The Sweetest Poison

by Jane Renshaw

  Hector pulled James back and said, ‘Okay,’ and then he bent down and said something to Robin, and Robin got up and ran off round the side of the school. Suzanne grabbed Lorna from Shona and they ran after him.

  Fiona said, ‘Are you okay, Helen?’

  ‘She’s okay.’ Hector put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’

  She walked with Hector across the playground. She didn’t look at him. She didn’t want him to look at her.

  ‘You can wash in the river.’

  ‘We aren’t allowed.’

  ‘No one will see.’

  He took her out of the gates, and onto the road, and along past the manse to the kirkyard. Behind the old gravestones there was long grass, and the river. There was a nice sandy bit like a beach. If you looked in the water you could see little fish.

  Helen sat down on the sand.

  Hector said, ‘You can wash while I go back for my lunch.’

  When he’d gone, Helen went to the edge of the river and pushed her feet down into the sand, so that the water came right up over the red straps and sides of her shoes. Right over her socks. It was shivery but it smelt nice, like hay when it was cut, only wetter. The only thing she didn’t like was that there were flies and midgies.

  Malfolio was exploring up the Amazon. He had blood all on him from werewolfing, and he needed to wash himself. He didn’t take off his pants, he just waded out into the water. Shivery on his legs. He bunched up his pinafore – his explorer’s cloak – to keep it dry. The water tugged at him as it went past. Some of the big stones had weeds growing from them like hair pulled back by the river, spongy under his feet, but some were slimy, and if he stood on them he could slip off and fall and get eaten by piranhas.

  Helen squatted down so the water went over her pants, then she stood and struggled her legs back to the beach.

  By the time Hector came running through the gravestones she was cold.

  ‘Here, these’ll be a bit big but they’re dry at least.’ He dropped some black rubbery gym shoes in the grass next to her.

  They didn’t go back to the playground, they sat on one of the flat table graves in the sun. It wasn’t very comfy because of the knobbly carvings of skulls and angels and things but the stone was warm on her bottom. She lifted up her pinafore so her pants could dry, and her shoes and socks steamed on the stone next to her. She had put her socks on an angel’s wings.

  Hector took a squashed tinfoil shape out of his pocket and unwrapped it on the gravestone. There were two soggy sandwiches inside. Mrs MacIver made his lunch, and she wasn’t very good at it. Hector didn’t have a mummy because Mr Beattie had asked God to kill her, and God had.

  ‘Looks and smells and probably tastes like something a cat’s vomited up, but I’m hoping it’s meat paste,’ Hector said. ‘What’ve you got?’

  ‘I’ve eaten mine already.’

  She pushed her empty box away to the other side of the angel. How long would the seeds take to kill Robin Beattie? She hoped by the end of lunchtime.

  His grave would be over where all the new ones were, next to the road. It wasn’t so nice there. There was just short grass and the wall and the railing.

  Hector said, ‘Like one of these?’

  ‘No thank you.’ But she was hungry.

  He didn’t say anything more until he’d finished the first sandwich. Then he said, ‘When Robin Beattie bullies you, why don’t you come and tell me?’

  Helen didn’t say anything. She couldn’t tell Hector because God would kill him if she did. When Robin Beattie was dead, he wouldn’t be able to get God to kill people any more.

  ‘I’ve told him he’d better not bully you again. If he does, you’ve got to tell me. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  She watched him eating the other sandwich. You never knew how long Hector would stay with you for. He didn’t like just sitting. He liked playing football and other boys’ games like British Bulldogs and Thief and fighting, and when he wasn’t doing that he liked exploring. Mummy said he shouldn’t be allowed. Helen and Suzanne weren’t allowed past the track end unless they were with each other, and even then mostly only to go to school or the shoppie, but Hector went everywhere. He’d been right up Ben Aven on his own. He killed rabbits with Mr Cranston’s ferrets.

  Helen let the gym shoes slide down her feet into the grass. On the long stalks there were those spit-gobs made by little insects. The insect was inside, and spat and spat to make a big gob all round itself. A fly was climbing towards one of the gobs. Its legs were long and so thin they looked as if they would snap off if you touched them.

