Blood Salt Water

by Denise Mina

  Boyd chanced a glance up. The watchful customer still had her eyes trained on him through the glass display case. An older woman, but everyone in this town was old. Sharp greying bob, cornflower-blue eyes, expensive sweater in mustard cashmere. She had a very long straight nose, pinched at the end. Her blue neck scarf was pinned with a Victorian brooch, opals and diamonds, inherited. She was smiling at him, her eyebrows raised in recognition. He didn’t know her.

  Taking their brief eye contact as a prompt, she stood up and sidled around a display crate of organic local seasonal tomatoes.

  ‘Boyd. It’s Susan Grierson.’

  He reeled at the sound of her voice. ‘Miss Grierson? For goodness… ’ He stumbled around the counter to her, a boy again, thrilled to see his old Akela from Scouts, his very first sailing instructor. He sandwiched her hand in both of his, wanted to hug her but knowing it would be too much. ‘You’re back!’

  ‘I am,’ she said, the warmth of her smile meeting his. ‘My mother died.’ Boyd hadn’t heard that and he usually knew these things: the café was a hub of local news.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Me too. My father.’

  ‘Your father? Well, that must have been a well-attended funeral.’ She meant his father’s congregation, not friends, certainly not family. In fact, the turn-out was poor. Most of them were very old. ‘My mother’s funeral was pitiful.’

  Miss Grierson looked tearfully at the floor, shaking a little, as if she had forced her mother to be old and lonely by going out into the world. Lots of people came back here after a death. Grief and dislocation took them all differently but everyone felt guilty. Sad and guilty. There was no use in it.

  Boyd tried to help her out of it. ‘So, where have you been living?’

  ‘US. I was in the Hamptons for twenty years.’

  ‘What’s that like?’

  ‘Quite like Helensburgh, in fact. Lovely, gentle people. Changed a lot now, though.’ She looked sad but lilted her voice, as if trying to lever her mood. ‘Then London for a while.’ The sadness lingered, joined by what looked like wet-eyed anxiety. ‘So… ’

  ‘Well, I was in London too,’ said Boyd kindly. ‘Fifteen years. Glad to get out in the end?’ He was leaving it open for her to denounce London, as people who left it often did. It usually cheered them up but she didn’t take the bait.

  ‘Where were you living in London, Boyd?’

  ‘Crouch End.’

  ‘I knew it!’ She smiled and looked around the Paddle’s interior. ‘Hamble and Hamble?’

  ‘Ah.’ Boyd gave a cheeky grin. ‘You’ve found me out.’

  ‘I knew it! I lived right next door in Highgate. When I walked in here I knew it was a copy. Because of the local produce oath on the menus.’

  ‘I can picture you in Hambles’.’

  ‘You even used the same colour of Farrow and Ball paint.’ She nodded at the walls. ‘Don’t they mind?’

  ‘Well… ’ He looked at the wooden shelving displaying retro-style olive oil drums, the tumbling basket of sourdough bread and the string of brown paper bags hanging from a bare nail hammered into the wall. ‘They don’t know. They would know if they came in but they won’t come in.’ Because no one came here–at least, no one Boyd was very interested in.

  ‘I’m so glad to be back now, in time for the independence referendum… ’

  Boyd knew then that she was just back. With three weeks until the vote no one else was glad. Those in favour of independence could hardly wait another minute, and the other side just wanted it to be over. Miss Grierson raised her eyebrows, waiting for him to say whether he was pro or anti. Boyd didn’t. He ran a business, for fuck’s sake. He couldn’t afford to take a public position and alienate customers on the other side. He raised his eyebrows back at her and she changed the subject:

  ‘And I was so pleased when I saw you did gluten-free bread… ’ Miss Grierson got that look in her eye then, a look of mild martyrdom Boyd recognised as the presage to the biography of an allergy. He zoned out on the details but she seemed to be hitting all the narrative points.

