The Bass Rock

by Evie Wyld

  ‘Viv. Viviane. Don’t you feel it?’

  ‘Feel what?’ I say again, on the verge of anger. I feel sure I was just about to get going on my evening – the computer is only sleeping.

  ‘That your life is a meaningless lump of shit and you can die and no one will give one single dry fuck.’

  She comes out of the bathroom pulling up her tights – she yanks them over her dress and does not correct the problem. She goes to the kitchen window, looks out, drags down the blind, then she goes to the fridge but finds nothing relevant to her needs, just the green bottles. She starts opening cupboards.

  ‘Where do you keep the drink?’

  ‘I don’t have any left.’ That’s a lie.

  ‘Seriously?’

  She looks at me like I’ve disappointed her dreadfully. The silence deepens between us. If I am passive and silent and give her nothing to grab hold of, she may still go quietly to bed. I’d like to be alone, I’d like not to drink, I’d like to sleep to get the feeling off me, have the day finished.

  ‘You do feel it. I see it on you. I bet you didn’t even take your coat off, you just sat right down and waited, didn’t you?’ She is smiling because she knows she is correct. The pattering murmur of my heart, a toothpick-sized spear of ice on the back of my neck.

  ‘You felt so mutherfucking hopeless – no hope.’ She holds up her index finger to me, to bring home her point, and says again, ‘No. Mother. Fucking. Hope. You’ve got to fight it, Viv. You’ve got to acknowledge it, and then –’ her voice now not much more than a croak – ‘you’ve got to pick yourself up, and fucking down something until the feeling goes. You’ve got to have an end point in sight – your job tonight is to get your body drunk – you have to believe that there’s worth in that. You have to.’

  ‘You’re not making any sense.’

  ‘You,’ she says, with complete confidence, ‘know that what I am saying makes perfect sense.’ I wonder if she is only drunk, or on something else as well. There’s a flicker of danger, something manic about her. ‘That smell – all the fuckin’ pigs, and flowers and the fire, and all the holes in the ground, everything clogged with the mud.’ She looks at me, her eyes glassed over; she rocks a little, not unbalanced, just like the blood pumps through her strongly, like it wants to get out.

  I go to the drawing room and take the whisky from the drinks cabinet. Back in the kitchen, I take two mugs and pour large measures. Maggie says nothing but fixes on my eyes as she takes her drink from me. We stand with eyes locked, drinking. Inside I am repeating, She’s right, she’s right, but I don’t know what about. My scanner is picking up nothing. I don’t know anything other than once the glasses are empty they are refilled and we drink again, and only after the second mugful do I realise I have yet to turn the light on in the kitchen and we are standing in the dark.

  There is a knock at the door, steady thudding. One, two, three, four, five. We both jump, then Maggie holds her finger up and mouths, ‘Don’t move.’

  The wolfman.

  After a pause the thudding returns, faster and louder. I go to look out of the blinds to see who is there, but she holds my arm and shakes her head. When the thudding stops and several minutes have passed she takes the bottle from me and pours again, but this time her hand is shaking.

  I wake in the night on the sofa, hearing the back door close. My coat is over my head. I find Maggie necking a pint of water at the kitchen sink.

  She is holding her phone, staring at it in disbelief. ‘Listen to this,’ she says. ‘You taste like peaches.’

  She turns and looks at me, eyes round and ringed by mascara.

  ‘I do not fucking taste like peaches.’ She raises her arms up like she is soliloquising to an audience. ‘I taste of soil and salt and the mutherfucking ocean. The fucking depths of the darkest parts of the ocean with the oil slicks and the scaled fish and the mutherfucking sea scorpions. That’s what I taste of. And sometimes, beetroot.’

  She smacks the phone down hard on the table and rolls a cigarette. She is still drunk. I don’t have it in me to ask her to go back outside to smoke. I open the window instead.

  ‘Do you ever scare yourself?’ she says as she moistens the edge of her paper. ‘Do you ever look at yourself in the mirror for such a long time that you start to see something else? Like there’s someone else under the skin. Have you ever looked in the mirror and deliberately made an ugly face, bared your teeth, growled and snarled and become suddenly aware that there is something else inside of you that you’re not letting out? Like we’re the wolves, and that’s why we’re hunted.’

