So now I have to make small talk. Fine. Just fine. I might have been writing by now, might have really, suddenly felt like it, but fine . . .
Mary began, “When the sun sets . . . ,” by which time you’ll have gone. “When the sun sets, the colours fall in here . . . and it’s remarkable—red sand, red light, red walls. Red. You know. Red. In large amounts.”
Oh bollocks. Talk like that around Nathan and his liver would probably pop out and club him unconscious to save him from death by narrative despair.
Lynda switched on her torch. At once, the cave shrank down, coarsened: its potentials redefined in a cheap, sallow glare.
“I wanted . . . You don’t mind, do you?”
Mary attempted a sociable half-smile. “No, of course,” like fuck, “I don’t mind. Is there, is there . . .” careful now, she might answer, “something wrong?”
“I know we don’t . . .” Lynda firmed the torch into the sand, let its light boil up through the dust in a tunnel of glinting air. She seemed uneasy, even unwell, her make-up was having to work harder than usual, especially round her eyes. “We haven’t really got to know each other. Not that we have to. The last thing you want in a madhouse like this is to know everybody—guessing is bad enough.” She seemed to pause and consider laughing, but decided to simply go on. “But I did, do want, or would like to be your friend. I notice you make all your phone calls from Joe’s place now. Hm?”
Mary felt as shabby as she was intended to. “I hadn’t thought about it really. I suppose I talk to him quite a lot, so it seems . . . convenient.”
“Yes. It would be. I’m not criticising, not really. God knows, I’d rather talk to a man than a woman, every time. And not for the obvious reasons. Really.”
Mary tried to look uncontradictory.
“I seem to have more in common with men—attitudes. I can’t stand all that passivity, the moaning and fussing about details you get with women. Women fuss. And they want to be your friend before they do anything else, which makes it impossible to work with them. Quite impossible. You feel the same? A little?”
“I suppose.” Mary noticed that the cave had filled with Lynda’s perfume—something dry and tinted with sandalwood, but with a richer, warmer aftertaste today, a flavour that was softly rank.
“You can’t make someone your friend. Make them like you.”
“No.” Where are you going with this?
Something clattered inside the wall behind Lynda and she lost her thread, tugged absently at the collar of her blouse: silk, something pale between peach and pink.
It’s lovely. Too lovely for here, for the island, for us. She always has to try too hard with everything, doesn’t she? Always that extra effort.
“Lynda, I—”
“I know. I’ve walked in on you and you’d like to know why.”
“Well. Yes, I would. Probably.”
“I thought I would add to your education. Or mine.” She brushed her hair back from her shoulders, hands careful, attentive, holding her picture together, although no one was taking it. “A thing that you’ll find as you go on, if you take up our line of work, is that writing is like wishing. You’ll notice this. At first, you won’t mean it, won’t completely realise that what you choose to write about will come and seek you out. What chooses your fiction can choose your reality, too. Which makes a kind of sense, don’t you think?”
“Ah, it could do.”
Lynda gave a neat, closed laugh. “Yes. It could. And you’ll catch on, you’re bright, you’ll see. Quickly or slowly, coincidences will happen: faces, phrases, tricks of speech, foreign cities, accidents—you’ll see what you dreamed, what you thought out of nothing, what you wrote. Not too precisely, but enough for you to recognise it, enough to tease. You know what happens next, of course.”
“I suppose you would want to—”
“Control it. That’s right.” She treated Mary to a slipping little look of complicity, something faintly repellent about it. “You really are one of us, aren’t you? It’s only a matter of time . . .”
Mary made an effort to find this opinion pleasant.
“Yes, you try to control it. You try to make the fucking monster that has eaten up your life and frightened away every man you ever cared about and made you a freak in a Boy’s Club profession—you try to make that monster give you back what it’s taken—even just a piece of what it’s taken. You know? No, of course you don’t, but you will. You will. And I’m just saying, I’m just telling you, it doesn’t work. You’ll never get the part you ask for, no matter how often you ask.”
