White Pines

by Gemma Amor

  ‘Megan Douglas,’ he said, and he was no longer laughing.

  ‘Oh, sweetheart. What the hell happened to you?’

  The storm of tears passed after a while, and Matthew ushered me inside, unlocking the front door with the key I meekly gave him, and steering me to the kitchen table. I collapsed like a sack of rocks into the chair he pulled out for me, and rested my head on the table top, too tired to sit upright. Within moments, I realised that my headache was back. That it had started as soon as I’d crossed the threshold to Taigh-Faire.

  But why? Like everything else, it made so little sense. I was closer to the Island now than I had been in Laide. My back wasn’t turned to it either- I could still see the damn thing through the kitchen window.

  So why?

  A burning, irrational hatred for it bloomed. Fuck it. I didn’t care anymore. Curtains. If I was to stay here, I would need curtains. Block the damn thing out of sight for good. I didn’t care if my head popped like a balloon, clean off my shoulders. I just didn’t want to look at it anymore.

  Meanwhile, Matthew confidently made himself at home, hanging his coat up in the hallway, unloading the groceries that he’d bought from the plastic bag, banging cupboard doors and drawers as he found his way around the kitchen. Every bang and slam made my headache worse, and I gritted my teeth, trying to think of a polite way to rid myself of him. I appreciated that he’d come all this way, I understood his concern and what he was trying to do, but it was too much. Too much to deal with right now.

  ‘I would have called,’ he said, as if reading my mind, ‘But your phone is disconnected.’

  Was there even a phone line? I hadn’t had time to check.

  ‘Where are your cups?’ Matthew slammed another door shut with gusto. Too loud. He was being too damned loud.

  ‘Cupboard over the kettle, I assume.’ I hadn’t had time to check for those, either.

  ‘Ah.’ He retrieved two ancient tea-stained mugs that must have belonged to Granny, and set them on the counter. Then, he caught sight of my word processor, sitting on the kitchen table.

  ‘What the hell is that?' He asked, incredulous.

  ‘It's my word processor,’ I said, feeling my eyelids droop, even as I longingly stroked the dead keys. My head hurt so badly I was fighting back vomit once again, taking slow, steady breaths to help keep it down. Matthew didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Christ, Megs, what decade are you living in? Get yourself a computer like everyone else.’

  ‘Matthew, why are you here?’ I whispered.

  He ignored me, opened my fridge, saw that it was completely empty, and winced.

  ‘Honestly, Megs, what is this nonsense?’ He began to put away the supplies he’d bought: milk, tea, biscuits, coffee, bread, eggs, ham, cheese, and fruit. Almost as if he’d known what sort of state he would find me in. Almost as if he understood how completely my world had fallen apart, and decided to come anyway, the very day after it happened. Almost as if these things were a bribe, calculated to make me more amenable to his being here.

  Or maybe I was being unfair.

  ‘Matthew.’ I tried again, but speech had become difficult. If I held myself very still, and pressed my hands into my eye sockets gently, and thought of dark, cool spaces instead of blue skies and blue seas and gravestones with hanged men on them and wooden frames that stood proud and mysterious, my headache quieted a touch. Just enough for me to speak. Just enough.

  ‘How did you find me?’ I croaked.

  Matthew thought about it, carefully, before answering.

  ‘I went to your house last night,’ he said, eventually. ‘I called by on my way to the pub, in case you fancied a drink. Just on the off-chance.’

  Just on the off-chance. I didn’t believe that for a moment.

  ‘And?’ I replied, not wanting to know, but being unable to help myself.

  ‘Someone that wasn’t you opened the door.’

  I took my hands away from my face, slowly, and looked at him. He was trying not to show how sorry he felt for me.

  Someone that wasn’t me. In other words: another woman.

  ‘Was she pretty?’ I said, slumping further down across the table. ‘Young?’

  Matthew came over to me. He gently cupped my hot face in his hands, his eyes searching mine.

