Five minutes later Jinn came out. I’d known she was in there, but it still jolted me, because she didn’t fit. That’s why I didn’t turn quickly and walk away, just stood there staring as she marched across the road, arms folded, lips tight. I was scared, but not because she was going to tear a strip off me. I was scared because the house had started sucking the life out of her. The light and the sparkle had gone out of her hair and even though the sunlight was falling on both of us, it was like she was under a shadow. She didn’t radiate light any more. I could see it and I was frightened to tell her. Even if I said it, I was afraid she wouldn’t hear me, like she was already locked in an invisible shroud, like the house had dropped a clear glass bell jar over her. When she stopped right in front of me, and two fighter jets screamed overhead, the smothering noise just confirmed it. We couldn’t even hear each other any more.
The jets roared into the horizon and she sighed out her impatience until the silence came back, heavier than before.
‘Are you spying on me?’ she snapped.
I shrugged. I was going to say ‘No’ but that would really have sounded mighty stupid.
‘Leave us alone, Ruby. You kicked him out of our house. Isn’t that enough?’
‘I didn’t!’
‘You might as well have. Don’t come round here.’
‘I had something to tell you,’ I blurted.
‘What?’
Bugger. I’d been lying and now I couldn’t even think of anything. The truth was hard enough to speak. Lies needed too quick a reflex.
‘He doesn’t love you,’ I said.
‘What did you say?’
I wished I hadn’t, now, but I started again. ‘He doesn’t –’
‘Yeah, I heard you! How dare you, Ruby. How dare you!’
I looked at the pavement, then at the view over her shoulder. The sea between the houses was blue and glittery. A white scrap of sail drifted behind the skerries on a May breeze. Idyllic. I was hoping that if I stayed silent long enough, she’d start to protest. She’d start shouting He does love me! He does, he does! And then I’d know she was protesting too much and I’d know it was all a fleeting lie and a whim and it wouldn’t be for ever.
But she didn’t do that. She didn’t protest, and anyway she knew me too well and she was wise to my silent tactics. I’d lost and we both knew it.
‘You don’t even know him.’ She said it with a tinge of disgust.
‘I do,’ I said. ‘Sort of.’ But I could feel the flutter of my heart in my throat and the tinge of heat in my face. I was embarrassed. I’d gone too far. I’d lost. Stop pushing it, Ruby.
‘He needs me.’
‘You can’t help him. He’s a useless jun –’
‘And for your information,’ she said loudly over me, ‘he loves me. And even if he didn’t, I love him anyway. So it’s none of your fecking business, Ruby.’
There was nothing more I could say or do so I sloped home like a scolded puppy. I couldn’t face going back to our empty little house, not yet, so I stopped by the mini-mart, and this time Wide Bertha was there. For the first time ever, she didn’t look very pleased to see me.
Actually, that’s an understatement. She tried to pretend she hadn’t seen me, and if I hadn’t shouted her name (just ‘Bertha’, obviously; I don’t have a death wish), she would have slid into her tiny office cubicle and locked the door to avoid me.
I said, ‘Why isn’t Jinn at work?’
Bertha turned over a piece of paper and took a biro from behind her ear and scribbled down a random number. She stared up at the racks of cigarettes and nodded and scribbled again, and read what she’d written, and bit the end of her pen.
She said, ‘I didn’t know you could talk.’
And that’s when I knew she’d sacked her.
Twelve
She had to let Jinn go, said Bertha. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her. It wasn’t that she wanted to do it. It was just that she couldn’t afford her any more.
I waited a week, counting to ten and biting my tongue, then went back to Dunedin. This time I didn’t even get the chance to glower at the blank windows. Jinn came storming out, dragging on her thin cardigan as she crossed the road. She didn’t look at me, just marched ahead of me and down through the town square to the playpark.
A haar lay over the town: had done for days, blurring the whole place. You couldn’t see anything clearly, and even the jets weren’t flying. There was still a smear of sunlight through the sea mist, there were half-shadows – shadows of shadows – and you could just make out the dunes across the river mouth, glowing pearly-pale-gold. There’s something oppressive about that haar, something that smells of mystery, and not a nice one: a Fog out of Stephen King or Bram Stoker.