  ‘… found I wasn’t actually coeliac but certainly had a very strong reaction… ’

  Boyd’s mind wandered again. He was thinking about giving up the gluten-free range. A big Waitrose had opened nearby and they did it cheaper. He didn’t want to have to listen to this story three times a day any more. ‘Allergy bastards’, he called them, in his head and to Lucy. ‘Allergy bastards bought all the bread today,’ he’d say while they were watching telly. Or, ‘Had to chuck all the gluten-free out because not enough allergy bastards came in.’ They didn’t seem able to buy the stuff without telling him about their Damascene journey. He’d spotted a gap in the market. It didn’t mean he wanted to keep a chart of their colon function.

  Miss Grierson had stopped talking. She looked at him quizzically, sensing his disengagement.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘how long have you been back, Miss Grierson?’

  She hesitated, probably meaning to tell him to call her Susan, but decided not to, for some reason. ‘Recently–going through her things.’

  ‘Sad?’

  She looked sad. ‘No. She was very old. A lot to do in the house, though. Garden’s a mess.’

  The Griersons’ garden was a huge lot in the middle of town, three quarters of an acre. A small estate really. He used to pass it on adolescent runs in the summer. Giant Scots pines with trunks the colour of ginger snaps. A hundred-foot lawn and a big walled vegetable garden at the back. He had been passing again recently, out running or walking Jimbo, but the walls were high and even the hedge breaks were overgrown. He couldn’t see in any more.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’ll know that most of those big gardens have been sectioned and sold off for new builds. Bear that in mind when you’re selling—’

  ‘Oh, I’m not selling. I’m moving back.’

  Boyd smiled. ‘I’ve moved back.’

  ‘We’re all moving back, aren’t we? The old pack.’

  ‘Seems that way. I see a lot of old faces in here.’

  She touched his elbow in a comradely manner–‘Our age… ’ Though he was only thirty-five, younger than her by a good fifteen years.

  Suddenly conscious of all that needed to be done before lunch, Boyd let his weight shift to his back foot, moving behind the counter. ‘Do you still sail?’

  ‘No, our boathouse is empty now. Mother sold them when I left for the States.’

  ‘We have a boat, if you’d like to go out?’ The offer was no sooner out of his mouth than he wished it back. He saw her eyes widen, wonder, file the invitation away for possible use later. Boyd didn’t sail for company. He was dreading his boys being old enough to go out with him.

  ‘Maybe, another time,’ she said. ‘Thanks, Boyd, it’s kind of you.’

  He wanted to change the subject. ‘Were you an Akela out in the States?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I gave it up when I moved. I loved it, though, while I did it. Gave me real confidence.’

  ‘Leader of the pack?’

  ‘I’m not much of a leader, but, you know.’ She warmed at the memory. ‘It gave me such courage just to go off and do things. Super thing for a young woman to have, that confidence. Good for me. My mother made me do it because I didn’t go to uni with my friends, you know, “Do something, Susan!”’ Miss Grierson launched into a dull reminiscence about her mother giving her advice and how it was good advice or something, but Boyd wasn’t listening any more. He picked up the mezzaluna again, holding it loosely with one hand. It was a prompt to her, to say goodbye, but she was talking without heeding the listener, rolling through a story to please herself, the way old people did.

  Boyd raised the mezzaluna slowly, waiting until the end of the story. She got there, looked at the knife and then around the shop.

  ‘So,’ she said vaguely, ‘d’you have a job for me?’

  Very American. Forthright and unembarrassed. Quite unattractive.

  ‘You can
’t need the money?’ He looked at the teenage waitresses on the floor and dropped his voice to a murmur. ‘Miss Grierson, the money I pay is crap.’

  She smiled. ‘Call me Susan, please. No, but I need to do something. I can’t bear the thought of working in a charity shop. The people in them are all my age. I like a mix.’

  Boyd grinned at her: every second shop in the town was a charity shop. They were staffed by retired people volunteering for a few hours a week. Most of their stock came from post-mortem house clearances and the ring of old folk’s homes that circled the town, ornaments and personal effects the families didn’t want back, after.

  He leaned in and whispered, ‘It’s the half-dead selling the knick-knacks of the dead to the almost dead.’

  They both tittered, she with shock at his maliciousness, he with discomfort. He’d said it often but he wished he hadn’t said it now. It was quite nasty, and she was decent, so it mattered.

  ‘That’s what people call it here, anyway.’ He was lying. The line was his.

