Bone Deep

by Sandra Ireland

  ‘Of course. Being jealous turns you into a monster.’ She gives a humourless laugh. ‘He knows I suspect. He’s enjoying the intrigue.’

  My heart plummets to a new low. Is that me? Is that what I am – mere intrigue?’

  ‘I’m sure you’re mistaken.’ I must mean more to him than that.

  Jane shrugs. Her fine golden earrings shudder beneath her fine golden hair. ‘Now isn’t the time to talk about it.’ She stretches out her arms and the horrible yellow cardigan rides up to her elbows. ‘So I’ll go back home in the morning, look out some clean pants and deal with all the domestic crap; all the “life goes on” stuff. Lucie?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’m listening. You should take some time out, get some rest. I’ll go and see Reuben tomorrow.’

  ‘Thanks. Thanks for being here, Lucie.’

  I mirror her smile and avoid her eyes. I can’t afford to see my sister as that broken woman again.

  The day I do . . . that is the day I’ll have to let Reuben go.

  Lucie

  I am in a place of darkness.

  Literally.

  I mark the full stop in purple ink and close my notepad. It’s cold, and I’m beginning to regret my decision to come here, to the millpond, in the middle of the night. Jane went to bed, but I still wasn’t sleepy.

  Floss, surely an insomniac, turned up at the back door again and lured me out into the night with her whining and scratching. I was all set to be cross with her, but when I opened the door, the dog looked ready for a midnight ramble. I stepped out into the moonlight, and something came over me. I was entranced. It made me think of that Christmas poem, the one where the moon gives the lustre of midday to objects below. The wildness beyond the cottage was illuminated, a ghostly imitation of daytime. I had the world all to myself. I didn’t even pause to grab a torch, buoyed up with a strange sense of something burgeoning. I stuffed my bare feet into cold wellies and set off, pyjama legs flapping and robe tight-belted against the chill.

  The pond, blackberry-dark, glints juicily under the full moon. Something prickles in the undergrowth behind me, and bird-like creatures swoop low over the water. I’m pretty sure they’re bats. It occurs to me that the nocturnal world is just a mirror of the daylight one, but less complicated, with everything following its natural course. It is complete, and getting by just fine without me. I shiver and pull the neck of my robe tighter, horribly aware that I’m sitting on a bench in the dark in my pyjamas, writing poetry in a notepad I found in the kitchen drawer. Folk have been locked up for less.

  I’d set out with a sort of hopefulness – maybe I can get past this, be the sort of sister Jane thought I was. It’s okay to be alone. The sky won’t fall in. You just need to make sense of it all. Opening the book again, I ready my purple gel pen and look to the sky for inspiration.

  I see the pale underside of the moon;

  a faint seeding

  of stars.

  See . . . there’s a whole big universe out there. You can’t move on until you kick Reuben into touch. You know you have to. You can’t keep waiting for – what was it Jane had been waiting for? Circumstances to change? Only you can change them.

  The truth has been hooked. From the dark-berry waters of the pond the slippery fish has landed. You have to make a decision.

  I look up,

  but looking up exposes

  the soft parts of yourself.

  You started it. You’re to blame. You have to end it before the guilt destroys you.

  A bird sets up an agitated calling on the far bank, making me jump.

  End it . . . end it . . . end it . . .

  What sort of bird sings at night? One who can’t sleep. Fuck it, I shouldn’t be out here. I stuff the pad back into my pocket and get to my feet. Floss appears like magic, and as I bend to pat her head, a heavy splash startles me. The noise reverberates through my system, but when I spin towards it, there is nothing to be seen but the water spreading slowly in neat circles.

  What the hell was that? What size of fish would you need to make that kind of noise? Floss whines. I hold my breath and wait, all my senses straining. I’m never at my most comfortable near water, but the added dimension of something unknown lurking beneath the surface makes me want to run screaming for home. There’s nothing to see but faint circles in the water, the gentle slop against the bank. I search for a rational explanation. Maybe there are pike in there? You read about people netting monster pike all the time. I have an image in my head of some weird prehistoric-looking fish, lurking in the muddy deep.

