by Jenny Colgan
‘You hate me,’ she said.
‘Oh Christ, Mary,’ said Ramsay, opening his arms. ‘I love you. I love you to distraction. I just don’t know whether that can possibly be enough.’
‘I loves ma sister,’ said Hari charitably, and Zoe blinked again in utter astonishment as the welcome, comforting tones of the police boat ordered them to stay where they were, even as the waters of the loch were rising again, tapping round their ankles. Had it taken much longer . . . had they slept in even another twenty minutes . . .
But that was not something Zoe could think about for the rest of her life.
* * *
The police made them pull off their wet clothes and wrap themselves in silver blankets and sleeping bags. Ramsay, Zoe couldn’t help noticing, was utterly covered in bruises and cuts. He had been very, very quiet, holding Mary and saying nothing.
Hari, by contrast, suddenly couldn’t stop talking. He loved the police boat beyond everything and wanted to have a look, which the nice police lady was very happy to let him do. Eventually Zoe grabbed him as the boat took them in to the little Beeches shore. All the other boats had rendezvoused there, Murdo at the head, and Zoe threw her arms around him as soon as she saw him and burst into tears, and he patted her on the shoulder and held her up when she couldn’t stand.
They were all despatched to hospital – the helicopter was there, after all – but in fact, only Ramsay needed a couple of stitches in his feet. Regardless they spent the day getting tested and doing interviews and being fussed over and, finally, the hospital insisted on keeping them in overnight. Zoe found the room Hari was in, cosy and warm, and climbed into his bed. He lay there, breathing happily.
‘Oh my God,’ she said, covering her face. ‘I am going to have to call Jaz. Shit. I don’t know what to say. He might not even have left yet.’
‘I loves mah daddy,’ said Hari sleepily.
Zoe was terrified of making too much of Hari speaking in case it was an accident, a one-off, something that would vanish again if she spoke about it. She held him. It was . . . it was something else. He sounded utterly and totally born and bred in the Highlands.
‘What happened, darling?’ she said. ‘What happened this morning?’
‘Mary wanted to play,’ he said. ‘She’s ma sister.’
‘I know,’ lied Zoe. One difficult thing at a time.
‘And I go in the boat.’ He pronounced it bo-at.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I loves bo-at.’
She buried her face in his neck, unable to get all her limbs around him; if she could, she’d have gone back to being pregnant, absorbed him right back into her body where she could keep an eye on him.
She felt herself falling asleep, drifting off in the warm room in the hospital, nothing to hear in the room but a faint electrical hum, the scent of her child in her nostrils.
‘Monster took us,’ said Hari, yawning.
Zoe blinked.
‘What?’
‘Monster did pushing,’ said Hari. ‘Well, good night.’
And he reached out his little hand and managed to turn out the bedside light as Zoe lay in the darkness, suddenly wide awake.
Chapter Eight
Zoe had missed Jaz the previous day and so called him first thing in the morning. It is amazing quite how good a gloss you can put on things when you’ve had a decent night’s sleep. It also helped that down in London – where Jaz had already returned – the weather was climate-change nuts and it was still sunny and twenty-two degrees every day, and so it was hard for Jaz to imagine quite how bad it could have been. He wasn’t best pleased to find he had to come back up to Scotland, but was cheerful that she knew now that she had to be in London.
Zoe sighed. She couldn’t in any conscience stay in a home where things like this could happen; it was definitely something of a deal-breaker. Although she didn’t tell Jaz anything about that.
She looked up from the call to see a vast shadow in the doorway of the little room. It was Ramsay, and Zoe wondered how to delicately announce that possibly, due to attempted homicide, would he mind paying her up till the end of the month.
It also occurred to her that Nina was still in hospital and she’d have to see her too to explain. She hated to leave the van in the lurch, but she didn’t really have a choice.
Hari was still out for the count. Ramsay had a nurse beside him.
‘She can watch him,’ he said. ‘Could you . . . could you come with me?’
Zoe looked up at him. His face looked haunted and exhausted.
