The Race

by Nina Allan

  When we have sex I feel as if we’re doing it in front of a camera. I watch myself through the days, growing away from Maud, separating myself from her inside my mind and wondering if this is happening because I know we must part or if it would have happened – was already happening – anyway.

  I know a chapter of my own life is ending, but I can’t get away from the idea that this summer is more important for Maud than it is for me.

  Perhaps I’m mistaken. Perhaps these days that I am throwing away will turn out to have been the best days of my life.

  ~*~

  A week before I am due to leave I walk into Asterwych on my own and visit the tattoo parlour. When the tat guy asks me what I want, I tell him I want him to make a tattoo of the design that Maud hennaed on to my wrist the day before. The design, like three twisted grass stalks, is still crisp and clear.

  “That’ll be fifty shea. All right?”

  It is more than I was expecting but I say yes anyway. The tat guy wipes disinfectant over my arm with a cotton wool pad then goes to work. I lie still in the upright leather chair, listening to the whining buzz of the tat gun and feeling the curious burn-prick-burn of the needle thudding in and out of my flesh on its chrome-steel ratchet. It hurts but not too much – I have established that I can bear the pain, and I know it won’t get any worse. I can relax and almost enjoy the sensation, like the first time I had sex with Wolfe when I was fourteen.

  When it is over I feel a brief flash of regret at what I have done, mostly because I know how pleased Maud will be when she sees the tattoo. She’ll see it as a sign, that I am binding myself to her forever.

  Still, it’s too late now.

  “All right?” says the tat guy. “Not feeling woozy?” He uses a clean white rag to wipe off the blood then turns my wrist first to one side and then to the other, checking his work the same way a metal welder might check a mended section of copper piping. He claps a gauze dressing to my wrist and secures it with sticking plaster.

  “You should keep that on for twenty-four hours,” he says. “It’ll be fine after that.”

  I pay him the fifty shea and then leave, walking along the High Street towards the narrow brick pathway that leads up to the Croft. Will I come into Asterwych again before next week I wonder?

  I doubt it. This feels like goodbye.

  ~*~

  Maud and I shared a bedroom from the beginning. The first thing she said to me was to ask me when my birthday was.

  I couldn’t remember, so Maud said I could share hers and Kay said okay. The boys – Caine and Wolfe and Garland – were all older than me when they were chosen for the programme and they could remember their own birthdays. Sarah was born in Asyerwych. Her birthday was the fourteenth of April. She was brought to the Croft to live when she was two weeks old.

  For a while I believed that Kay was my mother as well as Maud’s. I carried on thinking of her that way long after I was told the truth, but lately I’ve noticed that my feelings for her are beginning to drain away. Tomorrow, Kay will travel with me to Faslane. At Faslane I will go aboard the Aurelia Claydon, the steamship that will carry me across the Atlantic to Bonita, which is a port city in Thalia. The programme’s main research unit is based at Kontessa, a city on the plain at about an hour’s remove from Bonita. Sarah and Caine and Garland are already there. Wolfe would be travelling with me, if he were still alive.

  If Kay could have got me on board a hopper flight she would have done, but there were no subsidized places available, so I must go by sea. A sea voyage is always dangerous, because of the whale convoys, but for the moment at least the danger seems remote to me and therefore not real. It is Kay who appears anxious, and I remember she was the one who taught us about the Atlantic whales in the first place, years ago in morning study. She made us copy a chart into our exercise books, showing how many ships had been lost to whale convoys in the last twenty years.

  When I tell Maud I shall be travelling to Thalia by steamship instead of by hopper all the colour drains from her face, and I know she is thinking about the Gisela Stuart, the Medway, the Faslane Princess, the TV images of shattered wreckage and bloated bodies washing up on the beaches at Jonestown three weeks later.

  “It’ll be fine,” I say. I brazen it out like I did with Kay only less sincerely.

  ~*~

  Maud wants to travel to Faslane with us but Kay won’t let her.

