She gave me a weighing-up look, then nodded and said, ‘Probably, yes.’ She asked me questions about everything: work, why I had left the self-esteem course early? Anyone special in my life? Because of course I knew she’d need details of a significant other. She had a bad feeling about me, she said, and maybe we should up the supervisions again. OK, I said, anything, just to make her go. And then, at last, she did. I gave her half an hour in case she popped back, or was watching, and I washed out the fridge, gagging at the cheesy reek of solidified milk spills, swallowed the wine and rinsed the glass, shut the window, locked up and went out, picking my way over the shards of broken glass and sour green slime to the dustbins with my old bread and flowers.
When I got home there was a message on the phone. It was someone from the crematorium inviting me to collect Fay’s remains. The other option was that they would scatter them in the Garden of Remembrance but I said no, of course I wanted them. I took a taxi and picked up the blue urn-shaped plastic jar. It came to me clear as a chiming bell that this was my reason for going north. Charlie would want to have the ashes as soon as possible. I could go north, I could simply disappear. But Rose and the authorities … I didn’t know, I couldn’t think, too many things, one thing at a time. To go north. The urn sat on my lap in the taxi on the way home from the crematorium and I swear it felt warm.
I packed a bag and ordered a taxi for first thing in the morning. It was a week and Rupert had given me the week. But he would never trace me. Not to Orkney. I was too excited to be hungry but, still, opened a tin of pea and ham soup. I sat Fay on the table in her usual place. I may have talked to her a bit. It was cosy, the three of us, Fay, Charlie Two and me. All in harmony. Charlie Two quiet in his cage, ruffling through his feathers with his beak. It felt like family. And then I had an idea. It started with curiosity. I unscrewed the urn and looked inside. Pale speckled gritty powder. I poured a little on to my bandaged hand and ran my finger through it. Incredible to think that this was actually Fay. I’m not mad, I knew this wasn’t her: this was just the remains of her body. She was crouching on the table, watching.
The beautiful and simple idea came to me then. How I could actually become part of the family, become Charlie’s flesh and blood. Because you are what you eat. I sprinkled some of the powder on to my soup like a seasoning and stirred it in. There was no taste, just a grittiness against my teeth, a slight scrape in my throat, and then she was inside me.
Chapter 31
~
On the twelfth of December, the day Jeffrey came home, she stayed away from his house, didn’t even let herself walk past, though was painfully aware of the phone, jumping and straining her ears whenever it rang, which it frequently did in a house of doctors.
Next day, after school, she walked past his house a few times and then, suddenly resolved to confront him, went back and rang the doorbell. He opened the door, but didn’t ask her in, instead he stepped out into the porch in his socks and pulled the door to behind him. His hair was longer now, parted in the centre, and his chin was covered in curly fluff. From inside the house she could hear music and smell the warmth of a baking cake.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me in?’ she said.
‘Got a friend here,’ he said, ‘they’ve come to stay for the weekend.’
‘One or more?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘You said they.’
He blushed. ‘All right. She.’
‘Can’t I meet her?’ Behind the lenses of his glasses his eyes darted about in a panic, his mouth opened and closed. ‘Oh I get it,’ she said. ‘I’m too common?’
‘No!’
‘Too thick then? Too young?’
He shifted from one sock to the other looking so desperately uncomfortable that she almost laughed.
‘Your new girlfriend?’ she said.
He smiled sheepishly.
‘Oh.’ She looked at the brass numbers on a plaque beside the door. Fifty-three. They were smeared and dull. With the corner of her scarf she began to polish the five.
‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘Karen, I’m freezing my bollocks off here.’
‘Jeffrey …’ a high voice drifted out. ‘I think it’s ready.’
‘Go in then,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be.’ She started on the three.
‘See you then.’ He hesitated, half through the door, letting out the warmth and music and cake smell – it smelt like chocolate – then stepped inside and closed the door. She polished the three until it shone, breathing on it and scrubbing at it with the thick wool of her school scarf. She could sense him standing behind the door waiting for her to leave. When she was ready, when the numbers were shiny enough, she walked away.