  She looked uncomfortable. ‘It’s a bit mean!’

  Boyd pretended to think about it for the first time. ‘Actually, it is a bit mean. I could do with a hand tomorrow evening, if you’re free?’

  She seemed disconcerted by that and looked around the café. ‘Are you open in the evenings?’

  ‘No. We’re catering a dinner dance at the Victoria Halls. Charity. Raising money for a children’s hospice. I need someone to stand with a clipboard and mark off the tables as they get served, time it so that no one is waiting too long between courses. Think you can do that?’

  He saw her fingers close over the edge of an imaginary clipboard. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think I can manage that, yes.’

  ‘Righto, Miss Grierson. Be here at five thirty, then. And wear black.’

  ‘Please, Boyd, call me Susan.’

  ‘No,’ he said firmly, ‘I like “Miss Grierson”.’

  4

  In the van, driving back.

  Tommy and Iain were heading out of the wild, back to Helensburgh on a road that cut through chocolate-box Scotland. On high, rugged hills mist clung to the lochans and rain blackened the stone cliffs.

  Iain had a barb in his throat. The lassie, the dead lassie, her breath was stuck in there, a cough about to happen. Why did she go with them? What did she think was going to happen? Iain felt the catch in his throat throb and tighten, as if she was trying to explain to him. He tried to reason himself out of the mood. This is a good thing, he told himself. It was done now and the debt paid. But it didn’t shift the contamination deep in the core of him.

  ‘You’re very quiet.’ Tommy accelerated on a sharp turn, making the chassis of the old van groan. ‘Did that do your head in?’ A smile was tugging at the corner of his mouth.

  Tommy got a wild buzz from acting like a gangster but he wasn’t one. He’d never been in prison. Iain knew what he would have been like: cowering in his cell at association, hand-washing some thug’s underpants in return for protection.

  Iain had done long time. He was always weight for a bigger man and had done his time with dignity. He’d been out for eight months now but he still had the head of a passman. Passman: a prisoner trusted to dole out cleaning products and pens. The passman was halfway between screws and prisoners. They were the moral compromise that kept the whole system working, the vilified keepers of order. Everyone felt superior to them, Iain knew that, but everyone colluded in the compromise because everyone wanted something.

  Keeping order didn’t include killing a woman. That was a different thing.

  ‘Did it?’ said Tommy. ‘Do your nut in?’

  Iain shook his head.

  ‘Here, she won’t just wash up on the beach outside the kiddie rides at Loch Lomond Shores, will she?’

  She wouldn’t. Loch Lomond was a mile deep in some places. There was nowhere to go but down. Sailors without life-vests, swimmers and weekend canoeists got sucked under by the eddies and were paralysed by the cold from the deep water. They didn’t come up for weeks. Sometimes they never came up.

  Iain looked at his hands. Her blood was watery on his cuffs, under his nails. It was one of the few bits of concrete advice Sheila ever gave him and he’d forgotten it when it mattered. Salt water lifts blood, only salt water. It was a fresh-water loch.

  After they dropped her over the side of the boat, Iain looked at his bloody hands. He wanted to be clean and plunged his hands into the water. He had expected warmth, the sensation of putting his hands under a duvet on a cold winter morning, but the water was scaldingly cold. He yanked his burning hands back out, contracted into claws, and stood, panting with shock, bloody water running down his forearms. His hands looked unfamiliar, like someone else’s. And now his cuffs were drying in the heat of the van, turning crusty.

  They drove on, passing a Waitrose lorry.

  ‘I was in that Waitrose. Don’t know what all the fuss is about.’ Tommy was determined to chat. ‘You coming to the dinner dance?’

  Iain looked at him.

  ‘Tomorrow night?’ Tommy licked the corner of his mouth, keeping his eyes on the road. ‘Got your ticket?’

  Iain nodded.

  The Children’s Hospice Dinner Dance. Iain had forgotten. He did have a ticket. Everyone had a ticket. Mark Barratt made it clear everyone had to go. He wanted everyone to attend because his niece wasn’t well and it was a good cause. Wee Paul, Mark’s second, nagged and nagged until everyone could prove they’d bought a ticket. They did whatever Mark wanted. Mark wasn’t going. He was away in Barcelona while the deed with the woman got done. Alibi. Privilege of management, he said.

