by Denise Mina
Replace the note in the pages.
Shut the book.
Bite your lip.
Smile past Karen and look for the bus. I thought I might be sick. I thought I might cry. I did neither. I sat, apparently calm, imagined what someone who hadn’t just been punched in the heart would look like, and I did that. I looked for the bus.
I scratched my face.
I saw a sheep on the sea front and my eyes followed it calmly for a few minutes. Karen kept her eyes on me the whole time, until the bus came and I got on and smiled at the driver and took my seat. Maybe she thought I didn’t get the note. Maybe that’s why she’s giving it to me again. Karen Little made me an actor anyway. I have to give her that.
When I got to the end of our drive I was struck by terror. Totty might find the book. It might be true and she might tell me so. Why didn’t I just throw the note away? It seemed inseparable from the book. I wrapped the book in a plastic bag and tucked it under a thick gorse bush. I left it there all night and picked it up in the morning and took it back to the library. I should have taken the note out but I didn’t dare look at it again or touch it.
I wondered about the writing at the time. Did Karen disguise her writing because I knew her? Why stand there, watching me find it at the bus stop? Or did she disguise it in case the police became involved?
I never told Totty about the note. Ever. And I’m glad. And I know I’ll be glad about that forever.
I remember that she’s gone for the fifteenth time in an hour. My thoughts are flying, racing somewhere and then BANG. Shock. Disbelief.
Totty’s gone. The world feels poorer. It feels pointless. The next breath feels pointless.
I sit on the couch and watch the waves break on each other as they struggle inland, then are dragged back out by their heels. Striving pointlessly. Then I make an effort. Studiously, I drink the crazy drink and get crazy drunk.
It’s the middle of the night and I wake up on the couch. I’m sweaty and I smell unfamiliar to myself, strange and sour. The sea is howling outside, fierce gray. A self-harming sea. I’m going kill Karen Little. I’m so angry I can hardly breathe in.
The first problem is the car. I get into the car and start the engine and back it into a wall. It sounds as if it was probably a bad crash, from the crumple of metal, but I can’t be bothered getting out to look at it. It’s windy. The sea spray is as thick as a fog over the windscreen.
It’s in reverse. That’s the problem there. I’ve solved a problem and feel buoyed.
I change gear. I go for a front-ways one this time and move off. I pass the gorse bush where I hid the Lik-Tin-Stein all those years ago. The engine is groaning and growling, doesn’t sound happy, so maybe it’s third gear. First gear. That’s the one. So I put it in first and it sounds happy now. Am I wearing a coat? Where does Karen even live now? I’ll find her. Wherever she lives.
I get all the way up the hill, looking down on the lights of the town and the harbor. Its inky dark up here and the road is disappearing in front of me, swallowed in the blackness. Lights! Of course! My lights are off.
I stop on the top of the hill, over the town. She’s down there somewhere. I crank on the hand break and look for the lights. I don’t know this car. The switch should be on the wheel but it’s not. Not on the dashboard. Why would they hide a thing like that? It’s ridiculous, it’s not safe. I’m going to write to the company.
A glass-tap and a shout through the sheeting rain—HELLO?
A face. Man-face at the window. Smiling.
I wind the window down. I’m already indignant about the safety flaws in the car and the rain comes in making my leg cold. Now I’m furious.
The hell’re you doing out here?
Else? He smiles, sweet, as round faced as he ever was. Tam. God, he’s handsome.
I heard she died, Else. I was coming to see you.
So there’s a dissonant thing going on now: inside my head I’m saying “Tam” over and over in different ways, friendly way, surprised, delighted, howthehellareye! ways. But outside my head, I’m making a noise, a squeal like a hurt piglet, very high noise. My face is tight so I can’t will it to move and I’m holding the steering wheel tight with both hands. And my face is wet.
Auch, darlin’, says Tam.
He opens the door and all the rain’s getting on me and he’s carrying me to his car and then I’m in the kitchen.
Tam.
