by Andrew Greig
Night-walkers. Girls who talked in their sleep. Girls who peed the bed. Feet padding across the floor, a creak of springs under the extra weight. A pale girl who would take anything without a sound except a soft huh from her throat. Girls who kept splintered biros under their pillows for protection.
Someone lost an eye once, she says. Her name was Veronica. She’d come to the wrong bed and put her hand in the wrong place, and the biro stabbed and went in somewhere squishy. Then the squealing, Veronica jerking her head into the floor, and before the lights went on she put the red biro in the secret place inside the bedframe but someone told on her.
An accident. One of those stupid, fated things. And then the Bad House, and a reputation to defend. A file that got thicker. Bruises that mended and bruises that didn’t mend.
She holds up her left hand and he sees the little finger is squint above the joint. We used to practise torture, she says. The nail on her next finger is small and bent and dark. You can’t imagine.
His chair scrapes loud in the quiet room. He fills his glass at the tap and sits down again. He sees another self lean over her and put his arms around her shoulders, cradle that erect head. He sees his shade gently wipe away tears that haven’t even been shed.
He’s been here before. He knows where such feelings lead. He’s engaged to Jo, and it was her illness and courage that first touched his heart. So he sits again, drinks his water and sees the sunlight has moved across the floor towards his feet. If he stays much longer the sun will reach him.
He says nothing. There is absolutely nothing adequate to say. He wonders about Veronica but daren’t ask. Eventually she looks down, nods like he’s done something right. Then she shrugs like it’s just a story that once happened to someone else.
We grow up, she says. Those years have awful bits for everyone, I’m sure. Anyway, in the Bad House I met my bestest friend.
Who’s that?
She hesitates. She swallows. He sees her throat thicken like she’s got a potato stuck in it. His phantom has already enfolded her. He feels her eyes pricking at the corners of his even as she looks away.
Carol, she says. She says it like she was offering a title to a song he ought to remember. Her name was Carol Anderson.
Was?
We don’t …
His hand has reached across the table. Her broken little finger curls round his ugly family ring.
We’re not in contact often, she says.
Her finger strokes the ruby stone then lifts away. There’s no accounting for this sense of suffocation. He feels like the clumsy gladiator who has had the net thrown over him and now waits helplessly for the sword.
She’s standing at the back of his chair. Her hands fall on his shoulders. She bends forward and over, kisses him from above.
Her mouth is full and hot and swollen. For a moment he responds. His hand is shaking as it comes up from his lap. He puts his palm across her forehead and gently pushes her back. Her hand trails across his neck, his throat, then her damaged fingers slip between his lips.
His fingers close round her wrist to push her hand away. For a moment they both use all their strength and with her leaning over him they’re evenly matched. Then she laughs and draws her hand back.
It’s only a kiss, Davit – no harm in that. There’s something so strong here.
He swallows, draws his fingers across his lips.
I feel it, he says. But I can’t.
A kiss before marriage, she says softly, like a kiss before dying? I’m sure your fiancée would understand.
He seems to consider this. He nods.
Maybe. But I wouldn’t. He laughs quietly. Anyway my Faith won’t let me.
What’s faith got to do with it?
He spells it out as she stands behind him with her hands now resting loosely either side of his neck. He can’t kiss her again. He can’t make love to her. He doesn’t make love even to his fiancée.
Never?
Not till we’re married.
Bet you tell them all that. She looks at him, then shakes her head. No you don’t, do you?
He grins and flushes, looks down, unable to conceal.
And does she share your Faith?
She accepts it’s part of me, he says quietly.
And the celibacy – she likes that.
It starts out as a question and becomes statement. He nods.
She’d had … a difficult time with a couple of men. And she’s got this illness …
What illness?
It’s called lupus. She calls it her wolf. It comes and goes. She could die of it. When it comes it’s serious and leaves her very weak and not exactly feeling like very much. So maybe the celibacy was a relief for her.
Was?
He looks up at her and laughs.
Now it frustrates the hell out of us. Well, me at least.
Her hands drop from his neck. I bet it does, she says quietly. I couldn’t stand for it.
Then she briskly sits at the table again and draws her chair in.
So tell me about your conversion, she says. Was it sudden? Flash of light on the road to the pub? Are you saved, oh my brother?
Forget it.
No, really. She leans forward across the table and for once her mouth is unambiguous. I’m not mocking. We mightn’t be so different.
He looks down at his hands then spreads them like a hand of battered playing cards, face down on the table. As he talks, hesitant at first, his fingers shuffle across each other. He looks up once in a while to check but she isn’t laughing. She seems to be listening for something behind his words, the sound of his voice or the wind perhaps. He can’t believe that he’s telling her. He’s learned not to talk about it much outside the prayer group. You can worship fire or mighty Pan or be a Zen Buddhist, and few bat an eyelid. But say you’re a Christian and people back off like you’re HIV positive. Perhaps it’s possible to be this earnest only with a stranger.
They lean towards each other, studying his hands as he shuffles and deals his life.
