The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae (ARC)

by Stephanie Butland

  He looks around, up and behind him. ‘This place has too many exits. Lead the way.’

  ‘Right.’ And they’re off, heading through pedestrians, up the escalator and across the walkway.

  He stops at the Sir Walter Scott quotes on the glass panels that decorate this part of the station, smiles and puts his arm around her shoulder. ‘Romantic soul, wasn’t he?’

  The panel he is looking at reads: ‘Scarce one person out of twenty marries his first love, and scarce one out of twenty of the remainder has cause to rejoice at doing so.’

  ‘Well, Romeo and Juliet wouldn’t argue,’ Ailsa says.

  Seb turns to the next panel and reads, ‘“To enjoy leisure it is absolutely necessary it should be preceded by occupation.” ‘

  ‘That’s true enough.’ Ailsa thinks of how good it feels to get into bed when she’s worked all day; how much she looks forward to seeing Emily when she’s spent the previous four hours being polite to strangers. ‘And look at this.’ She turns around and leads Seb to the other side of the walkway. They dodge a couple (another couple?) and stand in front of a decorated panel that reads: ‘Life is dear even to those who feel it as a burden.’

  ‘Having a picture of a heart on it doesn’t make it cheerful,’ Seb says.

  ‘You weren’t kidding about the temperature,’ Seb says. He pulls a hat from his bag, pulls it onto his head, down over his ears.

  Ailsa laughs. ‘I did warn you. June in Edinburgh equals March in Highgate.’

  Seb puts an arm across her shoulders in a way that is beginning to feel normal. ‘I know you did. But – I’m an optimist. And anyway, I’ve got an excuse to get close. Leech the warmth from you.’

  ‘Leech away,’ she says.

  They travel all the way around the open-top bus route, Waverley to Waverley, without getting off. Seb twitches an eyebrow at her when Burke and Hare are mentioned as they look down into the graveyards of St John’s and St Cuthbert’s churches. (‘I’m guessing you’re a fan,’ he says, and she shoves him with her elbow and says, ‘Not of the murdering’.) He wipes away an imaginary tear when they hear about Greyfriars Bobby; Ailsa hands him an imaginary handkerchief.

  ‘All these bridges that are streets,’ he says as they disembark, ‘it’s weird.’

  ‘Or a good use of space.’

  ‘Easier than moving a rock, I guess.’

  The tour guide recognises him and he stops for a photo, in front of the bus, sunglasses on, thumbs up – Ailsa declines to be included – and now, here they are, back on the pavement. It’s nearly five o’clock.

  Ailsa’s about to suggest they go home when Seb says, ‘Right. I’d say coffee, but are you sick of it? Maybe tea? Really just somewhere to be warm.’

  ‘Should we not be going to buy you a jumper?’

  ‘My fingers are too cold. Where’s good? Do you want to show me where you work? Or are you sick of the sight of the place?’

  Ailsa laughs. ‘Not yet. I love it. But we’re the wrong side of the city.’

  She takes him to the food hall in Jenners, because they’re almost on top of it where they get off the bus. It’s odd to be there with him. She’s only ever been here with her mother, when they’ve been shopping, or have fancied a change from their usual Rose Street haunt.

  ‘What’s up?’ Seb asks.

  ‘I was just thinking about having tea,’ Ailsa says, ‘and how it never used to be – an end in itself. Just something you did while you were doing something else. Like read a book or wait for an appointment.’

  ‘It is something you do while you’re doing something else,’ Seb says, ‘like talking to me. C’mon, Ailsa,’ he says, and her name is different in an English mouth, sharp at the beginning and end – not bad, just different enough to make her notice when he says it, as though she’s getting the smallest of static shocks. ‘I know you well enough by now. You’re not your usual self. Have you got scurvy?’

  ‘Scurvy?’

  ‘I don’t mean scurvy, do I? What is it you get when you don’t have enough carbohydrate?’

  Ailsa laughs. ‘Thinner? Scurvy’s what you get without vitamin C. I’ve plenty of that, believe you me.’

  ‘Rickets, then? Lack of calcium?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve got rickets. Not yet.’

