Pine

by Francine Toon

Niall remembers the fate of the old staircase occasionally when he climbs its replacement. It is happening more often now. ‘I’ve had my moments,’ he said to his friend Sandy a few weeks ago at the pub, ‘but can you imagine? No way. Never.’

  Sandy Ross just smiled at him. Niall knew it was a smile of sympathy, but in these moments he felt it was insincere, that his friend could not truly understand how he felt. When he had had a few drinks, he felt a growing paranoia that he was being mocked. They both watched Diane, a teenager who worked weekends, carry a stack of foamy glasses. Niall said then, ‘How much more do we need to drink before we start throwing these bar stools on that fire?’

  Sandy Ross was calm and when he spoke sounded as if he thought himself full of wisdom. ‘You canna be doing with they thoughts. I’m calling it a night. For me and you, pal.’

  Sometimes, more and more, Niall stops dead in the middle of sawing wood or hammering nails and looks down at the metal object he is holding in his hands. He will straighten his back and touch the points of the blade or weigh the heaviness of the iron hammer, maybe take a swing at a post in his workshop, and carry on.

  In the past few days he has been thinking of how Christine would have made them call Halloween ‘Samhain’ or ‘Oidhche Shamhna’, the start of the Celtic year and the beginning of the time when the dead can pass to the realm of the living. He remembers how she would make a ritual bonfire, late at night, outside the house. He was never able to live her strange habits down. Once an old man outside a pub told him she was a witch. Everyone else was too polite to say it to his face.

  Somewhere and some time before she moved to Strath Horne, she decided to learn the art of building bonfires, of filling the sky with smoke. He always assumed she had learned in Edinburgh, the same time – in her teens – when she had started to learn reiki and EFT. She used to work at Napier’s, an old herbalist, and the Forest Café. She began to make friends with students who studied in the Georgian university buildings near by and she became more than friends with some, he guesses now, kissing rich English boys with lip piercings who volunteered for People and Planet.

  He bases this idea on a few small details she told him in passing. He remembers it made his skin flush with jealousy and a quiet, heavy anger that surprised him. He prefers to think of her alone at seventeen, spending the long summer evenings on a wide expanse of grass called the Meadows. He imagines her among the drumming circles and poi dancers and tightrope walkers, reading palms, eating apples and getting high as the shadows lengthen, her blunt Highland vowels changing.

  From Edinburgh, she moved to Strath Horne, to work at the Castle Hotel and, as she always said, for a change of scene. The town was a wild, unknown place to her. He heard later her mother Lillith was from the west coast and part gypsy, but maybe that was after Christine started telling people’s fortunes. She said she had the sight. People in Strath Horne didn’t act like that. He had always thought Edinburgh was the place that formed her, but maybe she learned it from her mother.

  He opens his eyes in his bed and, keeping his head still on the pillow, reaches out and switches on the radio. He turns the volume down and listens to the wind rise up, the sound growing louder than the football phone-in. The window is a light-grey square. The spare bed sheets pegged out in the garden will be wet now.

  The radio hisses with static and cuts into a squeal, like a faulty microphone. An electric pain hits him behind the eyes and screws itself into his head. He slams his hand on the radio and it topples off the table, but the noise is unrelenting. He swears and props himself up on one arm to lean over and unplug it from the wall.

  Niall falls back on his pillows, clammy with sweat, and folds a third pillow behind his back. The room tilts slightly. He sees the mug of tea Lauren has brought him and looks at the time. Nearly noon. Now the tea is cold and grey, but he sips it all the same and appreciates its sweetness.

  He sinks back down and falls into a light, uncomfortable sleep, his brain like padded, lumpy bedding. He is in the work shed and there is a hand on his shoulder. He hears a creaking and the sound of a gun being cocked. He wakes again and realizes he is hungry and shivering. Some of the sick feeling rolls back and he lies still for a while, cold air on his face from a gap in the window. He wants to get up and eat but his body is a grey sack of coal. He can hear Lauren still bumping around downstairs, then walking up and closing her bedroom door.

  ‘Lauren?’ There is no answer, just a crash.

