Blast Radius

by Rebecca McKinney

  ‘She’s probably had enough trauma of her own to last a lifetime.’

  ‘Mmm. Maybe. I’m grateful to her, even if she doesn’t believe that. She didn’t have to let me come back. She probably wishes she hadn’t. But . . . I’ll have to get out soon, get my own place.’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘I don’t know. Away from fucking Eskbridge. Too many ghosts there for my liking.’

  ‘Ghosts?’

  ‘Reminders of things I’d prefer to forget. You know what it was like for me, Paula. You’re one of the few people in this world who does. I thought with Mum gone the place would be okay, but . . . I don’t know if it can ever be.’

  She draws her hand over her mouth. ‘Is it Eskbridge, or is it you? Your life is your life, wherever you go.’

  ‘Aye, but the place doesn’t help. Face it, it’s a dump. I’m thinking about moving up north.’

  I don’t know why I’ve said this, because it’s only ever been a transitory notion, which progressed through my head and disappeared without any call to action. Maybe I’ve only said it to gauge Paula’s reaction.

  Her eyes widen fiercely. ‘Oh no, don’t move away!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because . . .’ She checks herself. ‘Well . . . because I’d miss you, Sean. But at the same time . . . maybe it’s what you have to do. It sounds right for you. What about your job?’

  ‘It’s okay until I can come up with something better.’ I sigh. ‘It’s just a thought.’

  Her dark eyes flicker over my face, then she takes my hand and examines fingers that I trapped.

  ‘You’ve taken the skin off your knuckles.’

  ‘Ow,’ I say, without really feeling it.

  She gets up and dampens a bit of kitchen roll, then takes my hand again and cleans away the blood.

  I watch her doing this, my throat crowded with things I want her to know but can’t bring myself to say. Such a confusion of events and emotions and colours and smells – a proper boorach, my Granny would have said (the description she often bestowed upon Mum, hands on hips and head moving slowly from side to side) – that I can’t follow a single thread long enough to tell her about it. I want to tell her about Mitch, and about Cauldhill Farm and Duncan and Tig and Harry and Billy, and I want to tell her about the things that I’ve swallowed – snow and mud and dust and blood and shite and lies – and that they’re working on me like poison. I want to tell her that I have a black hole inside me, where the future disappears into the vortex of the past.

  ‘That’s better,’ Paula says, then brings my knuckles to her lips and kisses them. ‘You’ll live.’

  I swallow hard, sit there with my hand in hers and think about all the things I want to tell her.

  ‘I want to go to bed,’ is all I can manage.

  ‘You want to go to bed.’ She repeats, her voice low and careful.

  I nod and pull her toward me and slide my hands around her hips. ‘With you.’

  She sits on my lap, her warm weight heavy against my groin and her breasts rising and falling with her breath. ‘Oh you do, do you?’

  ‘Aye.’

  She tilts her head to one side and moves her hair away from her face. ‘Okay, then. With any luck, Madam will give us half an hour.’

  XXI

  We explore each other’s bodies, undressing piece by piece, revealing the places that might once have seemed ugly but which are now defining marks of who we have become: the scars on my face and legs, the stretch marks on the soft curve of her belly, the little red line of her Caesarean incision. Kissing hesitantly at first, with no urgency to reach the inevitable conclusion except the certainty that Eva will, at some point, wake up. I wait for Mitch to comment, but maybe he’s learned his lesson after last time and gone away to a quiet corner to put his Hank Williams on. He’ll be yodelling away to himself and pretending he can’t hear us.

  I move over her, then pause, circling one dark nipple with my fingertip. ‘Are you sure about this?’

  She kicks the covers out of the way and turns onto her back, pupils huge in the dark room, her hand running from my shoulder blade, down the small of my back and coming to rest on my arse for a moment before sliding around the front. Her fingers close around my cock and it stands eagerly to attention like a fresh recruit on the parade ground. It’s tempting to let out a cheer.

  ‘I am now,’ she whispers, then grasps more firmly and guides me between her legs.

  Her knees come up to either side of me as I slide into her, and she arches her back so that I can kiss the hollow at the base of her neck. After a few minutes, she moans softly, pulls me harder into her and nibbles my left ear.

