by S. E. Lynes
I saw the back of his head first. I knew better than to react. I was used to seeing the back of his head, his profile, him, everywhere. I’d called after him once or twice, only for that person to turn to me and not be him – to my eternal embarrassment. This was what missing someone meant sometimes. It was a kind of grief. So when he did turn, when he did see me, when it was him and when his face spread in shock, I too reeled.
“Dada,” said Isla from the sling, her voice seeming to come from my heart.
“Shona.” He put up his hands as if he were under arrest and blushed. I tried to think if I’d ever seen him blush about anything before.
I cannot remember exactly what I did. Perhaps I took a step back, perhaps my mouth dropped open – but nothing came out.
“Red-handed.” His face creased into a smile.
“What ...?”
He emitted a strange avuncular chuckle, still shaking his head. “Caught me. Red-handed.” He pulled me to him and kissed my head before crouching to kiss Isla in her sling. “Caught Daddy in the act, haven’t you?” He rubbed her nose with his. She giggled. “Now, don’t tell Mummy, but Daddy got sent home at seven o’clock this morning so he was picking up some scrummy bits and pieces for a surprise.” He pushed his finger to his lips. “Shh. Don’t tell.”
“Shh,” said Isla. “Dada.”
“I’m right here, darling.” He stood straight and kissed me on the cheek. “That’s a shame. I was hoping to arrive like Prince Charming with a luxury hamper.”
“But you’re on the rig.”
He threw out his hands, his mouth a flat line. “Compressor’s gone. The gas compressor. They’ve had to send for the suppliers to fix it so they’ve moved to skeleton staff. There’s a whole squad flying over. They need the beds so here I am – booted off!”
I met his eye. My head felt wrong on my neck, like I was holding it at an odd angle but couldn’t stop myself. “How come you didn’t phone?”
“What’s the matter?” He frowned, tucked a strand of my hair into my woolly hat. “You don’t seem very pleased to see me.”
The pink in his cheeks was receding. The lady at the counter was asking him if the olives in the square plastic tub were enough. Through the glass cabinet, on the other side where the lady was serving, I could see a wrap of cold meat, a small box of four designer chocolates and a bottle of Prosecco with an orange label: Valdobbiadene. Superiore. D.O.C.G. Valentina was right, I thought. I’d never seen that brand before.
“I tell you what,” Mikey was saying, “I won’t tell you what we’re having. At least that bit can be a surprise.”
I’m not confident I can tell you the rest. Maybe I should say nothing more. But I’m almost there, so I guess I may as well finish.
Mikey suggested grabbing a cup of coffee. I let him take my hand and lead me to a small café near the dock. It was a greasy spoon place, with linoleum floors and Formica tables. The kind of place folk like Mikey go, due to some perceived notion of authenticity. Me, I hate those places. Authenticity isn’t something I’ve ever felt the lack of.
“I’m gonna have the full Scottish,” he said. “May as well now we’re here, eh? What about you, Shone?”
“Just a cup of tea, thanks.” I fussed over Isla, looked at her, looked at the floor, looked anywhere but at him. Why I behaved like this, I had no idea at the time. If you’d asked me then, in that moment, I’d have said strangeness. Strangeness was all I felt.
“Sure?” Mikey was saying. “Go on, they do great sausages here. Real cheap shiny bangers. God knows what they put in them, probably ground up eyeballs but I love them, they’re brilliant.”
“I’m sure they are.” I pulled off my woollen hat, unwound my scarf. My nose was running, my eyes streaming in the heat of the caff.
“Here.” Mikey handed me a paper napkin from the table. “Freezing, isn’t it?”
Isn’t it. He had pronounced the t hard. The effect was fake. He never pronounced his ts that way, they always hissed a little. It was one of the first things I’d noticed about him, one of the things that made me fall in love. He got up and went to order at the till. Pulled his wallet from his back pocket. Paid up. Came back and took his seat.
“Are you OK?”
I nodded, met his eye. “So this thing sent you home.”
