Pine

by Francine Toon

  On cue, they hear Angela on the creaky stairs, a little breathless as she bears her weight carefully. ‘Ann-Marie, have you shown them the turnip? Last time we were in Inverness, we bought this book on Halloween traditions.’

  Ann-Marie flicks her eyes up and says, ‘It’s called Samhain,’ and goes back to work.

  Lauren leans on the Aga, avoiding the Hunter wellies that are drying in front of it. ‘Are you off school?’ she asks Ann-Marie, who is looking at her strangely. ‘We had our tattie holidays already.’ She wonders then if Ann-Marie’s older brother Fraser is here too, before remembering he set off for university last month.

  Before Ann-Marie can reply, her mother cuts in from the foot of the stairs. ‘That school is useless. They don’t know what they’re doing. Sometimes,’ she says, as if talking to an adult, ‘I think we should have sent her to school in Strath Horne with you, Lauren, not Edinburgh.’ A dog bounds up to Angela, its breath heavy and wet. ‘Get,’ she says, thrusting her arm towards its basket. ‘You’re not making a mess of me this time.’ In the kitchen light, her face looks bare except for a shade of autumnal lipstick and the chunky purple glasses that frame her eyes. Angela has the kind of eyes that like to peer into other people’s business. ‘Remember, wash your hands now before eating sweeties,’ she says to the children as they go to pet the retreating dog. ‘And it says, that book, they used to use turnips, so,’ she continues, nodding at the turnip, ‘bloody difficult, let me tell you. A lot of elbow grease.’ She moves over to the cherry-red kettle. ‘Who’s for tea?’

  Billy is in his own world with the dogs and doesn’t respond.

  ‘Can I have a cup, please? Angela, why did they do that?’ asks Lauren, quietly.

  ‘The turnips? Oh, this is before we grew pumpkins. Hang on. I’ve made some other treats.’ She makes her way over to the larder like a blustery wind.

  ‘So,’ says Lauren, ‘you back for long?’

  ‘Um. A few days.’ Ann-Marie does not look up as she carves.

  Angela returns to the table with ice-cream boxes repurposed as Tupperware. She adjusts her glasses and prises off the lids, revealing marshmallow top hats and meringues. ‘Happy Halloween!’

  Lauren takes a bite of a top hat, smudging the lipstick trickle on her cheek.

  Without Billy’s mum in sight, the children make their way back across the main road and uphill past Vairi’s. Niall’s truck is no longer by the phone box. As they reach Billy’s house with its fat stone walls, Lauren sees the pickup in the driveway. Its engine is rumbling and the headlamps throw an impatient light on the gravel. She walks up to the truck and presses her face against the cold window. Lewis, no longer wailing, is sitting next to Kirsty in the passenger seat. Lewis tugs at his mother’s arm. She catches sight of Lauren and scrambles to open the door. ‘Oh, here,’ she says, getting out. ‘Never mind, Niall,’ she calls back. ‘And thanks.’ She hurries inside, dragging Lewis.

  ‘Come in for a sec,’ she says to Lauren. Lauren steps into the bright hallway of Billy’s home. ‘I suppose you can have some too,’ Kirsty says to Billy and grabs handfuls of Freddo chocolates and Swizzels Matlow sweets from multi-buy packages.

  ‘Thanks, Kirsty,’ says Lauren, emptying her hands into her bucket.

  ‘See ya tomorrow then!’ Billy says, turning towards the stairs. ‘Are you wanting to work on the hut again?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so,’ says Lauren. ‘Bye, Kirsty.’

  Lauren passes the sycamores outside, their dry leaves chattering. A whiny guitar riff slithers from the truck and she catches the shadow of her father, waiting.

  As Niall drives his daughter home, he says, ‘What did Angela give you?’, his chin jutting up like a question mark.

  ‘Top hats.’

  He wiggles the back of his free hand by his cheek. ‘Ooh.’

  ‘Dad! It’s not that fancy!’ He always moans about Angela. At least she made me something, she thinks.

  ‘’S only kiddin’. Trying to make you smile. You’re like a teenager already.’ Her dad’s face is stony, as it often is, looking ahead at the road, but she can read the tiny margin of difference between anger and irony, like now.

  They listen to rock radio without speaking. The headlights track the monotonous black road, spotlighting potholes and rubble. The glowing white sign of the passing place jolts into view again.