  ‘She wasn’t a fucking patch on you, Megs,’ he said, and I rested in his hands for a moment, unable to do anything else. He stared at me a little longer, then went back to trying to make tea. I didn’t have the energy to tell him it was a wasted endeavour: there was still no money in the electricity meter.

  ‘After Tim told me you’d left, I remembered a conversation we had once about your Granny’s cottage, out in the arse end of Scotland. And I knew you’d want to get as far away from him as possible. I refrained from punching him in the face, by the way. You can thank me later for that.’

  I thought about a woman who wasn’t me, already living in my marital home, sleeping on my old side of the bed, cleaning her teeth in my bathroom sink, warming her toes in front of my fire. Fucking my husband on my cotton sheets.

  I hadn’t been gone longer than a few hours before she’d moved in.

  At least it explained why everything had ended so abruptly. I thought of my own behaviour towards Matthew. Tim, like the man standing in my kitchen, had been braver than I. He had seen the writing on the wall, and had the guts to act upon it. I couldn’t be angry with him for that. Not when I’d done what I’d done.

  Still. It hurt.

  Christ, Tim. Couldn’t you have waited even an hour or two longer to replace me?

  ‘Matthew,’ I said, my voice thick with emotion. ‘Thank you for coming, thank you for caring about me, but I wished you hadn’t. I need...I need some time. I saw some things today, and...and...’

  My lip started to wobble.

  He stopped clattering around, and for the first time since his untimely arrival, he allowed himself to see how distraught I was. He saw how I held my head, in pain. He saw my red eyes, my exhausted, pale face, my slumped posture, and finally, finally, it sank in.

  That I wasn’t ready for him, not yet.

  The wonderful thing about Matthew was that he was, unlike me, magnanimous in defeat. He was also one of the kindest, most loving people I’d ever met. And he was looking for an outlet to pour that love into, even if it meant simply caring for me until I had the mental capacity to recognise that love.

  And I could see him, then, swallowing the grand proclamations he’d driven so far to announce. I could see him shutting it all down, putting it away for another day. He’d waited long enough, what was a little more time, to him?

  ‘You need to sleep, Megs,’ he said softly, and helped me to my feet.

  I protested feebly. ‘I need to write,’ I mumbled, but writing was out of the question now, with my head pounding as hard as it was.

  He half-carried me upstairs to the master bedroom, which was Granny’s old room. I went with him, limp and compliant as a rag doll, my will and energy completely spent. Once in the room, he set me gently down on the bed, removed my still-damp boots, his nose wrinkling from the horrible smell they gave off. He didn’t ask questions, he simply stripped me of my socks, jeans and pullover, and lay me down across the bed, as if I were a precious thing, to be handled with the utmost care, in case I broke.

  I thought then that he might try to make love to me, and I thought about how I would have to say no, not right now, but I should have had more faith in him. I should have trusted him. I thought that so many times, after. How I should have trusted him enough to let him in.

  Because he didn’t try to make love to me. Instead, he settled a pillow under my head tenderly, stroked my hair, and closed the curtains, transforming the room into a muted, brown cave. Then he left me to lie in the dark, alone at last.

  I thought I would not sleep. I thought I was in too much pain, I thought my brain was too noisy, too burdened with information, but the darkness of the room, and the distance I had
driven, and the things I had seen, dragged me down. And sleep came quickly.

  And it brought me a gift.

  A dream.

  It brought me to the beach.

  8. The Beach

  The beach was wide, the sand a dark ochre shot through with shiny, jet-black streaks that looked like oil deposits at first glance. Tall, silvery grass sprouted from a steep embankment next to the beach, and stretched up towards a dull sky. Behind that, great cliffs climbed, striated with different coloured layers of rock, some red, some white, some yellow. The cliffs stretched out in each direction as far as the eye could see. What lay on top, or beyond, I couldn’t tell.

  On closer inspection, the oil streaks were actually glossy patches of molten sand, something I had never seen before. The beach had melted in places, the individual grains having coalesced into random, sprawling puddles of glass, presumably under the effect of an intense and highly localised heat. Glimmering patches of this glass lay all around me. I pivoted upon my heel, swivelling about to take in the entirety of the scene. A hard, slick outline of the peculiar glazed sand surrounded the point at which I stood.

