In the Woods

16

I saved the wood for Saturday night, hugging the thought to myself like a child saving a huge Easter egg with some mysterious prize inside. Sam was down in Galway for the weekend, for a niece's christening—he had the kind of extended family that holds full-scale gatherings almost on a weekly basis, someone was always getting christened or married or buried—and Cassie was going out with some of her girl friends, and Heather was going speed dating in some hotel somewhere. Nobody would even notice I had gone.

I got to Knocknaree around seven and parked on the shoulder. I had brought a sleeping bag and a torch, a thermos of well-spiked coffee and a couple of sandwiches—packing them had made me feel faintly ridiculous, like one of those earnest hikers in technologically advanced fleeces, or a kid running away from home—but nothing to light a fire with. The people in the estate were still on edge and would have been on to the cops like a shot if they saw a mysterious light, which would have been embarrassing all round, and besides I am not the Boy Scout type; I would probably have burned down what was left of the wood.

It was a still, clear evening, long slants of light turning the stone of the tower rose-gold and giving even the trenches and heaps of earth a sad, ragged magic. There was a lamb bleating, far off in the fields, and the air smelled rich and tranquil: hay, cows, some heady flower I couldn't name. Sprays of birds were practicing their V-shapes over the crest of the hill. Outside the cottage, the sheepdog sat up and huffed a warning half-bark, stared at me for a moment, then decided I was no threat and settled down again. I followed the archaeologists' bumpy trails, just wide enough for a wheelbarrow, across the site—I was wearing old runners this time, and ratty jeans and a thick sweater—to the wood.

If you, like me, are essentially a city person, then the chances are that when you imagine a wood you picture a simple thing: matching green trees in even rows, a soft carpet of dead leaves or pine needles, orderly as a child's drawing. Possibly those earnestly efficient man-made woods are in fact like that; I wouldn't know. Knocknaree wood was the real thing, and it was more intricate and more secretive than I had remembered. It had its own order, its own fierce battles and alliances. I was an intruder here, now, and I had a deep prickling sense that my presence had instantly been marked and that the wood was watching me, with an equivocal collective gaze, not yet accepting or rejecting; reserving judgment.

Mark's clearing had fresh ash in the fire-spot and a few new rollie butts scattered on the bare earth around it; he had been here again, since Katy died. I hoped devoutly that he wouldn't pick tonight to reconnect with his heritage. I took the sandwiches and the thermos and the torch out of my pockets, spread out my sleeping bag on the compact patch of flattened grass where Mark had spread his. Then I walked through the wood, slowly, taking my time.

It was like stumbling into the wreck of some great ancient city. The trees swooped higher than cathedral pillars; they wrestled for space, propped up great fallen trunks, leaned with the slope of the hill: oak, beech, ash, others I couldn't name. Long spears of light filtered, dim and sacred, through the arches of green. Swathes of ivy blurred the massive trunks, trailed in waterfalls from the branches, turned stumps into standing stones. My steps were padded by deep, springy layers of fallen leaves; when I stopped and turned over a chunk with the toe of my shoe, I smelled rich rot and saw dark wet earth, acorn caps, the pale frantic wriggle of a worm. Birds darted and called in the branches, and small warning scurries exploded as I passed.

Great drifts of undergrowth, and here and there a worn fragment of stone wall; muscular roots, green with moss and thicker than my arm. The low banks of the river, tangled with brambles (sliding down, on our hands and our backsides, Ow! my leg!) and overhung with elderberry clusters and willow. The river was like a sheet of old gold, creased and stippled with black. Slim yellow leaves floated on its surface, balancing as lightly as if it were a solid thing.

My mind sideslipped and spun. Every step set recognition thrumming in the air around me, like Morse code beating along a frequency just too high to catch. We had run here, scrambling sure-footed down the hillside along the web of faint trails; we had eaten streaky little crab apples from the twisted tree, and when I looked up into the whirl of leaves I almost expected to see us there, clinging to branches like young jungle cats and staring back. At the fringe of one of these tiny clearings (long grass, sun-dapples, clouds of ragwort and Queen Anne's lace) we had watched as Jonathan and his friends held Sandra down. Somewhere, maybe in the exact spot where I was standing, the wood had shivered and cracked open, and Peter and Jamie had slipped away.

