Page 22 of The Fall I Fell

I was too stunned to move even if I wanted to, and my eyes tracked his slow movements back to the tractor. Jacob pulled something from the cab and crept back towards me. An old film camera rested in his hands. He pressed a few buttons, wound a wheel, and lifted the viewfinder to his eye. I followed the direction of his gaze, until I settled on a doe in the field beside us, scouting out her surroundings, and looking over the land like it belonged only to her. My grin was difficult to stifle as I watched the scene play out, my lips still tingling from his touch. He moved like an animal himself – he was sleek, careful and elegant as he stepped around foliage and baskets to achieve the best angle. The twitching in his fingers had shifted from an anxious tremor to a deft command over his camera. Completely absorbed, it was clear that there was in fact something else he enjoyed.

‘I think we’ve found you a subject,’ I whispered. He took a moment of respite from his lens to shoot me an award-winning smile, and all of a sudden I was jealous that I didn’t have a camera in my own hands to capture this moment.

Chapter 13

Now

Relentless rain pummels down the orchard for what feels like an age. The leaves have already begun to fall and the gaps in the branches don’t offer much in the way of shelter. So, I sit curled up at the root of the tree, crying into the raindrops. It doesn’t take long for it to soak through my clothes, my hair, my bones, until a cold coat clings to me and forces me to tremble. Still, it’s not enough to make me want to go home. Well, now that I have no home, it’s not enough to make me go back to the farm and face Mum.

Jacob and I used to sit for hours in the summer rain, sometimes sheltered in the treehouse, feeling a rhythmic drip on our faces as it leaked through the holes in the roof. Or we’d be here, stealing the apples from the trees – they always tasted better when cold, crisp, and dripping from the elements. It was Jacob that found that out, of course. Sometimes we’d run across to another farm in the village and fill our t-shirts with their strawberries until they stained pink.

Lifting my head to the sky, I close my eyes and pretend I’m ten again, when my greatest worry was whether Granny was going to whip out the nail scrubbing brush at bedtime, or that the end of the summer would come too fast and it would be weeks before I saw Jacob again.

‘You’ll catch a cold.’ A voice startles me out of my daydream. I don’t open my eyes to see who it is. It is as though I have manifested him here, as though he heard my thoughts loud and clear from across the acreage and followed the call.

‘You of all people know that’s not true.’ I feel him sit down beside me, but I don’t turn to look.

‘Can you remember that one summer – I think we must have been eleven or twelve – when it rained for almost all of August?’ He is so close to me that I can feel the water drip from his hair and caress my shoulder.

‘And we tried our best to stay inside, playing games, drawing and God knows what else … and that lasted for what, two days?’ I’m scared if I open my eyes now, I’d be talking to a figment of my imagination, so I savour the rain on my cheeks and the warmth of his body beside mine.

‘Spent the next three weeks piss wet, though, and didn’t sneeze once.’

‘Well, apart from when Alfie shoved that dandelion up your nose.’ I laugh, taking a chance and opening one eye. I capture a glimpse of him, his dark hair soaked and almost touching his shoulders, the water puddling in his dimples as he smiles.

‘Yeah,’ he chuckles, ‘apart from then.’

We sit for a while, both letting the memory linger, both feeling the unrelenting raindrops on our faces, not worried that we’re soaked through.

‘So, are you going to tell me why we’re sat out in the rain like a pair of wet wellies?’ Jacob asks.

I rest my head on my arms that I have wrapped around my knees and watch him with a sad smile. ‘There’s no “we” about it. You gate-crashed my party.’

‘Looked more fun than what I was doing.’ He shrugs. ‘Want me to give you a lift home?’

Home. What is a home? Four walls and a roof? A space in a cardboard box next to someone you love? Or does it not really exist at all? My home was a person. Now he’s unrecognisable. My home was a place where all of my family gathered to eat their dinner and talk about their days. Now someone else and their family will eat at that table while mine is spread across the country. My home was Granny’s garden, and that doesn’t bloom so pretty now she’s gone.

Everything I used to call home has changed, and now I don’t know where to turn.

‘No, thank you,’ I say, stubbornly. Despite spending God knows how long out here, I’m still not ready to face Mum. I wish I never had to go back. I wish I could just disappear and all thoughts of university emails and broken homes didn’t matter any more. ‘We never did run away into the woods.’ I blurt, remembering all of the times we each promised the other we would. After bad grades, or family arguments, or just on days where normal civilisation was too much.

‘There’s still time.’ Jacob doesn’t miss a beat. If this were even two years ago, he’d leave with me now, without another word, but these days, I can’t bring myself to believe him.

‘We can’t. You have Pen, and I have university.’ In all honesty, university isn’t holding me back, not now anyway, but I needed to remind us both of the beautiful, model-shaped elephant in the orchard.

‘You’ve been accepted to uni?’ he asks, ignoring the mention of his girlfriend.

‘I don’t know. I have an email from them that I can’t bring myself to open.’ He looks at me like I’ve grown two heads. ‘I’m not sure I’ll be happy about either outcome,’ I confess. Despite all of his changes, I still can’t seem to hold my thoughts in my head around him. It’s like looking at him switches off the filter between my brain and mouth and it all just tumbles out. ‘Everything in my life is changing so quickly and I can’t keep up. No decision feels like the right one at the minute. I’m so lost.’

‘You won’t know unless you look,’ he says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. ‘Plus, what’s the worst that could happen? If you get in, you don’t actually have to take the offer, and if you don’t, one: you’ll have escaped an institution that is quite clearly stupid, and two: you have the world at your feet. One rejection isn’t the end of it all – there are more unis, more chances, so many more opportunities.’

Jacob grows more and more animated the more he goes on, as if it his own future he is trying to convince me of. I mull his words over in silence, but he takes that as more hesitation. ‘Kitty, you’ll be just fine wherever you end up. And the woods will always be there, any time you need to disappear.’

My heart thumps in my chest and the pressure on my ribcage makes it difficult to breathe. For the first time in weeks, I see a little glimmer of home in Jacob. It’s not much, but it’s enough in this moment where everything else feels so foreign.

The rain still persists as I pull my phone out of my pocket, finally with enough courage to open my emails. With one last look at Jacob’s grin, I slide open the mail app. I’ll always have a back-up plan: I’ll always have Jacob. I’ll be Kitty and he’ll be Wolfie.

I refresh the app once, twice, then on the third I deflate. No service. I thrust the phone towards him and he rolls his eyes, though still smiling. ‘Ah yes, the joys of living in the middle of nowhere.’ He mutters, getting to his feet, and wiping his hands on his sopping jeans before offering one to me.