Chapter Seven
The Session
For four days they spoke in numbers.
He called splits. She ran them. At breakfast nobody said anything, and her mother looked between them and let it alone. Dara figured it would pass the way these things passed. He would say something first. She was not going to be the one to say something first.
On the fourth evening he called a final split and she walked past him at the gate without breaking stride.
It felt like winning something.
On the fifth morning she was at the hills before light, because that was the standing session, and he didn’t come.
She stretched. She waited. The sky went from black to grey over the ridge. Good, she thought. Let him be the late one, for once in his life.
She ran the session alone. All six climbs, harder than he would have asked for, so that she could tell him she had.
Coming back down the track road she saw people standing in front of the house. Standing, not going in. Cheta was in the yard with his hat in his hands. Her mother was sitting on the ground.
Grown women did not sit on the ground.
Nobody had to say it. Somebody said it anyway.
They had found him on the ridge, at the old line, where he stood every morning of his life. She did not go up. Later she could not have said why.
The funeral was on the open hillside, in the red earth, and it seemed to her that the whole of the Highlands was on the slope in white. People kept taking her hands. People kept telling her who her father had been, as if she might not know.
Near the end a man she half-recognized from town took her hand in both of his and leaned close, meaning only kindness.
“Eighteen months,” he said. “Most men don’t get a year. He fought, your father. He fought.”
She heard herself ask it from somewhere outside herself.
“Fought what.”
The man’s face changed. He looked at her, and then past her, and Dara turned and saw her mother standing with her hand over her mouth, and understood that her mother was hearing it for the first time too.
Eighteen months. She started counting backward through them and had to stop.
The paper bag came back to her — Friday, the coat pocket — and she walked away from everyone, around the side of the church, and stood with her back against the wall until she could make her face work again.
The others went down with the evening. She stayed by the fresh earth, and after a while Cheta came and stood beside her, and held something out in both hands, the way you hand over something living.
The stopwatch. On its cord.
The numbers were still going.
Eighty-one hours, nine minutes, and the seconds turning over while she looked at it. Nobody had thought to stop it. Or nobody had been able to.
“It was with him,” Cheta said. “I couldn’t—”
He didn’t finish.
She took it. She watched the seconds change for a moment longer.
She pressed the button, and the numbers stopped.
“You knew?”
“Yes.”
“And you said nothing?”
“He asked me not to.”
She looked at him. The old man stood with his feet planted, his hat still in his hands, and gave her the rest of it without flinching.
“He was right to.”
There was nothing in her to answer that with. She put the stopwatch in her pocket and walked down the hill.
She packed that night. The spikes, the kit, the letter with the crest, folded smaller now than it used to be.
Her mother stood in the doorway and watched her do it.
“Dara.”
She stopped. She didn’t turn around.
Whatever her mother had been going to say, she put it down somewhere, and said instead:
“Eat something before the road.”
The bus left from the junction where the village road met the tar. She took the seat by the back window with her fist around the stopwatch in her lap. The ridge had gold along the top of it, first light, getting smaller.
She didn’t look at it for long.
END OF PART ONE