I didn't exactly have a plan for that night, in the strictest sense of the word. Go to the wood, have a look around, spend the night there; hope something happened. Up until that moment, this lack of forethought hadn't seemed like an impediment. After all, every time I had tried to plan anything recently, it had gone spectacularly, galactically wrong; I clearly needed a change of tactics, and what could be more drastic than going into this with nothing and simply waiting to see what the wood gave me? And I suppose it appealed, too, to my sense of the picturesque. I suppose I've always had a yearning, in spite of the fact that I am temperamentally unsuited to the role in every possible way, to be a hero out of myth, golden and reckless, galloping bareback to meet my fate on a wild horse no other man could ride.

Now that I was actually there, though, this whole thing no longer seemed quite so much like a free-spirited leap of faith. It just felt vaguely hippieish—I had even considered getting stoned, in the hope that it would relax me enough to give my subconscious a sporting chance, but hash always makes me fall asleep—and more than vaguely dumb. I realized, suddenly, that the tree I was leaning against could be the very tree beside which I had been found, could still have pale scars where my fingernails had gouged into the trunk; realized, too, that it was beginning to get dark.

I almost left then. I actually went back to the clearing, shook the dead leaves off my sleeping bag, and started rolling it up. If I'm honest, the only thing that kept me there was the thought of Mark. He had spent the night here, not just once but regularly, and it didn't even seem to have occurred to him that this might be a frightening thing to do, and I couldn't stand the idea of letting him have one up on me, whether he knew about it or not. He might have had a fire, but I had a torch and a Smith amp; Wesson, although I felt slightly silly for even thinking of this. I was only a few hundred yards from civilization, or at any rate the estate. I stood still for a moment, the sleeping bag in my hands; then I unrolled it, wriggled into it up to my waist, and leaned back against a tree.

I poured myself a cup of whiskeyed coffee; the sharp, adult taste was oddly reassuring. The shards of sky dimmed overhead, from turquoise to glowing indigo; birds landed on branches and settled for the night, with businesslike, decisive exclamations and bickerings. Bats shrilled across the dig, and among the bushes there was a quick pounce, a burst of scuffling, silence. Far away, on the estate, a child called something high and rhythmic: Ally ally in free…

It came to me gradually—without surprise, really, as if it were something I had known for a long time—that, if I managed to remember anything useful, I was going to take it to O'Kelly. Not right away, maybe not for a few weeks, I would need a little time to tie up loose ends and set my affairs in order, so to speak; because when I did it, it would be the end of my career.

Only that afternoon the thought would have been like a baseball bat to the stomach. But somehow that night it seemed almost seductive, it shimmered tantalizingly in the air before me, and I turned it over with a luxurious giddiness. Being a Murder detective, the only thing on which I had ever set my heart, the thing around which I had built my wardrobe, my walk, my vocabulary, my life waking and sleeping: the thought of tossing it all away with one flick of the wrist and watching it soar into space like a bright balloon was intoxicating. I could set up as a private investigator, I thought, have a battered little office in some dingy Georgian building, my name in gold on a frosted-glass door, come to work when I chose and skate expertly around the edges of the law and harass an apoplectic O'Kelly for inside information. I wondered, dreamily, if Cassie might come with me. I could get a fedora and a trench coat and a wisecracking sense of humor; she could sit poised at hotel bars with a slinky red dress and a camera in her lipstick, to snare cheating businessmen… I almost laughed out loud.

I realized that I was falling asleep. This had not been part of my plan, such as it was, and I struggled to stay awake, but all those sleepless nights were hitting me at once, hard as a shot in the arm. I thought of the thermos of coffee, but it seemed like way too much work to reach out for it. The sleeping bag had warmed against my body and I had adjusted myself around all the little lumps and crevices in the ground and the tree; I was deliciously, narcotically comfortable. I felt the thermos cup fall from my fingers, but I couldn't open my eyes.

I don't know how long I slept. I was sitting up and biting back a shout before I was even fully awake. Someone had said, clear and sharp and right next to my ear, "What's that?"

I sat there for a long time, feeling slow waves of blood surging in my neck. The lights in the estate had gone out. The wood was silent, barely a whisper of wind through the branches overhead; somewhere a twig cracked.

Peter, whirling around on the castle wall and shooting out a hand to freeze me and Jamie on either side: "What's that?"

