by Lucy Foley
MIRANDA
We stumble outside to the edge of the loch. Julien is hunched over himself – I think he might have hurt himself a bit when he was messing around with Giles and Mark just now. They broke a table, for Christ’s sake – they’re like children. Katie is still wrapped in one of the big woollen blankets, over the top of her clothes. She can’t still be cold, can she? She’s always been so bloody fragile. Still, I feel quite bad about my behaviour. Not for Mark – he had that coming, ever since last night. But Katie hasn’t done anything to me, really, beyond being a bit distant and not much fun. Sometimes these impulses overtake me – the urge to push things a bit further … even the urge to wound. I can’t stop myself, it’s like a compulsion.
I’d like to say something to Katie, to apologise, maybe, but I can’t find the words. The champagne has hit me really hard. My breath is misting in the air, but I can’t actually feel the cold, wrapped as I am in my own little blanket of booze. I feel numb. I’d forgotten I had so much wine before the champagne. My thoughts are jumbled, my mind fuggy. Maybe it would be better if I were sick.
The countdown to midnight begins. ‘A minute!’ Emma shouts, looking at her watch.
I stare up at the stars. The new year. What is it going to bring for me?
‘Thirty seconds!’
I look around at the others. They’re all grinning, but their faces, in the light thrown from the Lodge, look strange, spectral, and their smiles look like snarls.
Mark stands poised with a new bottle of champagne. He hasn’t glanced in my direction once, since the game. I’m used to having his eyes on me. I don’t miss it, of course I don’t. But at the same time, as I stand here in the dark, I have this feeling of being invisible … untethered … like a balloon that might suddenly float up into that starlit sky.
‘Twenty seconds …’ The others are chanting now. ‘Nineteen, eighteen …’
I don’t like it, all of a sudden. It feels like the countdown to something terrible … the explosion of a bomb. I imagine the little red lights blinking down.
‘Five, four, three, two …’
‘Happy New Year!’ The rest of us parrot it in response. Giles is fumbling with a lighter at the shoreline.
‘Be careful!’ Samira calls, her voice high and shrill.
‘Come on!’ I shout, trying to shake off the bad feeling. ‘We’re all waiting!’
Finally, Giles seems to manage to light the thing. He staggers backwards. Then there’s a promising fizz, and then a whoosh, and a big red rocket erupts from the ground with a sound like a scream and explodes over the loch. The water reflects it: a thousand tiny fragments of fire. It’s beautiful. I try to focus on it, but everything is spinning. The silence afterwards is so … heavy. The dark around us is so thick, like I could reach out … touch it. If we were in London – or anywhere near civilisation for that matter – we would be able to see all the other firework displays going off around us. Reminding us of other people, other life. But here we are absolutely alone.
I can still hear the scream of the firework inside my head. But it no longer sounds the same, it sounds like a person. And I have this thought … that it wasn’t like a firework at all. More like one of those safety flares. SOS. Fired from the deck of a sinking ship.
Julien comes back over to us. ‘It’s not quite Westminster fireworks,’ he says.
‘But who wants Westminster – all those sweaty bodies pressed together – when you can have this?’ Emma asks. ‘This place,’ she spreads her arms wide, ‘and best friends.’ She links her arm with mine, and smiles at me, a proper, warm smile. I want to hug her. Thank fuck for Emma.
And then she begins to sing – her voice is surprisingly good. I try and join in:
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and days of old lang syne?
Ok, I know I’ve had a lot to drink but together, out here in the dark and silence, our voices sound beautiful, and there’s something vulnerable about the noise. The trees around us are so thick and black. Anyone could be watching us, going through this little ritual together.
It must be all the booze, I think, that is making me feel so … strange. There’s a loud bang, and I jump with shock. But it’s just Nick opening another bottle of Dom. He pours it into glasses. As he passes one to Katie, I see her face, and it makes me shiver. What’s wrong with her? It can’t all be due to her dunk in the loch, can it? She doesn’t even look at the glass of champagne being passed to her, and it slips from her grasp. ‘Whoops!’ Bo says, catching it. ‘That was nearly a goner!’
