White Pines

by Gemma Amor

  Shit, shit, shit.

  I caught sight of my own reflection in a dusty, spotted mirror that hung on the wall opposite me. I looked thin, and tired. I was scowling, my brows low, my cheeks pinched. Huge, puffy bags dominated the skin beneath my eyes. My hair stuck out in scruffy peaks around my head, and my clothes hung from me like drapes. I looked ancient, and scrawny, and haggard, and unpleasant to be around.

  I looked just like my Granny, I realised in horror.

  No wonder Tim doesn’t love me anymore, I thought, and tears threatened suddenly.

  ‘Shut up,’ I told myself, out loud, this time. The mirror version of me glared back by way of response.

  I set out to find coins.

  4. A walk

  The closest place to withdraw money nearby that I knew of was the Post Office in the village of Laide, a tiny collection of buildings that lay a few miles up the coastal road from Taigh-Faire. I had driven past it on my way to the guest house, not thinking to stop. Not thinking of anything at all, except of getting away. Running from failure.

  I had neighbours that were closer than the Post Office. If I’d been feeling brave, I could have knocked on a door or two, explained my predicament, asked to borrow a couple of coins. But a morbid fear of waking complete strangers at such an early hour in order to beg for money while I stood shivering on the doorstep stopped me. As did pride. I didn’t need anyone else’s money, I had money in my own account. I just needed to access it, and change it into something useful. Food for my ancient meter. A simple thing. A small step. And then I could start anew.

  I decided to walk to Laide, rather than drive. I didn’t trust myself behind the wheel of my van anymore, and the village was no great distance. The fresh air and exercise might do me some good, I reasoned, as I steeled myself for the task ahead and tried to ignore the call of the beds in the guest rooms upstairs. A walk could be just the thing. It would allow me to prepare myself mentally for dealing with other people. And perhaps if I walk, I’ll stop thinking about Tim, I hoped, loading a tape into my Walkman and dragging the headphones over my ears. An image flashed into my mind, unbidden: Tim, rolling around in our bed with a woman who wasn’t me. Another: Tim, holding hands with someone else. Another: Tim, throwing the things I’d left behind in a large box, and taping the lid shut. This last image was the most difficult to dispel. Tim liked to put things in boxes, particularly emotions. I had no doubt he had already begun to package me away, box me up like an unwanted artefact in a museum. I was a part of his life that he had experienced, and must now move on from. I imagined him writing a single word on top of the box with a dark black marker pen:

  Archive.

  Thinking about this hurt so much I could barely breathe.

  I jammed my thumb onto the Walkman play button. Music filled my ears, orchestral, just enough noise to keep me company and help pass the time as I walked. It acted as a security blanket, the music, wrapping around and insulating me with the familiar rhythm and melody of Mozart’s piano concerto number twenty, in D minor. Intricate and upbeat, something for my brain to fix upon that wasn’t painful, or challenging. I felt a little better, squared my shoulders, and stood before the front door. Took a deep breath. Could I do this, really? Go out there, mingle with the locals, put my tender roots down here, in the Highlands? Tired. I was so tired. When had it become such a titanic, colossal struggle to simply exist as a normal, functioning human being?

  I tentatively laid a hand on the front door handle. Couldn’t I manage without power, perhaps just for a day or two?

  Get outside, Megs. Just get on with it, you daft bean. I half-heard the last part of this sentence in my Mother’s voice, and smiled. She had always called me ‘daft bean’ when she was exasperated with me. She would have had little time for my nonsense today.

  I turned the handle, stepping outside. As I did so, I caught sight of the Island once more, lying directly across the bay from the house. A brisk gust of wind came at me, smelling the same as the air in the cellar. I felt a strange, deep pull in the pit of my belly. I stopped, held there by something I didn’t fully understand, but it felt like a connection, like another piece of string, stretched taut from that place to this, binding me. My eyes fixed in place, until it felt that I could look at nothing else. The Island seemed to grow in size, filling my vision. I felt a sudden desire, a fierce compulsion to get out there, somehow, and explore. The Island...it called for me, and I yearned for it. But how to get to it? By boat? I would need to find one. Could I swim? It looked achievable.