Tam’s pouring coffee. I hope it’s for me because it looks really nice. He’s telling me a lot of things that are surprising but also nice. Tam was my first boyfriend and, honestly, I have never stopped loving that man. We were inseparable before I left so abruptly. He knew why. I never wrote to him or called. I never asked him to visit. But Tam isn’t bitter. He’s winning his race.
Tam’s telling me that he’s gay and he has a man and he’s happy. It makes me feel so pleased, as if a part of me is now gay and has a man and is happy, too.
Now he’s telling me very carefully that it wasn’t me that turned him gay, you know. Tam? The hell are you on about? He sees that I’m laughing at him. I’m laughing in a loving way because, Tam, you don’t need to explain that to me! For godsake! Well, anyway he’s laughing too, now, but his laughter is more from relief really.
He explains that he went out with another girl from the other side of the island. Well, she’s kind of angry with Tam for being gay. She thinks either she turned him gay by being unattractive or that he tricked her into covering for him. She hasn’t settled on one reading of events just yet, but even though it was five years ago, she’s still very annoyed about it.
I think about asking how unattractive can she possibly be, but that’s a quip and my lips aren’t very agile. Nor is my brain. And then the moment for a joke is past. So I just smile and say, Auch, well. People are nuts.
Tam says, Yeah, people are nuts and gives a sad half shrug. Still, he says, not nice to be the cause of hurt, you know?
He means it. However nasty she was to him, he still doesn’t want to be the cause of hurt to her. That’s what Tam’s like. Like my mum. Better people than me. Good people.
I put my hand on Tam’s to say that he’s a lovely person, that he always was a lovely person, just like my mum. But he looks at my hand on his and he’s a bit alarmed, like he’s worried I might be coming on to him and he’ll have to explain something else about being gay and how gay isn’t just a sometimes type of thing. He’s afraid of causing me hurt maybe. So I get out of my seat, sticking my tongue right out and sort of jab it at his face while making a hungry sound. Tam gives a girlish scream and pulls away from me and we’re both laughing as if it’s seven years ago and we’re that whole bunch of different atoms again.
But then, as I’m laughing, I catch a fleeting glimpse of him looking at me. He is smiling wide, his uniform shirt unbuttoned at the neck, his tie loose. His hand is resting on the table and he’s looking straight at me through laughing, appreciative eyes. I know that look and I feel for the jilted girl from the other side of the island. Tam would be easy to misread. When I’m not drunk I might tell him: you come over as straight, Tam. It’s an acting job, being who you are. I am good at acting and Tam isn’t. He’s sending out all the wrong signals.
I’ll tell him later. When my lips are working.
We’re different people, I slur, every seven years, d’you know that?
He says no and I try to explain, but it’s not going very well. Words elude me. When I look up he’s very serious.
He says, Else, you’re drunk. It’s a change of topic from the seven years and he’s not pleased I’m drunk.
I can get drunk if I want. You’re not the goddam boss, Tam.
Yes, he says, seriously. I am the boss. I’m a police officer. You’re drunk and you’re driving a car. It’s all banged up at the back. I am the boss. Where were you going?
I look at him and I think he knows where I was going but I just say nowhere.
I knew when she died you would do something, h
e says, as if I’m a loose cannon, a crazy person who can’t be trusted not to mess everything up unless my mum is there to tick me off. I look up and see the Smirnoff bottle and know that I wouldn’t be drinking if she were still alive. The world has been without her for less than twenty-four hours and I’m already drinking and driving and trying to kill people. Being so wrong makes me livid.
I say, So, Tam, you didn’t come to see me, you came to stop me? I call him a sweary name. What kind of person are you? You don’t give a shit about me or my mum.
But Tam’s face doesn’t even twitch. Don’t even try, he says.
Don’t even try what, Tam?
Don’t try to make me feel guilty, Else. You haven’t been in touch, you never even wrote to me. You didn’t call me and tell me she was dead. What happened to her is the reason I became a policeman so don’t even try that crap with me.
But I’m still angry because I’m so wrong and I say things to him that are just crude and mean. A drunken rant and I’m cringing even as I’m shouting. I start crying with shame and frustration because I’m saying things so unkind and nasty. I’m not homophobic. I don’t think policemen even do that. I’m just really drunk and my mum’s dead and they were so mean to her and Karen had the book all along and it’s not fair.
