The Lives She Left Behind by James Long

Author:James Long [Long, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471142987
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

She realised he would have been up there waiting for her yesterday when she had not come and she knew she must go straight back there. Dressing herself with minute movements, she pushed her ballooning sleeping bag into her backpack, wrote them a note, then inched her way past them, freezing when their breathing changed. She slipped out of the tent, excited, impatient, into a young morning.

A bearded man in overalls, standing on a street corner with a toolbox at his feet, was the only other person awake in Zeals. He mumbled a vague, embarrassed greeting, then looked up the road and at his watch. She ignored the way they had come. Now she was Gally, she could navigate with the certainty of a migrating bird, branching left on a lower road then on to an overgrown track, and every step she took, every foot of height she gained, was a step into greater clarity as the new parts of her brain weeded out the last traces of the drug. She was going to her real home and the morning air fuelled her with exhilaration.

The track flattened out over the shoulder of the ridge, into a lane which twisted downhill again between high leafy banks. She felt that if she stopped walking the magnet ahead of her would still tug her gently to her destination, whatever her legs might do. Then all at once there was not one destination but two. A climbing footpath beckoned to her right, the road ahead beckoned her on, down to a junction where the fall of the land ahead was screened off by woodland. She stopped in the road and they seemed equal in their demands so, thinking quite wrongly that it made no difference which way she went first, she carried on down the road. It seemed the right choice because when she turned left at the junction she knew she was within seconds of her heart-sought place. A bank backed by trees blocked her view to the right, but as she walked around the lane’s concealing curve, she saw a gateway and the gable-end of a house hidden in those trees and understood in a moment of ballooning delight that she had come home.

The sight of the gate stopped her in her tracks. It hung, crooked and decayed. She stood in the middle of the lane, disturbed and uncertain, acutely aware of her unwieldy backpack, feeling that she might need to turn and run. Taking it off one strap at a time, she lifted it over the roadside bank, pushing it out of sight in the bushes, then went nervously forward on soft feet to the gateway, craving and fearing the cottage. The sight of its sad dishevelment stopped her again as she went to push the gate open. In that frozen second she saw that although it was still so very early there was a stranger standing outside the front door – an older man, someone who should simply not have been there in that house.

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