by Emlyn Rees
A smile, half horror, half intrigue, flickered across her face. ‘I hope that’s not my present,’ she said.
He laughed. ‘Of course not.’
She looked at him curiously. ‘You didn’t just . . .’
‘What?’
‘Kill it . . .’
‘No. It died of cold. It must have got locked out last night.’
Roddy, Michael thought. Roddy must have put the chickens away last night while Michael had been over at the Thornes’. This chicken was dead because of him.
He dropped the dead bird into the black bin by the side of the shed. Taylor stared at his empty hands, then clasped her own together. She was wearing a bright green O’Neill skiing jacket, a silver hat with a pink bobble, and what looked like new jeans.
‘I thought you and Simon weren’t coming till later,’ he said.
‘We still are, but Dad needed to come into the village now and I fancied the walk.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Over at the yacht chandler’s.’
‘But they’ll be shut . . .’
‘That’s what I thought, but he says they’re expecting him. He’s picking up a present for Granddad. I’m meeting him round the front of the pub in half an hour.’ She scuffed her boot in the snow. ‘So did you get anything good for Christmas?’ she asked.
Taylor’s cheeks were rosy. She looked wide awake. He imagined how Christmas must have been at her house this morning. So different from his. As cuddly and cute as a Disney DVD, he guessed. Stockings and wrapping paper littering the carpets, everybody swapping presents in front of the fire. He wanted that when he grew up. If he ever had a family of his own, that’s how he’d want it to be: perfect, like hers.
‘Binoculars,’ he said. ‘From my dad. How about you?’
‘We’re not opening our presents till later. Did you get the torches?’ she asked.
The great, dark entrance of the mine yawned open inside his mind.
‘Two,’ he answered, ‘but I can get more. Mum keeps a stack of them behind the bar for guests. I put them upstairs in my room. But don’t you think we should forget it? At least until the snow’s gone . . .’
‘Why? I managed to make it from Granddad’s to here, didn’t I? So long as it doesn’t start up again, we’ll be fine. I think we should still go after lunch. Can you get to ours by two-thirty?’
He’d lain in bed the night before, flicking through a copy of Kerrang!, whilst listening to Good Charlotte’s latest through his earphones to drown out the noise of the pub below. He’d pictured Taylor standing by that gaping hole which led into the earth, and he’d seen a gnarled claw scythe out of the darkness and drag her screaming down into the depths. He’d woken soaked in sweat.
‘Won’t you still be eating?’ he asked.
‘They will, but we’ll slip away. You know how these things are. They’ll all be too legless to notice. I’ll nick some booze and bring it for us, too, if you like, but we’ll have to drink it on the sly so that Simon doesn’t see.’
‘Cool,’ he said, even though he felt anything but.
‘Do you fancy a quick . . .’ She mimed smoking a cigarette, by tapping her fingers against her lips.
‘I’ve got to . . .’ He faltered, unsure how to phrase it.
‘What?’ Taylor asked.
Michael nodded at the chicken shed. ‘You know . . . for lunch . . .’
‘You’re having eggs for lunch?’
‘No . . .’
‘You mean you are going to kill one?’
‘Well, it’s not exactly going to commit suicide,’ he said.
She looked over at the bin. ‘What about that one? Can’t you?’
‘Best not. Anything might have been at it during the night.’
She stared back at the shed. You could just about make out the silhouettes of the chickens’ heads bobbing back and forth inside, behind the wire mesh.
‘How will you do it?’ she asked. ‘With a knife?’
He pulled his top lip back over his teeth. ‘Or wit a lee-tle bite,’ he told her in his best Transylvanian accent.
‘Ha-ha. No, really. How? Do you wring their necks?’
‘You can. It’s quickest . . . kindest . . . that way – so long as you know what you’re doing.’
This was the way he normally did it. His father had taught him how, tucking the body in tight under his arm, before twisting and pulling the neck up sharp and hard. He’d never given it much thought, really, until today. It had never occurred to him that it might be a source of fascination, especially not to someone as worldly as Taylor. To Michael, killing chickens was no different from digging up spuds from the veggie patch his dad had used to keep outside the village. The birds were food, nothing else. None of them even had names.