  Then, I realised what I was doing, and shook myself hard. The string snapped. It left me feeling oddly lost, directionless. Confused.

  What is happening to me? I thought, reaching up above my head with my right hand and absent-mindedly stroking the symbol carved above my front door, my four fingers working their way into the dots at the tip of each point on the triangle, and the dot in the centre. When I realised what I was doing, I yanked the hand back, staring at it. The skin on my fingertips felt alive, like it had in the cellar. A buzzing sensation, almost like pins and needles, as if I had touched pure energy and come away with the residue beneath my nails. The small stump that was all that remained of my little finger felt peculiar. As if, for just a second, it wasn’t a stump at all, but a whole digit, and it buzzed and tingled just like the other four.

  I flexed my hand.

  A magnetic force of some sort? I peered at the lintel over the door. It looked as if it were carved from the same dense, grey stone that the capstone in the cellar was carved from. Perhaps there was iron in the stone, or something magnetic, an ore of some sort.

  I let out a shaky breath, smacking my hands together to get rid of the buzzing sensation. I was overtired, that was all. The house had me on edge.

  Get going, Megs, I told myself. You can do this. Even if you can’t, you have to try. Otherwise all those things you thought about yourself since Tim did what he did will be true.

  I started to walk.

  White fluffy clouds scudded across a patchy blue sky. Bracken and heather lay thick on either side of the road I marched along, framing my world. Beyond, the bay's waters sprawled out placid to the horizon, broken only by the uneven hump of the Island whose name I still did not know. It seemed to be following me around, that Island, following me as I walked. No matter where I was, I could see it. Even with my eyes closed. If I blinked, it was still there in my mind’s eye. It was almost as if it wanted to be seen, which I knew was nonsense, but felt like the only way to describe what was happening. If I tried to look away, the back of my neck prickled uncomfortably, and an odd, jittery feeling made itself known in the pit of my belly. If I looked at it, or thought about it, my fingertips buzzed and burned until it was almost unbearable. And yet the further I walked, and the more distance I put between myself and that hunk of land sitting in the ocean, the more uncomfortable I felt.

  I ended up walking with my neck craned awkwardly so that I could still keep the Island in sight as I moved. Eventually, I grew a stiff crick in the neck from staring at the place for so long whilst moving in a different direction. I wrenched my eyes back to the road ahead, wincing, but the Island still hovered in my peripheral, like the tip of my nose: always there, but just out of focus.

  I wondered why it insisted upon me so. Had I been there once, as a child? Maybe that was it. Maybe there was another repressed early childhood memory hiding in me somewhere, trying to work its way to the surface, like a bubble of gas drifting up from the bottom of a brackish pond. I had only lived in Scotland for a few short years, though. Visits to Granny had been few and far between. Wouldn’t I have remembered a trip out to an Island with her? Maybe not. The brain is a mysterious organ, fickle about what it chooses to remember, or forget.

  And speaking of fickle, my own traitorous mind had turned on me in the time it had taken to walk barely a mile up the road, and now that the dust had settled on my departure, I could tell it was angry with me.

  Angry that I had left my house.


  Angry about Matthew, and the Christmas party.

  Angry about my stupid, selfish lapse in judgement, and my behaviour.

  Angry at the heavy breathing, the taste of whisky, the smell of sweat and aftershave, the feeling of my legs being held apart, the sensation of being full, the orgasm, the breathless excitement of a shared secret as another man pulled my dress back into place.

  Angry about my situation, my newfound state of loneliness.

  And angry at Tim.

  Tim, who had brutally guillotined our marriage and taken me completely by surprise. I hadn’t seen it coming, not for one second. That infuriated me.

  Especially because I didn’t know why.

  If it wasn't infidelity, what was it, exactly?

  The further I walked, the more this question maddened me.

  He said he didn’t love me anymore. Why? Was it my personality? Was I too boring? Too straight? Too messy? Too married to my job? No doubt my personal idiosyncrasies had exaggerated themselves over time, including my strident need for privacy. If I thought about it, I would have to admit that yes, increasingly, I found intimacy difficult.

