by Ajay Close
Born in Sheffield, Ajay Close worked as a newspaper journalist, winning several awards, before becoming a full-time author and playwright. Her first novel, Official and Doubtful, was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her fourth, A Petrol Scented Spring, was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Her play, The Keekin Gless, was staged at Perth Theatre. The Sma Room Séance toured east Scotland and was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe.
By the same author
A Petrol Scented Spring
Official and Doubtful
Forspoken
Trust
First published in Great Britain
Sandstone Press Ltd
Dochcarty Road
Dingwall
Ross-shire
IV15 9UG
Scotland
www.sandstonepress.com
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored or transmitted in any form without the express
written permission of the publisher.
© Ajay Close ٢٠١٧
Editor: Moira Forsyth
The moral right of Ajay Close to be recognised as the
author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.
The publisher acknowledges subsidy from Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.
ISBN: 978-1-910985-42-7
ISBNe: 978-1-910985-43-4
Cover design by Brill Design
Ebook compilation by Iolaire Typography Ltd, Newtonmore
Contents
Title Page
PART I
Cheese
Soap
1972
Wink
Sperm
Brogues
Cat
1972
Card
Doctor
Trunk
1972
Barley
Bull
Bath
Poker
1972
Loan
Baby
Banana
Misdial
1972
Kilt
Shout
Test
PART II
Nudge
Champagne
Soup
Fungus
Blood
1972
Cow
Sheep
Bandage
1972
Bean
Lamb
Lily
1973
Gun
Lanterns
Acknowledgements
For Michael Lynch
There is the land, and the sky. Squares of red earth broken by the plough, bleached fields of winter grass and, from horizon to horizon, the milky blue. The Romans laid this road. For a few miles here it serves as a farm track, before cutting through the hills on its way south towards England. The odd hiker can be seen as late as November, but by now the strath is deserted. This is the slack time in farming, calving and lambing both months away. The rat holes in the grainstore have been patched, the fences mended, the beech hedges cut down to boxes of black twigs whose ruthless planes, up close, are mostly air. A fitful wind rattles the last rusty leaves, which are sapless and brittle but still brilliant with life, like the rest of this landscape, at once muted and vivid in the cold sunshine.
He breaks the shotgun and takes two cartridges from his coat pocket, his face gaining the narrowed look it wears when he is absorbed in any task. Each cartridge slots into its chamber, the gun snaps together. A familiar excitement stirs within her, not exactly pleasure, not quite unease.
The baby kicks in her belly. She presses a hand to the spot. He notices, the way he notices everything, not remarking on it, salting the knowledge away. A wind-stunted blackthorn has grown out of the drystone wall. The lichen on its branches is the same diluted shade of green as the dress she bought to wear at her wedding. Antique silk crêpe de Chine, reeking of mothballs even after a week hung in front of an open window. She takes a deep breath to clear her nostrils of the memory. A hint of leaf mould carries from the coppice wood the locals call the deil’s grun. Sun reflects white from the metalled road, a faint warmth on her face snatched away by the wind.
She follows him into the field, treading carefully. It will be weeks before the ground thaws. When he offers her the gun she laughs, but it’s part of the game to pretend she might take it. Their eyes lock. He has this way of stopping the world, so her breathing slows and the blood runs backwards in her veins. He looks up at the sky and she feels her own face lift as if an invisible cord stretched between them.
‘I’m not going to shoot a buzzard,’ she says.
‘I’m not asking you to.’
‘What then?’
He nods down the slope.
A fox trots along the bottom of the field. Only the second she has seen in the flesh, and the first was a shadow slinking across the road, the discs of its eyes caught in a car’s headlights. The same resistant glitter she sees in him sometimes. Aren’t foxes supposed to be red? This one is a startling cinnamon against the wind-silvered grass. She tells herself the farm is part of its territory, he knew it would be here, and still she half believes he has conjured it out of thin air.
He is watching her with those blue eyes that at anything further than kissing distance seem jet black. The wind worries at the hair not covered by his cap. He hasn’t bathed since yesterday, or shaved. Stubble covers his neck and cheeks, scratching at her across the air. Though he’s well-wrapped against the cold, with a couple of jumpers under his army surplus greatcoat, she can trace the outline of his body. She knows how the tendon twists over his forearm, the play of muscle under his sleeve. He leans towards her, or perhaps she moves. The power shifts. For a moment she leaves her own body and inhabits his suspense, feels the sensual weight of whatever she is about to do next.
The shotgun seems heavier than when she was aiming at the clays.
‘What if I miss?’
‘You won’t.’
He smiles as he always smiles when she submits to his will, and she feels, as she always feels at this smile, simultaneously titillated and detached. Only playing. She lifts the gun to her shoulder the way he has taught her, nestling into the cheek plate, lining up the sights, noting the movement of the barrels between her inward and outward breaths. Silently she urges the animal to run. Not that it’ll make any difference, she’ll hit it anyway. It’s like perfect pitch, a knack so innate it doesn’t feel like a skill. And to think she might have lived her whole life never guessing it was inside her. Her quarry changes course, moving uphill. She slides her finger off the trigger and looks at him, so accustomed to the tension between them that the instant it slackens she knows something is wrong.
