by Andrew Greig
He’d left Ballantyne’s one morning feeling solid and responsible. Now he and Jinny had done the right thing and called a halt, if nothing else there remained duty, decency, the estate business. He had to spend more time with Davy and try to love him. So he bent his neck like an iron bar away from the rusting blue caravan two fields away. He was about to step into the car, even wrapped his fingers round the door handle, when her voice said Sim.
She spoke clearly. Her voice, not his, right in his head. He looked helplessly round the yard. Mid-afternoon, the long hot spell beginning to fray in the wind from the south. No one there.
Meet me.
His fingers dropped from the door. He tottered slightly, suddenly weak as water. This kind of thing didn’t happen. Sex so glorious the bodies flared like magnesium strips then disappeared into spirit light, that didn’t happen. He didn’t believe in it. Joy didn’t happen, the world wasn’t made for it.
You’ll know where.
He stood in the yard feeling a breeze running over his palms. He stood with his arms out like an aerial, turning this way and that, willing to hear Jinny again. Nothing. He looked to the caravan. Not there, he’d wager the estate on that. He looked up to Crawhill Woods and shivered, they’d always been unchancy.
It was a nonsense. He needed to clear his head, get away somewhere. He found himself going uphill to the west, away from Crawhill. He crossed the dyke, followed the old drove road round for a mile into the next glen. The road dipped, twisted back on itself, and he came round the corner at the bottom of Creagan’s Knowe.
He leaned back against one of the oaks and looked up the stepped cliff and the long smear of water whispering down. As a boy home from boarding school he’d spent hours and days exploring here. After his mother drowned this was the special place. Something to do with the great stepped drop, the dark rock and the red ledges, the crown of pine at the top against the skyline like an Indian head-dress on a high forehead, and the small plootering burn dropping in stages, rubbed out when the wind gusted, reforming at the bottom to curve under the silence of the oaks and hazel and sycamore. He hadn’t been back here since Davy was born.
Simon!
Her voice this time not in his head but above him in the sky. He’d finally cracked up. He didn’t even bother looking.
She jumped down from the tree. She seemed startled as himself, smoothing her skirt back down over her hips.
How did you know I was here?
I didn’t.
Oh. This is one of my special places.
Sorry, he said. I thought I heard your voice down at Ballantyne’s.
She laughed. Oh that. What did I say?
My name. And to find you. You said I’d know where.
She looked down, nodded. Hair rolled and unrolled down her white neck.
The astral telephone, she said. Well, it happens. Only I can’t do it to order. But that’s exactly what I was thinking to you, oh forty minutes ago.
The stream ran by her feet, dusty summer leaves made light cancelling gestures above her head. His first thought had been disappointment: she looks less bonnie, not so special. (You weren’t as tall as I remembered, she said later. Though I still liked you, you seemed just another person.) Now she looked up. Her lips moved and everything around her began to glow.
Oh come on. He laughed nervously. Suddenly he wanted to run away. This spooky stuff made him jumpy. Hippie-dippy haivers, Jinny.
She shrugged. You heard it. You came. You explain it.
He stood distracted by her eyes. They’d swollen, he could see the yellow flecks wavering round the black centre. His body was starting to crawl and buzz, a high singing in his head.
I can’t. He stood helpless, unguarded. I can’t explain any of this.
She looked down. He couldn’t focus on her face or even her body. His eyes seemed to slide off her. She wouldn’t hold still, bits of her floated off, reformed. Swarming, the voice said in his head. She’s swarming. So am I. Nothing’s what I thought it was.
She hadn’t stepped towards him. In fact she looked ready to run or burst into tears. Her toe was rubbing a stain into the grass. He put his hand in his pocket.
I forgot to give you this back.
She stared at the worn coin. She stepped closer, put her thumb onto it. His palm dipped, she kept pushing down. When his arm was pointing straight down to the ground, she raised her head and kissed him and he was falling like a satellite into the sun by the banks of Creagan Water.
*
This is only the fourth plate. I may yet decide whether I’m a recluse, a mystery, or a straightforward person on the mend after a difficult time. I like to keep my options open. Yet I want to know what happens next, and sure as Fate, something must.
I could be frightened but I’m not. I could be anyone at all, and of all the people in a story, there is always one who cannot come to harm. But I must get out for some air, I can’t stay cooped up here like Elliot. I see him so clearly, skulking in the tower with only his guilt for company. He lies sweating on his bed, reading or dreaming. I can see the off-white sheet, the tall thin window pane, darkness beginning to silt up outside in his garden.
Time to rattle his cage a little at the end of the day. If I climb out the back window and keep low behind the dyke, I can make it to the woods without creepy Tat seeing me.
I light the lamp and put it at the bedroom window though the gloaming’s only begun, then lift down my cloak and fix the clasp high next to my throat. Rub the coin one time for luck, then ease the window open.
*
Living yet, Jinny reached up, tilted her head back and opened her mouth to him. From up on top of the knowe they could see way beyond the Border to the blue-green distant rise of more hills. Wind blew through the grass round their feet, the trees behind sawed and groaned against each other.
