by RL McKinney
‘Don’t ever think you’re above it, young lady.’
She groaned. ‘God, Mum.’
‘I could ask in the office if they could take you on part-time in reception for a few weeks. It’d be good experience for you, and I’m sure we’d both appreciate some extra income.’ She paused and waited for Cat to respond. ‘Cat … ’
‘Do we have to do this again? I just want to relax for a few days.’
‘Yesterday you watched television, all day as far as I could tell. It’s no wonder you’ve put on weight.’
Jenny was always on about her weight. The little sniping remarks, never calling her fat outright but suggesting it. You’ve got that from him too, she would say: another hotspot of regret and resentment. Catriona thought about letting the weight pile on. She thought about forcing her body to ooze and swell until she became repulsive in the eyes of men. Until she was too big to fit through the door, until she was so massive her legs couldn’t hold her up and her neck subsided into her chest. Then she could slip down into the great soft fortress of her own flesh and hide inside forever. Her parents could rage and blame, Kyle could try to carry her away, her friends could pester her to come out, her lecturers could prattle on about ideas of no consequence, and none of them could touch her. She could never be moved by another human hand.
She sat up and stared past her mother toward the wall that she had painted powder-pink when they moved into this house. She was thirteen then, girly, aspiring to prettiness.
‘I think I’ll decorate my room.’
‘Get a job and pay for it yourself.’
‘It’s only a bit of paint, Mum.’
Jenny rubbed the lines on her forehead, as if to remind Catriona that they were her fault. Another thing on a long list. ‘Catriona … I have supported you on my own your whole life. Maybe you could think about helping me for once.’
‘Dad helps.’
‘Your father is as helpful as a chocolate fireguard.’
‘He gave us money. He still does.’
Jenny’s voice climbed. ‘If you think raising a child is all about money, you’ve got a hell of a lot of growing up still to do.’
‘You could have let him come back when he wanted to.’
‘And so could you, but we didn’t, and that’s that.’ Jenny sighed. ‘Will you at least make an effort? Pop down to town and ask in a few shops.’
Catriona lay down again. ‘I feel a bit sick.’
‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’
‘No! I’m not bloody pregnant.’ But her stomach turned over. She easily might have been.
‘Well in that case, whatever you’re feeling sorry for yourself about won’t be helped by lying in bed for days. Get up.’
Catriona turned over, curled her back toward Jenny. ‘Whatever. See you later, Mum.’
Jenny said nothing else, and Catriona lay still until she heard her leave the house. Then she went to the bathroom, knelt in front of the toilet, waited for the sickness to consolidate and rise into her throat. When it didn’t come on its own, she put her middle finger down the back of her tongue and made herself gag. Clutching the rim, she heaved brownish liquid into the bowl. There was nothing inside her, nothing to bring up, nothing to flush out, but still she felt like someone had sprayed her with raw sewage. Her skin was saturated with it. When she got undressed she could smell something rotten, like a dead animal on the beach.
She showered, lathered and scrubbed herself until she was red and irritated, then dressed and went downstairs, made tea and sat at the table. The morning sun coming through the kitchen window warmed her face. It was tempting to sit out in the garden, but the fence wasn’t high enough. People passing on the back street could see her. Kyle could see her. She’d never given him her address in Aberdeen but he was clever enough to sniff her out. He hadn’t phoned for a couple of days. That should have brought some kind of relief, but it didn’t. When he left three or four voicemails a day, at least she could keep tabs on him. Silence was worse. He could be watching her right now. Her stomach contracted again and she pulled down the blind.
Her mum would go mad if she stayed indoors another day. Then there would be a performance, with tears and guilt and the same old single mother script, and Cat would finally have to tell her what had happened at that big house in the woods, and she couldn’t bear to think about that.
