by Ajay Close
My little light bulb, my unhatched chick, ma wee darlin, my flesh and blood. My laggard heart was faint with love, even as the sturdy muscle pumped life through the coiling cord, giving, taking, from her to me, from me to her.
Lamb
‘Hey!’
No answer.
‘Hey!’
We still hadn’t settled on what I should call him.
I turned to find him in the doorway. ‘Where do you keep your bin bags?’
‘If it’s food it goes to the chickens, if it’s…’
‘…combustible, you burn it, I know.’ I nodded at the bottles and tins I had piled on the table. ‘But what happens to the rest?’
He gave me one of his inscrutable looks. ‘I never asked you to tidy up.’
I decided to ignore this. ‘So you’ve no black bags?’
‘Never needed them.’
‘Plastic carriers?’
‘Go on the fire.’
I grimaced. ‘God knows what that releases into the atmosphere.’
I knew what I was doing, the transgressive touch of role-reversal in the child wagging a finger at the parent. I’d seen Ruth’s kids do it, stretching the elastic until it snapped back, so yes, I was pushing for a reaction. His face had given nothing away when I’d carried my suitcase in from the car. There had been no touch, no tender word, since he’d held my hand on the hill.
‘And you’ve been pouring hot fat down the sink,’ I said.
‘What if I have?’
‘It’s taking for ever to drain.’
‘I’m in no hurry.’
Perhaps it was for the best. When I considered the alternative, I wasn’t sure I could have borne it. Being enfolded by loving arms, taken into his confidence, introduced to his friends. How could I not have been bitter, brooding on the upbringing I had missed, the little ray of sunshine I might have become?
I waved him back up to the computer. ‘Never mind. I’ll try flushing it out with boiling water.’
Some days we barely spoke, and even when he was chatty – by his standards – he told me nothing I wanted to know. How he’d met her, why he’d loved her, how he’d felt about becoming a father. So I wasn’t there for the talk, and not for his cooking either. The porridgy broth he’d ladle into a chipped bowl, the blackened sausages served between slices of supermarket white slabbed with butter. Evidently tastebuds were not genetic. The olives I’d brought on my second visit were still mouldering at the back of the fridge. The seeded rolls stuck in his teeth (he’d never heard of dental floss). The bresaola I found floating in the lavatory pan two days running until I fished it out, wrapped it in newspaper and dropped it in a bin in Auchterarder.
I had come to hate the Travelodge: the endless hours with nothing to do but think about the life I had thrown away, how lucky I’d been to have Frankie, how far I’d had to push him to make him lose faith in us. I knew coming to stay with my father was a risk. He was a bachelor, set in his ways. I was bound to be an irritation. But there was something to be gained, a shared destination that drew a little closer every day. I was getting to know him. The ridges on his fingernails. His soundless laugh. The meticulous (or controlling) streak that had plotted to meet me. I knew he wasn’t a happy man but I felt so alive in his company, and I thought – I still think – that in mine he found a taste of happiness. The world arranged itself around us so vividly. The smell of broken earth in the field behind the cottage, that hare we surprised and set racing across the hill, the first eagle I ever saw. One rainy afternoon I trimmed his hair, lopping a couple of centimetres off the back, pruning the wiry tangle of his sideburns, taking a pinch out of the thicket in each ear. It was a joy to me, holding his lobes clear of the snipping blades, turning his head between my hands, his scalp under my fingers like the surface of a new planet. The cut hair clung to his skin and the collar of his shirt, defeating all attempts to blow it away, so I fetched a tea towel and flicked at his neck as I’d seen barbers do in black-and-white movies. His deadpan expression gave me the giggles, and I flicked more recklessly, though once or twice I could see the contact stung. He bore it for another minute, then, without warning, snatched the cloth from my hands. I caught his eye, tasting metal under my tongue, the convergence we were moving towards suddenly more imminent. He got up and returned the towel to the kitchen.
So here I was, a house guest. Maybe, in the fullness of time, something more permanent. And maybe not. He had not offered me his bed. I told myself I was glad he wasn’t constrained by courtesy, as families were not, but I was aware the situation could be read differently. I slept on cushions pulled off the armchair and the two-seater and arranged on the filthy carpet. It was comforting, lying there in the fire’s dying glow, lulled by the snoring I could hear overhead, waking at five to his tread on the stair. He had just two questions. Did Frankie know where I was? And, when I said no, did Kit? Every morning he set a mug of tea on the floor by my head, released the dogs and left for the hill.