“The gas compressor, yeah. Bloody disaster. Not for me though.” He took my hand. At the touch of his warm skin I realised how cold my hands had become.
“Does that mean you’ll be here all week, then the following two weeks? So you’ll be at home three weeks in total?”
“I’m not sure.” He tapped his fork against the table’s edge. “We had to go straight to the office from the heliport. I’ve got to go back in now, after this. Find out what’s happening.”
“So, what? You’ll know by tonight?”
“Yeah.” He leant back to allow the guy from the café to put his plate and my tea down on the table. I nodded my thanks, Mikey said cheers and carried on talking. “Hopefully they’ll let me stay home. I’ll have to see how it goes.”
“OK.”
I watched him eat. He carved through the bacon, made a great pile on his fork: egg, sausage, white pudding, black pudding, bacon – a real heart attack of a mouthful – and shoved it all in. He stopped talking then, his mouth was too full.
“Didn’t your mum ever tell you not to put it all in your mouth at once?”
He grinned, swallowed it all down. “I like to have it all at once.”
On the way home, I stopped the car and googled ‘gas compressor’ on my iPhone. I saw immediately that it was a vital piece of kit, skimmed the listings, eyes landing on ‘dangers’ and ‘fire’. After a moment, I looked up the number for BP – I was too paranoid to call Maple so I called BP and asked to speak to a drilling engineer, and after a few bars of lift music was put through to a guy who told me his name was Pete.
“Oh hi,” I said. “My name is Diane. I’m a researcher for the BBC drama department ...”
“Oh, aye?”
“I wonder if you could help me, it’s a small technical enquiry actually.” I laughed. “I’m working on a short drama series about the oil industry and I need to know what would happen if the gas compressor were to break down. The main character works offshore, you see, and we need him to be evacuated from the rig, for the purposes of the story ...”
“Right, well, in the event of the compressor blowing, yes, that would be ...”
He talked a lot. People love talking about what they do to someone who appears to be interested. They would call out to the suppliers, he explained. Evacuation was highly likely in the event of a big problem.
“... bunk space is tight, you see, and repairs can take days. Does that answer your question?”
“It certainly does,” I said. “Thank you, you’ve been more than helpful.”
I hung up. It was true then. My chest sank with relief.
Later that morning, Mikey called to say he was stuck in the office, that he would bring the goodies for supper instead of lunch. That night he came home and announced that he could stay the full three weeks. Due to the rota system, it had to be that way. He had brought with him the basket: the olives, some fresh pasta, some home-made (by someone) wild boar ragu, which he prepared once he’d put Isla to bed. And the chocolates, of course. The Prosecco was too warm to chill in time. We drank supermarket wine instead: Hardy’s Shiraz. Red. Australian.
He washed up, seemed determined not to let me do anything at all. Like a guilty person, I thought, then felt guilty myself for thinking it. But winter, isolation, all that business with Valentina and PC John Duggan, had shaken my faith in my own relationship. At least that’s what I’d say to anyone if I had to justify that, when he excused himself to go to the loo, I spent one long minute staring at his phone on the countertop before grabbing it and scrolling through his text messages. I couldn’t believe I was doing it even in the moment but I was. But there were only texts from me, a football-related banter t
rail between him and Robbie and one from George Maple, a colleague I presumed, asking if he’d completed some request or other. Nothing. I opened the photos – all of me, Isla, him, all three of us, one of Isla with his parents, Isla, Isla, Isla. I put the phone back, adjusted it to what I thought was the exact position it had been in when I picked it up. My insides burned with shame. Still I stared at his phone, knowing that even though no one had seen, I could not take back what I had just done.
A second later, I heard his footsteps on the stairs.
“Hey.” He came up behind me and ran his hands over my shoulders, up my neck. He leant down and kissed me on the cheek. “Shall I light a fire?”
I took hold of his hand and kissed it. “No, it’s OK. I’ll do it.”
