Anywhere's Better Than Here

by Zöe Venditozzi

  ‘‘I’m sorry,’’ she said. She took a breath. ‘‘I just feel a bit weird.’’ He didn’t say anything, just looked at her steadily, kindly enough, but not too kindly. He wasn’t going to do any of this for her.

  ‘‘It’s probably lack of sleep.’’

  ‘‘Probably.’’ He half turned. ‘‘You take the room on the left. Jamie and I will sort something out later.’’

  ‘‘No!’’ She steadied her voice. ‘‘No. There’s no need for that. I just need a nap, I’ll be fine later.’’

  ‘‘I’m not bothered, Laurie.’’

  But he was. He was bound to be. And she was bothered too, she realised.

  ‘‘No, really, Gerry.’’ She grabbed at his arm. ‘‘I’ll be fine later.’’

  ‘‘We’ll see.’’ He smoothed her hair briefly. ‘‘Just have a rest. It’s been a big day.’’

  He gave her a little nudge towards the bedroom and then went downstairs. She opened the door to the room. It was low ceilinged but large and held an elaborately carved double bed which was covered with pillows. She sighed and bent to unzip her boots. She would have liked to brush her teeth and have a wash before she slept, but there was no way she was going downstairs now; not with Jamie sitting there, watching her; no way with Gerry being nice and polite but thwarted all the same. She just couldn’t face it.

  She sank down into the bed and kept sinking. The bed was virtually springless, it was so soft. If there was one thing she hated, it was a soft bed. There was no way she’d be able to sleep in it. She got up again and went to try the other bedroom. Much smaller, this bedroom was instantly cosier. It had two single beds, but she didn’t care. They could always push the beds together if need be. All she wanted now was to sleep and feel better. She crawled under the chenille bedspread and pulled the cover up around her face. She lay like that, trying to will herself to sleep, but it was too bright in the room. She should have closed the curtains, but she couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed again. She pulled the cover over her face, but felt suffocated. After a bit of fidgeting she managed to contrive a sort of eye mask with the blanket that left her nose and mouth uncovered. It was still too bright though. She took off her jumper and then folded it over the top half of her face. Much better and it smelled better too. God knows what Gerry would think if he came in and saw her sleeping like this. But who cared? Just as she fell asleep she thought she heard the door open but she was too far gone.

  Mid Afternoon

  Dreich with Sudden Showers

  He was lying next to her when she woke up. He slept silently, turned away from her towards the door. She no longer had the cover pulled around her face but was now nice and toasty with Gerry close. He’d taken off his jumper and just had his T shirt on. She lifted the blankets to see what else was happening and was glad to see he still had his boxers on. Her legs felt restricted and itchy in her jeans so she climbed out of bed to remove them. As she kicked her jeans off her ankles, Gerry stirred and she stopped still, frozen, keen to get back into bed and curl into him without him waking. After a second or two she carefully lifted the sheet again and slid into the bed.

  She hesitated before wrapping herself around Gerry’s back but, in the spirit of just doing things, she went ahead. With the two of them squeezed into the bed, she didn’t have much choice anyway. Her face fitted nicely into his left shoulder and she breathed slowly trying to match his breaths. His T shirt smelled slightly of the wood fire and she could faintly make out Gerry’s own smell which was warm and pleasant. She sighed, feeling properly relaxed for the first time in a week, weeks even. It was so much easier when you could just have what you needed and nobody was trying to make you say or do more than that.

  They lay like that for some time until Laurie became gradually aware that Gerry was awake. He said nothing, but she could feel the change in the air. She felt electrified and caught; her finger tips tingled and itched.

  She wasn’t sure whether she should feel relieved or annoyed when she heard a gentle tap at the bedroom door. The boy said nothing, just tapped quietly again. She knew he’d probably give up if they stayed silent, but it didn’t seem fair to pretend they were asleep. That was the sort of thing parents would do.

  ‘‘Is everything okay Jamie?’’ asked Gerry without moving.