He takes back the gun. She turns to see a figure coming down off the ridge. His flannel trousers are streaked with mud. His camel cashmere coat, so smart on the streets of Edinburgh, looks ridiculous here. Fantasy has been her companion through these idle months but she has never let herself imagine this most predictable of encounters and now it is upon her, she feels – what? Dread in the pit of her stomach, a fizz of excitement in her blood. A steely thread of triumph. She closes her eyes. When she opens them again he is near enough to be heard should he choose to speak, moving towards them with a rapid, determined stride. And yet she knows: all things being equal, he would rather not. She has left him no choice. Now that she has seen him it is impossible to look away, but her senses remain attuned to the boy at her side, the loose-limbed insult of his stance, the loaded gun balanced in his hand. What is he doing? He has told her countless times, always point the barrel at the ground.
‘If you’d told me you were coming,’ she says, ‘I’d have put on some lipstick.’
He ignores her, his eyes on the boy. In that clipped but ringing voice that still lifts the hairs on her neck, he says, ‘I want a word with you.’
‘Don’t,’ she breathes.
Sunlight catches the reddish glints in his hair and the granular skin that has always reminded her of sandstone. She thought of him, and by extension all men, as mineral. Until the boy, who is so unignorably animal.
‘You like pregnant girls, do you? Knowing somebody else has already done the business? Sounds a bit bloody queer to me.’
‘Please, Brod.’ But she is to be allowed no say in this. There is no avoiding what is going to happen. It will follow its own course. That is part of her punishment.
The boy’s hand tightens around the gun. The twitch of his lips is almost a smirk. ‘If you’re wanting a square go, I’m a wee bit busy the now.’
‘You think this is a joke?’
His sandy neck is flushed, a bad sign. She has never seen anyone look at him with the challenge that glitters in the boy’s eyes. The hostility between them feels oddly intimate. Strangers as they are, they share an understanding. She is at once the pretext for this confrontation and entirely beside the point.
When the wind drops, the distance between the three of them seems to shrink. She can smell his aftershave and hear the faint rasp in his breath. The boy does not seem to be breathing at all. Every muscle in his body is tensed. Unnoticed, the fox slips under the hedge on the far side of the field.
Moving to put herself between them, she stumbles on the frozen ground. The boy reaches out to steady her, and the aggression in Brod’s face gives way to something like pain. At last he looks at her. ‘Was it mine?’ he says, as if the child she carries is dead, or dead to him. She was so certain he loved her, as certain as she has been for the past few months that he feels nothing. Once she would have risen to the challenge, licked her lips, sparkled her eyes, and won him back. She could still do it, even eight-and-a-half months gone – and what then: he loves her, until he’s sure of her again? A wave of revulsion washes through her. It seems to come from her belly, as if kicked up by the child in outrage at his question. Was it mine?
‘If you can ask that, you never knew me.’
‘And he knows you, does he, your farm boy?’
She will never understand why she says it: ‘With him I’m my real self.’
Later she will tell the police no one could have anticipated what happened next, but just beforehand she has a sort of presentiment. A blind lowers over her brain and, when it lifts again, though their surroundings are unchanged, the world is inside out. Everything that follows is already foretold. That crow flapping into flight. The sparkle of a car windscreen on the far side of the strath. The rabbit trapped by a stoat in the wood, its screams spreading like a stain through the air. The noise goes on and on. It’s the boy who breaks the spell, wrapping his free arm around her and pulling her towards him so the soft bulk of her bumps against his bone and sinew. His body heat always makes her shiver, with or without clothes. Brod makes a grab for the gun. It happens with the terrible slowness of all irreversible events, yet there is no time at all between the shiver and the struggle and her scream and the flash and the shotgun’s deafening blast.
PART I
I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
Macbeth, William Shakespeare
Cheese
Frankie split the bulb of garlic and I heard the papery skin strip from the clove, the creaking victory of the crusher, the percussive spitting of hot oil. A clatter as the lid settled on the pan. I was zesting lemons, a job I hate: trying to separate peel from pith when really it’s all one. The grater made its grating noise. His knife sawed back and forth over the wooden board. The rosemary twigs splintered. The syboes, shorn of their whiskers, bled a little colourless juice. That complaining floorboard as he crossed to the stove. I don’t use a lemon-squeezer, having a strong grip. A twisting column of bitterness splashed from my hand to the bowl. The saucepan lid clattered again, his spoon clanking as he drove it around the pan. I found the carton of cream pushed to the back of the fridge, a rubber thunk as the door slammed shut. The university clock struck noon, making it nearly an hour since we had last spoken.
‘Did you get the pecorino?’ I asked.
He didn’t look up.
We used to enjoy cooking together. The gentle hysteria of would-it-be-ready? Grumbling affectionately about our guests.
‘I said…’
‘I thought you were getting it.’