  ‘Well, good. But there’s something wrong, isn’t there? I’m not as green as a cabbage, as you would say.’

  ‘You’re not as green as you’re cabbage-looking.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  Ailsa sits back and takes her cup in her hands. She wonders if she can explain how she’s feeling – unstable, adrift, knowing everything she isn’t but unsure of what she is.

  Seb is waiting. Not in a finger-tapping way, just pouring his tea, sitting back. He takes off his sunglasses. Even though the light at their table, away from the window, is muted, he would have kept the shades on a month ago. His eye is healing, bit by bit, the way her body is strengthening, her life expanding.

  She says, ‘I’m not going to fall down dead any minute, anymore. And that changes things. I mean, my mother’s been amazing through my whole life, but for most of that I’ve needed protecting. Now…’

  ‘Even with only one fully functioning eye, I see a but,’ Seb says.

  Ailsa sighs. ‘You know I went over to see her? Things were a wee bit tense. I can’t make her see that there are things I want to do now, and they don’t mean I love her any less, they’re just … they are important to me. I’ve long enough in my life now to find out for myself.’

  ‘Find out what?’

  ‘I want to find out about my biological father. But just the mention of him and she shuts the conversation down. Actually, she cried, and then she went outside to have a cigarette, and when she came back in she said, “I just cannae, Ailsa. I’m sorry, I cannae talk about him.’” Ailsa had said that she understood, because she did, in that moment, with the distress coming off her mother like the smell of Marlboro. ‘There’s only once in my life that she’s told me about him, properly, and that was when I was ill enough that people have to give you what you want.’

  Seb nods. ‘Why is she so anti-him?’

  ‘He’s never been around. I don’t think it’s him specifically, I think it’s more that he left us and he’s never been around and she doesn’t see why I should want to meet him now.’

  ‘Because she’s done all the work and now he’s going to turn up for the fun part? I can see her point.’

  ‘Something like that. She thinks I’ve better things to be thinking about, than my father and This Seb.’ She’ll spare him the WAG comments.

  ‘Well, she wouldn’t be the first mother to be opposed to me. Isn’t she impressed with your unicorn barrister plan?’

  ‘She doesn’t know. I was going to talk to her about it but – well, we got on to my father first. And then’ – how to be fair, about this – ‘she’s not – all men are bastards. She just hasn’t had a lot of luck with relationships. Or time for them. So mentioning my father didn’t go down well. She wanted to know why. It’s hard to explain that it’s just for – for –’ She thinks for a minute. ‘for completeness.’ Yes, that’s it. If you have a four-chambered heart, there are things that go with it. A job. A plan. Knowing who your parents are, or were, even if they aren’t together. Making choices about all of these things.

  He touches the back of her hand across the table, smiles a gentle just-for-you smile. ‘But she’s not going to be up for a family reunion? No letting bygones be bygones?’

  Ailsa laughs at the thought of her mother and father meeting, her mother tolerating a kiss on the cheek, saying, ‘It’s all in the past’. ‘I don’t think my mother would know a bygone if it hit her on the backside.’

  ‘On the what?’

  She’s about to repeat herself when she notices his smile, lets it finds hers. ‘On the arse.’

  ‘I love the way you say that. So, what are you going to do?’

  ‘Well, I’ve written a blog post,’ s
he says. ‘I can show you, when we get back. Maybe you can tell me what you think?’

  Seb nods. ‘Of course.’ Then he smiles, a suggestive curl to his lip, an unmistakable glint in his eye. She feels naked under it. ‘I’m staying at yours, then?’

  Style it out, Ailsa, style it out. ‘Did I not say in my emails? I thought I’d cook.’ When they go out Seb always insists on paying and that just doesn’t feel right. Plus, now that she’s working she’s all the more aware of what everything costs. Her lunchtime soup and sparkling water, at the Northbridge Brasserie before they got on the bus, was the equivalent of two hours of coffee-making. She needs to be more mindful of money. And she doesn’t want Seb to be recognised again, and her to be photographed, published. The bus people didn’t have to ask; they could have just taken a quiet photo, and then Ailsa might have been in it.

