by Claire North
Pat finally plonks herself on the sofa. “He can’t do this, can he?” she says. “November’s our fiftieth. The pub’s booked. We paid the deposit in August.”
August. It’s been a little over four weeks since Scott asked me to move in. I told my landlord straight away, handed in my work notice and secured the transfer to Brighton. I’ve disposed of so many possessions that Marie Kondo herself would consider me hardcore.
Scott can’t be dead, can he? He’s only thirty-seven.
People die unexpectedly all the time, regardless of their age. If anyone knows this, it’s you.
That’s enough, brain. Any minute now Scott will text me back, so I must get my head back in the game. I have to maintain laser focus on Pat, whose husband really has died from a cardiac arrest in his late seventies.
Delivering one final compression to Roy’s chest, I feel yet another rib crack. Reality regains its grip on my sight, and Scott’s lifeless face becomes Roy’s once again.
Resting my backside against my heels, I swipe the back of one hand across my brow and claw at the collar of my shirt. This cheap polyester shit never gets any easier to work in.
Joining Pat on the sofa, I hold her parchment-paper hand, look her straight in the eye and say, “Pat, I’m afraid your husband has died. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Pat studies Roy’s corpse, which lies in the middle of the cramped living room where they’ve laughed, cried, watched TV and bitched at each other for so many years.
“Pat, would you like Trevor and me to move Roy through to your bedroom and cover him up on the bed until the police arrive?”
Her weathered face holds this frozen disappointment, like Roy’s genuinely let her down by failing to last until the big anniversary. By having forfeit that piddling deposit.
Everyone handles this in their own way.
Hey, why not tell Pat she can hold the wake in that pub instead?
I squeeze her hand. “Your husband’s moved on to a good place, sweetheart.”
Pat turns cold, appraising eyes on me. She says, “You don’t believe that. I can tell,” then returns her attention to Roy.
She’s right, of course. Despite having seen countless people die, I’ve never once sensed their spectral essence coil out of them, destined for Heaven, Hell, Valhalla or anywhere else.
The sorry truth is, dead people resemble complex biological systems that have ground to a random and sometimes ugly halt. What we humans think of as our minds, it’s all electricity. All our thoughts, desires and funniest jokes, they’re just lightning bolts, bouncing around inside a bag of meat.
“I do believe,” I tell her. “I really do.”
When Pat does not respond, I abandon these lies and offer to make tea. There’s always time for a quick brew when someone’s died. Trevor takes my place beside her as I disappear into a kitchen that smells of cooked sausages and fried onions. What would have been Roy’s final meal cools and congeals in two pans on the hob.
Once the kettle’s on, I feel the burning urge to check my phone. If Scott had texted, I would have felt the vibration against my hip, but I want to check anyway. This kind of compulsive behaviour feels dangerously like my old, bad ways. I really should restrict myself to one check per hour, max, but this is no ordinary day. This is the end of my life here in Leeds and the start of my life with Scott down in Brighton, so I decide to consult my old Nokia once again.
The tiny screen glows into life, opening a restricted window onto the world. This antiquated device shows me calls, texts, low-res photos and little more. Bare bones.
Still no reply from Scott.
He’s probably had second thoughts about this whirlwind romance—and can you blame him? If you were Scott, would you honestly want to live with some tedious Miss Average who comes home every night smelling of blood and sick?
I remind myself yet again that it’s only been seventeen hours since his last text. This is by far the longest we’ve ever gone without comms in the four months since we met, but there’s got to be a perfectly good reason.
There had fucking better be. What a truly weird time for him to drop out of contact.
Don’t you dare ghost me on the day before I move in with you, Scott Palmer.
Don’t. You. Dare.
Steam gushes from the kettle spout. The urgent bubble of hot water makes me feel panicked, so I switch off the kettle before it hits the boil, and I make the widow her tea.
CHAPTER THREE
14 February
The first time I ever see Scott Palmer, he isn’t really there.
