Page 44 of Never Tear Us Apart

Chapter Forty-Two

‘This changes everything,’ I say the moment Sal and I are alone. ‘I was starting to believe this, when Kathryn told me her stories, and there was Dr Gresch and her microtubules.’

‘What stories, what microtubules?’ Sal asks me. ‘You haven’t had a chance to tell me what you’ve found out, Maia. And what difference does a little boy’s name make?’

‘That little boy is my father ,’ I tell him. ‘And now it all makes sense. You, the island at war, Danny, Stella, all of it – it’s just my poor broken brain trying to find a way to fix all the shattered pieces of my life. It’s all an illusion, one made for me by me.’

‘That’s not what’s happening here,’ Sal tells me urgently. ‘I have lived thirty hard years in a time that doesn’t belong to me, Maia. I know what is real. I know that I am flesh and blood.’

His words swirl around me, but none of them strike home. All I can think of is how I am lost in a delusion of my own making, and I can’t find a way out.

‘My father has always rejected me. Something is so broken in him that he can’t find it in himself to truly love anyone: not my mum, not even his current wife, but especially not me, the kid he never wanted.

’ Even though I have known this to be true my whole life, saying it still slices like a knife through my tender heart.

‘So I dreamt up you, Sal – a man who is the epitome of what I think of as an ideal father.’

‘Really?’ Sal’s face softens as he smiles, but I’m too wrapped up in what I’m saying to acknowledge it further.

‘All of my relationships – if you can call them that – have been brief and detached. I’ve never fallen in love. I’ve never known how to until . . . I meet a perfect hero pilot with the sweetest smile and hope in his eyes. And then I start to think maybe . . . maybe I do have a heart after all.’

‘It’s not a good idea to fall in love with a pilot, as Christina said . . .’

‘Even Christina,’ I interrupt him as I pace up and down, tugging on my thread of logic and unravelling it at pace.

‘Even she is like the ideal best friend that I never really had. I was always a bit too weird, a bit too different and shy to have one of those. The way Christina accepted me and took me in – that’s just what I’ve always secretly wanted.

And then my dad as a kid, my dad who, according to this fantasy, started out as this sweet, funny, brave little boy and grew up to be this cold remote man who doesn’t even take an interest in his own daughter.

He’s here, because in my fantasy world, I can save him, change him, help him grow up to be the kind of dad I’ve always wanted.

Don’t you see, Sal? This is all just my stupid, pathetically needy subconscious.

I can’t have a life in the real world, so I made one up in my head. ’

Sal guides me out of the heat of the day, under one of the great stone archways built into the fortified city walls, left over from the rule of the Knights of St John.

Seeing the tears that track down my face, he reaches into his jacket and produces a handkerchief, which he gently dabs at my cheeks.

‘Come now,’ he says, gently catching my hands. ‘Breathe. In and out. Deep and slow. You are having a panic attack, I think.’

‘But if this isn’t . . .’

‘Whatever this is, you are feeling overwhelmed. So: breathe. With me. In, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Hold it. And out – this time count to eleven. Really empty your lungs.’

I keep my gaze fixed on him as I follow his instructions.

‘Good, and again.’

Slowly but surely, I feel the muscles that have contracted around my ribcage release.

I see the blue sky, cut into a wedge by the arch we are under, feel the pebbles jutting through the thin rubber on the soles of my feet, and Sal’s hands holding mine.

My shoulders fall in increments until I can think again.

‘To meet your father here as a little boy, knowing what he has endured and has yet to face – that has frightened you, Maia. It frightens me, too, if I’m honest. And perhaps it does make sense, especially to a modern mind that has grown up in a world where the unexplained is so often sidelined as nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

Believe me, I went there myself. But I know something you don’t yet, Maia. ’

‘What?’ I ask. ‘What do you know that I don’t.’

‘That I was sent here for a purpose. I was sent here to atone.’

In the shade, his glasses reflect the blue of the sky so I can’t see his eyes.

‘What do you mean, atone?’ I ask.

‘I didn’t come back to Malta to see my family,’ Sal says. ‘I came back to escape a terrible thing I did – something I tried to run away from.’

‘What terrible thing?’ I ask, anxious.

‘Before I came here, I drank. A lot. And when I found out that my dear Elena was pregnant, I got very drunk. I was so happy, you see, and that’s what I did when I was happy – I drank.

I never thought myself an alcoholic. I was never angry or cruel.

I never drank at work, or during the day, only when I had a reason to.

And I always had a reason to. Elena was quite rightly angry with me.

On this most important day of our lives, I went out to get wine, met a friend at a bar on the way and didn’t come home until the early hours.

I told her I was wetting our child’s head.

She said it had to be born first. We fought – I left the house and got in my car and .

. . I woke up with my head on the steering wheel, the horn blaring into the night.

When I got out, there was another car, run into a ditch.