She walked back home and took out her physics books. The three laws of motion was her topic of the day: balanced force; resultant force; reaction force. If object A exerts a force on object B then object B exerts the exact opposite force on object A, she read. And that seemed fair enough.
Chapter 32
^
I went back to Peerless View. High ceilings, gloom, smell of engine oil or somesuch that comes up through the floor however much Haze you squirt about. It’s a very private street considering the amount of lorries and cars that thunder past. No one would ever look up and see you. Even if someone did happen to look up, the windows were so thick with muck they wouldn’t know a thing. I stood with my face against the dirty glass for a whole morning and no one walked past or stopped. It was more private than the middle of the countryside. It was like an island in the city and not a place anyone would ever think to look if a person was to go missing.
This was when I made a big mistake. It was out of being soft. I don’t know what came over me except it was the aftermath of the blood and then the silly little pro. I had to get out of there and I went to the pub for my lunch. I was eating a Tex-Mex when my phone went and I knew before looking who it would be. She was getting predictable. But what she came out with caught me unawares.
‘Charlie’s mum has just died,’ she said and her voice had that ring of truth to it. I put myself in Charlie’s shoes for a minute, how I’d feel if it was Mum. And it came to me stronger than ever how vital it was to get this sorted out, how I’d never forgive myself if Mum were to go to her grave before Karen was dealt with. I gave her the week.
I checked with the hospital and confirmed that the death was true. I got details of the cremation and went along, sitting in the back. Charlie stood up and said a few sincere words and I got quite choked up. It was him I felt sorry for. She had the wool pulled over his eyes so far he was tripping up on it.
I left before she saw me. Keeping to my part of the bargain but I might have known she would not keep to hers. I got a drum of paint from Wickes and started to do the kitchen. The walls were done in a thick paper textured with something like medallions but it was all greased up what with the generations of cooking that must have gone on in there and the paint wouldn’t stay on. I went over and over one patch and then gave it up as a bad job. I was sleeping in the lounge, the other bedroom being so damp there was fungus on the walls like orange sponges. The lounge had a high ornate ceiling and a boarded-up fireplace with a mirror over it. Under the settee I found a mousetrap and under the toothed wire was pinned the skeleton of a mouse. You could see the breakage in the ribs and back.
I stuck to my part of the bargain re contact but that wasn’t to say I couldn’t keep an eye open. I sat in the car under the tree and saw the comings and goings. Him white as a sheet and with those shadows under his eyes that show he hadn’t slept going out for a paper and a pint of milk. Every night the downstairs lights went out at ten-thirty and the upstairs about thirty minutes later. And then, after a bit, the downstairs light would come on and go off again and there would be the flickering of light from the box. I went close to the window, just once, careful not to scrape the gate. Through the gap in the curtains I could see him sitting there,
a glass in his hand, the TV light moving on his face.
She wouldn’t have had the chance to get away if I hadn’t let my guard up. I’d popped into the pub for an early-evening pint. Usually I keep myself to myself but this night, as I was looking at my brochures, a man came up.
‘Mexico, eh?’ he said. ‘It’s the dog’s bollocks if you ask me.’ He happened to have been to his sister’s wedding there which coincidence I took as a good omen. He went on about the girls and the beaches and the food. He’d stayed on after the wedding to make a holiday of it and been there for a festival to mark Independence Day, music and coloured lights, girls dancing (though he was with his wife and it was on a strictly look-don’t-touch basis), beer and tequila.
We started knocking it back as he fired me up on all cylinders and I forgot the time and when I went to speak to him again he’d gone and I was the last one in the pub and the landlord was pushing me out of the door and all I was fit for was getting back to Peerless View best I could and if it hadn’t been for that I’d have seen her go.