‘It was on your list.’
‘You were in the offie. You only had to go next door.’
‘And then we’d have two lots, if you’d done what you were supposed to.’
From simple enquiry to sniper fire in seventeen seconds. I didn’t want to. I didn’t think he wanted to, not really. And yet somehow we couldn’t resist. When had we become this sort of couple? Ten years before we’d never had these conversations. We prepared elaborate meals for two to music, and slow-danced around the kitchen, the windows fogging with the steam of dishes we didn’t always get round to eating before one of us dragged the other into bed. We argued, if we argued at all, about Dave Eggers versus Zadie Smith, the Arctic Monkeys versus the Strokes, Lindt versus Green & Blacks, not how many months had passed since he last squirted bleach down the loo, or why I rode the clutch in the BMW.
I scooped up the car keys. ‘I’ll go.’
‘What d’you need the car for? They sell it in the corner shop.’
I stared at him for a moment, then put the keys in my pocket. ‘Did you get everything else?’
‘Aye.’
‘Rocket? Sour cream?’
‘Back off, Freya.’
The supermarket was clogged with families buying twice what they needed to get another fifty per cent free. Suitcase-sized cartons of cereal, jeroboams of milk, cellophane pillowcases stuffed with crisps. When I got home our neighbour’s new Barbarian was double-parked outside. She found it trickier than the Merc to get into tight spaces. The wind had changed direction. Mostly our corner of Glasgow reeked of diesel and fresh paint, but that day I could smell the farmers muck-spreading the Renfrewshire fields.
Inside, the house was pungent with garlic and rosemary. Frankie was sitting at the kitchen table. I dropped the bag on the newspaper he was reading.
‘Pasteurised pecorino.’
He pushed the cheese to one side and turned the page.
‘Are you all done then?’ I asked. The worktop was buried in potato peelings, cauliflower leaves, capsicum seeds, torn cellophane.
‘I’m taking five minutes.’
‘You know those kids get cranky if they eat too late.’
‘I told you, back off.’
Back off was a code phrase, a way of pushing the red button. Too often I exploded, allowing him to start the war while seeming to want to avoid one. (All our rows were fought as if adjudicated by a fair, yet foolable third party.) But there wasn’t time for a fight that day: Kenny and Ruth were coming to lunch. It would be a relief to feign harmony for a couple of hours. There was even a chance that, by the time they left, we’d have forgotten why we were fighting and could laugh about our
friends’ latest foibles over the clearing-up. We tended to notice the same things. He knew the paths my thoughts would take, just as I had a feel for the chain of memory and association in his head. For years this had been a source of jokes, but recently we had been exploring the darker side of marital telepathy.
He cocked his head. ‘Was that the door?’
‘They won’t be here till one.’
‘You said the back of twelve.’
‘Ruth rang to say could we make it later.’
‘And you didn’t bother to tell me?’
I switched on the electric whisk. For the next few minutes conversation was impossible. When the cream was standing in soft peaks, I said, ‘It slipped my mind.’
He put four tomatoes in a bowl.
‘There’s a private clinic,’ he picked up the kettle and poured boiling water over them. Tendrils of steam rose into the air. ‘In Perthshire.’
We both knew it had to happen, although neither of us had raised the possibility until now. It was a solution – perhaps – but also irrevocable acknowledgement of The Problem.
‘They get results,’ he said.
‘By cherry-picking their customers.’
‘So if they take us we’ll know we’re in with a chance.’
Silently the tomatoes split their skins. I lifted the pan lid and checked the pearly mush of garlic and onions.
‘This is about both of us, Freya.’
I knew what he meant, and knew he was claiming the moral high ground by not saying it.
We had reached that stage of material comfort where the only thing that mattered was the thing we could not have. And since we could not have it, we could not allude to it. And since we could not allude to it, it was all we talked about, but in ways we couldn’t anticipate until the words jumped out of our mouths. Everything meant something else. We weren’t just having friends to Saturday lunch, we were having them to lunch so they could bring their children, so Frankie could play at being a dad for the afternoon. A bittersweet pleasure. He hadn’t forgotten to buy the pecorino: the Frankie who feared he’d never be more than a make-believe dad was registering his protest at the dietary hoops I was putting myself through, the pointless disruption of our old easy routine. And there was an extra layer of meaning, apparent only to me. Should I ever fulfil his heart’s desire and bear him a couple of children, he would do his best, but he couldn’t promise to notice when their nappies needed changing. He might forget to pick them up from nursery the odd day, or take them somewhere without a bottle, or leave them strapped in their car seats in a heat wave with all the windows closed. His fathering would have much in common with his style of partnering. He would love his offspring dearly, and play with them – when he wasn’t distracted by work – and his sense of who he was would change forever, but the responsibility would all be mine. Just thinking about it made my blood pressure soar as if I were already half-dead with sleepless nights. So it was no trivial oversight to suggest I patronise a deli that sold listeria in the guise of unpasteurised cheese. Why would he do it? The only answer I could come up with was that he was no less angry with me.
