The Bass Rock

by Evie Wyld

  Hey, I have to move out of the flat. Can you help me? Dom has taken the car.

  Perhaps you aren’t coming back for the weekend. Let me know soonest please.

  If plausible.

  K

  x

  Each line is sent an hour apart. It’s the word plausible that makes me think I need to go back to London. Katherine reverts to a strange language when she’s stressed. During her university exams I remember her telling me that my request to borrow £20 was not actionable at this time. Her computer brain takes over. I’ve always envied her computer brain.

  Maggie knocks at the door at nine o’clock.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she says, but gives no explanation. She packs her clothes into her rucksack, smelling them with obvious enjoyment as she goes. She smiles happily. ‘Thanks for that.’

  ‘It’s no problem.’

  I am surprised by how relieved I am to have her company.

  ‘Look,’ I say, ‘I don’t want to, you know. I just want you to know that—’

  ‘Would it be OK if I had a bath?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I find her a spare towel and there’s some baby shampoo left under the sink. Bet used to wash her jumpers in it. I sit by the unlit fire, wishing there was no crow nesting. I can hear Maggie in her bath, the squeaks and thumps of her submerging and emerging from water. The low singing of a song I don’t recognise. I’ve never known comfort this quickly with a person before. I feel a flinch of sadness for my sister.

  She comes down wearing a man’s shirt over yellow long johns with the towel on her head.

  ‘Mint,’ she says.

  ‘You can stay the night,’ I say.

  ‘Double mint.’

  ‘You want a drink?’ She smiles broadly and I go to the kitchen. I’m a little embarrassed by the assortment of snacks I bought during the day – honeyed almonds and wasabi peas. They are in bowls and I think it looks like I’m throwing some do, rather than persuading a homeless sex worker to stay with me because there might be a ghost. I bought bottled beer too, because how drunk can you get on beer? As I’m coming back into the room, bottle necks between my fingers, and the bowls of nuts and peas in the crook of my arm, I try out something she might do.

  ‘Down there on the rocks,’ I say, not looking at her, ‘when I was a little kid, I found a dead woman. Her boyfriend killed her.’ I hand Maggie her drink, set down the bowls on the side table next to her. ‘Her boyfriend killed her with wire because he found out she was leaving. And he got her into a suitcase – cut bits off her so she fitted, hand-luggage-sized, really – and set fire to it, and then when that didn’t work he threw her into the sea. And then she was in the rock pool.’

  I look up and Maggie has not touched her drink. Her mouth is open a small amount.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, like I deserve the sympathy.

  She drinks and so do I.

  ‘That makes a kind of sense,’ she says.

  ‘Oh? How?’

  ‘Because it explains to me who you are.’ She stands and comes and sits next to me. We chink bottles.

  ‘Also,’ I say after we have drunk in silence a little longer, ‘also, I fucked my sister’s husband.’

  ‘OK,’ she says. She gives me a shrug. ‘That shit happens.’

  ‘Katherine doesn’t know.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes! Only Dom and I know. And he’s not telling her.’

  ‘Are you going to tell her?’

  ‘Do you think I should?’

  ‘I don’t know the situation.’

  ‘I feel bad for not telling her.’

  ‘You want to tell her?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘You’re in love with him?’

  ‘What, no. No. No – he’s an arsehole. And he’s fucking thick as well.’ I feel a bubble of panic in my chest talking about him. Maggie looks at me a speck longer. I should not have brought it up. Stupid to, now three people know. I scratch at my shin, dig my nail right in, can feel a dampness there. It feels so good to scratch it.

  ‘What’s that?’ Maggie says, not pointing, but just looking to where I’m scratching.

  ‘Oh, eczema. I’ve had it since I was a kid.’ I feel conscious of itching it and cross my legs so that my good leg is on top. There is some blood under my nails, which I tuck under my arm. Maggie gets an already rolled joint out of her pocket, opens it up and takes a pinch of the innards. She whispers something into her closed fist which I don’t hear, then holds out the small tangle on her palm and spits into it, a long-drawn-out slaver into her hand. She closes her eyes and says something else.

