Orla watched him for a few minutes, making sure he was going to stay in the safety of his bed before leaving the room. She was wide awake now and so, after making a cup of tea, she took the opportunity to look up sleepwalking online. The most likely cause for Luke, she believed, was sleep deprivation. She had the feeling he hadn’t been sleeping properly for some time now. What a pair they were, she thought – him sleepwalking and her with her nightmares.
The minutes ticked by as Orla began researching bereavement on the internet. She soon realised that there was a lot of confusing information. Some sites said that there were five stages of grief, but there was another that stated there were seven. Another article she found agreed that there were five: denial, anger, depression, bargaining and acceptance, but that they weren’t always neat and consecutive, but muddled and messy. But did anyone really know for sure? And did a grieving person know that there were all these neat stages to get through? Did they feel them instinctively? Orla somehow thought not and soon came to the conclusion that, because each person was different, it stood to reason that they would work through grief differently and that there was no one-size-fits-all pattern or solution. Some people might eat their way through their grief whilst others would starve themselves. Some people found talking to others about their grief helpful whilst others shunned company and grieved alone. There was no right or wrong way.
She yawned, her eyes sore from looking at the bright laptop screen in the middle of the night. Sleep, perhaps, was beckoning her at last and she switched the computer off. One Ear, who’d been snoring in his basket, raised his one ear and opened an eye as she got up to leave the room.
‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ she told him, switching off the light and making her way to her bedroom, pausing briefly outside Luke’s room. Was he still asleep, she wondered? And were his dreams as troubled as her own? She made her way to her bedroom, crawling under the duvet and switching the light out. The first rays of morning light were creeping under the curtain and Orla welcomed it. The night had been long enough and, although she felt she could sleep for at least a couple of hours, she would be glad when the time came to get up and greet the day properly.
Sure enough, Orla managed to sleep and, when she awoke, she whistled for One Ear and they left the castle together. A walk on the beach always restored her spirits after a rough night. There was something deeply comforting about the sea and, for some time, her world would be focused on the waves, the sand and the stones. Nothing else existed.
Every so often, Orla would bend to pick up a particular stone that had been waiting, hundreds of thousands of years, just for her to find it. Maybe its perfectly round shape appealed to her eye or its elongated body fit snugly in the palm of her hand, or perhaps the flat surface was fingertip friendly and perfect for skimming. Her favourite stones were the ones that simply felt right. She thought of them as good holding stones – companions for her seaside walk. She’d pick them up and dance her fingers around them while she was walking or quickly drop them in favour of another, prettier, stone, her affinity to the previous one quickly forgotten. Nature’s gift was a pocket full of pebbles.
One Ear wasn’t interested in stones. He preferred a bit of driftwood to carry or half a crab’s shell to crunch into splinters, or simply to chase the seagulls, scattering them seawards to a chorus of delighted barks.
Orla took it all in – walking, breathing and emptying her head of the assaults of her nightmare. The salty sea breeze was a great balm to a troubled mind and she refused to let the fears of the night carry over into the day. But there was another darkness filling her mind that morning – the loss of Helen. She was still in shock at having been told that her friend had been killed, and she could only imagine what Luke must be going through. Orla only wished now that she’d got to know Helen better. They’d exchanged many messages, but they’d always been so guarded. Or at least Orla’s had been. That had been deliberate on her part. It was a miracle at all that she’d connected with Helen in the way she had. She hadn’t talked to anybody else on Galleria in the same way, and yet there’d always been that part of her that hadn’t revealed itself. She kind of regretted that now because the opportunity to really get to know her friend had been taken away from her.
She looked out at the sea again, knowing that regrets were useless and that the past could never be changed, but how she wished she could go back and reach out just that little bit more. Luke had told her how much her words of encouragement had meant to Helen and the sweet gift that Helen had chosen for her meant the world to her, but she couldn’t help feeling that there was more she could have done and more that she could have shared.
Luke was up when she got back to the castle.
‘How are you?’ Orla asked.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I slept well.’
Orla took this in, wondering if sleepwalkers ever knew they had been sleepwalking. She thought it better that she didn’t mention it. He certainly looked okay.
‘Been to the beach?’ he asked her.
‘Yes.’
‘I thought I’d pop out later. Get to know the village a bit.’
Orla nodded. That was, after all, normal behaviour, wasn’t it?
‘Can I get you anything?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Nothing from the local shop?’ he asked, and she shook her head. ‘You want to come with me?’
‘No.’ Her answer was blunt, but she needed him to know that there was no compromise to be made here. She’d already asked him, politely, not to question the way she chose to live.
‘I’ll get a bit of work done first and then take a breather later. Let me know if you change your mind.’
‘I won’t. Change my mind, I mean,’ she said, feeling flustered.
‘Okay.’ Luke nodded, smiled and then left the room, and Orla immediately felt guilty for sounding so rude. But better to be rude than unsafe, she told herself.
Luke walked down the little hill towards the market square he’d driven into when he’d first arrived in Lorford. It was a beautiful June morning, with a clear blue sky, and the swifts were at play, screeching high above the rooftops. Luke took some good, deep breaths of summer air. It felt good to be out of the castle. He hadn’t been completely honest with Orla; he’d felt a little rough that morning, as if he hadn’t slept well, and yet he had no recollection of having woken in the night. He just felt unrested somehow. It wasn’t an uncommon feeling. Ever since the night of the train crash, Luke had found his relationship with sleep had become patchy at best. Sometimes, he was able to lose himself in a heavy and deep sleep, only to wake up feeling even more exhausted than before, and other nights he’d be restless, getting up every hour or so and then waking red-eyed and thick-headed in the morning. Maybe more walking would go some way to helping him sleep better, he thought. He was certainly in the right place, with the beach and the footpaths he’d spotted which led out across the fields and reed beds. Although a little voice told him that you couldn’t outwalk your grief.
He paused for a moment, glancing back at the castle. He’d been hoping that Orla would feel some sort of obligation towards her guest and come with him to show him around Lorford, but he was beginning to realise that it was more likely to be the other way around because she obviously didn’t venture into the village. She only ever seemed to go to the beach, although she did occasionally photograph the church. But that was set back from the village and he could see how she could walk there easily without too many people seeing her.