I’m furious and drunk and ashamed and wrong and it’s making me cry so much that I’m blind. I can hear Tam breathing gasps. Confusing. By the time the tears clear I can see him doubled over, holding his stomach. I think he’s being sick but then I realize that he is laughing, very much, at the things I said about policemen and what he might do with them.
If you saw them! he says, the other policemen! You couldn’t, even for a dare!
My mood swings as wildly as a change in wind direction over the open sea. I hope that coffee is for me.
My eyes are trying to kill me. They’re stabbing my brain. I wake up in bed this time, in the morning. I’ve got all my clothes on. I have to keep my eyes shut as I sit up. I get hold of the bedstead to steady myself and tiptoe carefully towards the bathroom. My mouth floods with seawater and I have to run, even with my assassin eyes.
The smell of coffee lingers in the hallway. I’m worried that I’ve broken something in my olfactory system with all that vodka, unaccustomed as I am, until I get into the kitchen and find Tam making more coffee.
I feel awful.
Good heavens, says Tam, there’s a surprise.
It’s a nice thing to say, the way he says it. Kind. I slither into a seat and shade my eyes.
He’s making scrambled eggs. I won’t be able to eat but I’m too comforted by his presence to interrupt him.
You can’t drive today, Else, he says. You’ve still got high alcohol content in your blood and your car lights are all smashed.
I don’t answer. I sit with my hand over my eyes and listen to him putting toast on the grill, scraping the eggs in the pan and I think, if this was the fifties we could have been happy in a sexless marriage of convenience, Tam and I.
Who were you going to see last night, Else?
The memory evokes a misery so powerful it almost trumps my hangover. I tell him: I want to kill Karen Little.
He’s stopped cooking and is looking at me. I can’t look back. Karen?
He puts two plates of scrambled egg down on the table. And takes the toast from the grill and drops a slice on top of each of the yellow mountains.
I pull my plate over to me.
Karen gave me the book back.
Tam is very still. Which book?
The Lichtenstein. She gave it to me at the library yesterday. She said it was the last book I ever took out of the library. No one had taken it out since. The note was still in it.
Tam sits down. His hands rest either side of his plate like a concert pianist gathering his thoughts before a recital.
Finally he speaks. I’ll kill the bitch myself, he says.
The hospital tells me that nothing can be done about my mum today. They need a pathologist to come over from the mainland and do a post mortem, but the ferries are cancelled because a storm is coming. I can sit at home alone or I can go and confront Karen. Tam says let’s go.
I’m in Tam’s work car, a big police Range Rover. He isn’t working today, he says, so it’s no bother to drive me around. He’s very angry about the book. He wants to know how she got the book to me. I tell him about the ceremony, in front of everyone, how she turned and HAHAHA’d into my face. He gets so angry he has to stop the car and get out and walk around and smoke a cigarette. I watch him out there, walking in the rising wind, his shoulders slumped, orange sparks from the tip of his cigarette against the backdrop of the grey sea like tiny, hopeless flares.
When he gets back in he takes a hip flask out of the glove box. He has a sip and gives it to me, as if drinking in a car is okay now, because he’s so angry. I drink to please him. I feel it slide down into me and pinch the sharp edges off my hangover. It is comforting to have my anger matched. He nods at me to drink more and I do. The alcohol warms me and eases my headache and just everything feels a little easier, suddenly. Being angry feels easy and the future feels unimportant. What matters is stopping Karen.
When he finally speaks Tam’s face is quite red. He tells me that we will find Karen and take her somewhere. We will not even ask about the note or the book; that would be a chance for her to talk herself out of trouble. If we asked she’d say she knew nothing about it. She’d blame someone else. She’d plead ignorance. We will simply get her alone and then, immediately, we’ll do it: we will stab Karen in the neck. We will get away with it because we’ll be together. We will be one another’s alibi. We’ll decide which of us will do the stabbing when we get there. But I already know.
