A belch bubbles up: chocolate and spirit and bile. She grimaces. Wonders when the crossover happened – when she went from being able to knock back six pints and a revolver of chasers and get up the next day ready for a bacon sandwich and a ruck. Hospital, she reckons,ngiving it some thought. The stabbing. The operation – when they cut parts of her away.
She leaves the darkened kitchen and makes her way to the living room, flopping down into a floral Ercol chair. She’s started making old-person noises too. Started groaning when she lifts herself out low seating and responding with elongated vowels to pieces of news. She’s already promised herself that if she starts to eat her dinner with a spoon or piss herself any more noticeably, she’ll chuck herself off the cliff without a backwards glance.
The door into the hallway is half open, half closed, and as she looks at it her mind plays a cruel trick. For a moment she sees him, with his dark hair and his big teeth and his neat tie, smiling at her in that way of hers, telling her she was doing a grand job, wondering if she might be able to spare a moment of her valuable time.
She feels a tightening of her throat. Closes her eyes and lets herself fall into it: to tumble over the lip of the precipice and into the person she used to be. Two years of chasing shadows. Of coming up with lie after lie, disappearing from her real life in increments. Two years of watching Derrick grow more intense, more obsessive, in his pursuit for a man that she was beginning to suspect did not exist. It was Eve who put the miles in, criss-crossing the country, tracking down camps and communes, wrapped up in a world of psychedelia, of communion with nature; of the blissful struggle of life outside the lines. Her notebooks groan under the weight of names: one-word monikers of people who may have come to harm, or who may have simply moved on to another camp; another life. Young women with names like Happiness; like Delilah and Morning. Young men: Water, Kaftanman, Squirrel Red. In a scattered community of itinerants determined not to play by society’s rules, she has found it impossible to determine what qualified as a missing person. And everywhere she has asked about Arthur Sixpence, about Cormac Pearl, she has drawn the same response.
“Sure, we’ve heard the rumours – but we look after our own. We welcome people in but we wouldn’t allow anybody who gave us a bad vibe. We’re about peace. About nature. About love …,”
The break came in 1990 A contact has nudged them towards a halting site further north than she had ever managed herself needing to travel. Mr Pearl had bankrolled the journey. He provided the car, paid for the hotels, and gave Derrick an envelope thick with cash in case he needed to be persuasive. She can see herself now, pulling up at the bank of Loch Linne, high up in the tip of Scotland: the car so full of Derrick’s smoke that it had been like driving in fog. It took the best part of nine hours to reach Raspberry Layby. They’d had to have the car pulled out of mud twice before they were able to make sense of their scribbled directions and weave their way to the secluded spot where a ragged community of families had made a home. Suspicious, bright-white eyes peered out from mud-crusted faces. Children played in the dirt, bare-legged and snot-faced. A man with an arm missing at the elbow and a straggle ginger beard emerged from a canvas tent; his belly hanging over a pair of camouflage trousers and a tangled collection of necklaces stuck in his chest hair like moths in a spider’s web. He was carrying a canvas backpack.
“You’re police, yeah?” he asked, his accent pure Glasgow. Thought you’d come eventually. She left this.” He held out the sack as if it were a bomb. “I’ve heard you’ve been asking. If you want my opinion she’s probably dead, but she might just have found a place to get him out of her head.”
Eve and Derrick exchanged glances. The Glaswegian set the bag down on the floor. Derrick crouched down. Retrieved a gold pen from his pocket and opened the top flap. Written on the canvas in felt pen, framed in a childish loveheart: Cormac and Freya 4 Eva.
“Where did you get this?” asked Derrick, his voice catching.
“She left it. Only stayed a night. She was running, I’ll tell you that. I’ve asked around and there’s nobody further North than us so she’s not fallen in with anybody friendly. She said she didn’t want to live that life any more. He’d gone too far. He was going home – that’s what she said. He was going home.”
“Is there somewhere we can talk in private?” asked Derrick, glancing around. People were emerging from tents and battered vehicles to gawp at the two newcomers as if they were some aquatic lifeform that had grown legs and climbed a mountain.
“Not much to tell you,” said the man, not unkindly. “She asked if she could join us for a night. Ate with us. Sang with us. She didn’t tell us anything other than her name and we’re not the sort to ask questions. It only rang a bell with me because I’ve an old pal who spoke to one of your officers at a folk festival near Cambridge back in May. That’d be you, I reckon,” he said, smiling at Eve. “He said you were pretty. He was right.”
“But you do believe in him, yes?” asked Derrick, his tick more pronounced than ever, his chin jerking as if pulled by a string. “You do believe he’s real …”
She arches her back, feeling the old wound pull on her stomach. She feels as though she is coming to the end of things. She wonders if this is how Derrick felt in those final days – as if he’d been spread too thinly over too much bread. Whether he’d let go of life in tiny steps or whether death had come in one great colossal punch.
She looks around for the letter – the one she’s pored over more times than she can count. She reads it daily, always looking for a new, more palatable truth. Each time she finds herself coming to the same conclusion. Derrick didn’t write this, and if he didn’t write it, then perhaps his suicide was a lie too.
She reads it again, eyes tired, even though she could recite it from memory.
Dear Eve.
I know you’re going to be cross with me for a little while. You’re going to grumble and bang things down and probably drink too much and eat the wrong things, and you’re going to say I was a coward who took the easy way out. You’ll be right about all of it. All I ask is that you forgive me. I’m doing this for the right reasons. I’m letting go. I’m tired, eve. Tired of carrying all this horrible darkness inside me. I’m tired of the bad dreams. I’m tired of being scared. I have to do this so your last years aren’t for nothing. I have to do this so you’re free to grow old the way you want to. I know you don’t believe in an afterlife or any of the hippy nonsense we spent so long looking into, but it means so much to me that we’re going to share the same patch of ground. It meant more to me than any wedding, though I reckon you were more likely to say yes to this than to any other question I popped. I want you to know, I understand. I won’t ever judge you, Eve. You had your reasons, I had mine. I’ll be waiting for you, forever grateful to be your friend.
With love,
D.Millward
Eve thinks that she could have left it at that. She could have persuaded herself that it really was a goodbye letter from an old, fragile man who simply couldn’t stomach any more suffering. Then she heard about the way he was found. About the mask, and the way he would wake, shrieking, in the cold dark space of his bedroom. Somebody sent him that mask, she knows that. It 3was on his bed, in a padded envelope. Somebody had left it there for him. Had he really staggered out to the old chapel, slipped a noose around his neck and pulled the ugly pig mask onto his face. Had he really dropped from a pew and strangled, slowly, in the dark? She would rather believe that than the alternative. Would rather believe he did it to himself than that the sins of the past were coming back to haunt her.