The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae (ARC)

by Stephanie Butland

  Figures are moving at the windows. It’s three o’clock but the sky is already dusking; the lights are on indoors. Ailsa opens the gate, looks at the path. Her foot seems unwilling to step onto it.

  ‘Remind me what the sisters are called?’ Hayley asks. People think that Ailsa’s mother never forgets a face but actually she revises, learns, practises. She says that when Ailsa was a baby, knowing the names of the nurses made sure they were on their side.

  ‘The eldest is Lucy and the younger one is Libby. Lucy’s bairn is Louisa. They all begin with L.’

  Hayley puts a hand around her daughter’s waist, squeezes, and Ailsa feels something simple and close between them. It used to be there all the time.

  Someone is waving from the front window. There’s no escaping now. Quietly, Ailsa says, ‘It doesn’t seem possible. That he’s not here.’ And that’s nowhere near expressing what she’s feeling, but it’s all she dares say. More, and she’ll break, even if her mother is holding her.

  ‘I know,’ Hayley says. ‘I havenae seen Ruthie and Dennis since you left hospital.’ There’s a pause, and Ailsa reaches for her mother’s hand, holds it hard. They are both remembering Lennox’s parents’ determination to support them, even though they were grieving for Lennox, even though their visits to Ailsa’s bedside felt like silent, aching punishments for them all.

  She fixes her best smile, and searches for a good memory of Lennox. The first: him holding her palm flat against his bare chest, saying, ‘I would give this to you in a heartbeat, if I could. I would fly it, from me to you.’ Another: they are seventeen, standing on the beach at Portobello, then he took off for the sea, rushing in, trainers and jeans and all, up to his thighs, and then he looked back and yelled, ‘It’s lovely! Come in!’ And now more memories are chasing in: the two of them sitting in the hospital garden, trying to teach themselves chess with the board and pieces from the day room. The knights were missing; they’d used two mints fished from Ailsa’s handbag for white knights, two dark fallen petals for black.

  There will be no more memories now.

  ‘Ailsa! And Hayley! Thank you for coming!’ Ruthie – thinner, greyer than last time they saw her – embraces them both at once, clutching their shoulders. Behind her ambles Dennis, smiling but smaller-seeming, who goes down on one knee, stretches his arms wide, makes sure he has Ailsa’s full attention before he starts singing.

  ‘Something’s got hold of my heart, tearing my soul and my senses apa-a-art.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Dennis,’ Ruthie says, half impatience, half humouring. And then, to Ailsa, ‘He’s like a five-year-old. If it’s funny once, it’s funny forever.’

  ‘It’s OK. I think it’s funny.’ Dennis stands to embrace her. She puts her head, sideways, against the top of his chest. He pats her back, between her shoulder blades. He told her once that she was like another daughter to him. Ailsa wonders if he’s like a father to her.

  She wouldn’t know.

  But he’s been a steady presence in her life for as long as she’s known Lennox. He holds her at arm’s length, looks her up and down.

  ‘You look well, chicken,’ he says. ‘Nothing wrong with a bit of meat on your bones.’ He pats his own stomach.

  ‘Dennis! Enough! Ailsa, I’m sorry.’ Ruthie looks mortified.

  Ailsa catches Dennis’s eye and winks. If he’s going to try to be kind to her, today, however clumsily, she’s going to try to help him out a bit.

  ‘It’s fine, Ruthie,’ Ailsa says. ‘It’s the steroids. I’m starting to get rid of it, but I was fighting a losing battle for a while.’ Ailsa hears herself, catches her mother’s eye, and Hayley winces in sympathy. Talk of losing battles isn’t really the thing, here, now. ‘At least the beard’s under control.’

  ‘Well, you’ve a lot to be grateful for,’ Ruthie says. ‘You’re a lucky young woman, and we’re glad for you.’

  ‘She has that,’ Hayley says, ‘and we both know it.’

  Dennis reaches for Hayley now, embraces her. ‘My wee Highlander. Fierce as ever.’

  ‘Drinks are in the kitchen,’ Ruthie says, and it’s as though each word is spelled out from a script she’s learned, for a play called How to Get Through This Day. Hayley follows her along the corridor.

