Mosaic

by Caro Ramsay

  ‘Why? Why don’t you sit in the main car?’ I asked, knowing the answer. ‘You nursed Melissa through so much of this.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the done thing, it wouldn’t be the right thing either. Me being staff and all that.’ She seemed very reluctant to go. ‘Just wanted to make sure you knew what was going on downstairs. There’s only you left now, of the three shell seekers, only you.’ She pats the back of my hand, and stood up.

  ‘Wait, what could be so important that it’d help that cop’s career?’

  ‘The rumour in the village is he’s trying to discover who killed Carla.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say, nothing more to add.

  ‘So you take care.’ She smiles the way she always smiles at me, as if she is a little scared of me, she thinks she has something to be fearful of. As if I might have killed her daughter.

  Carla

  Yes, take care Megan, somebody is investigating the incident again. That’s rather telling.

  While nobody can dispute that Megan was lovely. She was as substantial as a Thunderbird puppet in a hurricane; I mean she really was useless at times. And more than a bit thick. She could speak Latin but then got into trouble crossing the road. I mean she honestly thought that all that palaver about Princess Frosty Pant’s wedding dress was … about her wedding dress.

  Nope.

  It was all round the village and common knowledge to anybody who would listen, that those visits to Glasgow, Edinburgh, London and beyond were more about Melissa chucking her dinner down the toilet five minutes after she had eaten it.

  I have always been far too greedy to be anorexic. But with Megan you never knew, it might have been what she was told, what she had understood or what she had presumed. She did like to live in her isolated world. I had learned early that Megan spent her life assuming things and making up the end of sentences after only hearing the first part. Anybody with the faintest modicum of sense would question why Melissa had been looking for a wedding dress years before she was engaged.

  Megan has always lived her life in a bubble, she sees everything then makes up a soundtrack. She had very little idea of all the private clinics for Melissa while the village was ripe with rumours, some of them started by me. Some said that Melissa was pregnant, that Beth was pregnant, OK that one was ridiculous but they all enjoyed a good gossip and a laugh down the pub. They said that the family was so inbred that the baby had three heads and was walled up in one of the forgotten rooms at the back of the Italian House.

  Then the weight loss became really obvious.

  And then we changed tack to cancer or AIDS as Beth and Melissa were flying round the world. The weekends away became weeks. Beth would come back without Melissa, then Beth would go away again and come back with Melissa, thinner and weaker than before. All the time Ivan was standing in the front row at church with Megan standing beside him, trying to sing, trying to keep up.

  The family were trying to get a cure somewhere but as my gran always said, the cure for that kind of thing exists within four walls, there was no point in looking outside when the problem lay inside. Gran wanted to know what they were doing about that poor Megan one as everybody could see she wasn’t right in the head either.

  Our family, such as it was, had different issues. I was back in Dunoon. I think Mum and Dad might have been speaking to each other rather than shouting abuse, so Gran stopped talking to Dad and threatened to put him out the house if he got involved with ‘that tart’ again. She always referred to Mum as ‘that tart’, except when she’d had a few then it was ‘whore’.

  I think it’s fair to say that they didn’t get on.

  But they had my best interest at heart, although I used to hear them, Mum and Dad, Dad and Gran, and later Dad and Fishface Norma, arguing about not wanting me. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to help me, every time I turned up at the door somewhere with no more than the clothes I stood up in and a pocket of money that I had stolen from somewhere, they opened the door to me, sat me down, gave me something to eat, usually toast and a cup of tea before phoning somebody to come take me off their hands.

  They couldn’t get rid of me quick enough.

  It was just difficult for them to fit me into their life, Gran and Dad both worked, Mum did casual work and left me wherever was convenient. But whatever they had, I had my share. I used to think that I spent a lot of my life moving around, being wet and hungry, being cold and sleeping in strange beds, but Mum was doing the same. We were in it together, what she had, I had half of, except when I nicked it from her.

