While You Sleep

by Stephanie Merritt

  ‘Why didn’t the parents raise the alarm?’ Zoe sat upright, indignant. ‘How did they not notice their kids were out all night?’

  ‘The boys snuck out after everyone was in bed, apparently. Though in Robbie’s case, I’m not surprised no one noticed. His mother’s dead and his dad’s a lorry driver, he was away working on the mainland. Robbie was at home with his sister. She says she had no idea he’d left the house until the next morning.’

  ‘So people secretly think he pushed his friend over the cliff?’

  ‘Not so secretly, in a lot of cases. It seemed the police did too, for a while, but there was no evidence. Iain’s family moved away soon after, though, and a couple of other families moved their children out of the village school. Reading between the lines, I think that’s what did for the old teacher – the one I replaced. She couldn’t cope with the thought that one of her pupils might be a murderer and no one would ever be certain.’ He leaned forward and poked the fire; a flurry of sparks erupted and vanished. ‘But I think there’s just as many in the village really believe it was the curse of the McBride house. Another vanished boy, on the site of a famous child murder. It got a lot of attention in the Scottish papers and of course they dug up the old story – exactly what the islanders didn’t want.’

  ‘God. No wonder Mick’s so touchy.’ She fell silent, wrapped in her own thoughts.

  ‘He was so pleased you hadn’t heard about it. He wanted to keep it that way. I’m sorry – it’s a horrible story,’ Edward said. Zoe kept her eyes fixed on the floor. She knew he had seen her flinch. ‘I shouldn’t have told you. Even if you don’t believe in all that, it’s still …’ He tailed off, uncertain.

  ‘All what?’

  ‘Well. Ghosts. Curses.’

  She laughed, to show her disdain, but it sounded too loud in the small room. ‘I don’t mind a ghost story. It’s the living you have to be afraid of.’ She stopped, seeing his expression, hoping she didn’t sound paranoid. ‘I mean – when you look at the news, right? The stuff that goes on.’

  He nodded. ‘True. There’s enough evil in the world without inventing it. I hope it won’t frighten you away, though,’ he added, glancing up shyly, a half-question in his eyes.

  She looked at him, disconcerted; once more her awareness of the age gap that separated them was scrambling the signals. She felt herself flush with confusion. How mortifying it would be to respond as if she were flattered, only to find his concern was whether he would upset Mick; the embarrassment that would persist between them for the rest of her stay would be unbearable. In a place this size she could not risk having to avoid someone. Nor would it be smart to make herself a bigger target for village gossip: the American cougar. Even if he were flirting, what could come of it? She was still technically married, though she doubted that was weighing on Dan’s conscience much, back home. And really, who could blame him, the way she had been this past year?

  ‘It would take something genuinely terrifying to drive me away,’ she said firmly. ‘Like blocked drains.’

  He laughed, but she could not help noticing the way he dropped his gaze back to his mug, as if unsure whether he had been rebuffed. They sat in silence, listening to the whispering of the fire. The conversation seemed to have petered out now they had exhausted the subject of the McBride house. She wanted to ask him more about himself, this curious life he had chosen, but was afraid it would look like she was prying; beyond that, she thought, what did they have in common, she and this boy, besides the fact that they were outsiders here, both running away – the very thing neither wished to talk about?

  The rain had eased its assault on the window and through the narrow pane to her left she made out streaks of brightness struggling to break through the heaving clouds, though dusk was approaching. She shifted in her seat as a prelude to leaving, when her eye fell on the violin case in the corner.

  ‘That song you played last night,’ she said. ‘The haunting one – what was it called?’

  ‘They’re all haunting,’ he said, twisting to look at her with a smile, seeming grateful that the silence had been broken. ‘It’s the local speciality. Any more clues?’

  ‘It was right before you took your break. Before we went out for a smoke.’

