Darling Sweetheart

by Stephen Price

  ‘Good woman yourself,’ Proctor approved. ‘I’ll skin one up.’ He reached for his tobacco pouch. He still wore his cap, apparently having forgotten about it. He looked, Annalise thought, like a trucker.

  ‘I don’t normally take drugs, you know.’

  ‘Me neither. Just Mondays through to Saturdays then sometimes on Sundays after church. Cannabis resin isn’t a drug; it’s an important necessity in these troubled times.’

  ‘Ben…’

  ‘You used my first name.’ He licked a cigarette paper. ‘I have a horrible feelin’ that your next words are gonnae be “can ah ask you somethin’?’”

  ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’

  ‘Do you think I’d be sat in a forest in the middle of the night with a soft toy for bloody company, if I had a girlfriend?’

  ‘Boyfriend?’

  ‘Eh? What gives ya that impression?’

  ‘Just checking.’

  ‘Since you raise the subject, what about you?’

  ‘I don’t have a boyfriend.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I caught my last one in bed with three schoolgirls.’

  ‘Christ… good answer. I wish I could say that about ma last girlfriend.’

  ‘Why did you break up?’

  He shrugged. ‘Usual shite.’

  ‘Work, being away a lot?’

  ‘Kinda.’

  ‘You don’t talk shop, do you? Everone who works in film never shuts up about it, but you never mention it.’

  ‘Stuntmen get hit and fall over – what more d’ya need to know?’

  ‘Some of the biggest gossips I ever met were stuntmen – who they’d stood in for, who’s good to work with, who’s not. But you don’t say a word.’

  ‘That’s because I’m the strong, silent type.’

  ‘So what about that day on the rope? When you said I shouldn’t marry Emerson; what was that all about?’

  ‘Och… I was just messing. The lads dared me to ask – you had quite a fan club going there and you were right: they just wanted to know what the gossip was. Err… what are ya gonna to do about all that, anyway?’

  ‘About Harry?’

  ‘I meant the film, but yeah… the whole shebang.’

  ‘Do you know? I’d almost forgotten I was making a film.’

  ‘So why are you wearin’ that old dress?’

  ‘Roselaine’s?’ She pulled her cloak back to reveal it. ‘I suppose I don’t want to leave her behind, not entirely. I worked so hard to try to be her, and just when I was becoming her, all this… madness started.’ She waved a hand at Froggy.

  ‘That thing with the frog – is it for real?’

  ‘What do you mean, is it for real?’

  ‘It’s an inanimate object, not a real person.’

  ‘Shhh!’ she whispered. ‘Don’t let him hear you say that! I’m trying to get him to like you, but if you don’t believe in him…’

  ‘Annalise… when you make him talk, your lips move! I can see with my own eyes – you do his voice.’

  She sighed. ‘Look. If you were me, would you not marry the Hollywood megastar, spend his millions and do a blockbuster movie every few years?’

  ‘If I didn’t have to have sex with him, I probably would. But what’s that gotta do with–’

  ‘That’s how I know Froggy is real – because it’s the worst possible moment in my career to have him back again.’

  ‘To have him… back?’

  ‘Oh, Froggy was always there for me when I was little, he was my best friend… actually, he was my only friend. Then, when I was sixteen, I had another friend called Lucy but she didn’t last long and then my Dar… my dad died, so Froggy became my best friend again. But I put him away when a psychiatrist told me to, but now everything’s a dreadful mess so Froggy’s… back again,’ she finished lamely.

  ‘Sorry, but I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

  She sighed. ‘I know that other people find Froggy… difficult. I find him difficult, but in his own way he helps me when I need him most.’

  Proctor recalled his tactic of non-confrontation, although privately wondered how much longer he could keep it up. ‘“Always turn adversity to your advantage.” My old granny used to say that, usually when she was shooting her air rifle at the bailiffs.’

  Annalise smiled sadly. ‘Your granny sounds a lot like my mum. Was she on your mother’s side or your father’s?’

  Proctor lit his newly rolled joint. ‘Why do women always want to know things like that?’ She pouted and glanced over at Froggy; anxiously, he followed her look. ‘Okay, okay! Here’s everything worth knowing about me. My name is Ben Proctor. I’m from Kirkcaldy in Fife. I was born in 1974. I was raised by my granny – on my mother’s side, if it matters – and I’m a stuntman. The end.’