  Then there is more white, moving this time, as the blurred shape of a woman runs into the road.

  ‘Fuck.’ Niall pulls on the steering wheel, but they lurch towards a ditch. The pines jump close and Lauren’s scream seems to come from a different girl’s mouth. For a moment she only knows branches on glass, the squeal of tyres and Steven Tyler’s voice.

  In the stillness that follows, she notices the pumpkin bucket has fallen to the floor and lollipops are rolling between cans and dog hair on the shredded carpet. Lauren looks up, past the cut-out air freshener ticking back and forth like a metronome. The woman on her hands and knees comes back into view as Niall restarts the engine. ‘I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing’ blares as he swings back on to the road and the headlights catch her, crouching still as a hare, her face bleached out.

  ‘It’s that lady again,’ Lauren says. Looking more closely at her, lady sounds wrong. She’s too young. Girl isn’t quite right either. She might be the same age as Ann-Marie and Diane, or a few years older, it’s hard to tell.

  Her father doesn’t seem to be listening, but then in a distant voice he says, ‘I know who it is.’

  He dips the lights and Lauren can make out fair hair, hanging in a clump. The girl-woman rises and takes a shaky step towards them. Her dressing gown has been made for a man and is gaping. She’s skinny and her feet are bare. There are dark marks on her legs. ‘What’s wrong with her?’ Lauren asks.

  Niall frowns into his large palm as if trying to cover his whole face.

  ‘She … can’t walk properly,’ Lauren says. The young woman wears nothing but the dressing gown that slides down one shoulder. Lauren has never seen someone so naked before. Fear pulls close around her. She draws her feet up on the seat and sticks her woollen knees against her chin. ‘Dad?’ They should help; she knows they should.

  The woman has reached the bonnet, her shadow in the headlights stretching over the small stones of the road. The black pines are thick on either side.

  ‘It’s OK, love, it’s—’ Niall’s heavy jacket rustles as he shifts in his seat. ‘Stay here.’

  Lauren pulls her vampire cape over her head. She feels her father touch her shoulder, then the spring of suspension as he opens the door to leave the truck. Her cape lifts when the door slams. ‘Dad,’ she whispers, her tongue parched as a leaf. She hears his workman’s boots, heavy on the ground. Then there is no sound except her breath against the plastic of her cape. She opens her eyes, then closes them and it is the same black. She imagines she is shrinking smaller, very small, and the cape spreads into bat wings, growing from her back. She needs to fly out of the window, the same colour as the night.

  This does not happen. She listens to her own breathing as her skin grows clammy, then lifts the cape to see her father standing in front of the bonnet, holding the strange woman’s body to his. The woman is so much smaller than him, her shoulders narrow. Her girlish face is turned towards the windproof fabric of his chest and he looks straight down at her, pulling in his chin, running his rough hand over her wild hair, his own ponytail trailing from his ski hat. Lauren fidgets in her seat and makes a quiet sound that is not the same as crying.

  Niall leads the woman by a thin arm to Lauren’s side of the truck. She looks in at the passenger window and right through Lauren, her face gaunt and moon-coloured. Lauren’s bones feel cold. Niall moves his hand, signalling that Lauren should shift over to the driver’s seat. He opens the passenger door and the woman climbs in with the cold air, shaking, but her expression does not show it. For the ride home, Lauren sits on Niall’s knee, behind the steering wheel. It is cramped and quiet. The fan heater covers the
windows in steam.

  ‘Not far from home,’ Niall says as the headlamps search the road in front of them. ‘We’ll get you home. Up the road.’ He taps the sides of the steering wheel and drives slowly up the wooded hill to their house.

  Behind her father’s padded arm, Lauren can only see parts of the woman. She can see parts of the dressing gown and parts of her hair. The parts are shuddering. Lauren doesn’t see how her father might know this woman, whose face looks so young but whose expression is old.

  Time seems to still. Lauren’s dad smells of sweat and air from the woods. His beard and chin are touching the circle of Lauren’s braided hair. He makes her lean to his right side and she feels nauseous. ‘We’ll get you home,’ he says again. ‘Get us all home.’ The woman remains silent and Lauren looks ahead. They could be driving into nothing but the lit-up claws of trees, strange gestures. Lauren imagines the pickup eating the road as they drive, sucking it like a tarry soup, the trees trying to wave it down with their bony wooden limbs. ‘Stop wriggling,’ says her dad.