We had been outside all day, since the dew was still drying off the grass. It was boiling; every breath was warm as bathwater and the sky was the color of the inside of a candle flame. We had bottles of red lemonade in the grass under a tree, for when we got thirsty, but they had gone warm and flat and the ants had found them. Someone was mowing a lawn, down the street; someone else had a kitchen window open and the radio turned up loud and was singing along to "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go." Two little girls were taking turns on a pink tricycle on the sidewalk, and Peter's prissy sister Tara was playing teachers in her friend Audrey's garden, the two of them yakking at a bunch of dolls lined up in rows. The Carmichaels had bought a sprinkler; we'd never seen one before and we eyed it every time they put it out, but Mrs. Carmichael was a bitch, Peter said if you went in her garden she would smash your head in with a poker.

We had mostly been riding our bikes. Peter had got an Evil Knievel for his birthday—if you wound it up, you could make it jump piles of old Warlord annuals—and he was going to be a daredevil when he grew up, so we were practicing. We built a ramp in the road, out of bricks and a piece of plywood that Peter's dad had in the garden shed—"We'll keep making it higher," Peter said, "one brick more every day"—but it wobbled like crazy, and I could never keep myself from slamming on the brakes in the second before I took off.

Jamie tried the ramp a few times and then hung around at the edge of the street, scraping a sticker off her handlebar and kicking her pedal to make it spin. She had been late coming out that morning, and she'd been quiet all day. She always was, but this was different: her silence was like a thick private cloud all round her, and it was making me and Peter fidgety.

Peter flew off the ramp yelling and zigzagged wildly, just missing the two little girls on the tricycle. "You big ding-dongs, you'll have us all killed," Tara snapped over her dollies. She was wearing a long flowery skirt that puddled on the grass, and a weird big hat with a ribbon around it.

"You're not my boss," Peter shouted back. He swerved onto Audrey's lawn and swooped past Tara, grabbing the hat off her head as he went. Tara and Audrey shrieked in practiced unison.

"Adam! Catch!" I followed him into the garden—we would be in trouble if Audrey's mam came out—and managed to catch the hat without falling off my bike; I stuck it on my head and cycled no-hands around the dolly classroom. Audrey tried to knock me over, but I dodged. She was sort of pretty and she didn't look really mad, so I tried not to run over her dolls. Tara stuck her hands on her hips and started yelling at Peter. "Jamie!" I shouted. "Come on!"

Jamie had stayed in the road, bumping her front tire rhythmically off the edge of the ramp. She dropped her bike, took a running jump at the estate wall and swung herself over.

Peter and I forgot about Tara ("You haven't a titter of sense, so you haven't, Peter Savage, just you wait till Mammy hears about your carry-on…"), braked and looked at each other. Audrey grabbed the hat off my head and ran, checking to see if I was chasing her. We left our bikes in the road and climbed the wall after Jamie.

She was in the tire swing, kicking herself off the wall every few swings. Her head was down and all I could see was the sheet of straight pale hair and the end of her nose. We sat on the wall and waited.

"My mam measured me this morning," Jamie said in the end. She was picking at a scab on her knuckle.

I thought, puzzled, of the door-frame in our kitchen: glossy white wood, with pencil-marks and dates to show me growing. "So?" Peter said. "Big swinging mickeys."

"For uniforms!" Jamie yelled at him. "Duh!" She slid out of the tire, landed hard and ran, into the wood.

"Sheesh," Peter said. "What's her problem?"

"Boarding school," I said. The words made my legs feel watery.

Peter gave me a disgusted, incredulous grimace. "She's not going. Her mam said."

"No she didn't. She said, 'We'll see.'"

"Yeah, and then she didn't say anything else about it ever since."

"Yeah, well, now she has, hasn't she?"

Peter squinted into the sun. "Come on," he said, and jumped back down off the wall.

"Where are we going?"

He didn't answer. He picked up his bike and Jamie's and managed to wobble them both into his garden. I got mine and went after him.

Peter's mam was hanging out the washing, with a line of clothes-pegs clipped to the side of her apron. "Don't be annoying Tara," she said.

