McLennan returned the photograph and stepped away from the mantelpiece, glancing at the closed door leading to the byre. He turned, looking across to the other side of the room to the box bed. The walls of the enclosure, made up of patched together driftwood, served as a partition dividing the cottage into two rooms.
‘George! It’s Andrew McLennan,’ he called out, silence greeting his call. His boots clumped loudly in the stillness as he made his way through the space between the wall and the bed, into the other room which was as equally dishevelled and unkempt as the previous.
‘George, it’s Andrew.’ He knocked on the cabinet walls that enclosed the bed within, the structure forming a small, enclosed space, a room within a room, a large panel at the front that slid open. He knocked again before sliding the panel open with an air of dreaded expectancy.
A high-pitched scream from outside, piercing and pure, ignited the unease in McLennan’s stomach to full-blown alarm and he made his way to the front door as fast as his old bones would carry him, around the corner of the house, looking around the peat pile to the kailyard. The girls weren’t there, where he’d told them to wait. Scanning the outfields, he caught sight of the twins down near the burn and he ran prudently down the frost covered, uneven path towards them.
‘Whit’s wrong?!’ he called, breathless, dread thickening his words as he approached.
The girls had been huddled together and they both turned around still clutching each other, their faces pale, startled. Mavis’ lower lip quivered, a look of guilt on Dot’s face as if she’d just been caught stealing from the church plate.
‘His eyes, Granda.’
‘We just found ‘im. He wis jist lying der,’ Dot said, pointing down to the ground behind her, a look of utter comical repugnance distorting her face.
McLennan looked over at a frosted mound by the edge of the burn. George, lying belly down, the right side of his face pressed into the frozen ground, his eyes two black hollows where the birds had fed. A fine layer of frost coated him, his hair sticking out of his cap in icy tendrils. He sparkled in the morning sunlight spilling over Ayres Kame.
McLennan felt the weight of his years press down on him, his legs barely able to hold his weight.
‘Urr ye awright granda?’ Mavis asked, rushing to her grandfather.
‘Get yerselves intae Haardale an’ let dem know dat I’ll be needin’ some help wid George Hart,’ McLennan said, patting the girl’s shoulder. ‘Tell ‘em it’ll be da last time.’
Mavis glanced back at her twin. ‘Dot, you go. I’ll stay here wid Granda,’ she said.
‘You’ll both go,’ McLennan reproved, looking down on the girl’s pointed, defiant face.
Reluctantly, she marched off towards the Coffin Road, her sister running after her, eager to be gone from this place.
McLennan waited until they’d disappeared over the other side of Burland Knowe before pulling the cap from his head and stepping up to George Hart. He’d been lying out here for days and no one had known.
‘I should’ve come looking,’ McLennan muttered regretfully. He did, but it was too late. But it had been too late for George a long, long time ago. Awkwardly, McLennan kneeled down beside Hart’s stiff body, placing his cap over the ruined face. A ruined life, wasted. He should have been married, had bairns of his own. Running his own croft away from this place.
Reluctantly McLennan felt his eyes lift to the towering oblong of granite standing on the brink of Erdiness.
‘Enough,’ he said, tiredly. ‘Let dis be da last.’
Sydney, Australia – 2015
‘What do you think of him?’
Deidre glanced at Rebecca Gates, her younger, twenty-eight year old corporate climbing boss, wondering what she knew.
The question she, Deidre Hart, had just been asked was what did she think of Will Fielding? The answer: she hated him. Hate was a strong word, and she could ensure that she hated Will Fielding with every raw nerve in her body. Deidre averted her eyes in disgust as he swaggered towards them like a Komodo dragon. He made her sick. Reptile, she thought as they passed each other in the corridor between The Hub and Building 12. She heard him say hello and she ignored him, continued walking, eyes on the ground.