Lynda folded her arms in around herself—brown arms, fine-boned, the skin showing its age after too many sunbeds, too many afternoons at pool-sides, on patios, on boat decks: all the fashionable spots for carcinogenic lounging. Mary, for the first time, could imagine her, at ease in the proper setting, cultivating the knowing, cocktail elegance that seemed so pointless here.
Lynda reached a hand forward towards Mary, but then folded it back into her lap. “And never, ever trust anyone who writes too much about love. You’ll find they turn out to be too unpredictable.” She glanced to Mary, gave a brief tilt of the head, checking on her understanding and then deciding to elucidate. “Because they’re in despair. They write love because they don’t have it. Not always true, but quite often . . .” She smiled down, swirled her fingers in the sand, watched—quite contented—as they failed to form characters, to mark out any sense. “Can I show you something? I mainly came here to show you something. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I’m not usually so maudlin. That’s Nathan’s speciality. If you don’t mind my saying.”
“Why should I mind?”
“Why indeed.” The smile faded, locked off something in her eyes.
“You wanted to show me . . . ?”
“Oh. Oh, yes.”
Lynda stood, slowly, with a muted grace. The torchlight caught at her, whitening unexpected edges, deepening folds. She hesitated, hands indecisive, shining, bone pale. Then, carefully, she nodded to Mary and then looked beyond her to the blue break in the wall. Mary watched.
Lynda’s skirt unfastened with a single button and unwrapped from her as it fell, almost soundless, round her feet. Then she lifted her blouse above her waist in a strange echo of a curtsy and waited, naked from her navel to her shoes.
A metal glitter shifted incongruously between her thighs, a new bright clasp to Lynda’s body, easing and then interlocking again with each change of weight at her hips, each breath—all part of a permanent grip.
Mary felt the skin between her fingers moisten, a crawl of unease in her neck.
Jesus.
That rank scent smothered in closer, made her swallow and then regret it, while she looked and didn’t wish to and had to, all the same, deciphering in the half-light, concentrating.
Jesus Christ.
A number of metal rings were piercing Lynda’s labia, firmly bright against her lightly stubbled skin.
No one does this. No one really shaves their cunt. And no one, no one does this.
Mary wiped her mouth, resisted the urge to keep it hidden behind her hand, non-committal.
You don’t, not to yourself, you don’t, do you?
Lynda’s flesh layered in softly, from a nakedly sunless pallor, recently shaven, to a narrow furl of deeper, fawnish rose, now pressed between two lines of surgical steel rings, shining as they curved into her meat. And at the site of each penetration was a reddened flare of infection, a dried crust, yellowish, and the heavy, weirdly fascinating smell of injury and decay.
“It’s gone wrong.” Lynda let her hands meet and touch each other. “I thought it would be good. A change. I thought. This was going to make it mine.”
“But it . . . it is yours.”
“No, it’s not.” Lynda continued to stare at the wall above Mary’s head. “Everyone’s having it done now, all of the people who have fun.”
“Lynda, why don’t you . . . if you . . . Get dressed.”
“I know. I know, it’s horrible.”
“No, I didn’t mean—”
“It’s horrible.” She stooped, knelt, drew the skirt back round her waist and then found herself foiled by the button, fingernails stuttering. She let out an arid laugh and tumbled on into sobbing: irresistible, but quiet, contained.
“Lynda. Lynda. No, really now . . .”
God, Mary Lamb, you are a stupid cow sometimes, you are.
There being no other way to reach her, Mary moved to sit beside Lynda, to hold her, to feel a disarmingly frail body shiver with poisonous discontent, struggle against spasms of something darker, something that Mary did not wish to know.
“You’ll be all right, girl, you’ll be all right.” Words from the Uncles, words she’d only listened to, never said, words that sounded thinner, shallower in her voice. She pushed, eased Lynda into a slow rock, a rhythm that might fit something other than despair. The torch fell, laid a hot line pointlessly away across the sand until its reach failed, diffused. “You know it’s just . . . when you don’t feel well.”