His face has been rendered by one zillion points of light. Untold zeroes and ones. A whole bunch of nothing, which nevertheless ignites chemicals in my brain.
Say what you will about the dating app being the death of romance, but there’s such a primal power to swiping left to reject a stranger, then being confronted with a new person who speaks to you. A potential new partner in crime, as the great Tinder bio cliché goes.
Half an hour into my tragic Valentine’s Day Tinder trawl, Scott Palmer’s face doesn’t so much speak to me as yell out of the screen.
Some Tinder fuck-boys pose with a big dead fish. Oh wow, dude, you killed a sentient being by ramming a hook through its mouth and watching it suffocate? Please allow me to cock-worship you forever.
Other guys present themselves among a group of their mates. I don’t know which one you are.
And then there are the blokes pictured at their own weddings. WTF is that trying to communicate—“Hey ladies, someone once liked me enough to marry me”?
Scott Palmer, meanwhile, has chosen a simple portrait that allows his face to fill the screen. My ovaries may be twitching. My inner filth-goddess may be imagining how those cheekbones and the wild-yet-somehow-curated stubble would feel against my bare thighs. My fingers may be judging how his thin-but-nice, sandy-blond hair would feel. But these eyes, they seal the deal. Apart from being divine pools of azure blue, blah blah blah, their open nature betrays something else deep inside them. Something entirely at odds with the wolfy smirk on his lips.
This guy, whose screen-name is simply Scott, has this real vulnerability about him – one that you only see when you spend more than a passing moment gazing into these peepers. Up until Scott’s face entered my life, I’d been swiping with vigour. Having buried the guilt of passing shallow split-second judgements on people based on the configuration and proportions of their facial features, I had allowed myself to enjoy the chemical brain-hits that accompany the anticipation of the new. But I’ve now become an anomaly in the online world, simply by examining one single image for more than ten seconds.
What is the nature of Scott’s secret vulnerability? Can’t tell whether it’s hurt, or fear, or self-loathing, or whatever, but it makes me want to mother and fuck him at the same time. Yeah, I want to mother-fuck him.
Having fully absorbed his face, I tap the info button to see what he has to say for himself. Turns out he’s written no words at all. Hardly unusual on Tinder, but a lack of text is always disappointing. Makes the whole thing feel all the more intensely superficial.
The only information on display is Scott’s age: thirty-six. His distance from me is not stated, and neither is his occupation.
How am I supposed to know if we might get along if he tells me nothing about his personality, lifestyle, hopes or dreams?
Ah, fuck him. He’s blown this.
So of course, I hit Super-Like. Simply can’t help myself, even though Super-Likes on Tinder are a really bad move. Whereas regular Likes are kept secret from the person you’ve Liked, a Super-Like means the person actually gets notified. So when a woman gives a Super-Like, it’s the digital equivalent of doing a handstand and shrieking. While wearing a wedding dress.
See, part of me quite likes the fact that Scott has chosen to remain a man of mystery. An enigmatic array of pixels. Soon as I tap on that little blue Super-Like star, his face gets whisked off my screen, back into the labyrinthine serv
ers of Tinder. Ridiculously, I feel a tad bereft. Why didn’t I take a screen grab of him?
Doesn’t matter, Kate. He’s out of your league anyway. He’ll take one look at your profile, with your crooked smile splayed across that weird mouth, your eyes that are too far apart, your short hair of no fixed stylistic abode and your paltry cleavage, and he’ll think, “Aw, how sweet, the plain girl loves me.” Then he’ll move on, hunting for women with perfect teeth, blow job lips and tits that look like they’re inflated by a hand-pump twice daily. That’s the way of the dating app: everyone’s forever holding out to see if someone better lurks one swipe around the corner.
Having dumped the phone beside me on the bed, I force myself to get ready for work. Somewhere out there, across the sprawl of the city, there are people whose lives will need saving. These people currently have no idea, but they’re about to have one of the worst days of their lives, often for some cruelly arbitrary reason.
I’m attacking my damp hair with a towel when the phone goes ping.