Maybe she could go away for the summer, find a job in a hotel somewhere quiet and clean, where they would give her a room and meals and pay her minimum wage. There were worse jobs than changing other people’s sheets. She thought about her dad, whom she hadn’t seen since that Christmas five years ago when she’d said so many awful things. She could go stay with him, away out on the west coast, miles from anywhere. He might be so grateful to see her that he’d let her stay with him and not harass her to get a job. Either that, or he’d tell her to get lost and slam the door in her face.
INSIDE THE WALLS
The calls came every day near teatime: several seconds of silence and then a voice. Not quite a human voice, maybe some kind of robot or computer. You have been identified through a government database, it said. And then something about her boiler and her walls. Mary didn’t understand. They wanted to get inside her walls.
‘Hello,’ she said, but the machine was unresponsive. ‘Hello? Can anyone hear me?’ She pressed buttons but the machine spoke over her.
She hung up. They would call back the next day, and the next.
Maybe they were watching her. They were trying to get in, trying to get inside her walls. They’d install tiny cameras. She imagined an enormous room filled with thousands of screens. She’d never read Nineteen Eighty-Four until Finn became obsessed with it, and when she did it unsettled her terribly and gave her nightmares. The vision was so bleak it could never be possible, but now it was starting to seem probable. Orwell had been right all along, just ten years too early with his predictions.
Ten? It was more than that. Why had she thought ten? It must be fifteen now, or more. What year was it? The millennium had passed some time ago. Of course it had; there had been a ceilidh, and then those lads had nearly started a riot with their fireworks. Feral thugs. Most boys were brutes now: uncontrolled, selfish, vicious creatures. They ran in packs like dogs, they didn’t work, they knew nothing about work, they knew nothing about the land. Their hands were soft. They took drugs. They had nearly killed her Finlay with their drugs.
When she turned on the television, the news talked about Scotland more than it normally did. There were people on the streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and people with banners and people arguing. These same feral boys and girls, waving flags and shouting and talking about independence for Scotland. It had to be some kind of trouble. These kinds of things could lead to a war.
She and Jack had marched for peace. They had marched for solidarity, not division. He wouldn’t have liked this business. These young people didn’t know what they were asking for.
They didn’t know they were being watched. Those calls, those voices on the telephone, they were all part of it. Computers trying to get inside the walls.
She left the flat and walked down to the precinct. It was full of old people pulling their messages behind them in tartan trolleys, peering in the windows of vacant shops. They didn’t know. Nobody told them anything because they were old. They’d be the first to starve when the young people went away to fight.
There was Jean Crawford going into Boots. Beside the door there was a man with a blue badge that said Yes on it. He was handing out leaflets. He was trying to speak to Jean.
‘Don’t speak to him, Jean,’ she puffed, out of breath from hurrying to reach them. ‘He’s one of them.’ She said it in Gaelic so the man couldn’t understand. ‘Don’t tell them where you live or write anything on that paper. Don’t give them any information.’
Jean and the man looked at her with matching blank expressions. They looked like they’d taken some drug.
‘Mary, dear.’ Jean p
laced her hand on Mary’s arm. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand Gaelic. And neither does this young gentleman.’
The young man with the leaflets laughed. ‘More’s the pity. It’ll be different when we become independent. We won’t have to be ashamed of it anymore.’
Mary switched back to English. ‘Jean, these people are troublemakers.’
‘I seem to recall a time when you were a bit of a troublemaker yourself, Mary. You and that man of yours, God rest his soul. He’d have appreciated this campaign.’
‘I know what my Jack would have thought,’ Mary said. What did Jean know about her Jack? What had she told this man? She turned on him. ‘I know what you’re trying to do. You won’t get into my house. I won’t have you spying on me.’
He opened his mouth but she turned away sharply to cut him off and hurried in the other direction. She had wanted to go into Boots but couldn’t remember what she needed. It would come back to her once that dreadful man had gone.
‘Oh, poor Mary,’ she heard Jean say to him. ‘Such a shame to see them go that way.’
Poor Mary indeed, she thought. There’s nothing poor about me. I still have ears. I hear you. I know what’s going on.