  ‘What?’ I ask. She holds up a finger to silence me, rubs her spittle into the weed and then kneels down in front of me. She firmly uncrosses my ankles, and rolls up my trouser leg. She tuts at the wound there, which looks awful. Years of opening it up have left a shallow dent in my leg, it is scabbed over in places with a thick crust of black and in other places it glistens with new blood. It is not something I would ordinarily allow someone else to look at, but it occurs to me now that I don’t often let myself look at it either.

  Maggie rubs the contents of her hand into my shin. I don’t flinch, I just watch her. She offers no explanation, rests her fingertips on the scar for a few seconds.

  I have the impression she is somehow having a word with the wound, requesting that it behave itself. I remain very still. She returns to her chair, takes a long pull of her beer and says, ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got any crisps? I’m allergic to nuts.’

  When I leave the next day, I give Maggie a key. ‘You’d be doing me a favour,’ I say, ‘if you stayed for a few nights. I’m supposed to be house-sitting.’

  She doesn’t make a deal of it, just says ‘Sure’, and hands me a cheese sandwich to eat on the drive home. ‘Don’t go falling asleep.’

  Two and a half hours later I pull into a service station and sit very still for five minutes. What if she brings over this guy she has the arrangement with? Is she a confidence trickster? The kind who swindle old ladies out of their money? Am I the old lady? I imagine Deborah’s face when she walks into the living room and finds Maggie in her socks with a naked man and a crack pipe. They’d bring in stray cats who would shit everywhere and give birth to kittens, they would call squatters rights. I rest my head on the steering wheel and try to imagine what I had been thinking. What would Katherine say? The phone is disconnected and Maggie and I have never exchanged numbers. The signal doesn’t work unless you’re on the wall anyway. Oh God. At the exit I hesitate. I could drive back and tell her I made a mistake and she has to leave. That’s not something I will be able to do. I carry on to London, because I am a giant spoon. I will just stay at home the weekend to help Katherine and then I will come back and face Maggie.

  I am late to meet Katherine, and she doesn’t mention the evening we were supposed to spend together, and if we can get to the end of the month without it being brought up it will be filed in the disappointing sibling box and will only get mentioned if we have a proper falling-out.

  We were supposed to have a coffee before going to the flat, during which she would no doubt recite her game plan, packing, leave of absence at work, deeply spiritual but educational holiday, rebirth. ‘Well,’ she says, flashing a smile, ‘you’re late, so I suppose we should go straight to the flat and start.’

  She is polite as always, she has cut her hair and says she likes my boots. She walks faster than me, presumably to make up for the time I have lost us. We pass a newly refurbished pub – the kind that talk about brunch and bottomless prosecco, and an ironic quiz on a Tuesday.

  ‘Shall we stop for a quick drink before? Might, you know. Chill you out a bit.’ I regret saying it as soon as it’s out of my mouth.

  Katherine turns to me, smiling again.

  ‘I’m totally chill. What are you talking about?’

  In her voice, chill sounds rather like when Dad used to say groovy. I shrug.

>   ‘Cool.’

  ‘Cool.’ Smile smile smile. ‘Anyway. It’s a bit early, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, yes, but I was only joking,’ I say. The lie feels infantile.

  ‘We can if you like? Sorry, Viv – is this a difficult thing to ask you to do?’

  It is so like her to behave as though I’m the one having the drama. It’s meant to highlight how absolutely good and selfless she is in the face of my shitness, and it puts me immediately into a funk.

  ‘No, no, no – as I said, I was joking. I just meant, you know . . .’ I change the subject. ‘I like your hair,’ I say.

  She puts a hand up to it.

  ‘Oh – it’s just a bit easier like this.’

  I don’t know what she means.

  We walk in silence. It isn’t far – there is the sound of traffic and of people playing football in the park and so the silence is not overwhelming. We have to walk in single file where the pathway narrows between the road and the park.

