again.
She thought about going back to work.
The plans on the table were supremely uninteresting. Engineering had sounded cool when she enrolled at university. Doing stuff.
Not sitting drawing endless plans of endless air conditioning systems, no matter how complex.
Gabe’s living room, however, was lined with bookshelves, and the bookshelves were crammed with books.
And photograph albums. Her secret vice.
Other people’s families.
Nikki had been sent to boarding school at seven. If friends invited her home for the holidays her parents were relieved, so she’d spent much of her childhood looking at families from the outside in.
Brothers, sisters, grandmas, uncles and aunts. You didn’t get a lot of those the way she was raised.
Her friends could never understand her love of photograph albums, but she hadn’t grown out of it, and here were half a dozen, right within reach.
A girl had to read something. Or draw plans.
No choice.
The first four albums were those of a child, an adolescent, a young woman. School friends, beach, hiking, normal stuff. Nikki had albums like this herself, photographs taken with her first camera.
The albums must belong to Gabe’s mother, she decided. The girl and then the woman looked a bit like Gabe. She was much smaller, compact, neat. But she looked nice. She had the same dark hair as Gabe, the same thoughtful eyes. She saw freckles and a shy smile in the girl, and then the woman.
After school, her albums differed markedly from Nikki’s. This woman hadn’t spent her adolescence at university. The first post-school pictures were of her beside stone walls, wearing dungarees, heavy boots, thick gloves. The smile became cheeky, a woman gaining confidence.
There were photos of stone walls.
Lots of stone walls.
Nikki glanced outside to the property boundary, where a stone wall ran along the road, partly built, as if it had stopped mid-construction. Wires ran along the unfinished part to make it a serviceable fence.
She turned back to the next album. Saw the beginnings of romance. A man, considerably older than the girl, thickset, a bit like Gabe as well, looking as if he was struggling to find a smile for the camera. Holding the girl possessively.
An album of a wedding. Then a baby.
Gabe.
Really cute, she thought, and glanced across the passage and thought … you really could see the man in the baby.
Gabe before life had weathered him.
The photos were all of Gabe now—Gabe until he was about seven, sturdy, cheeky, laughing.
Then nothing. The final album had five pages of pictures and the rest lay empty.
What had happened? Divorce? Surely a young mum would keep on taking pictures. Surely she’d take these albums with her.
She set the albums back in place, and her attention was caught by a set of books just above. The Art of Stone Walling. The Stone Walls of Yorkshire. More.
She flicked through, fascinated, caught in intricacies of stone walling.
Gabe slept on.
She was learning how to build stone walls. In theory.
She’d kind of like to try.
She reached the end of the first book as Horse struggled to his feet and crossed to the French windows. Pawed.
Bathroom.
But … Escape?
Visions of Horse standing up to his haunches in the shallows sprang to mind. She daren’t risk letting him go. The faded curtains were looped back with tasseled cords, perfect for fashioning a lead.
‘Okay, let’s go but don’t pull,’ she told him. At full strength this dog could tow two of her, but he was wobbly.
She cast a backward glance at Gabe. Still sleeping. Quick check. Chest rising and falling.
She and Horse were free to do as they pleased.
When Gabe woke again the sun was sinking low behind Black Mountain. He’d slept the whole day?
His head felt great. He felt great all over. He was relaxed and warm and filled with a sense of well-being he hadn’t felt since … who knew?
He rolled lazily onto his side and gazed out of the window.
And froze.
For a moment he thought he was dreaming. There was a woman in the garden, her back to him, crouched over a pile of stones. Sorting.
A dog lay by her side, big and shaggy.
Nikki and Horse.
Nikki held up a stone, inspected it, said something to Horse, then shifted so she could place it into the unfinished stretch of stone wall.
He felt as if the oxygen was being sucked from the room.
A memory blasting back …
His mother, crouched over the stones, the wall so close to finished. Thin, drawn, exhausted. Setting down her last stone. Weeping. Hugging him.
‘I can’t …’
‘Mum, what’s wrong?’
‘I’m so tired. Gabe, very soon I’ll need to go to sleep.’ But using a voice that said this wasn’t a normal sleep she was talking about.
Then … desolation.
His father afterwards, kicking stones, kicking everything. His mother’s old dog, yelping, running for the cover Gabe could never find.
‘Dad, could we finish the wall?’ It had taken a month to find the courage to ask.
‘It’s finished.’ A sharp blow across his head. ‘Don’t you understand, boy, it’s finished.’
He understood it now. Nikki had to understand it, too.
People hurt. You didn’t try and interfere. Unless there was trouble you let people be and they let you be. You didn’t try and change things.
He should have put it in the tenancy agreement.
Stone wall building was weirdly satisfying on all sorts of levels.
She’d always loved puzzles, as she’d loved building things. To transform a pile of stones into a wall as magnificent as this …
Wide stones had been set into the earth to form the base, then irregular stones
