Bone Deep

by Sandra Ireland

  I look again at the words I’ve typed. Not starting at the start, as commanded, is fairly typical of me. Being impulsive has consequences; I’m learning that. I’m the sort of person who reads the last page first, spoiling the ending. I ignore operating instructions and wonder why my life is full of devices I can’t work. Even if Reuben had come with a manual and a risk assessment written in red, I’d still have jumped right in.

  So, typically, I skim the first couple of stories without paying too much attention. The first is about a blind fiddler who can see into the future. Mac calls it a ‘gift’, but I’m not so sure. This guy seems pretty bogged down by the present. Quickly, I move on. The second story is about a warrior queen who leaps from a waterfall. This one is better. She’s rash, impulsive. She’ll do anything to get out of trouble. I’m really getting into this one but it stops on a cliffhanger. Maybe Mac has writer’s block? Then there’s a little snippet about an abandoned castle. Just a paragraph, nothing more. I close the notebook with an irritable snap.

  Various old books are lying open on the desk – other people’s collections, ballad sheets, an encyclopaedia of fairy lore. I sift through them, gathering up pieces of A4 and securing all the scribbled-on scraps with a large bulldog clip. Maybe I can persuade Mac to take a look at Pinterest; she’d love it.

  There are old photographs on the desk too, and I can’t resist picking them up. The frames are tacky with dust, and the masking tape on the back is all dried out and peeling. Close up, they smell of mildew. In the first picture, a smiley woman, ration-book thin, poses with her foot on the bottom spar of a farm gate, and in the other, an unsmiling man is bending over some machinery. Judging by the flour sacks around him, he may have been a miller, but since I don’t know much about mills, other than the squat stone building I now see when I open my curtains in the morning, I put the photo down. Mac’s world is a bit sepia, like the photos, and it makes me sad. I realise this is the first time today I’ve actually thought about sadness. I suppose that in itself is a start.

  Lucie

  February

  Mac has dismissed me for the afternoon, promising to call if she needs anything. It’s a bit of a relief – I find it hard to concentrate when she’s around. She’s always muttering something to herself, pulling books from the shelves. I moon about the cottage for a bit, getting in my own way, and thinking of all the things I should be doing. I’ve been here over a week now, and I still haven’t unpacked my suitcase. A pile of dirty laundry is growing steadily in the corner of my bedroom.

  I’m in the little utility room at the back, trying to figure out the washing machine, when I hear a car. Probably the postman with his endless supply of junk mail. I turn my attention back to the control panel and manage to activate a red light. I’m so absorbed in what I’m doing, a sudden knock on the back door makes me jump.

  I open the door and there he is. Reuben. The last person I expect. The only person I want to see. My heart leaps. It’s been – what? Two months? He looks achingly familiar, as if we’ve been apart just days, not weeks. He’s alien too. There are things about him I don’t recognise: sleepless hollows, lean planes. He looks on edge; his jaw is set, as if he can’t stop gritting his teeth.

  We lock eyes on the doorstep, not speaking. We’ve always been the kind of couple that breathes in sync, and we’re doing it now – bodies readjusting, realigning to accommodate each other. I take a step back, bare heels colliding with a wicker basket, not noticing the pain. Reuben is gazing at me from under his wayward fringe, face full of questions. I should tell him to go. I can’t see you any more. This isn’t right.

  But I don’t.

  I say his name, and it feels so good to say it out loud. He smiles and I’m lost.

  ‘Come in,’ I hear myself say. ‘The place is a mess.’

  I’m always in a mess. My bedroom was in a mess the first night I ever slept with him. I’d had to bundle my knickers off the radiators and kick dirty plates under the bed. Reuben hadn’t cared. He doesn’t care now. He wanders past me, hesitating briefly, just letting me know he’s close enough to touch me, to stroke my arm. Something flips over in my chest. I break eye contact, swing out my arm like a hostess at a dinner party. This way. Just keep walking.

  I follow him into the kitchen, inhaling the Reuben-smell. It’s nothing fancy, not designer cologne or anything like that, just over-the-counter deodorant, mixed with something indefinable and good. My insides contract.