We drank the rest of the red in front of the fire. The stress of suspicion had tired me out. I ached all over, as if I’d been in an accident. So, when he laid his hand on my neck and told me I was beautiful, that I was his, that he loved me, when he pulled me to the floor and covered my mouth with his, I had neither the strength nor the will to stop him.
SEVENTEEN
Two weeks on. I blinked. Two weeks off. I blinked. He was here. I blinked. He had gone.
On Monday Valentina came over as usual. I had not seen her for a few weeks. She breezed into the cottage in her usual way, proffering wine and some red tulips, which she presented to me with a shy smile.
“Thanks,” I said, “but you don’t need to bring flowers for me.”
“Trust me, I do,” she said, taking hold of my arm before I could turn away, her eyes glowing green.
The kids played – if that’s what babies do at eleven months or so. Zac wasn’t walking yet so he sat in Isla’s bouncy chair while she toddled around him, passing him bright bricks, plastic lorries, toy figures.
“Ta,” she said, holding out whatever it was, her face set in hope: accept my gift.
Valentina sat down at the kitchen table: a sandwich lunch, a few crisps, white wine. Though, actually, I barely drank. Isla was sleeping better and I was sick of feeling woolly-headed.
Valentina took out her phone and held it up, her expression coy.
“What?” I asked.
“I thought you might like to see a picture of John.”
I didn’t, not really. It was the first time she’d mentioned him since our conversation before Christmas. I found it odd that she would bring it up out of nowhere like that.
“Sure,” I said and took the phone from her.
On the screen was a picture of the pair of them together. It looked like a selfie, taken in the centre of town. They were smiling away, in broad daylight.
“Don’t you worry Red might find this?”
She snorted. “Ha! He’s too doped up to notice me, let alone my phone.”
“He’s good-looking,” I said, moving on. “Lovely dark hair.”
“His father’s Sicilian.”
“You said.”
“And yes, he’s easy on the eye but so dull, bless him. Better than nothing though, eh?”
Red, then, was nothing. As if he did not exist.
“So what do you guys talk about?” I asked, feeling less comfortable by the second. “Does he like the same films and books?”
She laughed. “God, no! Shona – it’s a bit of fun. It’s just sex, you know? Not like we’re going to break each other’s hearts or anything.”
“Ah. OK.”
“And I’ve been so low lately I guess I felt like I deserved some fun for a change. You can’t help how you feel, can you?”
“No. I guess you can’t.”
I felt a little bit sick. But I listened, because that’s what friends do. And wasn’t it me, after all, who had urged her to take me into her confidence, who had wanted intimacy above all else?
“Last week we went to the new place up by the golf course. You know that hotel? We ordered room service and when it came we were, you know, in the throes.” She clapped her hand over her mouth to suppress her shrieking laughter and rocked back and forth. “So he picks me up – he’s inside me, right? I had to wrap my legs around his waist while he carried me, like that, to the frickin’ door.” She gave another shriek.
I composed my face into a smile that said: well, I never. Fancy that.
“He stops off halfway to grab his wallet from the chest of drawers. He pulls out a note and hobbles over to the door and he says, ‘Hello?’ And the guy says, ‘room service’ and I’m laughing so hard at this point but I’m really trying to hold it in and John has me against the wall but his knees are buckling, poor guy. He’s smaller than me.” She giggled. “And he opens the door a crack, pops his head round. He’s got one hand under my butt and with the other he gives this guy a tenner tip and says, ‘leave it there,’ except his voice is really strained so it was more like ...” She repeated what John had said in a strained voice, her glee palpable. She poured the information over me, like hooch from a jug. I guess she must have thought, now I knew about the illicit brew, that the two of us could get blindly, secretly, gloriously drunk.
“I thought you said he was dull,” I said.
“Oh, he is. But not in that way.” She laughed and shook her head. “Oh, Shona.”
Watching her laugh, feeling the joy that came off her, it occurred to me not for the first time that I must be her closest friend and that perhaps she, like me, had been lonely when we met.
