Hen's Teeth

by Manda Scott

  Oh, hell. That explains too many things.

  I really should have known.

  The disks were still lying on the floor. I stood up, slipping them back into an inside pocket and slid back into my jacket. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I better go.’

  Janine watched me, confused. ‘What are you playing at, Kellen?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I leant down and gave her a hug, kissing the top of her head. ‘It’s not important. I’ll see myself out. Talk to you later?’

  ‘Sure.’

  At least she had the sense not to ask when.

  Elspeth Philips stood in the living-room doorway and watched me as I let myself out of the flat.

  My car remained unmolested by the wandering wardens, so I left it parked where it was and, pulling my jacket tight against the blustering wind, walked round the corner to Bee’s for a coffee and a chance to do some serious, uninterrupted thinking.

  Bee’s is a café with wine-bar pretensions two blocks down the Great Western Road from the Botanic Gardens. It’s been a queer dive since long before I was a student, first by default, then, after a sudden change to a less-than-sympathetic management, by sheer force of numbers and finally, after a local group buy-out, by design. The name changed in the process, settling into a tacky, unmemorable acronym which is painted in livid pink on the front boards.

  For the local clientele it has stayed as Bee’s; only the straight population use the official acronym and very few of them venture inside more than once. Being in the minority can be intimidating when you’re not used to it.

  The downstairs bistro was filled with the usual Sunday evening throng; boys on one side, women on the other and the ubiquitous fag hags hovering in the middle, trying not to look conspicuous.

  Small cliques gathered in opposing corners. The university crowd, nervously experimenting with sexuality as a form of self-expression. The town dykes, paired into the butch and the very butch, here for a quiet coffee in a smoke-free zone before moving on somewhere with a late-night licence and louder music. The occasional professional couple, keeping to the shadows, conducting the beginnings and endings of affairs in strained, muted undertones.

  And me, playing at being the average citizen-off-the-streets, with my lover three streets away chatting up a professional policewoman who very probably will never come out at work and would almost certainly not dare to cross the threshold of a known lesbian bar.

  The cross-section of a cliché. Sad but true.

  I looked around for a free seat in the crush and spotted one, eventually, at a table for two on the far wall, under the stairs. One problem. A small plume of blue smoke spiralled upwards from the seat at the opposite side. Smoking is absolutely forbidden in Bee’s; there’s only one person who ever gets away with lighting up and that’s only because no one in their right mind would think of trying to stop her.

  Mad Mhaire Culloch.

  Lee’s ‘Auntie Mhaire’ is a wee Irish crone, well into her eighties. She has white hair, stained yellow at the edges from her nicotine habit, no teeth, a voice on her like the three Furies with amplifiers and she is, in my professional opinion, barking.

  But very bright with it.

  If she had behaved as she does now when she was younger, they would have locked her up and thrown away the key. So she didn’t. She played the bonny lass, got married at sixteen and had her seven children to keep her mad mother happy. Then she waited until the war was providing good reasons to go missing, left the lot and moved to Glasgow, where she slowly turned into the kind of person she had always been.

  Now, in her prime, she runs a very healthy social security scam from her council flat on the South Side and makes a killing on the side reading palms and Tarot cards and star charts and generally telling people the things they need to know but might not want to hear. She is, unquestionably, the most terrifyingly accurate psychic I have ever met and she knows how to use it when it suits her.

  Her position as island-appointed mentor to Lee means that she knows more about her than anyone else in the world and that, by extension, she knows more about me than I find comfortable. So when she was sitting at the only table with a spare seat on the first time I had been into Bee’s since the hogmanay party, there was probably a good reason.

  I picked a particularly sticky, sticky bun from the counter and carried it over to her table, holding it in front of me like an offering in the vague hope that the sight of so much congealed carbohydrate might keep her quiet until I got close enough for her not to shout.

  No such luck.

  ‘You’ve blood on your hands, woman.’

  She screeched it across the room while I was still negotiating a path through the student contingent and half a roomful of heads turned.

  I had showered twice in less than six hours and I knew that my hands were, to all intents and purposes, spotless.

