The old man’s right arm was held out at an unnatural angle, creasing the sleeve of his jacket into an ugly concertina of fabric.
o -* o J
She knew that Harry felt himself being physically tugged towards the woods along the valley side; his body was tense with the effort of resisting the pull. But emotionally he was being drawn in two directions. The conflicting pressures only seemed to strengthen and toughen him, setting his shoulders rigid and hardening the line of his jaw. His face held no possibility of turning away from whatever he had decided to do.
‘Granddad? Please.’
The sharp edges of the stone wall were digging into her thighs through her shorts, and the skin of the palm on her left hand stung where she had scraped it on the jagged topping stones. There had been a sudden, desperate rush, a moment of overwhelming emotion, and now she didn’t know what to say. She felt the impotence of the conventions that surrounded the communication between one adult and another, even when they were members of the same family. She shared with her grandfather an inborn shortage of the words she needed to be able to express her feelings to those closest to her.
‘Grandma is very upset,’ said Helen. ‘But she’ll calm down in a minute. She’s worried about you.’
Helen had never needed many words before, not with Harry. He had always known exactly what she wanted, had always responded to the message in her eyes, to the shy, adoring
smile, to the gleam of sun on a wave of flame-coloured hair, and to a small, trusting hand slipped into his own. She was no longer that child, and hadn’t been for years. A teacher learned a different way of communicating, a calculated performance that was all surface gloss and scored no marks for feeling. Harry still understood, though. He knew what she wanted him to do
o
now. But it was too hard for him, a thing completely against a lifetime’s habit.
Gradually the juddering noise was fading to the edge of audibility, muffled to a dull rattle by the trees and the folds of the land. Its temporary absence released the subtler sounds of the evening — a current of air stirring the beech trees, a cow moaning for the bull across the valley, a skylark spilling its song over the purple heather. Harry cocked an ear, as if listening for a voice that no one else could hear. It was a voice that deepened the sadness in his eyes but stiffened his back and tautened the clench of his fists and his grip on the loop of worn black leather held in one hand.
‘Come back and talk to us. Please?’ she said.
Helen had never heard that voice. She had often tried, staring intently up at her grandfather’s face, watching his expression change, not daring to ask what it was he heard, but straining her own ears, desperate to catch an elusive echo. Like most men who had worked underground, Harry spent as much of his time as he could outside in the open air. As she stood at his side, Helen had learned to hear the sounds of the woods and the sky, the tiny movements in the grass, the shifting of the direction of the wind, the splash of a fish in a stream. But she had never heard what her grandfather heard. She had grown up to believe it was something uniquely to do with being a man.
‘If you don’t want to talk to Grandma, won’t you tell me about it, Granddad?’
And then the noise began to grow steadily louder again, clattering towards them as it followed the invisible line of the
o
road that meandered along the vallev bottom. It drew nearer
o J
and nearer across the rocky slopes of Raven’s Side, skirting a sudden eruption of black basalt cliff and veering north once more towards the village until it was almost overhead. The din was
enough to drown out normal speech. But it was then that Harry chose to speak, raising his voice defiantly against the clattering and roaring that beat down on him from the sky.
O .’
‘Noisy bastards,’ he said.
The helicopter banked, its blue sides flickering in the fragmented shadows of its blades. A fipurc could be seen, leaning forward in the cabin to stare at the ground. The lettering on his door read ‘POLICE’.
‘They’re looking for that girl that’s gone missing,’ said Helen, her voice scattered and blown away by the roar. ‘The Mount girl.’
‘Aye, well. Do they have to make so much row about it?’
Harry cleared his throat noisily, sucking the phlegm on to the top of his tongue. Then he pursed his thin lips and spat into a clump of yellow ragwort growing by the gate.
As if taking offence, the helicopter moved suddenly away from the edge of the village, sliding towards a row of tall conifers that grew in the grounds of a large white house. The pitch of the noise changed and altered shape as it passed the house, tracing the outline of the roofs and chimneys like an echo locator sounding the depths of an ocean trench.
‘At least it’ll wake that lot up as well.’
‘Granddad —’
‘There’s nowt more to be said. Not just now.’
Helen sighed, her brain crowding with thoughts she couldn’t express and feelings she couldn’t communicate. The old man only grimaced as his arm was stretched at an even sharper angle.
‘Have to go, love,’ he said. ‘Jess’ll pull me arm off, else.’