Chapter 33
*
As I stepped off the tiny plane, the wind lifted my scarf and whipped it against my face. It was a sweet cool wind, salty and grassy. The airport was nothing but a shed on the edge of a field, a small strip of tarmac with sheep grazing on either side. As soon as my foot hit solid ground, I saw Charlie standing at the gate. He had one leg bent up on the bottom rung, talking to a man in overalls. He squinted across at me, shading his eyes with his hand – the light was stinging bright. I walked towards him and couldn’t stop a big grin from splitting my face. It was just a few metres but they seemed to stretch for ever.
‘Nina,’ he said flatly, then to the other two visitors in a heartier voice: ‘Hello, welcome. Here we are. Good flight?’ He walked off towards a Land Rover and threw open the back door. The others climbed in and then he came round to the front. ‘Get in then,’ he said to me, indicating the passenger seat.
He jumped in beside me and turned round to the couple. ‘Been here before?’ he asked and when they said not, ‘Welcome to North Ronaldsay. Mind a detour before we go to the observatory? Got to fetch someone from the top of the island.’
‘Super,’ the woman said from the back. They pumped him for information on what was about – meaning which birds – as we drove up the narrow road that is like the spine of the island. I stared out of the window adjusting my expectations to the actuality: I had thought there would be cliffs and trees but the island was as flat and sprawled open as a naked body. There were cows in fields and ruined buildings, a church, and a clear and vivid scudding of clouds.
We drove to the tip of the island where there are two lighthouses, a working one – the tallest in Britain, Charlie said as proudly as if he’d built it himself – and the stumpy original at the end of a stony spit.
We sat there for a moment while the person we were picking up, a female in a knee-length cagoule and wellies, loped across the shore towards us.
‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ Charlie said quietly.
‘Super,’ the couple agreed, in unison. They were both peering through binoculars at something or other.
‘Beautiful,’ I said, though really it looked like the end of the world to me.
The woman shouted, ‘Hey Charlie,’ quirked her head at him and hopped into the back. We drove to the bird observatory at the other end of the island – maybe ten minutes away. It was a modern, wooden, solar-heated building with big rooms, glass everywhere and through each window more and more of the same – sky and sea and fizzing salty light.
‘If I ever go back to architecture,’ Charlie said, ‘this is the sort of thing I’ll do.’
‘If?’ I said.
He shrugged and led me through into the kitchen. I tripped on a plastic doll – toys were scattered everywhere as if this was a nursery school. Charlie introduced me to Ruth and Bruno and their two small children, both of whom looked at me unsmilingly with the same bright incisive eyes.
Ruth was plump and blonde with a squinty glance. ‘Welcome,’ she said, ‘’scuse the mess.’
‘Welcome,’ said Bruno and crushed my hand in his huge one. His name suited him. He was dark, squat and as hairy as a bear. Springy curls spilled out over the neck of his T-shirt and climbed up to merge with his beard.
‘Bruno’s the GP and lifeguard,’ Charlie said, ‘Ruth’s the bird warden and runs this place too – B&B and evening meals – there’s nowhere else for the poor buggers to go.’
‘God!’ I said.
‘I run it after a fashion,’ she said, gesticulating at the mess. ‘So, you’re Charlie’s …’
‘Girlfriend,’ I said.
‘We didn’t know you were coming.’
‘It was a surprise.’ I smiled. ‘A sort of impulse.’
‘And what do you think so far?’ Bruno said.
‘It’s very …’ I hesitated and he boomed out a laugh.
‘It certainly is very …’ he said. ‘Extreme is the word I’d use. But watch out, people do fall in love with it. They could have one of the guest rooms for a night or two, couldn’t they, Ru? There’s a double empty.’
‘Tonight there is,’ she said.
‘Don’t go to any trouble,’ I said.
She laughed and her breasts shoogled under the RSPB logo on her T-shirt. ‘Not much danger of that,’ she said, ‘you’ll have to make the bed up yourself. Sheets on the line. Charlie, maybe you could get them in?’
