by Manda Scott
Life blood.
‘I brought you this.’ She held it out, pale and unalive on the palm of her hand. ‘I thought you might want to say goodbye.’
‘Hers?’
‘Yes. It’s all that’s left.’
‘You don’t need it?’
‘No.’
‘Caroline?’
‘She knows.’
‘Right.’ I took the tube and laid it in the patch of light at the end of the bed. ‘I’ll take the dog out for a walk before lunch.’
‘Right.’
Tîr abandoned the blackbirds in the vegetable patch and came to heel for the shepherd’s whistle. Generations of breed selection cut through the novelty of the new game and she transformed from leggy pup to fine-tuned sheepdog in the time it took her to cross the yard to the field gate.
The ponies provided an interesting challenge, resisting repeated attempts to gather and move them and generally ignoring a glare that would have had genuine sheep sprinting for the shedding pen. Only the young Connemara had not been through the same with Tan. She put her head down and snorted hard through flared nostrils as the pup edged forward, belly to the grass, in an attempt to exert canine authority. There was a moment’s eyeball to eyeball confrontation and then both discovered they had better things to do in other parts of the field.
I left her to play and meandered across the grass from pony to horse to pony, checking legs for knocks and feet for signs of heat.
Balder and Midnight followed along, as ever. The rest had other things on their minds: grass and the itch between the shoulderblades and the faint promise of winter that hid behind the sun and warm air.
At the fence, I whistled the dog back and she hung obediently on my heel, following me across the fording stones at the narrow part of the river. The rain had raised the water level almost to the top of the stones and the two of us skipped across, hopping from one dry patch to the next, trying to avoid the slimed areas of wet lichen round the edges. Above us the beech trees in the wood clung on to handfuls of bronzed leaves, waiting for the autumn winds to twist them off the limbs and spin them down into the water below.
The beech wood is oval and spreads over a small, very old and not particularly natural hill. The Ordnance Survey maps for the area list it as a burial mound, which stretches a point a bit. The mound itself is a barrow twenty feet long with a stone cairn standing at one end that lies in a clearing on the southern face of the hill. The hill itself was thrown up in an earlier era, when the indigenous populations needed a raised fort to keep the invading Scots at bay.
Now, it’s a hidden backwater in a hidden backwater. A peaceful oasis, walled off by the encircling trees against the noise and stress of the world outside.
I would have found it alone eventually, no doubt, but Bridget took me there as a way to relax late on a Sunday evening after one of those hopelessly chaotic weekends when we seriously believed we could run the farm, build a new set of stables, fix the car and still remember to be reasonable to each other while we were about it.
We’d been together almost two years by then, although we’d heard a fair bit about each other, through Malcolm, for another six months before that. With a characteristic sense of clinical duty, Malcolm Donnelly worked the rotas so that neither Lee nor I got near his sister while we were still on his rotation and needed our full concentration to look after his patients. On the last day of the six months, however, all embargoes were dropped and Malcolm invited Bridget over from Edinburgh for the end-of-rotation party. To be honest, I doubt if he could have kept her away by then. Malcolm may have kept us apart, but we knew more about each other than most folk know after six months in the same house. It’s amazing what you talk about to fill in the late nights on the ward.
The party itself was, without question, one of the most spectacular events ever to hit the Western. It was the one and only time that the Helensburgh monstrosity I inherited from my mother proved itself useful. We invited the entire class, plus partners, siblings, nursing ‘friends’ and other adherents, and they all fitted in with room to spare. By the end of the evening, we had consultant surgeons who hadn’t been seen mixing with the ranks for decades dancing alongside junior nurses and students and all three groups jostled, uncomplaining, with the pariahs of the system, the hospital porters. The miracle of it all was that, with the alcohol flowing like water and food enough to feed the entire Strathclyde Health Department, not one single person threw up inside the house or on the pavement outside. It’s probably the only thing that stopped the neighbours from calling in the police.
I’m not sure exactly what time I went to bed and I don’t remember a huge amount about the next twenty-four hours, except that Bride and I talked a lot more than I was used to on a first night and when Lee left a magnum of champagne outside the door for us at about two in the afternoon, I was afraid to drink any in case it somehow broke the spell. I do remember that she was everything that Malcolm had said she would be and that, for the first time in my life, I didn’t feel that I could walk away safely the next morning and keep my sense of self intact.
There followed a hectic year of trans-Caledonian courtship. I learned the fastest ways to and from Edinburgh by every form of public transport and Bride learned her way round wards so that she could find me if I was still on call when she arrived. She introduced me to the Edinburgh scene while I backed away, with unbounded relief, from the tangled mess of the Glasgow student ghetto. She taught me the rudiments of the Scottish legal system, I taught her to ride and, with Lee’s help, to climb.
The four of us, me and Bridget, Lee and Malcolm, plus Caroline, who had become one of the group by then, made a pilgrimage out to the islands. We went to visit Lee’s clan of grandmothers, all of whom, without exception, fell for my new lover, proclaiming her ‘one of them’, whatever that was supposed to mean. It was crazily chaotic and absolutely exhausting, but it was fun.