  Had I, in fact, pushed him away?

  Or maybe, just maybe, I was too old for him now. Maybe Tim had met someone else. Someone younger than me. Someone with firmer tits, flawless thighs, an arse like a pair of tennis balls. Did she like to screw all night, and all day too, with wild abandon, like young people do in the movies?

  The irony was that he would have hated this train of thought, and had I been voicing these concerns to him in person, he would have rolled his eyes at me.

  ‘Why do you do this to yourself?’ He would have said. ‘Why do you let your thoughts spiral out of control in this way? What good does it do, to obsess over things like that, again and again? You’re just hurting yourself. What good does that do?’

  No good. No good at all.

  But I didn’t know any other way to be. I didn’t know any other way of dealing with it. I had always felt things deeply, that was my nature. It was why I was a writer. Sometimes, the feelings were so huge, they needed a place to go. And that place, more often than not, was my word processor.

  I thought of the word processor sitting on the kitchen table at Taigh-Faire. I felt the weight of the words that I couldn’t set down pressing on me. All I needed was a handful of coins, and I could put down the burden. Such a stupid, small barrier between my brain and acceptance. A handful of coins, a tax for my own peace of mind.

  And then, I felt a different weight crush my shoulders as I walked. The weight of responsibility.

  All of this was my fault.

  Because I had failed.

  As a wife, a friend, an adult, a woman. Failed. On all counts.

  A sadness so deep and so profound settled upon me that I gasped out loud, and almost forgot, in that moment, how to walk. I had to consciously command my left foot to step out in front of my right foot, and so on.

  I. Had. Failed.

  And as soon as that miserable thought crossed my mind, I came upon a man standing on the side of the road, and dashed the gathering tears from my eyes with relief. Here was a temporary reprieve. A welcome distraction.

  Or so I thought at the time.

  He stood with his back to me, and carried a thin, light rifle across one shoulder, the type used for shooting rabbits and small game. A dog sat on its haunches next to him, a black and white collie. Both of them stared silently out across the bay.

  At the Island.

  Him too? I thought. Do his fingers itch too?

  The pair looked as if they were waiting for something. Yes, that was it. They looked expectantly off to the distance, as if they knew something were about to happen, and were standing in that exact spot on the roadside for the sole purpose of watching it. Spectators at a private event, the details of which I was not privy to. Guests, welcomed, while I was merely trespassing through.

  What, though? What are they waiting for?

  Pungent smoke clouded around the man’s head as I approached. Neither man nor dog heard me coming up behind them. I pulled off my headphones, cleared my throat by way of introduction.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I called out, uncertain. ‘Can you tell me if the Post Office in Laide is open yet?’

  The man turned, slowly, to look at me. He was dressed in a long waterproof wax jacket, a flat cap, and ancient, worn-out boots with great cracks running under the toes. A tired looking cigarette dangled on his lower lip, dark smoke drifting skyward. Something glinted on his hand: a ring, gold, or brass, I couldn’t tell.

  He didn’t answer the question.

  I waited for a moment or two, and then repeated myself, louder this time, in case he hadn’t heard. His demeanour didn’t change. He just kept looking at me.

  His dog caught my scent and also turned its head, moving from two legs to four as it did so. It had a distinctive black patch over its eye. Before I could repeat myself for a third time, the dog’s hackles rose. Its lips curled, showing white teeth and mottled gums. I stepped back, afraid. The dog began to bark furiously.

  I backed up another few steps, held my hands up to show I meant no harm. The dog’s master did nothing. He just stood, watching me, and the collie lowered its head, began to stalk towards me, canines bared, tail held out rigidly behind it.

  My mouth went dry with fear.

  ‘Hey!’ I shouted, and pointed to the animal. ‘Aren’t you going to control your dog?’

  The man did nothing. The dog began snapping at my heels. I reared back hastily, nearly tripping and falling, only just managing to stay upright. The collie’s bark was loud, angry, and incessant. Convinced I was about to be bitten, I flailed about, trying to scare the animal away, but it was no good. It could sense my fear, and that seemed to spur it on as I tried to defend myself.

