When they had finished their tea Trevor put his hand over hers. ‘This is what you want, isn’t it?’
Alice nodded. Not the flying and the lonely distance and the weight of uncertainty, but to be doing something that would connect her to him instead of waiting and fading in a life that no longer fitted her.
‘You will come home if you can’t find what you’re looking for?’
‘Of course I will.’ But she didn’t want even to consider that possibility, because it left too much aching space that didn’t have Rooker in it.
Trevor blew his nose. ‘I think I’ll get back to your mother. Do you mind if I don’t wait until the last moment?’
‘Of course not.’
He pushed Meg towards the exit and Alice linked her arm through his.
‘I love you,’ they told each other at the terminal doors. Trevor tried to smile, then smoothed his hair over the dome of his head and turned abruptly away. Alice watched him go, one hand raised and the other gripping the handle of the buggy, torn between the old familiar and the new desire.
When she could no longer see him she turned back into the endless cycle of the airport.
Rooker weaved his way through the fast traffic. The road signs and the miles flashed past. ‘Wait for me, wait for me,’ he muttered. The first sign for Heathrow whirled at him and then the second. The daylight was turning blue-purple as the sun sank.
He was almost there. A plane rose on his right hand, its nose lifting towards the sky. Wait for me, wait for me. Fifteen minutes later he was at the airport turn-off. He
hunched forward over the wheel, searching for signs to guide him through the unfamiliar layout of flyovers and underpasses. There was no time to return the hire car. He slammed it into the terminal car park and ran.
The airport was packed. Queues stretched from the check-in desks for all the overnight long-haul destinations. He stood at the top of an escalator and scanned the crowds. She was here. She was here
somewhere
.
He ran to the enquiries desk. A plump woman in a uniform blinked at his gabbled request.
‘Could you repeat that?’
He repeated himself, wrote down her name, begged for help.
‘I’ll see if we can do that for you.’
He tore himself away from the desk and ran again. ‘Departures’ a sign informed him.
Alice changed some money, bought herself a magazine, wondered if she had the right clothes for Meg. There would be shops in New Zealand, she reminded herself. She went into a cloakroom and changed Meg’s nappy. There would be time to find a quiet corner to feed her and change her once more before they boarded. Her head was bent over Meg and a distant tannoy announcement was no more than a scramble of words.
She put the baby back into the buggy and slowly wheeled her towards the ‘Departures’ barrier. There was a long crowded slope, divided into aisles by chrome handrails. An electric zigzag of carpet led to boarding controls, and beyond that she could see baggage scanning machines and the white glitter of duty-free shops. The buggy was rolling down the slope, drawing her with it. There were people flowing around her, some of them walking backwards, in tears, eyes fixed on those they were leaving behind. There was a bored man
behind a tall desk, holding out his hand for her boarding card.
Rooker pushed through the crowds and sprinted past shops. The aimless surges became a steady slow tide, creeping towards ‘Departures’. He scanned the backs of heads as they bobbed in front of him. He reached a chrome rail and a slope leading downwards. The press was thickest here. People leaned over the rail with their hands to their mouths or stretched out in a final wave. He stared down at the sea of heads.
She was there.
There she was
. He could see her dark head, held upright.
She was at the desk, boarding card in hand.
‘Alice,’ he roared. ‘Alice, Alice.’
The airport stilled for a second.
He was aware of a flowering of faces as the people all turned to stare at him.
Someone was calling her name. She froze, with her hand raised to take back her boarding card.
It was his voice.
Her head turned, the eyes of strangers catching the corner of hers.
It was Rook. Blood rushed to her head, hammered in the chambers of her ears. He vaulted over a rail, stumbled and pushed his way through the crowd as the slow tide crept forward again.
‘Could you stand aside, please?’ an official voice ordered.
But she couldn’t move in case something might break and admit reality again.
It
was
him. He reached her and caught her in his arms and held her against him. She could hear his heart, feel the pulse in his neck. Their mouths met blindly.
‘Stand
aside
, please.’
The current was flowing around them as if they were two rocks standing up against a lee shore. His mouth moved against hers, shaping her name. She tasted and smelled the familiarity, the strangeness, the solid manifest reality of him, after months of waiting and wishing.