The first day I went grocery shopping in the nearest village, politely stonewalling the shopkeeper’s questions. I thought about driving down to see Lilias in hospital, but one day off couldn’t hurt. The second day I cleaned the kitchen, making room for the food I had bought, promising myself I’d go to Edinburgh tomorrow. But tomorrow’s weather was foul, a biting wind driving icy horizontal rain, so I kept the fire blazing all day and listened to the radio. By then my phone had died. I must have left the charger behind at the hotel. Who knows how much longer I’d have stayed away, had events unfolded differently? I might have driven down the next day to find Lilias hadn’t noticed my absence.
Mid-afternoon on that third, icy day I heated the griddle I’d found at the back of the kitchen cupboard and whisked up a pancake batter. When he returned the room was fugged with the smell of wood smoke and dropped scones and stewed tea. He shed his wet coat and slumped in the fireside chair while I fed the dogs. Looking up, I noticed he had something inside his sweater.
‘I found her up by the black crag,’ he said. ‘The yowe’s dead.’
It was a newborn lamb, a scrap of shivering life, treacly with afterbirth.
‘Lucky I saw her. They’re not due for another week.’
The dogs caught my excitement. He made a harsh noise and they dropped to a crouch, ears flattened.
‘Get a towel.’
I did as I was told and he rubbed at the stickiness, revealing the concave flanks covered in tight-curled fleece. It was trembling uncontrollably. I had seen lambs before, of course, from the car, exclaiming over their cute little ears, the vertical lift-off in their gambolling. But I had never been close enough to notice the baggy skin and delicately etched nose, the restless movement of the lips, like an old man whose dentures were slipping. He pinched them apart to reveal a mouth that was astonishingly clean and pink. ‘See the teeth?’ he said, and I saw the top set, their shape quite clear under the plastic-looking gum and, just behind, the pristine pink tongue. He took several newspapers from the pile, making a platform on the sheepskin rug and setting the lamb on top, nearer the warmth of the fire. When he put her down she made a high-pitched creaking sound.
I found the feeding bottle in the shed and fetched the whisky he’d requested but, instead of lacing the warmed milk, he poured a nip into our mugs of tea. The first sip seemed to bring home how tired he was. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
His face. I couldn’t get enough of it. Those flaccid earlobes, the cracks in his chapped lips, the platinum glint of whisker in the slack flesh under his jaw. I stared as I’d stared at the Mona Lisa as a teenager in the Louvre, my eyeballs raw with staring, trying to find the trick of light or love that would show me what she had seen in him. He opened his eyes. They were darker without the magnifying lenses.
I glanced at the lamb on the bed of newsprint, her shuddering ribcage and twitching haunches. She seemed to be straining for something.
‘Pick her up,’ he said.
‘I’d better not.’ But he wa
s right: there was nothing I wanted more. ‘Toxoplasmosis is all I need.’
That faint glassiness in his look whenever I baulked him.
‘How old is she?’ I asked.
‘A couple of hours.’
The tail lifted to reveal a patch of flesh as shockingly pink as her mouth. A glistening olive of shit squeezed out.
‘Will she be all right?’
‘If there’s a stillbirth. Once lambing starts I’ll not have time to footer about hand-rearing her. I’ll flay the corpse, tie its skin on.’ His mouth formed a pessimistic line. ‘Even if the yowe accepts it, after a week on the bottle they don’t always fancy the real McKay.’
‘And then?’
He looked at me.
‘I’ll feed her,’ I said.
‘What about toxoplasmosis?’
‘I’ll wear gloves.’
He laughed his soundless laugh, reaching for the whisky to pour us both another nip. I knew I should refuse because of the baby, but I didn’t want to say no to him again.
I touched the dusty neck of the whisky bottle. ‘How long have you had this?’
It was just something to say, not a real question, but he replied with a snippet of real information. ‘It only comes out at Hogmanay. For twenty years I didn’t touch it at all.’