  ‘‘I was just thinking it might be a good idea to go for a walk.’’

  Laurie groaned. But before she could protest that it was too cold, Gerry was yanking the blankets off the two of them. He sat up and looked at Laurie.

  ‘‘We’ll be down in a minute. Grab a warm coat from the boot room.’’

  He leaned down and kissed her. After a moment Laurie pulled him down on top of her, suddenly desperate. He pressed his weight against her and she felt the air go from her, making her charged and breathless.

  Then he leapt up, grabbed his jumper and headed for the door.

  ‘‘You coming?’’

  ‘‘What?’’ She sat up in the bed, furious. ‘‘What are you playing at?’’

  He smiled at her. ‘‘There’s time enough Laurie.’’

  She turned from him, blushing furiously. She’d be fucked if she was going to look at his stupid, smug face now.

  ‘‘You sure you don’t want to come with us?’’

  She ignored him. He closed the door.

  She lay in the bed thinking about how she was going to get home on her own from here. She cursed the day she’d met Gerry and wondered aloud how she could have been so stupid. Her anger ebbed away as she heard the heavy front door slam and she realised that she was in the house alone. The dark green walls of the bedroom pressed in on her as she started to think that a house as old as this in such an isolated spot had surely had many deaths within its walls. Maybe even in this bed. She sat up and looked at the bed. There was no headboard so it was hard to tell how old it was without raising the bed skirts and having a look underneath. She took a deep breath and tried to steady herself. She knew rationally that being fearful of ghosts was ridiculous and childish, but she couldn’t help it.

  Once she’d started down the track of thinking about spirits it was hard to get away from it. When she was a little girl she’d had frequent nightmares and had developed routines surrounding bedtime and middle of the night toilet visits. Her parents had been thoroughly dismissive of any talk about ghosts and had told her repeatedly that there were plenty of real things to be scared about without making things up, but it made no difference. She was still afraid to look in the mirror late at night just in case somebody scary was looking over her shoulder.

  For weeks after her mother’s death, she’d been convinced that her mother was sitting in the chair by the window watching her in her bed. It didn’t matter how much she reassured herself during daylight hours that there was no reason why her mother would wish her harm, when it was the middle of the night she was petrified. She couldn’t move, her hands clamped themselves shut and she strained through the dark to try and make out her mother’s face. She reasoned that if her face was happy or even calm, she could live with her mother showing up and sitting quietly on a nightly basis. But she couldn’t make out anything other than a shadowy shape hunched in the chair. She couldn’t even be remotely sure that it was her mother rather than some other dead person. But she read somewhere that it was quite common for the recently bereaved to think they saw the deceased. But who was to say that it wasn’t relatively common because the dead really did come back to check on their loved ones? Why should rational scientist-types have first dibs on explanations? What was that saying about heaven and earth and not knowing everything?

  Still, thinking about things sensibly would be good in the night or in strange old houses in the country. She dressed quickly and walked as fast as she could out of the room and down the stairs. She wasn’t going to run – partly because she could just see herself falling down the stairs and breaking her neck and also, more importantly, she wasn’t going to give any ghost the satisfaction of seeing her running scared. />
  Slowly and with a great show of calm she turned the handle of the front door and stepped outside. She saw Gerry and the boy making their way up a slope that led to the tallest hill that stood behind the cottage. No doubt it had some unpronounceable Gaelic name but even if she knew what it was called, she’d still be inclined to think of it as The Tallest Hill. It was much more straightforwardly descriptive than Fairy Dell or Place of Mist or whatever its Gaelic name translated to. Regardless of what it was called, it was pretty high. She knew it wasn’t a mountain, but if she got to the top of it, it would be the closest she’d ever willingly get to a mountain.

