“You said to promise?”
Evie dropped the counter and went to the window, breathed on the glass and scratched a clear line in the haze of steam. She had been too troubled over the last few days not to speak her mind, despite her reservations, and Lawrence, she realised, was the only person in her life who she could to talk to.
“OK,” she finally said, taking a deep breath. “This might sound weird but, Lawrence… do you ever feel like you want to disappear?”
Lawrence seemed about to get up, but stayed where he was. He never got things straight away. In the passageway with Ryan Fenton, consenting like that, a part of Evie had taken over that she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about and was only just beginning to comprehend. She was trying to describe the pursuit of loss: the compelling minor deaths that come from sex.
Lawrence must have realised he’d behaved incorrectly because he quickly apologised. “You’re going to have to explain.”
Evie sighed.
“Lose myself?” said Lawrence.
“As in, go after a feeling you can’t put your finger on. Like what’s the point in not doing.” She was nervous around him as she’d never been before. “Oh, forget it.”
“No, hold on. Give us a chance.”
He nodded for her to go on.
Evie’s voice felt very tight. She wasn’t sure what to do with her hands. “So the last few months,” she said, swallowing. “Maybe the year before, I’ve been feeling, I dunno, like I’ve been opened up, like something’s passed across me and now everything’s changed. Do you ever get that? I mean, is it just me or does this happen to everyone at some point in their lives?”
Lawrence always seemed so quiet, even when he was talking. He said, “This year I’ve felt like that.”
“So is this what it’s like to be an adult?”
“I wouldn’t know what adults are like.”
“Have you ever wondered how it would be, following that feeling to its logical conclusion?” Evie felt tearful. She knew now that she wanted to dismantle absolutely everything. “Because I feel as if that’s what I’m always trying to do these days, one way or another.”
Lawrence picked up the battleship, and moved it to its destination: the chance panel. He didn’t take a card. He simply reclined in his seat, twiddling a strand of hair for such a long, ponderous moment that Evie nearly reached out and tapped him on the knee. It was his eyes that kept her from doing so. Beneath their blinking hoods, Lawrence’s pupils were swollen with the same distance Evie saw in everyone. She wanted so dearly to drift in the sap of another person’s thoughts, to understand someone the way she thought she understood herself. But she knew she never would.
Eventually Lawrence spoke. “My family have this saying, right. Well, it’s not a saying, exactly, it’s more a thing we refer to. Dad says Gran started it◦– it comes from the way out of town◦– she just started going, one day, if you were caught daydreaming, like, Oh, he’s taken the Litten Path. Meaning, you know…”
“You were miles away.”
“Yeah. Then everyone started using it. Someone a few towns away wins the pools, he’s taken Litten Path. Someone pops their clogs, they’ve gone up Litten Path, you with me? You’ve a choice to make, one way or the other. Path or safety.”
“You take it or you don’t.”
“Yeah. It’s a divide between one reality and the next. When things come to an end, you go up top. It’s the route you take. It can mean all sorts.”
Evie felt giddy with recognition. “And what’s on the other side?”
“Oh, nothing. Like really nothing. But everything as well. My dad’s obsessed with it. I think it’s desolate. It scares me.”
Evie remembered their first meeting in the forest, Lawrence’s bald head, his muddy trousers. There had been a boy who had experienced poverty, not just in material terms but in all its myriad forms, and poverty can be a stigma you can’t shake. She would never have thought the two of them would still be hanging around together all these months later. That she would come to think of him as a friend.
“See someone can come back from most places where there’s life,” said Lawrence. “But the Litten Path, if you take it, I mean really take it, the fog comes. That’s it.”
“Only footprints left.”
“I suppose on the one hand if you really wanted to take it then you wouldn’t want to come back, even if you could. Otherwise it would defeat the purpose of going in the first place. I guess I think sometimes people think taking the Litten Path is the only way, when really it isn’t.”
“Oh, Lawrence, it’s the perfect way to describe it.”
He almost folded in two. “…I always thought it were daft.”
“No, no. It’s quite beautiful.”
The Litten Path. Evie murmured the words to herself and tried to visualise it, although picturing something so figurative was surely pointless. She had the idea of a line of pebbles showing the way in a hailstorm; another of stepping stones reaching to an endless island on the other side of an unknowable lake.
“Your gran taught you all this?”
“My dad, mainly. Did you know my whole family’s either a Capricorn, a Virgo or a Taurus? We’re Earth symbols, all of us. Which star sign are you, Evie?”
“Aries.”
“That’s fire.”
She picked up the dice and rolled her turn.
The rain had abated and now dusk had settled. Evie’s feet seemed to make no impact in the furls of mud, the saturated grass. Unable to resist following Lawrence had betrayed the interest she had in him, an interest she hadn’t been prepared to acknowledge up until now. She blamed their conversation earlier. It had slit holes in every part of her. She could now see her thoughts for the lost cleft of stones they had always been. She could see that life was really just a hike to a barrow built at storm height just for you.
Lawrence’s spry figure made its way down the lane, and into Litten itself. His parka could have been a cloak. She could have been pursuing a highwayman in the eighteenth century. Evie wished she’d brought a coat herself.
Urgent blue flashed in the armada of rabbit runs and chicken coops that comprised Flintwicks Estate. Evie knew where the welfare was, the arcade and bandstand. She knew where the pit was, too. Living here during the miners’ strike had been like flying above a tempest, even though she had befriended Lawrence, who she now knew was from a pit family. Even though he had described to her the intimacies of the strike, his experience at Orgreave, Evie had been barely able to express anything beyond a plastic kind of shock as she reached for the next gin and tonic.
But that Litten Path. He was just like her, and so, at last, what was going on had become no integer, but a number and a half. There were additional values to everything, it seemed. Hidden decimals.
Lawrence must have been eighty feet away. He was a funny thing: loping and genial, and that pigeon chest! Lying on the sofa, slipping his top off, that time, Evie wouldn’t have been surprised to see a downy bar of plumage across his breast. He looked so much like his mother. After he’d told her about Shell’s affair, Evie had gone to have a look at the woman. Scones in a paper bag, a tired face, spinach-green tabard and netted homburg; the two of them had touched fingers as Evie received her change. Saturday lunchtime, full of the secret power of knowing things. Shell had no idea Evie knew about her. No idea at all.
Evie had also quizzed Lawrence about the family friend who turned up that night, the scarred man with ashen pinches in the crunches of his eyes that made him look like he was wearing mascara; Lawrence just said there’d been a falling out. Evie wondered what he’d say now if he saw her as they came to a strip of terraces. These houses were bigger than those on the Flintwicks estate, and were bricked or pebble-dashed. A clump of scruffy trees flailed outwardly behind them.