Billie's Kiss

by Elizabeth Knox

  ‘Just the coat then, its sleeves are fuller.’

  When the coat was on he leaned against her, gasping. She put her head against his, to hold it up, and answered an earlier question. ‘I wasn’t hit.’ Then, again, ‘I was waiting for Rory.’ She explained, ‘I like your hair’ – leaving out several intermediary premises in her argument.

  ‘I like yours, too,’ he said, and laughed.

  ‘You shouldn’t have to kill someone twice,’ she said, supplying one of her missing premises.

  ‘That’s true,’ Hesketh agreed. ‘It isn’t reasonable.’

  Billie felt she hadn’t made herself understood, but just wiped the rain from his cheeks and tried to follow his instructions.

  He told her that he wasn’t able to climb past Rory’s body. She would have to, she was smaller. He had tried to haul Rory back up the stairs but, what with his arm, he wasn’t able to. ‘We can’t leave him, Billie. We have to move him before rigor sets in.’

  She peered into Hesketh’s face, and his eyes avoided hers. Even in the poor light she thought she saw him blush. ‘While he’s still flexible,’ he added. ‘Do you understand me?’

  Billie nodded. What she did understand was that he’d take her to the place and give her directions.

  In the faint light they found Rory, and Billie saw what she would have to do. She would have to wriggle between Rory’s scissored legs, under his canted, backward knee, then reach back through to free his other leg. Sure, Mr Hesketh could sit on the step above and shove with his own feet, but he couldn’t guide the jammed limbs into a position where they’d unlock – unlock the space they had obstructed.

  Billie got down on her belly and first threaded her feet through the gap. She could smell Rory, then, as her head and hands passed beneath him she came into contact with the crotch of his pants, squelching with a stinking jelly of faecal matter.

  Billie delivered herself and, on the far side, put her head down to retch into the warm slime already coating the steps.

  Rory seemed to look down at her, quizzical, his head on an angle, one shoulder up in an exaggerated shrug.

  Billie didn’t want to stretch an arm back through. Hesketh was coaxing again, she could see him, wet, and as clean as water. Billie shook her head at him. For several minutes she only listened to him apparently talking to himself. He had his shirt, he said, he should have covered her hair. He knew that. Billie, he said, I was careless. He said that she couldn’t go for help. That wouldn’t do. She couldn’t leave him. Someone was trying to kill him. Why would Rory? But he did appreciate that he and she were only on parallel courses, not in the same boat. Geordie Betler had said the same: We’re not in the same boat, Geordie had said. ‘And he said that he had more confidence in his vessel, in its instrument of navigation, in the necessity of its voyage.’

  ‘What did he mean?’ Billie finally responded.

  ‘He thought it was wrong-headed of me to investigate the sinking as sabotage, not as murder.’

  Billie peered up at Murdo through Rory’s straddled legs. His shoulders were invisible, black against blackness, but she could see his skin gleam, his chest, face, hair, and his breath, paler than the rest. He told her that he thought that if she stood hard on Rory’s cocked knee, his inverted cocked knee, she might free the joint enough so that Rory would finish falling forward.

  Billie got up to do it. It was like trying to break a green branch against the angle of a step. She put her hands on Rory’s shoulders and used all her weight, bounced up and down until the spring began to give.

  It gave, and Murdo pushed, and Rory Skilling sagged, then collapsed onto Billie.

  She screamed and fought. She felt the pressure of the floppy form increase and stopped screaming, she used her mouth to bite, she clawed and writhed till she was out from under him. She tore her skirt free and flew, ran, tumbled down the last steps, and ran out of the tower.

  MURDO HAD lunged forward in an effort to catch the back of Rory’s jacket and lift him. The reaching arm worked, but his bad hand couldn’t anchor him, so he fell across Rory, and doubled Rory’s deadweight. He heard a hitch in the motor of sound and motion that was Billie Paxton, then that small dynamo started up again, growling with effort, seething like a cat in a bag. Rory jerked, jostled, then deflated, and Murdo heard Billie thump away down the tower.

  Murdo took a deep breath, clambered over Rory, and slid down Rory’s body on his own belly, kicking at the walls to guide himself. He put his hand on Rory’s crown, pressed the man’s face into the step, and slithered free, greasy with filth. He went down slowly, feeling in the dark for his gun. He found it, cold and spent.