* * *
They left the paediatric building. Outside it was, astonishingly, a lovely, calm day. Bloody Scotland, Zoe found herself thinking. It could not make up its mind day to day.
Ramsay didn’t say anything, just kept hobbling. Zoe glanced at him. She was expecting an apology, which she was also planning on accepting, but would tell him that obviously it was impossible for them to stay and that if anything would make a difference, he had to – had to – get Mary the help she needed. She had tried. It hadn’t worked. It could all have been so very, very different. From various garbled accounts, they’d put together that Mary had pretended to be playing hide and seek with Hari, intending to lose him in the woods and give him a fright – malicious, but not dangerous. Hari had instead grabbed the boat, and Mary had done her best to save him. Of course he wouldn’t have been out at dawn at all if it wasn’t for her.
Ramsay’s flushed face and hangdog expression seemed to have anticipated this and they trudged round a grassy perimeter, littered with leaves, round the low pink-brick hospital buildings.
At the very back of the hospital, out by the bins, nowhere most people would come or see, was another low building with its own separate parking. Out in front was a surprisingly beautiful garden made, Zoe read, by the local community. It had gravel pathways and knot hedges and benches situated just where they were best placed to catch any rays of sun that might appear. Here and there were people in wheelchairs, talking to their relatives.
Ramsay, still silent, led Zoe to one of the empty benches and asked her to sit down. Then he went to the main door and buzzed on the bell.
It was, Zoe realised, a security bell. He entered and she watched him through grilled glass, talking to hospital staff who obviously knew him well. After a time, something happened and another figure appeared, and the main door was buzzed open once again.
Zoe could barely make the figure out as the bright sunlight was pouring into the low garden. It looked incredibly old; bent over, with wispy hair. But as Ramsay led her over, Zoe realised with a shock that it was a woman, not much older than herself. She had missing teeth and a gaunt haggard appearance and she was extraordinarily thin.
Zoe stared for a long time. Then she glanced at Ramsay to confirm what she thought was happening was happening. He simply nodded.
Zoe stepped forwards.
‘Hello,’ said Zoe. The woman didn’t answer. There was nothing in her eyes to suggest that she’d seen Zoe or was even looking at her on the same plane at all. Her hands were shaking.
‘Sit down, love,’ said Ramsay, and when the figure didn’t respond, he gently touched her shoulder and lowered her into the seat, where she stared straight ahead, not looking at either of them, one hand stroking the other.
‘This is Elspeth,’ said Ramsay, his low voice a rumble. ‘The children’s mother.’
Chapter Nine
‘Hello, Elspeth,’ said Zoe, gently taking the woman’s stroking fingers, which then started stroking Zoe’s own hands. They were thin and papery, as if she were a hundred years old. ‘Your wife?’ she said, looking at Ramsay.
He nodded.
‘Common law. You couldn’t tie down Elspeth. “You might be lord of half the world, you’ll not have me as well”,’ he quoted wryly. ‘That sounds like you, doesn’t it?’ he said to Elspeth.
Zoe stared at her.
‘What happened?’
He sighed.
‘All of it?
’
Zoe shrugged.
He leaned over, tucking Elspeth’s cardigan over her shoulders. She ignored him as if he weren’t there.
‘Sorry for talking about you,’ he said to her. ‘I . . . I promised I would never talk about you. But something happened. Something happened.’
He blinked, his voice wobbling.
‘When I met her . . .’
‘In the village they say she was very beautiful,’ said Zoe.
‘She was. Don’t tell me – they also say she was fey.’
‘They do,’ said Zoe. ‘I don’t know what it means.’
‘I do,’ said Ramsay. ‘I think they’re right too. She came from a faerie hill and got stuck . . .’
‘But . . .’
Ramsay rubbed the back of his neck.
‘She was very young . . . maybe too young for children. Shackleton was a difficult birth . . . She was never quite . . . She had post-natal depression, for sure. Maybe worse than that. She wouldn’t see a doctor, get help. I was going out of my wits.’