  Dennis smiles at Ailsa, though his eyes seem too sad for smiling today. He gestures her forward. ‘I’ll be getting a rollicking for that comment later, don’t you worry about that. Let’s get a drink. I’d guess you could do with one as much as I could.’

  There must be about forty people scattered through the kitchen, living room and conservatory. Ailsa spots Libby and Lucy, some of the staff from the hospital, and a couple of friends of Lennox’s from university; scattered now, all well established in their lives, they’ll have come a long way to be here. There’s the head of the school where Lennox taught PE, and another teacher colleague, the one he called ‘Rockets’, though Ailsa cannot remember why. She’s stabbed by the bright pain of knowing that she can’t ask him.

  Everyone seems to have made the effort to dress and talk cheerfully, although there’s the forced feeling that Ailsa remembers from a Christmas she had to spend in hospital, when it seemed that if anyone stopped smiling the whole elaborate happiness-shaped celebration would collapse and kill them all.

  Ailsa almost chooses wine, but decides against it, because she needs to hold on tight to herself if she’s going to get through this afternoon. And wine will add to the meat on her bones. Diet lemonade in hand, she scans the crowd for someone she’d like to talk to. After years of breathlessness she still cannot believe that she has as many words as she wants at her disposal. She can let them bounce or fall from her mouth, unmeasured, uncounted, for as long as she likes.

  But first, she steps out of the door of the conservatory, and goes to sit on one of two benches in the corner of the garden, on either side of an apple tree that’s in a vast zinc pot. The air is cold, but the trunk seems to have warmth, and she puts her palm against it, looks up. Apple stirs. This is Lennox’s tree, his ashes buried in the pot. Of course it’s going to be warm.

  Ailsa looks up into the branches and sees the tatters of dark green card and string on the bare branches. Soon there will be nubs of a different green clustering, waiting. She tries to think about those, instead of that day. At the funeral everyone was invited to write something on a label, a memory of Lennox, that would be tied to the tree. There wasn’t a memory she could so much as glance at, then, without knowing that she’d shatter, so she’d written something else. Three words: ‘Please come back.’

  ‘Could I join you?’ Lucy has emerged from the house, a drowsing Louisa heavy in her arms.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I didnae want to disturb’ – she settles the toddler’s curly head against her shoulder, and leans back on the bench – ‘but it’s getting a bit hot in there. A bit noisy.’

  Ailsa takes her hand away from the tree trunk and rests it in her lap. It’s as though she’s been caught in an intimate act. Being close to death had been easy when she was with Lennox. With anyone else, she doesn’t know how or when she’ll cause offence.

  ‘He thought the world of you,’ Lucy says, her voice a sad, low note of loss. ‘How have you been?’

  Ailsa nods. ‘I’ve been…’ But she can’t complete the sentence. She almost says, ‘lost’ – it’s the word that surprises her by springing to mind – but she can’t say that she’s lost when she’s alive and well, and sitting next to a sister who used to have a kind, clever younger brother and now has, instead, an apple tree with the disintegrating remains of memories hanging from it. She’s not sure she should be here, in this garden – or even in the world. Apple could have gone to a more deserving person. If she’d died sooner, would that change whatever equation the universe was using, and could Lennox have lived? She can’t say that to Louisa. ‘I thought the world of him, too.’

  The February chill and encroaching dark drives them inside, and Ailsa is immediately drawn into conver
sation by Craig, one of the critical care nurses who looked after Lennox in his last days. They are soon joined by Suze, an old friend of the Douglas family. Craig asks questions about what Lennox was like, before he was ill, and between them Suze and Ailsa pull together a patchwork of anecdotes that has all three of them laughing. Suze’s memory goes back further than Ailsa’s. She remembers Lennox, ten years old, coming home with a dog that he’d untied from outside a shop, claiming that the owner had given it to him as a present; she talks about the swimming competitions he won; how his parents despaired of him ever sitting down for long enough to do his homework. Ailsa’s stories only really start at sixteen, when she and Lennox both got involved in a project to provide activities for underprivileged kids. Lennox was one of the students who arranged games, Ailsa and some others helped with homework, and slowly they noticed, then got to know each other. By the end of the six weeks of the project, they were holding hands on the way to the bus stop. She doesn’t tell Craig and Suze that part. It’s just for her.