‘I wouldn’t call him good looking but there’s something about him,’ Rebecca continued. Rebecca enjoyed expressing her thoughts to Deidre on just about every one of the thousand or so workers that went about their business every day for the multi-national pharmaceutical conglomerate they were employed by. ‘What do you think?’ Rebecca pressed.
Deidre looked at the younger woman feeling a flush rise in her cheeks. ‘I don’t know. I don’t even know who he is,’ she lied.
She knew who Will Fielding was. She knew him very well. She’d spent two months of her life in a fatuous dead end affair with him, starting the night they’d had farewell drinks for Sally in accounts at the Wagging Dog. Deidre had gone along just to say goodbye but after two glasses of red wine she’d decided to stay a bit longer. That was when he, The Reptile, hit on her, her low self-esteem marking her out like a wounded animal on the edge of the herd, the allure of her shy self-consciousness drawing him to her from the other side of the room.
At thirty-three years of age Deidre should’ve known better, probably did know better on some deeper level, but flattery, desperation, need, caused her to ignore the slick glaze of slime coating Will Fielding in a shiny sheen. She was still naïve, unskilled in the games of love. And sex.
‘I’ve lost my phone,’ he’d said, stepping up close to her, inside her personal space, ‘can you ring my number to see if I can hear it?’
He recited the number in her ear, whispered it, his breath tickling her neck, making the hair on her arms stand on end, and she dutifully, gullibly, dialled it. It rang in his jacket pocket a moment later and he smiled slyly at her, pulling it out.
‘Now I’ve got your number,’ he said, glancing at his phone. ‘I’m gonna put you in my contacts under Nice Tits.’ He winked at her. He was a real charmer.
For the first two weeks, he plagued her with text messages. She loved it; she loved the attention, her phone a new appendage on the end of her arm.
‘I saw you walking down the corridor this morning. You’ve got one sexy b-hind, m’lady.’
‘You should wear that skirt a little bit shorter and your heels a little bit higher.’
‘You’re doing terrible things to me. How can I listen to Clive Walden drone on when I’m thinking about you all the time?’ He embellished his texts with ogling, winking, panting emoticons and she treasured them, archived them in a special folder in her phone.
She sought him out at work, devised excuses to walk past his office. He would bump into her in the canteen, in hallways, their eyes would meet and he would wink at her. She was flattered. She felt beautiful, desirable, euphoric.
‘We need to meet up soon. Just the two of us. Somewhere quiet.’
She met him for a drink, away from the bars around work. They went to a cheap hotel room afterwards and he left at four o’clock in the morning.
She fell for him like a rock over a cliff, a dumb, stupid rock with no other direction to go in except down. For the following two months after that, Will Fielding had complete control of Deidre Hart’s life. He never called and she couldn’t ring him, if she did he never answered. He texted her occasionally just to keep her on the hook.
So she waited, wondering, wishing, dreaming, making excuses for him and falling deeper and deeper, her phone always in her hand and never out of earshot, dropping everything and running when he beckoned. She slept with him twice after that before she overheard his name being mentioned in the canteen one day, a young woman she’d seen around the organisation and had never given much thought to. The young woman was telling her lunch partner how Will Fielding had gotten her number last Friday night by asking her to ring his number because he’d lost his phone. The lunch partner advised her to erase his number, have nothing to do with him, that he was a s
leaze and married with two kids.
Deidre’s world had darkened for a moment, everything becoming silent and slow, powering down, as if the plug had been pulled from the socket. This news hadn’t come as any great surprise to her, like knowing the reason why the water wouldn’t drain down the plug hole was because there was something horrible and ugly deep down there that needed dislodging, something she couldn’t bring herself to probe into.
It was over that quickly, her world ceasing to turn in that one small moment, her dreams, exposed to such glaring reality, turned to dust. And she wondered why she’d allowed herself to be so blind. Was she that desperate? She changed his name to Reptile in her contacts and never answered his texts again.
