The Women Who Ran Away - Sheila O'Flanagan Page 0,112
conscious of a sense of anticlimax at the fact that Charlie Mulholland wasn’t here. It wasn’t that she could really have expected his work to coincide with the one night that she and Grace were staying at the wellness centre, but she’d had this feeling of fate about him. Meeting him on the boat, at the service station, in Pamplona – those things had seemed more than chance. But unlike Tillie, she didn’t believe in fate.
‘We should go back,’ she said to Grace. ‘It’s getting late and I don’t fancy following that trail in the dark.’
When they returned to the building, Grace said that she was going to have an early night and allow herself the full benefit of her massage. Deira was happy to chill out too. She’d given her phone to Muireann, but kept her iPad, and sat in her room scrolling through her photographs. She saw herself age alongside Gavin, and wondered at exactly what point he’d fallen out of love with her enough to want to sleep with somebody else.
In her own room, Grace was scrolling through photographs too, although hers went back a good deal further than Deira’s. Fionn had digitised their old family snapshots when he was at college, and the result was nearly ten thousand photos detailing their family life. She stopped at the ones of their holidays in France, remembering the moment each one was taken, finding it hard to believe that some of them were from over twenty years ago. There were very few of herself and Ken together – in the days before selfies, one or other of them had always been taking the snap. But she paused at one that she remembered Aline taking, where they were sitting on the bonnet of the car at one of the service stations on the way to La Rochelle. She’d automatically stopped at that service station on this trip too. Even though he was gone, Ken was still with her. Still beside her every step of the way.
When Deira awoke with a jump, she had no idea what time it was. The blackout curtains on her windows didn’t allow the slightest bit of light to enter, and it took almost a minute for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. It was still night-time, she realised, when she got out of bed and parted the heavy drapes. But although the sky was black, it was lit by more stars than she’d ever seen before.
The information package on El Pozo de la Señora that had been left in the room had promised spectacular night skies thanks to the lack of light pollution in the area, but Deira hadn’t imagined it could be like this. Instead of the dozen or so isolated stars she could normally make out when she looked upwards, there were hundreds above her. Maybe even thousands. Or perhaps hundreds of thousands. They were bright enough for her to be able to check her watch and see that it was almost four thirty in the morning.
In Dublin, at this hour, dawn would be creeping over the horizon, but further south, as she was now, it was still a couple of hours away. She slipped the catch on the door and stepped outside. Despite the altitude, the air still retained some of the warmth of the previous day, and she didn’t need any more than the light pyjamas she was wearing. She sat on a wicker chair and gazed into the distance. Apart from the stars, the only other light was a small cluster in the distance that she presumed was the village in the valley.
She felt small and insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe. In knowing that she was sitting on a rock hurtling through space. She’d watched several popular science programmes in the past and she knew that the distances were enormous. She also knew that many scientists believed that there had to be other life forms out there. And she wondered if somewhere in that vast expanse of space there was someone else like her, someone whose life had been ripped apart because the person they’d cared for most in the world had betrayed them. Not that I have to head out to space for that, she told herself. Don’t humans betray each other every single day?
She got up from the chair and walked barefoot along the smooth stone paths of the Zen garden. She kept going until she reached the more uncultivated space beyond, treading gingerly