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Guilt flickers. I’ve rained on his parade right after he helped me out of a similar quarry-deep hole with Charles. It makes me quicker to talk than usual, faster to mention someone who usedto make those almost daily drives to footy practice with me. “Dad always said that quarry had stories to tell.”
Rae asks, “Yeah?”
“Yes,” I agree firmly and glance sideways. Rae sits taller in his seat, and that’s better, so I keep going. “He said smugglers would drop their loot over the edge.”
“Into the water? Why? And how would they?—”
“Get their loot back out?” I snort. “Dad had some ideas.” Which were wacky enough that I’m pretty sure they were all tall stories. “But smugglers did run Cornwall for generations, back in the day. Anything that washed up after shipwrecks was meant to belong to the crown. We thought differently.”
“We? You count yourself as Cornish?”
“Course I do. And Polish. I was born here. So was Dad, but he still would have told the tax man to take a hike if he’d been a Polish national. He was fierce about what mattered to him.” Like I am about my stepmum and the girls, so I guess that apple didn’t fall too far from Dad’s tree. “Give anything up? Nope. Not him.” He never gave up on a single thing for us until that choice was taken from him.
Another sideways glance shows that Rae is soaking this up like I soaked up his description of his camping adventure, which I guess proved Charles right. He told me that communication with kids only works when it is two-way. That even if they are silent, every mark they make is them trying to tell their story, so we should watch them closely. Rae is better at this than me. I just shut him down even if I didn’t mean to. He does the exact opposite by saying, “Don’t stop. Keep going. What else did your dad say?”
“That there’s a cave hidden by an overhang at the base of the quarry, and it’s full of Spanish gold and silver.”
I focus on the road but can hear his smile clearly. “Next you’ll be telling me that smuggling is a Novac family tradition. How did he even know? Did his dad tell him?”
“I don’t think they did a lot of talking. Different generations.” I answer an unasked question. “I don’t remember him. My grandfather wasn’t a well man after the war.”
“Ah, sorry.”
I shrug. “Dad said he promised to make sure I knew where we came from. That I’d speak and read the language. He only spoke to me in Polish if I went to work with him, or if we were at footy practice.” I give examples and hear them in Dad’s voice, not mine, which is a weird yet also a surprisingly warm blast from the past. “Reach for the save, son,” I say in Polish. “Keep playing like that and you’ll go all the way.” This comes out more thickly in English. “Anyway, he told me you could only see what was sunk in the quarry when the water was particularly low.”
“Did you ever go look with him?”
I wish I had when I had the chance to.
Perhaps Rae guesses that. He continues before I can say so. “Do you think any of that is actually true?”
“About treasure being hidden in the quarry?” I’m about to say no when a memory flickers a whole lot brighter than any Spanish gold or silver. It glitters like I remember seeing something else under that water with my dad’s hand tight around mine. “Yes.”
I slow down below a line of camper vans all lollygagging over this tor-filled view, which makes it easier for me to look Rae’s way for longer, and his gaze?
It glitters as well.
Who needs treasure?
I have to focus on the road before I steer us off it. Knowing my luck, I’d tip us straight into that quarry before I get to kiss him again.
Because that’s what I want even more than getting to hold his hand like some kind of lovestruck kid. I want to kiss him for the first time in days, but I have to settle for giving him a new journey to add to his collection. “Dad worked on the moors as a warden. One summer, we had a drought and the water was really low. So low that I did see something.”
“What?” I can hear his grin again. “A barrel of rum? A cave full of silver?”
“No.” The traffic has moved on. I chance one last glance at him. “It was a car.”
“In the quarry?”
“Yeah. Must have been there a while, Dad said. An old classic car, he called it. I just remember it being bright blue and shiny.” I must be misremembering. Something that had been down there for decades wouldn’t shine, would it? “You’d never know it was down there unless you looked at the right time.”
At least Dad and I got to see it together.
That hike with Dad still replays when we reach the spot Rae wanted to show me. I’m caught between the past and the present, which only continues after I pull off the road and take a track that cuts straight through the kind of managed woodland he liked the least. These regimental rows of fir trees don’t belong here, all lined up like ranks of waiting soldiers, but that’s what they lead up to, Rae tells me—homes for Polish soldiers and their families, who waited for the country they’d fought for to build real homes for them.
I park next to a wilder section as Rae says, “Like in this image.” He unfastens his seat belt and slides closer along the bench seat. His phone is in his hand, and he shows me a photo of an old drawing where tents stand in similarly neat rows. He scrolls to another. “I took photos of Olek’s scroll and diary before I left. This next image comes later.” Other structures have replaced the tents, even if they still look temporary. “Prefabhuts,” Rae confirms. He expands a section of writing. “Can you translate this?”
I take his phone, our fingers grazing. That’s a light touch, a slight brush, that’s all.
