by Flynn Berry
I sat on one of the benches. White spray broke over the harbor walls, and I looked across the gray, heaving sea towards Denmark. There was a gale coming towards us. No one was supposed to drive tonight, and all the stores were closing early.
A couple walked past me and into Reilly Shellfish, and came out a few minutes later with plastic bags of ice and mussels. At sea, the rigging on the fog buoy clinked. I loved the sound, especially at night, when you couldn’t see the buoy itself.
I pulled my boots onto the bench and wrapped my arms around my legs. Waves knocked against the hulls of the fishing boats, and a few pieces of driftwood floated on the water. We’d collect it from the beach after the gale. Mum liked to burn driftwood in the fire, she said it smelled better.
I don’t want to leave, I thought, but if someone on the forum knows that we live here, I’ll have to tell Mum, and we might have to move.
• • •
At home, I opened the thread. “They moved to Ireland,” said the first reply. “They live in Dalkey now.”
I slumped back in my chair. Not our town, not even close. Someone else wrote, “Are you sure? Isn’t Dalkey quite expensive?”
The people on the forum knew more about our finances than I did. My father hadn’t taken any money from his accounts when he disappeared, apparently. The accounts were still shared with Mum then, since they hadn’t started divorce negotiations yet, but she refused to take anything that was his. She signed the house and all of their shared assets over to my grandmother. Which explained why we’d had so little money in our first two years in Scotland, before Mum found her job at the chiropodist’s office, and why she was still paying off credit card debt.
I kept checking the thread throughout the day, as more and more people posted answers. A few confirmed that we were in Ireland. One said, “My friend works with the police. They’re definitely in Ireland, but in Wexford, not Dalkey.”
No one mentioned Crail. I was so happy we could stay that I almost told Mum everything. The gale broke on shore, and I read a novel in my bedroom while listening to the salt rain lashing the roof. We were safe. No one was watching us, no one was checking the doors and windows when we were out.
23
ALICE IS WEARING a white cotton tennis dress, and the sun is strong enough to make a fuzz of glare around the fabric. I’m not playing well, I’ve been distracted all morning and keep making mistakes. We’re both sweating, wiping our hands and foreheads before each serve. She wins the first set, and says, “Want to stop there?” I nod, using my teeth to open the water bottle.
Alice winces, and I ask, “Are you all right?”
“Just a headache. Do you have any aspirin?”
“Not with me.”
“Do you mind if we stop at my parents’ place?”
We walk across Burton Court to St. Leonard’s Terrace and her parents’ house. I try to stay steady as Alice opens the gate, as we walk down the path to the front door and inside. I look at the carpeted staircase, the red dining room, the pile of envelopes on a sideboard. Alice leads me down the hall and into the kitchen, where a glass conservatory extends into the garden.
She checks a drawer, then sighs. “I’ll be right back. There’s lemonade in the fridge if you’re still thirsty.”
As she climbs the stairs, I open a cabinet and take down a glass. So this is what their house is like inside. Her parents read those newspapers crumpled on the table. They chose this set of china. That laptop belongs to one of them. I have trouble opening the bottle of lemonade, since my hands are slick with sweat.
The house’s thick Georgian walls absorb sound, I can’t tell where Alice is above me. I open the laptop. It asks for a password, and I’m trying to think of one they might use when a key scrapes in the lock. I move away from the laptop, towards the sink, as a tall, wiry man in a navy polo shirt comes into the room. He frowns when he sees me.
“Hi, I’m Claire. Alice is upstairs.”
James considers me, and I’m aware that I’m sweating, that there are stains under my arms, that some of my hair is stuck to my forehead, that I’m a stranger in his house. He looks at the glass in my hand, and I want to say that Alice offered the lemonade, I didn’t just help myself.
“She has a headache,” I say, finally.
“She often does. Good match?”
“Not our best.”
James stands with a slight stoop. His hair is thinning, I can see the reddish freckles across his scalp. He starts to sort through the post on the counter. I don’t know what to do with my glass, if I should leave it in the sink or put it in the dishwasher. Either one seems presumptuous.
Alice comes back at last, says hello to her dad, takes a peach from a bowl, offers me one. “Ready?”
I set my glass in the sink and follow her outside, where Rose is in the front garden unpacking bags from a nursery. “This is my friend Claire,” says Alice, and Rose gives me a distracted smile. I look at her and think, We were almost taken into foster care because of you.
Alice explains about the headache, the aspirin, and Rose says, “Are you still coming over this afternoon?”
Alice nods. “I might spend the night. I think I’m coming down with something.”
“I’ll ask your father to get Stella from your house. He has to drive over to Putney anyway,” says Rose, and I have to stop myself from asking why.
Alice waves goodbye to her mum, and in a few minutes we’re ordering at the café, and I feel sick thinking of how poorly that went.
• • •
At home, I take a beer from the fridge, then stand looking into it. I’d forgotten about all of this food, the frozen pizzas and soups, the fresh gnocchi and spring greens, the fruit, which I thought Robbie might like to press for juice. I’ll never be able to eat it all on my own before it goes off.
