‘Let me see.’ She began ticking off the reasons on her fingers. ‘It’s dark, you don’t know the neighbourhood, there’s free wine and food downstairs – oh, and did I mention it’s pitch fucking black outside?’
‘It’s not pitch-black.’ I looked out of the window as I tied my trainer laces. It was pretty dark, but it wasn’t pitch-black. The sun had set but the sky was clear and still illuminated by a diffuse pearly-grey light in the west, and a round white moon rising from the trees in the east. ‘And it’s going to be a full moon, so it won’t be that dark even after the sun sets properly.’
‘Oh really, Miss Leonora “I’ve lived in London for the past eight years and never strayed more than fifty yards from a streetlamp in all that time” Shaw?’
‘Really.’ I double-knotted the trainers and stood up straight. ‘Don’t give me grief, Nina, I’ve got to get out or I really will go crazy, moon or no moon.’
‘Huh. You’re finding it that bad?’
‘No.’
But I was. I couldn’t explain why. I couldn’t tell Nina how it had made me feel, having strangers picking over my past with Clare downstairs, like someone picking at the edges of a half-healed wound. I’d made a mistake in coming – I knew that now. But I was stuck here, car-less, until Nina chose to go.
‘No, I’m fine. I just want to get out. Now. See you in an hour.’
I set off down the stairs, with her mocking laugh following me as I slammed out the door.
‘You can run … but you can’t escape!’
Out in the forest I took a breath of the clean, crisp air and began to warm up. I stretched my limbs against the garage, looking out into the forest. The sense of menace, nearing claustrophobia, that I’d had inside had gone. Was it the glass? The feeling that anyone could be out there, looking in, and we’d never know it? Or was it the strange anonymity of the rooms that made me think of of social experiments, of hospital waiting rooms?
Out here, I realised, the sense of being watched had quite gone.
I began to run.
It was easy. This was easy. No questions, no-one prodding and poking, just the sharp, sweet air and the soft thud of my feet on the carpet of pine needles. It had rained a fair bit, but the water could not sit on this soft, loose-draining soil the way it could on the compacted rutted drive, and there were few puddles, or even boggy bits, just miles of clean, springy pathway, the drifted needles of a thousand trees beneath the soles of my shoes.
There are no other runners in my family – or not that I know of – but my grandmother was a walker. She said that when she was a girl and in a rage with a friend, she used to write their name on the soles of her feet in chalk, and walk until the name was gone. She said by the time the chalk had worn away, her resentment would have faded too.
I don’t do that. But I hold a mantra in my head, and I run until I can’t hear it any more above the pounding of my heart and the pounding of my feet.
Tonight – although I wasn’t angry at her, or at least, not any more – I could hear my heart beating out her name: Clare, Clare, Clare, Clare.
Down, down through the woods I ran, through the gathering dark and the soft night sounds. I saw bats swooping in the gloaming, and the sound of animals breaking from shelter. A fox shot across the path ahead and then stopped, superbly arrogant, his slim-nosed head following my scent as I thumped past in the quiet dusk.
This was easy – the downhill swoop, like flying through the twilight. And I didn’t feel afraid, in spite of the darkness. Out here the trees weren’t silent watchers behind the glass, but friendly presences, welcoming me into the wood, parting before me as I ran, swift and barely panting, along the forest path.
It would be the uphill stretch that tested me, the run back along the rutted, muddy drive, and I knew I must make it to the drive before it got so dark that I could not see the potholes. And so I ran harder, pushing myself. I had no time to keep, no target to make. I didn’t even know the distance. But I knew what my legs could do and I kept my stride long and loose. I leapt over a fallen log, and for a minute I shut my eyes – crazy in this dim light – and I could almost imagine that I was flying, and would never meet the ground.
At last I could see the road, a pale grey snake in the deepening shadows. As I broke out from the woods I heard the soft hoot of an owl, and I obeyed Flo’s instructions, turning right along the tarmac. I hadn’t been running for long when I heard the sound of a car behind me and stopped, pressing myself up against the verge. I had no wish to be run down by someone not expecting to find a runner out at this time.