  I kept them in full view and hoped that everyone knew Mhaire well enough to know that she was mad and not quite well enough to know that, more often than not, she was right.

  At the table, I moved the saucer that was serving as an ashtray and laid my offering in front of her.

  She ignored it.

  ‘You drink too much coffee.’ At least her voice was down.

  ‘I know.’ I sat down. ‘Who’s blood did you see, Mhaire? Mine?’

  ‘Yours. Aye, yours.’ She rocked backwards in her chair once or twice and hummed tunelessly past the butt end of her roll-up. Bad news. Mhaire in humming mode is not easy to handle.

  She grinned winsomely. ‘Some is yours and some is hers and some is someone else’s.’ She sang it in a lilting, playground rhythm. For someone with no teeth, her s’s are remarkably sibilant.

  The key with Mhaire is not to get sidetracked.

  ‘Some is hers. Who’s that? Bridget?’

  ‘Ahhh.’ A long, mournful sigh. ‘Poor Bridget. Dead and dead and all for an egg. Poor Bridget. Poor, poor Bridget.’

  She rocked forward abruptly and poked a finger at my sternum. ‘It’s no on your hands you keep that blood, woman. It’s in your heart and it’s all clotted up and cold and hard like a stone and you’ll no end this while you keep it there.’

  Her voice rose back up to a screech and the finger jabbed hard like a blunted knife. ‘Learn to weep, woman, learn to weep.’

  Brilliant. Other folk pay their therapists by the hour to hear the things they don’t want to know. I get it for free from a batty old Irishwoman in a bar with half of the Glasgow queer community listening in as my very own personal encounter group.

  ‘I’ll weep when it’s all over, Mhaire.’ I kept my voice as low as I could. ‘Who’s blood is it then? Lee’s?’

  Her face twisted. ‘Aye. Her. The black one. Her. Forgotten her Auntie Mhaire now she’s gone up in the world. Never comes to visit. Never comes to see if I’m still alive in the cold and the rain with no money and no one to take care of me. You tell her to visit old Mhaire if she wants to know what to do when the blood runs on the stones.’

  I imagine she can work out that kind of thing on her own by now.

  ‘I’ll do that, Mhaire.’

  ‘Aye, well mind that you do. She’s too clever by half, that one. Thinks she knows it all. She’ll get her fingers stepped on one of these days if she goes about sticking them into other people’s business.’

  Don’t get sidetracked.

  ‘I’ll tell her, Mhaire. You said someone else. Who’s that? A man?’

  ‘A man?’ She made the word a treasure, rolling it round in her mouth and tasting the flavour of it. Then she took a hefty bite of the pastry. ‘Aye. A man. Not good with the gentlemen are you, woman?’

  Look who’s talking.

  ‘No, I’m not. What man’s that, Mhaire? The one who killed Bridget?’

  She thought about that one, squinting at a far horizon with screwed-up eyes.

  This time when she answered, her voice had come back to ground level, as lucid as it ever gets.

  ‘No. Not yet. There’s ot
hers before him. He’ll not die until it’s all over and maybe not even then. He could live for ever, that one, if you let him.’ Her head cocked to one side suddenly, as if struck by a fresh idea. ‘Choices, my pretty one, choices. Do you know how to choose?’

  I have no idea.

  The finger drummed again, on my forehead this time.

  ‘It’s anger you carry in there, woman, not love, whatever you like to think. Anger. If you’ve not got a clear mind, you’ll not be able to make clear choices. Remember that.’

  Tell me something I don’t know.

  ‘I’ll work on it.’

  ‘Hah.’ She lit the charred roll-up and waved it in circles before my eyes. ‘Hah. And hah. And hah. Man, but you’re the arrogant one. Here I am, the oracle, talking for you and you think you know it all.’

  She rocked back again and rolled her eyes up in her head, showing the whites, and her voice sank deep into the sepulchre. I’m sure it impresses the clients on the South Side.

  ‘Red and black. Black and red. The one is yours, the other’s dead.’

  Give me a break.

  ‘I think we’re a bit past that, aren’t we, Mhaire?’

  Her hand slammed on the table. Heads failed to turn.