  Lauren begins to say the words to ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ inside her head. She repeats the verses without thinking of their meaning, just the shape of the words and their sounds.

  They reach their own stone house in minutes. Niall shovels coal from the outside bunker into an iron bucket while Lauren fiddles with the key in the lock. She can feel the woman standing behind her. Yet when she looks over her shoulder, as she opens the front door, there is only the dark rustling of trees. Lauren looks around. The woman is standing behind her father at the bunker. She has a strangely crooked body and her dressing gown is so white it almost glows in the starlight.

  As they enter, the woman drifts silently into the house behind Niall. Now they are inside, her eyes remind Lauren of puddles, frozen over. The hollowed skin beneath them is the shade of bruises as she takes a seat on the pleather sofa of their back room, the place they spend time eating and watching TV. The woman looks straight ahead, almost unblinking, at the painting on the wall of a wolf in the snow.

  It is hard to stop watching the woman, but Lauren has to go to the kitchen and creak open the boiler door for her father. She jerks her head round as Niall shakes the coal out of the scuttle.

  ‘How do you know her?’ Lauren asks. Despite the boiler starting, she still feels cold.

  ‘Did I say that? It’s late now; I’ll explain to you in the morning.’ His voice is distant, dreamy, like when she tries to wake him up from the sofa, the times she takes herself to bed.

  Once he has finished shaking out the coal, he passes Lauren, looking straight ahead, before kneeling by the hearth. His glassy eyes dart between the woman’s blank face and his twists of newspaper, ready to burn. Above him, on the mantelpiece, stand a Himalayan salt lamp and two chunky amethysts, halved like purple fruit, their insides catching the light. Crystals hang over the sliding doors to the overgrown garden. These are objects that belonged to Lauren’s mother, before she slipped out of their lives, when Lauren was a baby. Lauren’s father doesn’t like her asking questions too often. Their house is still filled with these salt lamps and candles. Niall says they belong to him, but Lauren knows they are her mother’s. The only times Niall will speak of her, your mother, is when he has drunk four glasses or more. Your mother. Two words that sound soft together. He never says too much though, only that her mother was a healer and different to anyone else. They met when she was eighteen and had moved to Strath Horne after a stint in Edinburgh. If Lauren tries to ask where she might be now, Niall says she must have gone on to better things. This makes Lauren scared to ask any more, scared that this means she, as a daughter, was not a good thing and her mother was looking for something better. Maybe her father doesn’t like to talk because he knows she won’t like to hear what he has to say.

  There is only one photo in the house, taken by Lauren’s granny, who has now passed, where her mother is so young she looks as though she could be Lauren’s classmate. Sometimes if Lauren is browsing in a shop in Strath Horne, which is only a little bigger than a village, she will notice women looking at her out of the corner of their eyes. Children have made strange comments in the cloakrooms at school, before talking among themselves. Lauren hopes one day she’ll be able to overhear a hushed conversation long enough to understand.

  From her seat on the sofa, the woman is looking at Lauren on the floor. She doesn’t seem happy or sad, but empty. Lauren wonders what she is thinking, if she is thinking anything at all.

  ‘Would you like …?’ says Lauren in a quiet voice. ‘Would you like …’ She bites her lip and looks away. She thinks maybe the woman needs a hug, the way she would hug Ann-Marie when she’s sad, but something stops her. There is a long pause while Niall scrunches a ball of magazine pages to add to the fire. She takes a breath and looks back. ‘… something to drink?’

  The woman sits motionless, staring at the painting. Her thin body under the dressing gown makes her look like a bundle of laundry. Her legs remind Lauren of a chicken’s and her skin of eggshell. There is a crookedness to her nose. It has a bruise at the bridge.

  Lauren’s dad breaks white chunks of firelighters with mechanical movements. Firelighters remind Lauren of the foam casing from the internet packages he picks up at the post office. She gets them confused sometimes, but her dad says you shouldn’t burn plastic. The room is heavy, as though invisible smoke is clogging up the air.

