You, Me & the Sea

by Elizabeth Haynes

  The ‘getting away’ thing had been in relation to getting away from Lucy and Ian. Preferably getting away from Lucy and Ian’s house and back into Mel’s spare room. It takes a moment for Rachel to sort through what Mel’s said; she’s feeling fuzzy, has been awake most of the night, staring at the telly, zoned out. When she pieces it all together the whole idea seems so laughable she thinks she must have missed something.

  ‘You mean … me? Go to Scotland?’

  ‘Yes, you. Of course you.’

  She feels the panic rising, and all the things fly at her at once. No. It’s too far. She knows nothing about lichens, or Scottish islands. She has never been north of Yorkshire. And, and, and all the things she can’t even admit to, about wanting to go and wanting to run away, all at the same time. About how she feels every time she sees a baby. About the sour taste of shame. About the creeping danger of the misery. About how close she has come to ending it.

  ‘Go on, Rach. You’d be perfect for it. And it would get you away from … all this. Give you a chance to get your head straight. And besides, it sounds like the work is piss-easy.’

  ‘What’s the job?’ Rachel asks.

  ‘The island has a lighthouse, and, like, a hostel thing – not a B&B, it’s like a hostel for birdwatchers. Julia was going to be managing the hostel, changing the sheets, doing dinners. I think there’s only six beds. And it’s not even that busy, even in the summer, but apparently the guy who lives in the lighthouse doesn’t want to do it.’

  ‘So – it’s living on the island?’

  ‘Yes. All that fresh air! And solitude, too, just you and the gulls and the occasional twitcher. Julia was going to do all this stuff on the ecology of the island, too, and they were really keen on it, but I don’t think they’d mind having someone who isn’t a naturalist. They’ve just got all these birdwatchers booked into the hostel and nobody to look after them. They’re desperate.’

  ‘And a lighthouse-keeper who sounds a bit difficult.’

  Mel looks at her. ‘It would take your mind off things. Anyway, he’s not the lighthouse-keeper, it’s automated; he just lives in it. He’s the nature reserve warden, or whatever it’s called. Looks after the wildlife.’

  ‘They wouldn’t want me,’ she says.

  ‘Yes, they absolutely would. Besides, Julia will recommend you; she really wants it to be someone she knows. And it might not be for very long, maybe even six weeks or so, just until Julia’s mum can manage without her. And the summer, too; you’ll be out of there before the bad weather starts.’

  ‘She doesn’t know me,’ Rachel says. ‘What if I fuck it up? What if I can’t manage? What if I have to come back?’

  ‘What if you don’t?’

  Rachel stares at her. And Mel fishes in her pocket and brings out a square of paper, folded into four. She smooths it out on the table, looks at it, slides it across. Julia Jones, it says, and a phone number. And then, underneath, Must. As if she had been about to write something else, something to compel Rachel to act. Must call. Must act. Must fucking do something before this gets any worse.

  ‘That’s the name of the island,’ Mel says. ‘Nice, isn’t it?’

  Before she forgets, Rachel writes a quick email to Julia.

  Date: Friday 5 April 2019

  From: Rachel Long

  To: Julia Jones

  Subject: Arrived!

  Hi, Julia,

  Hope things are okay with your mum. Mel says she has gone for the operation – I hope it goes well.

  Just to let you know I got here safely and the island is lovely. I’ll keep you updated.

  Best wishes

  Rachel x

  She walks back to the lighthouse the long way round, figuring that later in the week one of the birdwatchers might try and ask her something, and she will look like a prize idiot if she has to admit that she has never been to the north end of the island. She has her fleece on but the wind has picked up and it’s colder than she expected, given the sun which is now shining in a cloudless sky. The island is glorious, although the seabirds are something of a hazard: they have no fear of her whatsoever, landing abruptly in front of her and flapping off again without warning, circling overhead in a menacing fashion and dropping shit everywhere. Rachel thinks she should have brought a hat. So far she hasn’t been hit, but it must be a matter of time.