A car alarm sounds in the road. I can hear voices from the flat below mine, and the night air is thick with ozone. I check the schedule for my on-call day, I start a load of laundry and make sure that I have clean suits for the week.
I’ve messed this up. The way James met me—alone inside his house, having made myself at home—could hardly have been worse. Both of her parents noticed my discomfort, I think. They might mention it to Alice. I can picture Rose saying, “Why do you need a new friend? You already have a cast of thousands.”
James seems to have aged a lot recently. I find the picture, cut from a newspaper, of the Ramsden Club, eight young men in tailcoats, including my father, James, and Sam. All of them look pleased with themselves. They’d made it through the initiation, after being chosen from all the undergraduate men at Oxford, they’d joined a club where members had become judges, actors, spies, foreign secretary, prime minister.
I read about one of their parties once. Its location was a secret, in a field somewhere outside Oxford. They brought guests, mostly girls, in on buses. All the guests were given white masks and dark robes. There were pigs’ heads on stakes and a huge fire in the center of their circle.
But it was just slightly too cold. And the masks fastened behind the head with elastic, which people found irritating. A few of the guests pushed the masks up onto their hair, like sunglasses. Some of the girls put coats on over their robes for warmth.
No one knew what to do. It seemed wrong in that setting to talk about exams, or gossip, or tell jokes, as one usually did at a party, but there wasn’t a replacement activity on offer. Instead there was a lot of drifting around, standing by the fire, looking at the soapy skin on the pigs’ heads.
Two of the Ramsden members wrestled in the mud by the fire, which was stirring at first, the flames jumping on their cold skin, their dark hair falling over their eyes, and then went on too long and became boring.
One of the bus drivers was sleeping in his seat, the other was reading a newspaper and working through a bag of crisps. Their complete indifference to the party w
as galling to the club members. They’d thought the bus drivers would want to watch, maybe even become too excited and have to be told off.
The guests grew hungry. No one had brought any food, they hadn’t thought they’d need it. The party was meant to last until dawn, but by midnight most of the guests had begun to hitchhike back to Oxford.
Early the next morning, a boy from the party arrived at a hospital in Oxford with three broken ribs, but he refused to say what had happened to him. He’s in Parliament now. I wonder where he would be if he’d told the truth.
24
GOOD NEWS,” said Nell on the bus home from school. “Caitlin’s brother’s going to the Vix tonight.”
“Does he have room in his car?”
“Sure,” she said. At Caitlin’s house, we ate cherry Haribo and drank vodka while getting ready. One of our friends had told me that if you filter cheap vodka five times, it tastes the same as the expensive brands. I remembered that every time I drank vodka, even though it wasn’t particularly interesting, and I never planned on trying it.
“Close your eyes,” Caitlin said, and dragged liner above my lashes. Nell changed the music, and traded me the vodka for the Haribo. Fat bubbles slid through the vodka when I lifted the bottle to my mouth.
Nell was wearing a gray tank top over a neon yellow bra, and I’d borrowed a short dress with a zipper up the front. We put on our duffel coats, and I noticed that specific sensation, which you only ever have while going out in the winter, of bare arms against slippery coat fabric.
Caitlin’s brother and his friends were in the kitchen, also drinking Glen’s, not eating Haribo. He looked at us. “I don’t have room for three of you.”
“We’ll fit,” said Nell.
“Hi,” I said in the car to the boy whose lap I was sitting on.
“Hi,” he said. “Are you comfortable?”
I nodded, took the vodka from Nell, drank, handed the bottle to him, hunching forward so he had enough room to maneuver it. Nell said, “Can you turn the music up?”
The boy whose lap I was sitting on said, “My name’s Tom.”
“I’m not driving you back if you don’t get in,” said Caitlin’s brother.
“We’ll be fine,” said Caitlin. The three of us had gone to a head shop in Edinburgh to buy fake licenses, which we’d tested at all the bars on the Grassmarket. The only place that hadn’t let us in was a strip club. Which may have been a good thing, actually. Instead we went to the kebab shop next door and got in an argument about sex work. Nell said that it should be legalized, and sex workers celebrated. I said yes, but only if people entered into it by choice, not because they had no other options. She said, “What about people working in call centers? Should that be illegal unless they have other options?” “Definitely,” I said, then Caitlin said, “If I get more chips will you have some?” and we both said yes.
Caitlin’s brother parked the car, and we joined the queue outside the Vix. “Do you think we’ll get in?” I asked Nell, and she nodded. “But we haven’t used them here,” I said.
“Stop it,” she said.
We reached the door, and then the bouncer was returning my license and I was following the others into the club. Nell ordered a vodka tonic, and I asked for the same. I used Nell as my pacer, like the cyclist in a marathon ahead of the runners. It seemed good for me to have one. I didn’t think that my childhood had been the best preparation for setting limits.
At the bar, I talked to Tom about his history course. I breathed in, feeling my dress tighten around my ribs, the metal zipper cool against my stomach and chest. Nell ordered two kamikaze shots for herself, and it occurred to me that I should have chosen someone else as my pacer. Using Nell was like having no pacer at all.