  The notion of climbing things because they were there was ridiculous to her. Ridiculous and manly. She doubted any woman would ever say that. Any normal woman anyway. A woman might say it if she was trying to impress some mountaineer, but she still thought it unlikely. It would sound silly coming from a woman anyway. You did things because they were there if those things were washing or making the dinner or picking up a found ten pound note. Not climb a dangerous, near vertical bit of rock that was likely snowy or shrouded in mist and required a significant amount of planning to tackle. Planning, equipment and money to tackle. Definitely not something a woman would waste her energy on.

  Because it was there! Ridiculous. She was already out of breath and questioning her sanity and she was only about a fifth of the way up a tiddly little hill!

  Jamie looked back at how far he and Gerry had come and when he saw her struggling up behind them she watched an expression that said for-fuck’s-sake cross his face and then he turned his back on her and kept going, not bothering to alert Gerry to her attempt to catch up. She couldn’t even muster the puff to yell; she just got her head down and pushed on. It didn’t seem at all far and yet it was taking her an age to get anywhere near them. She decided to try distraction as a means of moving her on. She thought about what she could make to eat later, but that made her realise how hungry she was. Then she tried to enjoy the nature around her as she knew lots of other people would gladly do in this situation but there wasn’t much to look at unless she stopped and looked back at where she’d come from and she wasn’t at enough of an elevation for the view to be any different to what she’d seen out of the cottage window.

  She looked down at her feet and tried to focus on the small things. But the small things consisted of grass, rocks – some small, some bigger- and occasionally, what appeared to be shit. Whether it was from sheep or cows, she couldn’t tell. She was no naturalist, clearly. Although, if she thought about it, it probably was sheep shit, because it didn’t look like your typical cow pats as it was too small and sort of knobbly. For fuck’s sake, she thought to herself, this is what she was reduced to: a nice enough looking young woman in the prime of her life with a degree (admittedly an Ordinary arts degree wasn’t going to light up the universe, but still, it was something), her health (she needed to do something about her lung capacity judging by how tricky this was for her) and her whole life ahead of her. And she was doing what a couple of days before Christmas? Hanging out with other Bright Young Things in a throbbing Metropolis somewhere planning exciting events? No. She was sweating up a hill (not even a fucking mountain!) in a sort-of chase for a man who was vague about himself and a teenager who was vaguer still if not actually a downright liar about his circumstances, in order not to be alone in a probably haunted, definitely damp and bloody freezing so-called cottage in the middle of nowhere! The last part of this thought rang very clearly in her mind, filling her with a hot, white light that stopped her dead in her tracks.

  She clenched her fists and screamed once, very loudly, very theatrically. At once she was both exhilarated and mortified. She didn’t need to look at Gerry and Jamie to know they’d stopped and spun round to look at her. Probably there were sheep straining all over the hillside to see what had happened. She closed her eyes, took a deep cleansing breath through her nose and let it out slowly through her mouth. She half expected to open her eyes to see Gerry running down the hill towards her, but when she opened her eyes Gerry and Jamie were still in the same place. In fact, Jamie immediately carried on upwards whilst Gerry looked back, one hand on his hip and what might very well have been a look of amusement on his face.

  Bastard, she thought, he isn’t even shocked! I’m a joke to him. She looked down to the house and, remarkably, it was further than she’d thought. She couldn’t face being the big, moody baby again so she set off towards Gerry who at least, seemed to be waiting for her.

  It took a few minutes to march up to him. Almost everything was easier to do when you had some anger pushing you on. Sometimes she pictured a big wheel in her head like the one on the TV show Wheel of Fortune, except the wheel in her head was called Wheel of Fury and it would spin and spin (making her feel angrier still) until it came to a halt on any one of a hundred things that made her furious. There were some topics (bosses, her ongoing lack of ready cash, other people’s general stupidity) that always had a place on the wheel and there were also weekly – sometimes daily – hot topics.