  ‘Have you seen how Fish runs?’ Hector got up and pretended to be Fish running, with his feet sticking out. ‘It’s possible he really is a fish.’

  Helen laughed.

  Hector sat down and put the last bit of sandwich in his mouth. ‘You’re a better runner than most of them. If they really had been British Bulldogs, they’d have been mown down by submachine-gun fire in about two seconds.’ Hector was going to be a real soldier in the Army when he grew up, and so was Malfolio. Hector and Malfolio were best friends.

  ‘Someone who could run fast would be all right though, wouldn’t they, in a real war?’

  ‘If there is another World War, we’ll all just get fried by nuclear bombs.’ He picked some green stuff off the letters on the grave.

  ‘In wars, people kill other people but they’re not murderers.’

  ‘Of course not. Unless it’s a war crime. In a battle you can kill as many people as you like.’

  ‘Murderers go to hell, don’t they?’

  He smiled at her. ‘There’s no such thing as heaven and hell. They’re just made up. God’s just made up. You didn’t think God was real, did you? It’s just stories, all that guff in the Bible.’

  She stared at him.

  ‘My father says the idea of heaven and hell is to make people be nice to each other. To make them scared of what might happen if they don’t behave themselves.’ Hector didn’t speak like everyone else. He spoke like an English boy, but he wasn’t. His daddy was the Laird and so Hector was posh. That was why he was going away to a school in England after the summer holidays.

  Helen didn’t want Hector to go away. Thinking about it made her feel funny. How could there be school without Hector?

  She looked down at the angel. Hector scraped green stuff off it. ‘That’s meant to be the soul going up to heaven. That’s what the wings are for. See, it’s rising up from the skull.’

  ‘I thought he was an angel.’

  ‘And that’s a coffin.’ His fingers moved across the stone. ‘And an hourglass. And a scythe. They’re called emblems of mortality. To make people think about what happens when they die – to make them behave themselves, and go to church.’

  ‘People who believe in God, though – they still go to hell if they’re bad, don’t they?’

  He smiled, and crumpled the foil and put it in his pocket. ‘Just because you believe something doesn’t make it true.’ He stood up on top of the table grave. He took a few steps back and then ran and jumped, through the air, and landed on top of the next table grave. Then he jumped to the skyscraper one with the cross on top. Helen put on her socks and her shoes, which were still a bit wet but not too bad, and slid down to the ground. She picked up her box and the gym shoes.

  ‘We’d better go back,’ Hector said.

  Helen looked up past the trees and over the wall to the manse. Mr and Mrs Beattie were probably in there having their lunch. Maybe Mrs Beattie was saying, ‘I’ve made some nice biscuits for when Robin and Lorna get home from school.’ She wouldn’t know that Robin was probably dead now.

  Hector scrabbled down the skyscraper, his grey socks at his ankles, and half-ran and half-leapt along the path to the steps and down to the gate. Helen ran after him, and Hector held open the gate for her and she jumped through.

  The bell went, so they started running. At the gates of the manse Helen looked up the drive. Ma
ybe Mr Beattie would be saying, ‘What are we going to do about Robin? He’s so horrible,’ and Mrs Beattie would be saying, ‘I know. If we just had Lorna and Scamp it would be better, but we have to keep Robin or God would be angry.’

  Someone was running out from the school gates. Suzanne and Lorna. They were holding hands, and Lorna was crying. Robin came after them – but walking, not running.

  Hector put out his hand to make Suzanne stop. He looked down at Lorna. ‘What’s he been doing to her?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Lorna’s head was bent over and her hair was hanging down. Hector pushed back her hair, and then they could see her face was all red with crying, and all wet. Her mouth was open and a dribble was coming out. Her eyes were scrunched up.

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  What if Lorna didn’t get that seed off the toilet floor? The seeds had been stuck to the butter, so it would be hard for one of them to fall out. What if Lorna got it from the sandwich? What if Robin gave her a bit of the sandwich, and Lorna ate it all up except for one seed?