  “It’s a pointless waste of the train fare,” she says. “You have to say goodbye at some point, you know that. Don’t make things difficult.”

  Kay is tense and Maud is angry. Her eagle’s-beak nose, so like Kay’s, juts like a crag.

  “It would be awful anyway,” I say to her. “With Kay there, I mean.”

  We say goodbye on Wych Hill instead. Maud sets her alarm clock for four o’clock and places it under her pillow so it won’t wake the rest of the house when it goes off. We pull on our windcheaters and sneak down the back stairs. There is thick dew on the ground, and by the time we reach the summit our trainers are soaked. We sit side by side on the damp grass and watch the sun rise over Asterwych. The light is greenly translucent, like sea-washed glass. I feel a hard pain inside my chest, as if a stone were lodged beneath my breastbone. The ends of Maud’s hair trail in the grass. After a while she reaches out and takes hold of my hand. I know I’ll cry if I look at her, so I don’t.

  When we arrive back at the Croft it is still only six-thirty. No one even knows we’ve been gone.

  “When the car gets here, don’t come down,” I say to Maud. I don’t want her making a scene. Now that the time is almost upon me I just want to go. “Start writing me a letter instead.”

  She is already crying a little. I put my arms around her and hug her, smelling her smell, the stringy green reek of her armpits, the cloaky scent of her hair where the wind has tangled it together into damp knots. I kiss her on both eyelids and then I let her go. I ache for Maud, even though she is standing right here in front of me, even though I know there is no point in aching for Maud now, ever, because I will probably never see her again after this next hour.

  I am glad Kay wouldn’t let her come on the train with us. I think of Maud’s pond-weed pubes and freckled thighs, and I want to weep out loud.

  Kay has ordered a car for us. The car will carry us to Inverness, for the through-train to Glenver. The car crunches on the gravel, creeping forward towards the gates like a large black beetle. Kay opens the hatch at the back to put in my suitcase and then we get in. The vehicle’s interior smells of old leather and dogs. The car reverses in front of the house and then drives away. I see the shadow of the Croft, sliding off the bonnet like a loose grey blanket. I feel empty, as if I were already gone from here and this is just a memory, as perhaps it is.

  ~*~

  The journey lasts eight hours in all. The further south we travel the flatter the landscape becomes: sparse heath cover and scrub-edged reservoirs, strange, stony little villages whose granite cottages clamour eagerly around a steel-framed pump house. Here and there I glimpse factories, and once an old fracking station, rusting derricks rearing from the ground like the beached carcass of an Atlantic whale.

  The northern lowlands are all potato plantations and chicken hatcheries, nothing to look at for miles and miles. As the evening draws close I find I can see the lights of Glenver on the horizon. I know I shall not see anything of the town, because a room has been prepared for me at one of the travellers’ hotels along the harbour front. Kay will take me as far as the hotel then catch the return train. By the time she gets back to Asterwych it will be after midnight. I stare at her as the train draws alongside the station platform at Glenver, the long straight back and jutting nose, Maud’s features, only more refined and less telling. In a little under an hour we will be parting forever.

  All these years, and I feel nothing at all. What is wrong with me?

  ~*~

  The hotel is square and grey as a barracks, and when Kay tells me it used to be a submarine bas
e I am not surprised. The solar panels that make up the roof cladding gleam silver as the last of the evening sunlight passes across them.

  Kay accompanies me to the reception desk. She seems nervous, unsure of herself in these unfamiliar surroundings. I have never seen her like this before and I wish she would leave. She stands awkwardly in front of me and I can tell she is waiting for me to hug her, or to say something meaningful and earnest, but I do neither.

  This is the only chance I have to punish her and I take it.

  When I ask myself what I am punishing her for, I don’t have a proper answer. There is just the sense that it feels necessary, and that Kay herself will know the reason better than I do.

  Instead of hugging her, I shake her by the hand.

  “Goodbye then,” I say. I turn back towards the reception desk. The man on duty gives me a form to fill in. Once I have done that I will be free to go to my room.