  ‘He won’t be there, will he?’ I hadn’t thought much past the logistics of parking near her flat and then parking near our mother’s.

  ‘He said not – but you never know,’ she says and smiles. It is a tight smile with something else behind it, something other than control, other than disappointment. She stops suddenly at the top of their road.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she says, turning sideways, shifting her handbag from one shoulder to the other, ‘perhaps we should have a drink after all.’

  I watch her for signs of sarcasm but see none. She looks at me.

  ‘Well?’ She says it rather aggressively, and I nod and we turn back in the direction of the pub. ‘To be honest it’s not that early now, because even though I told you to meet me at ten thirty it’s now nearly eleven fifteen.’

  Inside is a collection of old cotton spools as a centrepiece above the booth we sit in. To our left children’s shoes arranged around the head of a stag. Two small glasses of wine are £15.

  ‘So! How have you been?’ I ask in an over-the-top way. ‘Until now – until this?’

  ‘Good!’ she says. ‘Though not ideal, I suppose, just at the moment.’ As she takes a large swig of wine, something occurs to her. ‘I like my new hair,’ she says. ‘What about you? What’s going on with you?’

  I shrug. We are really acting out our exclamation marks.

  ‘Mum says you’re seeing someone?’ says Katherine.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Says you’ve got that stoaty thing about you that you get.’

  ‘Stoaty?’

  ‘You know. She said, like a . . . stoat in the snow – flicking about – like you might run up a trouser leg.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake.’

  My sister smiles.

  ‘Well? Is she right?’

  ‘Not really. I mean she’s wrong.’

  ‘How boring.’

  ‘A stoat?’

  My sister runs her hand over her face, and as she does her expression changes.

  ‘Oh God, Viv. I’m moving back in with Mum. What’s going to happen to me?’

  A bottle of wine is only £19, and so we get that next.

  ‘Why are you moving out of the flat, and why does he have the car? Aren’t both those things yours?’

  ‘It’s complicated.’

  ‘Does he know you’re leaving?’

  There is a long pause. She refills our glasses higher than she would ordinarily approve of. I remember, drunk, that I am driving. I concentrate on forgetting the fact.

  ‘He ought to have understood the way things are by now,’ she says, which is meant to be inscrutable, but I understand from it that she is doing a runner.

  At half-midday we blink into the bright sunshine and make our way down the road, a little unsteady.

  Inside Katherine and Dom’s flat, nothing much is out of place at first glance. I see her shoulders drop when there is no sound of Dom. We stand still in the hallway, looking. His overcoat, his briefcase full of notebooks waiting for him like a dog by the door. He takes it with him whenever he comes to family things and he rifles through it occasionally, as though there were a very important document he can’t be separated from. I know, though, that it is full of fishing magazines and a notebook in which he writes poetry. I read a few of the poems once, Dom gave me a taster drunk. A stanza that sticks with me:

  Oh, the purple mountains of home,

  groaning with my absence,

  watch my blooming

  into the wild flowers of spring.

  I remember him taking the book from my hands and saying, ‘It’s about my ejaculate.’

  ‘You ever read his poems?’ I ask Katherine. She gives me a look and I know that she has and finds none of this funny.

  A voice from the bedroom makes her stiffen. The radio alarm, set to go off at six thirty each morning, has had nobody to silence it.

  ‘He’s in Swindon doing some kind of spoken-word event.’ She waves a hand in front of her face like she’s describing something completely everyday. She sees to the radio and I wait in the hallway for instructions. An unsmoked roll-up in the ashtray and a half-drunk bottle of wine, with one glass, tinged with lees, on its side, broken at the stem on the occasional table by the sofa. The coffee table has snapped in half, as though someone has fallen on it.

