Something to Think About

Cathy settles down pretty quickly. She’s very quiet – doesn’t talk very much. But I’m much the same – so that’s fine. No hysterics – no fits of weeping – at least nothing in public. Sometimes she looks very sad and goes even quieter than usual. Then I just let her alone and I just sit and read. I could go to my room – but usually I stay downstairs. She just sits there.

Other times she wants to look around, or do things, and so we go out into the woods or the fields.

The other day, the weather was nice, so I thought to take her out to the stones. That would give her something different to think about.

We walked out towards the woods. Cathy always wears long baggy skirts. Not the most ideal clothing for clambering through the woods – but she never seems to have any problem. Mind you, she wears strong leather boots too – more sensible than my trainers – so I suppose it all equals out in the end. I don’t tell her where we’re going. I just tell her it’s a surprise – a special place – which it is. She’s good – she doesn’t ask too many questions and spoil things – so we just walk along, clambering up slopes, down slopes, over rocks and fallen trees, and squidging carefully across the muddy soft bits with their bright flowers, their odd smells and their scuttling bugs. Some places are a bit too squidgy, and my socks are not going to be very nice – but never mind. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again.

We don’t go around things – not if we can help it. It’s more fun if you can clamber over something. And anyway – if you always go around, you never get to stand on top of a rock and look about you – like a king or a queen, gazing over your lands from your castle battlements.

The stones are a way away from our house, so it takes quite a while, but it’s worth it when you get there. They’re in the middle of some woods – but the trees are thin there. The soil’s a bit sandy – so maybe it’s no good for the thick growth you find elsewhere. They’re on a slight hill – so you have the feeling of height – though it’s still all enclosed by trees, so you still can’t see far – not that you’d want to.

I’d been coming here for years, ever since I remember.

It’s very warm here, even when the rest of the woods are cold and damp. And it has a good feeling about it – open, light, inviting.

“There’s never anyone here but me,” I say. “Very quiet, very private.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls,” she says.

“What?” I say – then I look over and see her grinning – pulling my leg. I grin back. She must be getting better a bit if she’s making jokes.

The sun was up, and it was shining hard on the big, grey blocks of the stones. I’ve heard people say they look like a ring of broken grey teeth – if that’s the kind of image that leaps to mind, they should go to the dentist more often. Me – I think they look like big, grey blocks of stone – they just feel friendly. There is a good smell of warm leaves, warm lichen and sun-warmed rock. I hear the soft buzz and hum of bees from the gorse bushes. The tightness around my heart relaxes and goes away a bit. I can’t feel bad here – ever. I wonder what Cathy feels. She’ll tell me if she wants to.

There are seven big stones here – all about seven or eight feet tall from the ground – I don’t know how deep they sit. And there are fifteen or more smaller stones. I don’t know exactly how many – they are largely hidden by bracken or gorse, or they’ve been covered up by centuries of leaf mould or by the slow creeping flow of the earth – softened by the rain and pulled down by gravity, down the slope of the hill. I’ve tried to count them – but never seriously – and I’d never take a shovel to the soil round here – so I’ll never really know. That’s fine. I like not knowing things.

Cathy sits down at the base of one of the big blocks – careless of dirt or rabbit droppings – maybe she doesn’t actually know what those little brown balls are – she’s a bit of a city girl, and I’m certainly not going to say anything. I sit a way off, facing her. I start to unpack our lunch.

“I don’t know why they’re called ‘terrorists’,” she says – suddenly – violently, but still quiet.

‘Because they cause terror’ – I think that’s the standard answer – but I don’t say anything out loud.

“I don’t feel scared,” she says – almost as if she’d heard what I was thinking – “I feel angry,” she says. “I feel a hot, terrible, burning anger.” She wipes her eyes.

She’s never talked about any of this before – so I don’t know how to react. Who would? I just wait – see what she says next.

“Everything I had, they took it away from me,” she says.

Well, that’s true enough. She’s lost her parents, she’s lost her home – well, not lost – it’s being kept for her – rented out – until she’s old enough to live alone – if she wants to – but she can’t live there now. She’s come up to live with me and my dad, so she’s lost all her places and people – everyone she used to meet, everywhere she used to go. She probably had friends – must’ve had – but after the holidays end she’ll be going to the same school as me and she won’t know anyone – well, she’ll know me, obviously, but I don’t really count. She’s even lost her school. I think about that. I’ve never really liked school – too many people – too many rules – the bullies, the boredom, the easy, arrogant assumption of superiority by the teachers – but now that I think on it, I’d miss it if it was gone. At least I have some teachers I like, and at least I have some friends. But not Cathy – she really has lost it all.