  ‘Hey!’ I shouted again, terrified, as the dog went for my right leg and latched on. I felt teeth scrape past my skin, but the animal thankfully got a mouthful of jean fabric in its jaws instead of flesh. It started whipping its head from side to side, like a terrier with a rat, trying to throw me off balance, and almost succeeding.

  I screamed.

  And finally, the man relented.

  He spat out his cigarette, crushed it under his boot, and clapped his hands together sharply. The dog froze, mid-shake, although it didn’t let go of my leg. The man clapped again. I waited, heart in my mouth, horribly aware of how close to the skin of my calf the dog’s jaws were.

  There was a moment of stasis, during which the dog stared up at me, frost-blue eyes brimming with a type of violence I had never seen in an animal before. Then, it gave my trouser leg one final, reluctant, vicious shake, and let go. Rigid, I did not dare move a single muscle for fear of another attack. The dog didn't back away. It just stood there, as if waiting for further command.

  And the command came.

  The man clapped his hands together one last time, smiling as he did so. The dog cocked an ear, listened, wheeled about, lifted a leg, and pissed on my shoes.

  I stood there aghast as the hot urine streamed onto my boots. Then the animal shook itself, as if pleased, and trotted back to its master. It sat down obediently at the man’s feet once more, tongue lolling in satisfaction, ears pricked.

  And they both watched me like that, side by side, watched while I tried to recover my composure, my boots shining wet with dog piss, my heart thundering in my chest. I wanted to shout and scream at them both, to ask the man what the hell his problem was, rail at him, but I was too frightened. Too shocked. Too exhausted.

  Instead, I turned on my heel, and moved quickly on up the road, trying to put as much distance between myself and the disgusting pair as possible.

  I could feel their eyes on me as I went.

  And behind them, the Island.

  5. Laide

  Jesus Christ, I thought, over and over as I walked. I shook as I tried to process what had just happened. Fear quickly turned to outrage.

  Jesus. Chri
st.

  That dog had attacked me! Pissed on me! What’s more, it looked as if his master had told it to. My mind reeled from the encounter. I knew I ought to report him to the Police, a dog like that shouldn’t have been roaming around freely. What if I had been a child? Or someone elderly? What if I had fallen? Would I be lying back there on the road now with my throat torn out? A crimson scarf about my neck, eyes fixed on the sky?

  Why, why had the insane man set his dog on me? All I had done was ask a simple question!

  The miserable sting of indignity and embarrassment whipped my cheeks, and as I stumbled along, I felt the dog’s piss soak through the leather of my worn boots and into my socks. I had no choice but to continue, because turning around and going back up the road meant going back past those two, and I wasn’t brave enough for that.

  I should never have left the house, I thought, wretchedly. And then:

  I should never have left my home.

  Damn you, Tim. This is all your fault! Not my fault, yours!

  I looked back over my shoulder with every few steps I took, worried that I was being followed. But the odd couple were done with me. I saw only two statues, growing smaller with every step I took. Backs turned, faces pointed out to the bay.

  Staring at the Island.

  Crazy bastards, I thought, my lips trembling, my mood verging on hysteria. And yet still, I walked on.

  The dog’s urine saturated the thin fabric of my socks, which then started to rub against my skin uncomfortably. After another mile, blisters sprouted on my heels. I ignored them the best I could, but soon found myself limping.

  Eventually, the morning sun disappeared behind a large bank of cloud. It grew colder, and I was glad to keep moving, past the hamlet of Second Coast, past the hamlet of First Coast. The road here undulated across the coastline, weaving up and down and around the contours of the land. I passed a small waterfall, which pooled and then ran across the road as a cold, clear stream, rushing on its way out to sea. Ferns nodded on the verge as the water passed beneath. A skylark erupted from the undergrowth and rose almost vertically, high into the air above me, screaming its flight-song as a warning. There was probably a nest nearby on the ground somewhere. The bay stretched out to the right of me, calm, its waters placid. There was such beauty, all around. It didn’t feel right, after the dog. It felt...deceitful. Like a distraction.