‘Was there a high you liked better?’
‘Drugs, you mean?’
‘You lived through the Summer of Love.’
‘The sixties was the fifties round here.’
‘So the seventies was the sixties?’
His eyes reflected the firelight. ‘Not where I was.’
I leaned back against the settee. ‘If I’m supposed to guess, you’ll have to make the clues less cryptic.’
He lifted the mug and drank. I could see I wasn’t going to get anything more out of him. The lamb yawned, showing the bubblegum-pink inside of her mouth. I touched her hoof. It was smooth and faintly warm. Outside, the daylight was ebbing. Neither of us rose to switch on the lamp.
I said, ‘How did you know about Kit and me?’
‘I saw you at the bull sale.’
‘We weren’t together then.’
‘Any gowk could see what way the wind was blowing.’
My memory of the day was changed, the crowd turned away with a smirk. ‘Do you think badly of me?’
He looked up from the fire. ‘Do you think badly of yourself?’
‘Apparently I do.’
‘How’d you do it then?’
‘I wanted a child.’
‘Ah.’ It was barely a syllable, a breath.
‘The joke is, it’s not his.’
He was staring into the flames again. ‘It might be your idea of a joke, Lil, it’s not mine.’
The awful silence came from him, I merely complied. The fire spat a glowing spark onto the rug, leaving a stink of singed wool before it died. I took a nervous swig of tea, forgetting it was spiked. The whisky’s heat blazed a trail through my veins.
He picked up the poker and goaded the fire. ‘You’re nothing like her.’
‘I know.’
It’s just…’
I held my breath.
His eyes slid across my bump. ‘…it brings it all back.’
She had told me so many lies, and still this surprised me.
‘She said you didn’t stick around for the pregnancy.’
There was no mistaking the smile of a man whose appetites are roused. ‘She had me up all night many a night, even with a belly full of arms and legs.’
I looked down at my own belly, my own arms and legs. ‘Were you there when I was born?’
‘When she went into labour.’
‘In the audience?’
He looked at me blankly.
‘The King’s Theatre.’ But already I knew I was wasting my breath. Her waters breaking over the red surcoat, the ginger understudy: all a fiction. Who was I, if not the daughter of Lady Macbeth?
‘I suppose I wasn’t born in Edinburgh, either?’
‘The hospital at Crieff,’ he said.
‘But you saw me, you held me, after?’
‘No.’
There was too much feeling in the eyes I raised to his.
‘Dinnae ask.’
They had been lovers late into the pregnancy. He was with her when she went into labour. Then it was all over. The only shred of comfort I could find was that he had tried to see her later. She was the one who had slammed the door.
The lamb stirred on its bed of newsprint, struggling to stand on quivering legs. The bottle of milk was still on the floor by his chair.
‘You should feed her,’ I said.
He picked her up and dropped her in my lap. She was lighter than a cat, her fleece surprisingly harsh to the touch. I expected her to struggle, but she settled trustingly against my bump. The arc of milk I squirted across the back of my hand seemed fine – not too hot, not too cold – but what did I know? The dainty nostrils sniffed at the rubber teat, but she would not take it in her mouth.
He got up from his chair and sat beside me on the arm of the settee. ‘Like this.’ He wetted his pinkie with the milk and insinuated it between her lips. She resisted for a moment, then began to suckle, pulling at his finger, her tail whisking against my thigh. His head was very close to mine. I could smell the whisky on his breath, the fusty-leathery blend of skin and sheep and coal smoke that was his characteristic scent. I nudged the teat into position, replacing his finger the instant he withdrew. The lamb accepted the substitution. I ran my palm over the scratchy fleece. My nipples were hard, with that same tight tug in my breasts I got when Ruth fed the baby. I could feel him leaning over me, the bony shelter of his body, its heat detectable even in the charmed semicircle of the fire.
His hand settled on the back of my neck. His palm was hot and dry, his voice hoarse. ‘You should ca’ canny with folk.’
‘I do,’ I said, ‘with everyone else.’
His calloused fingers caressed my cheek. ‘You should ca’ canny with me.’
I held still, hardly breathing.
The dogs began to bark before the knock came at the door.