  ‘What happened to your mum and dad?’

  ‘I never knew my mum and dad.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘My dad was an Elvis impersonator; he fucked off to Las Vegas when I was three, then my mum went after him and they never came back. That’s all my granny would ever tell me.’ He looked out into the night. ‘I was a bit of a rip, always gettin’ into trouble, juvenile detention and that. Broke the poor woman’s heart. But when I was eighteen, my probation officer got me work at a circus, muckin’ out the animals. I liked it so much I ran away, but at the circus you don’t just do one job, you do loads, so I learned a bit of performin’ – trapeze and that – then I got asked to do stunts for TV.’ Annalise laughed. ‘I did!’ he protested.

  ‘I believe you!’

  ‘So why are you laughing?’

  ‘Och, because it’s such a canny wee answer…’ and she had his accent, his voice, his stoner demeanour to a tee. ‘Ah was a bonnie wee lad, but at the age o’ thirteen, ah wuz made tae sweep chimneys…’

  ‘Stop that!’

  ‘… then ah wuz sent down the coal mines and ah drank loadsa Buckfast and ah robbed stereos frae cars, and ah got sent tae prison and ah ran away wi’ the circus and now ah’m a stuntman and ah smoke loadsa dope!’

  ‘Witch!’

  ‘Sorry.’ She smiled, reverting to her own voice. ‘My father made a film in Scotland, once upon a time.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘One of his Fanshawe and Grovel comedies.’

  ‘Naw! You mean your da was…? My God! I’m so stupid! I should have made the connection! So is that what this is all about?’

  She shrugged. ‘Maybe…’

  ‘David Palatine! Didn’t he die in a… err, sorry, but he did, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that.’

  ‘You never knew him?’

  ‘Who, me? No! I knew of him, obviously, but I didn’t get into film until a few years ago, doing fight scenes and stuff.’

  ‘Like fighting, do you?’

  ‘Och, those guys in the studio? I’m fucked if a pair of poncey yanks are gonnae cramp my style. They wouldn’t last ten minutes in Kirkcaldy.’

  ‘I’m tired.’ She yawned. ‘I slept in an airport last night, feels like a thousand years ago.’ She crawled under the blanket beside Froggy. As she lay there, she watched the red point of light where Proctor was smoking and listened to the conspiratorial whispering of the pines.

  Trapped in total darkness, Driscoll had no way of telling whether it was night or day. He had slept, so he thought it might be early morning. When the lorry had finally stopped, he had screamed and battered at the door until his throat, hands and feet turned numb. Then he had sobbed for a while, in a self-pitying sort of way. Finally, he had forced himself to listen but heard nothing; no movement, no voices, no traffic. A disbelieving terror had set in, but, eventually he had garnered enough presence of mind to use his cigarette lighter to explore his makeshift prison. He had freed one of the filthy old mattresses that padded the lorry’s walls – it had fallen to the floor with a corpse-like crump. But he had slept on it, in freezing fits and starts. Every time h
e woke, his face hurt like hell – his nose and two front teeth were broken: he could feel that much with his fingers. He was thirsty and needed the toilet. But there was no toilet, just the same dark, dusty box, hour after hour, until he lost track of time. He had put off the evil moment as long as physically possible, but in the end had had to use one of the corners. The stench and humiliation redoubled his terror. What if the people who were doing this to him had simply left him forever? Was he going to die in this place, with nothing for company other than the smell of his own… He jumped up from his mattress and hammered at the door again.

  ‘Sorry!’ he squealed. Whoever it was, they were out there; they had to be. They were just keeping quiet. ‘Sorry! I’m sorry! Whatever I’ve done, I’ll make it up to you, I promise! I’ve got money – it’s all yours! Just let me out! Please! Let me out!’

  He listened. Nothing. Why was this happening? What had he done? His mind raced with guilty possibilities; all the bands he had ripped off during his years in the music industry; all the promoters he had crossed; all the girls he had… oh shit. What if this was an angry parent? What if this was some hard-case father who objected to his daughter being sodomised in the name of rock and roll?

  Driscoll curled up on his mattress and submitted to his dread. ‘Gosh! They’re both amazing! I don’t know which way to look!’