  Half a mile or so northeast of the bird observatory, Rachel comes across the ruins. She read about them when she did her limited island research; it’s a former priory, dating back to the twelfth century. Some crusader built a sanctuary here and founded it. Later on, the island had been a plague refuge, and then later still a shrine, thanks to the miraculous recovery of some of the plague victims, who had been left on the island to die. Over the years the reputation for healing had persisted, but then the weather, and the distance from the mainland, had made the island less appealing and the priory had fallen into disuse. Now little remains but waist-high walls and the large stone altar, almost cave-like, with two vertical stones and a remaining flat stone across the top of them. The grass is dotted with rocks that have probably come from the priory, and now the birds have taken it over.

  The north side of the island is different from the south side; the cliffs have fallen away to nothing. In places the rocks give way to sections of beach and it’s possible to reach the sea, should something quite so daft become necessary. The waves crash in spumes of glittering white, the noise a dull roar. With no cliffs here, there are fewer seabirds, with the exception of some black birds sitting on the rocks, long, graceful necks and sharp-looking beaks – cormorants? Or gannets – or are they the same thing? She’ll have to look them up. She finds a place to sit on the springy turf and watch the roaring waves for a little while as they surge through the spaces between the rocks, white foam racing towards her. Turns her face to the sun, closing her eyes, enjoying the solitude. She finds silence difficult, always has. When things got really bad, she used to sit with her headphones on and an app choosing music for her for hours and hours. Anything to blank it all out.

  You might expect it to be peaceful here, and it is, but it’s not a silent peace, it’s a noisy one. Very noisy. Waves and wind and birds crying, and the ever-present call of the sea.

  Something flickers across her closed eyes and she opens them quickly. A bird flying across the sun, probably. But she has an odd feeling now, as though she’s being watched. She gets to her feet and brushes her hands across her backside, looks up the long slope towards the bird observatory, and the lighthouse beyond and to the right. Behind it are ominous dark clouds, a smudge of a rainbow.

  She needs to get back.

  In the distance some movement catches her eye. At first she thinks it must be a bird, but then she sees a figure near the lighthouse, walking up the hill. She can just make out a dark coat, some sort of hat, jeans. It must be Fraser, of course. But he looks different, somehow, from the man she met earlier. Smaller. Skinnier. The figure moves out of sight behind the building.

  Of course it’s Fraser. Who else could it be?

  Rachel

  The lighthouse isn’t at all what she expected. She had expected a single column, gaily painted with red and white horizontal bands. Over the years she has been dragged on many a post-Sunday lunch bracing walk along the coast, and the lighthouse at Happisburgh was always a marker that indicated a cup of tea and a biscuit was imminent. Happisburgh Lighthouse was what Rachel had been expecting, despite having seen pictures when she had been Googling the island. But this lighthouse looks more like a Victorian parsonage lifted from the North Yorkshire moors and impaled on to a tower, which happens to have a lamp room on the top of it.

  It’s not unattractive. It just doesn’t feel quite right.

  Rachel’s walk back to the south of the island takes her round the other side of the lighthouse, and there is plenty more to see. A series of outbuildings at the back, set in a rough U shape. And there are chickens! To her absolute delight, she can see four – no, five �
�� big old hens pecking around in the yard. The outer doors to the workshop, which she’d seen when Fraser showed her the back door, are open. Just inside – she hadn’t noticed it earlier – is a smaller wooden structure that she guesses must be their coop. She wonders about predators, but then realises that probably there aren’t any.

  Beyond the sheds is a garden of sorts, raised beds and a wigwam ready for beans. She looks at the beds and tries to guess what’s growing, but beyond the canes and something that looks like carrot tops it’s hard to tell. It’s neat but not obsessively so; weeds grow up around the sleepers that have been used to make the beds.

  So: Fraser likes his fresh veg, and his fresh eggs. And his decent coffee.