  The moon slinks behind a cloud and everything is swallowed up. Only sparkles remain – glints and droplets and the paleness of leaves. My eyes are fixed on the spot where the thing disappeared. That splash, such a heavy weight . . . My vision blooms in the dark; my eyes grow wide. Out there, something surfaces. A glimmer of yellow. Something yellow, floating just beneath the surface. Then it sinks slowly out of sight.

  Not everyone can float.

  I run. I run all the way back to the cottage, skidding on mud, tripping over the thorny snakes of brambles, with Floss galloping at my heels. I have no idea what I’ve just seen in the pond – that heavy splash, the glimmer of yellow – but all I can think of is Jane and that stupid yellow cardigan. I run straight to her bedroom, crumple outside the door, my breath coming in short gasps and my heart thudding with terror. I know it’s not her. Didn’t I say goodnight to her just an hour ago? But I’m afraid to open the door. I am so afraid to see an absence of Jane, when for all these months I’ve been praying for just that. All those times I’ve wanted my sister to disappear off the scene . . . My head is filled with that yellow cardigan, imagining it saturated with pond water, weighing her down . . .

  I burst into the room.

  Jane is asleep, as I knew she would be, breathing deeply and evenly.

  Relief washes through me until I feel weak from it. I retreat silently and close her door.

  Mac

  April

  Other gifts arrive from the young Lord Musgrave: love tokens, lockets, even a pony, white as new milk. It is unusual for the younger sister to wed first, and Father pretends to be angry, perplexed and put out in equal measure. There are long discussions in secret between the two men, and much ale is consumed. Eventually the deal is struck, and a wedding date set. Elspeth has never been thwarted, after all.

  Bella can’t bear to be in her mother’s bower any more, as the talk turns to flowers and dresses and bairns. They even discuss the wedding night, making Bella turn crimson inside and out. She begins to dread that she will never know such a night, that no man will ever come to her father’s castle to seek her hand. Maybe she will die here, unloved, with just the old hound standing guard over her body. The hate seed burrows deep, and germinates.

  Love tokens. Doesn’t that conjure up something sweet and timeless and real? My fingers are stiff with cold. I put down my pen and tug the blanket more tightly round my shoulders. If I look like a bag lady, so be it. My circulation is shot to hell, all a result of this heart problem they cannot get to the bottom of. Love tokens. I press my palms against my ribcage, as if searching for the butterfly ghosts of some lost emotion, but all I can detect is a slight, tight burning sensation, the result of too much banana on my cornflakes.

  Jim once carved for me a love spoon out of apple wood. I think I can still remember the tickle of possibility deep inside, the belief in magic.

  A memory surfaces. An elderly spinster aunt, living alone here in Fettermore, in the house by the church, my mother packing me off at regular intervals. Make yourself useful. She has no one else. The house smells of broth and mushrooms, and the dust on her fine mahogany dining table is dappled with cat-prints. I wipe them off, make tea, volunteer to shop. From the cupboard under the stairs, the old dame drags a tartan shopping trolley, deep and wide. I notice cobwebs in the corners. It is a relic, the type of monstrosity that negates my whole self-image. My mini skirt, my cute beret, my whip-smart understanding of the nuclear
arms race and the ethical treatment of animals: my whole being droops like a pair of un-elasticated pants as I drag the relic along the village street. Folk stare at me from cottage windows. I am an incomer, a foreigner with a posh accent and a borrowed shopping trolley. I still remember that walk of shame.

  I lived for the times when my old aunt ran out of flour. It meant I could escape to the mill. Jim would be there, a young man just out of school, helping his father. He’d fill my measure with fresh, powdery flour and smile and voice mundane country thoughts that meant nothing to the young, urban me. Been a good growing season. His slow, blue-eyed smile. Looks like we’re in for a dreich day. I started to tell him about my life in Edinburgh. My visits to the mill became more frequent. I’d wait for him in the half-dark under the apple tree, imagining the taste of flour on his lips.

  The apple tree was the oldest one in the mill den. It would be even older now, if that ignorant gardener hadn’t chopped it down. Back in those days, people knew how to prune trees, and one day, in the month before I left for Cambridge, Jim presented me with a love-spoon, carved especially for me from one of the branches.