  ‘Tell your alter ego to watch the railway bridge then you can look at this one,’ Proctor suggested.

  Their little van was high above the sea, crossing the Firth of Forth on the road suspension bridge outside Edinburgh. To their right, the much older, even more dramatic railway bridge ran almost parallel, three mighty red cantilevers dominating a panorama of water and coastline.

  ‘Wow,’ Annalise laughed. ‘It’s like we’re crossing over into another world.’

  ‘We are crossing over into another world – the Kingdom of Fife. “A beggar’s mantle fringed with gold.”’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Fife was an old Pictish kingdom. King James VI called it a beggar’s mantle because it was so poor. The fringe of gold was all the wee villages round the coast, rich from fishing and trade.’

  ‘So you think one of those could be where Evelyn lives?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘You don’t seem too bothered.’

  ‘Neither do you.’

  ‘That’s because I haven’t felt this good in months.’ Iceland, she thought. She’d last felt this happy in Iceland, with Jimmy, although what she knew about him now cast a dirty shadow over any good they’d ever shared. ‘I know it’s a really unprofessional thing to say,’ she added, ‘but it’s such a relief to be away from Emerson and his bloody film.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful day, the scenery’s great, we’re tootlin’ along the open road, we’re both unemployed and wanted by the police but we got plenty of hash – it doesn’t really get any better than this, does it?’

  ‘Kirkcaldy…’ She read a huge road sign as they descended off the bridge. ‘That’s where you’re from, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can we stop there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because once you’ve seen one concrete tower block, you’ve seen them all.’

  ‘But it’s so lovely around here!’

  ‘Kirkcaldy isn’t lovely.’

  ‘This place where you’re taking me – is it near Kirkcaldy? Is that how you know about it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ve gone all monosyllabic.’

  ‘I don’t like Kirkcaldy.’

  ‘That’s okay – I didn’t like the town I was from, either. We have a lot in common, you and I. More than I’d have imagined.’

  ‘Yeah,’ his tone turned dry, ‘who’d have imagined, eh?’

  She leaned across and kissed him on the cheek. ‘I never thanked you for helping me.’

  He blushed. ‘Hey. I’m just the driver…’

  ‘Damn right you are, fallguy!’ Froggy piped up from her lap. ‘And don’t you forget it!’

  ‘Awww…’ She tickled the toy under his furry chin. ‘Is a little froggy-woggy jealous? Does he want a kiss from his momma?’ She puckered her lips.

  ‘Ugh! Get away from me! Save the yucky stuff for fallguy here. But if your babies are born all bent and twisted, they’re not allowed to play with me, okay? Come to think of it, your babies aren’t allowed to play with me no matter what. Buy them a chainsaw or maybe a set of kitchen knives.’

  ‘You’re a real charmer, aren’t you?’

  ‘Just doing my job. So let’s get this straight – we’re headed for a village that we don’t know the name of, to find a woman whose name we don’t know either, who might not be alive?’

  ‘Yes. And on the way, we’re passing through Ben’s home town – isn’t that nice?’

  ‘I bet it’s not.’

  ‘For once,’ Ben interjected, ‘I have to agree with the frog.’

  ‘I think,’ Froggy sneered, ‘that Little Miss Famous here is just trying to find out more about the future father of her children.’

  ‘Oh, give over!’ Annalise shook him.

  ‘Aye, frog,’ Proctor agreed. ‘Shut the fuck up.’

  The dual carriageway turned east, skirting around Kircaldy. Annalise strained to see, but only caught glimpses of a rambling, urbanised port. When it fell behind, the road shrank into a curling coastal one, so she settled for admiring the muscular green farmland on one side and the ever-widening view across the firth on the other. The sky was a massive sunny blue. They stopped at a garage to buy cheap sunglasses and laughed at one another, trying them on. Proctor bought a child’s pair and sellotaped them on Froggy, who approved because he said they made him look cool. A few miles farther on, Annalise saw another road sign that announced:

  Pittenweem

  Anstruther

  Crail

  ‘Is there really a place called Pittenweem?’

  ‘It’s the only Scottish fishin’ village I know of that begins with “Pit”. So, seek and you will find, or words to that effect.’