  ‘Hey, you thought about “Yes” yet? “Bairns not Bombs”, eh? Thought about that?’ Tommy was forever trying to bring up the independence referendum, pushing ‘Yes’. The naval base nearby meant there were nuclear bombs barely a mile down the coast. The independence camp had vowed to get rid of them and spend all the money on nurseries or something.

  ‘That’s what we’re about. The future. Hope, yeah?’

  Iain nodded. He just agreed with everyone. He’d never voted. He wasn’t registered. Mark said they were all to vote against it. He said independence would interfere with his business in Europe.

  ‘Ye not talking, buddy?’

  Iain didn’t say anything. He was so low he wasn’t sure he could speak.

  ‘Ach, well, you’re maybe just tired.’

  Just tired. It was weird that Tommy chose that phrase, said it the way Sheila used to. Iain wasn’t thinking about her, exactly, but he felt as if he’d just been about to. It was stupid, what he’d thought the woman said, but it was as if Sheila was determined to come back into his head and this time she did it through Tommy.

  Just tired.

  When Iain was young, if he came in with bloody fists, or a sore face, or a bag of something he had no business having and he didn’t want to tell her what or why, she always said maybe he was ‘just tired’ and made him a wee cup of tea.

  Sheila died so young he didn’t have the time to think of her as anything but his mother. The only time he ever thought of her as a person in her own right, as having anything that wasn’t him or about him, was as he stood in the pew at her cremation. Some guy was talking about Jesus. Not a priest, though that’s what she would have wanted. Behind closed red curtains a squeaky wheel signalled the lowering of her coffin. Iain wondered what would happen to the metal plates in her head. What temperature would they cremate her body at? Would it melt the metal or would it just burn everything else around it? He imagined the skull they were attached to melting like butter in a pan and the plates collapsing towards each other, tired sides on a house. Just tired.

  Metal plates in her head and jaw. The guy who hit her wasn’t Iain’s dad, he was just some guy. Early in her life, Sheila declared herself unlucky in love and then went on to pick arsehole after arsehole.

  Every time Iain met a new one, even if the guy seemed nice or gave him sweets, he knew that they would tur
n out to be an arsehole. There was one guy who tried to touch him, and Iain didn’t have the words to tell but Sheila worked it out somehow. She told the local heavies and they broke the man’s arms and ankles. He never came back to the town. Heavies were heroes to Iain. They were order and justice to him. They were the Passmen of Outside.

  Iain was allowed to visit her in hospital after the plates were fitted. Her head was bandaged, her jaws wired. She sat up in the bed, unable to speak. Iain was exactly seven years and three months old. He knew that for sure because, much later, a lawyer in some case brought it up as a plea in mitigation–‘severe head injury’. Seven years and three months when the social worker brought him to the intensive care ward and stood at the door to the room, watching to make sure he was OK, not too frightened by the machines or Sheila’s bandages and her wired-up jaw. Iain was fine with it. He was only there to show off to the other foster kids. He had a parent who wanted to see him and they didn’t need social work supervision for visits. His mum didn’t want to hit him. His mum really liked him and could make food and dinners and clean his clothes and everything. The other kids in the foster home were spitting with envy.

  Sheila’s eyes brimmed with joy at the sight of him, and Iain ran over to her bedside. She couldn’t talk. She held up a hand, warning him not to touch her face or head. She rolled her eyes to show him it was sore: Oooof! She made the noise with her throat because she couldn’t move her lips or tongue. Then she smiled with her eyes to show it was OK. Iain hugged her toes, staying as far away from her head as he could. He squeezed her toes and kissed them through the rough hospital blankets and Sheila watched him and crinkled her eyes to show him that she liked it. Then her eyes invited him to sit on the bed with her and cuddle in and watch the telly and he did. He lay his head on her belly and she stroked his hair with lazy fingers and he listened, half to the giggle of her guts, half to the news on the telly.

  After, when the wires were taken out, Sheila stayed not talking much. She shrugged, what is there to say? She had a point.