  It’s a strange sensation, warm and wet but without sound, and it makes my breath catch in my chest. My knees shake as I come, with a wave of emotion I can’t quite identify. Relief, maybe? Gratitude. Love? Something that will disappear if I try to name it.

  We collapse in a sweaty tangle of limbs and covers, the air cooling our skin, pulse rushing in my temples. We lie there for several minutes without speaking, then she kisses me, rolls away and pulls on her knickers, steps lightly over the wooden floorboards and into the lobby. I hear her go into the kitchen to check on Eva, and then into the toilet, the water running in the pipes. She comes back after a minute or two, curls up beside me and draws the quilt over us, her arm sliding around to my front and her fingers spreading on my chest, her mouth against the back of my neck.

  ‘That was worth waiting for,’ she whispers.

  ‘Mmm. I’ve been wondering what that would be like for twenty years.’

  A giggle. ‘I hope it wasn’t an anti-climax.’

  ‘I wouldn’t use that word.’

  ‘Oh good.’ She pauses. ‘My first time since having Eva. I’m glad it was with you.’

  I glance back over my shoulder. ‘I didn’t hurt you . . .’

  ‘No, you didn’t hurt me. Just the opposite.’ She kisses my shoulder, then sits up and pulls her shirt over her head. ‘I need to feed her. Stay here as long as you like.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’ I close my eyes. ‘I might never go.’

  ‘That might be okay with me.’

  I wake sometime later, sweating and sticky under the duvet, the late afternoon sun beaming into the high window. My heart is hammering against my ribs as the tail end of a dream recedes into a dark cave in my brain, like the final scene of some cinematic gore-fest. Paula is sitting on a white upholstered chair beside the window in her dressing gown, sunlight glinting on the crown of her head. Eva lies across her lap, legs kicking and little fingers kneading as she suckles.

  ‘Hi.’

  I catch my breath and sit up too quickly. Stars swim in front of my eyes. ‘Hi.’

  ‘You alright?’

  ‘I was somewhere else there.’

  ‘I could see that.’

  My mouth is dry as cotton and it’s difficult to swallow. I pull in a deep breath through my nose and let it out slowly, willing the monster back into its hole. My hands are shaking visibly.

  I hold them up and watch them, as if they don’t belong to me at all. ‘Look at this.’

  She nods slowly. ‘Will you tell me what you were dreaming about?’

  I swing my legs out of the bed, reach for my jeans and pause, looking at the two of them with the sun illuminating their faces. ‘You look like Mary and Jesus sitting there. I wouldn’t want to ruin it.’

  ‘Kinda late for that, isn’t it? After what we just did? Anyway, my arse is too big for a pedestal.’

  ‘Your arse is just perfect.’ I force a laugh and pull on my jeans. ‘Do you mind if I have a shower?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  She’s in the kitchen when I come out. She pours tea from a pot with pink and green polka dots and hands it to me. Eva is lying on her back in the playpen, slavering and doing her best to get her toes into her mouth.

  ‘Feel better?’

  ‘Aye. Ta.’

  I sit in the window seat beside
the cooker and look out at the lines of washing stretched across the back greens, fluttering in the pinkish light. ‘Do you really want to know what I was dreaming about?’

  ‘Only if you want to tell me.’

  ‘I have this recurring dream that I’m trying to kill a man with a knife, or sometimes an axe. I’m on top of him, covered in his blood, and no matter how many times I stab him, he doesn’t die. He just sits there looking at me.’

  ‘Jesus, Sean.’ She sits down at the table.

  ‘I have others, but that’s the worst. Fucked up, huh?’

  ‘A wee bit. Please tell me that never actually happened.’

  ‘No. In reality, if I’m going to knife some bugger I’ll get him first time. Slitting the throat from behind generally works better.’

  ‘Right . . . it’s a little scary how confident you are about that.’

  ‘I was a reconnaissance specialist, Paula.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  I sigh. ‘It means it was my job to scout out positions ahead of operations. To locate targets and send back information. It means that I had to put myself into very dangerous places, very close to the enemy, very quietly. The knife comes into its own. So aye . . . yeah . . . two. Two men with the knife. More with the rifle or the sidearm . . . I don’t know how many.’