*
A nearly young man feeling old was walking weeping through the streets of London. That morning, about an hour ago he reckoned, his married sort-of girlfriend had had their would-be baby aborted. The night before she’d looked up from the asparagus flopping into her mouth and said there was no question about it. His. No doubt, no blame, no debate. A fling (he winced, stopped in the street half-bent over, converted it into a coughing fit so no one would look at him), a fling was one thing but she couldn’t deceive Harry with a child. There were some things one didn’t do.
Apparently abortion was not one of them. He’d looked at her looking at him, then neither of them could bear to look at each other. Their great glamorous original adventure, this giggling secret of passion, of remarkable sex and awe-struck guilt and tender allowance in hotel rooms, friends’ flats and Forestry Commission Leisure Amenity Woodlands, was revealed truly in the length of time it took her to lick her fingers and pick up a napkin. He pushed his plate away and that was the end of a life.
As when she walked away outside the restaurant with a vague backward flip of her hand and her head down into the drizzle, he knew they both knew it wasn’t even tragic, and that was the only tragic thing about it. It was so little.
And he was so tired he had to sit down but there were no seats and the kerb was wet. He believed in nothing and nowhere was home, except a flash of hillside mottled green and yellow sloping down by a big house wrapped round with trees. But inside was a man he could never walk past. A man who had destroyed three lives by his greed and lust, a man who might have killed. A man who was his father.
He clicked off that picture in his head, as he had thousands of times for years. He closed it like a window on the computer screen in the Forestry office. That revealed another picture that had been hidden behind it. A yellow face, aged before its time, the mind and liver rotted. His mother before she moved into the private nursing home, still calling for justice and gin.
He clicked that picture closed and then there was nothing. He was leaning like a drunk against a shop window full of blank-eyed dolls that never blinked. There was a baby who would never be, and he had no say in it and in the end he wasn’t a free spirit but another greedy lost soul. He had become the man he most wished to avoid.
He put his hand to the glass window and pushed himself back into the street. A huge woman bumped into and past him, muttering. Bastards, she said. You’re all bastards.
He had to sit down. There was a red-brick church coming up. The door was open. He went up the steps with his legs so heavy and chest feeling like a balloon filled with water. He went into the dim, and slumped onto the first hard wooden seat. He could go no further.
He opened his eyes when he felt someone sit beside him. A man about his own age. Longish hair, no dog-collar, thank God. The man looked at him and nodded.
Life’s bloody tough, eh?
David bowed his head. The simple statement got under whatever defences he had left. Life was tough, that was all that could be said, the final wisdom. He felt water prickle from his eyes.
I suppose you think this is where it’s happening, he muttered.
A long silence.
The church? the man said. I doubt that. It’s only a building.
David looked at him then. He wasn’t clean and shiny. His skin looked older than the rest of him and he wasn’t smiling.
Still, the man went on, if this place helps you should try our group. I was a wee shite once and all. The power of prayer is amazing and the Mercy is a much bigger hit than smack.
Prayer, David muttered. I haven’t got one and I don’t believe in it.
No, but we do. I’m Chris. He held out his hand. Have you got any better ideas?
*
The Mercy, David says to Mary Allan. Have you ever felt yourself forgiven, completely? Forgiven yourself? When it finally happened I felt it from the crown of my head through to my toes. It shook me like a rat on an electric fence. I couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened. So …
So you’re a Born Again?
David shrugs. Evangelical, he says, if you have to call it anything. It doesn’t mean fundamentalist, though I did go a wee bit overboard that way at first. We meet in folks’ houses rather than church, so I guess we’re dissenters. He pauses then laughs. Aye, we do quite a bit of dissenting among ourselves. But the prayer and the love, that’s real enough. End of sermon.
So what’s this Mercy? she asks.
It just means you have a conversion experience. Feeling the Mercy is like … He pauses, looks across at Mary Allan. For once she won’t meet his eye. He looks past her, out the window at the trees moving.
It’s like seeing the wind, he says. I don’t normally talk about it. Don’t worry, I won’t try to convert you.
Thank Christ for that, she murmurs, but still she doesn’t look at him. She seems to have gone way back inside herself. Her left hand is brushing small circles on the wooden table top.
I’m burning in Hell, she says, so quietly he’s not sure he’s heard her right. That’s how I breathe.
What?
Slowly her head comes up. The black discs of her eyes punch into him.
Nothing, she says. Then she begins to nearly smile. I don’t normally talk about it much, she says.
She gets up quickly and stands over him again. He can feel her heat, and smell it. The world has clicked off, leaving only her body and his in a small room. Time has gone strange as her hand moves towards him. It descends slowly through the air, the long pale fingers opening. She grasps his shoulder, he feels her fingers burn through his shirt.
I’m sorry, she says, then abruptly lets him go. She bends over the soup pot and stirs while the flames flare blue and yellow.
He clears his throat of something swollen there. For what?
Uh? She sort of chuckles like it’s nothing and already in the past. I don’t know yet, she says. I hope you’re hungry.