  ‘Oh, you mean “Ailein Duinn”?’ He hummed a few bars and she nodded, hard. ‘Yes, that one always gets to people. Especially the way Kaye sings it. It’s a lament for a sea captain who was drowned, supposedly composed by his fiancée. She went mad with grief and drowned herself too, a few months later. So the legend goes. The lyrics are a bit grisly, though.’ He hesitated, as if he wanted to protect her from any more unpleasantness.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘She sings of how she wants to go to him in the sea. It ends by saying she wants to drink his heart’s blood after he’s drowned.’

  Zoe tried to recall how it was to feel that kind of desperate passion for someone, the kind that draws you willingly to your destruction after them. She had been wildly in love with Dan at the beginning, or thought she had, which perhaps amounted to the same thing, but when she tried to remember the sensation it was as if she were remembering a movie she had seen long ago, or a second-hand anecdote. Now there was only Caleb. ‘Eat you up, I love you so,’ she used to whisper into his neck when he was smaller, clean and powdery after his bath, his hair damp; she would nuzzle closer, pretending to chomp his soft, soft skin, until he squealed with delight and wriggled away. Sometimes she felt the breath crushed out of her by that desire to enfold him, take him back into the protection of her body where she could keep him safe. But he had grown too big for that game; he had learned to push her away.

  ‘The older folk get very emotional about that song,’ Edward continued. ‘We have to play it every time. I suppose it’s not so long since every family on the island knew what it was to lose someone to the sea.’

  It sounded like the story of Ailsa McBride. Had she too gone mad with grief for her drowned husband, and walked into the sea to join him, first killing her son, perhaps out of some deranged maternal instinct not to leave him alone? But nothing in Charles’s account so far had suggested that Ailsa’s ‘madness’ was any more than malicious gossip about a woman who refused to surrender her independence to other people’s expectations. Once more Zoe found herself wondering what had really happened to Ailsa and her son.

  ‘Will you play it for me?’

  He looked surprised. ‘Now?’

  She shrugged, gesturing to the sky. ‘Before I go.’

  ‘I can’t sing it,’ he said, with a hint of alarm. ‘It’s not really the same without Kaye.’

  ‘I’d like to hear the music.’ She smiled encouragement and, after a brief hesitation, he sprang up from the floor in one easy bound.

  She watched him tuning the violin, plucking each string with his head cocked, as if listening for invisible echoes only he could hear. In the corners, the shadows lengthened. If that song had been stuck in her head last night, to the point where she had imagined hearing it in the house, there was no sense in reminding herself of it, only to have it turning round and round once more as she tried to sleep. But she figured that perhaps hearing him play it in that drab but oddly cosy little room might rid it of any associations with last night’s strange dreams and sleeplessness; a kind of aversion therapy. If it came to her again in the night she could think of the music without the words, and picture the intensity of Edward’s expression as he played with his eyes closed, lashes resting on his cheeks, lips pressed firm in concentration.

  As soon as he struck up the first bars, she realised that she had made a mistake. Dusk fell as if suddenly across the room; the last hopeful streaks of light in the sky obscured by fast-moving clouds. The violin’s mournful notes trembled on the air. Strangely, she found that she knew the words; she had the curious sense that she could hear them quite clearly, though silently, inside her head, as if it were an old familiar tune echoing in her memory – but how could she hear the words so intimately when she
had no knowledge of that ancient, guttural language? She wanted to ask him to stop, but the song filled her mind so entirely that there was no room left for other words; she could not form the sounds. Behind her breastbone she felt a pressure building, tightening her throat, a great wave of grief rising up; all the grief she had ever known and buried, gathering force like a wall of black water called into flood tide by the song, threatening to overwhelm her while he went on playing, his eyes shut, oblivious to the danger; she must escape the music or the weight of it would burst her defences and drown her—

  With one mighty effort of will, she wrenched herself up from the sofa and ran from the room, snatching up her jacket on the way out, wrestling with the bike in the passageway, trying to ram it backwards through the door as he followed, bow in hand, his face taut with alarm.