  ‘How can you think you know the answers when you’ve never listened to the questions, woman? There’s more that’s red than blood and more that’s black than her who’s dead and don’t you forget it. You can’t have them both. Red or black. Only one. Remember that.’

  Time to go. Rhyming couplets are the widening end of a very tedious wedge.

  I left her, giggling happily to herself through mouthfuls of pastry. As I reached the foot of the stairs and began to go up two at a time, I heard her voice shriek again behind me.

  ‘Mind the fox, woman. Remember that while you’re about it. Mind the fox.’

  Back at the farmhouse, the guard lights failed to come on as I drew into the yard. The kitchen was in total darkness but there was a blaze of lights and the screaming dialogue of a television soap blared from the living room at the front.

  Last thing I knew, the farm didn’t have a television and I would put money that no one’s paid the licence. As I walked up to the back door, I heard the telephone ring in the far room and then Caroline’s voice answer it, except that the telephone sits under the window in clear view and Caroline was nowhere near it.

  A scrape of gravel stopped me as I was about to knock on the back door and I felt the faintest touch of a finger just under my ear. I stood very still, cursing with reasonable invention. There seemed very little point in keeping quiet. If it was anyone other than Lee, I would have been bleeding to death on the doorstep.

  A hand wrapped lovingly round my throat.

  ‘Bang.’ A voice breathed warm in my ear. ‘You’re dead.’

  I extracted myself from her grip. ‘Thanks, partner.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  She stepped ahead of me and opened the door. Inside, the kitchen was pitch black. The fire had been doused with water leaving a strong, acrid smell of saturated peat ash. Lee walked round me, feeling her way to the cupboard over the fire and flicked a series of switches. The lights returned in the kitchen and the yard, the racket from the television stopped in mid-row and the answer-phone reset itself with a quiet ting.

  Caroline was leaning, hands in pockets, against the wall at the far end of the room, with the dog lying quiet at her feet.

  ‘Like it?’ She looked peaceful. Satisfied with her work.

  ‘Wonderful.’ I looked around. ‘All this and square-pin plugs too.’

  I turned to Lee. ‘Does it light the fire again?’

  ‘Sour grapes,’ said Lee cheerfully. ‘Ignore her, she’s just jealous she didn’t get to play.’

  Which only goes to show that I am transparent too.

  We spun coins to decide a rota for the night watch. I landed the middle shift, sandwiched between Lee and Caroline. It went some way to restoring my faith in the fates. More than anything else, I wanted to sleep and not to think.

  Caroline began work on another minor culinary adventure, while Lee made up a bed for herself in the office. I was left to the fire. Fair division of labour and as good a way as any of keeping my hands occupied and my mind focused on something other than the events of the day.

  Lee came to sit in the chair while I cleaned out the grate and laid some more kindling.

  ‘How did you get on?’

  ‘Grim.’ I pulled out the disks and slid them across the hearth rug towards her.

  ‘She wouldn’t, or she couldn’t?’

  ‘Neither. I didn’t ask.’

  ‘I see.’

  She kept the question out of her voice.

  ‘Elspeth Philips was there. She’s on Laidlaw’s force, working with MacDonald. I think we don’t need to hand either of them proof on a plate.’

  ‘Would it be passed on?’

  ‘I don’t know. Possibly not, but I’m not about to find out the hard way.’

  I changed the subject. ‘Mad Mhaire was at Bee’s. She sent you her love.’

  She grimaced painfully. ‘You mean she sent the great green curse of the wee Irish pixies for me not visiting her more than twice in the past month.’

  ‘Something like that. And she hummed.’

  ‘Hell. That’s bad. I thought you were looking rough. Did she say anything intelligible?’

  ‘That depends on how good your translation is these days. Apparently I have other blood on my hands that’s not mine and not yours and there are more men dead than we know of. Also we have to be careful of foxes. Is that intelligible?’

  ‘It might be if that was what she said.’

  ‘Almost.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  I rocked back on my heels, closed my eyes and relayed most of the conversation verbatim. With Mhaire, there is no basic sense, the key is in the choice of words, and I have never known her well enough to decipher the time of day, never mind the deep, cryptic analyses of relationships and events.