  The outline had straight edges, three of them.

  Forming a triangle.

  Within which, I stood, like an anchor point. Or a dot, set dead in the centre.

  Outside of the triangle, all was chaos.

  Like a reluctant tourist I left the safety of the shape and picked my way cautiously across the blasted landscape.

  And the further I walked, the more I saw.

  There were things jumbled up in the sand, half-submerged under it and fused with it and trapped, like bugs in sap, in the strange beach-glass: books, debris, a horseshoe, a suitcase, a bicycle, a child’s buggy, upended, wheels pointing at the grey sky. A white marble headstone. Was that an Arabic script carved upon it? A cast iron water pump, old-fashioned handle bent awkwardly in invitation. A rusted plane wing, jutting out of the beach like a huge rotted fin, metal exoskeleton visible beneath the warped outer paneling. A drooping lamp post, again misshapen from exposure to some force, or energy, or incredible heat. A computer monitor, screen smashed. A fully decorated plastic Christmas tree, angel perched absurdly on top, tinsel glittering in a faint breeze that danced along the beach. A violin, strings curled and wavering loose in the air. Partial train tracks erupting skyward from the sand. All these things littered the land around me as if they’d been scooped up from the ordinary, everyday human life I inhabited whilst awake, and then dumped without ceremony onto the shore, where the dark sand had hungrily swallowed it.

  But that was not the worst thing about the beach. Not by a long shot.

  Worse, far, far worse than the wanton, widespread chaos, were the bodies.

  Human bodies, or parts of them, lying everywhere, like gruesome driftwood washed ashore by an angry tide. Sometimes an arm, sometimes a foot, sometimes a portion of a face, like an eye, staring fixedly but seeing nothing, the rest of the visage mercifully covered with sand. I saw a mouth, or rather, I almost trod upon it before I realised what it was. A small, pink mouth poking out of a smooth, exposed patch of beach. The lips were peeled back to reveal two rows of white, straight teeth. I peered at this in horror, trying to make sense of what I was seeing, and the teeth snapped together, hard. I cried out in disgust and fear. The mouth yawned opened again, slowly, stretching wide as if it were screaming. Sand poured in between the lips, quickly filling the space behind the teeth. I saw a squirming tongue. I saw the mouth gag, and spit, and then it dawned on me. There was someone down there, a whole person buried beneath the surface of the beach. I saw sand and phlegm spray from between the lips as the person struggled to rid themselves of the invading grains of sand, and understood with an abject, complete terror that whoever was stuck down there underneath the sand was still alive.

  Suffocating.

  I dropped to my knees, and tried to dig my fingers into the beach, excavate the rest of the face, clear the nose, the mouth, find something to get a hold of, something to pull. The sand was dense and heavy, and every pocket of space I cleared simply filled straight up with more of the horrible, silky stuff. I managed, through sheer force of will, to eventually push one of my hands down past what felt like an ear, work my fingers deep behind the person’s hair, which felt short and scrubby, get a frantic purchase on the twitching head. Then I began to pull.

  The person vanished.

  My hand was sucked down, as if by a hungry maw.

  I fell back, wrenching my arm free of the sand.

  And at that point I realised, with a lucid type of panic, that I was dreaming. Dreaming, but unable to jerk myself awake. This was a nightmare, and, as with all nightmares, the rules of reality did not apply. But, unlike most nightmares, I found I could not escape from it.

  Could not escape from the horrible, hellish beach.

  I began to cry, and stumbled to my feet, looking out to the ocean, hoping for some visual solace. Instead, I saw buildings, drowned by the sea. A slate spire rose from the tideline. There was a small iron cross fixed on top. Waves lapped against richly coloured, stained-glass windows. A wooden saint with a stern expression carved upon his face kept his head held just above the waterline. Further out in the ocean, away from the beach, there were more roofs, a smattering of them, barely visible above the water. They looked like odd, boxy turtles swimming alongside each other, lurking on the surface. This illusion was broken only by the chimney stacks that jutted incongruously out of the surf atop the slate. A seagull perched on one, threw its head forward, and bawled at me, wings outstretched.

