Seth set about weeding Bunny’s borders. My father wandered outside to catch him on his own before the wedding the following week.
‘Nice to meet you. We’ll be neighbours soon.’
He shook Seth’s hand and inspected his own, suddenly aware of how soft it must seem. Those hands had known nothing but paperwork and pens until they’d arrived on the island. Now, they knew nothing but waving people onto a ferry for their journey, and waving them off, back and forth all day. I never saw a man who smiled so little wave so much. Seth leant on his rake, my father struggling to make conversation. He knew nothing about hardware. He struggled to put up a shelf.
‘I suppose we will be neighbours.’
Seth pulled a dandelion and tossed it in a bucket.
‘I was thinking, perhaps I could join your card game?’
My father did his best to sound laid-back and didn’t quite pull it off.
Seth glanced towards the distillery, contemplating my grandfather’s disapproval. A bet was a serious matter, no one knew that more than Grumps. He wouldn’t want his son-in-law in the game he’d participated in for years. Bad enough sharing a house with him. Friday nights had always been a night off from family. Besides, never play cards with a man who can’t crack a joke, can’t be trusted.
‘We have a full game right now.’ Seth picked up a stone. It clanked into his bucket. He lowered his voice. Not everyone knew about the cards. He wanted to keep it that way.
‘But if someone drops out in the future, who knows? I can do you a discount at the store though. How’s that? Now we’re neighbours: screws, tools, paint. Anything you need.’
It meant nothing. Grumps hadn’t paid full price for hardware in years. He virtually owned that store. Then he didn’t, then he did. Every weekend the same group of men played in Seth’s stockroom, surrounded by last season’s hoses and shovels. Seth Johnson won Grumps’ pick-up once. Grumps won Seth’s. The men got to display their largesse by letting their friends keep their cars and agreeing to play for same stakes next week. They would laugh and wave at one another across the street. ‘Be careful how you load that coal! I own that car until Friday night… I’ll be there with bells on. Careful, or you’ll be walking home!’
I could always tell when Grumps won by the way he walked: straighter, with a glint in his eye, sharp as a boy sneaking a sip from a hip flask under moonlight. I could also tell when he lost. He’d sit in the distillery doorway: head low, staring at a dead owl he’d found outside. The slightest win could make a man a decade younger, or strip the spring out of his stride. I supposed that was why my father wanted in.
‘Congratulations anyway, congratulations.’
My father repeated himself, unsure he had said it right the first time. I don’t know how he managed to make such a joyous word sound so flat, but he did. He had a voice that could suck the air out of anything. Thinking about it, there wasn’t much he managed to make sound joyous, but I barely noticed. None of us did.
An Evaluation of my Father
Nose: He carries the aroma of his desk covered in paperclip chains, ink from the pen that spots his shirt pocket, and the cigarettes he can’t smoke in front of men like my grandfather without looking ashamed. The men who were born here hold a cigarette differently, clamped between forefinger and thumb. They snip out the fire with the tips of their fingers. My father’s cigarette perches in the V of his fingers, in a Hollywood manner. He scours the ashtrays longer than most, until he is sure nothing glows.
Palate: The ham and mustard sandwiches he gets out of the same brown bag every day, tipping yesterday’s crumbs away. His favourite food is the gooseberry crumble my mother makes for his birthday every year, and the hot chocolate he occasionally orders in cafés to remind my mother of the day they met. He looks at his wife, letting the foam on the top of the milk linger for a second, hoping to invite her finger to his lips. Eventually, he wipes it off himself.
Finish: Brown as sparrows. Black jackets and trousers are undertakers’ clothes. His former career selling insurance made him cautious. He didn’t want to remind his clients of a vulture when he asked them to picture their families paying for their funerals. Almost everything he owns is dark blue or brown. There’s one sheep-coloured sweater in his wardrobe my mother bought him when he complained about the wind on the island. I saw him wear it only once. The whole time he looked scared of gravy. He is a man who lacks the ability to put on anything that could stain.
