The Day She Died: A Novel

by Catriona McPherson

“Oh God, nobody really,” I said. “Done tons of Open University and thinks he’s Einstein.”

  “I’ll try again,” said Gus and his voice was very steady, like he was talking someone down from a high ledge. “Who the fuck is Steve? And why the fuck were you talking to him about Becky?”

  I blinked a couple of times. Well, at least there was no denying I’d pissed him off this time.

  “Steve,” I said, “is my pal from work and of course he knows about Becky, because for one it was on the news, and for two I had to explain why I was driving in from out of town in a strange car and where I went on Wednesday. Which was, in case you’ve forgotten, to pick up your daughter at school and bring her home, even after I had said she wouldn’t be able to cope, which she couldn’t. And after I’d said I couldn’t do it because I’m no good with kids and I shouldn’t be left with them. So shove that up your arse, Gus King.”

  There was an even longer silence after that. Hardly surprising. But when he spoke again he was a different person. Well, in a different mood, anyway.

  “It’s just … what you said.” His voice was quiet and kind of wondering, like he was trying to wrap his head round it. “It’s quite a lot to take in. All at once.”

  “Well, while you’re taking it in then,” I said, “I think I’ll get the torch and go and get the pee-stick out the bin like I should have done last night. I’m sorry I went off at you.”

  He had picked up Dillon’s shoe again and was staring down at it, turning it over and over in his hands, and he only nodded sort of half-listening and half off in his own wee world kind of way. No chance of him apologising too, it didn’t look like.

  Outside, with the torch balanced on the kitchen windowsill, I lowered the wheeliebin onto its back and shook it until all the nappy bags and banana skins and other crap were up near the top, then I got down on my hands and knees and peered inside. The stuff from the bathroom was a long way down; I could see two bog roll middles and a plaster. I was looking about for a long stick when I heard the back door.

  “Don’t do that,” said Gus. He held me by the waist and dragged me backwards. My knees scraped on the hard ground through my jeans leg.

  “Hey!” I said, wriggling out of his reach. “I can’t keep up. Do it. Do it now. Do it tomorrow. Don’t do it at all.”

  “Don’t do it at all,” Gus said. “It doesn’t matter now. I’m sorry, Jessie.”

  “Yeah, what the hell was that in there?” I said.

  “I was jealous,” he said. “And I was just saying what was in my head, cos with you, I can.”

  So I put my hands in his and let him pull me to my feet.

  “I get it,” I said. “Flexing your muscles, kind of thing? Well, newsflash, Gus: you overshot.”

  “Yeah, I know,” but he was still smiling. “But it’s not brought the sky down, has it? I pissed you off and you straightened me out, and it’s over. It’s brilliant.” He kissed me, and it seemed kind of rotten to carp.

  So I changed the subject. Or changed it back again anyway. “Why doesn’t it matter now?”

  He put his arm around me, tucking me in against him, and led me around the house to stand in the garden and look out at the black sea.

  “Don’t know,” he said. “It just seems like that baby isn’t really real anymore. I only heard about it on Tuesday and by the end of Tuesday, it was all over. Seems daft now. Keeping something to remember it by.” We stood side by side listening to the rush and sweep of the tide, smelling the chimney smoke, snatched by the wind and sent gusting past us. I shivered.

  “Come on,” said Gus, rubbing my back hard, trying to warm me. “Let’s crack open a bottle of wine and sit in front of the telly like a pair of old farts, eh?”

  “What’s on?” I said, turning and following him back inside.

  “Oh, bugger all,” he said. “I’ll let you loose on the video collection and you can choose.”

  But the first three films I spotted were Forrest Gump, The Witches of Eastwick, and Dances with Wolves and my heart fell into my guts and died there.

  “We could just listen to music,” I said.

  “What’s up?” He ran his hand along the shelf of boxes. Chicago, Chicken Run, St. Trinian’s. “Jessie, what’s wrong?”