My heart leapt at the sound of Frankie’s voice, then shrivelled when he walked in with Kit, who seemed younger to me, though that might have been his deferential manner around my husband. Frankie looked sick, something deadened about the way the skin hung on his bones, a sorrowing heaviness in his movements. He stood in front of the settee. I looked up, still holding the lamb.
‘Is it Lilias?’
He nodded.
‘Is she OK?’
He shook his head.
Lily
Frankie arranged the funeral, put the notice in the papers, booked a bar at the Criterion Theatre for the funeral tea. I let him do it, the good Catholic boy in him rising to the occasion, while I went back to the Travelodge. I knew I should find myself a flat, but it was too much to think about. I used to be galvanised by bad news, never more efficient than with a crisis to be managed. Now I couldn’t be fagged. Nothing I or he or anyone did was going to change the central fact.
She left it too late to get treatment. The mastectomies were irrelevant, an indignity she could have been spared. The secondaries had already seeded in her liver. It wasn’t worth taking the overdose. Within a month, two at the most, the cancer would have done the job. But she could never bear to be upstaged, so she discharged herself from hospital, went home, locked the door, glammed herself up, put on some Rachmaninoff, opened a bottle of champagne, and sat down to write her last note.
Except she didn’t. She was found in that white djellaba of hers, which hadn’t been washed for weeks. No make-up, her hair lank. Frankie tried to talk me through it, telling me everyone owns their own death. However upsetting I found it, she had the right to choose. I recognised this as the healthy view, but it meant nothing to me. Suicide as dramatic gesture I could have accepted. It would, after all, have been the logical consummation of the life. But she had slipped out through the
back door, indifferent to those who lived on.
I couldn’t shake the suspicion that she knew. Rationally, there was no way she could have found out. Frankie had no idea until he phoned the farm, and even Kit was taking a wild guess on the back of a half-rumour that had made it across the strath. Still I tortured myself. She had left me in no doubt: I could have him or her, not both. What if she thought I’d made my choice? I want you to swear on the body of that thing inside you… Her last words to me of any significance. Terrible, but no more terrible than the words I’d said. I’m thinking I’ll never forgive you. These were the thoughts that looped through my head, chased by scenes from my childhood. The day she sent me back to Uncle Nellaney because I’d caught the mumps. The day I waited two hours for her outside the school gates. The day she told me I’d never be a heartbreaker so I’d better learn to cook. All my memories were tinged with blame: my blame of her, the counterpart to my lifelong conviction that she blamed me. For being insufficiently graceful, or charming, or playful, or lovable. For fetishising the real over the ideal. And for some other crime too, some failure of mine I never understood. Or maybe I’d just wished there were something else: the broken part that could be fixed, making everything all right. How I longed to make a clean cut through the knot of grievance that bound us. Or rather, to have made such a cut, to turn back the clock and have what had happened unhappen, to make her un-die, not only for my sake (but yes, for my sake too), to snatch her from that locked room and save her from the unimaginable moment when she was no one but herself.
I once caught her eye on-stage. I was ten, or maybe eleven, and living most of the year with Uncle Nellaney, which would make it Easter, or summer in one of the more bourgeois resorts. It was an accident, yet I’d seen a performance earlier in the week, I was familiar with the blocking. I chose that particular seat in the first row of the stalls, knowing that just before the interval she would walk to the front of the stage, stand on the very brink of the eleven-foot drop to the orchestra pit, and look down at where I was sitting. I can’t remember the play, whether she was in contemporary or period dress, but I remember that terrible shared glance. The audience noticed nothing, she didn’t miss a beat, but I knew I had breached the ultimate taboo. A tremendous wave of heat passed through my skinny frame. My cotton vest was soaked, my cheeks ablaze, while my consciousness (my soul, Frankie would say) left my body to share the space behind my mother’s panstick mask. For a split-second I felt what it was to be Lilias, acting over that vertiginous drop, her nerves strung so tight that the stale air of the auditorium tasted thin and sharp and the actors’ words reached her ears through a high-pitched whine. This was what she called being alive. Afterwards, in her dressing room, she insisted she hadn’t seen me and I didn’t press the point because I knew I’d been privileged to experience it, even as I prayed with all my skinny girl’s soul for it never to happen again.
