Mosaic

by Caro Ramsay

  I guess that kind of put an end to that relationship.

  His family and her family got together, of course. Ivan got Megan help, the best of help. Dr Scobie, the shrink, started treating Megan with a compound of drugs for some mental disorder. They get her well enough to leave the house, the minute she’s back the madness starts to kick off. She needs to get away, but she’s being pulled back in, her work say there’s no need to come back, so the arms of the family are round her, trapping her. She’ll think it through one day, that she’s better off the drugs than on, better off away from the house than here. She’s too trusting, I’d have seen through that quack in a minute, He is a right little shit of a man, he looked like a piglet poking his head out a hole. And I think, and Megan suspects, that her father and dear Dr Scobie are too close as friends, and it’s really another way for Ivan to control his daughter. It’s very much Donald and Ivan, not Dr Scobie and Mr Melvick and who can blame Ivan for giving his deaf daughter a get out of jail free card in case she does turn out to be bonkers?

  Megan believes in those very people she should be suspicious of. I can hear her dad’s voice warning her that she should have been suspicious of me.

  Me?

  What about her? When the news of that fire spread round the village, suddenly little innocent Megan walked onto centre stage of the tragedy of the wedding night. The poor little deaf bridesmaid, standing beside the more beautiful sister, then setting a fire and killing the other bridesmaid, burning her to a crisp, spoiling the day and the memory of the day for everybody. Did she do it?

  If she did, was she aware she did it?

  People will talk. And let’s face it, when you are deaf people can talk about you all they like, you’ll never hear it. But as far as Megan knows, her sanity is slowly unravelling.

  I knew she’d fall apart without me.

  The preparations for the funeral seem to be underway, people are coming and going, the gates of the Italian House are opening and closing like the legs of a French whore in wartime, as my gran used to say. The family do have a sense of occasion; no doubt this is all part of doing the right thing by Melissa. We have caterers, the distant family, the close family, friends, business people, fellow theatre types and, of course, Jago when he wakes up. That will be fun. Not. He’s never forgiven me for pointing out what a small willie he had. It wasn’t what I said, it was the fact I knew. And Melissa knew I knew.

  So all that is coming back to bite us on the bum, except instead of it being Melissa’s wedding it’s her funeral, a bit like a replay. But the colours are darker.

  A wedding and a funeral, five years apart. Almost to the day.

  There was a rehearsal for the wedding, two days before it. All shite and hullaballoo about who was to stand where, sit where, speak to this one, speak to that one or in my case speak only when you are spoken to. Then I got lectures on how to speak. Try to say a ‘T’ at the end of the word if it is spelled that way, and try not to swear. My mum really stressed the not swearing part.

  She was hanging around on the sidelines, looking across the stage waiting for her big break. I think I even saw her practising, putting on her new nude lipstick, rather than her usual tarty bright red. She’d always have that lipstick, even in the days when we had no food, nothing to eat in the house at all, she would always have bright red lipstick. Her own lips were thin and mean looking, as were the words that came from them. At that rehearsal I heard her practising, in her mad head she was rehearsing her own wedding, like that would ever happen now, as she put it ‘with all the baggage I have’.

  I think that was a small reference to me.

  It was something she said a lot when she met a nice guy, his reason for not wanting to go near her with a bargepole was me. ‘Why would a man want anything to do with me when there’s a kid like you buggering around, all the nice men will go with women who do not have wee shits like you’.

  On the wedding day, we were in the same church as the funeral would be. Both a summer’s day in a plain church, a single figure of Christ on the cross, his face bearing down on me like a dog that wanted to be put to sleep. I always think that Jesus looks like he wants to be put out his misery hanging there on the cross, in pain. I’d prefer that he was happy, not suffering, not on my behalf.

