The Day She Died: A Novel

by Catriona McPherson

  But as well as the sex thing (thank you Dr. Freud), it was novelty pen ends too, and Gus was saying they were all next door and he’d finished them. But if he opened the door of this workshop bit and then opened the door of the storage place too, they would probably catch a draught and blow right in.

  So he opened the door and I was punching the buttons on the baby monitor to tell him to stop, except the monitor was a phone and I didn’t know how to work it. A Fisher Price phone that played tapes too, and Ruby said the battery’s dead, and I woke up.

  Another night survived. Good old sub-subconscious. Well done. Have a drink on me. Have two.

  And even if it had failed and I’d dreamed about them, breakfast with Ruby and Dillon was enough to drive any other thoughts out of my head. Most of the problem was Gus being so determined to get Ruby back to nursery for the day.

  “Break her in gently,” he said. “Otherwise she’ll start on Monday with five days straight.”

  “But why?” I whispered. We were standing in the bathroom with the door pulled. The kids were in the hall putting their boots and coats on. “She could have another week off. Do mornings only, day about. Gus, think about it. Her mum’s just died.”

  “Miss Colquhoun seems to think she should be at school.”

  “She never said that!”

  “She threatened to come out here checking up on us if Ruby wasn’t at school.”

  “No, she didn’t!” I could have shaken him. How could anyone misunderstand a simple conversation so badly? Well, maybe if their wife had just driven off a cliff, Jessie. So I took a big breath, counted to ten, and let it go. “I’ll take her in,” I said. “But if she doesn’t make it, you’ll have to get her on the bus.”

  “If she wants to leave early, I’ll get her in the van,” he said, kissed my head and left me standing there.

  “The same van I couldn’t put the kids in yesterday?” I said, following him. Jesus, Jessie, give it a rest, I told myself, but I kept following all the way through to the kitchen, stepping over the children on the hall floor.

  “You can’t put both kids in the van,” said Gus. He was on his knees at the cupboard beside the door, rummaging in amongst the Tupperware and ice-cream tubs. “It’s fine with just Ruby.”

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  He was stirring the tubs round, collapsing the neat towers and sending lids wheeling over the floor. “Flask,” he said, finding it. “It’ll be brass monkeys in the workshop today.”

  “What’ll you do with Dillon?” I said. I bent to pick up a couple of the lids and got close enough for him to grab my legs and pull me towards him, holding my bum in his hands.

  “He’ll be fine in his snowsuit.” He put his mouth against the front of my jeans and breathed out hard, like when you’re trying to melt ice on a window. I could feel the heat right through my clothes. “And he runs about a lot anyway,” he added, looking up. “It’s me that gets freezing, sitting hunched over at the table all day like … ”

  “Like who?” I said, smiling down, melted away to nothing again. “What are you making just now anyway, hunched over your table? I thought it was something huge.”

  “Gepetto,” he said. “Bob Cratchett. One of them. Man, I need to see something that’s not Disney one of these days.”

  “Dickens, though,” I said, running my hands through his hair. “I’m impressed.”

  “Muppets’ Christmas Carol,” he admitted and got to his feet with the flask in his hand, went to the kettle.

  It wasn’t until Ruby and me were in the car bumping over the track through the caravan site that I realised he’d misled me. Or misunderstood me, anyway. I hadn’t meant how would Dillon keep warm, I’d meant who was going to look after Dillon if Gus went to town in the van? But I shook the worry away. What did I know about their arrangements, really? Neighbours and babysitters and friends to turn to in a pinch? Except on Tuesday it hadn’t seemed like there was anyone. And nobody had come round with a pan of soup or a bunch of flowers since the news broke about Becky. Funny that. How could a family be so all alone?

  I swung round towards the shower block and shop and there was Gizzy, standing at the open gate of the enclosure where the big Calor tanks were. She had her jeans and fleece on, Crocs on her feet, but she had a look of bed about her, her hair flat on one side, pale pink fluffy socks.

  I rolled the window down. “See you about four,” I called over.

  “Four on the dot,” she shouted back, her voice croaky, definitely pre-breakfast. “And don’t come dragging any weans.”