  I walked on, trying not to think of whether there were bodies trapped inside the houses, drowned instead of buried beneath the sand, floating, face down, eye sockets filled with crabs and barnacles. The chapel was close enough to the shoreline that the majority of it must be beneath ground level. Was there a priest interred within, kneeling beneath my feet, knees and head bent in prayer? I kept my eyes averted from the things in the sand. I felt overwhelmed by the thought of so many bodies, so many people suffering and dying agonising, painful deaths. Tears dripped from my chin. Too late, I thought, but I had no idea where the thought had come from, or what it referred to. Too late for so many.

  What was I thinking?

  A flake of something white drifted past my nose. I put my hand out to catch it. Snow? No. The flake crumbled to a fine dust as it hit my hand. Ash. I looked for the source. Further along the beach, I saw a great fire burning, where seconds before, there had been nothing. Was that a car on fire? I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I glimpsed blistering cherry-red paintwork amongst the flames. And behind the paintwork, there sat a blackened, humanoid outline. Curled and stiff, charred beyond recognition. The driver.

  The blaze sent a towering column of black smoke into the sky. Ash drifted out of it and across the beach, over the waves. Human ash.

  I was surrounded by death.

  I waited in vain for the dream to end. It didn’t. Instead, I stubbed my toe on something: a large lump of concrete, smoothed by seawater. I looked down, hissing in pain. Jutting out from the centre of the lump was a sign, or half of one. The rest had been eaten by the sand. It was metal, and rusty, only one word visible, printed in stern red block lettering:

  PROHIBITED.

  Half a sign, half a missive. Even in my dreams, the bigger picture eluded me.

  The waves lapped incessantly upon the beach, drawing me further along. I saw a shimmering cloud of something brown and amorphous flit across the surface of the sea, and then disperse. A gas cloud of some sort? A swarm of insects? It was gone before I could really tell.

  And then, I came to the cherry tree.

  Like the burning car, it had not been there moments before, but then, without warning, it was. It blinked into existence so abruptly that I almost walked into it.

  It was in full bloom, encased perfectly and completely within a large sphere of blackened, light-flecked glass. It was impossibly beautiful. I stopped dead in my tracks. After so
much horror, I did not know how to accept the thing before me. The effect was one of a giant crystal paperweight, the tree meticulously arranged inside. Every petal, every twig, was perfectly, brutally static within the glass. The sun, with a timely fanfare, broke through the dense bank of cloud overhead and shone down, harsh and bright, throwing the white petals and dark sand into chiaroscuro competition with each other.

  The cherry tree, locked forever in place in full, blooming glory, was incredible.

  Poignant, heart-breakingly so. Like a memory of death corked in a bottle.

  I peered through the glass bubble and saw birds, tiny finches, feathers puffed out, beaks stuffed with insects, sitting on branches, encased in the glass. Motionless. Eternal.

  I wanted so badly to wake up, then, but found to my distress that I still couldn’t. I knew I was dreaming. I knew there was another place I should be. I knew there was another body to inhabit than the one that stood before this tree, another body that was wrapped up safe and warm in an old, musty bed, whilst downstairs, a man who was not quite a friend, and not quite a lover, watched over and waited for me.

  I knew this, but could not convince my mind to let go of the dream. I was trapped, as surely and completely as the cherry tree was trapped in the glass before me.

  And so instead of waking, I stayed. I stared, hypnotised, until my eyes dried of tears and grew sore. I exulted in the presence of the tree whilst simultaneously screaming at myself internally to wake up. Then I dropped my gaze, overcome. And saw fistfuls of small, dark crystals encircling the tree-bubble, radiating out across the sand in an organised series of lines, a geometric pattern that was part triangle, part spiral. I knew these shapes to be no accident of nature. They were deliberate. They were boundaries. Like lines drawn in the sand, only more powerful. Whatever was within was sacred. Protected.