  I like this church. It belongs to the Melvicks. It was plain not fancy. It was a church of the people, while it was a Church of Scotland, but it was the Melvick family who kept it going. I bet any minister that didn’t get on with Ivan Melvick never lasted more than a month. I wonder if Megan had any sense of the power her father had, he could have sacked my dad at any time and we would have lost the house, my mum would be in worse straits. He had the power of work and idleness. Did he have the power of life and death? Did Megan ever stop to think about the hanging tree and the madness in the family that all started somewhere? Did Megan ever stop to think how close that madness might be stalking her?

  I doubt it.

  It was a quiet church, a space to reflect and think, bit like the Benbrae but closer to the village and even here the Melvicks were the family, standing at the front, the congregation was subservient to them, separate. Again, there was a ‘them’ and an ‘us’, I don’t think my mum changing the colour of her lipstick was going to alter any of that.

  There had been seven rehearsals for that wedding, Melissa getting more and more stressed at each one, Ivan trying to look interested but looking like a clown at a christening. And Beth looking at her watch to see when she could get back to the ponies, pouring words of comfort while my mum poured something a little stronger if nobody was looking. Melissa wanted it all this way then all that way. Megan fretted about being in church, her hearing aids could pick up sounds the normal healthy human ear could not hear. And that was why she hated big echoey places like the church.

  She preferred her world quiet.

  The main players exchanged glances behind the bride’s back, uncomfortable shoulder shrugging, awkward silences, and those little coughs that mean nothing and everything.

  It was tedious beyond belief.

  Megan and I were bored so we were studying Melissa’s university pals and Jago’s friends. We started marking them out of ten, then betting on who might have some weed on them and might be up for a wee puff in the toilets.

  I suggested who might be up for a shag, but Megan took a quick look round and shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t bother.’ As if she knew it would be crap.

  Megan

  Shit. It’d happened again.

  I felt that creep of madness coming on. I had no recollection of hitting anybody but the evidence on my nightdress told its own story. Was this how it felt for Melissa? How it started, an inability to trust yourself and memory? There is something malevolent in this house now, it’s poisoning me. I was well when I wasn’t here but now it’s happening again.

  I felt banished to the long veranda outside my bedroom, the early-morning air was clear and still and the heat continued to build. I was sitting on my rocking chair, wrapped in another light housecoat and another cotton nightdress trying to catch up on some less troubled sleep. I had four of these nightdresses, pure Irish linen, crisp and cool for hot summer nights like those we had suffered in the last six weeks. They never left this house, they carried the scent.

  The conversation with Deborah, the concerned looks from Dad, had convinced me that I was guilty. I must have been up in the night, walking around the house. Who was I looking for? Melissa? My psyche unable to accept she was gone. Mum? Because I wanted her to come back. Carla? I missed my friend.

  I had gone into the shower the minute I woke up so there was no point in looking at the souls of my feet, the ground outside was burned to a crisp. My shoes if I had them on, or my slippers, wouldn’t show anything. There was just the blood on the linen, the injury to Deborah’s face and the fact that I felt overwhelmed with tiredness.

  And now I had to talk it through with Dr Scobie. He would talk about my blackouts, my unreliable memory and the anger
of my deafness, his diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder. He was shit hot on that one; the distress and the memory loss, the anxiety and the sense of being detached from myself. There would be a fight about resuming the medication, what I did and did not need, what I would and would not take. It hadn’t escaped my notice that it was all starting to slip, just as I returned home. Like I was being poisoned by the very air that I breathe …

  I needed to get dressed again, although I felt more tired than I had felt when I got up the first time. Dad never liked us walking around in unsuitable clothes, people like us didn’t do that, we didn’t get tattoos, women didn’t cut their hair short and the men didn’t grow theirs long. We didn’t swear in public, we didn’t get drunk either.

  Such were the rules of the club.

  I looked out on the water of the Benbrae and the Tentor Wood beyond; the word tentor derived from the Latin for ‘to hang’. The trees sit there as a reminder of the best escape route when you cannot trust your sanity. As a family dyeing our hair was frowned upon but hanging yourself out in the woods was perfectly acceptable.

