Just Before I Died. S. K. Tremayne

says nothing, I stare down at the darkness between my arms, and sob and sob, in my white-painted kitchen. But I am not crying for me, I am crying for Adam, for my dead mother, for my brother, for this house, for this place around me, for the wildflowers on the high moors in the summer, for the meadowsweet at Whitehorse Hill, for the foxgloves down at Broada Marsh, for the sundews and shepherd’s dials and pennyroyals and roses – all the flowers my daughter loves, all the ones that she can name and I cannot, all the one she shows me, all the flowers and rocks and feathers she collects, because I am crying, crying, crying for my daughter, the little girl I was prepared to hurt, to damage, to dismiss, to throw away; the girl I picture, standing alone in the farmyard, listening for the tiny animals, puzzled in her anorak, wondering why her mother tried to run away forever.

      To kill herself.

      And my God. It is too much. And the rain tinkle-tankles on the window, as my tears run to their end.

      How long I sit there, with my head slumped, I don’t know. An hour or more. But even the fiercest tears find a cease, as all things must die, and I lift my head. Tessa is sitting there patiently with a look of deep pity on her face.

      ‘Sorry,’ I say.

       Warren House Inn

       Monday lunchtime

      Lyla is at school and I should be at work in Princetown. Instead I’m parked down the road at Warren House Inn. The fog is so thick I can barely see the humble old whitewashed building, though it is only a hundred yards away. Normally the inn is visible for miles around – because it is the only building for miles in the rolling, bony moorland. Today, in the Dartmoor murk, Warren House looks like the vague, gloomy idea of a cottage, half-formed in someone’s mind.

      Stepping out, locking the car door, I pause and stare at my own hand, unnerved. I never used to do this. Locking my car, in one of the wildest places on the moor. We never lock anything on the moor: bikes, cars, houses. And who’s going to steal my worthless old Ford? A team of stoats?

      One of the shaggy Dartmoor bullocks?

      Or the sheep?

      I can hear sheep, somewhere around me, also invisible in the fog:

      meh, meh meh meh meh, as if they are mocking me.

      MEH, Kath Redway, MEH.

      It was Lyla who first suggested this to me, that sheep say meh not baa, and once she’d said it I couldn’t get it out of my head; because she was right. Sheep are laughing at us, mocking; meh meh meh, look at you, what are you doing here, look at this person locking her car door, meh, why is she locking it, mehh, is she scared she might get back in and drive into a reservoir?

       Mehhhhhhhhhh!

      Thoughts press in on me: I am stuck inside myself. How could I possibly have tried to kill myself? What did I do on that fateful December day? I do not believe it; yet I have to believe it.

      As I walk up the mist-swirled moorland road towards the inn, I go over it for the seventeenth time this morning. Yesterday I thought it through two hundred times or more. I’ve been obsessing like this since Tessa’s visit.

      I remember Christmas, I do remember that. It was nice. We did what we always do, went down to Salcombe like the poor relatives we are, and feasted at my brother’s expense.

      We had a roasted goose, like they eat in Dickens. And Lyla actually got to play with other kids, her rambunctious eight- and ten-year-old cousins, Oscar and Charlie – or Foxtrot and Tango, as Dan calls them. Charlie and Oscar tolerate Lyla because they’ve grown up with her: when she twirls her hands repeatedly or gets phobic about scratchy things or hides shyly under a table with an encyclopaedia, they accept it, and laugh good-naturedly, and that makes Lyla smile and come out from under the table and play with them in her own awkward, funny way, and that’s why I like Christmas. Lyla is always happy at Christmas.

      And I enjoyed Christmas this year, too. I remember crackers and sloe gin, and luxury chocolate assortments my brother bought from some posh London shop, and then a fat, contented drive home to Huckerby on Boxing Day – and that evening Adam went away for a week, to do up the rangers’ hut on the northern moors, leaving me alone with Lyla.

      And after that, the horrible fog comes down on everything, like a door closing, and everything is lost in the remorseless mist of my post-traumatic, retrograde amnesia, the vapours of my bruised and useless brain.

      From Boxing Day onwards my mind is basically a void. Four days later I tried to kill myself, and I have no idea why.

       Meh.

      As I get nearer the pub, I see the door is shut and the windows are dark. It looks as if the pub is closed. The peat fire in this pub has, famously, never gone out since 1847. But sometimes they casually close the place in the dead days of winter. But I need this pub to be open: because it is the one place I might find Adam, when I need to find my elusive husband.

      It’s not his fault he’s a ranger. But it means he ranges, across a sizeable tract of moor with all its sparkling streams and clapper bridges, its hidden spinneys and forgotten villages. He is always out and about, usually in remote areas with no mobile coverage, so I can’t get hold of him. And right now I want to get a proper hold of him. We’ve spent the days since Tessa’s visit quietly not addressing the massive issue: pretending that this enormous thing isn’t there, didn’t happen. Let’s have some more tea and say nothing. I know Adam is resentful but he keeps it pretty much hidden.

      This morning my mood changed. I dropped Lyla at school, went back to the office at Princetown, opened my computer and typed in some words: The first recorded instance of the word ‘swaling’ comes from a thirteenth-century poem. It means the spectacular, controversial winter burning of Dartmoor’s stubborn gorse and bracken, and can still be witnessed every winter, on the higher moors … And then I stopped writing and looked at my stupid words, so irrelevant to the gaping void in my life, the open wound in everything, about to be infected. So I decided I had to leave the office and talk to my husband: immediately. And I made my excuses and headed out here.

      Enough tea; enough denial. Enough imaginary men in woods.

      I need the facts.

      Turning the rusty handle of the knackered wooden door, I step through. The pub is open, but almost empty. There are a few local drinkers with drams and pints at one end; a huge grey wolfhound snoozes by the undying fire at the other.

      I suspect this story about the eternal Warren House fire is a lie, told for tourists, but we all tell lies, to get by. And why not? I wish I had more lies, to tell myself. I would happily lie to myself for the rest of life if I could: I didn’t really try to commit suicide, no: I was trying to explore the reservoir. I was trying to see if my car would float. I was in a parallel universe at the time. I never tried to kill myself and leave my daughter alone, meh meh meh meh meh. I feel like crying again.

      ‘Hello, Katarina.’

      A friendly face: Ron, behind the bar. He’s owned this pub for decades, possibly centuries: I wonder if he kindled the hearth fire in 1847. He certainly knew my mum, who loved this poetic little pub with its ghosts and legends and mummified cats buried in the walls, and the stones of the Iron Age village visible from the saloon bar windows. He knew she called me Katarina, and he knows that I shortened it to Kath because I felt it was pretentious. So he teases me.

      ‘Hey, Ron. Call me Kath?’

      ‘Nah,’ he says. ‘Doesn’t feel right. What would your mum think?’

      We’ve probably had this conversation six hundred times. It is comfort food for my soul, right now.

      ‘How are you, Kat? I heard about the accident.’

      ‘Oh, OK. Recovering. Wouldn’t mind the odd