  Seb looks as though she’s given him a BAFTA. ‘Really?’

  ‘Don’t get excited, I’m no Masterchef,’ Ailsa says, ‘and we could go out, if you’d rather, but…’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ Seb says. ‘I don’t know anyone who cooks. Except Yusef, and I haven’t seen him since February.’

  Ailsa says, ‘No, you’re kidding. You don’t know anyone who cooks?’

  ‘Well,’ Seb says, ‘bacon sandwiches, scrambled eggs, that sort of thing. My sister makes nice pasta things. Not making her own pasta. But other than that it’s takeaways or stuff from Waitrose.’

  Ailsa laughs. ‘I don’t know anyone who makes their own pasta.’ Ah. But Lennox said he’d learned, at university, from a flatmate. He’d told her about it, one day, when she was sitting at his bedside – how he’d been amazed by how simple it is. She feels caught in a lie. How easily it is to change someone, once they’re dead. She wonders what misremembrances there would be of her, now, if things had been different.

  ‘Yusef does,’ Seb says. ‘I’ll introduce you when he comes back.’

  Ailsa can’t process the long-term relationship, or at least the future visits to London, it implies. Not that Seb means being a couple. Just – knowing each other. He seems to be friends with a lot of people he’s slept with. Or it could be that he sleeps with most of his friends. Emily says what Seb might want is one thing, but what Ailsa wants is the other half of the equation. But Ailsa has no idea. That is, she loves the thought of spending time with Seb, of looking forward and seeing him there. But she doesn’t know how to look forward. Not properly, anyway, not yet. Apple seems to think it will be fine. But Ailsa has only ever been in love when one of them is dying.

  Back to safe territory. ‘It sounds like your standards for home-cooked food are good and low, then.’

  ‘Low standards never let you down,’ Seb says. ‘Do we have to go and spear a sabre-toothed tiger first?’

  ‘We could,’ Ailsa says, ‘or we could go to the supermarket on our way back. You decide.’

  ‘Supermarket,’ he says. ‘I didn’t bring my spear.’

  So that’s what they do. It’s almost like they’re a couple.

  It’s odd, though, having someone else in the flat. Odd, too, how quickly Ailsa has got used to Hayley’s absence. Just the sound of Seb moving around, flushing the loo, throwing himself down on the sofa, makes Ailsa stop and listen as she stands in the kitchen. She’s dismissed Seb from helping – ‘I don’t want you cutting your thumb off; Roz will kill me’ – and chops vegetables for the ratatouille contentedly. She’ll give it an hour in the oven, then grill the pork chops. Easy. Seb seems determined to be impressed/excited, though, so she lets him.

  He closes the blinds and takes off his sunglasses, attempts to read the paper, gives up, has a look through Ailsa’s law brochure, gives up faster.

  ‘Put the TV on if you like,’ Ailsa says. ‘I’ll come and join you shortly.’

  ‘Was there something you wanted me to read? About your dad?’

  She had been going to leave it until later, but this might be as good a time as any. ‘My biological father,’ she says, ‘if you don’t mind. Dad means riding bikes and helping with your homework. Father is…’

  ‘I get it,’ Seb says. ‘Sperm. Sorry.’

  ‘That’s OK. Paper or screen?’ Ailsa loves how easy this is.

  ‘Paper, please. Nice big font size.’

  She opens her laptop, puts the printer on, opens the document, enlarges the text size, and sends it to print.

  She goes back into the kitchen and tries not to think about Seb, sitting in the next room reading the story of the beginning of her life.

  The lid goes on the dish, the dish goes into the oven and Ailsa sets the timer so she doesn’t forget the half-an-hour stir point. She washes up the knife and chopping board, and puts the thyme away in the cupboard; then there’s really nothing else to be done in the kitchen. Nothing for it but to go and see what Seb has to say.

  Deep breath. Four-four time heart.

  www.myblueblueheart.blogspot.co.uk

  (DRAFT – UNPUBLISHED)

  A Big Decision

  Advisory: swearing (you know I don’t generally swear) and the kind of behaviour that might make you spit teeth.

