by Ajay Close
I turned from the view and followed my father through the gate into the field. He broke the gun and took two cartridges from his coat pocket, his face gaining that narrowed look it wore when he was absorbed in any task. When he offered me the gun I took it, raising it to my shoulder, nestling in to the cheek-plate as I’d seen him do, noting the movement of the barrels between my inward and outward breaths. He had taught Lilias to shoot. Apparently she was a natural. Odd that she’d never boasted of it. A pearl-handled revolver tucked in a black-lace garter would have been just her style.
I gave back the shotgun and he squinted down the sights, aiming at nothing I could make out. Only when I saw his finger on the trigger did it occur to me he might actually fire it with me beside him, six months pregnant.
‘Not while I’m standing next to you.’
‘Wheesht,’ he hissed.
A fox was trotting along the bottom of the field. I put my hand on his arm. He lowered the gun and turned to me with a look on his face I can only describe as spooked.
‘What’s the matter?’
Sunlight glinted off the metal legs of his glasses. The wind teased his hair. I was close enough to see the odd wiry strand still grew jet-black.
‘I was here with your mother,’ he said.
‘When?’
He looked at me as if I knew. ‘The day you were born.’
I was touched that he had brought me here, that he cared enough to sense I’d want to come.
‘What happened?’
A pointless question, I thought, even as I asked it. Her waters broke, he took her to hospital. What always happens.
‘He comes down off the ridge, city shoes and his fancy coat. I ken who he is as soon as I see him—’
I had no idea what he was talking about.
‘He’s wanting a fight. He doesn’t care about her, but he’s not going to have a teuchter have one over him. A shortarse, big head, older than I thought, not as fit as he thinks he is. He’s peched from the walk. He stops up there, looking down on us.’
I got the picture. It was pretty much as I’d surmised: Lilias up to her old tricks, a shouting match, a punch or two thrown.
His glance dropped to the gun.
‘It was my mother’s,’ he said. ‘She got it back. After.’
It was then I asked the question that had been at the back of my mind ever since I first visited Shepherd’s Cottage.
‘Is it usual to keep a shotgun on top of the wardrobe?’
‘It’s out of the way. If the police call in.’
‘And if they find it?’
A wagtail landed on the ground nearby.
‘I go back to jail.’
The world slipped its axis, the ground tipping beneath me.
He released a long, audible breath. ‘Now you know.’
‘Who was he?’
He jerked his head dismissively. ‘He was a cunt. He grabs a loaded gun, my finger’s stuck in the trigger guard…’ His mouth worked soundlessly. ‘He could have killed both of you—’
I didn’t doubt his account. It was the corollary I could hardly believe. My mother, the femme fatale, the drama queen, had rewritten history to deny herself the most sensational role of her life. Small wonder she had treated herself to a consolatory fable. I realised then I had underestimated her, thinking she was oblivious to the irony of Lady Macbeth. A coded admission? Or just a gallows joke?
‘The shock kicked off her contractions. I had to get her to Crieff in the back of the Land Rover. She was hysterical, I couldnae manage them both.’ His eyes glittered. ‘By the time I got back he was dead.’
‘And she blamed you.’
‘She blamed me, aye, but she couldnae forgive herself.’
‘It didn’t stop her sleeping around,’ I said.
‘I’m not talking about sex. It was love she had the problem with. She couldnae trust herself to be loved, you know that—’
I did, but I had never put the knowledge into words.
‘And a man died for it. Two men, maybe – the man I was then, anyroad.’ His eyes showed a sudden suspicion. ‘This is the first you’ve heard of it?’
‘Yes.’
‘She never said?’
‘No.’
She must have been tempted. Your father killed a man. There was a handy finality to it. A bad dad, nothing more to be said. Was she protecting me with her silence all those years, making sure I had someone to love? I might not have needed him so much if she’d let me love her. But she didn’t believe in the kind of love that was there day in, day out, through bad reviews and three-quarters-empty houses, through boredom, and getting old, and cancer. I’ll never forgive you. I’d meant it when I said it. It seemed so long ago now. I could remember being angry with her, but the feeling itself was gone.
