“I like looking at trees,” he said.
They came to the edge of the woods, where the ground dropped away and there was the sea, suddenly. Cliff was kicking at the vast, upturned roots of a fallen tree. They were ripped apart, as if in a terrible storm. Broken shards of bark and blackened wood stood up in nasty spikes. “This looks like lightning,” said Liz with a shudder.
He shook his head. “Just frost.” He pointed to clearly cracked-open rocks tangled in roots thick as his arm. “Water in cracks in the rocks freezes and the whole thing bursts open.”
“You always know everything,” she said, turning away. “You can be too practical you know. It gets on people’s nerves. I still say it was lightning.”
“Well, you would.”
She raised an eyebrow. There was a bench so you could watch the sea. Liz swished over to it, and Cliff followed.
“Didn’t you tell me some story about you being struck by lightning once?” he asked.
Liz eyed him. “I remember,” he said, sitting beside her. “You said you were holding your Penny at the time. She was a baby and you were outside—”
“In a car park,” Liz prompted.
“—in a car park, and lightning struck you…and that’s why you turned into a woman!” He sat back on the metal bench, stretching out his legs with a chuckle.
Liz had gone red, but her voice was very cold. “You’re simplifying that just a bit.”
Cliff laughed. “You make things sound so sensational. It’s ridiculous.” He shook his head. He realized what he thought Liz was like: a comic book superhero. Each superhero had an origin story that they flashbacked to, telling you how they ended up like that. The She Hulk was bathed in green radiation. Spider Woman was bitten by a radioactive spider. Liz got struck by lightning. What did she become? Woman Woman.
“What’s ridiculous about it?” Liz was shrill suddenly.
He sighed. “Lightning can’t give you ideas about a thing like that! You just made it up! You make everything up!” He stood up. “You know what I think?” He was baiting her now.
Liz saw one of the couples with proper leaflets and boots coming through the gap in the trees, and she shushed Cliff. The intruders looked mortified at disturbing the row and they backed carefully away.
"What do you think?” she asked through gritted teeth.
“You can’t face the truth of any of it. You make up all these over the fact of your own decisions.”
“Oh, really?”
"You can’t face it, so you dress it up like fate, like everything changed in a flash of light.”
"Cliff,” she said “You understand nothing.”
“I understand that you think you’re the Queen of bloody Sheba, and the laws of the universe run different for you.”
They both fell quiet at this. Liz was shocked by his bitterness.
“Have I been getting on your nerves?” she asked.
Cliff glowered. “All you go on about is leaving Newton Aycliffe behind, about how I’ve taken you away from everything that’s yours.” He sighed. “You make me feel like I’ve dragged you off and made you a rubbish bargain.”
“Cliff,” she said. “It’s been wonderful, this trip. I’ve loved it. It’s just not…”
“It’s not real life, is it?”
When they walked back through the park they started to notice the brighter flowers that hung from some of the trees, looking tagged on like Christmas decorations. Amazing this far north, this time of year. Obviously a well-cared-for garden. Liz dropped some change in the box as they left.
In the car Cliff said, “Do you want me to take you home?”
She stared at the windscreen as it started to rain. “Don’t know, Cliff.” She pulled a face into her mirror. “I don’t think so.”
I tried to tell him I needed a routine. it does me no good not knowing what’s coming next. That sense that you are free to do anything depresses me. Because in the end anything that free has to be boring. Life made up minute-by-minute makes me sad. It’s like being old or mad or with nothing to do. Cliff never agreed. Cliff with nothing to do was like a child.
My Aycliffe routines. I loved them even though I didn’t know it. How’s about that for a sad, small life? But it’s only when I’m stranded in the mountains, looking at bigger skies than I’ve ever seen, that I start to appreciate…I don’t know. Getting the Road Ranger to the town centre. The tantalizing Cliff taking my money, punching my ticket. Belting round the supermarket, filling a trolley. Fresh bread and sausage roils from the bakers. Picking up shiny magazines in Stevens. Sitting in the Copper Kettle and gassing with whoever I see there. Swanking through the precinct and knowing that I — more than anyone there — am looking drop dead.
Here there’s no one to see me but Cliff and is it awful to say this? He looks less tantalizing driving a car than his bus, when it was scandalous to talk too much with him. The sign by his head warned his passengers not to address him when he was driving. So we stared at the sunburned nape of his neck, his dark curls sweated down on the skin.
I’ve got him and don’t know what to do with him.
He pointed out that it could be the countryside that was getting her down. “You’re not one for open spaces.”
He took them to Glasgow, where the rain kept up and the turn-offs into town confounded them. The middle of the city was like being in canyons. They parked and hunted the car boot for an umbrella.
Full of holes, Cliff muttered and chucked it. They went by the town hail. Elkie Brooks was on posters outside.
“Pearl’s