  “If she didn’t sell sweeties,” said Ruby, twisting round to watch Gizzy out of the back window, “she’d be rubbish.”

  “You have got your head screwed on tight, Tootie,” I said.

  “Is that good?” said Ruby. “Sounds ouchy.”

  “It’s very good,” I said. “Now, listen, Roobs. Don’t take any crap today. If anyone does anything that makes you feel crummy, you go and tell Miss Colquhoun, okay?”

  “Like if Jay McVitie shows me his scab he’s pulled off?”

  “More like … yeah, why not?” I said. Could she really have bounced right back already? Was she really not scared to be going back into school? Even the wet pants, never mind the dead mum, should still have been bothering her today.

  Or maybe it was me. Maybe I had an aura around me that was strong enough to help a wee girl like Ruby going through what she was going through. When I got into work, I’d have believed it.

  “Oh-ho!” said Dot. “Who is he?” I had done no more than come round the corner and take my keys out of my bag to open the door. She was waiting in the doorway, standing there in her good maroon moccasins and her good matching maroon coat buttoned to the neck and belted too. She always looked so trim. I hated to see her having to wait with chip bags blowing round her feet and nothing to read but graffiti. But dropping off Ruby and finding a place to park had slowed me down some.

  “What? Who?” I said, blushing.

  “Who me? Says you,” said Dot, mocking.

  “What’s this?” said Steve coming up behind me.

  “Couldn’t have been! Then who?” Dot sang. “Jessie’s got a boyfriend,” she said to Steve.

  “Is that his car you came in?” said Steve. “I saw you parking at Whitesands when I was coming over the footbridge.”

  “God almighty!” I said. “Who needs security cams?”

  “Oh, he might be a keeper if he’s letting you borrow his car, Jessie,” said Dot as I got the door open and we all hustled in. “But it’s a right old waste of money driving in from Catherine Street and paying to park all day.”

  Not to mention stopping off for more new socks and knickers on the way, I thought. In Dot’s world, where your shoes match your coat, there’s nothing about a new boyfriend that would make you come to work from anywhere but home, where all your clothes were. I slung my coat and bag behind the desk and went round putting the lights on for the day, took a duster with me, gave the shirt shelves a flick as I passed them. They were black enamelled metal, from a bankrupt art supply shop, looked great when they were clean (spotless, as Dot would say) but drew the dust like iron filings on a magnet. The pipes were starting to warm up, creaking and popping like old men’s knees at mass, and I carried on round past the kids’ section, the stands we’d scrounged from the garden centre in Castle Douglas when it closed down, meant for trays of annuals but perfect for babies’ tiny clothes, rolled pairs of socks like sugar bonbons, sets of vests tied together with ribbon—that was Dot—looking like those potpourri cushions you get in the useless tat department on the ground floor of Barbour’s—every posh department store probably, only I’d not been in enough of them to know. I stopped and ran my hand over a pair of Thomas the Tank dungarees and a matching jersey. Dillon would look cute in those. He’d suit blue with that white-blond hair of his. Then I heard
Dot coming with the coffees and walked away before temptation got me.

  “Everything okay in the Layette section, Jessie?” she said, putting down a mug with a jumbo scone balanced over the top of it, warm scones a la flour in your coffee—a Dot special.

  “Layette is looking lovely, Dotty.”

  “Dot,” she said. “Think I don’t know when you’re laughing at me, you young ones that know everything and what you don’t know isn’t worth knowing.”

  But I wasn’t laughing. She hated being called Dotty as much as I hated being called Jess. Her brothers had called her Spotty Dotty when she was fifteen and only got to wash her hair once a week and it hung on her face, she’d told me. But why was that story that Dot had repeated a hundred times making me feel so freaked out now?

  “Soooooo.” Dot had a way of nestling her folded arms in under her bosom that made me think of broody hens. “You’ve got yourself a nice lad at last.”

  “He’s just a friend,” I told her, but I could feel myself blushing again, and she didn’t believe me.

  “Another one!” said Dot. Steve wandered up with a bale of shirts that had been tried on and needed refolding now. Needed sniff-checked and then refolding. I could feel my heart hammering. I had promised to keep it quiet and had made Gus promise the same, but I had to tell someone.

