‘I’d like to have her back,’ said Bertha.
‘She’d like to come back.’ I don’t know why I said that. How would I know?
‘What’s she living on?’
I shrugged. ‘Benefits.’
‘Ruby.’ She hesitated. ‘Is she really OK? I mean, she’s had her problems, Jinn, but she’s a good girl. She doesn’t deserve her troubles.’
‘She’s fine.’ I hadn’t seen her for weeks, so I didn’t know how she was, but I wanted to make Bertha feel better. I wouldn’t want her feeling guilty, because after all she hadn’t had much of a choice. Even Jinn said that once. She said she’d have sacked herself if she was Bertha. ‘She’s getting herself together.’
‘Oh, I’m glad to hear that. Is it Tom?’
My fingers froze. ‘What?’
‘Tom Jerrold. I’ve seen her with him. He was a good boy. I was hoping she’d left Nathan for him. He’d be better for her.’
‘You’ve seen them? Together? A lot?’
‘Well, a few times. In his car and that. By the marina once.’
I didn’t know what to say. I was scared and I didn’t know why. ‘Yes, it’s maybe – it’s maybe Tom then. She’s getting herself together.’ A flash of loyalty came out of nowhere. ‘She’s getting both of them sorted. Her and Nathan.’
Why did I not just stop there?
‘She’s talked to her GP. She’s trying to get Nathan to go to rehab. They have that – there’s a clinic up in Glassford. They’ve got an appointment.’
And that’s one more reason I don’t overdo the talking. Because when I do I overcompensate, and all that comes out is lies.
Twenty-one
I didn’t know where she’d been for the last few weeks, but she couldn’t have been far away. Glassford’s one of those towns that isn’t huge, it’s just big enough to lose yourself. Small enough to let you reappear though. Jinn cornered me in the Tesco car park two days later.
I was so glad to see her, despite the way she looked. And I was glad she was stealing from a bigger company these days, and it was a massive relief to know she wasn’t going near the mini-mart. I was guiltily glad to know that she was as ashamed as I was. Jinn didn’t hang around Breakness so much; she was always up in Glassford. This didn’t worry me too much and it saved me from embarrassing moments like that one by the river. Life without Jinn was becoming normal life, easier life. To reassure myself I walked by Dunedin sometimes, but even though it was dark and silent I knew she’d be all right; Jinn always was. Somewhere nearby, Jinn was all right.
Richer pickings in Glassford, I told myself: more clients, a bit more anonymity. I suppose she worked in Breakness too, but if she met a punter at the pub by the marina, she’d get in his car (because I knew she’d lied about that) and they’d go into the countryside, and then he’d drop her off in Glassford.
Even that thought didn’t upset me too much any more. I was getting so used to the notion of what Jinn did – what Jinx did – I was inured to the fear. The thing is, I knew it wasn’t for ever. What I’d told Bertha wasn’t so much a lie, really. It was by way of foretelling the future. It was a prediction. It was wishful thinking.
In the meantime, I bought her a coffee. Should have gone to Starbucks in Glassford, for the anonymity, or stayed at the Tesco cafe, but we took the bus home – well, to my home – and went to the Mermaid Cafe in Breakness instead. It had always been Jinn’s favourite, and Lara’s before her.
We didn’t say a word to each other until the sullen waitress had delivered the coffee. I’d asked for some toast too, so some warm singed bread had appeared with a tiny plastic tub of Flora. I’d ordered it for Jinn, but she showed no intention of eating it. She prodded it with her thumb. It was squishy. Wrinkling her nose, she wiped her fingertip on the paper tablecloth.
‘Have some?’ I tried.
‘Not hungry.’ She smiled, but with an edge of desperation.
The Mermaid Cafe was as quaint, but not as nice, as it sounds. The painted chipboard mermaid outside was grotesque enough to put off a few potential customers even if they hadn’t tasted the toast yet. She was more like a sea-witch: ogreish, with glaring eyes and lips that were too red, and she didn’t have any eyebrows, and her forehead was the wrong shape. The incompetent artist had covered that up with curls of blindingly yellow hair.