But Taylor wasn’t worried anyhow. ‘It’s only a chicken,’ she said.
Michael took his Leatherman knife from his pocket. He unfolded its honed blade and watched her stare at it, enraptured. ‘Or you can do it with a knife,’ he said, thriving on her fascination now, enjoying the sense of power his esoteric knowledge gave him.
‘And you’ve done that, too?’ she asked.
‘Sure.’
She glanced between Michael and the shed, seeming to weigh something up in her mind. Then she fixed her eyes on him.
‘Let me do it,’ she said. ‘Let me do it with the knife.’
‘But aren’t you . . .’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know . . . most girls I know . . . they’re, they’d be . . .’ He was fumbling for words. Squeamish, he wanted to say, or freaked out, or grossed out, but none of these words fitted Taylor, because she wasn’t that kind of girl.
‘I want to know what it feels like,’ she said. ‘I want you to teach me.’
Something in her eyes, something he’d never noticed there before, made his heart race. The way she was looking at him, with admiration, with respect, made him feel older, and stronger too. He felt like someone she might want.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Well, why not?’ She laughed nervously. ‘I’m happy enough to buy it shrink-wrapped in the supermarket when someone else has done the dirty work for me, right? So what’s the big deal about doing it myself?’
‘Fine,’ he told her and opened the chicken shed door. ‘Then be my guest.’
The chickens scrabbled around as Michael reached inside and fished one out. The selected bird then sat motionless in the crook of his arm, blinking stupidly between him and Taylor in turn.
Michael talked Taylor through it. He explained to her about the positioning of the knife, there, just behind and above the lower jaw. He demonstrated with his fingers how then to roll the bird’s head a little to the left and apply upwards pressure with the blade of the knife, before pulling it sharply across the bird’s jugular.
He half-expected her to balk at this point, to tell him that she’d just been kidding and didn’t even want to watch him kill it, let alone perform the deed herself.
But she didn’t waver. She didn’t even ask him to explain twice. She already had the knife in her hand and now she took the chicken from him and gripped it tight.
‘Here?’ she checked, placing the knife blade where he’d told her.
She had it exactly right. ‘Yeah,’ he half-whispered, shocked by how quickly she’d turned the tables, amazed by how it was that it was suddenly him staring at her in awe, rather than the other way round.
Her brow creased in concentration as she rolled the chicken’s head. Then she sliced the blade sideways with the grace and exactitude of a violinist working a bow.
Taylor’s eyes blazed as the chicken bled. She knelt down and let the bird go, then watched it jerk spasmodically on the ground by her feet. There was blood on her fingertips and blood on the snow.
‘Why isn’t it dead yet?’ she asked.
‘It can take as long as three minutes,’ he told her.
As the bird approached death, its wings began beating franticall
y.
‘It’s like it’s trying to take off . . .’ Taylor said. ‘Like it’s trying to fly away from here, before it’s too late . . .’
The bird died and slumped sideways on to the snow.
‘That was amazing,’ Taylor told him. ‘I think that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’
Afterwards, after he’d handed the newly killed chicken over to his mother to scald and pluck, and he nicked – at Taylor’s insistence – a couple of Bacardi Breezers from behind the bar, Michael told his mother they were going to go outside to try out his new binoculars. He took Taylor round to the front of the pub and checked that no one was around, before ducking behind a sprawling holly bush with her and lighting them both a smoke. They twisted open the Bacardi bottles.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever got drunk this early before,’ Taylor said, ‘but what the fuck,’ she added, taking a swig, ‘it’s Christmas . . .’
Michael followed suit.
Then they clinked their bottlenecks together and each took another swig. He glimpsed her momentarily through the bottle, distorted and trapped, like a genie locked behind green glass. They both tipped back their heads until the bottles were empty. Taylor chucked hers casually over her shoulder and Michael did the same.
He took a long drag of his cigarette, and raised the binoculars to his eyes. He tried tracking a seagull high up in the sky, then he scanned along the empty road. The snow made the village look like something from another planet, as if his ordinary world had switched to science fiction and anything might happen today.