‘So you went to see her when you got out of jail?’
‘She was in a play in Aberdeen. My mother saw it in the paper. I’d not had a word from her in twenty years, but I thought if she saw me, if I could talk to her and…’ and hold her, he meant. ‘I thought I could convince her.’
‘Maybe you could have,’ I said, ‘maybe that’s why she wouldn’t let you in.’
He broke the gun and put the cartridges back in his pocket. He was ready to move on, but there was something else I wanted to ask. He’d spent twenty years in prison, which meant he’d been out for another twenty.
‘Why didn’t you get in touch with me?’
His smile was sheepish. ‘I couldn’t find you. I’ve only just got on the Internet.’
He had found the means to track us down just as the cancer had dragged her out of reach.
‘I should have tried to persuade her to see you,’ I said.
He shook his head.
‘I’m not saying I could have swung it, but I should have tried.’
‘Ach,’ his eyes connected with mine, ‘I got more than I bargained for, anyroad.’
That was when it happened.
I gasped and clutched my belly. He stared at me with the same spooked expression he’d worn when he saw the fox.
I laughed and took him by the wrist, placing his hand over the spot so he, too, felt it. A fluttering deep inside me, the swimmer in her viscid pool.
‘It’s OK, Dad.’
His smile was shaky. ‘She used to…’ he had to swallow to get the words out ‘…I used to do this with you.’
Lanterns
It was one of those nights when sirens shriek along Great Western Road and tomcats yowl in tenement back courts. I hadn’t been home since the funeral (if Glasgow was still my home), but it made sense to see out the last weeks of pregnancy ten minutes from a hospital. I locked the car and walked to the gate. Frankie hadn’t drawn the blind. Under the protection of a broken street lamp, I stood and watched the scene inside.
Ruth was at the sink, washing utensils as soon as the cooks put them down. Torcuil, tied into my blue-and-white striped apron, was stirring something in a pan. Under Frankie’s supervision, Meaghan was feeding oranges into the juicer. Kenny was chopping syboes at alarming speed with the cleaver I liked to keep out of harm’s way in the bottom drawer. Every so often he crossed to the stove, knocking his head on the Mexican lampshade. The third time, he turned it into a gag, ducking the shade on the ouward journey, only to blunder into it on his way back. For a few seconds Ruth disappeared from view, returning with her red-faced baby daughter. Frankie took her. Surprise showed on everyone’s faces. Evidently the crying had stopped. Ruth bowed to him. The baby in my belly did her little flip. Kenny looked up and waved through the window.
The children were marginally less like themselves once I’d entered the house, barely smiling at my lame joke about them teaching their dad and Frankie to cook. Although Ruth and Kenny hid it better, they too seemed uneasy. Coded glances passed across the table. I gathered a surprise would be sprung after dinner. A kitten to find sitting on my daughter’s face? A nippy little dog to sever a couple of fingers? I heard my mother’s voice in my inne
r ear. Wait and see, darling.
We ate spaghetti with artichoke pesto, and a salad of bitter greens, lemon and capers zinging with folic acid, and affogato with goat’s milk ice cream. At school Torcuil was learning to skip. He had tripped on the rope. He rolled up his trouser leg to show us the graze. This led to Kenny’s broken nose (playing rugby), the snooker cue that had just missed Frankie’s eye, Meaghan’s broken toe and Ruth having the top of her finger sewn back on. My turn. The kids were fascinated by the laparoscopy scar. Kenny was appalled. ‘Jaysus, yer man off the street would have done a neater job.’
Frankie made no comment.
When he got up to fetch the brandy I followed, intercepting him in the hall. ‘Can I have a quick word?’
He looked me in the eye for a long couple of seconds before his wary nod.