He grimaced.
‘My family weren’t pleased I was with her . . . which is putting it mildly . . . and I was trying to get on with everything . . . I was away.’
His voice lowered.
‘I was away. Too much. She’d wander. At night. Into town. Leave Shackleton with Mrs MacGlone, and just . . . vanish. For longer and longer periods.’
‘Where was she going?’
Ramsay shrugged.
‘Anywhere with drugs, as it turned out. Anywhere else. And I came home, but it didn’t help. Didn’t make her any happier, any more settled.’
An incredibly kind nurse came out with two cups of coffee; Zoe clutched hers. Even with the warming sun, she still hadn’t got over her chilling dousing the day before.
‘She was just wild,’ said Ramsay. ‘Couldn’t be tied down. It was like I was trying to domesticate her, trying to cage her. But I wasn’t. I just loved her.’
Elspeth’s fingers were still stroking Zoe’s hand.
‘Every time I came downstairs . . . the front door would be wide open, and she’d be gone.’
‘Is that why you like it shut?’
Ramsay shrugged.
‘How did you manage to stay together to have three kids?’ said Zoe.
Ramsay stood up then, stared out of the boundaries of the hospital, through the garden, out past the walls and the houses and straight to the mountains beyond, where the sun was glinting off the wing of something circling, only barely visible to the naked eye, so very far away. He let out a great sigh as if letting down something very, very heavy.
‘Nobody . . .’ he began, then clenched his fists. ‘Oh. What the hell,’ he said to himself. ‘Only Shackleton’s mine,’ he said quietly.
Zoe blinked. ‘What? What do you mean?’
‘We were together – just about – long enough to have a baby. Then she’d vanish. She hated me by then. She’d go who knows where? Ireland once, I think. Then she’d come back. One time, pregnant.’
‘With Mary?’
‘What could I do?’ said Ramsay. ‘She’d broken my heart and needed help and I was the one person in the world she wouldn’t accept it from. I thought . . . I thought she might come home if we settled down, if we raised Mary and Shackleton together. But she was worse by then. Getting worse all the time.’
‘So she left you with Mary? What about Patrick?’
Ramsay sunk his head. ‘I can’t . . . I can’t explain how bad it got. Patrick, she barely came home at all. Left him on the steps like a foundling.’
‘You’re kidding.’
He shook his head.
‘I wish.’
‘But in the village . . .’
‘Oh, they say a lot of things. She’d turn up from time to time. I made out she was working . . . Ha.’
He touched Elspeth.
‘Oh, my darling. Imagine you ever having a boss.’ He paused. ‘We just . . . kept ourselves to ourselves.’
‘And what about social services?’
Ramsay gave her a look.
‘Why don’t you think they’re round every second? They know all about it. She had no family we know of . . . If I was happy to take them, they were happy to sign off on the paperwork.’ He winced. ‘I think that house still means a lot.’
Zoe blinked. She couldn’t bear the thought of Patrick being left . . . or Mary.
‘She did try. She’d clean up for a few days, a few months, come back. She used to sew for the children, make the most beautiful things. Then something would happen . . . something would trigger her and . . .’
Zoe suddenly realised something.
‘Mary’s scar?’
Ramsay nodded.
‘Two years ago. And after that . . . she couldn’t see them any more. She couldn’t. It was bad for them anyway, her bouncing in and out. And then she hurt Mary so badly. And I have never known a child who so needed a mother . . .’
Zoe swallowed hard, thinking of all the unpleasant thoughts she’d had about the difficult girl.
‘The police got involved . . . I had to take out a restraining order and, well, that did it. God it was so, so horrible.’
‘What happened?’
‘She found some drugs. Took them. She’d been clean for a long time, didn’t know . . . didn’t know her own limits. Overdosed. stopped breathing for nine minutes. Heavy brain damage. It’s a commoner problem than . . . well. So they say. It doesn’t feel common to us.’
He patted Elspeth on the arm.
‘She . . . she might regain some function some time. Well. They thought that. A while ago. I come here a lot. We don’t know what she knows.’