  At some point, we were living above a pub, it was just before my twelfth birthday. Mum was having an affair with two of the customers at the same time. Then one of the wives found out and came into the pub. I was upstairs watching TV and eating peanut butter out the jar with my finger, I heard the sudden crescendo of squeals that sounded like excitement at first, and then it got violent. I heard crashing furniture, doors banging, voices raised, ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’, more doors banging, glass breaking, and that’s never a good sign. I crawled off the settee and over to the window where I squashed in behind the table, it was dark and cold outside, my breath steamed up the glass as I cupped my hand to see better, letting the curtains close behind me. They were rolling on the ground. The traffic had stopped. My mum was being held down by her hair. Some woman, wearing a neat suit of skirt, jacket and heels like she worked in a bank somewhere, was trying to kick my mum in the face. I was on the side of Team Mum of course. Some guy grabbed The Suit round the waist lifting her up off the ground so her legs flailed in mid-air, well short of their target i.e. my mum’s head. The crowd started to clap, egging them on, maybe if someone had got hold of Mum, it might have ended there but as the other woman turned her attention to the guy who had grabbed her, so my mum went on the attack, head down and rammed the other woman, hands up like claws. At that point an onlooker realized that somebody was going to get very hurt, they were dragged apart, the crowd scattered and the police arrived. It all happened very quickly, Mum was handcuffed and huckled forcibly into the back of the van, people came and went, and the pub door was opened and closed.

  Nobody remembered I was there.

  Soon the street was empty.

  I took the money out of Mum’s hidey-hole, a roll of tenners at the bottom of one of her boots and scarpered.

  It’s easy when you are invisible, I slipped through the cracks as easy as I slipped through the door.

  I made my way to the train station, there were reasons I didn’t want to go back to the pub. I didn’t like the way they talked or the way they looked at me. I had a sense I needed to get out of there before I got any older.

  I spent the night in a few cafes round the station, kept looking at my watch as if I was waiting for somebody to come and get me. That stopped any busybody from calling the police. From there, train to Glasgow Central then to Greenock and out to the ferry, it was not a difficult thing to do.

  I walked to the house I once lived in, but Dad was not there.

  Fishface told me where to go at first, then looked at my face and decided to take me to casualty. I told her it was nothing, but the police were called when the fractures appeared on the X-ray. So much for me being nice to my mum’s boyfriends.

  Megan

  In the end I didn’t go downstairs. Dad would be annoyed that I wasn’t treating our guests properly and acting as the Lady Of The House. I could leave that safely in Heather’s hands. I could rely on Deborah to spread the word that I wasn’t up to it, and being who they were, they would respect that.

  I drank my tea, and lay down, waiting for sleep.

  It came quickly and noisily.

  Of all the noises I often heard in my sleep the loudest was always Carla screaming. Now I am dreaming of Melissa’s funeral. The coffin opens and inside is my mother, smiling at me and telling me not to bother.

  But usually, it’s Carla screaming and the flames crackling across the water. I think I am running to hold them back, I need to g
et there to save somebody but I can never quite do it, pulled back by the bedclothes or by the bedroom door being stuck. I try to move quickly while my feet are stuck in the mud. Dad, Mum, Melissa, Deborah and Heather. I cannot get any closer – every time I reach the water they move further away. They are talking and laughing at her, ignoring me. No, not ignoring me. They cannot hear me, they are deaf. Carla has taken my place in their lives and I am left on my own abandoned. In the dream I can’t get out of the house. I am left to walk in and out of every room with only Agatha for company. I can see the sky out the paladin window, down to the Benbrae. There are people in the courtyard, drinking champagne and chatting, all laughing and drinking. Jago is there, in the centre of it all. As I move from window to window, so do they. I batter at the glass, but they do not hear me, and Carla has her arm round my mother. Carla then turns around, and looks right through me as if I am not here.