"We won't," Peter said, dumping the bikes on the grass. "Mam, we're going in the wood, OK?" The baby, Sean Paul, was lying on a blanket, wearing nothing but a nappy and trying to crawl. I poked him tentatively in the side with my toe; he rolled over, grabbed my runner and grinned up at me. "Good baby," I told him. I didn't want to go find Jamie. I wondered if maybe I could stay there, mind Sean Paul for Mrs. Savage and wait until Peter came back to tell me Jamie was going away.

"Tea at half past six," Mrs. Savage said, reaching out absently to smooth down Peter's hair as he passed. "Have you your watch?"

"Yeah." Peter waved his wrist at her. "Come on, Adam, let's go."

When something was wrong we mostly went to the same place: the top room of the castle. The staircase leading up to it had long since crumbled away, and from the ground you couldn't even really tell it was there; you had to climb the outer wall, all the way over the top, and then jump down onto the stone floor. Ivy trailing down the walls, branches tumbling overhead: it was like a bird's nest, swinging high up in the air.

Jamie was there, huddled up in a corner with one elbow crooked across her mouth. She was crying, hard and clumsily. Once, ages before, she had caught her foot in a rabbit hole when she was running, and broken her ankle; we had given her a fireman's lift all the way back home and she had never cried, not even when I tripped and jolted her leg, just yelled, "Ow, Adam, you thick!" and pinched my arm.

I climbed down into the room. "Go away!" Jamie shouted at me, muffled by her arm and tears. Her face was red and her hair was tangled, clips hanging off sideways. "Leave me alone."

Peter was still on top of the wall. "Are you going to boarding school?" he demanded.

Jamie squeezed her eyes and mouth tight, but choked-up sobs broke through all the same. I could barely hear what she was saying. "She never said, she acted like it was all OK, and all the time…she was just lying!"

It was the unfairness of it that knocked the breath out of me. We'll see, Jamie's mother had said, don't worry about it; and we had believed her and stopped worrying. No grown-up had ever betrayed us before, not about something that mattered like this, and I couldn't take it in. We had lived that whole summer trusting that we had forever.

Peter balanced anxiously along the wall and back again, stood on one foot. "So we'll do the same thing again. We'll have a mutiny. We'll—"

"No!" Jamie cried. "She's paid the fees and everything, it's too late—I'm going in two weeks! Two weeks…" Her hands balled into fists and she slammed them against the wall.

I couldn't stand it. I knelt down beside Jamie and put my arm around her shoulders; she shook it off, but when I put it back she left it there. "Don't, Jamie," I begged. "Please don't cry." The green and gold whirl of branches all around, Peter baffled and Jamie crying, the silky skin of her arm making my hand tingle; the whole world seemed to be rocking, the stone of the castle rolling beneath me like the decks of ships in films—"You'll be back every weekend…"

"It won't be the same!" Jamie cried. Her head went back and she sobbed without even trying to hide it, frail brown throat turned up to the fragments of sky. The utter wretchedness in her voice cut straight through me and I knew she was right: it was never going to be the same, not ever again.

"No, Jamie, don't—Stop…" I couldn't stay still. I knew it was stupid but for a moment I wanted to tell her I would go instead; I would take her place, she could stay here forever… Before I knew I was going to do it, I ducked my head and kissed her on the cheek. Her tears were wet on my mouth. She smelled like grass in the sun, hot and green, intoxicating.

She was so startled that she stopped crying. Her head whipped round and she stared at me, wide red-rimmed blue eyes, very close. I knew she was going to do something, punch me, kiss me back—

Peter leaped off the wall and dropped to his knees in front of us. He grabbed my wrist in one hand, hard, and Jamie's in the other. "Listen," he said. "We'll run away."

We stared at him.

"That's stupid," I said at last. "They'll catch us."

"No, no they won't, not right away. We can hide here for a few weeks, no problem. It doesn't have to be forever or anything—just till it's safe. Once that school's started, we can go home; it'll be too late. And even if they send her anyway, so what? We'll run away again. We'll go up to Dublin and get Jamie out. Then they'll expel her and she'll have to come back home. See?"

His eyes were shining. The idea caught, flared, spun in the air between us.

"We could live here," Jamie said. She caught her breath in a long, hiccuppy shudder. "In the castle, I mean."

"We'll move every day. Here, the clearing, that big tree where the branches do that nest thing. We won't give them a chance to catch up with us. You really think anyone could find us in here? Come on!"