PUSSY CAT
Catriona woke in the wee hours. She lay under the duvet with her phone and surveyed Kyle’s activities on Facebook. He had been to Croatia with his parents: pictures of a yellow villa, turquoise water, brown skin. Bare-chested selfies beside a skinny bitch in a bikini. Perfect white teeth. Rich people could buy perfection. Something alien surged through her, as if someone had injected her with poison. The phone pinged in her hand and a message popped up: I know you’re logged on, Sneaky Cat. Come on, enough of the silent treatment. Go and answer your phone, eh?
‘Fucking bastard,’ she said aloud. Then she switched off the phone, pried off the back and pulled out the SIM. She chucked the phone onto the pile of clothes on the floor on the other side of the room and lay back, breathing hard. Blood thrummed so loud in her head it was all she could hear.
In the space of two months, Kyle had taken over every aspect of her life. He lived with such urgency, consuming everything around him with a voracious appetite – books, politics, coffee, women, alcohol – that you’d think he was trying to squeeze a lifetime into a few weeks. The referendum debate fuelled him with the kind of enthusiasm that you couldn’t argue with, even if you wanted to. Even his smell was intoxicating. Catriona thought back to the night they met, in that club down the Cowgate. She should have known then that he was too good to be true. She had known, but she’d let herself be sucked in anyway.
Edinburgh, April 2014
‘You look far too interesting for a place like this.’
Catriona took a sip of beer and looked up at the boy. He was tall, lithe, admirably cheekboned. The inflections in his voice suggested he’d grown up surrounded by money and confidence, but it could be put on. Pretty much everyone at Edinburgh University was putting on some kind of act. It was hard to imagine that he’d be interested in her for any other reason than the fact that she was easy prey, sitting on her own. Still, a little blue badge on the breast of his black shirt said Yes, and a quick glance at his feet revealed a pair of Dr Martens Chelsea boots. In politics and footwear, at least, they had something in common. He might merit speaking to.
‘I can’t be bothered with it,’ she said. ‘My pal dragged me here and now she’s bagged off with some guy.’ The club was thronging with girls in negligible dresses and monumental heels. Chart anthems thudded out of the speakers. It was Avicii at the moment: ‘Hey Brother’. A decent song the first two hundred times you heard it. Emily and Todd were practically giving each other hand jobs on the dance floor. ‘I’m about to ditch them.’
‘If I buy you a drink will you stay?’
‘Maybe.’ She held up her bottle. ‘Same again, if you’re offering.’
‘I’m offering.’ He held out his hand. ‘I’m Kyle.’
‘Cat.’
‘As in Stray Cat or Wild Cat? Or … Pussy Cat?’
She laughed. ‘I don’t know you well enough to tell you that.’
His lip curled into a smile and his eyes narrowed. ‘I’ll be right back.’
She watched him go to the bar. Jostling bodies parted to let him through and he got served almost immediately: a trick she still hadn’t mastered. Being over six feet tall and male would help. Cat sometimes had to resort to hanging her tits over the bar to get served, but she wasn’t tall enough to do it comfortably and so she felt like a wee girl playing at being an adult. She didn’t understand the attraction of clubs like this, where sex and violence were so close to the surface you could practically taste their associated bodily fluids. Last weekend she had punched a guy who had groped her arse and Emily told her off for it. Emily said she should have been flattered. Flattered. Honestly?
Take off your combat boots for once, Cat. Just be a girl for Christ’s sake.
Kyle drifted back over with two bottles of lager and slid into the booth beside her. ‘That was cheeky of me, wasn’t it? Pussy Cat? If someone hit me up with a line like that, I’d think he was a dick. I bet you’ve heard them all before, anyway.’
‘Once or twice, but I’ll forgive you.’ She accepted a bottle and clinked it against his. ‘Thank you.’