Tom and I went outside for a cigarette, then into the backseat of Caitlin’s brother’s car. When we came back in, Nell said, “Should I tell him he needs to get his car washed?” Tom and I nodded our heads, laughing. On the ride home, I drowsed on Nell’s lap, with her arms linked around me.
I knew what the people on the forum would say if they’d seen me in the car with Tom. They would think I was putting myself in harm’s way, like shagging a boy in the backseat of a car was dangerous. They would make it sound like I wanted something bad to happen to me, but the bad things had already happened, I wanted something good.
* * *
—
WHEN I CAME HOME from school on Monday, the house was empty. I kept my coat on while checking the rooms. No one had replied saying we were in Crail, but that didn’t mean we were safe. My father had tried to kill my mum, and she was still alive. He might try again. Or one of his friends might. Or someone from the forum, like the man who’d posted a picture of a woman—not Mum, but she looked like her—naked with a metal ball bearing stuffed in her mouth.
My bedroom door was open just wide enough for a person to be standing behind it. I pushed the door, holding my breath, waiting for it to swing back towards me. The handle knocked against the wall and I exhaled, then looked under the beds, inside the wardrobes, behind the shower curtain.
When Mum came home, I was studying at the kitchen table. She said, “What’s the hammer doing there?”
The hammer was on the table, next to my textbooks and notes. I pointed at the floor. “Loose nail.”
A hammer was apparently more reliable than a knife. You didn’t have to worry as much about accuracy.
• • •
I wondered how hard it would be to get a hunting rifle. Most of the estates in the Highlands, a few hours north of us, had guns. People like my father’s friends used them for shooting parties, and it wasn’t fair that they had access to rifles and I didn’t.
Years earlier I’d stayed in one of those houses in the Highlands. Sam’s family had an estate near Inverness, and we’d visited for the Glorious Twelfth, the start of the shooting season.
They had a six-hundred-acre grouse moor. None of the children were allowed on the shooting party, but I remembered seeing them crossing the flank of a hill, small figures in flat caps and jackets, with guns like sticks over their shoulders.
I should have taken one of the rifles and hidden it in the woods. I’d be able to go collect it now. I would have had plenty of time. The adults were out of the house all day, moving across the moor, going through thousands of rounds of ammunition. While they were gone, I played in the stream, which they called a burn, and which ran wide and shallow over pebbles, under a bridge with a double arch.
The adults didn’t come back for lunch. One of the servants drove a small lorry over the hills to meet them with wicker baskets of cold chicken and lobster. From the stream, I watched the lorry rattle away over the rough ground, while the cold water swept around my ankles. I’d been gathering pebbles. I should have dropped them then, and climbed onto the bank, and walked back to the empty house and the gun room. I needed a rifle now, in Crail, because it wasn’t over.
One day on that trip, it rained too hard for them to shoot. My father borrowed a jeep and the two of us drove across the moor to the loch. Rain flashed away from the windscreen wipers, and we had to shout to hear each other over it. My father told me that Sam’s grandmother had said there was a monster in their loch. She’d swum near it once when she was a little girl. “Was she scared?” I asked.
“No, she said it was one of the best things that ever happened to her, she’d always wanted to see one.”
“Has anyone else seen it?”
“Sam’s uncle did. We can ask him about it at dinner tonight.”
The jeep bounced on the rocks and scraped through the gorse. Ahead of us, the loch lay under dark mountains. As we drove around it, I watched its surface for the monster. Part of the track had been washed away. “Is it safe?” I asked.
“We’ll be fine,” he said. He often told me to worry less.
25
ALICE IS LYING on h
er stomach with her ankles crossed in the air behind her. While we talk, she rubs the top of one foot with the toes of the other. In front of us, women are standing on a dock, diving into the water, swimming across it. The trees around the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond are dense enough to hide it from view, separating it from the rest of Hampstead Heath. I pull my wet hair over my shoulder. Coming here was Alice’s idea, she couldn’t believe I’d never been before.
On the slope above the pond, as our bathing suits dry, we’ve been talking about our ancestors. We both know a lot about them. Alice’s aunt is interested in genealogy, and I let her think that my information comes from someone else in my family too, that I wasn’t the one who made an account on a heritage website and paid to access the records.
I spent a while on it a few years ago. I copied down the family tree on Mum’s side, going back six generations, in careful, sepia ink. I like to look at it and remind myself that I have parts of those people in me too, not only him.
“My great-grandmother was estranged from her siblings,” says Alice, her arms bent behind her, tightening the straps of her bikini.
“Why?”
“There were three children, and she was the youngest. When her older sister and brother were teenagers, they fell in love and eloped.”
“Together?” I ask.
“Yes. They changed their names when they ran away, and were never found.”
I lie with my chin on my hands, facing a bee clinging to a stalk of clover. A woman dives into the pond and yelps at the cold water, and Alice says, “It’s not even bad now. My mum swam here through the winter when we lived in Hampstead.”
I turn to look at her. The Frasers never lived in Hampstead, they’ve had the house in Sussex and the one in Chelsea since before she was born. “Where did your family live?”
“Flask Walk,” she says. I twist a piece of grass around my finger and tug. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe they stayed here temporarily once.