The Day She Died

by Catriona McPherson

  Ten

  It was evening before we got to the studio. I had heard people say that the day just disappears when there’s kids, and I never bought it—thought they needed to get a grip and how could a person call the shots who was so small you could just pick them up and put them where you wanted them to be? That Wednesday afternoon was boot camp. Ruby needed a bath. Gus wanted a long walk. Dillon wouldn’t go in his pushchair. The milk in the couch was starting to stink. Three times I filled a basin with hot soapy water and it cooled, unused. Dillon’s nappy. Ruby was hungry. Gus came back and needed quiet to make some calls. They both got wet in tide pools when we were staying out the way. Ruby didn’t like what clothes were clean. Gus wanted to find some paperwork he needed for the undertakers. Dillon was hungry but only for sweeties, not for food. Ruby wanted to walk to the shop on the caravan site. Dillon wouldn’t go in his pushchair. Gus had a headache and wanted a bath. There was no hot water. Go to the shop in the car. Ruby wouldn’t go in her car seat. Dillon wouldn’t be left behind.

  “I’ll just take your pushchair in case you get tired,” I said.

  “Noooooo!” he squealed.

  “He wants a carry,” said Ruby, making trouble.

  “No,” Dillon sobbed. “Walk. Pomise. Pomise, Jessie.”

  “Will he walk?” I asked. Gus was standing heating up pans of water on the cooker-top, wrapped in a towel. I was trying not to look at him. Topless men never seem to think they’re as naked as I think they are.

  “No chance,” said Gus. “Dillberry, why don’t you have a bath with Daddy and let the girls go shopping?”

  “Not much good for your headache,” I said. “I’ll carry him. He’s only a baby. I’m a big strong girl.”

  But God almighty it was a long way. We were hardly on the sand before he was lifting his arms and smiling up at me, batting his lashes. I hoisted him onto one hip. It seemed okay. Twenty paces later, it felt like I was carrying a bag of rocks. I shifted him to the other side. Ten paces later, I put him down.

  “Nooooo,” he moaned, as if I’d dropped him in a pit in the woods and left him there.

  “How about a kelly-coad?” I said. Dillon sniffed and stared. “A piggy-back.”

  “His legs are too short,” said Ruby.

  “Noooo,” said Dillon.

  “High-shoulders?” That did the trick, but there’s a reason it’s always men you see with kids on their necks. It kills your back and it doesn’t make them weigh any less. By the time we were at the end of the beach, going up the track to the shop and shower block, my legs felt rubbery enough to make me worry I would slip and drop him. And my arms had pins and needles from holding onto his feet, so putting him down didn’t feel that possible either. There was no one around to ask for help. Just the blank gaze of all those caravans with their net curtains drawn across their single eyes.

  Ruby ran ahead over the car park and leapt at the door handle. She bounced back. Tried again. Turned to me.

  The lights were off inside. Just the drinks fridge glowing.

  “I think it’s closed, honey,” I said.

  Ruby stuck her bottom lip out and glared at me. “It is not closed, you stupid!” she said. “It’s open when Mummy comes.”

  And right enough, the hours said Wednesday 10 to 5, and it was just on four now. Four o’clock on an October afternoon, with two grumpy kids and a stiff neck, and a sore ear from the cold wind and the other one set to catch it all the way back. I banged hard on the door and shouted.

  “Shop!” Ruby giggled at that.

  “Hello?” I called.

  Over at the house, a door walloped open and a woman in a toweling kaftan, bright yellow, no excuse for it, stood scowling in the doorway with her hands on her hips.

  “We’re shut!” she shouted.

  “How come?” I shouted back. “It’s nowhere near five.”

  “We’re short-handed,” she said, and made to close the door.

  “You might have put a sign up!” I said. “In emergency, call at house or something.”

  “What emergency?” she said. “There’s a shop at Gatehouse.”

  “Aw, come on,” I said. “I’ve lugged this pair right along the beach promising sweeties. Two minutes, eh?”