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  But she could only shake her head, teeth clenched; she could still hear the song, yearning and wistful, and her only thought was to get away, as if it were not in her mind now but somewhere in the cottage, so that she might be able to outrun it. He tried to take hold of the handlebars, protesting about the weather and the dark, but she did not hear it, she knew only that she had to get out before she lost control in front of him; yanking the bike from his grasp, she blundered through the schoolyard to the gate, swung herself on to the saddle and rode away down the green without looking back, her plastic bag of shopping smacking hard against her shin, hair whipping in her eyes, her open jacket snapping in the wind.

  A mile or so out of the village she found herself slowing as the road began to climb an incline; the street lamps had ended and dusk was closing in fast over the moorland, the daylight all but dissolved, though it could not be much past four. She brought the bike to a stop, aware, as she returned to herself, of the ragged breath tearing at her chest, the blood pounding in her temples. She zipped her jacket up to the neck – cursing at leaving her scarf behind in her haste – and cast a glance around her. The horizon had dwindled to a pale streak above the dark spine of hills. She could hardly make out the line of the road as it rose. The bike was fitted with lights but she had been in such a hurry to leave the shop that she had not waited to check the batteries; now she flicked the switch on the headlight to reveal a wavering beam that did little to cut through the shadows ahead. At least the song in her head had stopped. Rain spiked her face as she strained to listen, relieved to find she could hear nothing now but the cries of seabirds and the low moan of the wind through heather.

  Perhaps she should call Mick and ask him to come out and find her in the Land Rover. It would be folly to try and continue along an unfamiliar road through moorland in the falling dark on a bike with poor lights, even if another downpour held off. Common sense told her so unequivocally; weighed against it was her pride, and the embarrassment of her emotional outburst, the way she had fled from the School House like someone in the throes of a breakdown. What must he think of her, the young teacher? Neurotic middle-aged woman, she supposed; it would be the last time she was likely to be invited there for a bottle of wine, anyway, which was probably for the best.

  She peered up at the sky. She had come here to learn how to be alone, not to rely on men for company or to ferry her around; she must not crumble at the first hint of difficulty. That was what Dan expected her to do, and so she must prove him wrong. The house was not even five miles away, and a faint light clung to the horizon; from what she could recall, the road ran straight across the moors to the cove. Setting her face into the drizzle, she pointed the bike up the hill, stood on the pedals and picked up her pace, this time feeling every twinge in her muscles without the spike of adrenaline that fear had lent her. Fear of what, though? Nothing she could quite name. Fear of betraying herself, was the closest she could come to defining the panic that had driven her from Edward’s room.

  A brief sense of triumph washed through her as she crested the hill, only to ebb away at the sight of a fork in the road up ahead. She did not remember this parting of the ways from her drive earlier with Mick, and neither branch had a signpost. The road that veered away to the left was narrower, less frequented, and since she could not recall a turning, she made the decision to take the right-hand fork, which seemed a continuation of the main road. There was no sign of any traffic. Long needles of rain fell harder across the cone of light from her headlamp; the wind bit colder out here and her fingers numbed around the slick rubber grips of the handlebars. Fifteen minutes of unchanging scenery passed: undulating hills, dark heather, a pale ribbon of road unspooling ahead, edged by occasional boulders. Her legs began to ache and the earlier alarm flickered in her chest. Finally, defeated, she planted her feet and reached inside her jacket for her phone to call Mick, but when she swiped the screen, shielding it from raindrops, she saw that there was no signal. She should have guessed, out here. No choice, then, but to press on.

  But as she stood reluctantly on the pedals, she caught sight of a figure up ahead in the distance, walking with a purposeful stride along the left-hand verge at the side of the road, away from her. For an instant, her heart clutched in fear – there was no one else around for miles – but as she peered harder, she felt certain it was a woman, wrapped in a long all-weather coat. One of these hardy crofters who barely noticed the rain, she supposed; out gathering peat or whatever people did up here.