  ‘You haven’t told anyone that before, have you.’

  ‘Confessing to murder isn’t very pleasant, strangely enough. I needed to say it but now . . . I feel like I don’t deserve to be sitting here drinking tea with you and Eva, getting away with it.’

  ‘Getting away with it? It isn’t murder, Sean, it’s war. It’s different.’

  ‘Murder on a mass scale. That’s the only difference.’

  ‘Why did you go, if that’s how you see it?’

  ‘I didn’t see it that way then.’

  ‘But you do now.’

  I nod. ‘I do now.’

  ‘Oh Sean. You’re too good, that’s the trouble. I’ve always known that.’ She crosses the kitchen, squeezes onto the seat beside me and places a warm hand on my back. ‘What changed it for you?’

  Her touch just about dissolves me and I can’t speak. There is a hot stone in my throat. I draw my knees up toward my chest and stare out the window. The back greens blur through a sheen of tears. Paula watches me blink them away but doesn’t ask any more. I know the precise moment it changed. I can still remember the substance of that day; its smells and sounds and particular terrors. I remember it all, but I can’t tell her.

  ****

  Monday’s delivery round finished, Jack drops me at the shop and heads off for a more lucrative job fitting Davie Blair’s new kitchen. I find Harry standing in the storeroom staring at a tangled jumble of bicycles that have been donated to us by the police. Some of them are partial: frames missing wheels and seats and handlebars.

  Harry’s fingers are twined in his beard and his breath whistles in his nose.

  ‘They’re all nicked or just . . . dumped places. Nobody claims them.’ He surveys the collection, with something like despair across his face. ‘The world we live in, eh? You any good at fixing bikes?’

  I spend the afternoon straightening spokes, patching tires, oiling gears, salvaging useable parts from knackered frames and swapping them onto good frames where I can. The smells of mud, rubber and grease are reassuring, and the fiddly work fills the empty places in my mind where more disturbing preoccupations might otherwise creep in.

  After a couple of hours a shadow falls across the floor in front of me and I look up. Dawn is leaning in the doorframe, arms crossed, jaws grinding on chewing gum. She’s dyed her hair black, which makes her look even pastier than usual, and cheap perfume wafts off her in nose-tingling waves.

  ‘Alright Sean?’

  ‘Yep. What’s up?’

  ‘What ye daein tonight?’ She gnaws the cuticle on her left little finger and seems very young.

  ‘No plans. Why?’

  ‘There’s an Abba tribute band at the Miners. There’s a few of us going. Fancy it?’

  ‘Not really.’ I spin the front wheel of the upturned bike in front of me and crouch down to check its alignment.

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t go to bars and I fucking hate Abba.’

  ‘Whit dae ye like? We could dae somehin else, like. If ye wanted. Pictures or somehin.’

  I sit back on my heels and wipe my greasy hands on a cloth, clearing my throat to cover a laugh. She’s trying to keep her cool, still scraping at her finger with her bottom teeth.

  ‘I don’t want to go out with you, Dawn. Sorry.’

  Her expression shifts from baby doll to hard bitch, and I have a passing vision of her staring up the rope climb in Bottom Field at Lympstone: full webbing on, black hair hanging over her eyes, chewing on her finger.

  ‘Whit’s wrang wi’ us, like?’

  An under-fire appraisal of the situation suggests that honesty isn’t the best policy for maintaining workplace relations, such as they are. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you. I’m seeing someone.’

  Paula and I still haven’t managed to articulate what our relationship is, if it’s anything at all, so it’s possible that the statement “seeing someone” is a little overcooked. But it’s a useful defence at the moment.

  Dawn looks doubtful. ‘Who?’

  ‘Paula Fairbairn.’

  ‘Never heard of her.’

  I shrug.

  ‘She doesnae have tae ken.’

  ‘I’m too old for you. Let’s just leave it at that, eh?’

  ‘I’ve got two bairns, I’m no a baby.’

  ‘Dawn, what part of I’m not interested don’t you understand?’