  Lauren remembers the time she rescued a bird from a cat. The bird was so sick it was tame, and sat on her shoulder, and she hoped it could be her pet. She fed it food and made a bed for it in her clothes drawer with cotton wool. But the next day, the bird was lifeless. Her father told her cats’ teeth are like poison and the bird never stood a chance. He is scrunching more newspaper and stacking kindling in an upward point, adding blocks of peat like thick slices of dark cake. He lights the fire and it burns into the silence. The white-green moss on the kindling starts to crackle and curl. Niall pulls the heavy blue curtain across the door frame. He pokes the fire again, goes over to the other side of the room and takes a bottle of whisky, nearly empty, from inside the hatch. He glugs it, slouching on the sofa. Jameson pads in and lies down by the fire. Lauren kneels and gives the spaniel’s tummy a rub. He comforts her, more than she comforts him.

  Can I ask you something? Are you a vampire? Are you a kelpie?

  She doesn’t say these words aloud, but instead looks over to her dad and says to the woman: ‘It’s OK. We’ll look after you.’

  The pale young woman is still staring at the wall, making Lauren wonder if she is deaf or speaks any English at all. As if reading her thoughts, the woman looks her in the eyes and smiles.

  Lauren looks away. ‘Dad, I’m hungry.’ She can’t help but glance back. There is something unearthly about the fabric of this woman’s dressing gown and the colour of her hair. Unearthly and yet familiar. Perhaps it is the way she smelled when she was sitting close to Lauren in the pickup truck. Musky, warm blood and soil, like a nocturnal animal that has come out from its den. The woman sits still but shifts around in Lauren’s mind. Her eyes are huge and black. When Lauren turns away, she can feel the eyes burying into her back.

  ‘Dad, what are we eating the night?’ She wants things to be normal.

  Her father takes a moment to respond, tight-lipped through his teeth. ‘All these questions, Lauren, you’re doin’ ma heid in.’

  ‘I just—’

  ‘Gies peace, all right? Christ sakes.’ When he speaks like this, a blade in his voice, Lauren knows she shouldn’t ask any more. He sits down in the armchair with a sigh and begins peeling a small stump of wood with a knife, shaping it like an owl. Lauren knows then that he can’t be too annoyed, because this owl will be for her. Vairi once told her that the Gaelic name for owl translates as ‘night-hag’. This is what she imagines when she hears them hooting in the dark. She will find this wooden night-hag sitting on her pillow when it’s finished.

  ‘There’s stew in the freezer. That rabbit.’ His
eyes are sad. This is how he looks when he isn’t talking or listening, when he is in his own thoughts.

  The young woman rises, followed by her shadow. Lauren’s father gets up to face her. His eyes still have a dreamy, glazed look in the firelight.

  ‘Look at you,’ he says to the woman. She doesn’t reply, but sits back down on the sofa, as silent as a moth. Niall shakes his head and goes into the leaking utility room to take the stew from the freezer. He begins to heat the icy lump in the metal saucepan. Usually they eat easy things: mashed potatoes, scrambled eggs, sausages. Sundays he might roast a chicken or stew a rabbit in the big pot. He calls this a batch. Through the hatch, Lauren watches him take another whisky bottle out of the cupboard.

  Lauren’s dad’s rifle is propped outside the kitchen doorway. He uses it to shoot rabbit, pheasant and foxes. She has never seen the deaths herself, but she has heard the shot in the woods. She has seen the rabbit pelts and their unskinned bodies hanging in the garden and laid in the kitchen. She has touched their matted fur. Careful, her dad always tells her, ticks. Jameson eats their insides, the bad parts. He likes them, the same way that if he finds a dead animal in the forest he will roll on his back in it. Watching this woman, Lauren thinks of those animals and their bad parts.

  Lauren’s father kneels in front of the woman, who does not meet his gaze. He tries to make her eat from a steaming bowl, holding the steel spoon to her mouth. He blows on the food and holds it to her again. The woman keeps her mouth shut. He tries a third time, the spoon at her closed mouth, her closed face.

  ‘I’m so hungry,’ he says. He places the bowl by the armchair and sits with Lauren at the wooden table in the kitchen and they eat together without speaking. There is comfort in the stew. Lauren looks up. The grey bristle of her father’s jaw is working away, while his shoulders and head, with its blond and white ponytail, tower over the bowl. His hands are big and coarse from making things, mending fences and hewing posts, hitting them into the earth, unrolling chicken wire. He builds things for inside the house too. Chairs, boxes and shelves made from wood from a further part of the forest, which he collects from the sawmill. On his forearm is a tattoo of a blue rose.