by Caro Ramsay
He was good looking for sure, any boyfriend of Melissa’s was.
Megan and I used to hang around casually waiting to catch a glimpse of any new man Melissa brought home. Then we’d give him marks out of ten for all the things that were important – looks, wallet, car, personality and shaggability, but not necessarily in that order. Sometimes they were such pompous braying arsepieces we just considered how good we would feel if we threw them off a cliff.
Jago, as his name might suggest, was a total wanker, and a bit on the plump side. But he was incredibly rich, not quietly rich like Megan’s dad, but good cars and expensive presents kind of rich. He was good fun in small doses and easy to take the piss out of as he was so stupid. His money, though, was awesome.
We had looked at him, in one of our slightly drunken hazes and had a bet that one of us was going to shag him as this thing between him and Melissa wasn’t going to last. We had a short window of opportunity and we had to make the most of it.
I knew the minute that I caught him looking at us, he was the kind of man who liked young flesh.
I had known men like him, too many of them.
If Ivan Melvick was a good guy, then Andy Pandy McColl was way down at the other end of the spectrum and then some. He was a stick-thin, waster, heroin addict and he lived slumped in the corner of the living room, between the fire and the tele, in a house share Mum had dragged me into when I was twelve or so.
Andy was always pissing himself, his head lolling from side to side, slobbering. On the day he died, I had noticed Mum had left her bag on the fag burned sofa. I reached out to get it as I thought he was in his normal stupor, but I was wrong. He struck like a cobra. Pulling the purse out the bag, his nose in the zip, helping himself. Propping himself up on his elbow, he focussed on me and said if I told Mum, he’d kill me. I didn’t believe him so I kicked him in the face.
Then I did believe him and kicked him in the balls as well.
He went out like a light, his head hit off the wall and ricocheted, leaving a red smear and spatter. It took him ages to slide down the wall, back to his corner.
SIX
Megan
I sat down on the settee, Molly flopping at my feet, I could sense the thump. Dad would be annoyed that I had not come out to greet Jago, but I could always claim that I never heard him. Nobody could argue with that.
I looked up at the beautiful ceiling. It used to be white, the delicate cornicing pattern of cherubim, seraphim and grapes was left to speak for itself, now it had been picked out in white and duck egg blue. Heather again. How much did that cost? How much chaos did that cause, all that scaffolding? The whole works. Another part of my mother’s simplicity had been eroded. Weirdly, my mind then turned to how quickly I would put it back the way it should be as soon as I inherited. And that thought did not make me feel guilty, it should have been my decision not Heather’s.
But for now I lay back, in between the cushions of the big sofa. Molly, sensing my disquiet, jumped up and lay beside me. This sofa, this room, a different dog. My fourth birthday. How did it all come to this? The five years between the wedding and this, all that happiness and expectation of all those lives on that carousel has come down to me lying on the sofa of this big house, dreading seeing my dead sister’s estranged husband.
The garden had looked so beautiful that day, the wedding was in full flow, it was getting dark, the garden looked like a fairyland covered in nightlights. The water of the Benbrae looked alive, glistening with fairy lights, flower candles drifting. I was intending to go down there, meet Carla, have a float around in the water, escape from everybody else and have a good bitch.
But everybody wanted a photograph taken. It was then that it became clear to me that Melissa considered Carla was an add-on to the wedding, and in the pics she wanted it to look like one bride and one bridesmaid; subtly, Carla had been sidelined.
And Carla was not the person to take that lying down.
I had been walking down to see Carla, desperate for a drink and a fag and to get away from Melissa’s lovely friends who kept saying, I paraphrase, ‘Oh you are the deaf sister, how awful,’ to which I would reply, ‘Pardon?’
