The Bass Rock

by Evie Wyld

  ‘No. She’s a friend.’

  ‘A friend.’

  ‘Yes. Look, I’m only saying because she can come across a bit strange. I don’t want you to freak out about her.’

  ‘What is there to freak out about?’

  ‘Well, she sometimes, and not all the time, just sometimes when things are slow and she’s broke, I think – she sometimes does a bit of sex work. I wouldn’t have said anything, except she’s the sort of person who might just bring it up at any moment like she’s talking about the weather, and I just don’t want you to get offended and then . . .’

  I look at my sister, expecting a face of horror.

  ‘Viv. It’s really none of my business.’ She has never seemed less herself, with morning light in her unbrushed hair and improperly removed eyeliner. She is a smudged version of my sister.

  ‘Cool then,’ I say.

  ‘I got paid to fuck someone once,’ she says. I have taken the keys out of the ignition, and I put them back in to have something to do with my hands. ‘And to be honest I don’t feel strange about that. Sex has bought me a lot worse things than money.’ She looks at me. I am holding the steering wheel. ‘Do you disapprove?’ she asks.

  ‘No. I just didn’t know.’ But that’s not it. ‘I feel bad I didn’t know that about you. No one has ever offered to pay to have sex with me.’

  Katherine smiles. She lightly thumps my arm. ‘I bet if you took up yoga and drank some water someone would pay to have sex with you.’

  Inside, we find Maggie in the dining room. She has put a bunch of carnations in a vase on the table and she’s sitting with her legs crossed on the window seat looking out towards the sea. From her earphones comes a tinny version of ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’. Maggie is sniffing. She hasn’t noticed us, so I knock hard on the open door. Her head whips round and she takes us in like a predator, recognises me and softens. She rips the earphones out.

  ‘Hey,’ she says and gets up and gives me an unexpected hug. ‘This is your sister?’

  ‘Yes, this is Katherine. Katherine, this is Maggie.’

  ‘You look the same.’

  I snort as though I’m eight years old. Maggie wraps her arms around Katherine and hugs her.

  ‘Hi,’ she says through a squeeze. Tentatively Katherine puts her arms around Maggie, sends me an uncertain look.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ she says.

  Maggie releases Katherine and turns to me. Sniffs. ‘You know there’s a ghost here, right?’

  To my surprise Katherine answers, ‘The girl with the hair?’

  Maggie looks at her. ‘She’s so sad.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say, but I have no further thoughts on what to say next.

  ‘I thought no one else saw her,’ says Katherine. ‘You never saw her, did you, Viv?’

  ‘Well, no.’

  Maggie and Katherine look at each other.

  Pathetically, I feel left out.

  Katherine is straddling the garden wall, talking to Mum on the phone.

  ‘So what’s the deal with Katherine?’ Maggie asks. She takes a long sip from her coffee, which I notice she has upgraded to cafetière coffee in my absence.

  ‘I guess her husband might be more of an arsehole than I thought.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Hey,’ I say – I don’t want to talk about Dom, and have to remind myself that he is not mine to talk about – ‘when we came in, you seemed like maybe you were crying?’

  ‘I was crying.’

  ‘Is everything OK?’ Maggie puts down her cup.

  ‘Sometimes things are just really sad.’

  ‘Which things?’

  Maggie sighs. ‘I was thinking about work. How we work for money, to have nicer things – and that’s all fair enough until you think about what those things are.’ She talks slowly, like she’s very tired. ‘A pair of shoes, a nicer chair to sit in, a phone that you can use to look at pictures of other people’s nice lives. Fancier salmon on your bread, mint humbugs from Marks & Spencer, a lovely imported tomato.’

  Her voice is brittle in the way it gets when she’s lost in herself. Her hands are flat on the table, and she focuses on the old clock above the door.

  ‘And it seems mad that you’d do that shit job you hate just so you can have a nice tomato which will be gone in two minutes.’

  I watch Katherine sign off from Mum, and sit for a moment looking out at the sky. A seagull gambols in the updraught. Katherine swings her leg over the wall and slides down onto the bench.