  He puts on his dressing gown but as he stands, the room spins, and he heads to the bathroom, touching the walls for balance. He kneels on the damp blue carpet. Nothing comes. It doesn’t any more. He rests his head against the edge of the bath for a while. ‘Lauren?’ He listens carefully and hears another bump. He picks himself up slowly and slumps under the shower.

  He calls Lauren again, but the house stays silent. He knocks on her door and, when there is no response, goes in. A heady smell hits him like flowers and bad chicken. Water has spread across the ceiling. Shadows play in her empty room from the swinging dreamcatchers. It is tidier than usual: her duvet, patterned with sea creatures, has been tucked straight and her books have been stacked neatly on her bedside table. Webster, her fluffy toy duck, sits on her pillow. There are no clothes on the floor or any of the little horses she likes to play with. He sees the little wooden animals he carves for her in a straight line along her windowsill: a shoal of fish, a family of cats and a parliament of owls. Her wardrobe is fuller and tidier than it has been all year. He looks out of her window and into the empty garden. He calls her name again. Occasionally the house creaks when he is the only person home, he knows that. A drop of water trickles down the wall. His foot stubs against something hard and he looks down at a trail of rocks, curving around the bed in an oval. They look strange on the blue carpet, the only untidy thing in the room.

  He heaps them up in the corner and opens a window to let out the fuggy scent. He picks up one of the colourful Jacqueline Wilson books, turning it over in his calloused hands. He has never read one but will spot them in the quaint Strath Horne Bookshop, to buy for Lauren’s birthday or as a Christmas present. She has started taking more of these books out from the library bus. When she isn’t looking he will write their titles carefully in a notebook to remember those she doesn’t yet have. He’ll find her own books lying damp in the bathroom or down the side of the sofa and tell her to take better care of them. His own book collection is limited to what he has picked up here and there in the charity shop or car boot sale, a few music biographies and the works of Tolkien and George R. R. Martin. The small bookshelf in his bedroom is mainly filled with sheaves of sheet music.

  He sees an orange bucket next to Lauren’s pink rucksack, ridged like a pumpkin with two black triangles for eyes and a jagged mouth. For a moment, he thinks it is new but then remembers the night before. They bought it from the service station. Of course they did. He is almost surprised to picture them out at night, Lauren in her vampire costume. His memory is patchy. An icy cold creeps over his body and he realizes he is still in his pyjamas, his long hair wet from the shower. He stumbles to his room and picks up a crumpled, wet Motörhead T-shirt from the floor, willing himself to try and remember.

  The air in his bedroom is unusually damp. To his annoyance, he sees small florets of mould spreading in one corner of the room.

  He staggers down to the kitchen with the pumpkin bucket filled with rocks, to throw outside, his knee joints clicking, like Long John Silver.

  There is nothing so comforting to him as the smell and crackle of lichened wood in the stove, nothing like the morning when light falls across the table, except where his daughter is curled in a blanket in front of the fire, eating her breakfast. The phone rings like a musical drill and he rises from his chair unsteadily. He looks at the clock on the wall. Just past noon. ‘Hello?’

  There is a brief silence and then a low, half-whispered voice: ‘Hi, Niall. I hope I haven’t caught you in the middle of something.’

 
; ‘Er … not at all.’

  ‘It’s Angela.’

  ‘Hi, Angela. What can I do you for?’ He tries to sound happy to hear her clipped voice. He stands up and looks at the clock again. ‘Hang on. What time is it?’

  ‘Three o’clock.’

  Lauren will have been gone for hours. ‘Huh.’

  ‘Why?’ She sounds genuinely concerned.

  ‘Never mind. So, on you go.’

  ‘Well. I’m not sure if it’s even silly of me to call, but …’

  Niall coughs. ‘Oh aye?’ He needs to fix the stopped clock. His house is disintegrating.

  ‘Well, I’ve just been looking out of my window and … Oh, I really don’t know how to put this, Niall.’ Another pause.

  He clears his throat again, trying to get rid of the croak in his voice. ‘What needs done? Is it that fence that’s—’

  ‘Oh no! Oh gosh, no, nothing … nothing needs to be done.’ He hears her take a deep breath. ‘I can see someone out of the window, Niall …’ She lowers her voice further. ‘She’s been standing there a while now.’