  ‘Hello!’ she called, but she was too far away and the wind too loud for the woman to hear. Zoe paused to re-tie her wet hair back from her face and redoubled her efforts to catch up, rising out of the saddle, crouching forward, the bottle of wine in the shopping bag bruising her legs with each movement as she pumped towards the brow of the next incline. She tried shouting again but the figure did not turn around before disappearing over the hill and Zoe was too short of breath to put more effort into it. She would overtake her on the downward slope, she thought, pushing onwards, though it seemed the woman must be walking unusually fast. Zoe breasted the hill and eased up on the pedals, coasting a little as gravity took over, straining her eyes to see the woman, expecting to draw level with her at any moment. But the road was empty; there was only the black ridge of more hills ahead.

  She called out a third time, but heard no answer. Blinking hard, she wiped the rain from her eyes with the heel of her hand. She had not imagined it; that was impossible. She had seen her, a person walking up ahead, perhaps fifty, sixty yards away. The woman could not have vanished – unless she had left the road and taken a path across the moor, but surely she would have heard Zoe shout. It made no sense.

  The rain fell harder; a heavy, vegetable smell of wet earth rose from the moorland to either side. Zoe pressed the inside of her wrist against her forehead, trying to think – the worst she could do would be to waste time here, indecisive and exposed. If Dan could see her now, he would feel entirely vindicated. Before she had left, when he still thought there was a chance he could change her mind, he had insisted, over and over, that she would not be able to cope on her own, but she understood now that this was part of his strategy, one of the ways he had subtly undermined her independence over the years. When she now understood that it was he who could not cope with her finding the determination to make her own decisions, to steer her life without deferring to his judgement and his choices. If it weren’t for Caleb, she would have broken away much sooner, she told herself, and the thought made her immediately uncomfortable. She had been repeating this for months, but it had taken on the shape of a comforting reassurance that she knew, deep down, to be false. She was not even sure that she had left him this time. For now they were both playing along with the idea that this was a temporary departure, a rebellion she had to get out of her system.

  The bike’s front light flickered and died. Hot tears of self-pity pricked the corners of her eyes; she knuckled them away and squinted into the dark. Rainwater invaded the collar of her jacket in rivulets; she could no longer feel her fingers or feet. But the faint line of the road continued to spool out ahead. The only t
hing was to keep going. That woman must have been on her way somewhere; if Zoe followed the road, she would surely find a cottage or croft. She mounted the saddle and pushed forward a few shaky yards, riding almost blind, when she heard the sound of a car engine in the distance and turned to see two watery discs of light approaching through the downpour.

  The Land Rover pulled up alongside her with the window open, Mick leaning across.

  ‘There you are. God Almighty.’ He jumped out with the engine running and flung open the back doors. ‘Give me the bike. Get in out of the rain.’ His tone was brusque.

  She took the bag, bending her freezing fingers around the handles, and allowed him to lift the bike into the back while she slumped like a sodden towel into the passenger seat, almost crying with relief and shame.

  ‘What were you thinking?’ Mick said, slamming his door. The wipers beat a frantic rhythm but the windscreen remained a sheet of water. ‘You don’t know the road and you’ve no lights – you’ll break your neck out here. Or get pneumonia, one or the other. Why didn’t you call me?’

  ‘I didn’t want to bother you.’

  ‘It’s no bother, I told you. Better that than have you lying in a ditch all night with a broken neck.’ He breathed hard, trying to compose himself. ‘It’s damned lucky Ed called me. He said you’d gone haring off on your own.’ He hesitated. ‘He thought you might be a bit distressed.’

  ‘I’m fine. I was just in a hurry to get home.’ Zoe bristled. He was speaking angrily because he was relieved that no harm had come to her, the way she had screamed at Caleb more than once when he had run off out of sight at a park or a mall; rationally she knew this, but she could not quell the resentment knotting at the base of her throat, the same resentment she had been directing towards Dan a few minutes ago. She had crossed the Atlantic, and still she was surrounded by men who thought it was their job to supervise her. She wanted to tell Mick, slowly and clearly, that she was an adult; he was responsible for the house, no more than that, certainly not for her choices. And Edward was no better, sending Mick after her. He said he had a car; if he was so worried, why hadn’t he come himself? But she already knew the answer to that: he was afraid he had upset her, and would not have understood why.