  She asked Lorna, ‘Have you got a sore tummy?’

  Lorna carried on crying and pulled her hand away from Suzanne.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with her,’ said Suzanne. ‘Robin cowked and some got on her shoes.’ She pointed.

  Lorna’s blue shoes had splatters of sick on them, and up her socks.

  Suzanne grabbed back Lorna’s hand, and Lorna’s crying got louder. She stomped her feet up and down really fast, as if she was trying to get them away from the splatters. She pulled at Suzanne’s hand.

  Robin walked up behind them and said, ‘Stop – being – such a baby, Lorna.’

  He had his arms across his stomach and he was walking in a funny way. He didn’t say anything else. He just walked past.

  ‘We’re taking her to her mum,’ said Suzanne. ‘Can you tell Miss Fraser? I might be late, and Robin might have to stay off.’

  Helen nodded.

  Lorna was tugging at Suzanne’s hand, leaning forward so her hair hung down even more. Suzanne said, ‘Come on, then,’ and they started running again, past Robin and in at the gates to the manse.

  ‘Have you shat yourself, Zombie?’ said Hector.

  ‘No,’ said Robin. He didn’t turn round.

  ‘Yes you have. I can smell it. When your mum’s finished cleaning up Lorna, you’d better get her to wipe your arse.’

  Robin kept on walking until he got to the manse gates. Then he stopped, and Helen waited to see if he was going to lie down on the ground. But he didn’t. He looked round, and Helen looked back, and said in her mind, You’re going to die now.

  He went in at the gates.

  Hector said, ‘We’d better hurry up or we’ll be late,’ and she ran after him along the road by the playground, and stretched out her hand to brush the tiny, pale, brand-new ivy leaves hanging like waterfalls of green stars from the top of the wall.

  When she was eighteen

  4

  She climbed the gate, jumped off it and ran up the cowpat-dotted slope of the Lang Park towards the plantation. The binoculars bumped against her hip bone but she didn’t care. She needed to run, to let out the energy that’d been building up inside her all day with nowhere to go, making her feet tap and her brain somersault when it should be checking invoices, or deciding what she should wear tomorrow, or putting sensible words in her mouth when Mum asked if she was all right.

  ‘Yaaa!’ she shouted at the stirks.

  They didn’t move. They were standing in a row by the dyke, watching her, bored-looking, but she knew that really their little stirkie brains were somersaulting too. This was their mad time, the long still summer gloaming, the time when Dad used to say the devil got into the coorse buggers. But Helen liked to think it wasn’t the devil, it was just the wild part of them, the part that remembered being free.

  When it happened, the weirdest thing was that there’d be no bellowing or snorting or pounding of hooves. If you’d turned away you might not even realise they’d moved, until something made you look round and you’d see the silent pack of beasts rushing down the field at you, all shoulders and haunches and hooves, big doe eyes rolling with bloodlust.

  They’d never actually trample a person. They always veered off at the last second, whether you shouted and waved your arms about like she did, or just stood there with your hands on your hips like Dad.

  ‘Yaaaa!’ she encouraged them.

  They didn’t move. They just watched her, all the way to the top gate and over it into the resin-smelling plantation. Here the old drove road curved away round the hill, but she only ran a short distance along its grassy ruts, past the pet cemetery with its little wooden crosses, before taking the path that went vertically up through the trees.

  The binoculars were bugging her now.

  She took the strap off her shoulder and let their weight swing from her hand.

  Mum’s face, when Helen had asked where they were! But nothing had been said. Mum had just reached in to the cupboard under the stairs and pulled out the case, and run her hands over it to rub off two years’ worth of dust.

  She always used to have plenty to say about Helen’s ‘obsession’. That it was an old man’s hobby, sitting on your own up a hill staring at a lot of flechy animals for hours on end. That she should be off having fun with Suzanne and her friends. That she spent too much time on her own as it was.

  What she’d meant was It’s not normal. And Helen used to hug to herself the thought that what she was really doing up the hill was about a million times less normal than watching badgers. And a million times better.