Nobody knew the wood like we did. Sliding through the undergrowth, light and silent as Indian braves; watching motionless from thickets and high branches as the searchers clumped past…

"We'll take turns sleeping." Jamie was sitting up straighter. "One of us can keep watch."

"But our parents," I said. I thought of my mother's warm hands and imagined her crying, distraught. "They're going to be really worried. They'll think—"

Jamie's mouth set. "Yeah, my mam won't. She doesn't want me around anyway."

"My mam mostly only thinks about the little ones," Peter said, "and my dad definitely won't care." Jamie and I glanced at each other. We never talked about it, but we both knew Peter's dad sometimes hit them when he got drunk. "And anyway, who cares if your parents worry? They didn't tell you Jamie was going to boarding school, did they? They just let you think everything was fine!"

He was right, I thought, light-headed. "I guess I could leave them a note," I said. "Just so they know we're OK."

Jamie started to say something, but Peter cut her off. "Yeah, perfect! Leave them a note saying we've gone to Dublin, or Cork or somewhere. Then they'll be looking for us there, and we'll be right here all the time."

He jumped up, pulling us with him. "Are you in?"

"I'm not going to boarding school," Jamie said, wiping her face with the back of her arm. "I'm not, Adam. I'm not. I'll do anything."

"Adam?" Living wild, brown and barefoot among the trees. The castle wall felt cool and misty under my hand. "Adam, what else are we supposed to do? Do you want to just let them send Jamie away? Don't you want to do something?"

He shook my wrist. His hand was hard, urgent; I could feel my pulse beating in its grasp. "I'm in," I said.

"Yes!" Peter yelled, punching the air. The shout echoed up into the trees, high and wild and triumphant.

"When?" Jamie demanded. Her eyes were bright with relief and her mouth was open in a smile; she was poised on her toes, ready to take off as soon as Peter gave the word. "Now?"

"Relax," Peter told her, grinning. "We have to get ready. We'll go home and get all our money. We need supplies, but we have to buy them a little every day, so nobody gets suspicious."

"Sausages and potatoes," I said. "We can build a fire and get sticks—"

"No, no fire, they'd see it. Don't get anything that needs cooking. Get stuff in tins, spaghetti hoops and baked beans and stuff. Say it's for your mam."

"Someone better bring a tin-opener—"

"Me; my mam has an extra one, she won't know."

"Sleeping bags, and our torches—"

"Duh, but that's not till the last minute, we don't want them noticing they're gone—"

"We can wash our clothes in the river—"

"—stick all our rubbish down a hollow tree so no one finds it—"

"How much money have you guys got?"

"My confirmation money's all in the bank, I can't get it."

"So we'll get cheap stuff, milk and bread—"

"Eww, milk'll go bad!"

"No it won't, we can keep it in the river in a plastic bag—"

"Jamie drinks chunky milk!" Peter yelled. He jumped at the wall and started scrambling up to the top.

Jamie leaped after him. "I do not, you drink chunky milk, you—" She grabbed Peter's ankle and they tussled on top of the wall, giggling wildly. I caught up with them, and Peter shot out an arm and dragged me into the scuffle. We wrestled, yelping and breathless with laughter, balancing dangerously half over the edge. "Adam eats bugs—" "Screw you, that was when we were little—"

"Shut up!" Peter snapped suddenly. He shook us off and froze, crouched on the wall, hands out to silence us. "What's that?"

Motionless and alert as startled hares, we listened. The wood was still, too still, waiting; the normal afternoon bustle of birds and insects and unseen little animals had been cut off as if by a conductor's baton. Only somewhere, up ahead of us—

"What the…" I whispered.

"Shhh." Music, or a voice; or just some trick of the river on stones, the breeze in the hollow oak? The wood had a million voices, changing with every season and every day; you could never know them all.

"Come on," said Jamie, her eyes shining, "come on," and launched herself like a flying squirrel off the wall. She caught a branch, swung, dropped and rolled and ran; Peter was leaping after her before the branch stopped swaying, and I scrambled down the wall and chased behind them, "Wait for me, wait—"

The wood had never been so lush or so feral. Leaves threw off dazzles of sunlight like sparklers and the colors were so bright you could live on them, the smell of fertile earth amplified to something heady as church wine. We shot through humming clouds of midges and leaped ditches and rotten logs, branches swirled around us like water, swallows trapezed across our path and in the trees alongside I swear three deer kept pace with us. I felt light and lucky and wild, I had never run so fast or jumped so effortlessly high; one shove of my foot and I could have been airborne.