  “The same one,” I blurted out at last. Dot’s powdery face clouded. “Gus King. The sculptor. The one that’s wife just died.”

  Dot’s face changed the way it does. Her eyebrows went up in the middle and down at the ends and her eyes went diamond-shaped and shiny. And it looked like her mouth had a drawstring round it, a tiny rosette of a mouth. A dot of a mouth.

  Steve was standing with a shirt collar tucked under his chin, ready to fold the sleeves in and, with his mouth open and his eyebrows raised, he looked like a cartoon of surprise.

  “What?” I said.

  “Oh Jessie!” said Dot. “That poor girl!”

  “No!” I said. “She didn’t know! God sake, that’s not how it was at all.”

  “How can you be sure?” said Dot. “She killed herself. Oh Jessie!”

  “Because—” I stopped. Because she was already dead when I met him, of course. But I couldn’t say that after telling them yesterday that he was my friend. “Because—” I tried again. “Because even though they weren’t happy, Gus loved his kids and he’d never have left them like his dad did, and he tried to make it work.”

  “Can’t have tried that hard,” said Dot. “The poor girl flung herself off a cliff.”

  “Drove off the road, and not because of anything Gus did,” I said. “It was finding out she was pregnant again that did it. She didn’t want to have another baby.”

  “She was pregnant?” Dot whispered the last word. She always did. She whispered cancer and asylum seeker too.

  “It’s actually more common than you’d think,” said Steve, back on social statistics where he was happy, back out of the mess of the heart. “Women are more likely to commit suicide while they’re pregnant than at any other time. More likely to be the victims of domestic violence too.”

  “Thanks, Steve,” I said. “That’s a cheery thought to take through the day.”

  “How could anyone take her own life and the life of an innocent baby?” said Dot.

  “And her friend had left,” I said. “Her only real friend. Took off back to Poland without saying good-bye.” Of course, I had no idea if that was true; Ros might have come round with farewell balloons and a teddy bear that played “Goodnight Sweetheart” when you pressed its tummy. I was just trying to stop them thinking Gus had driven her to it.

  “But what kind of woman kills herself over a friend when she’s got a husband and wee ones?” said Dot.

  “Ah,” said Steve. We both turned to hear the words of wisdom, but he just nodded with a really full-on Steve look smarmed over his face.

  “Ah, what?” I said.

  “Loveless marriage, inability to fulfill traditional female roles, intense friendship with another woman, loss of friendship causing despair. I see.”

  “I don’t,” said Dot.

  I did. It was another one of Steve’s favourite themes. Practically everybody was gay in Steve’s world, but nobody was just getting on with it. Everyone was sublimating and repressing and suffering. Everyone from Billy Bunter to Jimmy Krankie. Anne of Green Gables and Henry the Eighth. Everyone you could think of—except, of course, Steve, who was just interested in the subject in an objective way. And was single. And hung out with a load of women in a clothes shop all day.

  “No way,” I said. She’d been with a different bloke before Dillon was born and then a different one again to get knocked up this last time. “Becky was as straight as a … ” And then I wondered. What about the fact that Gus had never managed to—

  I felt myself blushing.

  “I’m right!” said Steve.

  “About what?” Dot asked him.

  “Steve,” I said, “do women who’ve not come to terms with their … selves”—this was for Dot; there was no whisper quiet enough for the words I needed to say—“ever act promiscuous with men?”

  Dot squeaked and started clearing the coffee cups away. Promiscuous had done it for her.

  “Oh yes,” said Steve. “The Goldilocks Syndrome—looking for some individual in the societally acceptable gender who’s just right. That’s very common.”

  “Well, in that case,” I told him, “I think, for once, you might be right, then.”

  Should I tell him?

  Would it make it worse, or would it make everything clear so he could grieve and recover and be free? Would it help him not feel guilty that things never worked between them? Or would he feel humiliated and worse than ever? He was a guy, even if he was a good one, and guys can be funny that way. So, even though I had thought that the worst bit of my new job at Sandsea would be the loneliness, when four o’clock came round, I was dying to leave Gus and the kids in the cottage and head out to the first van to scrub it down and think things over.