  ‘And it’s the same with men and women. The reason men want women is to fuck them, ultimately, right? And sometimes, once they’ve fucked them, they kill them because they weren’t allowed to fuck them and they don’t want to get in trouble. And always it’s about property, it’s about being clear that this is your tomato that you worked hard for and it should do the thing you expect of a tomato, it should sit on your plate until you cut it open and sprinkle on the salt.’ Maggie leans forward. ‘Am I talking shit?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s just, how does it make sense? Why would a person throw another person away like that? That’s the question. And what I realise is there’s no answer – it doesn’t matter if there’s a reason for it. That person doesn’t like redheads, they feel rejected, their mother used to dress them up in sailor suits.’

  The last message from Vincent: Don’t forget I know where you live. You can’t just disappear.

  Katherine is standing in the doorway.

  ‘John’s dead,’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  I stand and sit down again. Maggie stands and takes the whisky out of the cupboard.

  ‘Who is John?’ she asks.

  ‘Our great-uncle. He was old and sick.’

  Katherine sits down and Maggie pours the drinks, just for Katherine and me. I don’t know why it feels momentous, but it does.

  It is a surprise when Katherine starts to cry. I put my hand over her cold one.

  ‘Sorry,’ says Katherine. ‘I was horrible to him when he came to Mum’s. I think he saw me rolling my eyes when he was talking about partridge.’

  ‘It’s OK – he didn’t notice. I promise you.’

  She sniffs. ‘Anyway, the funeral will be here in a week so Pauline doesn’t have to travel far. Uncle Christopher is sorting it. Mum’s coming up.’

  ‘Hey,’ says Maggie. She takes hold of my hand and of Katherine’s. ‘Close your eyes.’

  There is no other point in our lives when either of us would follow these instructions, but I see Katherine close her eyes without hesitating and it feels good to follow orders. When my eyes are closed, Maggie starts humming and then chanting. I am surprised that I’m not embarrassed.

  Diana, goddess of the moon, light the light

  Pan, horned god of the wild earth, light the light.

  She squeezes our hands and we join in, and we just say these sentences over and over, and there’s the feeling that you get when you’re crying and shouting in the car on the motorway, but also later a feeling of elation, and all there is, is the rosy black of my closed eyes and the sounds reverberating in my teeth and it feels good, I am just my hands joined to my sister’s and my eyeballs safe in their sockets, my tongue and my spine all the way down to my base. I don’t know how long we chant for, but it is like I’m a bat or a whale, and I can see that there are people in the kitchen with us, there are children and women, all holding hands like us, and I wonder, is this the ghost everyone sees, is it in fact a hundred thousand different ghosts? It’s only possible to focus on one at a time. They spill out of the doorway, and I see through the wall that they fill the house top to bottom, they are locked in wardrobes, they are under the floorboards, they crowd out of the back door and into the garden, they are on the golf course and on the beach and their heads bob out of the sea, and when we walk, we are walking right through them. The birds on the Bass Rock, they fill it, they are replaced by more, their numbers do not diminish with time, they ne
st on the bones of the dead.

  ‘What in tarnation is happening here?’ Deborah stands in the doorway, a plastic file clutched to her breast.

  ‘Hello, Deborah,’ I say, and I feel for some reason elated. Deborah looks behind my head at something and the colour drains from her face. She drops her plastic folder and leaves and her footsteps echo down the corridor and the door slams behind her.

  ‘That’s her,’ says Katherine, who is facing me and can see behind. Maggie does not open her eyes. I don’t turn round but I can smell the woods, the earth and the rain.

  The opening chords of a song play loudly in the master bedroom, a man, dark-haired, wiry, stands legs apart in the middle of the room testing the swing of his golf club. He is wearing yellow trousers that flare out at the ankle, and no shirt. He mimes along to the song.