We climbed the stairs and sat side by side on the bed.
I had phoned him five days earlier. It had all been very terse. He was busy at work, but could manage Friday night. Kenny and Ruth were coming round to dinner. I noted his need for chaperones, but maybe he wasn’t fending me off, maybe we’d be more natural in the company of old friends, and by the end of the evening he’d realise how much poorer his life was without me. From the minute I arrived, I had been losing faith in this scenario.
I told myself he knew what I was going to say, but still it was hard.
‘I want you to give me another chance—’
He exhaled in a long sigh.
‘I am so sorry.’
‘Are you? For what?’
I supposed I should have anticipated this.
‘For sleeping with somebody else. Quitting the clinic and not telling you. Finding my dad and not telling you. Not telling you anything really. It’s all such a mess.’ I stopped, defeated by my own indictment.
‘But I didn’t help, staying in Glasgow every weekend?’
‘I never expected Saturdays, I knew you had to work.’
‘You could have come home.’
‘I felt I was doing enough, stuck on the farm, being injected with God knows what. It’s only an hour’s drive. I thought you owed me that much.’
‘So you shagged somebody else to square the balance sheet?’
I looked down. ‘I suppose.’
He said nothing. I wondered if he was censoring some inflammatory remark, or was he just embarrassed by my grovelling now it was too late? You could have come home. Would he have said that if we were finished? Wasn’t the impulse to quarrel a hopeful sign?
‘It might not be my baby either.’
He squinted as if I’d said something unbelievably crass.
‘Read the newspapers,’ I said. ‘It happens. And we know they’re not exactly careful.’
For the past month I’d thought about little else. A clearly Sinhalese baby. Being sued by the genetic parents and forced to take a test. Red-top reporters camped outside the door. Even with Frankie’s fame dimmed by three months on radio, his wife would be news. Or his ex-wife. I might get lucky with the genetic lottery, her colouring might suggest she was mine, but there would always be a doubt. Was it right to keep somebody else’s baby, even if I had carried her to term? How would I feel about a child with my DNA somewhere out there in the world? Then there was the ticking bomb of the child herself, her sense of identity, her right to know – and to reject her substitute mother, if she got that far. If I kept her safe from asthma attacks and nut allergies and speeding cars.
I said some of this.
‘You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?’
There were angry words I could have said then, but they weren’t going to help, so I shrugged. ‘You know me, always planning ahead.’
‘Aye,’ under his breath, ‘I know you.’
I had a burning feeling around the eyes I remembered from childhood. ‘Don’t be cruel, Frankie. Tell me yes or no.’ Was it a mistake, admitting the possibility of refusal? ‘It doesn’t have to be for ever. Even if you just put up with me till she’s born. I want her to hear your voice in the womb.’
‘Why?’
‘So she can find you one day.’
In the silence I could hear the ticking of the bedside clock.
His voice was so low he might have been talking to himself. ‘All I wanted was a wee Freya—’
I stared at him.
‘But I’ve been thinking: I guess the nipper was always going to be himself.’
‘Herself.’
‘Whatever—’
I waited, hardly daring to hope.
‘A wean needs two parents.’
‘She might have two parents,’ I said. ‘There might be a couple out there childless because of us.’
‘There might be. We don’t know.’
‘We could find out.’
‘But we won’t.’
‘And you’re OK with that?’
His eyes held mine for a moment. I knew the question should never have been asked, that I’d left him no choice but to lie, and that when he lied I would choose to believe him.
‘I’m going to be a father. OK, my sperm count’s twenty-three and a half, but I don’t know one of the plucky wee bastards didn’t score the goal.’ He stood up, as if everything were settled now he’d decided to co-parent. As if our getting back together were too self-evident, or too self-evidently impossible, to discuss. ‘Kenny and Ruth’ll be wondering what’s happened to us.’
I looked up at him. ‘And me?’
‘What about you?’
‘Have you been thinking about me?’