How long did we run? All the familiar loved landmarks must have shifted, turned out to wish us good speed, because we passed every one of them on our way; we jumped the stone table and soared through the clearing in one bound, between the whip of the blackberry bushes and the rabbits poking up their noses to see us go by, we left the tire swing swaying in our wake and swung one-handed round the hollow oak. And up ahead, so sweet and wild it hurt, drawing us on—

Gradually I became aware that under the sleeping bag I was drenched in sweat; that my back, pressed against the tree trunk, was so rigid that I was shaking, my head nodding in stiff convulsive jerks like a toy's. The wood was black, blank, as if I had been blinded. Far off, there was a quick pittering sound like raindrops on leaves, tiny and spreading. I fought to ignore it, to keep following where that frail gold thread of memory led, not to drop it in this darkness or I would never find my way home.

Laughter streaming over Jamie's shoulder like bright soap-bubbles, bees whirling in a sunbeam and Peter's arms flying out as he leaped a fallen branch whooping. My shoelaces coming undone and alarm peals rising fiercely somewhere inside me as I felt the estate dissolving to mist behind us, are you sure, are you sure, Peter, Jamie, wait, stop—

The pittering sound was catching all through the wood, rising and falling, drawing closer on every side. It was in the branches high overhead, in the undergrowth behind me, small and swift and intent. The hairs rose on the back of my neck. Rain, I told myself with whatever was left of my mind, just rain, though I couldn't feel a drop. Off at the other side of the wood something screamed, a shrill witless sound.

Come on, Adam, hurry, hurry up—

The darkness in front of me was shifting, condensing. There was a sound like wind in the leaves, a great rushing wind coming down through the wood to clear a path. I thought of the torch, but my fingers were frozen around it. I felt that gold thread twist and tug. Somewhere across the clearing something breathed; something big.

Down by the river. Skidding to a stop; willow branches swaying and the water firing off splinters of light like a million tiny mirrors, blinding, dizzying. Eyes, golden and fringed like an owl's.

I ran. I scrabbled out of the clutching sleeping bag and threw myself into the wood, away from the clearing. Brambles clawed at my legs and hair, wing-beats exploded in my ear; I shoulder-barged straight into a tree trunk, knocking myself breathless. Invisible dips and hollows flicked open under my feet and I couldn't run fast enough, legs crashing knee-deep through underbrush, it was like every childhood nightmare come true. Trailing ivy wrapped my face and I think I screamed. I knew beyond all doubt I would never get out of the wood, they would find my sleeping bag—for an instant I saw, sharp as reality, Cassie in her red sweater, kneeling in the clearing among falling leaves and reaching out a gloved hand to touch the fabric—and nothing else, ever.

Then I saw a fingernail of new moon between racing clouds and knew I was out, on the dig. The ground was treacherous, it sideslipped and gave under my feet and I stumbled, flailing, barked my shin on a fragment of some old wall; saved my balance in the nick of time and kept running. There was a harsh gasping sound loud in my ears, but I couldn't tell whether it came from me. Like every detective, I had taken it for granted that I was the hunter. It had never once occurred to me that I might have been the hunted, all along.

The Land Rover loomed up radiantly white through the darkness like some sweet shining church offering sanctuary. It took me two or three tries to get the door open; once I dropped my keys and had to grope frantically in the leaves and dry grass, staring wildly over my shoulder and sure I would never find them, until I remembered I was still holding the torch. Finally I clambered in, banging my elbow off the steering wheel, locked all the doors and sat there, gasping for breath and sweating all over. I was way too shaky to drive; I doubt I could even have pulled out without hitting something. I found my cigarettes, managed to light one. I wished, badly, that I had a stiff drink, or a large joint. There were huge smears of mud across the knees of my jeans, though I didn't remember falling.

When my hands were steady enough to push buttons, I phoned Cassie. It had to be well after midnight, maybe much later, but she answered on the second ring, sounding wide awake. "Hi, you, what's up?"

For one hideous moment I thought my voice wasn't going to work. "Where are you?"