  ‘Where? I mean, who?’

  ‘The orchard. You know, our kitchen looks out on to the orchard? And I had just sat down to read the paper and …’

  ‘Wait, is this Lauren you’re talking about? She’s out with Billy. I mean … I thought I heard her back in the house, but she isna …’

  Angela draws in her breath and it comes out a whisper. ‘Lauren? Oh gosh, no. No, I haven’t seen Lauren. This …’ Angela’s always been one for dramatics. Every month she travels to Inverness for her theatre club.

  ‘Oh,’ Niall replies. ‘But you’re saying someone’s in your garden. Right now?’

  Another silence. ‘It’s somebody … She’s just standing there. I don’t know, she looks like …’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘She’s got her back to me.’

  There is silence and Niall thinks something is wrong with the phone. Angela whispers again. ‘I just tried tapping on the window and … she turned. And it … it really looks like her, Niall.’

  ‘Like who? Like Lauren?’

  ‘No! No …’ Her voice is barely audible. ‘She’s just standing there. Like she’s watching us.’

  Niall struggles to form words. ‘What you on about? You daft?’

  Her voice is louder. ‘Hang on. She’s turning around now and walking away.’

  ‘If this is a joke, it’s not very funny.’

  ‘I’m not joking, Niall. Why would I joke with you about this? She’s just heading to the apple trees at the edge of the copse.’ Angela’s voice sounds urgently.

  ‘Angela.’ It doesn’t sound like a joke.

  ‘I’m so sorry, I don’t mean to distress you, Niall, I just … I can barely see her any more, she’s walked into the trees.’

  There is a long pause. Niall pictures his wife disappearing into the woods and it makes him feel sick. He begins to wonder if Angela is still on the other end of the line when she speaks again. Her voice is different.

  ‘Sorry, Niall?’

  ‘Of course it fucking isn’t her.’ You daft cow.

  ‘Isn’t … who …? I’m sorry, what – what are we talking about again?’ She sounds as if she has just woken up from a deep sleep. She loves to meddle in other people’s business but she has crossed a line that astonishes him.

  ‘You really want me to believe that? You see some woman, walking her dog or whatever, fuck knows, in your fucking garden and you have the gall to phone me up—’

  ‘Oh! Remind me again, what is it you are phoning about?’

  ‘Angela, you phoned me.’ It is taking everything he has to rein in his anger. Still, he can’t help but think he’d like to go over there and talk some sense into her.

  ‘I phoned you?’

  ‘You’ve lost it. You’ve actually lost it.’

  ‘I – I’m not sure what you mean. Sorry, I have a headache …’ He can sense she is trying to straighten herself up. ‘What is it you wanted to talk about, Niall?’

  4

  Outside, the sun has gone down and rain is battering the cloud-coloured sheets on the washing line. Niall watches them but doesn’t move; the drip in the utility room increases in speed. He switches the radio off and turns on the TV. A woman is taking small glass bowls from the countertop of a polished studio kitchen and tipping their contents into a larger glass bowl and stirring. She looks at the camera seductively and shows him how to turn flour and butter into breadcrumbs. She explains how to make pastry, leaning gently over the bowl. Is this for men or women? he thinks. She is making a chicken pie and smiling with straight white teeth. He pulls the quilt further over him and falls asleep and in his dream Christine is cooking on TV, smiling at him, with her henna-red hair, holding an electric whisk. He wakes up. He fights the quilt off and punches the sofa cushions. His headache punches him back. How could she be in the apple trees? he thinks.

  On the TV screen now, tiny skiers are crossing a white mountain track between miniature coloured flags. He catches the same rotten smell again and wonders if a dead mouse is trapped in the walls. He turns the TV off and goes outside without a coat in the dark gale. He slams an axe into logs in the garden, one by one, on the huge oak trunk he uses for chopping wood. When he has finished all the logs he swings the axe into a bush that springs back at him with thorns. He gathers the firewood in his arms, takes it inside through the patio door and throws pieces into the fire so that sparks rise. He watches the flames creep up. Outside, a buzzard is sitting on the fence post. He has never seen one so close before.