  And then, two years ago, it had all stopped. Mum and Dad had eventually noticed that it’d been a good while since Helen had been up to the sett, and she’d told them she’d been put off after getting a tick on her bum.

  She’d been a miserable little cow for months. Mooning around, leafing through her diaries, reading and rereading the best bits. She was going to have to burn those diaries. What if Hector found them? It would hardly take an Enigma Machine to work out who ‘H’ was – and that the last entry coincided with his last visit home two years ago. She could just imagine him looking at her, and raising his eyebrows, and saying, ‘Should I be flattered, or checking the rabbit hutch?’ but deep down thinking, Oh-oh.

  She could never tell him about ‘badgers’.

  Oh God oh God oh God. Tomorrow was almost here, and she still hadn’t a clue what she was going to say to him.

  And she’d been getting in a right state, trying on the cream dress, and then every alternative she could think of, even ridiculous things like an old school skirt, and she’d got all sweaty and had to have a shower. In the end she’d put all the other stuff back in the wardrobe, and hung the cream dress up on the back of the door, and run downstairs.

  When she’d asked Mum where the binoculars were, she’d expected her to sigh and shake her head. To say she’d hoped Helen had outgrown all that. But all she’d said was, ‘Don’t stay out too long. Make sure you start back before the light goes.’

  And the light never really went, not at this time of year. ‘Simmer Dim’ they called it in the Northern Isles, this weird not-day-not-night of midsummer, when the air lay still over the fields, and hung in the sweet-smelling, midgie-ridden shadows under the trees.

  The trees swayed and a branch creaked as a breeze got up out of nowhere. She didn’t like the plantation. It was a dead place. Looking to either side of the path was like looking into a Grimm’s fairytale forest, dark and spooky, the ground covered in decades of brown needles and not much else. But right by the path there was grass and ferns and wood sorrel, and wood anemone, and sweet mini-trees where the lucky cones had fallen.

  She slowed to a walk, pulling at her top so the air could get to her skin, her feet finding a new rhythm as the path left the plantation behind for the open spaces of the native forest. Here the pine trees were wonky, and all different sizes, from tiny little asterisks to huge big
giants. But Helen’s favourites were the birks, the birch trees, slim and delicate. When the wind blew, their leaves flipped up to show their pale undersides. In the evening light everything was muted, but in bright sun the wind through the birks was a shimmer of silver. That was the Ghillie Dhu, Dad used to say, reeshling his siller for a penny to pay the tinker.

  The path was springy from the peat, and soft from all the layers of pine needles and dead leaves on top. It wound its way among mossy stumps and heather and blaeberry bushes. If she really had been wanting to watch badgers, here was where she’d leave the path and make for the ridge above the sett, and find a comfy place to sit and wait.

  She carried on up the hill until she was out of the trees, and the path petered out in the short heather and the scree. Here rocks came poking out of the ground, little ones, and big rounded lumps, and flat ones like pavement slabs.

  She stopped at the heathery ledge, with its wall of rock behind to lean back against, where she’d sat so often and for so long that she wouldn’t be surprised to find a shadowy figure lingering, the ghost of that skinny girl with the spotty face and the hair that stuck out at the sides like something on a cartoon character.

  She wished she could reach through time and grab that little ghost and say: Look! Look at this! And pull from her pocket the last letter from Hector. The little ghost’s eyes would open wide, and she’d take the letter in her hands like it was a holy relic; but then she’d probably shake her head, and bite her lip, and say Suzanne was right. What made her think he didn’t have a string of drippy idiots carrying his letters about in their pockets? What made her think it wasn’t all going to end in tears?

  The little ghost had misery down to a fine art. Her fantasies about Hector hadn’t been the kind where he took her in his arms and told her he loved her, and kissed her, and made wild passionate love to her – oh no. In her daydreams she’d be attending his wedding to Fiona, and Hector would smile at her as he walked down the aisle, arm in arm with his beautiful bride, and Helen would smile back while inside her heart was breaking. And then she’d get leukaemia, and as she lay dying suddenly Hector would be there, and she’d finally confess that she loved him, and he’d weep bitter tears as she died in his arms, knowing too late that he loved her too.