“It hurts.”
“I know.”
I don’t, I fucking don’t, I haven’t the first idea.
Nathan was hung in the thick of the sea, each huge shrug of motion round his body making him, as usual, aghast. He hated swimming, particularly in the sea. The vertigo of suspension above unpredictable depths left him simply afraid, while the supernumerary horrors—submarines, sewage and toxic wastes, tangling net drifts and unreasonable creatures—could mean he was very literally seasick before he could even flail for the shore.
Swimming through your own puke, terrific.
Still, it’s all good for the lung, the capacity. I suppose.
And good for the dog.
In fact, Eckless hated the water more than Nathan. He seemed unable to understand its nature—too giving to be ground, but too solid for air. It pained Nathan to see the beast so unsettled, unwilling to paddle or even to swim, albeit fairly pointlessly, after stones thrown into the waves. Other dogs would race into the foam and plunge about, but Eckless was positively phobic.
At least partly to give himself company, Nathan was training Eckless, along with himself, to trust the water. He wanted to build their characters. After two summers of salty experiment, the animal would follow him as they moved beyond both of their depths. They would then pummel anxiously at the water, heads held improbably high and trying, at any point, to enjoy this.
Eckless’s excursions never lasted long. After a minute or two he’d abandon Nathan, withdraw to the beach, shake and—in passing spasms of alarm—bark for Nathan’s return, or the sound of his voice, yelling reassurance.
“I’m still here! It’s all right, you big daftie.”
Eckless was already done with his dip and lying in the sand today, patiently despondent, while Nathan bobbed, then struck out for the good of his lung and then settled to bob again. The glare from the wavelets and the high sun was beginning to give him a headache. He shoved himself forward through another fifty strokes and then swayed at rest, his heart clumping in his ears like an increasingly weary man climbing wooden stairs.
That’s exactly the sound—like hard shoes on a thin carpet, climbing the height of my spine, labouring away towards the point where I can kick myself in the head.
He slapped both hands down on the lightly iridescent surface.
Nathan Staples, you’re not allowed the miseries today. No more complaining, not now. Sophie’s here and you can borrow her as much as you want. The weather is gorgeous, you can’t deny it. Nothing like sunlight and green stuff to relax you. Your tests are all clear again. There is nothing wrong.
Beyond the usual.
Nothing wrong.
An especially solid lunge of liquid crested against him and he felt the usual aftershock, the wash of heat, sweat, his own salt breaking round him. Nathan decided to take the hint—it was time to head for shore. He had things to do.
J.D.—if I phoned him, he would understand. If I asked him, he would understand . . . Post this letter for me, will you, from anywhere in London you would like. For me. A favour. I don’t often ask.
Jack wouldn’t need to know what the letter said.
Then again, why not? I wouldn’t mind saying.
In fact, I’ll tell him before he asks: it’s a letter to Mary.
Jack’ll understand.
Of course, first I’ve got to write the fucking thing.
Shit.
He staggered up and out of the water, feeling his own weight bear down on his bones, his beached clumsiness.
If I start with something neutral, anonymous—not because I’m scared, just . . .
Because I’m scared.
But I do need to be careful at first, to not take any risks, not shock her, not the first time.
Jack’ll do it—the man for the job. I’ll just post him the letter in a stamped, addressed envelope and all he’ll have to do is stick it in a pillar box, only that. A London postmark—far away from here. I don’t want to give away clues, not yet.
I want to be gentle. I’ve waited this long, there’s no rush.
Mary wasn’t exactly rushing.
Bloody hell. Jesus bloody hell.
More like taking a fast walk.
Fuck.
And it seemed perfectly natural for her to aim her fast walk at Nathan’s house.
What did she want me to do?
Jesus, it looked . . .
And all I could think of was to tell her boracic acid crystals in water, they’re very gentle, as if picking the right antiseptic is going to solve everything.
Bloody idiot, I am.
