Hollow in the Land by James Clarke

Author:James Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2020-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

10

One Fixed Point

THESE MORNINGS MADE THE EARLY STARTS more bearable. The valley looked like a Rothko painting, thought Nessa, colour transferring from uneasy blue to red. She had her route down pat, this same hike every day. Up the ancient pack-horse trail, following the gravel snake until she was up on top: overlooking Calf Hey Reservoir and what was left of the eighteenth-century spinners’ cottages. From her vantage point the ruins resembled the beginnings of a misspelled word, or a series of runes, as if someone had used the stone to write on the hill, vainly trying to remind the world they still exist.

There was never anyone here at this time. This was Lancashire, a couple of hours’ drive from the Lakes’ tourist trap, west of the Peaks’ stonescapes and occasionally bordering Yorkshire’s intersecting wolds. Come the weekend you could count the passers-by you got here on one hand, sometimes less. In fact, commingling was so rare on the valley’s hills that to see another rambler was to have something sacrosanct interfered with, your meditations halted. Whenever Nessa saw another person on these baldly intimate heights, she tended not to greet them. She would steel herself like a gunslinger then hurry on staring at the ground. There was no other way to overcome such challenges to her thoughts. The rest of her walks were spent pretending nothing had happened.

This is why she was surprised by the figure patrolling the crumbled cottages below. Nessa didn’t need binoculars to recognise the metal detector, nor that it was a man carrying the device, for who else but a man would be out grubbing for treasure at this hour? Nessa’s shift started at ten but she headed down-track anyway, able to hear the chopping reservoir in its embankments, the guinea-pig squeal of the detector and the metallic un-click of the micro-shovel as it extended in the man’s hand. She watched him remove his backpack. She watched him force the tiny shovel into the grass.

She unhooped the binoculars from her neck. By dividing her view into quarters, she located the man. He knelt on the grass a fair distance above twin pats of sand on the reservoir path, a fixed point between discarded tresses of builders’ netting and a United Utilities sign that bulged outwardly on its posts. There you are, she said. His rippling turquoise anorak caught the eye like a fisherman’s float against the water of the hill. And he wore his curly, Atlantic-grey hair shaved up the sides, almost militantly, thought Nessa, as the guy turned around to face her.

Jesus.

She dropped her binoculars.

Bloody hell.

It was Sean. Nessa dusted the binoculars on her jeans and hurried away as fast as she could without running. Already she knew that for the rest of the walk she’d be unable to shake the feeling that it hadn’t been her that had seen Sean. Rather he had seen her.

She arrived at Steve Biko House about an hour later. Biko was a pebbledash care home with a scale-tarnished billboard on its side that advertised supermarket milk.

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