By twelve months later, the novelty of travel and fortnightly meetings began to wear a bit thin. As luck would have it, that was around the time the house prices peaked and, with a lawyer for a lover, selling my albatross of an inheritance in Helensburgh was smooth, painless and very, very lucrative. Overnight I became better off than if I’d saved every penny from ten years of medical pay.
We took almost another year after that, deciding what to do with the money. Bridget had saved enough of her own to raise a mortgage so that it wasn’t as unbalanced as it might have been and we knew that, between us, we had the capacity to do something totally different. Something that would last and that would keep us going, together, for the rest of our lives.
The farm came on the market in the summer and we fell on the first visit. The agent spent the best part of an hour trying to divert us away from the outhouses and stables so that we wouldn’t see the state of the timbers, but there were five of us and only one of him and he didn’t stand a hope in hell. By late afternoon, we had seen everything it was possible to see, poked fingers into the rotting woodwork, flaked off the peeling paint and lifted bricks out of mortar-free walls. But we still loved it and, after that, it was only a matter of haggling the price down to something vaguely manageable.
By autumn it was ours and by hogmanay Bridget had prised herself loose from the talons of the Edinburgh legal vultures and set up the beginnings of the business, making the transition from urban socialite to rural agrarian in a single, instinctive step. The island grandmothers were right, she was one of them. She just hadn’t had the chance to find out.
The visit to the cairn took place on a foul, wet, windy Sunday evening. Most of the preceding two days had been spent staring at spreadsheets and financial forecasts in the fractional spaces between rides.
Never try to get anything done on a working horse farm in the summer. Especially not if your name is on the pinboard in the local tourist board offices. We had more foreign visitors wanting to ride ‘real Highland ponies’ in the first four hours of the morning than the Burrell Collection on a wet Saturday i
n June. By five o’clock on Sunday we were both frazzled, irritable and ready to blow a fuse at the slightest excuse. On top of that, I was having hourly cold sweats at the thought of returning to Monday morning ward round and the catalogue of chronic patients I’d left behind in the ward.
It was blowing a gale and threatening rain and the forecast was ghastly for the rest of the night. Bridget force-fed me a double-strength white coffee with extra sugar, pushed my oldest jacket into my hand and dragged me off across the fields before I could get my brain together to ask where the hell she thought we were going.
I suppose she must have known the cairn was there. It’s not much more than a fifteen-minute walk from the back door, it’s just that you have to know where you’re going and be prepared to lose some skin or some fragments of jacket on the brambles on the way in. The path was even more overgrown then and I was in a filthy temper by the time we reached the final ring of beech and hawthorn bordering the clearing. But the trees buffered the wind and the rain hadn’t started and the clouds thinned to let the odd strand of moonlight filter down into the clearing and it was one of the most spectacularly peaceful places I have ever been.
We sat together on the grave mound with our backs against the mossed stones of the cairn and decided that, whatever the spreadsheets said, it was time for me to get out of medicine and move to the farm for good.
It felt like wilfully stepping over the edge of a cliff.
I remember Bride sitting there in the half-toned moonlight, a kind of anxious concern overlaying her usual organized calm.
‘Are you sure?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Absolutely sure?’
‘Absolutely sure.’ My stomach had long ago ceased to adhere to normal gravitational forces and my small intestines were twisting in knots but I was one hundred per cent, completely and absolutely sure.
‘Thank God for that.’ She reached an arm round my shoulder and hugged me hard enough and for long enough for all my anatomy to settle back into place. By the time we rocked apart, the moon had moved down below the level of the trees and the rain was becoming a serious possibility. We stood up, feeling a little foolish, creaking the cramp out of our knees and the cold out of everywhere. I was about to head off between the trees looking for the path home when a tug on my sleeve pulled me back.
Bridget was standing by the cairn with both hands on the flat, moss-covered stone that lay at chest height across the top. ‘Here’ – she nodded down towards the stone – ‘help me shift this.’
There are times with Bride when it’s better not to ask why.
‘Sure.’
Together we twisted on one corner, sliding it sideways until there was a space big enough for one hand to slide in. We both stood there, looking down into the hollow centre of the cairn.
‘Bride, I hate to appear . . .’
‘You make a wish and throw it in.’ She looked serious. She sounded serious. ‘It helps make it real,’ she said.
Stupidly, she was right. At the very least, it was something concrete to remember in the days and weeks afterwards when the entire world of medicine informed me exactly why, in its individual and collective opinion, I had lost every last one of my marbles. In the face of that, the memory of the dark and the rain and the weight of the roof stone as we slid it back afterwards was oddly tangible and secure.
We spent a lot of time at the cairn after that, in ones and twos. Lee spent hours there, hunting with the dog, and Malcolm used to make it his Sunday desert island, taking a picnic and a pile of books as an escape. Once, when Tan was about three years old, all five of us, me and Bride, Lee, Caroline and Malcolm, plus the pup spent an afternoon swimming in the wide part of the river just below the wood and then the evening in the clearing, eating the remains of the picnic and enjoying the last of the sun as it filtered through the trees.