  But Lee can, sometimes. One of our basic differences is that Lee thinks Mhaire Culloch is ultimately sane and has our best interests at heart and I think she is an interfering old bat with not a good thought in her soul. The fact that she’s more often right than wrong is hardly the point. However, Lee knew Mhaire long before she knew me and I’m not likely ever to be able to convince her that she’s wrong. Persistent if misplaced loyalty is a cornerstone of the Adams psyche.

  When I had finished the recitation, I opened my eyes. Lee was sitting forward in the chair, balancing her chin on her hand, her eyes on my face.

  ‘Any ideas?’ she asked.

  ‘Lots. Like we could lock her up and throw away the key until she learns to talk real English. You?’

  ‘Some.’ She looked at me and her eyes were only half-amused. ‘Loosely, I’d say it’s going to get worse before it gets better, but then we know that already. With Mhaire, we’ll only know how much of it’s right in retrospect.’

  ‘If there is a retrospect.’

  ‘Ever the optimist, Dr Stewart.’

  ‘You’d be sad if I changed, Dr Adams.’

  ‘Surprised, anyway.’

  I finished laying the fire and lit the edges of the paper, kneeling forward to blow into the air vents at the base. Kindling caught and flared and then the peat flickered smokily to life. I watched until I was sure it wasn’t going to die out, then I stood up, leaving the disks where they lay on the floor.

  ‘I’m going to bed. Wake me when it’s my watch.’

  ‘Not hungry?’

  ‘No. Just tired.’

  I undressed messily, draping my clothes, unfolded, over the chair by the bed, and crawled under the primrose printed duvet. Slipping a hand under the pillow, I wrapped my fingers round the vial of blood that had come back with me from the cairn.

  It didn’t stop the nightmares but it added an interesting edge.

  Lee broke through the thundering fires, showering them with wa
ter so that the red-hot earth hissed and spat. ‘The horses,’ she said, ‘we need to get them in.’ And then, as I opened my eyes, ‘Rise and shine, Stewart, there’s a storm coming.’

  There was indeed. I dressed in a hurry, throwing on the clothes discarded earlier that evening, and listened to the fabric of the house groan in muted anticipation of a hard north-westerly gale. The hills protect the farm on the east side, but the storms from the west come in straight off the Atlantic with precious little in the way to soften the impact.

  I grabbed a jacket from the coat rack and followed Lee at a run out of the back door.

  Outside, the smell of pre-storm ozone prickled in the air. The wind laid the reeds around the pond flat in sudden, buffeting blasts. Loose bucket handles flapped in odd corners of the yard with a discordant metallic clatter and, in the far wood, the beech trees shed leaves like confetti. Massed banks of clouds spewed up over the horizon and fragments torn from the leading edge raced across the face of an almost-full moon.

  The dog danced and twisted at our heels, pouncing at the shadows rippling across the gravel. Her coat glowed pale in the moonlight and she became a ghost-fox, hunting for the souls of the dead through the cracks in the night.

  Nights like this are alive with everything you ever imagined.

  Magic.

  ‘Race you.’ I grabbed the corners of my jacket, sheeting in so that it became a galleon sail in the wind. Then, turning broadside on to the blast, I let the gale haul me, feet skittering on the gravel, towards the field.

  One after the other, we careened into the gate.

  I clung on to the rails, winded by the impact and breathless with laughter. ‘I won.’

  ‘Cheat. You started first.’

  ‘Only because you’re so bloody slow, Adams . . . Oh, shit . . . the horses.’

  The ponies, milling on the other side of the gate, shied as a group in a whirl of black manes and rolling white eyes. A couple of the youngsters propped and turned, and somewhere, in the darkness, a single set of unshod hooves hammered on the hard earth. The Connemara.

  Without thinking, I put my fingers to my mouth and whistled. Tîr wriggled under the bottom rail of the fence and vanished, a pale blur whipping through the grass. The running hoof slammed to a standstill and there was a horse-snort of sheer astonishment. I whistled again and the footsteps walked, and then trotted, back to the group. Rain’s filly glared at me with undisguised disgust.