  She leans back on the sofa and lights up, takes in one long draw and lets the smoke curl out of her. I know I am not expected to give an answer.

  ‘It’s the same as when you lie in bed thinking bad thoughts – those thoughts are in your head. None of this “it’s all a dream” bullshit. Where do you think the dreams come from? When you’re looking at yourself, growling, flecking spit on the mirror, that’s just as much you as when you’re grocery shopping or sucking a cock, or cooking a Christmas fucking ham.

  ‘I need some air,’ I say. It occurs to me that Maggie is not well.

  We go outside in the dark and climb the wall to look at the sea with the moon striped on it. It is cold but not oppressively so. Maggie is quiet now. The cigarette lights her face. She looks divinely sad.

  My phone buzzes. Hey, let me know when you’re back from Scotland. Had a really good time yesterday.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Maggie asks. It irritates me, this presumption that my life is something to be made available to her, that it is something with which to pass the time. I think of lying, but it would be one inconsequential piece of information exchanged for another.

  ‘Just some guy I’m seeing.’ I am not seeing Vincent. Not in the way Maggie will interpret it. But I like how it sounds – casual – like maybe we’re having sex, like maybe Vincent is some dark and attractive man person who comes and stands at my window at night, who is interested in, maybe even beguiled by me.

  ‘Some guy you’ve been seeing?’ A long pause, while she looks at me like she can’t gather her thoughts in her head. ‘What the fuck?’ She puts out her cigarette on the wall. ‘Who?’

  ‘Why is that so hard to believe?’

  Maggie shifts in her seat. ‘Just. I didn’t think you had anyone.’

  I shrug, but I feel a quiet, deep satisfaction that I have surprised her.

  ‘It’s nothing serious,’ I say, like I’m brushing her off. Secrets – the careful drip-feeding of your life to make it seem tantalising.

  ‘What does he say?’ Not, Who is he? Not, What is his name? Not, Where did you meet? I don’t reply.

  She looks up, awaiting an answer.

  ‘Wait – have you fucked?’

  ‘Jesus, Maggie, it’s none of your business.’ She holds eye contact, trying to read me.

  ‘Just. What is he? A wolf? Or a fox?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t fuckin’ know. I don’t know.’

  I go to bed, leaving Maggie out on the wall as the sun starts to come up and the first birds begin to sing.

  I wake feeling worse than before. I must stop drinking. I think about the times in the past week where I have drunk too much and eaten badly and I imagine being able to go back and pluck them out of my past so that by now I am clean and healthy. I wish I was a female detective from the telly who deals with her feelings by running and running until she doubles over and sobs or vomits up the feeling. I would probably vomit before I even made it to the beach.

  Maggie has left a note saying she has gone to work. I wonder when she left it. I put on a green woollen hat and my coat and I go down to the sea to clear my head. I can’t see to the far end of the bay where the police were yesterday, but I walk slowly in that direction. The tide is out and I find myself heading towards the rock pools. The spot is one I have visited often since I was a little girl. The place is always just the same, the limpets I could sw
ear dot the rocks in just the same pattern as they did when I was a kid, the waves roll in the same rhythm, a gull cawing, the bark of the dog, the rake of the wind on my face. It is always precisely as I remember it, not a detail out of place, and I search the rock pools for some scar of what has been there, but there’s never anything to give it away. Nothing. The rock is indifferent.

  A girl walks by me, I see her from the corner of my eye, but I can’t move my eyes from the space in front of me. She goes onto the edge where the waves send white spray high into the air and stands looking out at the Bass Rock. When I look up, she is gone, and my heart races because she must have gone over the edge, where the sea is roughest, but when I reach the spot, there is nothing there, only the shallow foam of the retreated water, and a hollowness in my stomach.

  Back at the house, Christopher is waiting on the doorstep.

  ‘Hello, old thing,’ he says and kisses me lightly on the cheek.

  ‘Oh, hello – sorry, I didn’t know you were coming. You don’t have your key?’

  ‘I suppose I do, yes, but I didn’t want to alarm you. I don’t like to just turn up unannounced, but you know – the signal here is no good at all. Is it OK that I’ve come?’