But the cafe itself was popular with locals for cheapness, and with tourists for character. It was crammed full of old trinkets and photos, far too many ever to be dusted. The walls and the ceiling were swagged with old netting and rope, and tucked into that were glass buoys thick with dust, driftwood and old bottles. Every other inch of wall space was covered with monochrome postcards and seashells and bad paintings. The whole place smelt funny. It smelt of all the years trapped in those trinkets and photos and postcards. I think it was the smell of all the sepia people, surly and poker-faced. It was the smell of their surly sepia lives.
Though it was brightly sunny outside, indoors was a puddle of dark. That made it a little harder to see properly, but I could see well enough. Jinn looked terrible. There seemed to be a layer of grime on her, too, like she hadn’t been dusted for a long time. So thin, so fragile, she could give you a paper cut. I shivered. Somebody kept dancing over my grave and I wished they’d stop it.
‘I’m kind of stuck for money, Ruby.’ Jinn smiled into the dusty air. She smiled at a stiffly-posed thirties tourist by a motionless sea, like she had more in common with dead people than she did with me.
A shaft of sunlight angled in, but it didn’t light her hair: all it lit was the floating dust motes. It cast her face into beige shadow.
‘Are you really stuck?’ I swallowed and hesitated. ‘I thought you were OK.’
‘Well,’ she said.
‘You know,’ she said.
‘Things are a bit complicated just now,’ she said. ‘We’ve got something coming off but there’s a delay. You see? I just need something to tide me over.’
‘Tide you over?’ I repeated.
‘Till we’re sorted. Till we can pay these guys what they’re owed. Then we’ll be fine.’
‘Till youse are sorted.’ I licked my lips. ‘You and Nathan?’
I couldn’t leave it there. Oh, if I just had, but I opened my mouth again.
You see? You see what happens? I opened my mouth and said the one word I should never have said, the word I wish more than any I could take back. I parted my lips and detached my tongue from the roof of my mouth and out it came.
‘Jinx,’ I said.
Her face didn’t move, or not much; her determined smile might have twitched a bit. ‘You shouldn’t call me that, Ruby. Don’t. Nobody calls me that. Nobody but Them. OK?’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘It’s not my name. Tom doesn’t call me that and neither should you.’
‘You’re still –?’
‘I’ve seen him a few times. I like him. Not like Nathan,’ she added belligerently, ‘but I like him so I don’t –’
Charge him. It hung in the air like a dusty net.
Jinn ran a finger round her cup’s chipped rim. Inside it was stained pale brown, in rings, like a tree. She poured new tea in to cover the stains and then she poured for me.
Shall I be Mother?
Oh yes, please, Jinn. Yes, do.
I watched the flow of tea. The pot was a bad pourer. Tea dribbled out of the spout and spotted the paper tablecloth with a spreading brown stain. Every damn thing in here was sepia.
‘Jinx is her name. Not mine.’
I tapped my teaspoon against my cup, dipped it in the tea, but I didn’t take sugar and I didn’t take milk: there was nothing to stir. I wanted to say So get rid of her, Jinn. Leave her behind. I wanted to say Get a life and mean it in the best way. Get a life without Jinx. Get your old life back.
But I’d already said enough and there was guilt blocking my throat. I should have said any one of those things but I didn’t. Things might have happened differently if I had. But I
didn’t, and so it’s like with Alex: I’ll never know. I’ll never know what would have happened.
After all, I never said anything to Alex. I didn’t shout Stop or I didn’t mean it or Do you want to go to a film after all? I didn’t shout Get a life, Alex! and mean it in a good way. All I said, the last thing I said, was Take a running jump.
And I hadn’t learned my lesson, because I didn’t say the right words to Jinn either. All I said to her, all that she heard, was Jinx. I didn’t say the words that mattered and it’s just like Alex: I’ll never know what would have happened.
I pulled out my bag and gave her some money, and she crumpled it in her fist, eyes bright and grateful and loving. ‘I love you,’ she said. ‘When we’ve paid them, I’ll stop. I love you.’
I tried to say it, but it got stuck. Instead I said, ‘Call me, Jinn? If you need more. If you need me.’