That was the last time I was there. Other things got in the way for the winter and then in the spring everything began to fall apart and the cairn ceased to be a part of my life, along with the farm and the horses.
It felt odd coming back. Like going back up into the bedroom but more so. I pulled my jacket up round my ears and tried to keep my face clear of the clinging brambles.
The rain began as I made my way to the edge of the wood. A light saturating haze that seeped in past a turned-up collar and ran down past the neck of my shirt. At least the path through to the grave mound was less overgrown than it had been. As if more people passed more frequently in the last four years than the four before them.
Other than that, it’s amazing how little the clearing has changed, given the rate of progress in the world outside. The hawthorns forming the inner ring have never aged and never will. The grave mound still looms at the back of the clearing, the grass on the top darker as if the bodies of the dead underneath still feed it with something richer than the earth beneath the paler grass of the clearing.
The dog whined and trotted to the north end of the mound, heading for a tree at the back of the clearing. The pile of leaves at its base was too big, covered the ground too well. Together we cleared them away, me with my hands, the dog with her nose, casting them aside in flurries of ragged bronze to get to the grass beneath. I ran my fingers across it, feeling for the knife cuts and found them. A criss-crossing grid where the turf had been lifted and relaid. At the base of the tree lay a single, unmossed river stone. A marker on the grave of a dog.
Tan’s grave.
The obvious place and the only place. Hidden and private and still easy to find.
The pup circled on the spot and lay down, eyes closed against possible orders.
I left her alone and walked over more slowly to stand with my back to the cairn, searching for memories of the dead that bring a reverence to the place. Tan as a pup, joyously delinquent. Scourge of butterflies, slugs and billowing leaves. Tan older, more stoic, learning that horses kick if you wind them up far enough. Tan and Malcolm, swimming at the bend in the river, both chasing the same stick in the current. Tan and Bridget. Bridget and Tan, lying asleep in late summer, hiding from clients and riders and horses and, once, from an absent lover with no sense of discretion, or even of tact.
I must have been mad. Completely and utterly mad.
The cairn still stands at the end of the grave mound: a conical beehive reaching up to my shoulder, with a crust of ancient moss and flat, spreading lichen so thick that the stones could crumble and the shape would stay. On the top is a wide, flat stone and on that the moss is thinner. The roof stone. The only bit of the whole thing that moves.
The inner surface of the wall stones is washed with the blood of the dead. It was the way they used to say goodbye. So much cleaner than digging a hole in the ground. She told me that a long time ago. I never asked how she knew.
I slipped my fingers into my pocket and pulled out the blood tube, turning it over and over as Lee had done to mix the straw gold of the plasma with the mahogany dark cells at the bottom.
If it’s all that’s left, it’s better than nothing. More than there was of Malcolm.
The roof stone gave way, slowly and at the cost of skin and blood, as it always did. I suppose it was designed that way. The sun rode high over the clearing by then. High enough to angle down through the gaps in the cloud and let some light into the black cavity of the cairn. Down at the bottom, something glinted. Just once, but enough to be different. Mud and stones don’t glint.
It’s not a friendly place, the inside of a cairn. The walls are unworn and sharp-edged and I would believe without question that they are washed in blood. The insects skittering across them run faster than in daylight and with more evil intent.
Sliding in a hand felt like a trial by ordeal and I had no idea if I was innocent of the crimes laid against me. But I came back up at the other side with my prize and it was worth a knuckle of lost skin at least.
A watch. A man’s watch. Gold with a fading black leather strap, and a second hand big enough to take pulses even in
poor light. I reached in and lifted it out, turning it over as soon as it reached daylight to look for the inscription on the back.
It was there. Just where I remembered it: MDD, MD. Take Care. B.
Malcolm’s watch. Put there, without question, by his sister. Because there was nothing else.
I reached in and slid it back over the projecting spur of stone where it belonged.
A shadow moved to my left, too hard and too fast to be anything but human. A hand fell on to my shoulder, catching me in place as I spun round.
A voice, like water over gravel said, ‘Now then, you’re not looking so happy with life.’
Inspector MacDonald. The ever practical, ever present Inspector MacDonald.
Bastard.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I’m not at my most tactful when scared out of my mind.
‘The same as you, lass,’ he said placidly, ‘the same as you. I came to see where your young friend had put the old dog. It seemed the best place to look.’
I turned round to look at the man. He still wasn’t in uniform. He wasn’t even in the fisherman’s jersey. He was dressed in an old wax jacket with its collar turned up to the rain and an inside pocket that bulged with a rabbit-sized bulge. His moleskin trousers had fresh mud caked around the knees and his boots had seen the best part of a lifetime’s wear. On top of it all, there was something uncommonly like a ferret box hanging from his shoulder on a webbing strap. My dog sat at his feet, ears up, waiting for the chance to work.
Inspector MacDonald may have been here to look at the grave but he was making the most of an afternoon’s rabbiting while he was at it.
The last time I heard, ferreting on land without the express permission of the owners is defined in legal terms as poaching, a felony which tends to be unpopular with the local law. I suppose that if the local law is the one doing the poaching then it must be all right.
He saw me looking at the box and one eye dropped in truncated wink.