  “You’re not the only one having a bad day, hen,” said the woman and slammed the door.

  “Shop!” shouted Ruby. Dillon joined in.

  “Shop! Shop!”

  “I’ll make pancakes,” I said. “Come on. And Dillon, pal, you’ll have to walk for a wee bit because my neck is killing me.”

  We were a sorry procession that trailed back down to the beach. Ruby was whining, Dillon was whining. I nearly joined in. I held them by the hand, one on each side, and dragged them along. It looked even farther this way, the outcrop of rock tiny at the end of the sands. And it had started raining too; sore, cold rain lashing across our faces. The beach was deserted. One of the houses had a light on—the one with the kayaks—but it was the light that people leave on when they’re out: one lamp in the front window, not the kitchen strip lights, not a reading light by an armchair, just the light that tells burglars the place is empty.

  We trudged on.

  “Wanna carry,” said Dillon.

  “You’ve had a carry,” said Ruby. “I want a carry.”

  I said nothing.

  “Jessie, I want a carry,” she said again.

  I was staring along the beach at someone approaching. A tall someone with flapping hair pushing an empty buggy.

  “Here’s Daddy,” I said, pointing.

  “Good,” said Ruby. “You’re rubbish.” She sat down on the sand, getting her second wet bum of the day. Dillon sat down and leaned against her. I ripped the hood off of my borrowed kagoul, put it Velcro side down on the sand, and sat down too. Gus broke into a run and, as he drew near, I could hear him making nee-naw siren sounds.

  “The shop was shut, Dad,” Ruby said.

  “We’ll go to Gatehouse,” said Gus. “Buggy, Dillon. No discussion. Cuddy-back, Roobs.”

  “What a waste of a hot bath,” I said, shuffling, ready to get up. Gus put out his hands and hauled me to my feet. “You’ll be in a muck sweat again.” He kissed my forehead before I had time to dodge it, and I felt the kiss, the ghost of it, for the rest of the day. It was like when you scoop for a dog and your hand’s got that radio-active feel till you wash it. Except good, not manky, but otherwise the same.

  I turned away from the endless whipping wind coming off the sea, sheltering myself while I velcroed my hood back on (and to get my face to stop smiling in case I embarrassed him), and that’s when I saw a shadow just flitting between two of the caravans. I wiped my wet hair out of my eyes and looked harder.

  It was him. I was sure it was. His hair was even wilder than the night before, and I could see the black on the bottom half of his face from here. He was standing pressed hard against the wall of the caravan now, peering round the corner, like the pink panther, or whoever it is, because Steve’s always telling me how the pink panther isn’t the pink panther at all, like Frankenstein.

  “What is it?” asked Gus. The guy had ducked out of view as soon as Gus turned to face him.

  He’d told me he didn’t want to know. “Nothing,” I said.

  “You’ve had a hell of day, haven’t you?”

  “Coming in in fourth place,” I said. He lifted Ruby onto his shoulders, clamped one arm across her feet, and nodded at me to take the handles of the buggy. Why couldn’t he push it one-handed, I was grumpy enough to think, before I found out.

  He needed his other arm to put round me.

  So it was pitch black and getting on for nine o’clock before he dropped the baby monitor into his jacket pocket and took me to the studio. It was in a dip in the field right by the headland, on the side away from the caravan site. Gus’s torchlight bobbed over the dark gr
ass, and then he raised it to show me where we were heading. I couldn’t remember seeing so much as the top of the roof during the day, but there it was: a long stone building with grey slates, two sets of double doors, windows painted the same dark red as the cottage, a Bedford van parked alongside.

  “Does the monitor really stretch all this—” I said. “Sorry. As if you’d—so what is this place? What was it, I mean.”

  I felt Gus shrug beside me. We were walking close together, coats just brushing.

  “Just a bothy kind of thing. A cow byre. Dave used it for a workshop as long as I can remember, and I just gradually took it over.”