  I went to one of the armchairs and sat down, hugging myself, feeling colder now than when I was standing in the dark of the garden.

  “I know they’re all pretty ancient,” he said. He pulled a box out of the row. “Have you seen Crouching Tiger?” I shook my head. “Give it a go?” I shook my head again. There had been too much stress already, no room for more. If I couldn’t get myself together, I would just sit through whatever he chose and hope he didn’t see my eyes screwed shut.

  “Jessie?” he came and crouched in front of me, cupping my face in his hands. “Tell me.”

  So I did.

  “Forrest sits on a bench and a—shit!—a feather floats down and it keeps coming back all the way through. The Witches of Eastwick has a storm of feathers all over the road and they get stuck to him. The Indians in Dances with Wolves wear headdresses. So do the dancers in Chicago. Chicken Run—clue in the name. And St. Trinian’s has a pillow fight. Probably. I’ve never plucked up the courage to watch it.”

  “There’s absolutely no feathers in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” he said.

  “Yeah, except there probably is,” I said, and I knew I hadn’t managed to keep even a drop of the misery out of my voice.

  “There really isn’t,” he said.

  “Okay,” I nodded. “What about Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves? Any feathers in that?”

  He sat back and thought hard for a minute. “Not a single one,” he said.

  “Except for a hundred and fifty million arrows,” I said. “So who the hell knows about Crouching Tiger either, eh?” I was angry. So hurt and sick of it and so disappointed that I’d spoiled everything again. I wished he would just get on with it, laugh or shout or sneer or do whatever he was going to do, but do it soon and get it over.

  “You poor sweetheart,” he said. “You poor wee darling. You know what you need?” I looked at him, half laughing, pretty sure he’d suggest the last thing I could even think of doing right then. “You need to sit on my knee and let me tell you a story,” he said. “Like Ruby when she’s sodded something up and wants to punch somebody.”

  I laughed then. “Exactly!” I said. “That’s exactly how I feel.”

  “You’re just like her,” he said squeezing in beside me and lifting me into his lap. “In a few years people are going to be saying. ‘Oh, Ruby’s just Jessie over the back.’ You wait and see.”

  I curled my feet up and stuck them down the side of the chair between the arm and the cushion, then I tucked my head under his chin.

  “Your hair smells nice,” he said. “Covers the smell of whatever that smell is in here.”

  “It’s milk,” I said. “I spilled some on Tuesday night. I’ll have another go at it in the morning.”

  “So what’s your favourite story from when you were wee?” he asked, beginning to rock me.

  I laughed so loud and sharp that he jerked his head away, saving his eardrums.

  “You’re kidding, right? My mum used to pray for me when I made a ‘nuisance of myself with my nonsense’. Do you want to hear the prayer?”

  “Something tells me I’m not going to like it,” he said.

  “He shall defend thee under his wings and thou shalt be safe in his feathers.”

  “What a prize bitch,” said Gus.

  “A few years ago, I’d have thought you meant I was one for telling tales on her,” I said. “But I’m getting better.”

  “And you’ll get even more better now I’m helping,” said Gus. “So here’s where we’ll start. Tell me what happened.”

  I was wedged in tight to the chair and his arms were wrap
ped right round me, but I stiffened and tried to wriggle away. He held me tighter.

  “You’re as safe as a baby in your mother’s bell—Bad example. You’re as safe as a bunny in a burrow. Tell me and I’ll make it better. I’ll take care of you.”

  “You’re not angry with me for saying that about Becky and Ros?”

  I thought I felt him flinch and I turned to see his face, but he was smiling by the time I could see him.

  “I’m angry about whatever happened to you to make you think I could be angry,” he said. I was too tired to follow. Too tired to do anything except give in, really.

  “My granny had a quilt,” I said. “I’ve never told anyone this before. Except therapists and them. I tried to tell Dot just the other day, but I crapped out in the end. Okay, so my granny had a quilt. It was plain mustard-coloured silky stuff on one side and green and pink patterned on the other side. Flowers and kind of bandstand things. She’d had it since she got married.