The frog rubbish bin at the playpark entrance loomed, lime-green and gape-mouthed. Jinn stopped right beside it, so that I almost tripped, and turned on me.
I said, ‘You lost your job.’
‘Tell me something I don’t know.’
‘You didn’t tell me . . .’
‘No indeed.’
‘Bertha’s upset. She didn’t want –’
‘Bertha’s a bitch. She won’t even give me a reference.’
‘She’s not a bitch.’
‘What are we going to do for money?’
‘We? You work, don’t you?’ She gave me a filthy glare. ‘Me, I get benefits. When do you think I got sacked?’
I opened my mouth, shut it again.
‘She kicked me out three weeks ago, Rubes. Social’s paying the rent.’
‘She says she wants you back.’
‘She doesn’t want me back any more than you do. She wants Jinn Carmichael, goody-two-shoes. You want your mammy. Well, I’m not your frigging mammy. I’ve got a life of my own.’
I bristled. ‘Bertha just doesn’t want you nicking the profits. What’s he gonnae live off?’
Jinn swatted a couple of early wasps away from the giant frog. ‘None of your business, Ruby. You had to get rid of him, didn’t you?’
‘I don’t want to be around drugs.’ Miss Prim. What did I sound like?
‘And I don’t want you around drugs. So we’re fine then, aren’t we?’
‘The house stank.’
‘Sure did. Well, it doesn’t any more, does it?’
‘Are you coming back, Jinn?’
She just smiled at me.
‘I miss you,’ I mumbled.
‘I don’t want you around drugs,’ she mimicked.
Cold nitrogen running down my backbone. ‘What about you?’
‘Oh, piss off, Ruby. You know I wouldn’t take that stuff. Nathan’s his own person. He’s been in trouble. He’s trying to get clean and they won’t leave him alone. He’s in trouble and he needs me and I want to be with him. Help him get free of those people. That’s all.’
I thought: she’s addicted, just like he is. But she’s addicted to Nathan. I felt like I wanted to cry but I didn’t want to do it in front of Jinn.
She licked her lips and looked out to sea: the sea that was invisible, smeared out of sight by the mist. She frowned, pushed a twist of hair out of her eyes.
‘That bloody smell,’ she said. ‘It sticks to my clothes.’
When late spring turned to summer, Jinn got another job to go with her benefits. Cash in hand, I think, and not a lot of it, but summer jobs weren’t so easy to come by as they’d once been. She’d stopped even pretending to live with me; hadn’t been home for weeks. That’s why I didn’t recognise her at first: that, and the fact she was dressed up like an idiot.
The house was lonely without Jinn, but I was damned if I was telling her so. We were still pretending to the housing authority that the two of us were living there. Nobody checked. We’d always paid the rent on time and now the social were doing it. There were nasturtiums and Livingstone daisies outside, seeded from last year, and I kept them going, and bought a few more sickly plants on a three-for-two special. I kept the blanket tucked tight round
the tyres too, weighted down with stones. I didn’t want the tyres to get in a mess but I didn’t want to get rid of them either. One day Jinn was going to want them for her tyre garden, and she’d do something with the mush and pustules that were the old potatoes. I took to looking in the garden tent in Tesco’s car park every time I went in, thinking about herbs. I wondered if Jinn would want basil or dill or parsley, and I wondered if it was worth trying tomatoes. I didn’t buy anything, because there wasn’t any point till Jinn came home. I’d only kill them; even the nasturtiums were on borrowed time.
It was on the way home from Tesco one day that I saw Jinn, looking windblown outside the Folk Museum. I’d just got off the Glassford bus with a bag in each hand and I did a double take. The Museum was holding a Witch Month to commemorate the burning of four witches in the town square in sixteen-whatever, which was more reasonable than it sounds because the witches had done something sinister with eggshells and milk, and sunk a fishing boat. The Museum said the townsfolk had been very credulous. I reckoned they were smart and entrepreneurial and not a little far-sighted. The witch trial may not have done a lot for the witches, but its magic spell on the Breakness tourists had only just worn off.