  “And how come they don’t still use it for the cows?” I said. I knew solid buildings with roofs intact were never going spare on a farm.

  “It’s not theirs,” said Gus. We had arrived at the big double doors and he gave me the torch to hold while he opened the padlock. “Dave bought the cottage and this building for peanuts back in the sixties. He bought a right of way through the farmyard too, but they mump on till it’s not worth the hassle, so we come through the site.”

  “They don’t mump on, the site folk?” I asked. “I met one today that won’t win any awards from the tourist board!”

  “Oh, they wish we’d go away too,” said Gus. “They’d buy us out, change the name to Bayview, and charge a thousand pounds a week in the season.”

  “You’d never get a grand for Stockman’s Cottage right enough!” I said. He hauled open the doors and paused with his hand on the light switch. I could smell a shifting cocktail of unfamiliar smells—oily, sharp, earthy.

  “Becky always wanted to change the name,” he said. “Listen, Jessie. This—my work—it’s … What I mean is, if you think it’s crap—”

  “Tell you straight?”

  “No!” He sounded just like Dillon. “Keep your gob shut.” I laughed. “My br—well, folk that don’t get it come out with stuff you wouldn’t believe. And it usually starts with ‘I have to say … ’ And I always think, ‘No, you don’t.’ ”

  I laughed again. “You’re dead right,” I said. “No more than you ‘have to say’ your mum’s cakes are like bricks or your friend’s kids are ugly.” I shot him a look, wondering if he’d think I meant Ruby. I didn’t. She was growing on me—stroppy, gobby wee madam. She’d go far in this world, and I’d be happy for her.

  “Right,” said Gus. He switched on the light. I took a good long look around and got ready to be polite if it killed me. It was a single room, taking up half of the building. Sacks of concrete. Shovels. Planks. Scaffolding. Rolls of roofing lead. The usual power tools you’d see in any workshop, the usual orange extension cables. Shelves of boxes, labelled in code. And lamps. Loads and loads of lamps. Standard lamps, desk lights, bedside lamps, angle poise. Whole ones and parts of ones, boxes of bulbs. The edges of the room were stacked high with total junk, as far as I could tell. It smelled pretty lousy too.

  “So this is … the workshop side?” I said, looking towards the other end of the byre.

  “Yeah,” said Gus. “I use the other side to store finished pieces.” I must have sniffed, maybe my nose even wrinkled. “I know. There’s a grate over a pipe from when it used to be a byre. God knows how it can smell when there hasn’t been a beast in here for years, but it really does honk sometimes.”

  “So, what are you working on just now?”

  He walked ahead of me and set the monitor down on a tool bench. “Just finishing something off,” he said.

  I waited to see if he’d show it to me. “And then what?” I asked, when it seemed he wasn’t going to.

  “Lamps,” he said. “Well, lights. You know. Bulbs. Lamps, mostly.”

  I couldn’t help remembering what Buckfast Eric had said.

  “What are you going to do with them?”

  “Hard to say.” He was sliding cardboard boxes out from the shelves, looking at their contents, and sliding them back in again. He pulled out a tangled string of fairy lights and started straightening them. “What would you do with them?” He was really asking me too. The truth was I’d wire them to plugs and use them to help me see things inside my house when the sun went down.

  “Okay,” I said. “Could you … put them all in the … space with a ton of plug boards and a ton of bulbs and leave it up to the people who came to see it, what to do with them?”

  I thought he would laugh. I’d have laughed. Gus, though, looked suddenly miserable.

  “I haven’t got a space,” he said. “I’ve got one thing ready to sell. If it sells I might get asked to … But I don’t know if I can make myself sell it.”

  “Is it here?” I asked. “Can I see it?”

  “It’s next door,” Gus said. “Wait and I’ll bring it through.”

  He left me and—it must have been habit—as he went out, he clicked the lights off. I blurted something out, but he was gone.