  He went out into the dull morning, joined Billie, and did as she was doing, pulled up bunches of thyme and heather and scrubbed his face, hair, hands and clothes with their damp aromatic leaves.

  After a time Billie stopped trying to clean herself. She went on pulling plants and tossed them at him, her face screwed up and eyes streaming. She bawled, as noisy and dirty as an exhausted baby.

  Murdo put the revolver back in the pocket of his coat. He thought that perhaps he should comfort Billie, but her clothes were more contaminated than his and, besides, he was too angry to put out his hand to anyone. Instead he told her they should avoid the road. They must make their way back to Southport, across the bog to the coast at Craige Sands, then walk along the Sands to Clodel, where there was a church that was always open, but scarcely used. (And another tower he had climbed with Ingrid Hallow.) ‘We can spend the night there,’ he said, ‘then we’ll go on to Southport, where I will put you on the pilot’s vessel to Dorve.’

  Billie wiped her eyes on her wet sleeves.

  ‘I see you still have your purse at your waist,’ he said.

  ‘I have my banknotes, and Reverend Vause’s money order,’ Billie said.

  ‘You’re set then,’ Murdo said.

  She gave him a sullen, stubborn look and remained sitting.

  ‘You’re a witness, Miss Paxton.’ He shrugged, and it hurt him. ‘To someone’s crime. Rory Skilling hadn’t any personal grievance against me. Nothing I know of.’

  Drizzle blew against Murdo’s face. It felt warm, then hot, and he sat down. His knees had simply given way.

  It all came, in a rush, like seawater through a holed hull. Things he’d seen and hadn’t observed. Things he’d heard said and hadn’t grasped. A blanket in a bag, a man too tempted by the props of theatre, his costume, the new shirts and jackets and pants. The back of an envelope marked with a pencil, a tally of losses and wins, a tally in pounds not kronor, because the men were paid in pounds, the three men who filled the cabins but vanished before the last leg of the voyage. Elov’s letter – Geordie had mentioned it to Murdo – ‘Don’t come this summer’. A startled exclamation, ‘My cataloguer!’– Henry Maslen, who had been expected at Southport a day earlier, whose wife was in the cabin Murdo would certainly have occupied otherwise, a cabin just below the waterline, at the ship’s pivot point, where Murdo customarily lay low when travelling by sea. ‘Good God, my cataloguer!’ ‘Don’t come this summer.’ And the dependable fixity of maritime meals, the men’s mess at eight bells in anything but battle or hurricane, so that, just before the ship docked at Stolnsay the steward was still wiping black fingerprints from the edges of the tables where the five stokers and two greasers had sat. Three cabins filled with men who disappeared; Elov discouraged; most of the black gang topside at eight bells. Almost everyone topside when the pilot’s boat was alongside, forty minutes before the Gustav Edda reached the seawall of Stolnsay harbour – all this – and an old woman’s lace-mittened, pointing hand, her clock with its retrievers and ducks and bulrushes, its girls a-maying, and its cottages under snow. Her nephew late by forty minutes for her birthday celebration. Forty minutes, forty minutes. It was preposterous – as Murdo had said to Geordie about his suspecting all three sportsmen. It was fussy, and elaborate, and minutely controlled, and mistaken in its essentials. It was James, Lord Hallowhulme.
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  13

  A Cadaveric Grip

  AT WHAT was normally her breakfast time, Billie stopped to rest. She sat on a bank where the peat cutters had been that spring, making their neat chisel cuts in the black peat. She watched Murdo Hesketh continue away from her, his coat billowing behind him.

  Since they’d left Ormabeg he’d scarcely spoken. She had to remind him that he’d meant to lead her away from what they’d done. When she did remind him he took his head out of his hands and stood, and started away on his own – then came back to help her up. They went down the course of the burn where Billie had stopped to water Kirsty. The burn was little more than a wet crease, the slopes between which it ran so closely interleaved that Billie wasn’t able to see where they were headed. For a time she retained Hesketh’s hand, till they reached a long, canted table of bogland where he released her, and she fell into step behind him. Later, at Billie’s usual breakfast time, she realised it was the fourth meal she’d missed, and she sat down. Mr Hesketh strode on away from her. She watched him go. Perhaps it was better not to bother him. She knew he had the gun in his pocket, could tell by the way his coat lay close at one thigh and swung thumping as he walked.