Nick raises his glass. ‘To old friends!’ he says. He looks straight at me while he says it. I don’t know why, but I have to look away. I down my glass.
There’s a strange pause, now. No one seems to know what to do next. The landscape around is so quiet in the lapse. I feel my stomach do an unpleasant somersault; the ground beneath me seems to shift under my feet. Wow. I’m definitely drunk.
‘We should kiss,’ Samira says. ‘Where’s the kissing?’ She reaches up and smacks a kiss on Julien’s cheek. ‘Happy New Year!’
Mark turns to me. I don’t want him to kiss me. When he leans in, I duck so that his lips barely graze my ear. I catch the flash of annoyance, even anger, in his expression. I think of his eyes last night, the menace of his tone.
I turn to Julien. His face is completely in shadow from this angle. I cannot make out his features, or his expression: just the dark gleam of his eyes. When I lean in to kiss him – on the mouth, of course – I have this … feeling that he, too, is a stranger. This man with whom I have spent so much of my life, with whom I have shared a house and a bed, beside whom I have slept most nights. How little it takes, I think, just some shadows, really, to make ourselves unknown to each other. Wow. Alcohol always makes me think deep thoughts.
‘Happy New Year,’ I say.
‘Happy New Year,’ he says. And I’m not sure, but I think he turns slightly as I reach up to him, so that my lips land on the very corner of his mouth. Just like I did, with Mark.
Nick is on my other side. ‘Nick!’ I say, with forced jollity. ‘Happy New Year again! Come here.’ I put out my arms; he lets me hug him. He smells amazing, like the Byredo counter at Liberty. ‘Why have we never been better friends, Nick?’ I ask. It comes out sounding pretty fucking needy. I didn’t quite mean to say it out loud.
He steps back, his hands on either side of my shoulders: to everyone else he might be holding me in an affectionate embrace. He looks straight into my eyes as he says, ‘Oh, Miranda, I think you know the answer to that.’
It’s the way he says it: so quiet, under his breath, so that no one else can hear. I suddenly feel cold in a way that I don’t think has anything to do with the freezing air. I take a step back.
I drink a bit more. Then much more, as the others go on partying around me. I want to get back into the swing of things. I want to get rid of this feeling. A kind of fear, deep in my belly, deeper, somehow, than anything I felt last night, in the bathroom. I feel I am clinging to a cliff edge and slowly, slowly, my fingers are loosening their grip. That beneath me is … nothing, the loss of everything … everything important.
Bo slides up to me. ‘You all right?’ He’s always been the one to notice when someone isn’t OK. It’s because he’s quiet – he observes, while the rest of us are busy making lots of noise. And he’s kind. He’s so unlike Nick, with all his sharpness.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Want to go have a drink of water?’
I know he’s saying I need it because I’m drunk, but, actually, I do feel a bit weird. ‘All right.’ I follow him into the kitchen and watch dumbly while he runs me a glass from the tap. When he hands it to me I say, ‘Thanks. I might just sit by myself for a bit, if that’s OK.’
‘OK …’ he says, hovering.
‘Go!’ I shoo him away.
‘All right,’ he says, and
then, with a teacher-like waggle of his finger. ‘But I’m coming back in a little while if you haven’t reappeared.’
‘Fine.’ And then I remember to say, ‘Thank you, Bo.’
‘Forget it, darling. The number of times someone helped me out like this – I owe the universe a great deal.’
‘But Bo,’ I say, before I can stop myself, ‘I’m not a junkie. I’ve just had a bit too much champagne.’ Oops. I didn’t quite mean to say that.
Something in his face changes, his eyes going all narrow. I’ve never seen Bo look like this before. I’ve always thought there must be someone else in there: someone darker. And from what Katie told me once, someone capable of some fairly out-there behaviour. It’s like he’s been wearing this … mask, and I’ve just seen behind it. I suddenly feel a bit more sober.