Wow, someone has Super-Liked me on Tinder.
Okay, okay, let’s not get excited. This person is highly likely to have tapped the blue Super-Like star by mistake. All too many times before, I’ve Liked a Super-Liker back, only for them to totally ghost me.
In fact, it’s happened every single time.
Still, I may as well enjoy this minor chest flutter for the minutes it’ll take me to dry my hair and take a proper look.
Oh God, wait…
Surely this can’t be… what was his name again? Scott?
As much as I try to resist, a new future rolls out before my mind’s eye. My mother, suddenly growing a soul and flying back from New Zealand for the wedding. Scott, standing before the altar, grinning back over his shoulder at me and my magnificent frock. That last vision is weird, seeing as I don’t particularly want to marry. I suppose I like the idea of someone being there, for good.
Oh. This isn’t Scott. This is an altogether more Venezuelan guy named Rudolpho, with a broad brow and even broader shoulders. He looks pretty damn hot, isn’t clutching a dead halibut and he may genuinely Super-Like me.
Could be worth riding. I mean, investigating.
if you enjoyed
THE PURSUIT OF WILLIAM ABBEY
look out for
THE WITCH’S KIND
by
Louisa Morgan
Barrie Anne Blythe and her aunt Charlotte have always known that the other residents of their small coastal community find them peculiar—two women living alone on the outskirts of town. It is the price of concealing their strange and dangerous family secret.
But two events threaten to upend their lives forever. The first is the arrival of a mysterious abandoned baby with a hint of power like their own. The second is the sudden reappearance of Barrie Anne’s long-lost husband—who is not quite the man she thought she married.
Together, Barrie Anne and Charlotte must decide how far they are willing to go to protect themselves—and the child they think of as their own—from suspicious neighbors, the government, and even their own family.…
1
June 30, 1947
It was a long summer evening, the sun reluctant to sink beyond the Olympics, the shy stars holding back until the last possible moment. I lingered in my garden, sidling between my careful rows, tying up pea vines and pinching back tomato leaves. I ran my hands through the blueberry bushes that grew against the back fence, searching for a few more ripe berries to add to the baskets waiting in the pantry. I had a dozen ready to sell at the market. I expected to get ten cents apiece for them. I had eggs to sell, too, and several fat heads of butter lettuce.
It was a good harvest for early summer. I would be able to pay my electricity bill, my share of the party line, and have enough left over to buy scratch for the hens and flour and sugar and coffee for myself.
I scooped the berries into the front pocket of my overalls and straightened to gaze up into the twilight. These were lonely moments on my isolated farm, but I found beauty in them. Tatters of cloud shone silver against the violet sky, shimmering in the night wind. The breeze rippled the leaves of the apple trees clustered between my place and the shore of Hood Canal, and it tinged the air with the scent of salt water.
I felt the pull of the canal as a physical sensation. Its tides seemed to resonate with the tides of my own flowing blood, its life calling to the life in my veins. Sometimes the pull was so strong I had to drop what I was doing and go to the shore, driven by a need to touch the water, to feel its cool, salty texture on my fingers or washing over my bare feet. I felt the tug that night, the water beckoning to me, but the sky was beginning to darken, and the field between my house and the canal was pocked with holes and tangles of tall grass. I told myself I would go in the morning, as I often did, perhaps fish for flounder from the half-submerged dock or just ramble along the beach in search of sea glass.
I liked holding the glass fragments in my hand, bits of brown or blue or clear glass worn smooth by the water. I tried to imagine what they had once been part of—a milk bottle, a medicine vial, a jelly jar, perhaps even a glass dish that had at one time rested in some housewife’s kitchen cupboard. I told myself stories about how the glass had ended up in the water. The milk bottle might have been thrown overboard from a ship. The glass dish might have slipped out of the housewife’s hand and shattered on the floor. The jelly jar might have belonged to a child, who meant to catch polliwogs in it but had dropped it into the creek with small, water-slick fingers. I kept what I collected in a mason jar on the kitchen windowsill, where the sun could shine through, splashing the counter and the floor with prisms of light.