If I recall correctly, that was one of the first times I actually spoke to Deborah. She grabbed me on the way past. At that time, I hadn’t known her, she was Carla’s mum, and had never been in Carla’s life while she was up north. Carla had told me what Debs was capable of and my first instinct was to ignore her. After a brief chat I realized that maybe Carla had her own internal narrative of what was going on in her life. Children rarely truly understand why their parents make the decisions they have to make. A few words and, even at age fifteen, I knew she was fiercely protective of her daughter in her own way. She was then and still is now … Whereas my own mother … Well, when the going got tough she went.
Deborah wanted to ask if I was OK, if I had seen Carla, was she OK which I took as meaning, was she still sober? We were only fifteen but Carla liked a good bevvy and there was lots of alcohol about. Debs was complaining about her feet being sore, blisters on her heels and moaning about posh folk having no seats at their weddings. If I remember right, my feet were also hurting and we ended up strolling barefoot in the soft grass down to the Benbrae where Tom would be, us looking for Carla. Maybe Debs wanted a little company before she walked into the father of their troublesome offspring. Most of the guests were still up at the carousel, the noise of it was starting to hurt my ears. The fireworks had not begun at that point.
We stopped to have a quick puff and bitch about the guests. We were walking down by the fence, she said that spinning on a carousel always made her feel sick, I agreed. We watched it from a distance, she lit my cigarette with her DuPont monogrammed lighter, not monogrammed with her initials though. She told me she nicked it when she worked in a pub in London. It was worth more than her week’s wages, so she pocketed it and left. We shared a few laughs at the expense of some drunken guests. I realized that I liked her, I really liked her, she had all Carla’s endearing qualities, a straight honesty, unlike our family’s stiff upper lipped duplicity.
I said I was going off to find Carla, and she hugged me and told me to watch my ears with the fireworks, she would come out and say that, in a way my family would pussyfoot around the situation. The carousel was slowing down to a stop, people dismounting. I said that the fireworks must be about ready and looked up at the sky, I know that my ears were hurting and I wanted to take out my hearing aids. The plan was to go down to the water and get on the Curlew which either Carla or I was going to bag, whoever got there first.
The sky was a deep indigo blue and crystal clear, it was getting a little chilly.
Deborah asked me if I was warm enough as we were walking down the slight slope to the water. I said I was, the words just out my mouth when she fell, right over on her ankle. I remember putting my hand out and nearly catching her.
She jammed a fist in her mouth to stop her screaming. ‘Oh shit! Shit. Shit.’
I asked her if she needed any help. There were at least three doctors at the wedding. I could have called on any of them.
Debs, by then, was laughing. She shook her head. ‘Oh, don’t disturb anybody, just give me a hand back up to the fence, will you? I’ve done this before, five minutes it will be fine,’
‘Will I get you some ice? If it swells in those shoes?’
And I hurried away, holding my long dress up, to the long table, now strewn with empty bottles, glasses and scrunched-up napkins, and watery ice buckets.
The fireworks started in fine style, high in the sky, sparks and explosions and stars of colour bouncing around, all truly marvellous. I continued to walk up from the Benbrae, keeping my head down, avoiding all eye contact, looking like I was going somewhere with purpose.
Then there was a flash of flame close to the ground, a bigger bang, a huge noise, then a ball of white and blue fire. Some people clapped, some screamed in delight and then there was another sound, a collective gasp, a
shuffling of uncertainty. The crowd, whether they had been close or not, all moved slightly away. There was a hum of realization that something had gone terribly wrong.
Then there was the loudest noise I have ever heard. I felt my ears explode. I fumbled to pull my hearing aids out, screaming, clawing at my hair and my face. I saw flames and in the flames was flesh, a hand came out, it looked as though it was grasping for air, for freedom, for life itself.
It was a small hand, a small, fine-fingered hand.
The smell of burning flesh.
The screaming, agonizing screaming that rolled around my stomach.
The stench of acrid smoke and flesh worming its way up my nose.
Screaming, awful endless primal screaming.
Then it stopped.
Abruptly. Like it had never happened.
And the world was silent.
When the screaming had started, I thought it was the worse noise ever, until I heard the chilling silence.
How did I get through that? Well, I did.