‘I’m sorry, Bo,’ I say. ‘I didn’t mean it – I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve had too much to drink. Please …’ I reach out a hand to him.
‘It’s OK,’ he says, his tone light. But he doesn’t take my outstretched hand.
I wait until he’s gone, and then I click off the light and let my legs collapse under me like a folding chair, so I’m sitting on the floor. I’ll just rest here a bit, until I sober up … What the fuck is wrong with me? How could I have said that to Bo of all people, when he was trying to help me?
Katie once told me I was ‘careless’. ‘You say things off the cuff,’ she said, ‘without thinking. The only problem is people who don’t know you might think you mean them.’
She knows me so well. But I’m not sure even she knows how I hate myself, later on, after making one of these so-called careless remarks. The way, at Oxford, I’d lie in my bed the morning after a night out and think, think, think about how I’d behaved: everything I’d said and done.
‘Everyone falls in love with you,’ Samira told me, once. ‘They can’t bloody help it.’
But, I have often wondered, do they actually like me?
I’ll just let my eyes close here, just for a little bit …
I’m woken by the sound of a voice: low, urgent.
‘Miranda?’ It’s a man’s voice, little more than a hoarse whisper, as though he doesn’t want to be heard. Who is it? ‘Julien?’ I squint through the gloom. I’m confused by the dark. In the distance I can hear the rumble of voices … the others, I realise. My head’s swimming.
He steps forward, and finally, I see who it is. I’ve never seen him like this. There’s a strange, almost threatening, expression on his face.
DOUG
He’s sitting in the one armchair in his cottage. Every so often he reaches over and pours a little more from the bottle of single malt. His aim is to get so drunk that he simply passes out, or anaesthetises himself, but his mind is still obstinately clear.
New Year’s Eve. Another year clicking over. They say that time is the greatest healer, but it hasn’t done much good in his own experience. Events from six months ago are a blur – the days run into one another here, with little to differentiate them other than the slowly changing seasons. But that day in his past – three years now – is as clear as if it happened yesterday, an hour ago.
Beyond the window there is an explosion. He feels his whole body go rigid with shock; he almost drops to the floor, his heart feels like it’s going to punch its way out through his chest. Then he realises what it is. A firework. He fucking hates fireworks. Still, after all these years, they have this effect on him.
The day your life changes for ever. Does anyone see it coming? He definitely didn’t. It had been an uneventful few weeks. Things had settled into a pattern, had started to feel as normal as you can get in a place like Helmand Province. All the men had relaxed, perhaps got a bit sloppy. It’s impossible not to, even though you’re trained in how to keep yourself alert. But when you have to be more ‘on’ than the human body is ever meant to be, for four days in a row, it’s impossible not to switch off when the threat level lessens.
It was a routine excursion. As usual as a police officer’s beat. Just to check that everything was as it should be. The men making a patrol of the street, him up above as cover. Doug was one of two snipers; they had to take turns, shifts, to make sure that they were really focused, and this one was his watch.
The men were just below him, coming around the corner in the armoured trucks, when the spotter shouted out to him. A small child – a little boy – running from the other end of the street. Everything froze, apart from the small running figure. Doug realised the boy looked bulky. He was wearing a jacket several sizes too big for him. And he was running straight towards the men. He was only about five years old. Hardly even a proper little boy yet, hardly older than a toddler. But immediately Doug was thinking: bomb. He knew what he had to do. He took aim through the viewfinder. Tracked the boy. His finger was on the trigger. He was ready. But he wanted to get a better visual. He couldn’t see any proper evidence of a device, other than that bulky jacket.
He had perhaps ten seconds. Then nine, then five, then three. The spotter was screaming at him, but it was as if he was underwater: his brain and body seemed to have slowed. He could not shoot.
And then everything exploded. The men. The trucks. Half the street. All in the same second that he finally managed to exert the required pressure on the trigger.
The therapist he saw told him that his reaction had been completely understandable – that the situation had been an impossible one. And yet this didn’t help him explain it to himself, or to the families of the dead men who visited him at night. This is why he does not sleep: because as long as he is awake, he does not have to see their faces, and answer to their silent interrogation. Though lately, they have begun arriving even in his waking hours. He sees them approaching in the middle of the landscape. So real that he swears he could reach out and touch them.