“So,” she said coyly, nudging me with her elbow, narrowing her eyes. “You never talk about you and Michael. I bet he’s no slouch in that department.”
I felt myself blush. “Er ... he’s ... yes. I’ve no complaints.”
She leant forward, poked me in the chest. I realised she was a little drunk. “Come on, Shona, don’t be so secretive. You’re not a prude, are you?”
“I’m not,” I said, flustered. “But I can’t think of anything to say without ...”
“Without what?”
I shrugged, felt my face grow hot. “Without ... betraying him, I suppose.”
She threw herself back in her chair. “Oh, for crying out loud, Shona! Chill. Out. We’re only talking.” She took a slug of wine, gesticulated with the glass in her hand. “What about when he, you know, in the moment when he ...” she raised her eyebrows, smirked.
I nodded. “What about that?”
She shrugged. “I mean, come on, does he do or say anything in particular?”
“Like, ‘I’m coming’, you mean?”
“God, you’re hilarious!” She laughed so loudly I felt myself relax a little. I was being uptight. Women had these conversations all the time, I supposed, people had flings. It was the way of the world. Maybe I was weird or, like she said, prudish. Maybe I did need to loosen up.
“I suppose,” I said, taking a swig of white wine. “I mean, he gets this look in his eye – like he’s taking a dump, you know?”
She laughed again, arms wrapped around her belly, feet planted together on the floor to support all that hilarity. I wanted to join in but couldn’t. I felt horrible, dirty, wrong.
So I didn’t say any more. Instead I listened to everything she had to tell me and said hmm and oh yes and I drank the wine and did not mention the growing discomfort I felt. What could I have said? There was nothing to say. It was a feeling, to describe it in words would have been like trying to screw smoke to a brick wall.
At three o’clock, Valentina checked her watch and gasped.
“I need to pee,” she said. “Then I’ll get my shit together and leave you in peace.”
She disappeared up the stairs, singing. After a minute or two, I got up to clear the plates. On the floor, Valentina’s bag had turned upside down, half its contents spilt over the stone tiles. I put the plates back on the table and bent to tidy her things. Her beaded cloth purse had fallen out along with an official letter, unopened. On the front of the letter I read, couldn’t help but read:
Ms. G. Smyth-Banks,
14, Fittie Place,
Fittie
&nbs
p; AB11 5BT
“I think you’re out of loo roll,” came Valentina’s voice. She was halfway down the stairs.
I thrust the letter back in the bag, my face hot. I looked up as she was crossing the hallway. She glanced from the bag back to me.
“Your things had fallen out,” I explained, felt I had to explain.
She took the bag from me and pulled it onto her shoulder. Her movements had slowed. She appeared to reconsider her action, and placed the bag on the chair.
“That reminds me,” she said, pausing between each word. She turned towards the front window, as if she’d heard something outside, then back to me. “I’ve got to get to the post office before it closes.”
I took hold of our wine glasses, headed for the sink, ran some hot soapy water. With my back to her, I said, “Got a package to pick up?”
“No, it’s this damn letter.” I heard the chink of her keyring on keys. She was rooting – or pretending to root – in her bag. Why, I wondered, would I think she was pretending?
I plunged my hands into the hot water. Of course, I thought, the letter was from her to someone else. Why had I not realised that immediately? What other possibility was there? I was a nervous wreck.
“Got to post it?”
“Sort of.” Her voice came quieter and louder as she moved about the kitchen, the strain and ease of it as she bent or straightened to collect hers and Zac’s stuff. “Postman delivered a letter addressed to someone at the other end of town to my flat in Union Grove. Can you believe that? Brainless idiot.”
Not from her to someone else then.
“Can’t you redirect it?” I squeezed the cloth. My hands glowed red.
“What do I do, stick it back in the post box?”
“Um, yeah. You underline the name and write not known at this address on the envelope.” I turned, intending to look her in the eye but found myself staring at my own hands, wiping them on the tea towel. “That’s what I always do anyway.”