I was on the ground, somebody picked me up, thinking I was hurt. I thought my ears were bleeding and that was where the noise had come from, but I think I knew, deep inside, it had been Carla.
They wouldn’t let me go near the fire. I wanted to go down there to help, but I was held back. Guests, shocked and stunned, had drifted into little groups. Disparate, lost. The catering staff were tidying up in the way that people do when they feel the need to keep busy. Some were talking to police, I saw Carla’s dad talking to two officers and then they put him in the back of a car and drove away. Debs was sitting on the ground, at an ambulance, ankle strapped, a silver blanket round her shoulders. She looked as though she was sobbing. Dad had his arms round Mum, Melissa was with Jago, both in shock.
Me? I was alone. Deep inside I think I knew that Carla was gone. It was that sense of loneliness that did it. If she could have been with me at that moment, she would have walked through hell to do so.
What did I think? Well, I had no real idea what had happened, but I suspected even then, that it was no accident. I even suspected, that I was supposed to have died in that inferno, or is that a false memory?
At that point, it is considered that I suffered my first blackout. My brain did not want to know and shut down.
I was taken upstairs by some friend of my mother’s. I lay down in my bed staring at the ceiling, suddenly feeling very alone. Jago’s parents were still staying in our house, as were many of his closest friends. They had gone from merrily drunk, or extremely drunk, to sober in that huge flash of flame.
All the fun had gone, it was all over and all I could think of was that there was a sense of inevitability about it all. Even then I thought that death and the Melvicks went hand in hand. Agatha was on the stairs looking down as I went past, staring at me with that smirk on her face. She knew that we weren’t going to get away with it, the family had been on the brink of happiness, and that was never going to go unpunished.
All I recall was thinking that Papa had gone, Melissa had driven away with her new husband, no longer part of this family. And Carla? Where was she?
Carla was eaten up by flame and smoke.
I had never considered that she would leave me.
I had never felt so lonely, I watched the blue lights strobing across the ceiling, I made my loneliness absolute.
Always felt lonely living in that house.
Even afterwards nobody ever spoke to me about it. I was irrelevant, as if, because I didn’t hear I also didn’t see or notice anything, I was so easily forgotten about.
The dry wood of the Curlew was burned to cinders, her charred oak husk sank to the bottom of the Benbrae where I suppose it lies to this day. They didn’t drain it or anything. But the boat was burned to a crisp, and so was Carla. The post-mortems, both of them, concluded she had not drowned. The small brain bleed from the fall off the carousel might have contributed to her slow reaction, as might her alcohol consumption. She was already dead when she went in the water, the flames intruding into the lungs and burning them out. It happened in explosions. They called it something like butterfly lung.
Somehow that was fitting; sunflowers and butterflies.
I often think of that. The way they blamed her for her own death. I had nightmares about it all until Dr Scobie, the psychologist, increased the medication with a diagnosis of PTSD and then deeper issues came to surface. My mental health began to deteriorate after that. I admit I became obsessed by fire and flames and what it would be like to die like that, in some dreamlike state. I did used to burn myself with matches. Just a wee bit, just to get an idea of how much that would hurt. I wanted to feel a little of Carla’s pain. I felt I owed her that.
And then, in one of those moments of loneliness when I was thinking about Carla, I was playing with matches, smoking in bed, dropped one, and the mattress went up and my boyfriend was asleep beside me.
The rumour mill said I had tried to set him on fire and the suspicion of the Benbrae fire turned back round to me, whereas I was still suspicious of everybody else.
What was it like floating out on a burning boat like a Viking sacrifice? Floating across the Benbrae, seeing the flames rolling across the water heading right for the Curlew. How frightening must that have been, out in the dark, on ebony water? The only thing lightening the sky above was the flash and shower of rainbow sparks of fireworks, when a tsunami of golden flame comes cascading across the surface. Straight at the boat, there was no escape. It was moving so fast it would have engulfed the boat before anybody had the chance to get out.