  The veg garden is fenced on one side, presumably for some shelter from the wind, and on the other side of this is a much smaller garden, surrounded by a wall. To her surprise it’s a riot of spring colour. Lots of stunted daffodils, hyacinths, still some crocuses. It’s a wild, tangled sort of place, everything looking a bit windblown. And at the end of the path, a bed with a single rosebush in it, a leafy climbing rose which is having a good old go at clinging to the wire trellis covering the wall.

  And then she finds herself back at the front door.

  This time she opens the door without knocking and blasts into the hallway. Her cheeks are pink and stinging from the wind, her ears numb. She takes off her fleece and hangs it on the coat stand by the door, toes off her hiking boots and slots them next to Fraser’s giant wellies.

  Something smells delicious. She can hear pots and pans banging around in the kitchen. Fraser is stirring something on the stove, a huge black Aga-like thing that looks every bit as intimidating as he is.

  ‘Hello,’ she says.

  Fraser looks around and then goes back to the pot. ‘How did you get on down there?’

  ‘Great. All done, I think.’

  ‘Did you go to the cottages?’

  ‘I didn’t get a chance.’

  ‘I can take you down there if you like.’

  ‘That would be great, thanks.’

  She has so many questions for him that she doesn’t know where to start, but her conversation skills have pretty much dried up over the course of the past year. Apart from necessary conversations with Lucy, and Mel, of course, she sometimes went for days without talking to anyone. But then Fraser clearly doesn’t get to talk much, either. They make a fine pair.

  He’s changed from earlier, into a plain navy T-shirt and jeans. She watches him, eyes dry with tiredness. Is she imagining it, or is there something going on? It’s as if she’s walked in on something, an argument; it’s an uncomfortable prickle on the back of her neck, hanging in the air like static, like a moment of quiet in a classical performance when people aren’t sure whether to start clapping. It’s as if there is a question she has forgotten to ask. Something she should have done, and hasn’t. As if he is angry at her, sulking, and she has no idea why.

  ‘You like curry?’ he asks.

  ‘Oh. Yes, I do.’

  ‘Set the table, then. Cutlery in that drawer.’

  She finds knives and forks, and neatly ironed cotton napkins in the drawer below. A stack of placemats are on the kitchen table already; she sets two places.

  ‘It smells amazing,’ she says, not quite sure how to broach the delicate subject of cooking generally and whether they are going to take turns.

  He doesn’t answer. He takes two plates out of the bottom of the Aga, which makes her realise that he was always planning to eat with her and it wasn’t something he was forced into because she happened to turn up. In fact, she thinks, as he places the two plates on the table, he was probably waiting for her.

  As he does so, he looks at the door. As if he’s expecting someone else.

  ‘What sort of curry is it?’ she asks.

  ‘Vegetable,’ he says, and then, through his first forkful of it, ‘Butternut squash.’

  It’s a beautiful meal. Brightly coloured vegetables in a warm saffron-golden sauce, on a bed of steaming white sticky rice. Where’s he got a butternut squash from, anyway? Did he grow it? Or is it another one of the ‘special’ things that Craig has brought him from the mainland? He’s given her a huge plateful. She looks at it and remembers the Scottish breakfast she had this morning, which feels now like a year ago. She thinks, I don’t usually eat as much as this in a week.

  She takes a mouthful and the flavours are overwhelming. The heat of it rises a second later – quite the most chilli-laden sauce she’s had in a long time.

  He keeps glancing at her and looking away again, as if he can’t quite settle. As if he can’t bring himself to look.

  ‘Too hot for you?’

  She wonders if he’s deliberately overspiced it, to see her squirm. ‘Not at all,’ she tells him, with a little half-smile. ‘I went to uni in Birmingham.’

  They eat in silence for a while.

  ‘What was your degree in?’ he asks.

  ‘English.’

  She doesn’t tell him that she dropped out after the first year, although suddenly she finds a voice and can’t stop, rattles on about the nineteenth-century novel, the digs she lived in, the course, the lecturer she got on well with. He doesn’t ask anything else – doesn’t get a word in. Perhaps that’s why she’s doing it. Out of nowhere she remembers Julia Jones, whose job she has temporarily taken. Writing a thesis on something relevant, something he would probably be interested in. Fraser isn’t interested in feminist critical theory, clearly. She wonders if he’s even read a book.