When a coyote yipped, somewhere to the north, I started from my reverie. I hurried through the garden to the house to call Willow in from the darkness. One coyote wouldn’t be a problem for a dog of her size, but a pack of them could. We had lots of coyotes on the peninsula.
I had hung an iron bell on my back porch, an artifact salvaged from some derelict ship. I pulled the leather cord to strike the clapper, sending its hollow clang rolling out into the dusk. From beyond the orchard, Willow barked in answer, and I went to the side gate to hold it open for her.
She was hard to see in the dimness, but I could make out her pale silhouette as she loped through the apple orchard and trotted across the empty field toward the garden. She rubbed her shoulder against my leg as she came through the gate, and I scratched behind her ears. We walked side by side toward the house, my hand on her head, her rangy body warm and muscular against my thigh.
My aunt Charlotte said nobody calls a dog with a bell. I didn’t know if that was true. I didn’t know much about dogs except for Willow, and she always came when I rang the ship’s bell. She did it from the very beginning, even when she was so small I could hold her in my two hands.
I had never intended to have a dog. The previous June, Charlotte had paid me a surprise visit, rolling up my dirt lane in her big Studebaker, churning billows of dust as she swung the auto into the space by my yard. She hadn’t bothered waiting for the dust to settle; she had climbed out onto the running board, one gloved hand waving, the other clutching something small and beige and fluffy. I had come out onto the front porch to greet her, and I had squinted through the haze, trying to see what she was carrying.
“Barrie Anne!” she cried. “Brought you a present!”
No one uses my full name anymore, not since my parents died. Will never did use it. Charlotte likes it, but I really think she uses it to remind me that she’s family. That she knows me better than anyone.
She climbed off the running board, leaving the Studebaker’s door open, and came toward me wearing a wide, scarlet-lipsticked grin. I started down the steps to the yard to meet her, but when I saw what she was carrying, I froze.
I wasn’t afraid of dogs, or of any animal. I catch my own fish in Hood Canal. I chase away the deer who stretch their necks through my fence to nibble cherry tomatoes and snap peas, and I sho
ut and clap at coyotes who threaten my henhouse. I even shot at one, although I hated doing it so much I never did it a second time.
But a puppy of my own, one I might fall in love with, worry about, and one day, inevitably, lose—that frightened me.
No. I kept my hands at my sides. “Aunt Charlotte. I can’t.”
“Yes, you can, kiddo,” she said. With the puppy in her arms, she swept past me in a swirl of scarves. “You need her. Trust me.”
I knew better, of course, than to argue with Charlotte. She knew things. It was always wise to heed what she said.
I crossed the yard to close the automobile’s door against the dust before, resigned, I went back up the steps to follow my aunt into the house.
She was waiting in the living room, standing with her back to me. The puppy’s wide eyes and comical ears were just visible above her shoulder. One ear stood up, its tip pointed at the sky. The other, darker than its mate, fell to one side like a wet brown leaf. The puppy’s smooth little head begged to be stroked. Its liquid eyes gazed at me with innocent curiosity.
Charlotte heard my steps behind her and turned, holding out the puppy. Reflexively, my hands reached for it, and at the same moment, the hard pain of remembered sorrow pierced the center of my chest. Instinctively, I cuddled the puppy over the ache. It nestled there, warm and soft and vibrant with life.
“Where did you find it?” I asked, already knowing I could never let the little creature go.
“Not it. Her. And by the lagoon,” she said. “Actually, I didn’t so much find her as she found me.”
“Oh, my gosh, Aunt Charlotte. Were there other puppies? Did someone dump a litter?”
“Not that I could find. I looked, but this was the only one I saw, and she was a mess. Muddy, wet, shivering. She was hiding under a willow tree, and the moment I came down the path, she ran straight toward me.” She reached out a hand and stroked the little dog’s head with her forefinger. “It’s no accident, of course. This puppy was meant for you.”