  When a man loves a woman, swinging the golf club, enjoying himself. He raises it above his head like someone who has won a prize, as horns sound. He sings loudly over the top of the music. If she’s a bitch, he can’t see it and applies his gaze to the corner of the room. His poise changes, as if he is being lifted by the nape of the neck, and he squares his shoulders and stalks leisurely in time with the music to the corner of the room, where a woman is crouched. He uses the golf club as a microphone. He’ll give up all his comforts, and go and sleep in a drain, then swings the club in the air above the woman’s head, she cowers, and then scrambles across the floor to the doorway. As she stands he manages to hook the club under her ankle and she falls, hard. He moves calmly, everything is slow as if he has watched the scene play out before and knows what will happen, everything is choreographed in time with the song. She pulls herself up on the door jamb, and her face is mottled with blood, her nose has burst, the area around her throat is purple-red and she is having trouble standing. She moves out of the room, unsteady, and the man follows at a leisurely pace, golf club strung across the back of his neck with his wrists draped over. He disappears from the room. Baby, please don’t treat me bad. Even through the volume of the record, there is an audible thump and then another. He reappears, the woman crawling on all fours as he holds a large clump of her hair, as though it were the neck scruff of a dog. He hoists her up onto the bed. She is not much conscious, only following orders, they are the only thing she can connect with. He stands at the foot of the bed, windmills his arm like Elvis Presley. When a man loves a woman. Deep down in her hole. She brings him such misery.

  He jumps up on the bed, smiling, calm excitement. He straddles the woman, pushes his club up under her chin, and rests his weight on it. He stops singing, he stops miming, the music is gone from him, he bares his teeth, applies all of his pressure on the club. There is blood on the mattress, but where it comes from is unclear. It could be from so many places. A tugboat sounds its horn at the lighthouse keeper as it passes the Bass Rock.

  The Cave

  I

  Mum has brought with her three bottles of wine, which is better than whisky. ‘I would have brought more,’ Mum says as we head to the kitchen. ‘But I couldn’t carry them on the train and look after that old cow.’ The dog is rattled by her train journey and nods to everyone through squinted eyes and curls up in the easy chair by the unlit fire. She hides her nose with her tail, eyeballs us, and switches herself off.

  We haven’t talked about what happened in the kitchen; instead we have spent the past few days getting the house ready for the wake. I wouldn’t say I’m not afraid of what I felt behind me at the kitchen table. But she felt so like the rock out there in the sea, an immovable observer, unchanged and calm.

  Maggie is sitting at the kitchen table and she smiles shyly at Mum.

  ‘Mum, this is Maggie.’ Maggie hugs our mother in a way neither of us would. Mum is surprised but in the end she closes her arms around Maggie and returns the squeeze.

  ‘It’s very good to meet you,’ Maggie says.

  ‘Yes,’ says Mum, and she wipes her eyes. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know who you are. But you do seem very nice.’

  Maggie beams.

  ‘Nothing changes, does it?’ says Mum, glancing about the room.

  She takes a small bowl from a cupboard. She opens a bag of pistachios and there is the sound of her pouring them into the white bone-china bowl. She puts the nuts on the table along with a pale green mug.

  ‘Shells,’ she says, indicating the mug.

  One after another we pick out a handful of nuts and begin the process of shelling and eating. The sound of the shells in the mug. The tick of the clock, wine glasses on the kitchen table.

  ‘My mother underwent a lumbar puncture on this table.’ Our mother says this as though it will brighten the mood.

  ‘So there’s that,’ says Katherine.

  Mum lets a handful of shells fall in single file into the green mug. She never talks about her mother.

  ‘When she was a child, she lived here, just like me.’

  Maggie picks up her cigarettes. ‘I’ve got to go and check my messages on the wall,’ she says, and stands up using my shoulder to balance on. She squeezes it lightly before picking up her wine glass. I don’t know what she has sensed. Once she is gone, Mum refills our glasses and sighs.

  ‘I still chat to your father, you know. I still ask him what we’re going to eat for dinner, and I still argue with him about the same boring stuff. But John – and I know he was very old. And I know it comes to us all. But all of his memories and thoughts. All of his routines. All of John’s secrets, whatever they were. That’s it, because no one is left behind talking to him.’ Our mother’s eyes have filled. I have never seen her cry, it is deeply unnerving.

