By the time Ellen and Will arrived home, the only person who seemed remotely tired was me. The boys were pretending to be asleep, but while I was running through the events of the evening in the living room, Hamish burst in. ‘There’s a pirate in the garden and when I opened the door to ask him where his boat was he waved at me and said he’s waiting for Jenny. Jenny are you being a pirate and can I come too? I know how to hoist a mainsail and rip out guts with a cutlass and follow a treasure map and all those things like pirates do.’
‘You opened the front door again?’ Ellen scolded. ‘And more to the point, why aren’t you in bed?’
I squeezed past her, having handled enough mischievous four-year-old for one day.
‘I’ll lock it on my way out,’ I called, slipping my boots on. ‘I promise to tell you all about my adventures on the high seas tomorrow, Hamish, if you promise to go straight back to bed and not open the door again.’
‘Can I be your cabin boy?’ Hamish shouted, over the top of his mother’s telling-off.
‘Maybe another time.’
‘You really didn’t have to do this,’ I said to the pirate as he handed me the bike I’d left leaning on the wall. We started walking back towards the village green.
‘Yeah, well, I’m curious.’
‘Curious about what?’ I glanced at him. ‘Are we going monster-hunting?’
‘If there’s a monster in my woods, I’d like to know about it.’
‘Too scared to look alone?’
‘What do you think I’ve been doing since I dropped you off?’ He paused, waiting for a car to pass before we crossed the street. ‘Are you getting on that rust-bucket or not?’
I did, pedalling slowly along the now empty road while Mack jogged beside me on the pavement.
‘Did you find anything?’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
We turned onto the footpath, the yellow of Sarah’s apartment lights glowing through the gaps in the trees. By the time we reached the Common, my heart was scrabbling to get out of my chest again, via my lungs.
Mack looked across at me. ‘Maybe you should get a taxi.’
‘I’m fine,’ I wheezed, ignoring my hands jerking about on the handlebars.
‘You don’t need to do this. You’ve got nothing to prove.’
Oho!New Jenny cried.I think you’ll find I have.
But theonly thing my stupid, stubborn self proved was that I was too stupid and stubborn for my own good. As we reached the tree line my semi-paralysed limbs could no longer pedal fast enough to stay upright, causing me to slowly topple into a pile of nettles. Nettles I hadn’t seen because my eyes, wiser than my idiot brain, refused to remain open and watch the impending spectacle unfold.
Mack heaved me to my feet. The front light on the bike had gone out, reminding me the rear light wasn’t working to begin with as we plunged into darkness. Guiding my huddled form back to a bench, he lowered us down and pushed my head between my knees.
‘Glasses?’ I rasped.
‘I’ve got them.’ He took his hand off the back of my neck. ‘I’ll get Sarah.’
My arm shot out, fingers clutching his hoodie with surprising strength for someone dangerously low on oxygen. ‘No,’ I gasped. ‘I’m fine. Just need to catch. My breath.’And you are not leaving me here alone, in the dark, while I’m unable to breathe, let alone defend myself from an evil lunatic.
‘Okay.’ He shifted a little closer, turning his body slightly so I almost leant on him. ‘No rush.’
Darn it. The solid weight of Mack’s chest, entirely still save for the steady rise and fall as he breathed against my back, did not help my struggle for composure. I scrabbled for a conversation topic to lighten the atmosphere, tense for a lot of dangerous reasons now that barely included the Beast of Middlebeck.
‘Why did you replace my bike tyres?’
Mack said nothing for a few moments. Which, in the darkness, felt more like several hours.
‘It was painful watching you hobble about on the old ones. And it would’ve wrecked the bike if you’d done it much longer.’