"I just got home like twenty minutes ago. Emma and Susanna and I went to the cinema and then had dinner at the Trocadero and, God, they gave us the loveliest red wine ever. These three guys tried to chat us up, Emma said they were actors and she'd seen one of them on TV in that hospital thing—"

She was tipsy, but not actually drunk. "Cassie," I said. "I'm in Knocknaree. At the dig."

A tiny, fractional pause. Then she said calmly, in a different voice, "Want me to pick you up?"

"Yeah. Please." I hadn't realized, till she said it, that that was why I had rung her.

"OK. See you soon." She hung up.

It took her forever to get there, long enough that I started imagining panicky nightmare scenarios: she had been splattered across the highway by a truck, got a flat tire and been abducted from the roadside by human traffickers. I managed to pull out my gun and hold it in my lap—I had enough sense left not to cock it. I chain-smoked; the car filled up with a haze that made my eyes water. Outside, things rustled and pounced in the undergrowth, twigs snapped; over and over I whipped round with my heart racing wildly and my hand tightening on the gun, sure I had seen a face at the window, feral and laughing, but there was never anything there. I tried switching on the roof light, but it made me feel too conspicuous, like some primitive man with predators drawn by the firelight circling just beyond its glow, and I turned it off again almost at once.

At last I heard the Vespa buzzing, saw the beam of its headlamp coming over the hill. I got my gun back into its holster and opened the door; I didn't want Cassie to see me fumbling with it. After the darkness her lights were dazzling, surreal. She pulled up in the road, bracing the bike with her foot, and called, "Hey."

"Hi," I said, stumbling out of the car; my legs were cramped and stiff, I must have been pressing both feet against the floorboards the whole time. "Thanks."

"No problem. I was awake anyway." She was flushed and bright-eyed from the wind of driving, and when I got close enough I felt its cold aura striking off her. She swung her rucksack off her back and pulled out her spare helmet. "Here."

Inside the helmet I couldn't hear anything, only the bike's steady hum and the blood beating in my ears. The air flowed past me, dark and cool as water; cars' headlights and neon signs streamed by in bright lazy trails. Cassie's rib cage was slight and solid between my hands, shifting as she changed gears or leaned into a turn. I felt as if the bike was floating, high above the road, and I wished we were on one of those endless American freeways where you could drive on and on forever through the night.

She had been reading in bed when I rang. The futon was pulled out, made up with the patchwork duvet and white pillows; Wuthering Heights and her oversized T-shirt were tumbled at the foot. There were semi-organized heaps of work stuff—a photo of the ligature mark on Katy's neck leaped out at me, hung in the air like an afterimage—scattered across the coffee table and the sofa, overlaid with Cassie's going-out clothes: slim dark jeans, a red silk handkerchief top embroidered in gold. The chubby little bedside lamp gave the room a cozy glow.

"When did you last eat?" Cassie asked.

I had forgotten about my sandwiches, presumably still somewhere in the clearing. My sleeping bag and my thermos, too; I would have to get them in the morning, when I picked up my car. A fast finger ran down my neck at the thought of going back in there, even by daylight. "I'm not sure," I said.

Cassie rummaged in the wardrobe, passed me a bottle of brandy and a glass. "Have a shot of that while I make food. Eggs on toast?"

Neither of us likes brandy—the bottle was unopened and dusty, probably a prize from the Christmas raffle or something—but a small objective part of my mind was pretty sure that she was right, I was in some kind of shock. "Yeah, great," I said. I sat down on the edge of the futon—the thought of clearing all that stuff off the sofa seemed almost unimaginably complicated—and stared at the bottle for a while until I realized I was supposed to open it.

I threw down way too much brandy, coughed (Cassie glanced over, said nothing) and felt it kick in, burning trails of warmth through my veins. My tongue throbbed; I had apparently bitten it, at some point or other. I poured myself another shot and sipped it more carefully. Cassie moved deftly around the kitchenette, pulling herbs out of a cupboard with one hand and eggs out of the fridge with the other and shoving a drawer shut with her hip. She had left music on—the Cowboy Junkies, turned down low, faint and slow and haunting; normally I like them, but tonight I kept hearing things hidden somewhere behind the bass line, quick whispers, calls, a throb of drumbeat that shouldn't have been there. "Can we turn that off?" I said, when I couldn't stand it any longer. "Please?"