‘This is where you are when you go away all the time?’
He nodded.
‘I keep thinking she might get a little better.’
‘And when you’re working?’
He laughed ruefully.
‘This place costs a fortune.’
Zoe nodded. The cash in the biscuit tin; the lack of anything in the house. Well.
‘I was trying to hold it all together.’
Zoe leaned forwards.
‘Nobody can hold it together on their own. Nobody.’
He turned round and looked back at the main hospital.
‘But I see it now. I’ve tried to deny it for so long. Mary needs help. This kind of help. Psychiatric help. Christ, she’s so like her. Up until now I thought it was maybe because we had trouble keeping people to look after her – Mrs MacGlone hated Elspeth, absolutely hated her, and found it hard to get close to the children. She didn’t think we should take in Patrick at all.’
‘Not take Patrick?’ said Zoe in disbelief. ‘Who wouldn’t want Patrick?’
Ramsay shrugged. ‘And I thought, well, it’s because we can’t get a good nanny so that’s obviously why . . . I just couldn’t bear to see her mother in her.’
His voice drifted off.
‘And then we got you. And I realised the nannies weren’t the problem.’
Zoe bit her lip.
‘Oh, I don’t think . . .’
Ramsay looked at her, his eyes so weary.
‘You did,’ he said. ‘You’ve changed everything. You don’t realise what you’ve done. You’ve turned it into a home. For . . . for all of us.’
Zoe shook her head.
‘But you don’t realise –’ And as she started to say it, she understood for the first time that it was true. ‘– this is . . . the first real home Hari and I have ever had. You made a home for us.’
And the awfulness of that and what it meant and the fact that it wouldn’t change a thing, that they would still have to leave, regardless, made tears sting Zoe’s eyes.
Chapter Ten
They wandered back wearily. Ramsay had gently patted Elspeth on the hand, but she’d shown absolutely no sign of noticing. Zoe stared at her; she couldn’t help it. What strange mercurial creature had she been, bewitching Ramsay so? If you looked closely enough – and it wa
s very odd being able to stare so intently at another human being without their reacting or caring – you could see in the bones stretched under the skin that there must once have been a beautiful girl in there somewhere, who had bewitched the young Ramsay, still reeling from the loss of his father. She could see Mary’s high cheekbones, her firm chin. She couldn’t see anything of Patrick at all. That child really had come out of a fairy hill, she found herself thinking, then she banished the thought immediately.
They walked quietly, sadly, back to the ward.
Hari wasn’t in his room. Zoe was about to swear vociferously before Ramsay grabbed her and showed her into the next room. The sheets were off the bed and had been made into a tent that covered the whole room. Underneath could be heard giggling. Ramsay pulled it up. Hari and Mary were laughing their heads off, playing with Hari’s tablet.
‘HULLO, YOUSE THERE,’ shouted Hari cheerfully.
* * *
Ramsay took Mary off – she was scheduled to have a meeting with the CAMHs nurse with a view to what would be the best next steps. Before she left, she apologised once again to Zoe so wholeheartedly and desperately that Zoe had managed to nod. She knew it was churlish but it was hard to go further, not when things could have so easily – so easily – have been all over the Sunday papers.
She swallowed hard, thought of the poor mite’s mother, whom she could never see again, took a deep breath and patted her on the shoulder.
‘Okay,’ she said, inexpressibly weary. ‘I think the doctor is really going to help you, sweetheart. We just want you to feel better. That’s all.’
Mary nodded gravely and let her father lead her out by the hand. Zoe turned the television on for Hari. They found an old repeat of Balamory, and Hari happily recited the lines one after another while Zoe stared at him, wanting to gobble it up with her ears, unable to believe it was true, until she finally found a minute to lock herself in the bathroom and empty out her tears.
Chapter Eleven
The nice paediatrician didn’t really know how to help her, except to encourage her to be pleased. ‘Well, it is an anxiety disorder,’ she’d said, and Zoe had grimaced and said she’d known that.