  “You will write to us?” Kay says. I pretend not to hear. I know it will be all right, that once she is on the train Kay will persuade herself that I behaved spitefully because of her refusal to let Maud travel with us. Later, before it is dark, I take a walk along the quayside to one of the souvenir kiosks, where I buy some postcards. On the back of one of them I write a short message – ‘sorry, but I was upset – you are a saint’. I write in Gaelic, which is Kay’s native language. The front of the card carries an image of the harbour front, together with a simplified map of the Faslane estuary. If I post the card this evening, Kay will most likely receive it the day after tomorrow.

  By then I shall be at sea, and this moment will already be ancient history.

  ~*~

  There is a dog at the hotel, a mongrel with green-gold eyes and yellow hair. She’s not a smartdog but she’s still very bright. She has a collar around her neck, and a silver identity disc engraved with the name ‘Rosie’.

  She sits beside me on the front steps of the hotel. People think that what we do with the smartdogs is some kind of magic, but it’s not at all. It’s more like listening than actual speaking, catching the shape and drift of the dog’s thoughts as you might listen to and make sense of a new piece of music. Dogs can understand some spoken language because we teach it to them, but they don’t comprehend speech in the same way that people do. For us, words are objects as well as sounds, a physical arrangement of letters on a printed page. Dogs have no written language, and so for them a word is just a sound with learned associations attached. When a familiar word is spoken with a new intonation, a dog will hear it as a different word entirely.

  Try to imagine a word as picture and sound only, cutting out all associations with the written alphabet. Let the image it conveys expand inside you, let the sound of it fill up your mind. If you can free yourself, however briefly, from the idea of letters, then you will have taken a step towards understanding what we do.

  Rosie doesn’t speak to me because she doesn’t need to. She is happy just to sit and watch the road, her long jaw slack, her mind drifting in slow circles like sun-shot cloud. I caress her narrow head. She leans against my knees, panting a little. It is a warm evening, hazy with midges, stewed purple as plums. I find myself thinking of Lim, who wanted so very much to understand letters, who was always so sad when I told him that the way a word looked written down wasn’t important. I have not thought of Lim in a while, but the memory – which is somehow both vague and distinct – fills me with confusion and a sense of longing as it always does. Rosie registers my shift of emotions almost at once. She lifts her head towards me and whines.

  I laugh and give her a hug. “It’s all right, my girl,” I say. It is not my laugh that reassures her, but my touch and the feelings of rightness that come with it. Her tail beats gently back and forth on the concrete step, stirring up dust.

  ~*~

  My room is on the third floor. There is an iron-framed bed against one wall, a small Formica-topped desk beneath the window. Both desk and bed are bolted to the floor. There is a spotlight screwed into the window frame, and the light can be twisted one way to light the bed, the other way to light the desk, an arrangement that seems as economical to me as everything else in the room. There is an open rail for hanging clothes. I cannot imagine that the room has changed much since it was the land quarters of a working submariner and that suits me fine. If I sit still on the bed I can hear other people, passing along the corridor outside or climbing the stairs to the next level or watching TV in their rooms. Their nearness is reassuring, and I realise suddenly that this is the first time I have been alone in a room knowing that no one will enter unless I invite them. I find I’m not sure what this means to me. My nerves simmer, feeling exposed, like earthworms twisting on streaming asphalt after a rainstorm. I don’t want to unpack my suitcase because there’s no point, I will be leaving here first thing in the morning.

  I decide to undress instead. I take off my sneakers and jeans and vest and pull my nightshirt on over my head. One of the buttons catches briefly in my hair, which is yellow as rapeseed and coarse as an overgrown thornbush. I wear it cut short, because that’s the only way of keeping it under control.

  Sarah once told me that soon after my arrival at the Croft all my hair fell out.

  “It was straight before, can you believe that?” she said. I’m not sure that I can.

  I am slightly knock-kneed, flat-chested as a boy. My name is Maree. I am registered with the surname Forrest, the same as Kay’s. When I asked Kay what I was called before she said she didn’t know.