  I had another shower, running the water cold for the last few minutes, in an attempt to wake me up. Then I put my hearing aids in and immediately heard the rumble of the water pipes around the house. They brought back old memories of lying in my bed, the duvet pulled tight up over my head as Melissa told me that the noise was the padded feet of the bogeymen, coming to get me. When they caught me, they’d drag me out to the faerie pools and drown me. The age gap between Melissa and I left me wide open to be scared about stuff like that by my lovely sister. I believed she would drag me out and drown me. She had done the blindfold thing more than once. As I got older, Melissa would get her friends in to help her be horrible to me. I was always on my own, I liked being on my own as a kid but Mum thought I should be with Melissa and her friends as it was ‘good for me’.

  All that led to was me being dragged along and making all parties miserable. The last time it happened, Melissa and her mates had taken me out on the Curlew. We could all swim perfectly well so there was no danger with us slipping off the boat and into the cool water. It was a rare burning hot day. I was swimming back to the boat and Melissa thought it would be funny to place the palm of her hand on my head.

  It was very quiet under the water.

  I liked it, so I stayed there in the silent, cool water.

  And she got into a lot of trouble for that.

  I was dressed for the second time, in a neat navy-blue dress, my hair tied back in a slim ponytail as people were going to be visiting today and as a family we were in mourning so a certain sense of propriety would be expected between now and the funeral on Friday. There was a sense of waiting, hanging around, in a vacuum. All the clocks were ticking, their noises echoing round this empty house, yet time was standing still until Melissa was put in the ground.

  Dad was out on the terrace below my window, he had been on his mobile phone for about twenty minutes, making call after call. Tying up the final arrangements for Melissa’s funeral, calling friends who he hadn’t been able to contact yet, talking to the printer about the order of service. He was pacing back and forth, but with my hearing aids I could hear most of it, he was too far away to lip-read but I liked to practise and see how well my eyes heard. He was looking pale, anxious. This was a time for him to be strong and stand tall, the way the Melvicks always did.

  I took my chance, feeling brave and caught him in between phone calls.

  He smiled at me, like the earlier conversation had never happened. ‘Ah, Megan. You look very well turned out. I’ve got hold of Donald, he’s happy to come out to see you.’

  ‘Donald?’ I knew damn well who he was, but I was making a point.

  ‘Donald Scobie. I’m sure he’ll get you on the right road again.’ His hand came up, cupped the top of my arm and I have to resist the temptation to step back, to pull away. I have never felt like that before. This was my own father. He would do anything to protect me.

  Maybe he had.

  ‘I’m afraid I lied to you, Dad.’

  His eyes narrowed, the creases in his forehead deepened to a black plough line. ‘I am sure you had good reason, thought I’d like to hear it.’

  He didn’t quite add ‘young lady’ but it was there, unsaid at the end of his sentence.

  ‘I didn’t mean to, it was just something that Melissa said when she died. I thought it was for me, between her and me, so when you asked I didn’t want to break her confidence. As she said it, on her death bed, with her dying breath.’

  Did I see a flicker of fear in those blue eyes? The hand cupped my arm tighter, comforting now.

  ‘That wasn’t a lie, Megan, of course you kept that confidence. That’s between you and her. You kept it to yourself. If she wanted to say it to me, she would have.’

  ‘She said “sorry”,’ I blurted out, and then I was sure. There was that little flicker of fear in his eyes, a slight narrowing before he covered it with a slow eye blink. ‘Do you know why she would say that to me?’

  He smiled and shrugged, relieved. ‘You should know better than me, she once nearly drowned you in the Tentor Wood. She was a rascal.’ He tapped my arm. ‘You take it easy today, I’ve some phone calls still to make.’ He sighed like a man who had been told good news at the doctors. ‘Oh, and on a more delicate subject …’ He clasped both of my arms in his hands.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Have you got the necklace?’

  ‘No.’ Again I knew exactly what he was talking about.

  ‘It was in the safe, Megan, you haven’t been in there?’

  ‘No, of course not. The last time I saw it, it was—’

  He put his hand out not wanting that particular memory to come back. ‘I must have mislaid it.’