  A winding street fell down to a harbour crowded with colourful trawlers. Gulls hovered like greedy angels along a seafront overlooked by a convex curve of tall, steep-roofed houses. Proctor stopped the van and Annalise jumped out, carrying Froggy. There was a steady breeze and, just below where they stood, waves broke across angled slabs of rock.

  ‘It’s so different.’ She looked around. ‘It’s not like being in Britain at all.’

  ‘That’s because the locals used to trade with Holland and Belgium, and they copied their building style. See the red tiles on the roofs?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Ballast from trading boats, hundreds of years old. They didn’t miss a trick in them days.’

  They sauntered along the sunlit promenade, past shops that sold items of obscure maritime hardware. Another offered outdoor clothing; still another displayed silver jewellery. These façades were punctuated by steep cobbled alleyways called wynds: School Wynd, Cove Wynd, Kirk Wynd, Water Wynd. They arrived at a window jammed with jars; it was an old-fashioned sweet shop.

  ‘Liquorice Satins!’ Proctor read the labels. ‘Rosebuds! Gooseberries! Horehound Rock! Man, ye cannae get gear like this any more! I’ll be right back!’ He disappeared into the little store. Annalise returned to the window with the jewellery. Idly, she admired the rings.

  ‘Want one?’ Proctor asked in her ear.

  She smiled. ‘Are you proprosing?’

  He held out a small white paper bag. ‘I meant, d’you want a soor ploom?’

  ‘What on earth is a soor ploom?’

  ‘A uniquely Scottish experience for the mouth.’

  ‘Hmm… mind if we take a look in here?’

  ‘I wasn’t trying to be obscene…’ He extracted a small green sweet from his bag and followed her into the jewellery shop, through a tiled hallway to a room with a Victorian fireplace and wooden display cases. However, what had attracted Annalise�
��s attention were the dozens of paintings hung around the walls. These were mostly landscapes, a mixture of watercolours and oils.

  ‘They’re all local artists,’ announced a woman in a tweed skirt, who appeared through a twitching bead curtain.

  Annalise went from picture to picture, staring closely at each one, but only for a few intense seconds before moving on to the next. She circumnavigated the room, then folded her arms and sighed.

  ‘The signatures,’ she explained to Proctor. ‘Monica Goddard said that Evelyn had been an artist, but none of these are hers.’

  ‘Are you looking for a particular painter?’ the proprietress asked.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Annalise smiled wanly, ‘I’m trying to find a woman called Evelyn Davie. I believe she was an artist.’

  ‘A lady called Evelyn made that,’ the woman indicated a stained-glass panel that hung in a window, ‘but she’s Munroe, not Davie.’ The panel was composed from white, green, blue and grey glass, cut into countless rectangles. It was highly stylised, but Annalise could make out a naked woman, tilting her head to kiss the moon. Flowers fell from her hands into a pool of water, in anticipation of ecstasy. Sure enough, etched in the bottom right-hand corner were the initials E.M.

  ‘It’s her,’ breathed Annalise.

  ‘Oh, this is only a wee piece; she has much bigger ones at her home just along West Shore.’ The woman pointed up the street. ‘You can’t miss it; it has a very blue door.’

  And so they walked on, to a curious place where the road ended but the footpath crookedly continued and the tall sandstone houses gave way to whitewashed fishermen’s cottages, separated from the sea only by a low wall.

  ‘How do you know it’s her?’ Proctor asked.

  ‘I don’t. Like everything else in the past few days, I’m just doing what feels right.’

  The cottages were set around a neat crescent bay. Just over halfway along, they saw one with a cobalt door, which lay open. The windowsills overflowed with purple heliotrope.

  ‘Hello?’ Annalise called. There was no reply, so she stepped into a room with a stone floor, an assortment of easy chairs and a simple wooden dining table that bore a bunch of lavender in an old milk jug. The whitewashed walls were hung with stained-glass panels, similar to the one they’d seen in the shop. Blues and greens predominated, with slivers of purple. Spectral women drifted above pools of iridescent water, surrounded by figurative flower shapes. A large rear window of the cottage was entirely taken up by a maritime scene where the waves became nymphs, guiding tiny boats ashore. All around, candles stood in brass holders and an oil-lamp hung from a ceiling beam.