As I stood up and left, I took one look back at her. I couldn’t help myself. The shaft of sunlight had migrated across the dusty space and her head was turned a little away as she pocketed the money. The dust motes looked like they were dancing in her hair, and they turned it silver like before, like a Molotov girl, all life and sun and beaches. She felt me looking and turned and smiled, the motes sparkling round her head like stardust. She was very beautiful, that time.
And I try very hard to keep that tarty stardust elf-queen in my head, smiling like she’d just remembered she loved me. Sometimes I like to bring the memory out and dust it off, and set the silver motes dancing again in my head, because I never saw Jinn alive again.
Winter
Twenty-two
I’m very possessive about my name now. I don’t like being called ‘Rubes’ any more. I’ve hung on to my name this long and I’m kind of proud of it, the more so since Jinn lost hers. Jinn was two names away from herself by the time she died.
I didn’t know for a long time that she was dead. Nobody did. She wasn’t around any more, but then she hadn’t been around for a while. Wide Bertha said she’d maybe gone to Glasgow or Edinburgh or even London. Maybe Jinn wanted to be somewhere anonymous, she suggested. Bright lights, big city. A place where nobody knows your name, and nobody knows or cares if it’s the one you were born with.
I woke up at three o’clock one morning, in my quiet house that seemed to belong exclusively to me now, and had a sick feeling in my stomach. The silence was so heavy against my chest and face I could hardly breathe, and I was afraid to anyway, afraid that if I breathed out someone would hear it. When I had to breathe at last, it sounded loud, like a cry. I’d just remembered something.
Call me, I’d said. Call me if you need me.
If she called me, she wouldn’t get me. The phone she called would ring underwater, or in Norway, or wherever the hell it had ended up. Some ugly mermaid with red lips and bilious yellow hair was using my phone. I snatched my new one off the bedside table and texted Jinn that minute, not caring if I woke her up. My God, I’d forgotten it for this long; how could I trust myself to remember in the morning?
That was when I started to wonder if I’d done it on purpose: forgotten to give her my new number.
I didn’t wake her up. I know that now, because by that time it was already too late. There’s another thing I’ll never know, and that’s if she tried to call me. I’ll never know if she did need me. Maybe she tried to call and ask for some more money; for all I know she called me while she ran, or while she fought or hid or whatever it was she did with her last minutes. Maybe she cried because I didn’t answer her. But like so much else, I’ll never know.
When I went back to sleep, I dreamed I was under the bedclothes again. I saw Jinn’s face, haloed in the torchlight like a hollow-eyed angel. She was smiling at me, pricking her finger, pricking mine, swearing me to honour her choice. Overdoing the pricking thing, like Sleeping Beauty going to extremes. Blood getting on the sheets, Jinn giggling, our thumbprints smearing the polycotton as we tried to wipe it off, just making it worse. Jinn taking hold of my hand to try to clean up my bloody thumb. But it was all wrong. My hand got tangled in the duvet cover, and my arm, and I couldn’t move. Jinn’s hand slipped out of mine and I couldn’t find her; she bobbed away from me like a green-and-white striped ball, the sheets and the duvet settling over my face like smothering waves. I struggled to surface, woke, tore myself out of tangled bedclothes and took a breath with a high squeal in my throat.
I’m wondering now if that’s when it happened.
It snowed that winter more than it had for years. Every night it snowed more, and in the morning there would be a new thick crust of it. Everybody marvelled at it, except Mr Bertha, who grumbled even though he never went out of doors. It was the kind of snow you think can never end; you can’t imagine the world being green again. Like Narnia. The world became silent and beautiful and perfectly clean each night, laundered by cold.
In the morning, the schools being closed, the kids would tear out to sully it the best way they knew how. The playpark and the golf course and the hilly field just outside town were pocked with angels and blistered with snowmen and scored with sledge tracks, the slopes ironed into smooth and superfast chutes like the finest ski piste in Austria. Mallory’s preferred spot was the Tesco car park in Glassford, where she would cycle round and round like a suicidal maniac, scaring the motorists, doing stunts off icy lumps of shovelled snow that were blackened with dirt and exhaust fumes, but Foley spat out the taste of the air and put his foot down. While real life and real winter were on hold, we’d take our snow in the fields on the edge of town and the country beyond.