Overall: He’s a man passing through, small villages, kitchens, swigging milk on his way out the door and onto the road that once brought him to my mother. He had come to the island to scatter his parents’ ashes and found a girl. Eighteen, sitting in a café by the port, alone, head full of dreams. ‘Where are you heading?’ she asked. ‘The mainland. Do you want to come along for the ride?’ he said. It was a joke. He didn’t tell jokes well. She looked towards the silent road, at the person she’d agreed to meet failing to approach and said, ‘I do’, as spontaneous as the journey was planned. A trip to the mainland wouldn’t hurt. It had been a while.
He didn’t shave for the wedding. My father moved through the crowd stroking his stubble, attempting to rub his soft edges away. Bunny hosted her reception outside. It was one of those island mornings where the horizon brightens and fades and every other sentence is about the chances of rain. The clouds were biblical. They appeared to be painted-on silver. Everyone looked up, cradling their drinks, wondering if they should go inside. The sun didn’t show until lunchtime.
It was brighter at the front of the cottage. In the garden, folding chairs perched on the grass, yellow cloths fluttering around the legs of the picnic tables Seth assembled himself. Bunny had been cooking all week. Our cold store overflowed with surplus salad, fishcakes, langoustines and a special tartar sauce she absolutely refused to share the recipe for. ‘You must give me the secret to those fishcakes,’ women said. ‘You made those tables? I couldn’t have done better myself,’ the men told her husband. They loosened their ties, freed from church, while their wives slipped off their party shoes beneath the tables and rubbed their bare feet on freshly cut grass. Bunny was a whirlwind, complimenting the outfits of her guests, filling up glasses, and flitting to the kitchen for more bread.
‘Guess how long ago I made this?’ she said. ‘I had no time this morning, with getting ready and doing Sylvie’s hair. That child! Nothing but tangles! I made the bread yesterday, yet it’s still so fresh.’
Not even in a pillbox hat and an ivory suit with a whisper of ermine on the collar could she quite drop her sales pitch. It was an occasion to celebrate love, food, drink, home repair and kitchenware. The crowd raised their glasses and tapped their feet, the fiddler on the lawn sawing a dance out of usually stern-faced old men. The wives laughed, grabbing their husbands to stop them making fools of themselves. Oh, why not? They staggered into familiar arms, swirled into a foxtrot. Everyone looked happy, except Sylvie. All she wanted was to disappear.
It was killing her, the fun, all the noise. People everywhere, stopping to compliment the violets looped to her wrist with a ribbon, or comment on how much she’d grown. She rubbed her neck again and again. It ached from lowering her head for so long, trying to look less tall.
‘What do you enjoy in school?’ Her grandma ferreted in her bag.
She was a small weasel-faced woman who’d come over from Mull. Her fingers clawed a cigarette out of the packet. She lit it with a wince.
‘Is your arthritis playing up again Mammy?’ Bunny asked. ‘Perhaps you want to lie down in Sylvie’s room?’
Sylvie scratched her knuckles. During the ceremony, she’d stood with her mother where a father may give away his daughter. Now she was less sure of her place.
‘Sylvie! Answer your Nan! Tell her what your favourite subjects at school are!’
‘I don’t enjoy anything at school, other than when it’s over,’ Sylvie said, jerking away from Bunny’s hand on her forearm.
‘You’ll have to forgive her,
you know she’s shy,’ Bunny said.
‘She’ll grow out of it, I used to be shy. It’s a phase.’
‘Everyone was shy,’ Sylvie whispered, looping her arm into mine. ‘That’s what they all say. It’s a lie.’
We wandered around searching for a quiet spot to make our own party. We planned on grabbing a bowl of crisps, the icing and none of the fruit cake, and a bottle of cola with a waxy straw.
The cottage was packed. There was nowhere to go. The alcove where Sylvie loved to sit with a book was occupied by a woman stuffing tissues into shoes that pinched her heels. The lounge heaved with chuckles at an anecdote about changing rooms given by a large woman in a dress that almost fit. Sylvie slipped out of the door. I followed, waylaid by Toby trying to show me his magic. Today was his chance to be a star. He grinned, covering ping pong balls with cups in the kitchen, finally in the presence of someone who hadn’t seen his act before.