  “And it fitted perfectly onto the three-quarters bed in her spare room. My bed when I stayed there. With a bolster pillow and a pillowcase that had lace at the end like the pantaloon legs of the girls in my book of nursery rhymes.

  “But it was jaggy. It wasn’t so bad on the inside where there was a sheet and a blanket under it, but if you put your arms outside the covers, it jagged you to bits.”

  Looking back with my adult brain I can see that it was wearing out, washed too many times, getting threadbare, and the feathers were poking through. Back then, five years old, all I knew was that one night I found if I pulled the jags they came out, and it was soft and comfy. So I did. I pulled and pulled, my little hands roving all over the patterned top, finding the spikes and pulling them out. Every time I thought I had finished I found another one. Then I started on the inside, through the mustard backing. And there were just as many there.

  “So I pulled the feathers out,” I went on. “I’ve never bitten my nails so I could get a hold of every last one. I must have been awake for hours doing it. And then in the morning I woke up again, dead early too. Something had made me sneeze.”

  No prizes for guessing what, although it had been years later with a therapist called Moira that I had worked it out: in the night, more feather ends had worked their way to the surface and there were more jaggy spikes for me to pick at.

  “So by the time granny came to wake me, the bloody thing was practically empty. Well, not really, but there was feathers absolutely effing everywhere. She opened the door and they all blew up in a big storm like a snow globe and I could hardly see her through them. It was quite a small room.”

  “And was she angry?” said Gus.

  Granny had stood at the door with her mouth wide open as the feathers settled. She had blown one off her lip and then she had started—

  “She was furious,” I said. “I got the worst row I’d ever had in my life.”

  —she had started laughing. She kicked the feathers up like she was walking through autumn leaves in the park and she said—

  “She said I was an evil wicked child and I’d spoiled something precious that couldn’t be replaced.”

  —she said, Eh, dear, Jessie my darling. I didn’t know how thin that old thing had got. I think it’s time it went in the bin now, eh?

  “I don’t believe you,” said Gus. “What’s that got to do with looking after kids?”

  “Eh?”

  “Why would that make you say you’re not good with kids?”

  “Because if a bad thing happens I won’t be able to cope. They won’t be safe with me.”

  “There must be more to it than that.”

  “I’ve told you everything,” I said. “Swear to God.” That same therapist, Moira, had taught me how to put things in a box and put the box in a room and lock the door. So there was nothing more to say.

  “What’s wrong with your face?” he said.

  I put my hand down in my lap like he’d caught me picking my nose. I hadn’t even realised I’d been touching it. That little puncture mark in my cheekbone, so faded now you couldn’t see it unless I had a suntan. So small that only I knew it was there. I didn’t even know if I could really feel it anymore or if I just touched the place I knew it had been.

  “Nothing,” I told him. “My face is fine. And that’s the whole story of my pteronophobia. You think it’s going to be something that makes sense and it doesn’t. I can’t watch a film I’ve never seen before because my granny gave me a row for wrecking her quilt. I’m an idiot.”

  He just looked at me. “You’ll trust me enough one of these days to tell me it all,” he said.

  And a flash of anger blazed through me. He didn’t believe me? Look at what I’d swallowed from him in the last three days, and he had the nerve not to believe a perfectly sensible story from me? Maybe not true, but sensible for sure.

  Except under the anger was something else, I knew. Down the stairs into the garden, over the lawn, and into the lift—the therapists never tell you what a lift’s doing in a garden, by the way—down and down and down, past the panic and the memories and past the room with the box (locked tight) right down to the basement. And then out again at the beach. This is some lift, from a beach to a garden—and the beach is the safe place. Annabel—another one—told me that nearly half of the folk she spoke to chose that same lame beach. Or they chose their own bed or their armchair. And some chose a mountain. And one she told me about chose Harvey Nick’s food hall, but I reckon that was for show and probably in her head she had a wee beach there, one floor down in a lift maybe.