He manages a nod. This morning’s talk has been even stranger than the last. He’s no idea how he got here, only that he feels so alive it’s uncomfortable. Her shoulder blades flex like wings beneath her T-shirt but he can still feel his shoulder burning where her hand came down.
Spook, she says. That’s what I believe in.
What?
She pulls more onions from a drawer then stretches back for his knife.
Sometimes I live in Spook.
She says it with a capital, as if it were a place.
What happened to you in that prayer meeting, that was Spook. People say they don’t believe in the dead or hidden purposes or invisible connections and forces – yet they believe in subatomic particles and curved space and electrons going backward through time, which I personally think is completely away with the fairies.
He laughs. She turns and points the blade at him.
We both have that in common, she says, then goes back to slicing. We both believe in Spook, the invisible. We’re surrounded by the dead and the past and the future. It’s all there while we sit here. In its way it’s solid as these hills, and without it nothing means anything.
He wants to protest. Her ideas have nothing to do with his Mercy. He does not want to be claimed by her like this. But she hasn’t laughed at him. She too believes in the invisible. She has glimpsed the wind that bends before it. In a way they’re kin and if she’s deluded he may be too …
So he leans back, his hands clasped at the back of his neck, and he sings for no reason he knows of as the blade flickers through the onions and the distorted rectangle of sunlight moves over his boots: In Scarlet Town where I was born, there was a fair maid dwelling.
He feels charged, alert, giggly, almost strong. Reflections from the knife flick across the ceiling, into his eyes. And her name was Barbara Allan. They sing it together. Her singing voice is light and high and sweet as her speech is low and throaty.
She sweeps the onions into a blackened pan. It’s good to have some company, she says, though that’s not what I came here for.
What did you come here for?
Her hand stops. Her hips push against the sink.
I promise you’ll know soon as I do.
*
He dries the last of the dishes and is about to put them away by the painted ones he’s still curious about.
Does it still bother you? she asks as she takes them from his hand. The trial and … everything.
No, he says. He flips the drying towel onto a hook. Or at least, a lot less than it did. Now I’m moving on, got a new life waiting once I finish up here.
He looks round the kitchen one last time. He feels he’s been here before yesterday, though so far as he knows he hasn’t. But there was a picnic, the tall woman in a patterned skirt, his father, a toddler on the grass in front of a cottage. Maybe he saw it in a painting or a film.
Thanks for lunch, he says. I must be getting back.
Give my regards to your father.
I don’t think that would be a good idea.
You’re right.
She laughs, quite easily, as she covers the painted plates. He looks around, feels in his jacket pockets but finds nothing there.
You keep mislaying these, she says and opens her fist on a glint of metal and polished stone. The keys to the kingdom?
He picks the keys from her hand. The keys to his father’s Land-Rover, his own car keys, the Yale for the new flat where Jo should be. She needs him, she accepts him. She trusts him to look after her when she’s ill and not to hurt her.
He holds out the Yale.
This one is, he says. Believe me.
She looks at him like she’s unexpectedly found something from way back she’d forgotten about, and the finding makes her glad and tearful both.
I envy you. Goodbye.
She says it to the shelf above the plates. He wants to hug her or something but she’s not making any moves that way. When he turns at the door to look back, she is still staring there. He takes a breath to
say something but chokes on the tide of isolation that has risen round her.
I think it’s okay with my dad for a week or two, he says. Tat may be back but I reckon you can deal with him.
She smacks her hand on the table, a hammer falling when the auction’s over.
Surely, she says. Bye.
He looks back from the door and can see the waters that have grown around her and they are so so cold.
He stands outside and gulps in the bright blowy day now that the drizzle’s cleared. The trees, the corbies, the Land-Rover, Hawk waiting patiently this time. The real world. Something happens when he’s inside that cottage, he starts to drift and lose himself, but she can’t work that spell outside.
He says a short prayer for her as he gets into the cab. Hawk sniffs his hand doubtfully, licks it once then curls up in the seat. David drives along the rough track without looking back. It wouldn’t be a good idea to go there again, he can’t help her even if she would let him. He can’t save everyone, he can’t put the whole world right. Only the Mercy can do that.
The wheel twists and jerks in his hands as he drives fast along the drove road. He’ll not be back. Crawhill Cottage bounces small in the mirror.
*
Here on the plate the same bird in the sky reappears above the building in the lower left. A window and a thin bald man with something glinting in his hand. A knife? you wonder. Coins? You stare and stare till your eyes water and blur. These plates like the ballads are so corrupt it’s hard to be sure of anything. Yet the light shines back as though from a mirror, and now you guess what’s in his hand.
I set down the binocs, lit a cheroot and had a wee think. A second visit, a long one. The laddie came out alone and no canoodling at the garden gate this time. Perhaps they’d done that and more inside.
No. It’s not possible. It’s just my clarty mind. The boy’s a bit of a stookie, but honest. An evangelical these days, Annie says. With his fiancée woman coming, he’ll not be fooling around.