  He begins to call Jameson but remembers that Lauren has taken him out. With all the lights on, there is still a darkness in the house. He sits in the stillness, angry with the fading day. He sprays deodorizer around half-heartedly, then pulls on his woollen hat and ski jacket and takes two paracetamol. He will drive to Cowrie Point and forget about everything.

  Outside, on the doorstep, the rain is spitting. He takes a breath of damp air through his nose, thinking of how much Angela winds him up. He hops into the pickup and slams the door. ‘Fuck the lot o’ yous.’

  He looks out at Cowrie Point, soft and deserted in the dusk. The rain hits the windows and it soothes him. When the rain stops and the sky clears he gets out of the pickup. The tide crackles as it rolls over the smooth pebbles of the beach. The water stretches out in the twilight mist to the large slopes of hills like the resting bodies of giants under a huge sky. There is a tiny house with a red roof on the other side of the firth, evaporating into the falling dark. On a clear day he can usually see white specks of sheep. In the grainy night air he looks carefully for flat stones along the smooth curve of the shore. Once he has found a few he skims them across the black water. The ripples go one two for each stone. One day in summer he skimmed a stone and it touched the water six times before sinking. He tries again. One two. He is tired. Night is growing; the moon is bright. He skims another stone and a small bald head rises from the low waves. Large dog eyes stare at him. Sorry, pal, nothing personal.

  He can never look at a seal in the way he looks at cows or sheep or even dogs. He sees another head some way out that sinks back into the dark waves with the first. Seals bring him the words kingdom and folk. Lauren likes his stories about selkies, seal people, stories his grandmother told him, even though they are often sad. She prefers them to stories of kelpies, folkloric monsters that take the shape of a horse on a beach or river. A few years ago, a girl at school told Lauren that kelpies wait by the water for children to ride on their backs, then gallop into the surf to drown and eat them. For the next two years, Lauren told Niall not to leave her alone near the sea or a loch; it became a kind of game. He feels now that she’s getting older he no longer has to reassure her that kelpies are imaginary. Selkies, though, they are almost real.

  Niall flicks away a fly and smiles a small, dry smile, thinking of how Christine would have brought their daughter up. Naming her was an issue. Christine wanted to choose s
omething ‘special’, a name like ‘Solstice’, but Niall refused. He gave in to the name ‘Oren’, even though it was a name for a boy, meaning ash or pine. Yet, in the first few years following Christine’s disappearance, Oren morphed into Lauren.

  He is never usually at the beach without the sound of Jameson’s claws on the pebbles and his panting. Niall picks up larger stones, the kind Lauren prefers with long strands of bubbly seaweed attached like hair. Were she here, she would take them home and paint them with faces and sit them to dry out on the breezeblock wall in the garden. Her pebble people. He puts one in his jacket pocket and waves away another fly. They aren’t usually so close to the shore. When he, Lauren and Billy walk Jameson down here the two children hunt for the best-looking stones they can find, two each, and line them up anonymously for him to judge. They will often stop for a takeaway on the drive home. He realizes now how hungry he is, and as he turns towards the car his foot sinks into something soft on the grassy bank. It is a mound of shaggy wool, dirty with mud and streaked with red dye across the middle. As he draws his foot back he feels his gorge rise. There is a delicate pink ear tagged with plastic and a head, bone-coloured, already rotting away where the eye should be, black with blood and flies. A sheep that has wandered too far, dead on its side by the shore.

  On the short walk down the street from Lindsay’s Fish and Chips, Niall spots Catriona, the newly arrived GP whose renovated farmhouse he is working on. She is standing across the lamplit town street in a houndstooth coat and oxblood boots, unlocking her Volkswagen. She smiles at him broadly, her eyes huge and brown. He nods and smiles back, thinking he will see her soon and the oatmeal carpet in her house, waiting to be ripped up.

  As he approaches his truck, he bumps into his friend Sandy Ross, wearing a Puffa and the Timberland boots that Niall covets, a Sunday paper under his arm.

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Ni-all. How’s it going?’

  ‘No bad, no bad. One too many bevvies last night. Think I lost a few brain cells.’ He raises the hot takeaway parcel. ‘Soon be right as rain.’