  And then, suddenly, Ailsa is exhausted. She sees what Craig was doing, how kindly and cleverly he was taking their minds from the loss that is still too great to think about as a whole. She excuses herself and finds Hayley talking to Dennis. She hears ‘beta blockers’ as she approaches, and smiles to herself, because anyone who knows that Hayley is a pharmacist seems unable to resist talking to her about their drug regime. Ailsa catches her eye and tugs at her left earlobe, an old signal for ‘I’ve had enough’, useful at visiting times when she was in hospital or on any day out when she wasn’t. Hayley nods, extracts herself from Dennis’s monologue – ‘It’s your GP you need to be talking to, Dennis, but there’s no reason why those two drugs shouldn’t be compatible, so the indigestion is likely something else.’

  They start to make their goodbyes. Ruthie talks about meeting up with Hayley, doing something to ‘get her out of the house’. Libby says she’ll call, because the family is talking about fundraising in Lennox’s name, and Ailsa says she’ll help. Making arrangements to see Lennox’s family again makes it easier to leave.

  Or almost leave.

  Hayley’s hand is on the front door when Ruthie calls them back. ‘Oh, before you go! You remember those swatches you looked through with me at the hospital? Well, I took your advice – I think it was you, Ailsa, who said the blue would be too dark, and the grey with the silver stripe would go with anything?’

  ‘I think so,’ Ailsa says, although she doesn’t recall. She does remember long afternoons of sleeping, on and off, Ruthie keeping her mother company, and the two of them talking about curtains with an inappropriate desperation – as though they were using their words to hold up a roof in the rain. Which, of course, they were: Lennox was dead, Ailsa was dying.

  Ruthie leads them along a passageway, and opens the last door on the left. They are in the study: there’s a desk, a chair. And oh, look, there’s the rug Ailsa and Lennox had sex on once, when they were supposed to be revising for their Highers. Libby had just left to meet a friend and Lennox said they had ten minutes before his mum got home. Focus on the curtains, Ailsa.

  ‘Lovely,’ Hayley says, ‘they’re just the ticket, aren’t they?’

  Ailsa nods, although they look very much like curtains to her. She likes the blinds in their flat, which are bamboo, a little bit tatty at the edges, the cord to pull them up and down knotted in so many places that it looks like a string of beads.

  This house feels dark and quiet. Ailsa wants to be out in the air. Hayley squeezes her elbow.

  ‘Well…’ she begins.

  ‘Ah, just before you go,’ Ruthie says, and she sets off back along the central corridor, making a ‘this way’ motion with her arm. Hayley raises her eyebrows at Ailsa and Ailsa shrugs, but they follow.

  Ruthie opens a door, and ushers them into the room ahead of her. She follows them in and, as they stand there, says, ‘I thought you might like to see Lennox’s room.’

  It’s not, mercifully, a shrine, because Lennox never properly lived here, apart from during university holidays. The family had moved from Tollcross to Portobello when Lennox was nineteen. So at least there’s that.

  The room is neat and plain. There is navy bedding on the double bed, matching curtains, pale walls, an oak wardrobe and chest of drawers, and a white desk with a black swivel chair pulled neatly up under it. Ailsa recognises the wardrobe from his bedroom at the Douglas’s Tollcross house, but the rest of the furniture is new. She stops herself, just in time, from wondering what might be in the wardrobe. She doesn’t know whether she wants it to contain Lennox’s pressed shirts, or home a variety of old board games and boxes of photographs, or be empty.

  Above the desk there’s a noticeboard with ticket stubs (rugby matches, cricket internationals, football finals); airline boarding passes; tickets to Buddhist temples and city museums; postcards and railway maps. It’s a jigsaw of the life Lennox lived after university, his travelling years and his school-holiday sporting pilgrimages once he started teaching. On a shelf above sit framed photographs. There’s one from his graduation, and another from Libby’s, two years before; they could have been taken in the same week, as he looks almost identical in both, broad-chested and smiling.

  It’s designed to make Ailsa miss him with each iota of her soul. She can feel every cell of her body contract, as though it is trying to make a fist of itself.