The driver wasn’t moving. There were children crying in the back, shouting for help.

I reassured them, walked until I found a payphone and called for help.

And then I thought of my job, my baby, my Elena, and I hung up when they asked for my name.

I went back to my car, and I left those children crying behind.

I ran away. I left those crying children there all alone. ’

My mouth falls open. ‘Sal!’ I gasp. I can barely believe that this sweet man would do such a thing. But panic in the worst of situations does that to people, I would know.

‘The shame has followed me all my life,’ Sal tells me, tears in his eyes. ‘That doesn’t fit in with your perfect vision, does it?’

‘So, you think this is some kind of . . . cosmic punishment?’ I ask him, turning away from him.

‘No, I think it’s a chance to atone,’ Sal says. ‘To make amends and restore balance, to all that is, and to my soul.’

‘But you’ve been here for thirty years, and you haven’t atoned yet?’

‘Because the time has not yet come,’ Sal says. ‘But I believe it will. And when it does, I will be ready to pay the price for what I did. Whatever it is.’

Sal takes a step towards me. ‘I was a different man then, selfish and scared. I’ve had more than thirty years to learn how to be the kind of man who deserved all the things I lost and will never regain.

’ He bows his head. ‘It was nice to be seen the way you saw me, if only for a little while. The man you saw – that is who I have tried to be. For my sake, for my wife’s, for my child who I will never know. ’

This is impossible. I want something to believe in. I need something that I can know is absolutely true, and there is nothing – nothing but the beat of my heart in my chest, hard and fast. Wherever I really am, that at least proves I’m alive.

‘But why here? Why, in this one corner of the world, would there be this unique system of punishment? Or chance for redemption? Why only on the few square miles that are this island?’

‘The ancients lived another life, by another set of rules,’ Sal says.

‘They understood a reality that we can’t even imagine.

And they ingrained their interpretation of the universe so deeply into the rock that it became part of it.

They carved and painted it into the fabric of the island with such conviction that it lives on still.

Even after everything that has come since, it lives on underneath it all, waiting.

And sometimes, somehow, people fall through the gaps that remain – for a purpose. ’

‘Not those thirty children,’ I mutter. ‘You can’t tell me thirty eleven-year-olds all had something to atone for.’

‘What children?’ Sal asks.

‘Have you never heard of the children who were lost in the hypogeum? My cousin told me about them when I was last back in the present. My present, I mean.’

‘Whispers and rumours, I suppose,’ Sal says. ‘A ghost story, of sorts. You think it really happened, and that it’s connected to this?’

‘Don’t you?’ I ask, incredulous. ‘You think you are here to atone, Sal, but perhaps you are just here . And perhaps you are a figment of my imagination.’

‘Or . . .’ Sal thinks for a long moment.

‘Perhaps we are both wrong. The modern mind assumes it knows more than all those that came before, but perhaps it doesn’t.

I thought of the island as a sentient thing, but perhaps it’s just an anomaly; a passing-place in time that the ancients learnt to live with, but which we don’t even recognise; a mouth that knows exactly who it can feed on and takes what it wants. ’

‘If that’s true, then you will never atone.’ I find I can’t look at him, this frail man who ran away, even though he and I are so much the same.

‘Is there nothing in your life that you regret with every breath?’ Sal asks me.

For a second, I can feel a small hand growing cold in mine. But I can’t speak of her aloud. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I only know that you are my friend. You made an awful mistake – I’ve made them, too. When I was, back there, in my own time, I was out of place and lost. I missed you. I missed all of this.’

‘I’m still the same man, Maia,’ Sal says sadly. ‘A man who has done wrong, once. In the past, in the future – I’m not sure. But I am the man you think I am now. That’s all I can tell you.’

‘You’re right,’ I say, remembering a thought I had, the one that gave me the courage to keep going. ‘Sal, you’re right. What you did, what I did. It hasn’t happened yet. And if you and I are here, then . . .’

‘We have decades to make sure it never happens.’ Sal’s eyes light up. ‘Do you really think that can be true, Maia?’

‘I know that we have time. Maybe enough time to change what will happen somehow.’

‘But don’t we risk changing everything? Tearing up the world for our own benefit?’

‘No,’ I say, ‘because there is no future to alter yet. There is only now.’

‘Maybe . . .’ Sal thinks, a glimmer of new hope on his face. ‘Perhaps you could be right.’

‘All I know is that I just met my father. I know the little boy who becomes my father – or a version of him at least. Whatever kind of real this is, it doesn’t matter.

I have a chance to save a child – two children if you count the fatherless little girl I was.

Maybe it’s ancient wisdom or cosmic fate or just that my neural pathways have brought me here, but I am here.

In every way that counts. I’m going to save my father from all the loss and pain that changed him.

And that starts with making sure that Stella doesn’t die on the day she’s supposed to. ’