connections on the moor, and I’m always very welcome – but I’m not quite one of them. And never will be.

‘So, Kat, love, what can I get you?’

‘The usual.’

He chuckles. ‘Your husband? I’m not sure if he’s been by today, I was out this morning.’

We nod at each other. Ron leans over the bar, and calls out to one of the drinkers at the distant tables, a farmer I’m guessing by his muddy boots. He’s drinking on his own. I think I recognize him: yet another cousin of Adam’s. He has so many: so many with the very same dark hair, striking eyes and rakish, slanted cheekbones, the looks inherited by Lyla. This particular handsome cousin is on Adam’s aunt’s side, his dad’s sister. And I’m not sure he and Adam get on.

‘Jack, you seen yer cuz?’

Jack nods as he drinks his beer. ‘Adam? Yeah. By an hour back. He’s up at Vitifer, I think, some sheep in a wire.’

Ron turns to me with an expressive shrug which says: What do you want to do?

‘How far is Vitifer, where is it?’ I ask.

Ron shakes his head. ‘Half-hour walk, straight across the moors. But you don’t want to do it in this fog, Kath, you’d get lost in five minutes, we’d have the air ambulance out. And that goes on my tax bill.’ He is grinning. I’m not.

‘I really have to see him. It’s really, really important.’

‘C’mon now, Kath, please—’

‘I have to. Please. I have to! HAVE TO.’

I realize, too late, that I am shouting. The wolfhound lifts a lordly muzzle, sniffing the tension amidst the peatsmoke. The pub is silenced: the fire is probably going out. I have caused a scene. I never cause scenes.

For a moment there is deep embarrassment. The silence is shrill. Then someone says, ‘Hey. That’s all right. I’ll take ya.’ It’s Jack, again. He comes across, puts his empty glass on the bar. Grins at me. ‘I’ve got to go that way anyway, gonna see a mate about some feed. Thanks, Ron.’

Ron looks at the two of us, he squints unsurely at Jack, and he shrugs in my direction. ‘You’re more like your mum than I thought, Kath. She loved taking risks.’

Jack grasps me by the arm. Ten minutes later I am jumping from tussock to tussock and squelching through the foggy mire, with Jack at my side, guiding me carefully.

Ron was completely right. I wouldn’t have had a clue where to go in this mist. I’d have wandered off track immediately, got stuck knee-deep in a marsh, fallen head first in a leat, knocked myself out and drowned. Oh look, she tried to kill herself again. And this time she succeeded.

Meh.

Jack tells me he farms sheep, though I knew this already. He tells me all about sheep, as we hike through the fog.

‘You know they say sheep are stupid,’ he says, helping me over a wooden stile. ‘Well they’re right. Only thing sheep is good at is dying. You name it, they get it. Lice, ticks, scabs, big fat worms as long as a toddler’s arm.’ He laughs, his hand firm on my arm, or sometimes, rather too warmly, right around my waist. ‘Foot rot, braxy, tetanus, pulpy kidney, blackleg, lamb dysentery, black disease, pasteurella. And if that isn’t enough, if they haven’t managed to kill themselves eating ragwort, or drowned themselves down at Black-a-Tor, they go and stick their heads in wires. I sometimes think they are naturally suicidal.’

I try not to react. Does he know my story? Is he winding me up? I’m pretty sure Adam doesn’t like Jack Bryant. Some ancient family argument.

That arm strays to my waist again.

Squeezing.

‘Then there’s the devil-worshippers.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah,’ says Jack, steering me over a little clapper bridge. ‘Get a lot of that all over: weird patterns, burned circles, tortured animals. Adam deals with it all the time.’ He pauses, in the mist, looking at me. Smirking. ‘There was this one case, with a foal. Jeez. Did he not tell you?’

‘No.’

‘Guess he doesn’t want to bring it home, scare that little girl of yours, Lyla?’ His grin is very wide, like he finds it all funny. ‘Anyway, yeah. Last autumn he found a foal. Bloody odd, it was surrounded by these patches of charred grass.’ Jack chuckles loudly. ‘He called me and asked me to help. What a job. That poor bastard foal. They’d cut its tongue and eyes out, and cut off its, you know, genitals, cut ’em all off, and sliced off an ear. And there was this weird white paint on one leg, some symbol, a star or pattern.’ Jack is scanning the horizon, though all I can see is fog, then he puts his hand on my hand. ‘And the weirdest thing of all was, they’d dragged the bleeding corpse, when the animal was likely still alive, they’d dragged it round and round in circles and stars, making these crazy patterns of blood in the frost. Demon symbols, I heard. Strangest thing I ever saw. Sent a fucking shiver right down me. Happened over near your place, Pete Bickle’s farm. Not far from Hobbyjob’s and Huckerby. Which I thought was kinda funny, cos your mum would have loved the spookiness, if you see what I mean.’

‘What?’

I gaze at him. Those blue eyes so like Adam’s, but colder still. ‘My mum? You knew my mum?’

‘Sure I knew your mum, Kat, way back, when we were all kids, all of us cousins, lads in Chagford. And she was all into that pagan stuff, wasn’t she? You do know that? I don’t mean she tortured animals, nothing like that .’ He laughs. ‘All I mean is that she was into those symbols. Spells. Spirits, spooks, deadly nightshade, wacky mushrooms, whatever. Dancing naked around stones: all stuff they used to do on the moors back in the day, all the hippies from Totnes. Amazing she didn’t die of flu, your mum, amount of time she was starkers up the tors. They did like a party.’ He stops abruptly. As if he is teasing me.

‘There’s Adam.’ He pauses. ‘At least, I think it’s Adam. This mist is a right fucking job.’

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