  EIGHT

  Wednesday

  Carla

  Bloody hell the house is getting full of pretentious wankers. Megan is keeping out the way, I think we will be down at the Benbrae today. Not even Ivan would have the balls to be seen to disrupt his youngest daughter in her mourning, no matter how much he thinks that she should be putting a brave face on it. People do think that the deaf are simple, that because they can’t hear, they don’t understand.

  Some of Melissa’s friends have been popping in. The funeral is not for a couple of days, these are Glasgow, Edinburgh friends coming over, paying respects, then leaving. Jago is acting as host, like he owns the house. That will not happen now, Jago, will it? You have effectively just been disinherited. But if Megan had died first …

  The Italian House is very beautiful, grand and stylized, but it’s just as weird as the people who live in it. It’s very big, built round a central courtyard, spacious and not located as you might think, on the plot of land that would give the best views to the loch and down the Clyde. It’s built looking inwards. I think that says everything about the Melvick family.

  The house is huge, so spacious you could get lost wandering around inside, except that some bugger will always come and find you. In the old days that would have been the butler. Even in the teeny totiest weest bedsit or the grubbiest hostel there was a big outside where I could escape; wandering around a market, being in a greasy spoon making a cup of tea last as long as it possibly could because there I was warm and lost, amongst people, so I felt safe. There’s always a safety in numbers.

  The Italian House is not like that. Big it may be, but it’s a house of overheard conversations, staff going through your drawers and reading private diaries, and you can be heard all over, the dogs always know where you are. You are lonely but never alone, and never really allowed to be yourself. The family were always a Melvick and the staff were always the staff. Megan felt that far more than anybody else.

  So Jago’s parents, the Harringtons, his brother Jeremy and his incredibly vacuous wife called Cecily or Cecelia or some stupid name like that have arrived. If Cecily stands against magnolia wallpaper she disappears. His mother is a rotund woman who likes art and says ‘jolly’ a lot. I thought she was a painter but she buys art, invests in art, talks about art but couldn’t draw a shit in the dust. She owns a small gallery in London and is always on the lookout for ‘pieces’ … not the Glasgow kind with jam on them.

  They are supposedly here for the funeral on Friday, wanting a day of rest, going out for lunch. Some acting types are arriving, sad times but they manage to make the best of it. Sometimes, in my little working-class head, I think they get pretty close to partying. Like the Irish except they tend to include the dead in the party. Melissa is being forgotten already.

  We are all gathering again. There was a wrong done at the Benbrae on the day that Melissa got married, a murder was committed. As far as I’m concerned nobody noticed apart from Megan, and now maybe Drew Murray. Though I doubt my murder is important enough to get him promoted, I was investigated and written off as, well, not worth bothering about. It might be interesting to find out what Mr Murray thinks might be worth investigating. This house hides a shit load of secrets, and I bet Mr Murray Senior knew a lot of them.

  Interesting. Megan hasn’t made that connection. Hairy Monkey sitting on the sofa, me with my lemonade and my stookie. Megan with her head bandaged and her pinkie sticking out. Oodie eating the sandwiches. Ten years ago. I bet young Mr Murray knows a lot.

  Maybe Mr Ivan Melvick realizes that soon the same people who were there at the wedding will be here for the funeral, five years later, almost to the day. Yes, maybe now is the time for the hens to come home to roost, for the cost to be counted and the guilty to have the finger pointed at them. The past may have gone cold but that only fuels a desire for revenge.

  Maybe Drew thinks he can take on the previous investigation and revisit it, maybe Ivan gives him a little more clout. There’s something going on between these two …

  But for now, I am keeping well out of sight down at the Benbrae, hidden but capable of seeing and hearing everything and everyone that goes past. I think the rooks know, I think that’s why they have been so close to the house recently. The rooks and the family have been a permanent fixture for hundreds of years. A shotgun will not get rid of them.

  And that was a difficult thing for me to get my head round, me having been in sixteen different houses by the time I was eleven. I couldn’t imagine being in the same house for four hundred years, or at least living in the same bit of the garden, building and rebuilding the same house to make it bigger, smaller, easier to defend, easier to house a growing family, a stable of ponies, then a garage of cars. Nurseries being added, separate rooms for the grannies and nannies built on the ground floor.

