Just Before I Died. S. K. Tremayne

fine to arrange loads of creepy dead birds in rows and circles.’ I laugh, and hug her again. ‘What kind of birds are they, anyway? And what is the pattern, is it a face?’

      But now her head is turned, looking down the farm track, past the conifer plantation, past Hobajob’s Wood, as if she can hear something. In the far distance. I’ve known her to hear cars minutes before they arrive, long before anyone else.

      ‘Lyla?’

      What can she hear? A raven makes a cronking sound overhead as it wheels across the dull grey sky. Yet her focus seems to be on something else, further away. What is she sensing, coming towards us, down from the tors? The memories hurt. My head stings with pain.

      ‘Lyla.’

      No reply.

      ‘Lyla, what is it, what can you hear?’

      ‘The usual man, Mummy, the man on the moor. That’s all.’ Her words are a ghostly vapour in the cold. Her anorak is unzipped and I see she is wearing only a T-shirt underneath. She should be freezing, and yet she never seems to suffer from the cold: she likes the fierce Dartmoor winters, same as her dad. They both relish the cold. The snow. The icicles that hang from the splintered granite. ‘You know, Mummy, that if you see a lot of crows they are rooks, but a rook by itself is a crow. Did you know that?’

      I reach for her once more. ‘Lyla.’

      She squirms away from my touch. ‘Don’t touch me, Mummy. Leave me be.’

      She is snarling. Lyla does this when she is angry or alarmed or overstimulated, she snarls, grimaces, and waves her hands. She does this at school as well: she can’t help it, but it means other children laugh at her, or are scared by her. Isolating her further. She has so few friends. She probably has no real friends.

      ‘Lyla. Stop this.’

      ‘Go away, grrr …’

      ‘Please—’

      ‘YARK!’

      There’s nothing I can do. I step away, watching my daughter as she goes running to the farmyard gate, calling for the real dogs: I can hear them yapping, see our two big mongrel lurchers galloping after her.

      She could be gone for another two hours now, half a day even, running across the fields, romping through Hobajob’s, hunting for that Saxon cross lost in the nettles by the brook, with Felix and Randal on each side. Adam supposedly bought the dogs for Lyla, but he loves them as much as she does. They hunt, like proper dogs. They bring back dead rabbits, necks lolling, blood dripping from their muzzles. He likes to skin these hot, reeking corpses in front of Lyla, teaching her authentic Dartmoor ways, tossing gobbets of raw meat to the hungry dogs. Eat them up, you eat them all up.

      Lyla is far away in the distance.

      What can I do?

      Let them play, I think, let them go. Lyla is clearly still upset about my accident. We’ve tried to talk to her about it, as gently as possible, I’ve told her I hit some ice and veered into deep water. We’ve spared her too many details but she will surely have heard stuff from kids at school, in the papers, on the net. We’ve also told Lyla that my memories are hazy but that they will return. Retrograde amnesia. Common after car accidents, caused by the brain ricocheting inside the skull.

      Back in the kitchen I wash the coffee mug in the sink and gaze out of the window. In the distance I hear barking, getting nearer, louder. Then they come bursting through the door, the dogs happy, big and growling. Lyla lingers in the doorway, oblivious, it seems, to the bitter wind at her back.

      ‘Daddy is on the moor again.’

      ‘What?’

      She gives me one of her blank, impenetrable smiles. ‘He’s out there again like he’s watching us, Mummy. That’s Daddy’s job, isn’t it?’

      ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘He’s a park ranger. He has to patrol everywhere, looking out for people.’

      Lyla nods and shrugs, and pursues the dogs into the living room. I stare after her, wondering how she saw her father. He’s meant to be working in his normal patch, way past Postbridge. What is he doing down here? Maybe Lyla is just confused or upset. And I can’t blame her for this dislocation, this bewilderment.

      Because her mother nearly died. Leaving her alone, forever.

       Princetown

       Monday morning

      My daughter is silent, my husband is grimly silent, but the car is making that horrible grinding sound as Adam changes gear. I don’t care. I’m happy. The winter sky over Princetown is sharp, unmarred, and today I get my freedom back.

      I’m buying a car for myself, to replace the one still sitting at the bottom of Burrator Reservoir. This is the most intense relief. Living in Dartmoor – especially somewhere as remote as Huckerby Farm – is almost impossible without transport of your own. There are barely any buses; the railway lines were ripped away in the 1960s, and in winter on the lonelier roads you might not see a car from one cold morning to the next, so you couldn’t even hitch-hike.

      During these weeks of recovery since my accident, Adam has been driving me around in his knackered old National Park Land Rover, ferrying me to work, helping me do the shopping, and it’s been a source of friction. Adam can be taciturn at the best of times but when he’s had to take me all the way to the Aldi supermarket in Tavistock I’ve sensed a certain repressed seething.

      But today I’m buying myself a secondhand Ford, from a cousin of Adam’s. We bundled together some cash from God knows where, as Adam argues with the insurance people. Adam does everything to do with cars and engines and plumbing and stoves; and I like the masculine way he handles all that.

      Turning in the passenger seat I look at Lyla, in her grey-and-white school uniform. She is staring out at the dull housing of Princetown outskirts.

      ‘Hey, sweetpea. From now on I’ll be able to take you to school again, isn’t that good?’

      She says nothing. Her face is averted. She is gently tapping the window with her fingernails. I don’t know why she does this. Perhaps it’s another sound she likes. She calls them tinkly-tankly sounds. Crackling, jingling, light metallic sounds, things like the silvery rattle of coins, or keys.

      My daughter once told me, when we stood in the summer hayfields over Buckfast, how she loved the sound of butterflies.

      There are also sounds that she hates. City sounds. Traffic. Sirens. The jostle of people in crowds. It’s one of the reasons we moved to the remoteness of Huckerby.

      ‘Lyla?’

      She turns, her blue eyes wide. Distant. ‘Mmm?’

      ‘Did you hear what I said?’

      A shake of her head. She offers me a reserved frown: as if I’ve done something wrong, but she is too polite to say. I feel a pang of pity. She is a nine-year-old girl with troubles and issues and dreams, and laughter I sometimes do not quite hear; she’s a girl who has personal names for flies and rocks and frogs, who collects wild lilies and trembling violets from Nine Maidens and Seven Lords’ Land and presses them in books. My girl, my only girl. The idea that I could have died and left her behind fills me with a terrifying sadness, that threatens to make me cry, but I fight back the emotion.

      I’ve been getting these sudden spates of sadness, or anger, ever since the accident, but I do think that I am getting the hang of them. Coping. And today I am definitely happy. Or happier. Determined to be positive: yes, it’s winter but winter is the womb of spring.

      The car grumbles.

      ‘Darling, I said today Mummy is getting a car, so that’ll make everything easier, and Daddy won’t have to do all the driving.’ I turn to him, ‘Which will be a relief, won’t