  In the kitchen, I open the fridge, curious about what they ate as a couple. The food in the fridge is spoiled, minced beef grey and sweating with mould, lettuce brown at the edges, tomatoes that have collapsed under the weight of their own skin. No one has eaten here in weeks. I close the door. A bowl of black plums withering on the table. Two tiny white shells picked out of a small ornamental bowl of others. These are Katherine’s and I pocket them, in case they get overlooked. Left in the bowl are small yellow sea-snail shells, pearlescent limpets and slate-black cockles. I run my thumb over the backs of the shells in my pocket. She was the collector when we were kids. She would spend hours combing the tideline with her fingertips, patiently examining every piece of shell debris for these white mouse-ears.

  I am startled by the toilet flush. I am drunker than I thought, though exactly as drunk as I should be given how much wine I’ve had.

  Katherine comes out of the toilet holding something.

  ‘He left these.’ She holds up a pair of red knickers made out of some uncomfortable slippery fabric.

  ‘They’re not mine,’ she says, ‘he left them here for me to find.’ She looks lost, undone in a way I never expected from her. There are no tears – I sense all of these are in the past. What is left is salty bone dust lost at sea.

  I move forward and put my hand on her arm. It is tensing and she shivers.

  ‘Nobody would really wear those,’ I say, thinking that perhaps I’m right.

  She lets the panties fall through her fingers; they heap on the floor, a small puddle of red.

  Quietly she says, ‘I think that might be worse.’

  All she takes is a backpack full of clothes and a suitcase of books and photographs.

  ‘What will happen now?’ I ask once we are sitting in the car. ‘You can’t just let him have the flat, and the car and everything.’

  ‘When some time has passed. When things are calmer.’

  I don’t turn on the ignition. ‘Is it that he’s fucking someone else?’

  There’s no response from Katherine. Slowly I reach for the keys and turn them.

  ‘Fuck!’ she shouts. I jump.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re too drunk to drive.’ She says it quietly, puts her hands up to her face. I turn on the engine and we pull out into the afternoon traffic. She keeps her face covered the whole way to our mother’s house.

  There had been talk about the woman in the shepherd’s hut, the girl had overheard her father and the fishermen.

  ‘It was just a matter of time,’ she heard him say, and there was a murmur of agreement, until one of the men set his eyes on her and she was sent to collect her mother from the big house because the men were hungry.<
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  Her mother wiped her hands on her apron, and handed the girl half a loaf of bread. ‘Tell him I’m not yet finished here. There’s soup in the pot and there’s herring in the pantry. Tell your father he can wait till later and I’ll bring back mutton.’ Her mother gave her a coin for a jug of beer from the tavern. Her mother smoothed the hair down on the girl’s head and kissed her on the crown. ‘There now – I need to get on or I’ll not be back till midnight.’

  ‘Mother?’

  Her mother already had the door half closed and opened it in irritation. ‘What is it?’

  ‘What happened to the woman in the shepherd’s hut?’

  Her mother looked at her.

  ‘What did you hear about that?’

  The girl toed the dirt. ‘Father and the men were talking.’

  Her mother sighed, lowered her voice and stepped back out of the house, pulling the door so that no one inside would overhear.

  ‘The woman in the hut was warned and she still didn’t leave. That’s all you need to know, and that you listen to your mother and your father – or at least your mother – and you stay away from the Law, and the hut, and you don’t mention it to anyone. If word gets to the Earl, there’ll be a tell-about and a fuss, and no one can afford the stop in work, not right now. She knew that, and she still persisted, and now she has paid the price – just don’t you go around making things worse than they already are, you hear?’

  ‘What price did she pay?’

  ‘Never you mind.’

  ‘But what did she persist in doing?’

  ‘Never. You. Mind.’

  The girl went back home and delivered the bread and the beer, and some of the men had left but there were four of them to share the beer, the bread and the herring. They were not interested in the barley soup. ‘It churns my guts these days,’ said her father. The girl left the men to it and sat on the back step. From there she could see the hut, just a small shadow on the side of the Law, and above it birds circling, beyond it the water and then the silent black rock.