‘It is really you, isn’t it?’ Her mouth suddenly curved against his, warm with amazement and delight.
Over their heads a disembodied voice spoke her name, advising her to contact the information desk.
‘It is. You can’t escape,’ he answered. He held on to her and to Meg’s buggy as they pushed their way back up the ramp, against the endless outwards current.
When they reached a quieter place he propelled her aside and took her face between his hands. ‘Why are you going to New Zealand?’
He had to hear it from her, spoken in her voice.
She looked down, seeing the top of Meg’s head. ‘I’m going to Turner. Russ found a newspaper report from the
Turner & Medfield Clarion
.’ She had the printout of it in her hand luggage along with the picture of him standing outside Margaret Mather House. ‘It’s your family, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I tried everything else, Rook. I couldn’t think of any other way to find you. I thought if I went there I might find a link and I could follow the chain and in the end it would have to lead me to you.’
There wasn’t a shiver of unhappiness in her but her eyes filled with tears. They ran down her face and he tried to smooth them away, wordless, amazed that she was prepared to do this much.
‘Where have you been?’ she whispered.
He was looking down too, at Meg asleep between them.
‘Cuba. Mexico. New York State. Oxford. It doesn’t matter
where. Forgive me. Running away, then running to get here.’
‘Oxford?’
‘I flew in this morning, drove straight to your house. I missed you by about an hour.’
She was shaking her head, gazing at him through her tears. ‘You have to tell me the truth.’
‘I’ve never told you a lie, Alice. I swear. I swear on her life.’ He kneeled down then in front of Meg. She was transformed from the tiny, blood-smeared grey-pink fragment of humanity he had seen in the Zodiac on the frozen shore. Meg was round-cheeked now, with a crescent of dark eyelashes showing against her translucent skin. Her hand was curled on the blanket. The fingernails were perfect, the colour of rosy shells.
Alice said in a quiet clear voice, ‘You told me that you are a murderer. What does that mean?’
Rooker stood up, the terminal briefly swimming around him. The time had come to tell the secret that he had never confessed to another living soul.
He looked blankly at the throngs of people. ‘Can we go somewhere?’
‘There’s a place just up here.’
The tables were crowded and messy with spilled drinks and food debris. They found one as two people stood up to go. Alice moved aside two tall paper cups, a plate of cold chips smeared with ketchup. They sat down close together, their heads almost touching, Meg’s buggy drawn up beside them. He held her wrists in his hands, one thumb resting on the puckered skin of the long scar, as if to restrain her when she tried to run away.
‘Tell me now.’
He closed his eyes. It was hot and Tannoy announcements boomed over their heads.
‘Fire’ was the first word he managed to say. They both
remembered the smoke and the flames, and the roar as the walls of the old hut were engulfed.
Alice waited, but he seemed lost for what to say next.
‘Why did your mother do what she did?’ she gently prompted.
He took a deep breath. Close, grease-tainted air filled his chest.
‘She was an alcoholic. I was used to that; we could have managed between us. I looked after her when she needed it; she was a good mother in the in-between times. She was funny and clever and good company. I didn’t feel deprived, you know. I was luckier than some of my friends.’ Gabby Macfarlane, for instance. ‘Then Lester arrived.’
‘Was he her lover?’
‘No.’ Rooker turned his head away. She studied his quarter-profile, still only just able to believe that he was really here. ‘He tried to be mine.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Twelve.’ The dam was cracking. Words started to spill out of him. They were ugly in his mouth, but relief was already flooding in after them. ‘I didn’t know he was there, Alice. I swear to you. He was at our house, drinking. He’d just come on to me, not for the first time, and I was disgusted. I hated him and I wanted to hurt him, but I didn’t want him to
die
. I stole a bottle of scotch and ran out of the house. I drank as much of it as I could, then I went round to his caravan and set fire to it.’
The flood broke loose now. He talked faster and faster. Alice leaned forward, holding his hands. Her eyes never left his face.