A mordant breath. ‘A forty-year habit’s hard to break.’
Again I heard my mother’s voice, that sing-song phrase. Wait and see. But I couldn’t wait, I had to be sure.
‘And?’
He sat down again. ‘OK, I didn’t drive up there to see you. It’s not an hour, it’s three hours, ninety minutes there and ninety minutes back, and even when we were in the same room it was like you were on the other side of the world. Aye, maybe I did work too hard, but it wasnae just me. You were so mad about being signed off. I knew what was going to happen when you heard about the second count – it was one more way I’d taken a loan of you. So I kept shtum.Then I find out you’re pregnant. I was going to call Doctor Ross, ask her if there was any way they could have cocked the test up twice. I dialled the fucking clinic. I knew, but. There’s this thing you do when you’re not being straight with me.’ He made his voice clipped and efficient. ‘Hi, I’m going to have a baby. It’s like talking to the speaking clock. You’re playing away from home, I had Scott taking me for a mug at work – fuck’s sake, what am I, some sort of patsy? I thought, who’s to blame here, how’m I turning it on myself? How’m I no—’
‘Blaming me,’ I said.
He didn’t deny it.
‘Next thing, I’ve got the police at the door. I thought something had happened to you. When they said it was your mother, you know what I said? Thank God. “You’ll tell your wife?” Aye, of course, officer. I’d nae fucking idea where you were. Phoning him was bad enough – I had to drive halfway across the fucking country with him. I saw that place, like something out of a Stephen King novel, and I thought, we’re barking up the wrong tree here. I couldn’t see you spending five minutes in a dump like that. The old feller lets us in. You’re sitting there quite joco. You’ve put me through hell. So then I tell you about Lilias, and the look on your face, the way you just…’ he clenched his fist, his voice dropping away, ‘…crumpled. It killed me.’
He gave another long sigh.
‘So I can stay?’
‘Just for tonight.’
I looked at him.
‘It’s a joke, Freya.’
But it would be a long time before we could laugh about this.
I glanced down at the bed, made up with our best sheets, crisp from the airing cupboard. On top of the kist was a vase of roses with the refrigerated look of blooms flown in from another season. The room was dressed for romance, like his bachelor flat all
those years ago.
And then it came to me, what he needed to hear, the words I’d said so many times, though never with so much feeling.
‘I love you.’
He lifted his head. ‘You think I’d still be here if you didn’t?’
When we got downstairs the baby was alert and vocal in her mother’s arms. Ruth pulled a smiling, desperate face that said she’d get no sleep that night. Kenny was busy in the garden. Torcuil and Meaghan were hopping from foot to foot. They made me close my eyes as they led me outside.
I stood on the path, the children’s hands hot in mine, the night air pleasantly cool on my skin after the centrally heated house. I could smell the damp mulch on the flower beds and diesel from the buses on Hyndland Road. The breeze dashed a few spots of rain against my eyelids, and with them a sense of benison, like the feeling I’d had lifting my face to Frankie’s to be kissed.
‘You can open your eyes now,’ Torcuil said.
They were rudimentary contraptions: a pad soaked with meths, a wire frame and a tissue-paper sack. Kenny lit the wicks. I wasn’t sure they’d leave the ground but, after bobbing on the lawn for a minute or so, each floated into the air.
‘They’re a present for your mummy,’ Meaghan said, ‘because she’s dead.’
Ruth caught my eye. We managed not to laugh.
Our seven upturned faces watched the sky. The lanterns were slow to gain height. For a long time I thought the flames might blow out or the paper catch fire. Five hundred feet up, they met the wind and started to drift. Higher they rose, growing smaller, but still visible to the naked eye. Like stars, pure and white. Minutes passed, and they were still there, impossibly high. The children were getting restless. Part of me wanted to say Thank you, that was lovely, shall we go back inside? But I held still, my eyes following those pinpricks of light as they floated ever higher, ever further away.