And today, right now, she hated him more. Intensely. Passionately. She hated him so much she fantasised about walking into his office and stabbing a pen in his ear, right through to the other side. She hated him for the way he’d made her feel cheap and used. A quick and easy fuck when it suited him, as easily discarded and forgotten as the condoms he wore. She hated him for the disappointment she saw in her father’s face when she told him, when he’d pried it out of her, picking up on her emotional turmoil, commenting on her weight loss and the hurt in her eyes. All Douglas Hart wanted for his daughter was for her to be happy, he said, she would meet the right person one day, someone who loved her and respected her, and she’d know it when it happened.
It was one of the last conversations she’d had with her dad, the lingering memory of that morning playing over in her mind for the past three months. She could still remember watching the steam rising from their teacups as they sat at the kitchen table, the late winter sun spilling in through the windows, warming them. She had felt so miserable, so caught up in her own wretchedness she hadn’t really been listening when he’d complained about the aches he’d been having in his back and neck all week. Douglas Hart died four days later of a myocardial infarction. A heart attack.
She hated Will Fielding. She hoped God would forgive her for having so much hate in her heart. But she would never be fooled, or tricked, or used like that again.
Later That Afternoon
‘I’ve got a little surprise for you.’
Clark Sheldon, a partner in Fulworth and Sheldon Solicitors, experts in all family matters, smiled indulgently at his client. Deidre gazed across at Clark on the other side of the glossy black desk, the small meeting room they sat in enclosed by dark smoky glass, the lighting subdued, one halogen lamp shining directly down onto the table. There wasn’t a fingerprint or a smudge to be seen on the smooth, cleanly polished surface.
This was her second meeting with Clark Sheldon in as many months. He seemed a very competent individual, very assured of himself. Older, mid-fifties, dark hair greying at the sides. His clothes, his manner, tasteful and understated. Expensive. He had the look of a high-end watch advertisement. Even his name, Clark Sheldon, had style. It was a great name, Deidre thought, wishing she had a name like that. Claire Sheldon. Maybe she would have been a different person, with a different personality. It was better than Deidre. Dreary Deidre. In her lifetime, she’d overheard three different people, unrelated in time and place, refer to her in this way and she wasn’t sure why. She knew that she was one of life’s introverts, but she didn’t consider herself to be dull, dreary, not once you got to know her.
‘In the course of going through your father’s estate,’ Clark continued, ‘we discovered that he also had an entitlement to a property in Scotland.’
Deidre’s head tilted heavily with the weight of images of medieval castles and deer rushing through her mind. ‘Really?’
For reasons never fully explained to her, her parents had emigrated from Scotland to Sydney in the early eighties, uprooted their lives and moved to the other side of the world. Alone. Deidre knew there was family on her mother’s side still in Scotland, almost unknown to her, forgotten through time and distance. When her mother had still been alive, there’d been an occasional visit by Patricia’s various brothers and sisters and their accompanying families but there’d been no lasting connections, especially in the years following her death. Deidre knew nothing at all about her father’s side of the family. He’d been an only child and both his parents had died before she was born.
‘Well, it’s not really a property,’ Clark continued, ‘it’s not your property, it’s a crofting tenancy.’
‘A what?’
‘A croft. It’s a small farm holding-’
‘A farm?’
She’d spoken this quite loudly, she realised, when Clark put his hand up, an expansive grin on his face, allaying his client’s sudden concern.
‘You don’t actually own the land, you own the tenancy,’ Clark explained. ‘You don’t need to do anything with it. There’s a building on the land called Hart Croft, which is handy, you won’t have to change the name.’ He smiled at her. ‘But it’s derelict; it hasn’t been occupied since the thirties. It came up in one of our searches and it was something Douglas made no mention of in his Will so we looked into it a bit further. I’m not sure that your father was aware of it either,’ Clark added, opening the file on the desk. ‘He certainly never mentioned it.’ He flicked through a couple of sheets of paper, pulled one to the top and began reading it. ‘The tenancy was passed to your grandfather, Alistair Hart, after his older brother George passed away. The tenancy then automatically went to your father Douglas. And now from Douglas to you. I’m just bringing it to your attention as part of your father’s Estate.’