  As they left Ormabeg, Billie had told him about Alan Skilling. How Alan had hitched Kirsty to Minnie’s trap. Alan had been sent to find her, and she forced him to help her run away from Kiss. ‘He didn’t want me to go,’ Billie said to Murdo Hesketh. ‘To leave him.’ She thought Mr Hesketh would answer her, would say, ‘Why did you leave?’ or, ‘Poor Alan.’ Considering. Considering Alan’s father head down on the tower stair at Ormabeg, his broken body a burr twisted into the tower’s yarn. But Hesketh was silent.

  Billie needed to understand why she’d chosen to help Hesketh and had hurt Rory. She wanted Hesketh at least to meet her eyes again. She remembered his eyes holding hers at several critical moments: in poor light in the tower well; in the draining grey on the tower top, nothing in the air behind his head, birds singing below them, pinned down by rain. He had blushed when he asked her to move Rory, and talked about Rory’s malleability. She recognised the blush as shame, remembering his turned, burning cheek when she pushed past him in the passage between chapel and sacristy at Stolnsay Kirk, when Lady Hallowhulme had taken her to see Edith’s body. Billie wanted either the warmth of the blush, or to be borne along in the buoyant medium of Hesketh’s blue gaze. She wanted to believe she’d made the right choice, not just because one man was striking another, and giving away certain rights with each blow struck, and not because she was there and saw it and felt she had to act, but because she was involved, and her choice concerned her future. She needed him to confirm something, but he wouldn’t speak or meet her eyes. And when, worn-out, she sat down on the lip of a trench in the peat, he went on without her.

  She let him go – she’d keep him in sight. He’d take her to Southport and put her on a ship. He had promised that. He’d secure her escape.

  Billie lay down where she was and closed her eyes. She woke up once to see Mr Hesketh on the horizon of the farthest hill, but couldn’t wholly rouse herself. When she woke again she saw him nearer, on his way back to her. She got up and went to meet him.

  He was very pale. ‘You made me go the distance twice,’ he accused. He sounded hopeless. For the second time that day he sat down in his tracks.

  Billie knelt beside him. He passed her a handful of crumpled paper. She smoothed the pieces on her knees. Alan’s feet. She could see that handling had smeared the newsprint. She was puzzled – even more so when Hesketh asked her if she ever wondered why the ship sank.

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know why, Mr Hesketh. I mean, I don’t know why I never wonder. Maybe because only Edith was mine. And Edith often told me not to concern myself with other people, though she meant not be hurt by them.’ Besides, Billie told him, she had let him in on what she was wondering. Hesketh had seen Henry’s button. The button from Henry’s jacket that was found in Edith’s hand.

  Billie saw that she now had Hesketh’s attention and that he was nodding. He said, ‘A cadaveric grip. Your sister’s hand retained the last thing she’d taken hold of.’

  ‘You thought the sinking was my fault,’ she said. ‘But I jumped because I kissed Henry. Or – at least – there was kissing.’

  ‘I know,’ said Hesketh. ‘I guessed.’

  ‘I ran away because that’s all I could think to do. You see – when I was little my father was always handing me through windows to Edith. Me, and our suitcases.’ Billie told Mr Hesketh that she’d run away again. This time because Henry wouldn’t kiss her. ‘It made nonsense of everything. He wouldn’t kiss me. He kept saying that Edith was better than we were.’

  ‘Better? Better off? Or you were both bad?’

  ‘Edith was too good for us. Edith could have done better than him, anyway. That’s what he said. But I never think of people as better or worse. Even you.’

  ‘I’m very glad you’ve not made an exception of me.’ Hesketh was still grey, but seemed amused.

  ‘But you are worse, really,’ Billie told him. ‘You’re the least kindly person I know.’ She put her hand on his arm, and said, ‘I shot Alan’s father. I did it to save you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘No!’ Billie shook him. She was angry, and threatened by wordlessness, by muddle and stammering. ‘Edith wouldn’t have shot him.’

  How could she explain? Billie knew that Edith would have cried, ‘Stop!’ She imagined her sister, appalled, courageous, running forward to plead and reason.