I wasn’t too old for it, I discovered, and neither was Foley. Mallory fell out with us both because we monopolised her plastic sledge, which could go like a bobsleigh when you picked the right track. She screamed abuse at us, hurling viciously packed snowballs as we threw ourselves on to our bellies for the umpteenth time and hurtled down. Eventually, when we started to feel sorry for her, we let her have the sledge back. She was in a murderous mood by then, and her gang of small henchmen suffered for it.
Between Foley’s ongoing school career and my job there weren’t a lot of daylight hours to spare, but there’s something about snow: you just make the most of the hours you’ve got. To avoid the spontaneous combustion of Mallory, or maybe just because we tired of sledges faster than she did, we took the chance to go for walks.
So we’d leave Mallory with the sledgers (she was safe in a crowd; it was everyone else who needed protection) and we’d walk through the woods where sledging was impossible and where it was lonely except for dog walkers, feeling more benevolent than usual towards them, since dog shit is easier to see in the snow and the old stuff was buried. The field up beyond the woods – flat, and therefore a fat lot of use as a sledging arena – was untouched, the sheep who were there earlier having been slaughtered. Foley wanted to run on to the field and spoil the snow, but I wouldn’t let him. It was perfectly smooth, perfectly pure, like a linen sheet, except that it had a crust of ice that glittered like crystals in the sun. The tree shadows that lengthened too quickly across it were blue, nearly as blue as the sky. When you pushed your fist into snow piled against the fence, it glowed like aquamarine.
We’d walk as far as the distillery, and then Foley would get guilty and roll his eyes and we’d go back to find that no, Mallory hadn’t been abducted, but arrest was a real possibility. I wouldn’t let us turn round before the distillery though. It was a tourist attraction as well as a working distillery, which meant the grounds were groomed and landscaped and pretty even in the summer, with wooden benches and flags and beautifully painted signs. In winter it was magical: young trees and ancient stone, and snow. It even had a mill wheel.
The burn that turned the wheel flowed out of a small loch where in summer small boys sailed boats and older ones fished for trout. That was a pretty place too, wood-fenced and idyllic; choppy and windswept on some days and millpond-flat (naturally enough) on others, the reeds at its edges mirrored so perfectly, yo
u could have turned the picture upside down. There was an overflow where a burn ran through a metal grille and then vanished under the road, but it was a quiet trickle in the still freezing air, even though the loch was brimming. In the snow the loch had frozen over, opaque and misty and flat as a curling rink. It would have been stupid to skate, but it was tempting. As the winter days went on with no change, snow settled on the ice in a soft shroud, and no one walked on it.
In the snow even Dunedin was beautiful. I made a detour to pass the house on my way to the Glassford bus stop every morning, pausing to try and make out any signs of life. A forlorn string of Christmas lights hung over the window, but they hadn’t been switched on for weeks. I wasn’t sure if anyone was there or not, and I didn’t dare look through the letterbox to see if my Christmas card lay on the mat unopened. The slate roof was blanketed in snow, and that could have been because of excellent roof insulation or because no one was trying to heat the place. I suspected the latter.
Nathan’s friends might still have been in residence but I didn’t think Nathan was. I don’t think Jinn had been there for a long time either. Perhaps the pair of them had moved on. It should have chilled me that I didn’t know, but I could only feel numb about it. I didn’t have any feelings, I didn’t have any opinions. It was an interlude, this thing with Jinx. It was a warp in the space–time continuum. The portal was jammed. One day the spell of Dunedin would break and the portal would open and Jinn would find her name, and then she’d be back, tumbling into the light, laughing as the credits rolled. Jinx was an interlude.
I still think that would have happened. I do believe she’d have found her name and come back through the portal; it’s just that she never got the chance.
I should have known that, looking at Dunedin, frozen in the snow. The place was dead and the inhabitants were lost and the portal was closed for ever. I just didn’t know it at the time.
The Opposite of Amber Page 16