‘No, thank you for giving me hope that tonight might be salvageable. The people in this place are so unbelievably dull. And listen … listen to that … they’re playing One Direction. It doesn’t get any worse. Manufactured English pop for babies. It’s not music, it’s capitalist neuro-programming, designed to brainwash any individuality right out of you. It’s like saying, “I have no identity. I am incapable of having a single thought of my own. I am a drone.” Please tell me you don’t like this, Cat.’ He grabbed her hand and his eyes pleaded with her, pupils huge in the dim light. ‘Please give me hope for our generation.’
‘Oh my God, for once somebody here has said something sensible!’ He was still holding onto her hand, squeezing it hard like he was afraid of letting go. ‘The bar just down from our flat has an open mic on a Friday night. They get some great songwriters in there, performance poets, people doing things that are original and political. I wanted to go there, but apparently I’m like … a freak or something.’
‘I’d go,’ he said. ‘I’d go there any night of the week. When we get independence, the first thing I hope we do is ban the BBC. It’s just a mouthpiece for the Tories and the Royal Family. Have you ever noticed how they force feed us this disgusting, fawning idea of Britishness and we’re all supposed to be so cosy and unified, watching Strictly Come Dancing and Comic Relief and the Last Night of the Proms … and we’re all meant to say aw, look at us, all happy together on our wee island? One big happy family. It makes me want to puke.’
Cat’s head moved up and down emphatically. Even drunk, he managed to articulate the things she could never quite string together coherently. She felt she could devour his words.
‘My dad, right? My dad’s a musician. He’s like … the best musician you’ve ever heard, he can play any instrument with strings on it, I’m not kidding. He comes from the west coast, and he’s like … he should be famous. But he’s not, because he plays Scottish music and the music industry isn’t interested. It doesn’t value anything that comes from Scotland. He could never even make a living from it. He had to go and work on the rigs, and in America and stuff, so I hardly even got to see him when I was growing up.’
She didn’t know why she was telling Kyle about her dad, why she was almost bragging about her dad as if he was someone to be proud of. He wasn’t. He had never been the slightest bit interested in her. He never bothered hanging around more than a few days at a time. It was five years now since she’d seen him. More than five years. She’d been fourteen the last time, and it had been an almighty disaster. Sometimes she wished she could forget about it and pretend he didn’t exist at all.
But Kyle said, ‘I like him already.’ Then he leaned toward her an
d suddenly they were kissing. Her back was pressed into the corner of the booth and Kyle had his hands on either side of her, his tongue slipping between her teeth, his body radiant and damp. He smelled of beer and sweaty maleness, and he looked so good in his jeans and tight black shirt with the sleeves rolled up muscular arms. He pressed himself hard up against her, as close as he could get with clothes on, and slipped his hand under her dress.
She manoeuvred herself away from him, dizzy, waving her hand in front of her face, laughing. ‘Okay … that was unexpected.’
‘Damn, girlfriend,’ he groaned. Pupils huge in the dim light. ‘I almost forgot we were in public.’
He was back in Edinburgh now, campaigning for independence. If she was a braver person, she would go down and see him. They might talk about what happened, because maybe it hadn’t really happened how she remembered it. If they talked about it, maybe they could piece the night back together in a different way. He could convince her that it had been a misunderstanding. He could convince her of just about anything.
She lay there listing her failings: afraid, gullible, naïve, desperate, careless, stupid. Maybe if she kept the list going long enough, she’d eventually get to sleep. Twenty minutes passed, then another twenty. Fed up, she snuck down to the kitchen, ate a packet of crisps and spooned Nutella straight from the jar. The house felt hostile, more like a prison than a sanctuary. She opened the back door and faced the early dawn sky: a wash of indigo and gold. Dew beaded on the lawn and roses. She sat on the chilled concrete step and huddled into herself, body jittering with sugar and anxiety. She felt swollen and tight, like a boil in need of bursting.
After a few minutes she went back inside, took out a bottle of vodka and mixed at least a double measure with Diet Coke. It burned all the way to her stomach but she forced it down. She needed it to unlock the confusion that tightened around her like the coils of a python.
