Coldbrook(36)

‘She came through,’ the woman said, and Holly caught her breath. She could communicate with these people. Her eyes went wide and she could feel tears prickling their corners. She looked around at the others – still silent, watching. Then she stood up slowly from the stretcher, biting her lip against the pain singing through her skull. She smoothed down her clothes and opened her mouth to speak, but thirst had dried her voice.

‘So I see,’ the man said, and there was something about the voice that Holly recognised. This all felt suddenly dreamlike, and for the first time in her life she put the cliché into action and pinched the back of her hand. But she did not wake up.

‘How do you feel?’ the man asked.

‘Head hurts,’ Holly said. ‘And I need to pee.’ She almost smiled. What an auspicious introduction to another world.

‘Sorry about your head,’ the man said. ‘Precautionary. We’d been watching, and we didn’t know quite what to expect.’ He stood to one side as if allowing her to pass, and the little girl fled back through the doorway.

‘In there?’ Holly asked. From inside she smelled the faint hint of cooking meat, and heard the distant jangle of music. And then she saw the small logo on his jacket – three intersecting circles, their overlapping areas shaded black. She recognised it from the back of the jacket of one of her rescuers.

And she recognised it from home.

‘In there,’ the man confirmed. ‘Welcome to Coldbrook.’





7


In the end, they drove to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Tommy knew how much Jayne loved it up there, and the weather gave them a long, dry day of walking and picnicking, talking and being in love. He frequently surprised her with such gestures, and sometimes in his company she went for hours without being reminded of her illness. She’d forget herself under the spell of his kindness. He always waved off any comments, saying, It’s what you do for someone you love. But she always made certain that he knew how much she appreciated everything he did, and every small part of him, because she never wanted to take him for granted. And the gratitude was for herself as much as for him, a reminder of where she was and how important Tommy was to her well-being. If she didn’t thank him, she feared that she would lose her way.

She knew that she was lucky to have Tommy, and at least once each day she experienced a mortal fear of what would happen should that luck desert her.

Walking back towards Tommy’s battered old Toyota, holding his hand, Jayne’s discomfort was just beginning to grow as the sinking afternoon sun started to lengthen their shadows. The day was already a pleasing memory. Some days lived for ever; she never usually knew that when they were happening, but some time after she would realise that they had been among the best days of her life.

Jayne’s mother was still alive, somewhere, and the only time there was true tension between her and Tommy was when he suggested that they should get in touch. Didn’t you see her? she’d ask him, never quite shouting, never truly calm. You have no idea. No concept of what I went through before I met you. And he’d let it lie because he knew it would do no good. Jayne had made that very clear from the start; she was on her own, two thousand miles from where she’d been born, and her family had died with her brother. He’d been a small-time criminal, dragged into the LA gang culture and found dead at the age of seventeen with a bullet in the back of his skull and his genitals cut off. The coroner hadn’t been able to tell whether the mutilation was post-mortem, and Jayne had the impression that no one cared. One less gang-banger, one less headache for the LAPD. And when her mother had received the phone call she’d hung up, drunk another bottle of wine, and told Jayne later that evening when she arrived home from school.

Johnny’s dead, hon. Can you fetch your mother another bottle?

Why didn’t you call me!?

What good woulda that done?

Johnny!

He knew how it’d end up. I told him often enough. Now get your mother another bottle, hon.

Another bottle, and another, was the way it had been going, and the way it continued from then until Johnny’s sad funeral. Three f*ckers had shown up an hour after the last mourners had left, when Jayne was still kneeling beside her only brother’s grave watering the soil with her tears. They’d sauntered past her and stood beside the grave, then pulled pistols and fired three quick shots as some sort of f*cked-up salute. Jayne had stood to run after them, beat some sense into their twisted, drug-addled brains, but her legs had folded beneath her as her muscles cramped, driving wedges of pain into her brain. They’d laughed as they ran away, and she’d woken later with paramedics tending her along with the old lady who’d found her and was fussing around nearby.

Next day, she’d remained at home long enough to pack some clothes and steal a thousand dollars from her mother’s back-drawer stash. Then she’d called her school sweetheart Tommy and told him she was leaving LA to live with her cousin in Birmingham, England.

‘It’s been a lovely day,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’

‘Only did it ’cos I want a blow job tonight.’

‘Yeah, right.’ Jayne laughed, and the freeing of tension lessened the pains in her neck. Complete relaxation is the key, one specialist had told her, while another had said Exercise as much as you can, gently and often. Walking in the hills with her love gave her the best of both options.