  It’s in the drawer somewhere. It must be. The need to find it is overwhelming. I push my chair back from the desk and get heavily to my feet, completing a 360-degree spin around the room. I feel disoriented, as if the stacks of books are bearing down on me. I bend double, hugging my laboured breathing close to me. The love token. I must find it. You kept it. You did. Every bitter bone in my body laughs off the notion. Memory chimes in with a snigger. You snapped it over your knee. You fed it into the Aga.

  I stumble back to my chair, wilt beneath the blanket. The breeze of my motion has disturbed the pages in my notebook. The weight of ink anchors the written pages, but the blank ones flutter like wings. I have so few blank pages left.

  Fear goads me into motion again. I am a whirlwind, popping open cupboard doors, shuffling the things on my desk. I haul open the top drawer, scan it for clues. There is the carpenter’s pencil, the one Lucie used to pen a love note to a man who could never be hers. Anger unfurls in me like a sail, driving me on. I drag out the drawer, dump its contents on the tired carpet: old receipt books, recipes scribbled on envelopes, spent batteries, pencil shavings. There in the back corner lies the thing I hadn’t known I was looking for. Another love token. A sapphire pendant on a gold chain. I begin to laugh.

  Seizing the blue stone, I cup the cold weight of it in my palm, remembering the story of it. In the light from the desk lamp the blue stone sparkles and my eyes nip as if I’ve stared too long at the sun on the sea. I recall finding it, maybe twenty years ago. It’s a story as old as the hills: misty-eyed heroine discovers the receipt (the cost of it! And from that jeweller!), then creeps away, confident of a gorgeous, glittery surprise on Christmas morning. Only the surprise never comes, and you know full well that she’s going to be opening a set of non-stick pans while her heart breaks. One of life’s oldest clichés.

  I let myself sink back to that time. Had I smelled her perfume on him? No. There had been no clues, no indicators, other than that Christmas gift, the one that was never intended for me. There had been nothing leading up to that to soften the blow.

  Back to the present and I’m kneeling on the carpet, my insides heaving and the necklace still clutched in my fist. Tears drip between my fingers. When I can bear my own grief no longer I howl and hurl the thing at the wall. The sparkling stone hits the plaster with a hard click, and the too-silent aftermath echoes round the room. My head spins like a broken wheel. Sagging there on the carpet, I don’t know if I feel better or worse.

  The urge to destroy is monstrous.

  I leave my study, my books, my blanket and my warmth. I don’t care what time it is. I have the mill key in one hand, the pendant in the other. Smashing it against the wall has damaged the precious stone not one jot. I have to get rid of this. Life is so fragile. Every night I torment myself with the thought that I might not wake in the morning. There are loose ends I cannot leave behind.

  There’s frost in the air. My breath goes before me in the dark. I can hear the soft hoot of an owl, the steady white-noise whoosh of the lade, skimming through man-made channels.

  Once inside, the mill settles all around me, chill and clammy. My footsteps echo and my pulse takes on a new, unsettled rhythm. My hand scrabbles pathetically over the electrics, as if the flick of a switch can banish all things malignant, the dark presences that linger here. Beyond the civilised circle of light.

  I make my way to the water lever. The heft of it in my hands, the smooth, shaped oak, used to give me a kind of comfort. It was timeless, this action of diverting the water, of setting the ancient wheel in motion.

  The first time Jim showed me how to operate it, I felt giddy with power, with the notion of all that water under my command. Even now, I feel an elemental thrill as, outside, the water noise changes and the wheel loosens and begins to turn. Inside, the machinery creeps into life.

  I stand back, let things get up to speed. The initial grinding gives way to a busy clack as the sieves and chutes find their rhythm. In the far corner the millstones come to life. A gunpowder smell fills the air and sparks fizz in the gloom. The stones are running on empty. I hurry to the hopper. Some grain still remains, but it’s sticky and damp. I poke it with a stick and some of it dislodges, trickles into the eye of the stones, and they begin to grind greedily.

  I allow myself a little smile and extract the pendant from my pocket, pick off bits of fluff and dog biscuit. I hold it up briefly by the chain and watch it spin. There’s an old wives’ tale, that if you hold a pendulum such as this over a pregnant woman’s belly it can tell you the sex of the child. Jim tried that with me, when Arthur was on the way. He tried it with a bent nail and some miller’s twine, but we didn’t quite know what to expect and the experiment ended in laughter and a lot of ribbing. ‘What will it be, do you think?’ I’d whispered excitedly in the dark and Jim had kissed me softly and joked, ‘A miller!’