  At Lucy’s wedding, he’s squinting into the sun, tanned, bearded. Ailsa half remembers that he’d come back from Thailand to be there. The fourth photograph is smaller, poorer quality, and the most painfully recognisable of the lot: Lennox is raising his arms, half grinning and half grimacing, as he crosses the finish line at his first and only marathon, in London, in 2015. He did it in four hours and twenty minutes. His slow recovery time was the first clue to the fact that all was not well.

  Ailsa doesn’t know what to do, or what’s expected of her. She doesn’t want to look at Ruthie, in case she’s crying, or in case she’s waiting for Ailsa to cry. Which she will. She’s a tear storm waiting to break. Hayley’s hand is on the small of her back.

  She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.

  It’s a curious thing, that although Apple never knew Lennox, she’s understood, this afternoon, where to hurt for him, where to almost burst with the sheer volume of missing him.

  And then, out of nowhere, Ailsa can smell Lennox’s aftershave – Driftwood, it was called. He was first given it as an eighteenth birthday gift from his sisters. He used to say that wherever he went in the world it would always make him think of home. He said he was connected by it. And that’s what Ailsa feels as she breathes it in now – sage, patchouli, mandarin. Connection.

  She didn’t notice it when she came into the room. It seems impossible that the scent is even here. The rest of the house smells of tasteful plug-in air-freshener and Ruthie’s perfume, which is a melancholy one, jasmine and forest floor. They are too far from the sea for it to make its presence so strongly felt. And yet, the smell of the aftershave is all around her.

  ‘I think we really need to be going,’ Hayley says. ‘This is all – a lot for Ailsa. But thank you.’ She touches her daughter’s elbow. Ailsa opens her eyes, and the Driftwood has gone.

  Ruthie is sitting on the bed. ‘I’ll just stay here, for a minute or two,’ she says, her voice quiet, ‘if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Hayley says.

  ‘Do you want me to send Dennis?’ Ailsa lays her hand on Ruthie’s shoulder, lightly, not wanting to disturb her, in case Lennox’s mother is inhaling the aftershave now and she breaks the spell.

  Ruthie shakes her head, the smallest shiver, and Hayley and Ailsa leave, closing the door behind them, making their way out of the house as quietly as they can, as though they are trying not to disturb a sleeping child. They don’t speak until they are through the front door, down the path, and around the curve of the road, out of sight of the house. And then Hayley stops, holds out her arms, and Ailsa half h
ugs, half grips her. It’s a little while until she feels steady enough to let go.

  ‘Fuck, Ailsa, I’m sorry. You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ Hayley says. She’s pale, too.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting that.’ She wanted to remember Lennox, and would never, ever want this day to pass as though he had been nothing. That didn’t mean she wanted the bedroom, the photos, the ghost-scent that surely must have been a trick of her imagination.

  ‘Of course you weren’t. Me neither.’

  ‘I think she thought she was being nice,’ Ailsa says.

  ‘Well, you know what they say. Nothing says “nice” like “come and stand in my dead son’s room in silence for no good reason”.’ A beat. And then they’re laughing, the sound mirthless and barking, still holding hands.

  And then they’re silent, and it’s dark, and it’s cold.

  ‘I could murder a drink,’ Hayley says. ‘Do you fancy? Before we go home? I’ve only had tea. I’m fair drowning in the stuff.’

  ‘I’d really like that, Mum.’ It’s only five thirty, but it feels later.

  Hayley lights up, inhales, exhales a straight, tall plume of smoke into the still air above her. Ailsa steps away from the smoke, or at least that’s how it looks – but really it’s to preserve the last little bits of Lennox’s aftershave in her nostrils. The smell of the sea is blowing in to them now, overlaying what might be left. Ailsa used to wear floral perfumes – her aunt, Tamsin, said she smelled like a flower-arranging lesson – but now that she isn’t always trying to cover the smells of the hospital, or mask the aroma of illness that she seemed to exude, she doesn’t much bother with perfume at all.

  Hayley smokes two cigarettes as they walk in silence down the road, not quite lighting the second from the end of the first, but almost. They join the end of Portobello High Street and keep going, silent, with their backs to the sea, until they come to a pub.

  Hayley strides to the bar, then hesitates. ‘Did you have much to drink back there?’