‘How did you do that?’ Seth’s son asked.
Zach was a couple of years older than me. I knew little of him, other than he worked in his father’s store at weekends, mixing paint in a way that put Michelangelo to shame.
Zach looked at me and asked, ‘Do you know any tricks, Lorrie?’
I smiled with nothing up my sleeve.
‘Looks like a good trick.’
He stirred a jug of blackcurrant cordial smooth as a pot of emulsion. The quiet way he carried himself rendered me unable to pull myself away. A girl would never be able to tell what he was thinking, even if she looked at him for a hundred years. I could look for a hundred years without getting bored. He was easy to watch. I imagined marrying him for a second, looking at him was practice for something I wasn’t ready for yet.
‘See you later.’ I smiled and went outside to find Sylvie.
It was quiet in the back garden. All day, Bunny had been ushering guests away. The rabbit hutches and chicken runs would be scruffy on the photos. The borders bustled with too many unruly wild flowers Sylvie begged Seth to let stay. It was just me and Sylvie. She was bending down, peering into a foxglove to watch a bee sleep. The chickens were scratching about. The white one she loved pecked about by itself, then stopped in a blur.
The cat leapt off the fence. Claws out, canines biting through skin. The bird screeched and fell quiet, blood spraying from its neck. Sylvie rushed to it flapping her arms, a flush of colour gushing to her cheeks, panic darting in her eyes. Hsssssss. The cat hissed and squeezed through the fence. Sylvie knelt down to stroke the chicken on the grass. It lay on the ground stunned. She placed a palm on the wound, feathers floating around. I could see the bird breathing, its plump chest slowly moving and down. It barely made a sound.
‘Sylvie?’ I whispered.
She didn’t turn around. One hand on a wing, she lowered her head and placed her lips on the bird’s neck. I stared at her open-mouthed. It reminded me of when I came into the kitchen and caught my mother with the plumber. They’d be doing nothing but chatting, but I felt I was interrupting something. Mum would be wearing lipstick though she wasn’t going anywhere. The fawn shoes she loved slipped on and off one heel, legs crossed, facing him, sipping coffee at the table. I saw I shouldn’t be there; whatever I’d walked in on was a moment for them alone. This moment belonged to only one girl and a bird.
Sylvie looked up, blood on her chin, feathers crusted to her lace collar. The blood was already drying on her hands, and falling in flakes, freckling her skirt. Bok bok bok bawk. The chicken flapped up with an indignant shriek.
‘It’s not dead?’ I said. ‘It’s not dead!’
I stared at the bird, pecking the ground with the other chickens now. I was sure it had been so badly injured all I could say to Sylvie was ‘I’m sorry’, or ‘snap its neck’, if it didn’t die quickly. It was alive. Sylvie got up and wandered to the bench with a sway reminiscent of a party guest who’d raised one toast too many.
‘That bird was done for,’ I said. ‘It looked…’
‘Worse than it was.’ Sylvie smiled at the bird, her eyes closing softly.
‘Sylvie? Sylvie? Heavens, where is that child?’
The kitchen door flung open and Bunny burst out of it waving.
‘Come on! We’re taking a group picture out front!’
The words congealed in Bunny’s mouth. She gasped at the sight of us: two girls. One in a powder-blue dress. One in a lemon dress sprayed with blood, dirt on her knees and feathers in her hair. Sylvie stretched her cardigan, attempting to hide the stains, and gave in. There was no disguising anything.
‘What the… ?’
Bunny glanced at the door, aware of the party behind her. The forks clinking glasses waiting for a speech, the gifts that all looked suspiciously like teapots waiting to be opened. The photographs weren’t all taken yet. Thirsty people needed drinks. The fun depended on her.
‘What have you done? Today of all days, Sylvie! You’re filthy. The photos! What will it look like?’
Bunny grabbed Sylvie by the shoulders and attempted to shake the dazed look off her face.