So there was Jinn, handing out leaflets that fluttered in the breeze. I’m sure the witches themselves didn’t dress like that because it would have been a bit of a giveaway, but then I suspect the costume was a Halloween leftover. Her black dress came nearly to her ankles, layers and layers of lace and tulle, with a glimpse of buttoned-up black boots beneath. It was an off-the-shoulder number, and her pale shoulders were pink with the sea breeze. Fingerless black lace gloves didn’t help much, but her head was probably quite warm under the wild black wig. Her lips were scarlet, her eyes black-lined, her face death-pale. She wasn’t striking sparks today, not even in the breezy sunshine. I couldn’t see a single strand of silver-blonde hair. She must have been taking her work very seriously: a Stanislavski witch. When I got closer to her I saw fake black pearls wound into the wig.
‘What if the social sees you?’ I said. ‘That’s benefit fraud.’
‘Piss off, Ruby. I’m ghostly and aloof.’
I swear she winked at me though. I couldn’t help smiling.
‘I’m not getting paid anyway,’ she went on. ‘Much. I’ll get a commission if anybody turns up with a discount leaflet. Doubt anybody will.’ Sure enough there were tattered leaflets stuck to the mud in the gutter where they’d been dropped. ‘Don’t suppose you want twenty per cent off a Witch Tour?’
I shook my head, annoyed with her for trying to change the subject. I tried again. ‘What if somebody sees you, though?’
‘They won’t, and if they do they won’t recognise me.’ She tugged at a coarse black strand of fake hair. That drew my attention to her white throat. The amber drop wasn’t there. It had been replaced with a cheap Germanic cross strung on a black leather thong. Noticing my stare, Jinn put her fingers up to her throat and clasped the cross in her fist.
I decided I wouldn’t mention the amber. Why would I care anyway? It was a gift from him. And he’d nicked it in the first place.
‘Are you coming back to the house some time?’ I asked.
‘Maybe at the weekend.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I blurted.
Jinn thrust a leaflet at two tourists. ‘S’OK.’
‘I mean he could come –’
‘No,’ said Jinn. ‘No. I don’t want him to. I don’t want his stuff in the house.’
She didn’t say ‘our house’. I noticed that.
‘But he’s still –’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But not around you, he’s not.’
‘Jinn,’ I said. ‘Jinn, are you OK?’
‘Ruby, Ruby, I’m fine,’ she mocked. ‘Do feck off. Say what you’ve got to say and get it over with and feck off.’ She wiggled a thumb under her armpit. ‘This corset’s killing me.’
‘Not the corset,’ I muttered.
Which was when she stopped talking to me.
Summer
counting games
The third time it happened, I saw it in the newspaper racks in the big supermarket. I picked up the Mirror and the Sun and I read the story in both of them, and then I folded those ones up and tucked them back in the rack, and moved on to the Record and the Glassford-Breakness Courier. That’s why I remember the third girl so well, because the security guard gave me a row for reading all the papers and not buying them and then she chucked me out.
They’d realised there was a connection by now, but it didn’t do them any good. There was no CCTV footage; he’d been careful or lucky again. There wasn’t any DNA that wasn’t their own to connect the girls. He left nothing of himself. He left nothing of them either but a pale shadow in water that might have been a discarded doll or a reflection.
That was what the ghillie at the trout farm thought. Standing on the little bridge over the weir, looking down into the nursery pond, he thought she was reflected sky: so white, shining there a metre or so below the surface. That’s what he thought till she moved, till the current from the diverted stream shifted a little and rolled her to face him.
He’d have liked to take her hand and pull her out, he said; she didn’t look bloated or badly nibbled, she couldn’t have been there for long, she looked like a nymph asleep under the weir with her dark hair drifting. But he wasn’t a superstitious man, and he knew she couldn’t be sleeping, not now; so he left her there and took his phone from his jacket and went back to the hut to find a signal.