  Family, that’s what it was all about, keeping the clan together. The Melvicks had got that really sussed since 1600, then I came on the scene ten years ago and it all started to unravel for them, such is my power for bad luck but their power for self-delusion is amazing.

  I started to wonder if there was something wrong with me. Like a two-leafed clover, bringing sorrow in my shadow.

  Still, they had years of The Family keeping them safe, giving them all some backbone and structure – something that they could all come home to no matter what little corner of the world they had decided to invade and occupy.

  I think Mum just looked for corners of the world to hide in, then had to move on when they – whoever they were – found her. Or Mum’s behaviour got so bad, it was get out or else.

  There were times I felt safe. But not often.

  And it could flare from nothing, the violence.

  I’m not sure what sparked it the night Mum and Chris had gone to the pub, leaving me in charge of Baby Paul. They came back, rowing as usual. The noise of bone hitting flesh always woke me up. I’d listen for the footsteps coming up the stairs to have a go at me but I’d make sure that I looked as if I was sleeping. You learn to get these things right when it’s bloody sore to get them wrong.

  That night was different. I heard the usual shouting, the swearing, a bang. Then it all went quiet. Nothing. The baby must have sensed something and lay still, regarding me with big round blue eyes, wide with shock.

  Silence.

  I was wide awake by now, some spidery sense telling me that Mum was in deep trouble and I had to go rescue her. Or hope that Eddie’s mum had heard through the wall and had called the police again.

  There were footsteps on the stairs, running. Paul started screaming, a loud piercing scream, not a cry, and my door opened. I was told to get dressed, Mum hit me for not moving fast enough, before she took the scissors to my clothes. Then we were in the back of a taxi away to yet another refuge that would smell of cheap perfume and other folks’ burned cooking.

  We were installed in a tiny room, with walls the colour of a public toilet. It was ten feet by eight, made smaller by the cot in the corner for Paul, all his stuff and a pull down for me. Within a week I was in another school with a stookie on my other a
rm, my mum was the life and the soul of the whole refuge. I couldn’t blame them. The refuge was too small to live in and they took their chances to go out and enjoy themselves, six of them, all female, feeling safe and secure in each other’s company. One, a young girl called Mary, was left in charge of the kids who should have been asleep in their makeshift beds and boxes in the three stories above.

  I heard them go out, clattering down the stairs in high heels, some shrieking in excitement as they opened cheap vodka and swapped clothes, some of which had been shoplifted that morning especially for the event. They would be cutting off the security tags now. Mum came up to kiss me goodnight and say goodbye to Paul lying in the corner cot. I didn’t know what Mary was supposed to be doing, looking after me but I didn’t hear anybody come up to our floor. I woke up, my arm sore, a little scared at first as I couldn’t recognize where I was, the unfamiliar ceiling Artex and the single night light in the corner. I rolled onto the floor, pulled my sleeping bag around me and waddled off down the hall to the shared loo on the half landing, picking up our roll of toilet paper and remembering that I had to jam a brick in the gap so the door of our room wouldn’t close and lock behind me.

  I walked back to bed, dragging my sleeping bag. I saw Paul, eyes closed in his cot. I felt his cheek as I passed and pulled his cotton blanket up a little and tucked it round his neck as I thought he felt cold, very cold.

  Megan

  I had been up for a while, trying to retreat into what should have been the blissful quiet of my bedroom but I unable to concentrate on anything due to the constant pop pop of the shotguns outside. I didn’t like the rooks but I didn’t want them dead, too much death about this house. I slipped my hearing aids out, letting my mind tumble over thoughts of Mum, the fact I would be seeing her soon. What was the mysterious Drew after? I thought he and I had a connection but according to Deborah he was just using me to get a viewpoint on the death of Carla.

  He certainly picked his time well, all the suspects were gathering. And there was Melissa’s dying words. It took her a lot of effort to say that.