‘It’s not her fault, Mrs Tyler, I mean, Mrs Johnson, Mrs… Bunny. It was that crazy wildcat. It pounced on the chicken. Sylvie had to…’
I stopped. I had no idea what Sylvie had to do.
The photographer came out mopping his brow, all ready to say ‘cheese’.
‘Where’s that bride and the bridesmaid? We won’t have this light for long!’
He squinted through a viewfinder, clicked and froze where he stood. This was the photograph no one wanted to frame: Bunny yelling at Sylvie, a streak of cotton, feathers and blood.
In a blink, Bunny stepped out of the picture and became who she wanted the man holding the camera to see. The hostess. The doting mother. The bride.
‘Kids! What can you do? They’re always playing in the dirt!’ Bunny smiled. ‘There’s a clean dress in your wardrobe, Sylvie, petal. Get changed.’
The woman squeezed my shoulder. ‘Will you help her get ready, Lorrie? I think she’s eaten a dodgy winkle or had a shandy or something.’
Bunny ushered the photographer inside. I held out my arm for Sylvie. She stood and leant on me, so light, yet barely able to support herself.
‘The peachy dress, not the white one!’ Bunny yelled. ‘And wash your face!’
I followed Sylvie upstairs, one or two wedding guests on their way out of the bathroom turning to stare.
‘What on earth… ? Is that blood?’
People gasped at the girl who appeared to have been working in an abattoir. Bunny ushered them out to the lawn.
‘Just a little accident with spilled cordial! Nothing to worry about! Now, let’s get you another drink.’
Years later, at school, sometimes someone would raise an eyebrow and say, ‘Sylvie Johnson’s your friend? Isn’t she the one who bit a bird’s neck at a christening or something?’ ‘No,’ I’d reply. ‘That’s what I heard…’ they’d say.
I’d attempt to defend her, but it never quite worked. The story lived on without me. I’d sometimes hear schoolgirls whispering it without being sure who was involved. Did you hear about the girl who whispered to chickens? I heard she lives around here. I heard she could make birds do anything she wants them to… That’s not what I heard, I heard there’s some lassie who drinks chicken blood to live forever. She’s a hundred years old, but she looks just like us. She could be anywhere, she could be in our class, watching us.
Whenever I asked Sylvie about it, she’d simply shrug. ‘It wasn’t that bad. It was only a scratch. The chicken was fine. You’re squeamish, that’s all.’ The more I tried to explain it, the less I could. I wasn’t sure what really happened. ‘Sylvie’s alright,’ I’d snap at anyone who asked. I didn’t trust my memory of feathers. Sylvie must have picked up the wounded bird to see if it was OK. That’s all, I persuaded myself. It couldn’t have been anything like I remembered, I was sure, until I wasn’t any more.
Part II
&
nbsp; 19th February 1960
Ma’s carrying the cake with wee footsteps like a geisha. I’m wincing and picturing her dropping it. The candles drip waxy puddles all over the icing and I gulp a breath. Hold it in. The older I get the more I need to learn to breathe. Sixteen little fires looks like a lot to put out.
‘Happy Birthday!’
Ma’s singing and nudging Lorrie to join in.
‘You too, boys!’
Zach and Seth mumble-sing like they’re being made to say the Lord’s Prayer. Their eyes fix on the cake and their stomachs gurgle for a slice. The zing of lemon drizzle hangs in the air. Everyone’s staring and waiting for me to look all happy and stuff. I pucker and blow. Face burning for everyone to look at something else. Whoosh! The flames wobble out.
‘Did you make a wish?’ Lorrie’s asking.
‘Of course I did.’
Ma looks away. Only she knows what it is. It’s the same wish I’ve been making since I was a wean. Let me be the same as everyone else, God, please. Let me grow out of being different.
The knife splits the sponge dead centre. Ma cuts a strip and pushes both halves of the cake together. Folks who cut cakes pie chart style make her die a wee bit. They’ve got it all wrong. It’s a stinking waste of a cake. She can’t watch folk slice a Victoria sponge without waggling a finger. ‘No! You’re doing it wrong! It will never stay fresh. The ends will dry out! No!’
Something Like Breathing Page 5