  At her old work there would usually be something happening to drive her mad. Like her boss deciding he was going to make tits of all of them in an effort to increase sales. It was all a bit too much for Laurie. The first time they’d done one of the so-called ‘‘sales games’’ she’d tried hard and had even, horrifyingly, done a very enthusiastic air punch when she’d made enough. That was actually the worst thing, when she realised that not only had she done what she’d been told in a respectable time, but that she’d on some very basic level loved it. That was the first time she’d seriously considered killing herself in a toilet stall during her lunch break.

  She shuddered. She was so out of there.

  ‘‘I thought you weren’t coming,’’ said Gerry when she reached him.

  ‘‘For fuck’s sake Gerry, can’t I change my mind?’’

  He smiled annoyingly. ‘‘Of course you can.’’ He gave her a hug. ‘‘I’m glad you did.’’

  There wasn’t much she could say to that so she knuckled down to the pace that Jamie had set.

  ‘‘Onwards and upwards,’’ she said to Gerry.

  It wasn’t exactly that it was hard work getting up the hill. It wasn’t like actually climbing something: looking for toe holds; testing how much your arms could take. It was just the ongoing pushing upwards that did you in. That, and that it was hard to tell how far you’d come and how far you had left to go. She kept looking back for the first twenty or so minutes but there was little change to gee her on. She gave up looking backwards and just let her mind drift. She wished she had a stereo with her or a biscuit or a book about her someplace. That way she could promise herself something to keep going. But she had nothing, no treat or incentive to keep her motivated. All she had was the sure knowledge that she couldn’t go back down until she’d reached the top. There was just no way she was prepared to lose face to that extent.

  She saw Gerry shooting her looks now and then to check if she was okay. He was probably worried that they were going to need mountain rescue. Imagine that, needing mountain rescue to be taken down from a hill! How mortifying! She kept on powered by bloody mindedness as per usual. She didn’t like Gerry looking at her in that concerned way. It reminded her of the look on people’s faces after her mum was diagnosed and then again when she’d actually died.

  It was people being nice to you that did you in. It was like they were trying to make you cry. If you cried, they knew they were okay. They knew no one they knew had died or was dying. They knew they themselves weren’t dying. It made some people feel special to proffer kindness to the bereaved. They were the types that liked to tell you some sort of pearl of wisdom that had served them well. Served them well under what circumstances? She’d like to know. Served them well under the circumstances of having to basically parent your parents when one of them was dying? As Jamie had said earlier, un-fucking-likely!

  The truth was that no one really knew what it was like unl
ess it had happened to them. Some people made a good guess, but the phrase ‘‘I know how you feel’’ should be torn from the English language. It meant so little and caused a million repeated nips of pain for those who had to listen to it.

  God, where was all this bitterness coming from?

  She stopped and looked around.

  It was all very pretty in a photograph kind of way. She knew that people all over the world would love to see what she was seeing now, but it left her cold. Give her a city any day. She preferred the moving landscape of people and cars and signs and adverts and stray bits of rubbish and animals. All this hill and grass and empty nature made her feel too big and human. She liked the picture to keep changing. All this static beauty made her feel emptied out and switched off. She liked to think about people as they passed: what they were wearing; who they were talking to; where they had come from; where they were going to. She preferred to be a part of a flickering card trick of one thing after another after another.

  ‘‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’’ asked Gerry, standing on a rock one leg bent at the knee. He had one elbow on the knee and was surveying the land as if he was filming a documentary.

  She nodded. You couldn’t actually disagree with the observation. But there were all different types of beauty, and Gerry was welcome to his type. She just hated the idea that if you didn’t like the peace and quiet of nature that you were somehow less worthy, more shallow – someone not capable of stillness. As if stillness was so great. Who ever accomplished anything sitting around? What an annoying notion. These fake-buddhist books that you could buy all over the place had a lot to answer for. Feng Shui! Meditation! Yoga! These things were all fine where they belonged, but did they belong in Scotland? She thought not.

  ‘‘Are you okay Laurie?’’

  He was staring at her. Intently, but kindly and not in an annoying way. He was nice, Gerry. She should cut him some slack.