  It was cloudy outside, no moon, and so the room was black as ink around me. I picked my way towards the open door, feeling ahead for obstacles, guessing where to go from the sound of the sea. I stepped out onto the grass and felt the empty air above me.

  “Gus?” I said. There was no light from the other room, but one of its doors was slightly open. “Gus?” I said, louder. The door banged shut.

  It could have been the wind. Except the doors this side didn’t move an inch. Had he just shut me out? Why would he do that? If he had one thing finished and he’d gone to get it anyway, what did it matter whether I saw the half-done stuff too?

  I stood there, useless, doing nothing. Should I walk back to the house and wait for him there? Should I follow him through the door, banged in my face or not? Or stop being so touchy. I could find the light switch and wait in the workshop side. That’s the thing about therapy. Everything ends up meaning something huge. Nothing stays small like things really are. So in the end I picked my way back to where he had left me and stood there in the dark, waiting.

  A minute later he reappeared, clicked the light back on, and smiled at me.

  “Okay,” he said. “Here goes.” He turned and pulled something into the room. It was on wheels and was hidden under a dustsheet. “Ready?” I nodded. He swept the sheet aside and stood back. I stared.

  It was a pram. One of those old navy-blue monsters with the painted sides and the big wheels. A double pram, both of its hoods pulled right up so it was almost round. Gus beckoned me forward.

  “I can see it fine from here,” I told him, and my voice sounded strained even to me.

  “You need to look inside,” he said.

  “What’s in there?” I asked. “Nothing … bad?”

  But he didn’t know what I meant. Why would he? So I stepped close and looked into the gap.

  Except it wasn’t a gap. There was some kind of substance there, not quite see-through, not quite not. I touched it.

  “Resin,” said Gus. And then something caught my eye. Behind the strip of resin, inside the belly of the pram, a light had gleamed, just for a second. It wasn’t a flash, it was a gleam. Slow, measured, as if some creature had opened its eye and then lazily closed it again. I turned as another gleam lit the other side. In its light I thought I saw movement, but it was too far away to be inside where I was looking. I waited. And waited. And just as I was raising my head, a stronger, brighter steadier light shone for a half a second. I missed it. All I knew was that there was more in there than there could be.

  “What it’s called?” I asked.

  “Pram,” Gus said. “What do you think of it?”

  “It’s hellish,” I said. “In the good way. It’s creepy as hell.”

  I hadn’t offended him. He was trying not to beam, but it was breaking through. So I decided to mention it, while he was smiling.

  “Do you know you put the light off when you left me in here?” I asked. I gave him a chance to say sorry, but he jus
t waited. “If I’d have known your sculptures were this creepy, I’d have legged it!”

  “The new one’s not creepy,” he said, like that was the only thing he’d heard. “But it’s big. It’s next door.” He was grinning now. “You want to see more? You like it?”

  “I really do.” I really did. “Why did you put the light off, though?”

  “Well, it’s not ready. But I’ll tell you about it, if you promise not to tell other people.” He dropped the dustsheet back over the pram. He hadn’t turned anything off first; I didn’t like thinking about those lazy gleams carrying on in the dark with no one to see them.

  He moved to the light switch again.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That one.”

  “Don’t forget the monitor,” he said, nodding to where he’d set it down.

  “I get it,” I said. “Fair enough.” And it felt good to see the puzzled look spread over his face. He didn’t ask what I meant. Guys never do. Because they don’t want to admit they don’t know already. And that’s another thing therapy makes you forget: guys are just guys. And they hate making mistakes, so if you ask them why they did something daft, they’ll pretend they can’t hear you. Nothing sinister, nothing deep. Just guys.

  In silence, we stepped outside and I waited while he closed the padlock and switched the torch on. We were halfway back when he started talking again.

  “It’s Dave’s house,” he said. “A replica. About three-quarters size. Life-size would have been great, but it wouldn’t fit in the byre. I’ve got the breezeblocks done, skimmed the front, done the doors and windows, done the roof. Can’t decide about the porch.”