“They never found my parents’ bodies,” she says.

“What,” I say, “but I thought . . .”

“No. They never found the bodies. No one with the same clothes. No one with the same teeth. No one with the same DNA, even. The police checked, you know. No, my parents’ bodies weren’t there.” She pauses a bit, looking at me. I can hear the bees buzzing. “They were taken,” she says. “After the blast – they were taken.”

She glares at me – daring me to contradict her. But I’m not going to. I’m excited. I mean, on the surface, it sounds ridiculous, a sort of truth-denying fantasy, an irrational refusal to face facts – but I like it. Somehow it feels right – somehow I believe her.

“You mean, they might not be dead?” I say carefully.

“They might not be,” she says, still glaring. “Otherwise, why steal them away? They’re only worth taking away if they’re still alive. Right?”

I know she’s still in shock from the tragedy – she’s clinging to straws – she’s creating a fantasy where her parents weren’t blown into unidentifiable bits, but really were kidnapped – but I don’t care. Like I say, it sounds good enough to me. I like it. I know it’s not a game – I know it’s deadly serious – but I like it.

“OK,” I say. “But why?”

“They were journalists,” she says. “Investigative journalists. They probably knew something.”

I nod. Except that that sounded more like an argument for killing them than for kidnapping them – still – you never know.

I can hear the bees buzzing louder now. I look down at our food – but it’s OK – no striped marauders swarming our sandwiches.

“I don’t know what to do, Sean,” she says. “I have to find them – but I don’t know what to do.”

I can feel the strength of her anger and her helplessness. It’s like the heat waves, rising up from the stones. I look up, my eyes drawn by the shimmering air and the buzz of the bees. Hundreds of them – thousands – racing around above the stones, like a great black halo around the crown of the hill, with Cathy in the centre. Not normal behaviour for bees – not in my experience. Cathy doesn’t notice.

“I’ll help,” I say, eyes on the swarming ring of bees. And I mean it. I don’t know how, but I’ll help her find her parents. Assuming she’s right, of course, and they are still alive.

She smiles – and the energy fades off, and with it the bees break up from their fairy ring and fly off like bees again, looking for nectar.

“Here,” I say, passing a bottle, “have some water.” She looks like she needs it.

 

***

 

We spend some time at the stones. As I say, it’s comfortable just being here, and for Cathy it seems like a place where she can open up a bit.

“You never have any friends over,” she says. I assume that she’s asking, rather than hinting that I don’t actually have any friends. I might not be Mr-Popular-King-of-the-Playground, but I do OK. I’ve got Quick and Worry, anyway. Two good friends is much better, I tell myself, than ten of the light and flighty type.

“Actually,” I say, “I just thought you might not like too many people around.”

“Maybe you’re right,” she says. “But I’m OK. I can always go to my room or something.”

“Thanks,” I say. But I think I’ll leave it a bit longer before I call anyone round. I need time too – getting used to having someone else around the house – it’s not that easy – not after years and years of just me and Dad, although, actually, Dad’s not there as much as all that, and often it’s just me and Mrs Scarsdale, the housekeeper – come baby-sitter – come permanent, professional misery guts.

 

***

 

The shadows are starting to get a bit long now. I love this time of day – I always feel like it’s a time when the earth lets out some of the energy it’s soaked up from the sun. The sun makes me sleepy, but early evening – I feel like I could leap into the air and fly – there is so much energy about, and I soak it in like a sponge. Cathy is the same – I can see. And anyway, here at the stones you’d have to be a lump of clay to feel nothing.

“You believe me, then?” she says.

“Why not?” says me.

“Nobody else has.”

“Who else have you told?”

“I told the police. I told the doctors and the councillors. I even told your dad.” She looks at me again with those angry eyes she sometimes has. “No one believed me,” she says.

“Well – they wouldn’t, would they,” I say. “I mean, they all want you to get over it, don’t they? And they don’t want you getting up false hopes.”

“It’s not false.”

“I know.” And somehow, I do. I mean, it sounds preposterous – to blow up a pub as a diversion to kidnap two people walking past. But as I say, it felt right somehow. And I tend to trust my feelings.

“So, our problem,” I say, “is to find out who might want to kidnap your parents.” I think a bit. “Someone as ruthless as that must have a pretty good reason not to just kill them.”

“Tell me about it!” she says.