Deidre stared across the desk at Clark Sheldon. ‘What am I supposed to do with it?’ she asked.
Clark shrugged. ‘Well it’s been sitting vacant over there for decades. It seems your grandfather didn’t do anything with it and it appears your father didn’t bother too much about it either. Who knows, maybe with probate, some long lost relative will come forward and take it off your hands. I think up until the seventies a crofting tenancy stayed within the family and was passed down from generation to generation but I’m pretty sure you can sell the tenancy now. All the laws have changed. There’s specialised crofting legislation that I don’t know much about. This is way out of my range of knowledge.’ He offered a humble smile. ‘But I’m sure we could put you in touch with someone who could help you. It might not be worth anything, but you should check it out.’
‘And where is this ‘croft’?’
‘Unst.’
‘Unst?’
‘Unst.’
‘Where’s that?’
Clark nodded his head, pulled another sheet from the file marked with a red sticky tag. ‘I thought you might ask that question so I did a little bit of homework myself because I’d never heard of it either, so I had a look on Google and printed this off.’ He handed the A4 sheet of paper to Deidre. ‘Unst,’ he said simply.
Deidre looked down on a basic blue and white map of the northern part of Europe. A small neat circle had been drawn around a dot in the middle of a blue coloured square. The blue, she realised, was an unnamed sea, the white sections, countries. She frowned down on the circle reading the names of the countries in its vicinity.
‘It’s near Norway,’ she muttered, surprised, then on further inspection, ‘it’s near Iceland!’
‘That’s correct, but it’s actually a part of Scotland. It’s part of the Shetland Islands. Unst is the most northerly part of Scotland in fact.’
Deidre stared down at the map in her hand, at the small circle drawn in the middle of a big blue sea, in the middle of nowhere.
‘So what do you think of that?’ Clark asked, grinning.
Deidre regarded him, his handsomeness. ‘Not much,’ she replied. ‘It’s on the other side of the world. And up!’
Clark leaned forward, manicured hands folded in front of him. She noticed his wedding ring, thick, heavy gold, a large diamond embedded in the middle. It glinted in the beam of the halogen light. Deidre wondered about his wife. She would be beautiful, as manicured as he was. She imagined the
y held exquisite dinner parties and talked about politics and the fine wines that filled the heavy cut crystal glasses they drank from.
‘What?’ she asked, realising Clark had been speaking.
‘Your father has left you very comfortable, Deidre. Enjoy it. You don’t have any kids,’ he stated. ‘Boyfriend?’
She shook her head mutely, blushing. No. No boyfriend.
‘Take a trip. Check it out. You’ve got two years before you have to sell your father’s house. Tax purposes. Advisable,’ he imparted offhandedly. ‘There’s an old saying I heard once, ‘where you won’t go fate will drag you’.’ A mischievous smirk flickered across his face. ‘Maybe a farmer’s life for thee beckons.’ The smirk bloomed into a bright, white toothy grin. My God, he’s so attractive, she thought.
‘Yeah, maybe,’ she replied, humouring him, the reflection of the halogen light sparkling in his eyes.
The Following Weekend
Deidre pulled into the driveway of her father’s house and turned off the ignition, listening numbly to the tick of the engine as it cooled down. She’d been driving from Annandale to Castle Hill every other weekend since her father’s death. She would pull into the driveway, cry for a little while, clear the letterbox of junk mail, see that the gardener was doing what he was paid to do and leave, returning back to her rented one bedroom flat, pretending that her dad was still alive and just a phone call away. She hadn’t set foot inside the house since Douglas Hart’s funeral and that was over three months ago. After everyone had gone, after she’d done crying and tidied up, she’d left and hadn’t stepped inside again since. Now the longer she avoided it, the harder it had become.
The Stone Dweller's Curse: A Story of Curses, Madness, Obsession and Love Page 3