  I am tired from the day. Not tired enough to sleep yet, but it feels good to lie down on the bed and close my eyes. I ask myself if I am afraid, and think probably not. People are only frightened when they have something to lose.

  I don’t know what is waiting, and that excites me.

  ~*~

  Finally, I am on board. My cabin, with its built-in bunk and pull-down writing desk, is not so different from my room at the hotel. When I unpack my suitcase I find the clothes I have brought fit easily into the twin storage boxes under my bunk. There is a smell of varnish and clean bed linen. The shared toilet facilities are at the end of the companionway.

  The Aurelia Claydon is mainly a cargo vessel. I don’t know what she is carrying exactly, though I have heard it might be food or building materials, and one of the other foot passengers, a tall, strident-voiced woman named Dodie Taborow, insists it is horses. Most people on the ship are crew. The space for passengers is limited. Also there is not much call for civilian traffic between Crimond and Thalia, even now that the war has been over for fifty years.

  She is not a graceful ship. She has the twin red funnels and tubby white sides of an overgrown bath toy. On her port side and just below the gangway her hull has been patched. This means the ship has recently been in collision with something or else has been fired on. Neither possibility is reassuring.

  She sits snugly in the water, waiting to leave. We gather in the saloon, a long, low-ceilinged lounge where our meals will be served and that also doubles as a passenger meeting area and recreation room. The Chief Steward’s name is Djibril. He explains to us the fire regulations and also the lifeboat drill. Afterwards he takes us on a tour of the ship, telling us which parts we are allowed to enter and which are off limits.

  He seems very young to be so responsible, not much older than me. Like most of the male crew members he wears his hair long, secured at the nape of his neck with a piece of black cord. By contrast the three women working the engine room have their hair cut short. It is hot below decks. The Chief Engineer, Juuli Moyse, has her hair shaved so close to her skull that I can see globules of sweat glinting on her scalp like beads of glass. Juuli Moyse has a stern expression but I like her immediately. All her movements are sure and calm, as if the Aurelia Claydon were a nervous beast in need of gentle handling. I admire her confidence, the efficiency of her movements as her hands pass over the coils and ridges of the ship’s inner workings. I would swear she knows if all is well with the ship or not si
mply by touch.

  Juuli Moyse lives and breathes the ship and in some strange way she is as much a physical part of it as the steam shaft or the rudder control. I smile at her, and as my reward I see her mouth curve upwards slightly at one corner.

  After the engine room, Djibril takes us to see the galley, the stewards’ deck, the passenger sun deck, and the navigation room. The navigation room contains the charts database and the radio, which is fixed in a dura-cell housing to prevent electrical short-outs and also water damage. Off the navigation room is the switch room, with the control panel for the ship’s four great searchlights. Once we are in the Atlantic, the lights will be left on all night. Djibril explains that the fore and aft searchlights can penetrate the water to a depth of fifty metres. Officially, the searchlights are a protection against collision with other shipping. We all know what they are really for, though it’s seen as bad luck to mention it.

  Apparently Atlantic whales, whose natural habitat is deep water, dislike bright sunlight. The searchlights are meant to discourage them. Whether this actually works is a matter of debate.

  ~*~

  There are about a dozen foot passengers in all. My first instinct is to hold myself aloof from them. There seems little point in becoming close to anyone when I know that once the voyage is over I won’t see them again. Some of them will be gone even sooner – Dodie Taborow has already informed everyone that she will be leaving the ship at Brock Island, and several of the other passengers will be disembarking early also.

  And yet, I feel a huge curiosity about them. The Croft was like a family, but we were always discouraged from forming friendships outside the programme. Most of what I know about the world comes from books. The idea of getting to know some other people is exciting and strange. I am used to being in crowds because of our trips into Asterwych, but when it comes to starting a conversation with a stranger I still feel shy. I know so little about anything, other than my work in the programme. I’m afraid of seeming stupid or naive. When I remind myself that everyone on board the ship is a stranger to all of the rest of us I find this makes me feel more confident.