He stopped, puffing out steam like a traction engine.
“Hello, Marty,” she said.
“Hello.”
“You don’t know me.”
“No.”
She hugged her duffle coat more tightly around her. She was skinny, and looked twenty at the most. Her eyes, so dark a brown they looked black at three paces, were in him like claws. The ruddy face was wide, and without makeup. She looked, he thought, hungry. He looked, she thought, ravenous.
“You’re the one from upstairs,” he ventured.
“Yes. You didn’t mind me spying, did you?” she inquired, guilelessly
“Why should I?”
She extended a slim, gloveless hand to the stone of the dovecote.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she said.
The building had never struck Marty as even interesting before, simply as a landmark by which to pace his run.
“It’s one of the biggest dovecotes in England,” she said. “Did you know that?”
“No.”
“Ever been in?”
He shook his head.
“It’s a bizarre place,” she said, and led the way around the barrel-shaped building to the door. She had some difficulty pushing it open; the damp weather had swelled the wood. Marty had to double up to follow her inside. It was even chillier there than out, and he shivered, the sweat on his brow and sternum cooling now he’d stopped running. But it was, as she had promised, bizarre: just a single round room with a hole in the roof to allow the birds access and egress. The walls were lined with square holes, nesting niches presumably, set in perfect rows-like tenement windows-from floor to roof. All were empty. Judging by the absence of excrement or feathers on the floor, the building had not been used in many years. Its forsakenness gave it a melancholy air; its unique architecture rendered it useless for any function but that for which it had been built. The girl had crossed the impacted earth floor and was counting the nesting niches around from the door.
“Seventeen, eighteen-”
He watched her back. Her hair was unevenly cropped at the nape of her neck. The coat she wore was too big for her: it wasn’t even hers, he guessed. Who was she? Pearl’s daughter?
She’d stopped counting. Now she put her hand into one of the holes, making a little noise of discovery as her fingers located something. It was a hiding place, he realized. She was about to trust him with a secret. She turned, and showed him her treasure.
“I’d forgotten till I came back in,” she said, “what I used to hide here.”
It was a fossil, or rather the fragment of one, a spiral shell that had lain at the bottom of some pre-Cambrian sea, before the world was green. In its flutes, which she was stroking, motes of dust gathered. It crossed Marty’s mind, watching the intensity of her involvement with this piece of stone, that the girl was not entirely sane. But the thought vanished when she looked up at him; her eyes were too clear and too willful. If she had any insanity in her it was invited, a streak of lunacy she was pleased to entertain. She grinned at him as if she’d known what he was thinking: cunning and charm were mixed in her face in equal parts.
“Are there no doves, then?” he said.
“No, there haven’t been, as long as I’ve been here.”
“Not even a few?”
“If you just have a few they die in winter. If you keep a full dovecote they all keep each other warm. But when there’s only a handful they don’t generate enough heat, and they freeze to death.”
He nodded. It seemed regrettable to leave the building empty.
“They should fill it up again.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I like it like this.”
She slipped the fossil back into her hidey-hole.
“Now you know my special place,” she said, and the cunning had gone; it was all charm. He was entranced.
“I don’t know your name.”
“Carys,” she said, then after a moment, added: “It’s Welsh.”
“Oh.”
He couldn’t help staring at her. She suddenly seemed embarrassed, and she went back to the door quickly, ducking out into the open air. It had begun to rain, a soft, mid-March drizzle. She put up the hood of her duffle coat; he put up his track-suit hood.