  ‘It was uncivilised,’ Mr Hesketh said, as if he had read her mind. His ‘uncivilised’ wasn’t a criticism, but he’d failed to understand her. Or – as usual – she’d failed to make herself understood.

  Billie frowned at him, and tried to follow what he next said. He couldn’t behave either, he said. It was futile to try. He was fatally clumsy. ‘My whole spastic existence,’ he said, with calm self-loathing. Then he said something Billie thought was really rather grandiose. That everything had happened through his inattention. He was talking to himself now, not her.

  When his father died, he resigned his commission and took his mother to the spa at Vrena. He should have stayed in Stockholm and kept an eye on Karl. He gave his money to Karl, who lost it. Later he should have forced Karl to tell Ingrid they were bankrupt. Instead he’d told himself they were thinking of her health, of the baby. But perhaps Karl was planning never to have to tell Ingrid anything. ‘Sometimes I think Karl took my revolver to shoot himself,’ said Murdo Hesketh. He looked at Billie then, really regarded her. ‘My first revolver, not my double-action Colt.’ He patted the pocket of his coat. He said, ‘Karl told me that he only meant to say to his friend – the man who lost our money – that if there was anything left over from the other creditors to give it to Ingrid. But then he pointed the gun and pulled the trigger. I came back from Mother’s funeral and found Karl in prison. Ian Betler reappeared. You know, I don’t remember when I first really noticed he’d come back. He kept trying to make me see how foul our lodgings were and asking couldn’t I find a healthier place in the country for Ingrid.’

  As he spoke Hesketh subsided slowly; first his shoulders slumped, then he tilted sideways and sagged onto the marshy ground. He moved so slowly that Billie was able to interpose her hand between his cheek and scratchy spurs of grass. She told him that she didn’t understand his story. ‘Ingrid?’ she said.

  ‘My sister, the other Ingrid,’ Hesketh went on. ‘Ian knew his place, though. I hope you never will, Billie. I hope you’ll never be civilised. Still, I’m glad Geordie Betler was, and wouldn’t let you look at the baby. I would have shown you everything. I’m not the man I was. I was kinder. My poor sister. I still can’t understand how there can be nothing where someone was. My heart has just gone on with its restless looking about for them. Ingrid and Karl. When I came back to the house after the execution there was a bumblebee in the porch, stumbling about in the morning warmth. I was he
aring with Karl’s ears, and Ingrid’s. It was their world, still there, but not for them.’ Hesketh began to shiver, and Billie bent over him to help him with her warmth. He told her that it hadn’t helped that he’d had to pretend Ingrid was still alive to spare Karl in his last weeks. ‘I was afraid he’d read my eyes. I loved Karl. Sometimes I think that I could live if only the same teeth could reopen this wound.’

  Apart from his shuddering, Hesketh had been lying completely still, only making music with his voice. But he moved his good hand up between their faces, and Billie shifted her focus to study the white slots of scar tissue – a bite mark. Billie remembered biting Mr Hesketh’s arm on Scouse Beach, when he’d carried her out of the sea. She reminded him. ‘I bit you.’

  ‘But not hard enough,’ he said. He wasn’t joking. This wasn’t ‘repartee’ – a word Minnie had taught Billie. He was serious – and very sad. But he was looking at her. Billie had retained his gaze now for long minutes, even while he told her his story and wandered in his past. Time hadn’t stopped while he talked, but the minutes moved aside to admit a longer period, perhaps a lifetime. Billie could see it. And she witnessed the instant Hesketh saw it, too. She saw his blue eyes grow bluer, till they were the colour of the inhospitable ocean glimpsed through a crack in pack ice.

  He put his hand into her hair and held her face against his and kissed her. His mouth moved against hers as if delivering a practical lesson in how to shape certain difficult words. Suddenly, Billie was only her mouth – and breathless, then she was his mouth, too, and their shared, swapped breath was the only breathable air.

  THEY WENT hand in hand along Craige Sands, a long silver beach that terminated in a headland, beyond which was Clodel, where Murdo believed that, by nightfall, they would likely find the church open and empty.

  The tide was on its way out, the sea calm, and it had cleared, so that, with each wave, the sand beside them flooded blue. The blue drained back, leaving constellations of broken cockleshells.