Thirteen
Having Foley around was like picking a scab. I veered wildly between fancying the pants off him and being thrown by his very existence. Without Foley to impress that day, I wouldn’t have showed off, and I wouldn’t have told Alex to take a running jump. Foley was half boyfriend, half reproachful ghost; I would have liked to sleep with him, but Alex Jerrold kept getting in the way. I’d be sleepily cuddling up to Foley on the sofa, and his hands would be exploring one breast while he kissed me, and ker-plunk Alex would land like a bag of meat in my imagination.
Foley was getting tired of me turning him down, but not quite tired enough to finish with me. Besides, I think he loved me, in a Foley kind of way, and he didn’t want to dump me. I got the impression he was willing to wait, which made me fabulously complacent about keeping him in line. And he was at school. Still! I’d be shagging a schoolboy, for crying out loud.
I thought it was high time I slept with him. I’d have liked to sleep with him and I might have done it by now, but I had to consider Mallory the Walking Contraceptive. Mallory’s bedtime was the boundary between indentured servitude to a six-year-old and freedom, but Mallory’s bedtime was a very flexible thing, and quite a lot of the time Foley was a twenty-four-hour childminder anyway. Ma and Pa Foley took Apache and Mojave to an awful lot of dog shows, and even when they were home they were making the brutes roast dinners, or bathing and brushing them like gigantic My Little Ponies.
Very occasionally we got shot of Mallory early enough to watch a DVD at my place. Our place, I mean. Jinn’s and mine. Our place.
‘There’s a Foley in every movie,’ he told me once as we huddled on the sofa. ‘You watch the credits.’
‘That’s nice. What’s wrong with Brad?’ I asked. ‘Matt? Ben? You could change your first name.’
‘Nah.’ He nudged me. ‘Foley Operator – you just watch.’
‘Oh yeah. What does Foley Operator do, anyway?’
He shrugged. ‘Operates the Foley.’
‘Cameron’s a lovely name,’ I said. ‘Nothing wrong with it.’
‘Bloody is when you’re named after Cameron Diaz.’
‘Oh.’
‘Ma liked the name cos of Cameron Diaz. She told me that. I mean, Jesus. It’s like being called Paris. Or Beyoncé.’
‘Coulda been worse,’ I said. ‘She could have called you Cherokee to match the dogs.’
He sniggered. ‘Dances With Alsatians.’
He got up and pu
t another packet of popcorn in the microwave. I could hear him messing about in my kitchen. Slamming cupboard doors. Rattling bottles in the fridge. Fizzing the top off another Molotov, and another. Pinging the microwave, and deciding the popcorn needed longer, and clanging the microwave shut again. I could smell something acrid and I decided he was going to burn it, but I didn’t shout through. I was drowsy and cosy lying on the sofa and I liked listening to him. I could be quite a domesticated creature, I thought. I quite fancied having Foley around all the time. I wondered if he’d be able to shack up with me next year. I wondered if he’d get to leave Mallory behind. Fat chance.
I heard him hiss and swear because he’d burnt his fingers on the popcorn bag; then I heard the soft rustle of the popcorn being shaken into a Pyrex bowl.
He came back through. I didn’t look at him, just shut my eyes and smiled and enjoyed the way the sofa sagged and my body lurched into him when he sat down. He lifted my head like it was a cushion, and dumped it on his lap, and put a nugget of popcorn between my teeth. I wrinkled my nose. It was singed. Thought so.
I ate it anyway. As I chewed I heard him suck in a breath. I wriggled my head, like I was trying to get comfier, and he actually squeaked like a mouse.
I was being an insufferable tease and I knew it, but I liked having Foley physically close, I liked curling up against him. Sometimes I was tempted to shag him, just to keep him till morning, because I did get lonely. However well you know them, however long you’ve lived there, houses are bad about going all Stephen King when you’re on your own. But he couldn’t have stayed all night anyway. I couldn’t keep him there, so it wasn’t worth it. He got frustrated and impatient and who could blame him? But it wasn’t worth it.
I heaved a sigh. Spider-Man 3 was OK but I’d seen it twice before. I heaved another sigh.
‘Are you bored?’ asked Foley.
Well spotted. Ever sensitive to my moods.
‘The popcorn’s burnt,’ I said.
The Opposite of Amber Page 11