Just Before I Died: The gripping new psychological thriller from the bestselling author of The Ice Twins. S. Tremayne K.

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СКАЧАТЬ and he is still very handsome at thirty-eight: with those dazzling blue eyes and that crow-dark hair. Almost black, but not quite. Sometimes he could pass for a man ten years younger, he has that agelessness, despite the toughness of his job; perhaps it is because of his job.

      He doesn’t earn that much, as a National Park Ranger, but he adores the moors where he was born, and he adores what he does: from repairing walls so the Dartmoor ponies can’t range too far, to taking troops of school kids to see the daffodils of Steps Bridge, to guiding tourists, for fun, all the way down Lydford Gorge, spooking them out with stories of the outlaws who lived there, in the sixteenth century, the Gubbins who lived in caves, and became cannibals, and died out from inbreeding, and madness.

      Adam loves all this: loves the poetry and the severity of the moor. He likes the toughness and the strangeness; he grew up with it. And over the years he has allowed me to become a part of it: we have a happy marriage, or at least a marriage happier than many. Yes, it is regular, ordinary, even predictable. Right down to the sex.

      I am sure my friends from uni would laugh at the homeliness, but I find it deeply reassuring. The world turns: rhythmically and reliably. I desire, and am desired. We haven’t made love so much since the accident, but I am sure it will return. It always does.

      What else can I give thanks for? What else makes me glad to be alive? I need to remind myself. Because these flashbacks are pretty painful.

      Quite often I get sudden, frightening headaches: headaches sharp enough to make me cry out. It’s as if something is crunching in my mind, bone grating on nerves.

      Like now. I wince. Setting the big coffee cup by the sink, I put a hand to my forehead, to that tender place where I must have hit the steering wheel, cracking bone and brain and a week of memories into fragments, like a shattered pane of winter ice on a moorland dew pond.

      Deep breaths. Deep, long breaths.

      Focus on the positive, that’s what the doctor said. Be thankful every day. Makes the healing quicker. Mends the mind faster.

      I like my job, working in the National Park tourist office. It’s not the archaeological job I wanted when I graduated from Exeter University. It’s not my dream, and it doesn’t pay well, but I get to write the leaflets, to talk about history, to enthuse to day trippers, and the park authorities let me join the digs in the season, slicing into the turf to find Bronze Age barrows or buried kistvaens – sunken chests – of Neolithic skulls and femurs and backbones, the remains of people who lived here when the moors were warmer, and drier. Kinder.

      Better than all that: I love this rented granite house we live in, five miles south of Princetown, lost in the high moorland, a mile from the next inhabited building, the Spaldings’ farm, and two miles from the nearest hamlet, with its pub and tiny shop that sells processed ham and charcoal briquettes, and little else.

      I love the wild remoteness, the deep starry skies and deeper silence. I love the dreaming, arthritic, moss-hung rowan trees that line the lanes. I like that the moorfolk call them ‘quickbeams’, or ‘witchbeams’. I also love the battered, stubborn, obstinate history of it all. Huckerby used to be a proper farmstead, and it still has barns and outhouses crumbling in the Dartmoor rains, sprouting cornflowers and campions in the haze of high summer, but the only intact building is the one we live in, a classic moorland longhouse, possibly six hundred years old.

      Once there would have been a sizeable family here: humans at the top of the house, animals down the other end. Cattle warming people under the same Devonshire thatch. Now the house is converted, the roof slated, and the interior modernized. Yes, it’s hard to heat and it still gets damp. But it has character. And it is occupied by me, and Adam, and Lyla our daughter, and our two dogs Felix and Randal.

      I named the dogs from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I love poetry, too: I write it occasionally, and never show it to anyone. I hide it away, as shyly as my daughter hides her secrets. I would have liked to be a poet, the way I would have liked to be an archaeologist. But that’s OK: because I am happy, I think, and certainly happy to be alive, and I live in a house I love in a place I love with a man I love and two dogs I love and, best of all, with a daughter I wholly adore.

      Lyla Redway. The girl who likes to arrange dead birds in rows and curves.

      Lyla Redway. The nine-year-old girl out there in the farmyard wearing a blue beanie hat and a thick black anorak, playing on her own as she always plays on her own – or with Felix and Randal, who she probably prefers to any human beings.

      I don’t mind this. She’s a different sort of girl: she is herself, her vulnerable, eccentric, funny, kind, lovable self. How many kids would spend a cold frosty morning in January arranging dead birds?

      Sometimes she orders stones, or twigs, or bright blood-red berries. Other times Adam comes home with presents he has found on the tors, things he knows she will like – miniature pink snail shells and delicate bird bones and bleached-white adder skulls – and she arranges these faintly macabre moorland treasures into complex patterns: mandalas, hexagons and zodiacs, intricate visual symbols only she understands, imposing a poetic order on her lonely moorland world. Where she reigns supreme.

      And sometimes she does nothing. She stands for hours, listening to an unheard music, seeing things invisible to others, or remembering incidents from her very early childhood. I’ve read that these strange traits, the acute hearing, and that remarkable memory, are all part of her condition, almost proof of her condition. But we refuse to have her diagnosed, or examined, despite the obvious signs.

      Adam doesn’t want to label her, doesn’t want to put her in a box, and I tend to agree. We don’t want to set limits on her, because she seems happy, despite her isolation, her solitude.

      Though maybe less happy today?

      Lyla is staring down at the birds. And standing absolutely still. This is common for her: she seems to have no middle ground of normal movement. Either she is silent and frozen, as now, or she is dancing and twirling, skipping up the moorland tors, as if she has energy she cannot endure, waving her hands, nodding and rocking, and talking talking talking, chattering like the River Dart under Postbridge, nattering away to herself, a babble of information stored in her brain from all the books she reads.

      Hyperlexia, they call it. Another symptom. Reading too much.

      How can that be a thing? Reading too much? I let her read as much as she likes. Entire books in a day, thousands of words every hour. Filling up her hungry soul. Because this is, I hope, my gift to her.

      She has inherited her father’s beauty, the nearly-black hair, the piercing eyes, but she has my love for words. One day she might be the poet I never was. She might have the scholarly life I wanted. And I’m glad she got her looks from her dad rather than me. My looks have always disappointed: brown hair, brown eyes, average height, average face, nothing special to look at, just me, Kath, the woman married to Adam Redway, with the quirky daughter, does something for the National Park, lives way out in the middle of nowhere, over near Hexworthy.

      Nearly dying in that reservoir is probably the one exceptional thing to have happened to me, the only thing likely to get me noticed.

      Except, I don’t want to be noticed.

      Opening the kitchen window to the cold morning air, I call out: ‘Hey, sweetie, are you OK? Sure you’re warm enough?’

      Lyla does not move. She is still frowning at the dead birds, some of them arranged in lines like the rows of Bronze Age ritual stones out on the moors.

      ‘Darling,’ СКАЧАТЬ