‘Give us a go,’ Taylor said.
She checked out the village for a while, then turned to face the harbour.
‘Wow,’ she said. ‘They’re good. Hey, and look . . . It’s my Dad . . .’
She was right. Michael saw a figure in a bright red waterproof, which he guessed was the same one Elliot had been wearing the day before when he’d come in out of the snow. He was walking along the row of boatsheds, where the island people kept their sailing dinghies and fishing equipment. He stopped at one with a green door, opened it and stepped inside. Then the door shut and the harbour side was deserted again, as if he’d never been there.
‘What’s he doing in Grandpa’s shed?’ Taylor pondered aloud. ‘He’s meant to be at the chandler’s. He can’t be thinking about taking the boat out . . .’
‘Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t. Look . . .’ Michael said.
Taylor lowered the binoculars and he pointed out to sea.
‘No one’s going anywhere,’ Michael said. ‘Not today.’
Something was clearly wrong with the grey expanse of water. Its border, where the sea reached the land, was flat, immobile, covered with cracks. Sparks of light appeared and died on it, in it, ephemeral as flaws inside a jewel.
‘Sea ice,’ Michael explained.
It had gathered there overnight, as incongruous and solid as a stone terrace. His mother had pointed it out to him earlier that morning.
‘Look how far out it goes,’ Taylor said. She turned to him with a smile. ‘It’s incredible. Is it thick enough to walk on?’
He thought about kissing her, right there and then.
‘Hey, guys!’ a voice called out.
It was Ben, walking towards them from the annexe, from where the holly bush failed to shield them. His footsteps crunched across the snow.
Taylor flicked her cigarette away.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ Ben said, eyeing the cigarette butt as it melted the snow by her feet and then disappeared.
Michael dropped his cigarette anyway, and crunched it beneath his boot.
‘Those look pretty smart,’ Ben commented, checking out the binoculars.
‘They’re his,’ Taylor said.
‘I got them for Christmas,’ Michael explained.
‘So who are you spying on?’ Ben asked.
‘No one,’ Taylor told him. ‘We were just looking at the ice.’
Ben was a few inches taller than Michael and dressed in an old black greatcoat which had once belonged to Michael’s dad. Michael’s mum had lent it to Ben that morning, after Ben had turned up on the scrounge for some teabags and milk to take back to the cottage where he and the posh woman were staying.
Michael knew Ben’s parents well enough, but had only met Ben a couple of times. He had a kind face and made Michael’s mother laugh, and Michael thought he was probably OK.
‘How come you’re not back on St John’s?’ Taylor asked. ‘I thought that’s where you lived.’
For a moment, Michael wondered how they knew each other, then realised that it must have been Ben who’d ferried Taylor and her mother over the day before.
‘It’s a long story,’ Ben said. ‘I knackered my boat and I was hoping someone might be able to fix it, but it looks like nothing’s doing, not with that ice.’
‘You poor thing,’ Taylor said.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Ben said cryptically. ‘Things could be worse.’
They waited for him to explain, but he didn’t.
Instead, he said to Taylor, ‘Can I have a go with them?’
She handed him the binoculars and he scanned the sea, then the harbour.
‘Oh, look,’ he said. ‘There’s Kellie.’
Michael watched another figure, slighter this time, dressed in black walking around the harbour towards the boatsheds where Elliot Thorne had gone before.
‘Who’s Kellie?’ Taylor asked.
‘My friend. The one I’m staying in the annexe with. She’s a tourist. I was showing her round the island yesterday when the boat broke. Wow,’ he said. ‘She looks great, even from here.’
Ben winked at Michael and passed the binoculars to Taylor. Then he turned his back on Kellie and the harbour.
‘I’ve just been talking to your mum,’ he told Michael. ‘She’s agreed to do me a favour, but I’m going to need some help from you.’
‘Like what?’ Michael asked.
‘I want to make it up to Kellie. She’s meant to be back in her hotel in Fleet Town, but now she’s stuck here because of me, and so I want to make her Christmas as good as I can. Your mum’s asked us over for lunch, but I don’t want to intrude, and so I’ve come up with a plan of my own . . .’