  Not that getting rid of Gizzy was easy. You’d think cleaning a caravan was the kind of thing you could just crack on with, but I wouldn’t have hit on the Gizzy system in a million years. First, she told me, you Hoover everything, for the sand. Even when you can’t see it, there’s always sand. She’d never been able to get them told that they couldn’t fill the caravans with sand.

  “Well, on a beach holiday … ” I said.

  Then—she ignored me—you turn the water off at the outside valve.

  “So you’re not tempted,” she said.

  “Tempted to … ?” I climbed up the metal steps after her and went inside.

  I’ve always liked caravans. They make me think of Wendy houses, Polly Pocket and pop-up books, playing at life instead of slogging at it like you do in a house. And then they’re so totally, comprehensively, unrelentingly plastic. I’d checked with Gizzy because I’m paranoid, but I’d have dropped dead to come across them in here. Foam inside polyester, microfibre inside acetate, polymer inside viscose, all wrapped up in plastic walls with plastic windows and plastic cupboards full of melamine. A caravan was like a shrine to the by-products of the petroleum industry, like a spaceship from a world where no one had ever thought of ripping the coats off of poultry and stuffing them in bags for keeping warm. They were my kind of place, and this one was a classic. Every shade of brown, orange, gold, tan, beige, yellow, and cream that had ever been turned into dye and used to colour polyester was in here. It looked like a big bag of smashed toffee popcorn and, what with the crackle of the nylon carpet and the gritty squeak of the sand down the sides of the Crimplene cushions, it sounded not far off it too.

  “Tempted,” said Gizzy, “to use water to clean.” She set down her bucket on the floor and took out three Spontex cloths and three bottles of cleaner. “Lemon in the kitchen,
pine in the bathroom, lavender in the living room,” she said. “You soak a cloth”—she showed me—“and wipe it round and if the muck doesn’t come off, that’s special cleaning and they lose their deposit. Any questions?”

  “How d’you clean the toilet seat?”

  She stared hard over my shoulder. “Pine in the bathroom,” she said.

  “Same cloth as a the sink and shower?”

  “Doused in this stuff,” she said, shifting her gaze. “You could eat raw pork that’s been soaked in this, you know.”

  I swallowed and smiled. “What about the bedrooms?” I said.

  “Duster,” said Gizzy. “It’s in the rules there’s no food or drink allowed in the bedrooms. There shouldn’t be any need for wet cleaning in there. And if there is—”

  “They lose their deposit.”

  “You’ll go far,” she said and almost smiled. Unless I stay in one of your vans and contract C. difficile and a side of E. Coli, I thought but said nothing.

  “And,” she said as she turned, sloshing lavender Flash over her cloth, “don’t think you can go maverick on me and I’ll not know. The water metre’s right by my desk, and it’s broken down van by van.”

  “But wouldn’t it be cheaper to use soap and water?” I asked, following her past the breakfast bar to where the fitted orange and yellow bench ran round the end wall under the window.

  “Water,” said Gizzy, wheeling round and gripping her cloth so tight that drops of purple cleaner fell on the laminate floor, “is the enemy. Our septic system is our biggest single expense. Bigger than gas. Bigger than the electric. Bigger than the two-stroke for the mowers and the batteries for the solar glows put together.”

  “I thought it was the … other stuff that buggers your septic,” I said.

  “It’s both,” said Gizzy. She had wiped the big table and the fitted shelves and now she was backing across the floor, swiping the cloth over the laminate. I had to say, it was pretty shiny and smelled fantastic too. “We’ve eighty-five vans here, Jessica. Eighty-five families of eight in high season—and more than eight often enough; they can’t fool me!—all drinking too much and not letting their barbecues heat up before they sling the chicken legs on. Have you any idea the strain that food poisoning puts a septic system under? Not to mention the chip oil down the sinks, nappies down the bogs, biological washing powder glugging down my drains like there’s no tomorrow. I see them. Kids soaked in cola from head to toe at bedtime one day and then the self-same clothes sparkling white again by the next day’s tea. Try and tell me they get that done on septic-friendly soap flakes! I tell you what—those dry toilets in Portugal? If I thought I could get away with it, I’d have a good go.”