Tom jumped in. My dad ran down. Many men closer jumped in. Billy Williams, a farmer’s son from Kilaird, waded right in, so did his dad, both got badly burned. The petrol had been poured onto the surface of the water so after the initial rush, it burned as a widespread fine film, the flames as hot as any other flame and just as capable of burning clothes and human flesh.
It was the beginning and the end of me.
Carla
I don’t really remember much of all that. Probably just as well, the rocking of the boat, the flames going overhead, a wall of fire coming close, then too close. As Megan said, it was the beginning and the end of me.
I think I had a whole list of suspects, but those stupid buggers didn’t think it was deliberate, not at first, not until the rumours started. I would have liked to have been at my funeral and looked a few people straight in the eye. I wanted Megan to be there and do that for me. She fought her corner hard and despite that Scobie bloke and her darling dad trying an emotional armlock, Megan came back for my funeral, a silent, black creature, tearless and composed.
My memory is crystal clear. I had looked out the side of the boat, hearing voices, I saw who was there and who wasn’t. Nobody who should or shouldn’t. It was a wedding, people had a right to be anywhere they wanted to go. I know that somebody had tampered with the boat, the water. I don’t know much about combustion, but I know how fiercely that flame burned. I know because I was on the receiving end of it.
I had smoked many cigarettes on the Benbrae out on the Curlew, flicking fag ends and matches in the water where they would fizzle out with a psst. That did not happen on the evening of the wedding; there was a wall of fire.
There was a list of suspects because of my exceptional talent for pissing people off. And maybe I forgot that the Melvicks did not get all that wealth and power by being nice. And I had freaked them out just before the wedding. We chatted about pretending that Megan had done one of those ancestry dot com things and then we’d bound in over breakfast and tell Ivan Melvick, Lord Lieutenant of the County, that he was actually a Muslim. He would have had a coronary right over his Eggs Benedict while he decided what was the right thing to do.
Megan was quite funny, she whispered out the corner of her mouth, ‘As they load Dad into the ambulance, I can hear him saying, “It could be soo soooo much worse, we could be Catholics”.’
But we didn’t do that. To derail Melissa’s
plans for the bridesmaids’ hair, we went in to Glasgow to get a haircut. It was strategic, ten days before the wedding, too late for it to grow out.
We couldn’t use anywhere local as they would know who Megan was, for all the right reasons, and who I was, for all the wrong reasons, and some well-meaning and tattooed hairdresser would call Beth. And that would be the end of that.
I tended to forget that Megan always had money. To give her her due, she was never a mean person when it was something she wanted, although she’d never lend me a tenner for twenty Bensons. So, we went into Glasgow on the ferry and then the train. The city centre brought back memories for us. Megan’s memories were of Christmas shopping in the darkness of a winter afternoon, tea in the Willow Tea Room, visiting the Museum of Modern Art. Mine were searching for a fiver in Mum’s purse, finding a tenner, shoplifting some vodka, drinking it on the train home, homeless hostel hopping, me and Mum, here and there, bus shelters in the dark waiting for the first bus out, sitting with the drunks, make that with the other drunks, as Mum would be as bad as the rest of them. I’d be stone cold sober, especially the cold. I’d sit huddled up, hanging onto the rail, wanting it all to go away. Memories that were best forgotten, the kind that sneak up like a thundercloud covering the sun. Life was sunny and then the world went dark, and all I could think of was pain and blood, and being hungry on a midnight bus with no idea where we were going, being scared of the rain that spiked on the windows, stabbing my reflection. That afternoon in Glasgow I gazed at Megan as she looked in Hobbs’ window, grey trousers and a cream shirt that never seemed to crease. A satchel swung across her shoulders in a way that looked cool, and not as if she had stolen it. That easy grace, the world was a safe place and she had it sussed. I think I actually did put my hand out and touch her shirt tail, mentally admitting how much I hung onto it. It reinforced how comfortable I had been back in Kilaird, round the Holy Loch. How calm. How safe now I had Megan.