  The pendant swirls, faster, faster, round and round. What is it trying to tell me? With a shudder I creep nearer to the stones and toss the thing into the centre. There’s a bump and a crunch. The millstones grind to an imperfect halt, hesitating, grunting like a great beast tasting something new. Seemingly satisfied, they pick up speed again, juddering, but inexorable.

  Lucie

  I wake late after yet another terrible sleep. Reuben has been discharged from hospital and Jane has whisked him back up north. I’m tormented by the things I don’t know. Are they getting on? Has Reuben changed since the accident? Is he taking his pain meds? He would never even take a paracetamol before.

  Floss pitched up yet again, as if she can sense my troubled thoughts, when I was taking a sly midnight puff under the pergola. It’s chucking-out time, I told her, not visiting time. And anyway, I’m not going midnight walkies, not again. I’d been too weary to protest when she followed me through to the bedroom. She leapt lightly onto the duvet as soon as I snuggled down, turning around three times before settling herself into a snug ball. Three times, like a spell of protection.

  That unmistakeable noise, that deep unearthly rumble, had shaken us awake just an hour or so later. I’d known instantly it was the mill wheel, but as I’d stumbled over to the window, the black gap between the curtains warned me that it was out of time and out of context. Not natural, and the not-natural made my mouth go dry. Floss was awake by then, sitting up, ears cocked. I’d grabbed my coat and a torch and taken a deep breath.

  There’d been a late-night frost. The outside was monochrome; white ice dusting the black twigs, the black stones. The rumbling so deep I could feel it in my bones. The mill door was open. Standing in the shadows, I could see the mellow gold of its insides bleeding out onto the white ground. And there was Mac, standing in a pool of light, just inside the door. She was holding up her hands, like the wicked spellcaster in a pantomime. Holding up her hands, and they were glittering with otherworldly frost, stained with
something I didn’t understand. Ghost blood. My brain was making pictures that weren’t there. Ghost blood.

  As I watched, in my confused, dreamlike state, Mac wandered off, back to her house. And I went into the mill. I hadn’t meant to, but she’d left the door open. I should have locked up and returned the key, but instead I found myself standing on the threshold, in the gloom, letting my gaze wander over the rough surface of the walls, the complicated ups and downs of the machinery. I crept in deeper, shivering in the incredible chill. It was as if the frost had got into the walls. Playing my torch beam over the old timbers by the millstones, I spotted a snail trail of silvery lines. Some kind of list: 4 firlots, 2 pecks of barley, a quarter pound of nails. A primitive pencil drawing: a flower, pansy petals, stalky leaves, scribbled on the wood. And beside it, a name. I peered closer. The inscription was faint silver, but the name was unmistakeable: Bella.

  The mill den is the sisters’ favourite haunt. The burn, brown as a tarnished coin, runs through the bottom of it, and the trees bow down in prayer towards the water. Some of the trunks are as broad as ponies’ backs and the girls like to lean their spines against them and look up into the canopy of leaves and the fragments of sky beyond. Some days the sky is grey as stone; sometimes blue, like a bird’s egg, and the hawks, black as letters, scrawl across it. Bella imagines her name etched forever on the sky.

  They pick wildflowers in the den, or weeds, not knowing how to tell the difference, and slither down to the water’s edge to toss pebbles. Their hound, Faithful, dives into the shallows and the water breaks around him as if you’d thrown in a handful of diamonds. Elspeth always pleads to be allowed to swim in the millpond, but it’s very deep, and Bella is afraid to let her, in case anything bad happens.

  I’m sitting at the table with Mac’s notebook when a heavy knock on the back door pulls me back to the present, to the safe cottage kitchen. With a start I realise it’s after ten in the morning, and I’m still in my pyjamas. Floss, who’s been hiding under the table, gives a high-pitched warning bark. The poor dog is thoroughly freaked out. I bend down and rub her silky ears, then I open the door a crack, still smoothing down my bed hair.