‘I didn’t know he was in there. I didn’t mean to kill him. And after he was found dead, no one had seen me, my mother couldn’t remember anything. I just told everyone flatly that I’d been at home in bed all the time. Then I
waited, wanting them to find out the truth, because it was too much of a secret to keep. But no one tried very hard. He drank, he was a queer, he was a misfit in Turner anyway. The police probably thought it was no more than he deserved. But what it meant, as well as a man being dead because of me, was that my mother lost her friend. He was grown up, he was someone to tease her and keep her company and listen to her grief. I didn’t understand that, I thought she shouldn’t need anyone but me. She didn’t survive very long after Lester died. I suppose she felt too lonely. In the end she just got into the bath and pulled the electric fire in after her.’ He hesitated, but only for a second. ‘I came home from school and found her.’
A group of big men in football shirts noisily pushed past their table, beer slopping from their full pints. Rooker stared straight ahead, not seeing Alice or the crowds. He only saw his mother now, the last image he had suppressed. Tears ran out of his eyes and down his cheeks.
Alice stood up and went round the table to him. She wrapped her arms protectively round him and cupped his head against her ribs. She stroked his hair and leaned down so that her mouth was against his ear. ‘You are not a murderer,’ she whispered. ‘You never were a murderer.’
They stayed still. Rooker wept openly and Alice held him close. They created an eye of motionless silence together, in the midst of the airport’s turbulence. And because it was an airport, where tears and delight were ordinary currency, nobody spared them more than a glance.
At last he was able to speak again. He felt empty, but calm. If Alice were to reject him now, he thought, it would hurt him deeply. But it would not be the end of him.
‘Now you know,’ he said simply. ‘What shall we do?’
They looked into each other’s eyes for a long moment. The airport noise swirled around them, but they were deaf
to everything. Alice found that she was smiling. ‘I don’t care. As long as we are together.’
His grasp tightened. ‘Don’t go to New Zealand.’
‘Come with me,’ she countered.
The flight wasn’t quite full, they had told her that at check-in. ‘We can go back to Turner together. The three of us.’
She didn’t think for a moment that what Rook had just told her would be the end of the darkness for him. But if they went back together and turned over the stones of his memories, maybe they could lay a solid foundation for the future.
Because her future, and Meg’s, did lie with Rooker. She was as certain of that as anything she had ever known, and the travel and the distance and what lay beyond the gates of the airports was only so much detail by comparison.
He said, ‘I haven’t been back there since they took me to the children’s home.’
‘We should go now.’
Light suddenly kindled in Rooker’s eyes. It was simple.
Everything was simple. They had each other.
‘Wait here.’ He grinned.
‘Oh, no. Wherever you go, I’m coming with you.’
They leaped up. Hand in hand, propelling Meg in front of them, they ran like the wind back through the tide of travellers.
A flight attendant walked down the aisle. He leaned over the occupant of the seat next to Alice’s. ‘I wonder’, he murmured to the gap-year backpacker, ‘if you would be willing to exchange seats so that this family can travel together?’
Rooker felt a jolt of amazement at the word, then a sense of happiness taking root that he had never known before.
‘Sure.’ The boy shrugged indifferently.
The plane took off and London dwindled beneath them. Alice and Rooker sat with their hands linked, not speaking, knowing how much talking there was still to do. Rags of cloud blotted out the orange bloom of the city as they climbed. Ties and memories and fears dropped behind them.
They were airborne, in their jet capsule, suspended between what had been and whatever was to come.
Rooker released Alice’s hand for a moment and fumbled in his pocket. He brought out a small curl of red Velcro fabric and dropped it into her palm.
One-handed, because Meg lay in her other arm, Alice unfurled it. It was a name label from an EU Antarctic Expedition parka.
Peel
, it said.
Andrew Prossin of Peregrine Adventures generously enabled me to make two unforgettable trips to Antarctica aboard the
Akademik loffe
. I am grateful to Bill Davis, Aaron and Cathy Lawton, David McGonigal and all the expedition staff and ship’s crew in the 2000 and 2003 seasons. Andrew Prossin also introduced me to Professor Christo Pimpirev of the Department of Geology at the University of Sofia, who immediately invited a stranger to join his team for part of a season at St Kliment Ohridski Base, Livingston Island, South Shetlands. Without the opportunity to live and work alongside the members of the Eleventh Bulgaria Antarctic Expedition I could not have written this book. Nor would I have enjoyed the experience of a lifetime.