  My mind flits to what else I was doing while sleepwalking, ‘Dad? You can’t …’

  ‘I will have put it somewhere secure, don’t worry. Too much coming and going. But I do want you to wear the necklace at the funeral. I’m sure that will be difficult, but it will be an honour for you.’

  I hoped he couldn’t read the ungrateful comments that were going through my mind. It was more like a yolk than a piece of jewellery but he just nodded, it was a done deal, he added something about a phone call and turned his back on me.

  I looked past him down the Long Drive to the Benbrae, the ever threatening Tentor Wood. I am going to inherit all this, I had just been promoted to the lady of the house, that necklace with its twisted lion and unicorn of the family crest, that gave me a job and a status.

  His back was towards me now. I had been dismissed. I knew that my dad told lies, too.

  I went back indoors, feeling like I was waiting for a hurricane, searching out hot strong coffee to shrug off the rest of the fatigue. Debs was in the kitchen, sorting out laundry into piles, her face now neatly made up, the cut in the skin covered by a clear plaster.

  She smiled at me nervously, another person uneasy in my company now. She concentrated on her task, doing it slowly, making it last as long as possible, trying to keep busy as the kettle boiled. She was looking at a white linen bed sheet that she had taken off the line. Was it Melissa’s bed sheet, the one she had died in? That thought struck me brutally, she was gone. Never to come back, throw a tantrum, scream at the top of her voice or fling plates at the wall.

  Debs apologized, ‘Oh my God, I am so sorry, I didn’t mean you to see that. To see this.’ She looked down at the wicker basket as if kicking it out of sight under the table would make it OK.

  ‘You don’t think about that, do you? The pillow where somebody laid their head before they passed away. Seems too mundane and yet so final. Is your face still sore?’

  ‘Not really, it looks worse than it is. Carla used to sleepwalk when she was wee, you know.’ She smiled at the memory. ‘And because we moved about so much she never had a chance to get to know the layout of the house so we’d find her in all kinds of places. She’d sleepwalk when she was uns
ettled and that was always when we had just moved to a new place. We’d find her in the garden, under the table in the pantry, in the bath. We never woke her up though, I know that can be dangerous. Did you sleepwalk when you were wee?’

  She was blabbering. ‘I don’t think so,’ I replied.

  She pulled her short blonde hair, as wiry as a Brillo pad, back into its rubber band and put her hands on her hips. ‘I don’t really know what to do next. I don’t get paid to do nothing and I’m trying to keep out of Jago’s way, your dad’s way. I really don’t know what to say to him when I bump into him. He asked me this morning when Jago was arriving. I had to say that he arrived yesterday but how easy it was to get the days muddled. He’s been awake half the night. He really is the strong silent type but he can’t hold all this in, it’s not good for him.’

  ‘You should know us Melvicks by now. Dad’s been on the phone for ages doing the stiff upper lip routine,’ I said, switching the kettle on.

  ‘Here, dear, I’ll get that for you.’ She put down a pillow case she had picked up, clean ready to fold, pulling out a chair for me to sit down. Her fingers and hair and elbows and bruises all shook. Had it affected her more than me? She has more memories of Melissa being ill to forget than I have.

  ‘No, I will get it myself.’ It wasn’t a clear order but Debs felt it, the hired help but she wasn’t hired by me, and she and I, well, our relationship went back much further than making cups of coffee and folding the laundry. ‘What were you doing with the keys for the gun cupboard?’ The question rattled out as an accusation.

  Debs bit her lip. ‘I moved them. They are up there, in that jar marked salt.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I didn’t want your dad to have access to the gun cupboard. He was talking about taking the guns out in the evening. I wanted to stop him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You know he lost the necklace?’

  I nod.

  ‘I’m just a bit worried about him. The box for the necklace was up in his room, but it was empty. I’m looking for it, he’ll have put it somewhere. I didn’t want him putting a bloody gun down somewhere and forgetting it.’