She went off then to greet the other guests and Charlie and I went out to get the sheets. They were blowing horizontally, flapping and snapping, straining at the clothes pegs. We bundled them in, cold dry cotton scented with the fresh air, and Charlie took me up to our room. The window looked out over the sea towards the white ridge and tiny stub of lighthouse – the visible signs of the neighbouring island, a flat and sandy place I’d seen from the plane, white beaches and bays, sea as turquoise and azure as any in a Caribbean brochure.
He stood behind me, not touching. ‘I’ve been in the bunkhouse up to now,’ he said. ‘This is luxury.’
‘Glad I came then?’
He gave me a look. The sky was silver along its rim, long streaks of cloud racing. I willed him to put his arms round me but he moved away and began to make the bed, tipping the pillows into their clean cases and thumping them into place.
‘I know but …’ I said, ‘Charlie, I was lonely. I was scared.’
‘Scared?’
It was true. Last night I’d woken with a jerk to hear a regular clicking like the sound of a doll’s eyelids sliding up and down and it may only have been an airlock in a radiator, something like that, something with a tidy everyday explanation, but with every click I’d seen Fay’s eyes opening at me and blinking shut. I was wet with sweat. She was angry that I’d eaten her. Though it was only the tiniest bit. I couldn’t stop wondering which bit, which one of her ground-up bones. I shouldn’t have done it. I couldn’t get it out of my head.
Charlie huffed and sank down on the bed. ‘How long have you got off work?’ he said.
‘A few days.’
‘You’ll get the sack if you don’t watch it. And what about Charlie Two?’
‘Taken care of.’
I had left him on his own, cage open, lots of seed in his feeder and in a saucer on the windowsill in case he needed more. He’d been quiet when I left, huddled on his perch in a feathery huff. I wondered what was happening in his pea-sized brain. I hadn’t liked to leave him alone but there hadn’t been the time to organise anything. If I stayed on I’d send a card to Maisie, I thought, get her to go and see to him.
He was facing away from me and I could see the tender hollow at the back of his neck, exposed by the funeral haircut. I went and sat beside him. He lifted my hand. It had almost healed and I’d replaced the bandage with a sticking plaster. ‘How did you do this again?’ he said.
‘Told you.’
He looked into my eyes and his pupils were flared hugely and I know that mean
s emotion; it means love. He seemed about to say something and then he changed his mind.
‘I need a drink,’ he said and stood up.
‘I really came to bring you this.’ I knelt down and opened my bag. Carefully snuggled in a cardigan was the plastic urn. ‘Your mum,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d like to have her with you. It didn’t seem right to put her in the post.’
He took the canister and tipped it from side to side. You could hear the slight shifting movement of the gritty ash.
‘You might want to scatter her. Or bury her and plant a tree.’
He swallowed and put the canister down. ‘Let’s get that drink then,’ he said.
‘How far’s the pub?’
He almost laughed at that. ‘This is the pub.’
‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come.’ I put my arms round him. ‘We haven’t even kissed.’
He kissed me then, first just a brushing of lips and then a real deep angry kiss, the edges of his teeth against my lip. He looked hard into my eyes. ‘You drive me mad, you know,’ he said, ‘you never listen, you never wait …’
‘Sorry,’ I said again but this time I was smiling inside.
I didn’t want to go downstairs but he insisted and led me down into the big central room of the observatory. In one corner was a little bar, which he went straight behind. He poured himself a beer, me a glass of red wine from a box and we went over and sat by one of the windows. He seemed so much at home, walking about in his woolly socks, helping himself to drinks.
‘Did you get my letter?’ he said.
‘No. Why did you send me a letter? I must have missed it.’
He sighed. I didn’t want to know about any letter. I don’t trust letters.
‘Anyway, I’m here now,’ I said, ‘you can speak to me in person.’
He took a swallow of his beer and shrugged. ‘Yeah. Well.’
He got up to serve cider to some twitchers, then he came back.
Nina Todd Has Gone Page 16