  But the thing is this: in all my imagining of that safe place, I never expected someone to meet me when the lift opened its doors. Now it seemed like if I went down, past the anger and panic and memories, Gus would be there. And the beach had a name: Sandsea Bay.

  “Now what kind of story d’you want me to tell you?” he said.

  “Tell me about something you’ve made,” I answered. I knew how big a thing I was asking. “Like the pram. Or something you want to make. A plan.”

  He knew how big it was too.

  “Okay,” he said, at last. “You might think this is daft. It’s a shed. It was a shed. A garden shed. And I dismantled it and used the planks to turn it into a boat. Or like a raft. And I floated it down the river—that was the only way I could think of to move it—right down the Dee, and when I got it to the workshop, I rebuilt it.”

  I waited for a while and then I asked him: “What’s it called?”

  “Shed Boat Shed,” he said.

  “So … ”

  “And,” he said. “I put a video camera in the middle of the floor while I was taking it down, revolving. So it was making a film of the all the planks coming off and you could see the allotments outside and the sky and everything, and I filmed the journey on the raft, and then I put the camera back in the middle of the floor and filmed it going back up. So when the last plank goes on the roof, it’s completely dark again and that’s the end.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Can I see it?”

  He shook his head. “It’s sold.”

  “Hey!”

  “Yeah. You can’t see it but until Tuesday, you could have driven around in it. I sold it and bought Becky a car.”

  “Did she like it?”

  “She thought it was an okay shed. She didn’t think much of the raft, and she thought it took up a lot space in the workshop when it was a shed again. She’d have a fit if she saw what’s in there now.”

  “Jesus,” I said. I had felt sorry for Becky, angry at her, jealous of her, puzzled by her. But that was the first moment I just felt nothing for her. If she didn’t get Shed Boat Shed, she wasn’t worth the bother.

  “I bet the kids loved it,” I said.

  “Dillon was too wee to know, but Ruby thought it was brilliant,” he said.

  “Have you got a copy of the
film?” I asked. It took him a long time to answer.

  “The film’s part of the piece,” he said. “It’s sold too.”

  I felt like I’d asked if I could get a painting in cream to match my couch. Felt like I’d had no business looking down my nose at Becky. Poor, miserable Becky.

  “Bed?” said Gus.

  And he carried me all the way.

  Sixteen

  Saturday, 8 October

  I had thought that I was in a love story, a sad one, with a happy ending for lucky me. Ros was selfish—broke Becky’s heart, left Kazek in the lurch. Becky was selfish—ruined her husband’s life, broke her kids’ hearts. Then I came along, not deserving what I got but holding on to it anyway.

  Then came the weekend that changed everything.

  At the end of every summer when I was a kid, my mum used to say she’d be glad to get back to work for a rest. Now, I couldn’t see what could have tired her out on a caravan holiday, because this lot that stayed at Sandsea never did a hand’s turn. Gizzy, God rot her, had forwarded the customer services line to my mobile and all day Saturday folk were phoning to say they’d run out of bog roll or couldn’t work the shower, or there was a spider, mouse, or funny smell somewhere there shouldn’t be.

  And that was on top of the actual jobs she gave me. Plus Gus was working, locked in his studio, so I had the kids too, even though I told him Gizzy would sack me on the spot if she found out. They were fine. Ruby was a big help, pulling the bed sheets off and stuffing them in a black sack for me. She made it too heavy for her to lift, so Dillon and her rolled it along the floor and shoved it out onto the grass like a pair of dung beetles. That was as helpful as Dillon got, really. Except that he happened to be looking out the window, so he was the one who spotted Kazek coming.

  It was as soon as we went into the first really tucked-away van. He must have been watching for me.

  “Mr. Kaz!” Dillon shouted.

  “Kazek!” said Ruby, looking too.

  I opened the door and stood back, shut it after him, just a quick peek to see if anyone was watching, but with all those net curtains who could say.