He drives and he asks me about the book and I tell him it had never been taken out since I recovered it from the gorse bush and took it back to school. He remembers how upset I was back then. He says it was devastating for him, too, because I just left and I was his only friend. She ruined his life, too, because she chased me away. I know this is true. Back then Tam became fixated on me to a degree that wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t always benign. In vino veritas: if I hadn’t had that drink from his hip flask I might not suddenly know that I didn’t really leave despite Tam. It was partly because of him. He was too intense back then. His love was overwhelming, and I never realized that before.
Tam parks in a quiet back street in the town. He has finished his cigarettes. He needs more so he goes off to the shops while I go into the school and look for Karen. He says just pretend that you left something in there. I watch him walk away from the car and he is scratching his head and his hand is covering his handsome face.
Karen Little isn’t in today. The librarian’s position is part time, the school secretary explains. Karen only works Monday, Tuesday, and half day on Wednesday. Then she tries to segue into a rant about government cuts but she can see I’m not listening. Then she stops and seems to realize that I’ve been drinking. She waits for me to speak, cocking her head like a curious seagull. Then she guesses: did I leave something yesterday? I’m supposed to say I did but, at just that moment, I think of my mum laying in a dark drawer in a mortuary fridge and, to be honest, I just sort of turn and walk away.
Out in the car park Tam is waiting with the engine running. I get in. Karen’s not there, I tell him. She’s at home. He starts to drive and I realize that he knows where she lives. But he’s a cop in a small community. He probably knows where everyone lives. And then I wonder why the engine was running, before he knew she wasn’t in.
We drive out of town, onto the flat, wind-blown moor. I steal a glimpse at Tam. He’s furious. He’s chewing his cheek and for some reason I think of Totty. Not about her dying but what she said about being bitter. Tam looks bitter and I pity him that. I catch a glimpse of myself in the side mirror and I’m frowning and I look bitter. This is not what Totty wanted for me.
I know this road. We’re heading for Paki Harris’s house and I ask wh
y. Karen lives there now, says Tam. She was his only blood left on the island. Karen was related to Paki Harris. I’ve always known that. Everyone is related to everyone here except us incomers, but I didn’t realize she was so closely related to Paki. Second cousins, Tam tells me somberly, just as we’re passing a small farmhouse by the roadside with a “For Sale” outside it. The sign flaps in the wind like a rigid surrender flag.
“For Sale” signs are a sorrow on the island. People are born, live, and die in the same house here. A “For Sale” sign means the house owner had no one to leave it to, or maybe only a mainlander. Mainlanders don’t understand the houses here. They sell them for cash or use them as holiday homes for two weeks a year, a long weekend at Easter. You can’t do that with these houses. They need fires burning in them all the time to keep the damp out. To keep the rot out. These island houses aren’t built for sometimes. They need commitment. Karen Little has taken on the commitment of Paki Harris’s house.
It was an accident when my mother killed Paki. She ran him over on the main street on a Sunday afternoon in May, just before I was born. The Fatal Accident inquiry found no fault with her. She didn’t try to explain what happened. She just ran him straight over, once, completely. She never mentioned it to me, I heard it from just about everyone else, with various embellishments. But the note, that note in the book, was the first version I ever heard that made sense of it. Paki raped her. She got pregnant with me. She killed him. That’s why.
Paki Harris was from here. My mother was not. So the island took his side because loyalty isn’t rational and, in the end, loyalty is all there is in a place this small.
In the seven years since I left I have often imagined what it was to be my heavily pregnant mother and see a man who had raped her day after day, standing in church, shopping at the supermarket, strolling on the sea front. I would have driven a car at him. The note, though, the note made me realize how deep the bitterness is here. It had never occurred to me that she had a motive until I saw that note. And afterwards, I realized, if they knew, if they all knew that he had raped her and that’s why, could they not have found one shred of compassion for her? They spat at her in the street. She couldn’t eat in the café because no one would speak when she was in there. She used the library until they banned her for “bringing food in.” She had a packet of crisps in her bag. I’m not leaving, she’d say, because wherever you live, life is a race against bitterness and staying makes me run faster.
