But for the first time in as long as I could remember, Tommy took her on. ‘I don’t agree,’ he said. ‘I think this changes everything.’
This afternoon someone whose name I didn’t know, an Alan somebody, had replied to my post: I just looked up his profile for the same reason and saw your post, Sarah. He went AWOL after cancelling our holiday the other week. Has anyone messaged you about this? Let me know if you hear anything.
Then someone else, a Martin someone, had written: Was wondering the same. He hasn’t turned up at football for a few weeks. Admittedly, he is not known for his reliability, but this is beyond the pale. I’m sorry to say that tonight we were thrashed 8–1. A shameful episode in our long and magnificent history. We need him back.
A few seconds later the same guy, Martin, had posted a photo of Eddie and had written: Find this man. #WheresWally
And, finally: It doesn’t sit well with me that you can’t punctuate hashtags.
I stared at the photo of Eddie, holding a pint.
‘Where are you?’ I whispered, horrified. ‘What’s happened?’
Into the ensuing silence, my phone rang.
Everyone watched me.
I picked it up. It was a withheld number. ‘Hello?’
There was a silence – a human silence – and then the line went dead .
‘They hung up,’ I told the room.
‘I think you were right,’ said Jo, after a long pause. ‘Something very odd is going on here.’
Chapter Twelve
DAY TWO: The Morning After
I should have been jet-lagged. Deeply exhausted and probably hungover; certainly uninterested in waking before midday. Instead, I woke at seven o’clock feeling like I could take on the world.
He was there. Asleep next to me: Eddie David. A hand snaked out in my direction, resting on the soft shelf of my stomach. He was dreaming. The hand on my navel twitched occasionally, like a leaf in a half-hearted wind.
His curtains frilled at the bottom as the morning moved silently through the open window. I drew in a great lungful of air, drawn straight from the valley like water from a spring, and looked around the room. Mouse was sitting with Eddie’s keys on an old wooden campaign chest.
I hardly knew this man, of course. I’d met him less than twenty-four hours ago. I didn’t know how he liked his eggs, what he sang in the shower, whether he could play guitar or speak Italian or draw cartoons. I didn’t know what bands he’d loved as a teenager or how he was likely to vote in the referendum.
I hardly knew Eddie David, yet I felt like I’d known him for years. Felt like he’d been there too when I’d been running around the fields with Tommy and Hannah and her friend Alex, building dens and dreams. Exploring his body last night had been like returning to the valley here; everything familiar and right and exactly as I’d left it last time.
My first time with Reuben had been confused, brief and hopeful; the bonding of two lost little souls in someone’s spare room with the thunder of an air-conditioner and a carefully planned soundtrack on the CD player. And it had meant everything to us at the time, but in the years that followed we’d smiled ruefully at how bad it had been. There had been no such awkwardness last night. No misplaced fumblings or self-conscious questions. I bit my lip, smiling shyly at Eddie’s sleeping face.
He made a snuffling sound, stretched out and rolled in closer towards me. He didn’t wake up. Just reached out an arm and hooked it round me. I closed my eyes, committing to memory the feeling of his skin on mine, the gentle weight of his hand.
The world and its unsolvable problems seemed a very long way away.
I went back to sleep.
When I woke up again, it was gone midday and the air smelled richly of baking bread.
I put on a sweatshirt of Eddie’s and crept out of his bedroom into the big space he lived in. Light streamed in through skylights and dusty windows, spliced and jigged by a network of old beams, full of rivets and pits and rusty hooks.
Eddie was moving around the kitchen at the other side of the room, talking to someone on the phone. Fine particles of flour lifted off the work surface he was wiping down with his spare hand, shifting in a sunny cloud under the roof lights .
‘OK,’ he said. ‘OK, Derek, thank you . . . Yeah, you too. Speak soon, OK? Bye.’
After a brief moment of stillness he turned on a radio hiding behind glass bottles on a windowsill. Dusty Springfield was coming to the end of ‘Son of a Preacher Man’.
His phone rang again.
‘Hi, Mum.’ He rinsed a cloth and ran it over the surface. ‘Oh, she’s there already? Brilliant. Good . . . Yes, I . . .’ He paused, leaning against the worktop. ‘That sounds nice. Well, have a great time, OK? I’ll pop over on my way to the airport if I don’t hear from you before then.’ A pause. ‘Of course, Mum. OK. Bye.’
He put the phone down and wandered over to the oven to peer through the window.
‘Hello,’ I said eventually.
‘Oh! Hello!’ He spun round. ‘I’m making bread!’ He beamed at me and I wondered if this was all just some sort of psychedelic dream, a desperate escape from the quotidian trudge of divorce papers and accommodation searches. This ebullient, handsome man, sweeping into a part of the world I’d come to dread and painting everything in bright colours.
But it wasn’t a dream; it couldn’t be, because the commotion in my chest was too great. Somehow, it was real. (Would we kiss on the mouth? Would we hug, as if we’d known each other for years?)
There was a breakfast bar separating the kitchen from the rest of the room, a wide, polished plank of something beautiful. I took a seat at it and Eddie smiled, throwing his tea towel over his shoulder and walking towards me. He leaned across the bar and answered my question by kissing me decisively on the mouth. ‘I like you in my sweatshirt,’ he said .
I looked down at it. It was grey, worn ragged at the wrists. It smelled of him.
Dusty Springfield gave way to Roy Orbison.
‘I’m very impressed that you made bread,’ I said. ‘It smells incredible.’ Then I frowned. ‘Oh, hang on a minute. Are you one of those terrifying people with hundreds of skills?’
‘I’m a person who can do a lot of things badly but with great enthusiasm,’ he said. ‘You can call that skilled, if you like. My friends have other names.’ He pulled up a stool on the other side and sat opposite me, pushing some orange juice in my direction.
I felt his knees press against mine. ‘Tell me some of your non-skills,’ I said.
He laughed. ‘Um . . . I play the banjo? And the ukulele. I’m teaching myself the mandolin, which is trickier than I thought. Oh, and I learned to throw an axe recently. That was brilliant.’ He mimed it, making a thwacking noise.
I grinned.
‘And . . . well, sometimes I challenge myself to try to make things out of bits of limestone I find in the woods, only I’m especially bad at that. And I bake bread quite often, although again without any great skill.’
I started to laugh. ‘Anything else?’
He ran a finger round one of my knuckles. ‘Don’t invent some fiction in your head about me being a high-achiever, Sarah, because I’m really not.’
An alarm went off and he got up to check the bread. Eddie’s sense of place was so strong, I thought, imagining him combing the local woods for things to carve. It was almost as if he were a part of this valley, like an oak. Pieces of him would be flung into the wider world during season change or wild weather, but his core stayed in the earth. This earth, in this valley .
The thought came to me suddenly that I didn’t feel like that about LA. I loved it: it was my home. I loved the heat, the scale, the ambition, the sense of anonymity it gave me. But I wasn’t the dust of its deserts or the waves of its ocean.
‘Bread needs a little more time,’ Eddie said, sitting back down. ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘I was thinking about you as a tree and me as a desert.’
He smiled. ‘That doesn’t make us very compatible.’
‘It wasn’t like that. It was . . . Oh, ignore me. I was being weird.’
‘What sort of tree was I?’ he asked.