  I open the door and smile. ‘Has Deborah been in touch?’

  ‘What? Oh. No, poor Deborah. I don’t imagine this place’ll sell for some time – do you?’ There is something disarming about the way he asks my opinion, like I might have insight.

  I shrug.

  ‘No, really, I was in Edinburgh, and I had some news, and I sort of came here on a whim, I hope you don’t mind – are you in the middle of something? Because I can go, I don’t want to interrupt your day.’ He has started to back down the steps and I find myself reaching out and holding his arm, which embarrasses us both.

  ‘No, come in. Good news? Or bad news? Would you like a coffee?’ I let us into the hallway and Christopher closes the front door quietly.

  ‘Please,’ he says to the coffee and we start towards the kitchen. ‘Yes, well. It’s not good news really, it’s a friend of mine from school, one of the few I’m still in touch with – he died yesterday.’

  He has his hat in his hand, his coat still on.

  ‘Oh. Oh, I’m sorry.’ And then I can think of nothing to say.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, turning the hat, smiling. ‘Yes, it is rather tragic, I’m afraid. And anyway, I just thought I’d like to talk to someone, silly really, and as I say I don’t want to be a nuisance, and I’ve always rather admired you. I hope you don’t mind me saying that.’

  I let out an inappropriate snort. ‘Me?’

  ‘You’re just so like your mother.’

  He hangs his hat on the valet and begins to shrug out of his coat. I leave my coat in a lump on the floor. I’ve never thought of myself as being like Mum. Mum is capable and organised and contained. She can make me feel like an old sock.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, answering an unasked question.

  In the kitchen I fill the kettle. He puts his hands in his pockets and watches as I put it back into its dock and flip the switch. The noise of it is welcome. ‘Shall we have a drink?’ he says. ‘I have brought a bottle of whisky with me.’ I turn off the kettle.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘let’s.’ We go into the dining room and I take two crystal glasses positioned by Deborah so that morning light passes through them and onto the breakfast table on which she has done what she called a minimal lay with a coffee pot and silver toast rack. There are two silver partridges in the middle of the table, to add amusement.

  As Christopher pours, the clock in the hallway chimes eleven. I think Could be worse, could be before ten.

  ‘The world does conspire to make one feel guilty, doesn’t it?’ he says, and then briefly clinks his glass with mine before throwing the drink back. I sip my drink, my stomach not yet settled from the night before. It occurs to me that perhaps he’d rather not drink alone, and I was just the person closest when he got the news.

  ‘Who was he? Your friend?’ We sit opposite each other on the window seat.

  ‘Wally. Kind, sensitive chap. We used to share a bunk sometimes, in winter. He came here once or twice in fact – after Dad was installed at Edinburgh, and Deborah was born.’ Here he seems to stumble a little at the memory. ‘We have to give poor old Deborah a chance. I always feel rather bad I don’t know her better, and she had a terrible time, I gather, with Dad and her mad mother.’ He puts down his glass for a moment and rubs his legs vigorously as though trying to get the blood flowing there. I know the tic, I recognise it – the urge to tear off the skin. ‘We’d row out to the Bass Rock and smoke dope, Wally and I, after your mother had gone to London.’

  ‘Was he sick?’

  ‘No, not that I know of. Unless you mean depressed, which I expect he was. He’s not the first of them though.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Christopher pours another large measure. He looks away for a moment. He is looking at the Bass Rock, which today is far in the distance. A rust of seaweed surrounds it like a frill.

  ‘It must take enormous strength to hang oneself, don’t you think?’

  ‘Oh. Did Wally?’

  ‘He did. He did.’

  There is a gap where I know I should speak, but I don’t.

  ‘Him and me and your dad shared this thing we used to call the Wolfman – a sort of dread feeling – like one’s being chased by something. Silly really, rather childish, but truth be told I do still get it sometimes.’

  I blink. Perhaps Dad told me about the Wolfman. Perhaps that’s how I know exactly the feeling and exactly the beast.

  ‘It’s close to the feeling of homesickness. The only thing for it is distraction, and I came down last night and called Wally’s phone from the station and got his daughter, poor thing.’ There is a long silence. I can think of nothing to say. ‘Of course, Michael and I used to recognise it in each other, we used to know when it was coming and be able to head it off at the pass sometimes.’