  There it is again – the prickly tension on the back of her neck. Fraser hears something that she doesn’t, looks up to the doorway.

  Fraser

  He watches her eat, listens to her talking about Atwood and Woolf and feminist criticism, trying to think of things to say. He’s not used to making small talk. He’s never sat at this table with a woman before. All of this is new territory.

  He thinks of Julia Jones, and wonders if the conversation would have been any easier over her first meal. Mosses and lichens, he thinks; he’d have thought that on any given day he would take that over English. But Julia isn’t here yet, and Rachel is, and he has to make the best of it.

  He has no beef with feminists. His mother, who died of cancer five years ago, had been a fearsome wee woman from Paisley who would give him what for if he gave her any cheek, even though he’d towered over her from the age of twelve. She had had Fraser when she was sixteen, and he’d not had a dad or anything resembling one – not counting Uncle Jack, his ma’s older brother, who had taken him to Rangers matches a couple of times as a kid – until she had married Douglas, when Fraser was at college. And then Maggie had come along the following year. He’d thought it a bit weird, his ma getting pregnant, but of course when he’d seen the baby it was another matter. She was tiny and vulnerable and held on to his finger with her whole hand.

  ‘She likes you,’ Ma had said.

  The feeling had been mutual, although for his part it was strained rather by the screeching in the middle of the night; he’d got up a fair few times with her, when Douglas was on nights. For some reason Maggie had settled in Fraser’s arms better than she did for anyone else. He liked that – knowing that he had the knack. Or whatever it was. And after his ma and Douglas had got divorced, when Maggie was just ten, he’d been there for the both of them.

  Maggie.

  His ma never blamed him for what happened, or if she did she never said, which was something that he could hold close to his heart when she was gone. Given that there was nothing else left.

  He told her in the hospital, that one day he would kill Jimmy Wright. By then she had been unconscious, the morphine keeping her sedated but, at last, pain-free. If she heard him, she did not, could not respond. Couldn’t tell him that he was mad; couldn’t order him not to do it. Perhaps that was why he had waited. But he had wanted to tell her, none the less. ‘For Maggie,’ he’d said, kissing her forehead. ‘And for you.’

 
; She had died an hour after he’d left the hospital; one of the nurses, when he came back, told him it happened often that way. ‘It’s as if they want to slip away without you,’ she said. ‘So you don’t have to see it. She was waiting for you to go, so she could go too.’

  While it might have been the sort of thing some people’s mothers would do, to avoid fuss of any kind, he couldn’t help thinking that his own would have chosen to go out with a bang, with as big an audience as she could gather around her and as much drama as possible, if she’d had any choice in the matter. In reality she had changed the year before, when it all happened. She had aged overnight and shrunk into herself a little bit more with each day that passed. The lump in her breast and the one on her spine and the others they kept finding, until they stopped bothering to look for more – they were just so much scar tissue from her broken heart. It was this that killed her in the end. It wasn’t cancer. It was devastation.

  She was only fifty-five.

  He finds the emotion welling up inside him at the kitchen table. He hasn’t thought about his mother in a long time. It has been easier not to. Thinking about Maggie is hard enough.

  Rachel has fallen silent, is looking at her empty plate with surprise. ‘Plenty more,’ he says, waving a fork at the casserole dish. ‘Help yourself.’

  She takes a further delicate spoonful, and one of rice. ‘Thank you.’

  He wonders how she managed to eat it all so fast while simultaneously talking, while he’s still chewing on Round One.

  ‘Are you a vegetarian, then?’ she asks.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Are you?’

  ‘No. I mean, this is great.’

  ‘I thought you might be.’ He’s not admitting to the fact that he cooked this curry just in case she was, but that’s exactly what he did. It’s nice enough, though. He’ll do it again.