  ‘Mum,’ says Katherine.

  The morning it happened, Katherine had stayed over. She called me at seven and said, Dad’s died. Take your time.

  And I did take my time, I showered and dressed and then I sat in the car listing to Graceland for close to an hour. For that hour he was still alive, because Katherine may have lied. And then I drove to Mum’s and was met by Dom, who had tears streaking down his face. He hugged me and breathed into my hair, then he held my face and said He’s gone, he’s gone.

  I stroked the wiry hair at his sideburn all the way down to his jawline. People do go, I said, and it sounded like I spoke a foreign language. He went for a walk to clear his head.

  In the kitchen, Mum and Katherine were as tearless as me, but the dog was worried by something, she kept offering her head to us as we sat. All of us embraced – that was the correct word for it – comfortless squeezes that ended quickly so that we might all carry on. We drank a whisky at nine thirty, and then Mum said, You should go up and see him. It’s important. And I realised I had forgotten there was anything to see. I stood outside the kitchen for a moment, wondering if I would just pretend to see him, but Mum had said it’s important, and so I followed her advice, and in their room, he lay with a counterpane over him, tucked in up to his chest, his arms neatly laid over the top, hairless and yellow with large still hands. His head and feet large too, his body just as flat as the counterpane. I watched closely for breath. His mouth was open just enough to see the outline of one ruined tooth. His eyes were open too. I watched closely for breath. He looked to be concentrating on skinning a tomato. I did the thing that people do in films and passed my hand over his eyelids to shut them, but it didn’t work and so I just stroked his face, and drew my hand away like it had been burned and had the impulse to wash it immediately. I watched closely for breath. I wanted to have a thought, but I felt like I was in the presence of a stranger. I went to the window and opened it. Across the street, Dom was sitting on the wall of the house opposite, writing in a notebook. He looked up when the window opened and when he saw who it was he blew me a kiss.

  She lets out a long exhale.

  Katherine looks at the table on which our grandmother underwent her lumbar puncture.

  Mum takes a handkerchief from out of her sleeve and blows her nose longer than any human can possibly need to. ‘Oh dear,’ she says.
Katherine pats her hand and Mum withdraws hers quickly. ‘I’m fine, just a bit tired.’

  ‘Christopher should be arriving tomorrow morning,’ I say to have something to say. ‘He’s bringing some sandwiches and some wine.’

  Mum, now completely in control again, says, ‘Did I ever tell you girls that Christopher and me were together before your father?’

  Katherine picks up her wine glass and moves it a foot away from herself, then moves it back. ‘No. No, Mum, you didn’t mention that.’

  ‘Well,’ says Mum.

  ‘What are we supposed to do with that?’ she asks. Mum shrugs. The tears are a distant memory.

  ‘He didn’t want kids.’ She shrugs again.

  I excuse myself and get up and leave the room. I go into the ballroom and stand for a moment. I watch Maggie outside smoking on the wall. Katherine comes and stands next to me. Mum appears in the garden, to top up Maggie’s drink, Maggie hands her the roll-up she is halfway through and Mum smokes. I’ve never seen her smoke before. I watch her mouth the smoke expertly.

  ‘Right,’ I say. ‘I fucked Dom.’ It is out of my mouth. She looks at me.

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  ‘You know?’

  We stand like that looking at each other for the longest time.

  ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘Long enough.’ She sniffs deep and hard. My fingers go up to my head and down again. ‘And honestly, I wanted to tell you – I wanted to say, hey! Thanks! You’ve ruined my marriage!’ She makes not quite a laughing sound. ‘But you were too ill. And fragile. I didn’t want it to be my fault that you got sick again.’

  I lean against the wall and slide down it. Now what? Now what? squeaks the voice.

  The hospital hadn’t been about Dad. It was all I talked about in there. His illness, my memories of fights we’d had we hadn’t ever settled. The touch of his dead skin.

  But what I had thought about was that Dom had wanted me, more than he wanted Katherine. The kiss blown at the window.