  I make an unintentional sound – it was supposed to be a contemplative hmm, but what comes out sounds more like a yelp.

  He reaches over and squeezes my hand, realising too late that none of us are hand squeezers in the family. The squeeze which started out natural becomes confusing and he pats my hand twice and stands to look out of the window. There is a suggestion in his breath of great emotion. After a moment’s composure, he turns and says, ‘Do you know I almost killed a man a few years ago?’ He looks happy.

  ‘I didn’t know that, no.’ My stomach feels burned, but I can see there will be no getting out of this sober. I refill my glass.

  ‘I’d gone on a little holiday on my own. It was springtime, and I wanted to walk the Tennyson Trail – have you done that one?’ I shake my head. ‘Very lovely, and only one golf course. I didn’t take the car, because, and you won’t believe this – it’s cheaper to rent a car on the island and buy a train ticket than to drive and take the car over. Appalling what those people get away with – and to think some islanders commute every day. They have to take their cars. Quite frightful.’

  There is something forlorn in his digression. I wonder if he had already started drinking before he came to see me, and then I feel stupid, because of course he had.

  ‘Anyway, had a lovely walk, was feeling very pleased with myself and, back on the mainland, I got the train from the ferry – they still have the old trains on that line, the ones you open and close yourself. No locks on them, you just pull down the window and open them from the outside.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  Christopher swirls the whisky in his glass. Outside the sound of seagulls. The rubbish truck making its rounds, I hear the beeps as it reverses.

  ‘And I look over, and there was this old man sitting there, and I thought fuck and shit. My old housemaster. I recognised him at once. Charles Fucking Lahore. And I thought, if I go and sit opposite him and I calmly open the window and then the door, I can just push him out.’ He chuckles to himself. ‘I p
ut on my gloves so that they wouldn’t find my prints on the door handle. I could feel it, like I’d already done it, like when you’re walking and you see the point you’re heading towards and you can feel it drawing you to it. It was a straightforward task that I would carry out, and perhaps no one would miss him. And even if they did, I thought, if I got caught, I imagined all those boys – all of us old men now – and I thought of those of us left opening up their papers at the breakfast table and reading about it, and the comfort of that, and I was sitting there smiling to myself about that.

  ‘I hadn’t noticed we’d come into Brockenhurst and that he was trying to get off the train. And I’d missed my chance. He couldn’t do it, though, he couldn’t get the handle up. I sat there and I watched him struggle – he was very old and very weak, just a bundle of sticks really. He turned to me with this smile, a Can you help an old man, dear boy smile, and I smiled back. I got up and I opened the door for him, and he wobbled out and I passed him his briefcase, which had his initials on. And he said to me, Thank you so much, dear boy, and I said, You’re quite welcome. And then I said, Have a good day, sir. And he gave me a little look then, when I said Sir, but not much of one. And I didn’t say or do anything else.’ Christopher keeps his eyes on the water all the time he speaks. There is a very light tremble in his voice.

  ‘What did he do to you?’ I didn’t expect to ask the question, but when it falls out of me, he does not flinch.

  ‘There was one time I got caught smoking. That was what gave me away, he’d seen the smoke from across the pitch – I was also drinking – one started rather young in those days – not like now of course. I can’t recall if that was better or worse than smoking at the time. There was this beech tree at the edge of the cricket pitch and I kept a bottle of brandy in there, for sensible moments, and suddenly he was there. And he said, I’m not going to punish you now. You’re not going to know when I’m going to punish you, but when I call you, then you’ll know. And after a week or two I forgot about it. I thought he had forgotten about it. My brandy was still in the tree, he hadn’t confiscated anything. I think there was even a home visit, and then when we went back, there was some kind of masters’ dinner, midway through term, and I got sent for in the middle of the night. I go down in my pyjamas and there he is, drunk as anything, in his gown and his mortarboard, and his cane, and he’s pacing up and down his room, swishing it about, like he’s either excited or furious. Of course now, looking back, I’m quite sure it was cocaine. He had a cigar going. He made me stand in front of his desk. And he said, Hamilton, strip.’