I love high places, she said. I can see why the Devil took Jesus up.
He nodded, still panting from the climb and her nearness to the drop before them.
Heights scare me witless, he said. The trouble with being tall and that, is no one sees how wee and feart you feel inside. I can’t always be in charge and strong.
Her hand closed on his. Then don’t, she said softly. Let me make love to you. It’s your turn.
He was on his back looking up at her and the pine branches as she moved over him opening his shirt then his chest then his heart. No one had ever touched him like this, like he was precious. She looked down at him, holding his erection in her hand. Every other part of him felt soft and open. Her little breasts swung like clappers over his face.
Go slowly, Jinny. I want to remember for ever.
It’s all for ever, she said. Then smiled, opened her legs and settled down on him, inch by lovely inch. There was a thin ringing somewhere, like from bells no one has struck. He felt himself huge, disintegrating, full of space. She cupped both hands behind his neck and pulled his head up to her breasts.
Baby. Oh my baby.
*
He gently pulled the tufts beneath her arms in time to the branches moving overhead. Perfect, he thought. Everything.
So the first time wasn’t a fluke, she said quietly. We had to find out.
Jinny, I’ve never … I mean I’ve had sex but …
Wheesht. Later.
You’ve never?
She looked down at him, serious now.
Never like that, even when I’m really stoned. We were made to do this.
She sat up suddenly, looked around. Just the trees and the grass moving to the invisible wind, yielding and bouncing back. She relaxed, her mouth softened as she looked down on him, held him in her hand.
Is this for me? Again? It’s not scientifically possible.
He looked down at his erection, her fingers swirling lightly over the tip. She didn’t seem to find it ugly, or ridiculous.
I’m just a mortal man, he said. I don’t understand what’s going on here.
Mysteries, she said. The breeze made a low moan ove
r her mouth. Mysteries and energies.
He rolled her over onto her back. She opened her legs wide about his hips, took his cock and guided it in. When she was almost there she opened her eyes and saw Tat’s pale face through the branches above, eyes wide open seeing everything. Elliot mistook her cry, moved deeper and her eyes clenched shut, she had no choice.
When she was able to look again, the boy was gone.
The worst of it isn’t the sex, the staring eyes and bodies folding each into the other in every imaginable way (and several you hadn’t known of before). The worst of it is what cannot be shown in the plates but you know was there: the tenderness, the joy, the souls rising from the body like trout plucked from water on a tight line.
Jinny was speaking about love. Elliot cannot imagine now what excuse she must have given to get away for a whole weekend, but he can see her lying diagonally across the bed in his flat in the city, surrounded by nightlights flickering floating in saucers. She’s wearing the electric-blue crushed-velvet dress. He must have taken her out somewhere posh to impress, because she’s right dressed up, blue eyeshadow and stockings.
But none of that matters. All that matters is the gap between them closing. He is quite spaced out, not used to her long cigarettes. Her eyes are huge. Their centres open like a camera’s lens and stay open for a very long exposure. She is whispering now as his hands talk inside her and he too is talking without thinking. Between her legs his thumbs are opening her up as in his chest rusty doors have painfully squeaked open. As she kisses him, an ancient portcullis squeals and rises. He bends and sucks open another door. Her palms rest against his chest, pause then slide apart and open his heart. Now there are only thin curtains between them. She is locked into his eyes as she parts his heart. His fingers find a secret button and she is telling him she is down to the last veil now and he is too. As she rises in the bed they are staring direct into each other’s core.
The city has vanished, they are way beyond where taxis run and police cars wail. He is in a conservatory of the night and all the glass is flaming. She reaches and shows him a thorned trunk stretching up into the stars, and as her moment comes she reaches up crying and plucks a rose from the end of the branch. Between her fingers it is black and radiant as the centre of an eye. She hands it to him with a glittering smile as she falls away …
Simon Elliot lies sweating, still clutching the tent-pole of his hard-on. Outside the curtainless window of his bedroom it is near dark and his estate is a barren place. But twenty-plus years back he saw a night rose, rarest of all blooms. It rests still on an unreachable shelf somewhere, for Jinny Lauder is dead, but from time to time he still feels another petal fall.
He sits up on the bed by the window, chin clasped in his gnarly hands. The whole house is silent, just a faint wind brushing at the window. Down in the mirk of the garden, something stirs in the willows. It’s Jinny. He blinks salt away. No, too tall and strong and dark for Jinny. The willows bulge and part. The Marnie woman, surely.
He shouts and presses his face to the glass but she’s gone. There’s no one there and he knows that he must die soon. His heart won’t take much more of this.
That’s enough excitement for tonight, another little shake to Elliot’s tree.
Take off your muddy boots then trim the lamp and brush your hand across that Lovers’ Plate as though to close it. Time for bed and whatever dreams may come. Put the plate under the others then run water through your hair and shake all these imaginings away.