  ‘Ye’re a fucking wank bag,’ she blurts. ‘Ye think ye’re all posh or somehin, the way ye talk an’ that. Ye’re nae better than us.’

  I stand up. ‘A bit of advice for you. You want a guy to like you, it’s probably better not to slander his family in public or call him a wank bag. Just a thought. ‘Scuse me.’

  I push past her and head for the kitchen, hoping to hell she doesn’t follow me. She doesn’t, but instead stomps off through the shop, lets fly with the back of her hand and knocks over a glass table lamp. It shatters spectacularly on the concrete floor and Dawn flounces out the front door without looking back. Al looks up from the bookcase he’s working on, eyes following her out the door then turning back to me.

  ‘Fucking nutter,’ I mutter under my breath. ‘I’ll get a brush.’

  Harry comes out from behind the counter and follows me back to the storeroom. ‘What was that about?’

  ‘She asked me out. I said no.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Not your fault. You alright?’ He presses his fingertips into his eyelids and sits down on an old wooden chair.

  ‘I’m fine, Harry. You look like you’ve had it.’

  Harry leans his head back against the wall and laughs softly. ‘I’m getting too old for this. I suppose I’d better go after her.’

  ‘Why not just let her go?’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘That’s what she wants. Someone to go running after her. Why should you?’

  ‘Maybe she needs me to.’

  ‘Or maybe she needs to learn the consequences.’

  ‘Ach, fuck the consequences, Sean,’ he says, uncharacteristically sharply for him. ‘There are worse things than breaking a lamp.’

  ‘What, like stealing money?’

  He stands up, pats my shoulder. ‘I’d better go find her.’

  Sufficiently reprimanded, I take the brush and dustpan, then glance back over my shoulder at the blue mountain bike I’ve been working on. ‘Harry, would it be alright if I buy that bike, before someone else does? Tell me how much you want for it.’

  He gives a weary wave of his hand. ‘Just have it. There aren’t many perks in this job but I reckon we could stretch to that. Is it functional?’

  ‘Oh aye. It’s a good bike, act
ually. You sure?’

  He nods. ‘It’s my pleasure.’

  By closing time I’ve conjured another four saleable bicycles from the heap, and arranged them in the window display. I wheel mine out into a fine soft afternoon. A gentle breeze comes from the west carrying the smell of rain and gorse blossom, a flotilla of silver clouds moving across the sky from behind the hills. I glide home in a couple of minutes, decide to change out of my work clothes and head out for a proper ride.

  ‘Where’d you get the bike?’ Janet says from the kitchen sink. She looks pale and apprehensive, and my chest begins to tighten again. I’m beginning to wonder how much longer she and I will be able to put up with each other.

  ‘Harry gave it to me. I’m going out for a spin just now.’

  She huffs, lips drawn. ‘You don’t have a helmet.’

  ‘I’ll get one.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Aye, ma’am.’ I turn to head upstairs.

  ‘Sean, before you go up . . .’

  I pause. Janet dries her hands and stares at me for a moment, then takes a deep breath, picks up a large brown envelope from the kitchen table and hands it to me.

  ‘I lied to you the other night. I’m sorry.’

  XXII

  I glance at Janet, then slide my hand into the envelope, close my fingers on smooth photographic paper and withdraw them again. My hands shake a little as I stare at two faded colour prints. The first is of a soldier leaning on the wall of Edinburgh Castle Esplanade. It is not exactly the same as the photo I found in George Finlayson’s trunk, but must have been taken at the same time. The second picture is of the same man, this time dressed in dirty jeans and a jumper, smoking a cigarette at edge of a small, dark loch. A tiny boy with light blond hair sits on a stone beside him, dirty-faced, hand lost in a packet of crisps.

  I swallow heavily and turn the photos over. There is writing on the back of the first: D.C. June, 1977.

  ‘What’s the C for?’

  ‘Campbell.’

  ‘Duncan Campbell,’ I say softly, and the only coherent thought I can grasp is that I never imagined myself as a Campbell. The kitchen floor seems to tilt away from me; I lean against the bunker and try to collect myself.