Mary must have waited for something like half an hour after Lynda left, before she’d climbed out of the cave herself and headed up over the heart of the island, past the little lake and home. Or almost home—she’d see Nathan first and clear her head, tickle at Eckless’s ears for luck.
Her shadow was spilling away from her, striking out further and further across tussocks that threw up their own increasing shade. The whole island, peatily hot, seemed to camber under the sun while she trotted and stumbled on, silencing the crickets in a watchful hoop around her as she went.
Within sight of Nathan’s cottage, she turned and sat, blinking into the sunset. The turf gave softly underneath her, like coarse fur, reassuring.
Bloody woman. Poor, bloody woman.
Mary tried not to reconsider what she’d seen, not to taste a trace of it. She dropped her head to ease off a nasty tug of light-headednesss.
Shit, I should be telling Joe, I should be going and telling Joe. Not Nathan— he’ll only be . . . the way he is.
She mopped at her face with the hem of her T-shirt and knew that she was not presentable: hair sticking to her forehead, tacky hands and sand still sticking to the backs of her legs below her shorts. And her throat felt too dry to swallow easily, or speak well.
But she would still speak, and to Nathan, because he was a habit he’d made her form. She actually missed their daily interviews, now they’d been halted to let her write. Or, rather, she missed the occasional times when she could just sit in Nathan’s house, drink the water that came from his cistern—the coolest the island had—and know that he was about the place, or on the point of pounding in from one of his runs. She was used to him: the small but constant fluster in his eyes, his hands digging in the pockets of his overalls for objects he never found, his sudden, elegant sentences, his reliable physical clumsiness and discontent.
“Well, now, yes—but you’re guessing, aren’t you? Guessing wrong.”
Mary could hear Nathan’s voice as she came down the path. At first, she thought he was talking to himself and was—weirdly, briefly—pleased to think her absence might have left him still snapping and griping at thin air. Unless, of course, he’d always done this and her presence had imposed a kind of rational interlude.
“I know I said to guess, but I didn’t say to guess with this one.”
He was grumbling, as usual, but his voice, as she followed it in, was unmistakably different. Nathan—although Mary found this unlikely, even absurd—was sounding young.
“That’s right—it’s like parcel—the ‘c’ beside the ‘e’ goes soft—so that sort of ties up the ‘e’ and it can’t touch the ‘i’. You know? So notice gets to say noteiss and not not ice.”
Eckless padded out to greet her, tail lashing, and she knelt to hold his head in her hands and fuss under his chin and behind his ears. He could take any amount of fuss—perhaps groaning a little in his throat, if the pleasure proved particularly sharp.
“Well, I know you know now, but you didn’t a minute ago.” Nathan broke off for a noticeably jolly shout, “Eckless? Who’ve you got?”
Mary presented herself in his doorway only slightly before he reached it.
“Ah. You.” He grabbed at her hand and shook it in a kind of polite spasm, while smiling at somewhere slightly beyond her head. “Um, that is—not to sound so awkward—great. Lovely. What a surprise.” He managed to make surprise sound almost as welcome as hand grenade, or boils.
Mary was aware that her fingers were inadvertently coating him with dog saliva and old sweat.
“Come in, you look . . . Are you . . . well? Do you want to sit down?” His voice had narrowed again, aged, was suddenly showing more than the average strain. He led her inside, almost guiltily, to where Sophie was sitting at his kitchen table, swinging her legs on one of his high, hard chairs. There was a picture book opened flat in front of her. Her glass of milk faced his cup of coffee, a saucer of biscuits in between.
He never had biscuits with me.
“You’ve caught me in the act, then, Mary.” Nathan dodged back to his sink, began washing his hands and confessing in the general direction of the taps. “I have—um—another student.” He wiped his hands on the front of his overalls, grinning—half for Sophie, half for her.
“Eeaugh.” Sophie responded as it seemed he’d hoped she would. “You should use a towel. That’s horrible.”
“I don’t have any towels.”
“Yes, you do.”
Everything You Need Page 18