The Lovers’ Plate (Red)
The second Lovers’ Plate has flecks of red, near-crimson red that hasn’t faded like the other plates. Perhaps it’s made of different pigment, or else has seen the light of day less than the rest. Certainly there is much to be kept hidden here. A figure hurries from a little hut with cloak raised over its head. Another slips into the forest. More secret trysts, and the watcher there in the background. In this panel the woman has either put on a lot of weight or … Yes, you follow clockwise round the rim and there she is holding a baby, with one shadowy man at her side and another in front of her. Husband, father, lover?
The plates are neutral and ambiguous as oracles. You read into them what you need to, sure that is their only power.
She washed in pale light in the cold cottage kitchen, standing shivering at the sink. Jinny must have done this often, she thought. I wonder whose seed she washed away then.
Snow had fallen sudden and unexpected through the night, the last kick of winter. Outside was a ghost world, even the corbies’ nests were white in the tree tops. The top of the dyke was crusted and sparking in the low sun. Water was already dripping down from the roof, falling past the window, bright and distracting.
She dressed quickly. The doubt had grown bigger each time she woke in the night. She’d always assumed the affair had started when Jinny was living here in the cottage with Patrick, the baby already born. Thus the photograph. But more and more she thought on the rusting shell of the caravan overgrown among the trees. No mention of it had been made at the trial. In all that testimony, confession and cross-examination there was not one suggestion the daughter wasn’t Patrick’s.
She stared at herself in the mirror propped on the shelf, looking for Elliot, but he wasn’t there. Not much sign of Jinny either. Perhaps one could imagine something of Patrick in her heavy straight eyebrows. She had seen the same look Are you her? when she’d caught first Tat then Annie checking her out.
She didn’t know nearly enough about the order of events. At the trial, the prosecution had focused on Jinny’s pregnancy and Elliot’s fear of the affair coming to light as his motive for pushing her off Creagan’s. Introducing doubt about Marnie’s parentage would have muddled their case, even weakened it. By then Patrick was too drink-sozzled to think straight at all, and Fiona too … gullible? Furious?
She had breakfast and thought it through to the sound of snow-melt running from the roof. Her stomach was jumping and her jaw tight. She couldn’t spend another day dreaming over the plates when there was a mystery more close at hand. And she wasn’t ready to talk to the organ-grinder, so it had to be the monkey.
She picked up her notes and shopping bag, pinned her cloak and set off down across the soft white fields towards the Tattersall house.
*
Leave before dawn, Simon Elliot. Leave the tangle of her arms in the narrow bunk of the caravan. Whispers in the halflight as you pull on your shoes, drink water, wash your face in the little sink. Dry your hands and sniff your fingers and know your life has become impossible.
Two embraces at the caravan door. The first one slays you, the second resurrects. There’s nothing more to say, you must leave now. Hurry home while you still have a home, while your wife and child are still sleeping, before her man returns from the South.
This is the worst you’ve ever done. I’m so alive it feels like dying she whispers as you squeeze her breathing ribs into your chest.
Hurry through the thin dawn chill. Grasses bend before you, dew soaks your breeks and a sharp moon rests upright on Hunter’s Rigg. You cross the burn, loup the fence and come up through your own garden.
Go canny, Sim Elliot – in your shaky hands you carry a lamp that burns no fuel, a bowl that’s always brimming. Bear it carefully, let nothing spill, even Jinny’s last words whispered at your left ear. This must end.
Bear it carefully through this world. As you hurry through the garden and fail to see the sleepless city child crouched at his window, and circle round to the back door, you know you have already begun to pay. You are not the man you thought you were, the responsible, decent, dutiful and slightly dull man who never had to sin or suffer. You have no idea who you are now, only that you are alive.
As you prepare to make noise in the kitchen and pretend you have been up for an hour, you feel coarse hair tickling your face, see her grey eyes expand to enclose you, and know for a few moments in your unexceptional conventional life you have lived. As you stand lost over the toaster, the
kettle appears to be boiling in some other universe.
Let there be no tears, not a drop.
*
Sim Elliot lies awake in bed waiting for his heart to slow or stop, but it doesn’t. The light is pale and ghostly on his ceiling. He turns his head and sees the black branch across his window has been limned in white.
He closes his eyes, but that ends nothing. He hears Annie drive up but he doesn’t want to talk to her, not yet. There had been snow then too, early winter snow, the second time Jinny had summoned him in his head. Her voice urgent, shocked. You must come. It’s terrible. And he had had to wait and pace outside the house where he could watch the caravan until he saw Patrick leave and then ten minutes later the centre of his world hurry across the dazzling fields towards the bottom of Crawhill Woods.
*
She banged on the door and waited, thinking on the netsuke figures and what they said about the man who made them.
It’s yourself. Tat looked her up and down, pausing at the clasp about her throat, taking his time but she’d already seen his first involuntary backward step. What can I do you for?
Have I taken you from your netsuke?
His pale blue eyes unfocused, yet now he seemed to take all of her in.
What’s your interest in them?
She smiled and shifted the bag over her shoulder.
Only that they’re strange and beautiful, Tat, she said.