‘Go on,’ Michael said, but even as he listened to Ben’s request, he became aware of Taylor staring through the binoculars once more. She seemed frozen, her attention locked on the harbour. Then Michael saw why. The tiny figure of Kellie had stopped outside the green door of Taylor’s Granddad’s boatshed. Something seemed wrong. Then Michael saw what it was. Kellie was opening the door and stepping inside.
‘Is that OK?’ Ben asked.
‘Sorry?’ Michael said.
Ben smiled, realising he hadn’t been listening. ‘Do you want me to run that by you again?’ he asked.
‘Er . . . yes . . .’
Again, Michael found himself staring at the quayside. This time, Ben turned to look, too, but there was no one there. Like Elliot Thorne before her, Kellie had stepped inside the shed and disappeared.
Taylor lowered the binoculars. Her skin was pale, her expression blank. She stepped between Michael and Ben.
‘Your friend Kellie . . .’ she said. ‘What did you say she’d come here for?’
Chapter 14
Elliot tasted strange, an unfamiliar mixture of mints and coffee, and his hair had the lingering scent of a cigar, but as he held Kellie to him, she sighed with relief. In his arms, she suddenly felt safe. He was hers and she was his. Holding him made her feel solid again, as if he’d reconnected her to everything she knew and understood.
She made to pull away from him, to talk to him, but he stopped her, kissing her as if they’d been apart for years, not just hours, and he couldn’t get enough from her. Taking her hands, he pinned them with his against the wall behind her, pressing himself against her. She kissed him back, and he circled his arms around her, pulling her into a tight hug. As she surrendered to him, she felt as i
f she was recommitting herself to him.
‘Hey, happy Christmas,’ he said eventually. He pressed his forehead against hers.
The boatshed was lit by one bare bulb. The air shimmered with dust.
‘Happy Christmas.’ She smiled at him, scanning the features of his face. Held by his eyes like this, it felt as if nothing else existed in the world and nothing else mattered.
‘Fancy seeing you here.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Fancy that. I didn’t expect to be here, believe me.’
‘Well, I’m glad you are,’ he said, pulling back and tenderly smoothing a strand of hair behind her ear.
‘Are you? I thought you were furious.’
‘Don’t be silly. I was just a little thrown last night. You’ve made my Christmas. I was so afraid you’d have to be on your own and I wouldn’t see you.’
He kissed her again. Everything was all right between them after all.
Their whole encounter last night had left her reeling. It had been so dangerous. What if Elliot had been with anyone else from his family? What would have happened then? And what about Ben? She’d felt so wretched in front of him after Elliot had left. He’d been lovely to her all evening, and all she’d done in return was lie.
She’d stayed for one more drink, before making her excuses, pleading exhaustion, insisting that Ben stay on with his friends. She’d retreated to the annexe, dithering for ages about the sleeping arrangements. She’d been unnerved by Elliot’s jealous reaction to seeing her and Ben together. Had Elliot really thought that she could ever have flirted with someone else? Was he really as cross with her as he’d seemed at first? And if Elliot, who knew her so well, could have jumped to such a conclusion, then might Ben have done the same? She liked him, but not like that, and she didn’t want to give him the impression that she did.
In the end, she’d made a bed for Ben downstairs and had taken the room upstairs for herself, but despite her tiredness, sleep had proved elusive. She’d lain awake, looking at the shadows on the ceiling, listening to the faint music from the pub, wishing she was free to join in.
She’d heard Ben come in some time after one. He’d tripped over something, giggling and shushing himself, and she’d smiled to herself, picturing his face. For a moment, she’d been tempted to go down and talk to him. There’d been so much she still wanted to ask him: how he felt about the break-up with his wife, what their marriage had been like, how he’d known it was coming to an end, who had eventually called it off, and how he felt about his future now. But she’d stopped herself. Her curiosity had landed her in enough trouble for one day. Besides, she’d reasoned with herself, she hardly knew Ben. What would be the point in asking him anything? It was none of her business.