This is why he is lucky to have this job. In any other, he might not be able to hide it. Someone would notice that he was acting oddly, and report it, and that would be it. But here there is no one to notice. There’s Heather, in the office, but she gives him a wide berth. And perhaps she has some hiding of her own to do. Why else would a young, thirty-something, attractive woman come and live in a place like this on her own? He doesn’t ask her her reasons, and she in turn doesn’t ask him his. It’s an unspoken, mutual agreement.
He was lucky that the boss didn’t care about the other thing, even though he had to declare it on his application. ‘The boss,’ said the suit who interviewed him, ‘doesn’t mind about all that. He wants you to feel you have a clean slate here.’ A clean slate. If only.
He switches on the TV and immediately regrets it. All it shows, of course, are thousands of happy faces: families snug together on the bank of the Thames, eyes lit with red and gold flames as they watch the display. He wonders what Heather is doing, over in her cabin. He has seen her lights on, late at night. He knows she does not sleep well either.
He could go around, with the bottle of whisky, as he has thought of doing on more nights than he would care to admit. He recalls that night, when she opened her door to him – when she had heard the sound. He remembers everything about it, a picture clear in his mind: the flush of her cheeks, her dark hair mussed about her head, the giant pyjamas swamping her. She had invited him in – and then she had blushed, as she realised how it sounded. He had refused, of course. But he has imagined following her in. He has imagined a lot more too, in the lurid, sleepless small hours of the night, when he has glimpsed the light on in her cottage. He has imagined pushing her up against the wall, her wrapping her legs around his waist, how her mouth might taste on his … He will not go around there. Not tonight, not any night. Someone like him has a duty to stay away from someone like her. She does not deserve the catastrophe that he represents.
That sort of life is closed to him, now. He leans over, towards the fire. He raises a hand, and, with the dispassionate regard of a scientist, holds it in the flames, so that the skin sears like steak.
<
br /> NOW
2nd January 2019
HEATHER
Doug stands in the doorway, frowning at me.
‘Come in, Doug,’ I say. ‘Close the door.’ He comes to stand in front of the desk, towering over me.
‘Doug,’ I say. ‘I shouldn’t have done this. But I have something to confess. I googled your name. I found out about the court case.’
He says nothing. His eyes are on the floor.
‘What happened?’ Explain it to me, I think. What you did. The violence. Make me understand. Although I’m not sure that he can. I can’t see how there can be any way he could explain it.
He takes a breath, and begins.
He had been in a bar in Glasgow, he says, with friends, about three months after returning home from his tour. ‘Tour of Afghanistan, six months.’ He’d had one too many, or rather several too many, but he was feeling loose and relaxed for the first time in as long as he could remember. And then this bloke swaggered over to him. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘I recognise your face. I know you from somewhere.’
‘I doubt it.’ He’d barely glanced at the guy.
‘No,’ the man said, ‘I do.’ He took out his phone, did something on it. He held the screen up. Facebook, a photograph, it was him. It was in Helmand. ‘My best mate, Glen Wilson. I knew it. This is you, isn’t it? In the photo with him. I know it’s you.’
He could hardly bring himself to look at the photograph. ‘Then I’m sure you’re right,’ he’d said, feeling the beer sour in his stomach, still just trying to brush the guy off. Maybe this would placate him. ‘It must be me.’
‘So you were there?’ The man was standing too close.
‘Yes, I was there. I knew Glen. He was a great guy.’ He wasn’t, actually. Not one of the best – always picking fights – but you didn’t speak ill of the dead. And he knew so very many dead.
‘You were in his regiment?’ The man’s face, beer-stale, was squared up to his own. He was speaking too loudly. There was a pugnacious twist to his face, his shoulders set. Doug could sense the interest of those surrounding them quickening in the background, the irresistible lure of confrontation. Something’s going on.