She turned from the frying pan to look at me, a wooden spoon in her hand. "Yeah, sure," she said after a moment. She switched off the stereo, popped the toast and piled the eggs on top of it. "Here."

The smell made me realize how hungry I was. I shoveled the food down in huge mouthfuls, barely stopping to breathe; it was whole-grain bread and the eggs were redolent with herbs and spices, and nothing had ever tasted so richly delicious. Cassie sat cross-legged at the top of the futon, watching me over a piece of toast. "More?" she said, when I had finished.

"No," I said. Too much too quickly: my stomach was cramping viciously. "Thanks."

"What happened?" she said quietly. "Did you remember something?"

I started to cry. I cry so seldom—only once or twice since I was thirteen, I think, and both those times I was so drunk that it doesn't really count—that it took me a moment to understand what was happening. I rubbed a hand across my face and stared at my wet fingers. "No," I said. "Nothing that does any good. I can remember all that afternoon, going into the wood and what we were talking about, and hearing something—I can't remember what—and going to find out what it was… And then I panicked. I fucking panicked." My voice cracked.

"Hey," Cassie said. She scooted across the futon and put a hand on my shoulder. "That's a huge step, hon. Next time you'll remember the rest."

"No," I said. "No, I won't." I couldn't explain, I'm still not sure what made me so certain: this had been my ace in the hole, my one shot, and I had blown it. I put my face in my hands and sobbed like a child.

She didn't put her arms around me or try to comfort me, and I was grateful for this. She just sat there quietly, her thumb moving regularly on my shoulder, while I cried. Not for those three children, I can't claim that, but for the unbridgeable distance that lay between them and me: for the millions of miles, and the planets separating at dizzying speed. For how much we had had to lose. We had been so small, so recklessly sure that together we could defy all the dark and complicated threats of the adult world, run straight through them like a game of Red Rover, laughing and away.

"Sorry about that," I said at last. I straightened up and wiped my face with the back of my wrist.

"For what?"

"Making an idiot of myself. I didn't intend to do that."

Cassie shrugged. "So we're even. Now you know how I feel when I have those dreams and you have to wake me up."

"Yeah?" This had never occurred to me.

"Yeah." She rolled over onto her stomach on the futon, reached for a packet of tissues in the bedside table and passed them to me. "Blow."

I managed to work up a weak smile, and blew my nose. "Thanks, Cass."

"How're you doing?"

I caught a long shuddery breath and yawned, suddenly and irrepressibly. "I'm all right."

"You about ready to crash?"

The tension was slowly draining out of my shoulders and I was more exhausted than I'd ever been in my life, but there were still quick little shadows zipping past my eyelids, and every sigh and crack of the house settling made me jerk. I knew that if Cassie switched off the light and I was alone on the sofa the air would fill up with layers of nameless things, pressing and mouthing and twittering. "I think so," I said. "Would it be OK if I slept here?"

"Sure. If you snore, though, you're back on the sofa." She sat up, blinking, and started to take out her hair clips.

"I won't," I said. I leaned over and took off my shoes and socks, but both the etiquette and the physical act of undressing seemed way too difficult to negotiate. I climbed under the duvet with all my clothes on.

Cassie pulled off her sweater and slid in beside me, curls standing up in a riot of cowlicks. Without even thinking about it I put my arms around her, and she curled her back against me.

"Night, hon," I said. "Thanks again."

She gave my arm a pat and stretched to switch off the bedside lamp. "Night, silly. Sleep tight. Wake me up if you want to."

Her hair against my face had a sweet green smell, like tea leaves. She settled her head on the pillow and sighed. She felt warm and compact, and I thought vaguely of polished ivory, glossy chestnuts: the pure, piercing satisfaction when something fits perfectly into your hand. I couldn't remember the last time I had held anyone like this.

"Are you awake?" I whispered, after a long time.

"Yeah," Cassie said.

We lay very still. I could feel the air around us changing, blooming and shimmering like the air over a scorching road. My heart was speeding, or hers was banging against my chest, I'm not sure. I turned Cassie in my arms and kissed her, and after a moment she kissed me back.

I know I said that I always choose the anticlimactic over the irrevocable, and yes of course what I meant was that I have always been a coward, but I lied: not always, there was that night, there was that one time.