  I’m stuck on something and I need you to help me with it.

  I can’t ask you to make this decision cold. You need some backstory.

  It’s the story of how my parents met.

  My father lived in the flat below the one my mother stayed in with her mates when they left university and were finding their feet in the city, working their first jobs. My father lived on his own and worked in a bank; Mum, Tamsin and Una could set the clock by his coming and going. They laughed at him because he looked so boring and ordinary, the way they were determined not to be. But at the weekends he played Usher, loud, and he opened all the windows and he baked – not cooking, baking, cakes and biscuits and all sorts, and the three women upstairs would always be hungover from Friday night, and too disorganised to ever have done any shopping in the week. And there was this Saturday-morning smell of baking. My mother would lie in the bath, listening to the music coming up through the floor and smelling vanilla and chocolate. And one Saturday afternoon, when Tamsin and Una were away, Mum knocked on my father-to-be’s door and said, ‘If you’re going to bake with the windows open, then you need to share. It’s fucking torture otherwise.’

  And he said, ‘If you’re going to laugh like that until two a.m., then you need to tell your neighbours what the joke is. It’s fucking rude not to.’

  He was tall and skinny, with blue eyes and straight brown hair cut ‘like a schoolteacher’ (whatever that means) and my mother thought: I like you. And before you could say ‘Dundee cake’, they were a couple. He was nice. He seemed like an adult to her, and she still felt like a wain, even though she was working, and paying rent, and her friends were getting married. My grandma was still sending food parcels from Inverness, and my grandparents used to come down for weekends and help Mum rub down awful old bits of furniture she’d found in second-hand shops and repaint them, so she’d have something to go in the hypothetical flat she was saving a deposit for.

  When Mum introduced my father to her parents, he shook hands with them and they talked about house prices and she thought: I’ve grown up. This is real life.

  I asked Mum once if she had loved him and she thought for a long time and said, ‘I think so. It’s hard to tell now.’

  Over the next year she saved up half of a deposit on a flat, and my grandparents gave her the other half. She got a mortgage, and the only place she could afford to buy is now my home. Though it’s in a positively desirable spot these days, in the nineties it was the sort of place where you took your life in your hands every time you went out of the front door.

  My father helped her to do it up.

  And then my mum got pregnant.

  If they talked about abortion she hasn’t said so. They decided that she would move in with him, and they would finish doing up her place and rent it out. Mum thought – she laughs when she talks about this, but not in a funny way – she co
uldn’t have found anyone steadier.

  Foetus-me grew, and so did Mum, and my father cooked and generally took care of his pregnant girlfriend.

  They made a shortlist of names. If I’d been a boy, my father wanted Liam, but Mum thought he was joking and laughed herself stupid when he suggested it. She says it was the only time he was ever really offended. She wanted to call boy-me Hal. She wanted my name to be something no one could shorten. (People do try, with Ailsa, but it’s not very successful. ‘Ails’ is actually harder to say than ‘Ailsa’, because your mouth doesn’t want to stop at the s. Try it, you’ll see what I mean.)

  And then one day, out of nowhere, my father came home and said he’d been offered a promotion, his own bank branch to manage, but he’d need to move to Guildford. She said OK. It’s not like her life was going to much of a plan, and she thought she could raise me as well in Guildford as Edinburgh. But my father looked away and said he thought it was best that he went on his own. He spun her a line about needing to get settled, and sending for her, but she called him on it – according to her she said, ‘You’re not a pioneer, and I’m not a fucking army wife, so either I come with you or you have the balls to say you’ve changed your mind.’

  He said he’d changed his mind.

  And that was that.

  He went to Guildford.

  He’s never seen me, or asked after me, as far as I know. He has paid maintenance.

  When life was short, it was too short to care about people who couldn’t be bothered.

  Now that there’s a bit more room to breathe in this life of mine, I’ve got curious.

  I’m resigned to not knowing much about where Apple is from. The provenance of my heart is her own business: the people who agreed to give her to me did not expect to be tracked down.