The Moon Tunnel(64)

Dryden walked on, letting his anger build, knowing that with it he could justify retaliation.

Every day since Laura’s coma had begun he had been at her bedside, even through those first months when she hadn’t made a single microscopic movement. And then every day, again, through the intermittent, half-senseless period in which she had begun to broadcast messages on the COMPASS. He had kept faith with her, and kept faith with their dream. He had dealt with the real world in the best way he could while she lived in her own world, about which he knew so little.

How could she have a secret? He felt his anger surge, displacing other stored emotions.

The problem was words, he knew that now. For all that his trade had taught him, and for all of Laura’s talent with a script, they were bad at words. When they’d married they’d almost stopped using them, retreating instead into a comfortable and intimate partnership where almost nothing needed to be said. Now everything needed to be said, their relationship reduced to a series of computer printouts, e-mails and text messages, and the strain was distorting his ability to feel anything, let alone love.

Which was why he could savour his anger now: how dare she keep a secret from him, how dare she refuse to share everything, as he felt he had done?

He reached the riverside, slumped on a bench and threw his head back to look at the sky. The smog of the day had again been swept away; stars jostled for position in a sky teeming with light.

A nearly full moon. He thought about Etterley, dancing beneath the moon, as he’d seen her the first night he’d met the Water Gypsies. There was something redolent of the harvest festival about her body: her full breasts, her ample figure, her opulent blonde hair. He imagined that body, swaying under the moonlight, sinking to her knees in the long grass gilded with the moon’s white light.

He stood, setting off for the water meadows.

He’d made the Faustian pact with the first step: if they were dancing, he’d join them, if not, he’d walk towards his boat and drink his anger away before the inevitable nightmare, the familiar one now, the claustrophobia of the sand in sharp contrast to this, the overarching vastness of the night sky. He walked along the old wharf, past the darkened gables of The Frog Hall, and out on to the fen.

He saw the fire first, flickering where the water meadows folded down a slope. Here, in the lee of the flood bank, the Water Gypsies were gathered in a half-circle around a burning pile of wood and cardboard. He stood on the edge of the pool of red light and saw her immediately, dancing on the far side of the flames, and when she saw him she stopped, holding her hand out for his.

Dryden could smell the dope on the breeze, and – closer – the heat on his face which made his blood race. He took a drink from Speedwing, who pressed his shoulder, and he looked down into the amber liquid in the tumbler and drank as he felt Etty’s arm loop itself around his waist and then rest at the base of his spine. Dryden felt her mouth, warm and moist on his neck, and he felt then the need to say something, so he held her close and as he kissed her said, ‘Secrets.’

The moon was overhead when the dancers fell to the ground. Dryden could feel the sweat running between his shoulder blades and across his chest, while his mouth hung open, drawing in the cool night air. He let Etty take his hand and lead him along the river bank, away from the light of the fire, but into a field of meadow grass which almost reached Dryden’s shoulders. Someone by the fire played a drum, a rhythmic beat which made him feel safe, even out by the water’s edge.

He reached out for her but she stood back, put a hand to her shoulder and unfastened her dress, which fell in a single slide into the grass. The moon, ample itself, revealed her nakedness, and Dryden drank her in. He took her then and pressed their bodies together as she tore at his buttons and belt, then they knelt, briefly kissing before tumbling together to the earth. Quickly inside her he felt warm, enveloped, and when he came he was looking at her eyes, the familiar aqueous brown reflecting perfectly two nearly full moons. She cried out, and the drumbeat stopped, and he knew then that he too had a secret.





He saw them through a keyhole, that first time. It dated his passion, the shape of that vision – the heavy Victorian lock on the old outbuilding, the clunky key removed, to leave this window into their world.

Summer: 1983.

It had been the dairy once, his mother had said, for the farm which had stood on the bank above. Marco used it for wood, delivered into this treeless landscape by the merchant’s barge. But his boys had oiled the lock, and kept the key between them, securing for themselves a secret place for their childhood games.