  ‘So how did you find me?’ I sound out of breath and distant. He comes to a stop beside the table. I’d scrubbed the oilcloth after the Floss incident and reinstated it, but a faint smell of disinfectant lingers, slightly at odds with the luscious cherries. Reuben glances around, taking in the shelves with the mismatched pottery jugs and old glass bottles. He’s always loved vintage stuff.

  ‘I asked about you at the little cafe.’ He turns to face me again. He looks cold, pinched. That dusty blue sweater he’s wearing, that was the one he had on the day we went to the coast. We had lunch in a cosy inn with fish on the menu, and we stayed there all afternoon, chatting over pints of cider. We’d stayed there that night too, in an attic bedroom with a creaky floor and an old brass bed.

  ‘But before that,’ I ask, ‘how did you know I was in Fettermore?’

  My mother wouldn’t have told him, that’s for sure. I tried to make a clean break. He’d buggered off up north and I’d sent him a text: Don’t try to find me. I can’t do this any more.

  He doesn’t want to say who told him, muttering something indistinct as he hauls out a chair. I have to ask him to repeat it.

  He sits down at the table, clasping his hands in front of him as if he’s in church. ‘Jane. Jane mentioned it at some point. I have tried to stay away, believe me.’

  ‘I can’t believe you and Jane are still living in my home, when I got kicked out.’

  ‘You didn’t really get kicked out. You left –’

  ‘To get a job. Yeah, that’s the party line, isn’t it? You’re still all sticking to the bloody script. That’s so like good old Mum. Don’t rock the boat. Sweep things under the carpet. Has she ever said anything to you?’

  He looks at the floor, shakes his head.

  ‘No.’ I make a dramatic little gesture with both hands. ‘It’s always the woman who gets the blame.’

  ‘There is no blame.’ It’s Reuben’s turn to be angry. I avoid his eyes. ‘There is no blame. Sometimes people fall in love with the wrong person.’

  Love? It’s easy to say, isn’t it? But it’s not enough. Now, more than ever, I need proof. Nausea rises into my throat. I sit opposite him, an acre of cherries between us. The things we want to say are too huge to come out of our mouths, so we just look at each other in silence. There are deep smudges under his eyes and his hair looks dark, unwashed. There’s a certain satisfaction in that, an acknowledgement that I haven’t been suffering alone. Eventually I manage something mundane: I offer him a coffee.

  ‘No, you’re okay. I had a cappuccino at that cafe.’

  ‘You had a cappuccino? You were in a hurry to find me.’ I scrape at the tablecloth with my nail.

  ‘I couldn’t just go in and start asking random questions.’

  ‘You could. It’s no different to asking directions, is it?’

  ‘The baker guy seems to have a good idea where you live.’

  His tone makes me look up. His blue eyes are stormy. They do that, change colour with his mood.

  ‘Of course he does. I work for his mother.’

  ‘He said you might be working. He said you might not be home.’

  I check the clock on the wall. It’s just after three. ‘Technically, I am working. I’m awaiting further instruction.’

  ‘That’s a great job to have.’

  ‘The baker’s mother isn’t very organised. Sometimes I think she forgets I’m here.’

  ‘So what do you do, when she remembers?’

  ‘This and that. I walk the dogs, do the laundry. Help her type
up her work.’

  Reuben’s eyebrow perks up. Any mention of something quirky, something unexplained, and that eyebrow twitches like it’s on a thread. His eyes gleam with a fierce curiosity. I love that about him; it makes me smile.

  ‘Research?’

  ‘Fiction. She’s rewriting some local legends that fall into the category of things that are “beyond the civilised circle of light”. Fascinating stuff.’

  It’s my turn to gleam, and he smiles at me. There is appreciation there, love, and I feel a little bit of me melt. I can’t allow that to happen. ‘There’s a story with a blind fiddler and a woman who hurls herself off a waterfall. I don’t know if she survives. It’s not finished yet.’

  His eyes bore into me. ‘No. No, it’s not finished yet.’

  ‘We can’t do this.’ My voice is a bare whisper, and even I can hear the tears, not far away.

  He gets up from his seat. Don’t get up. Please.

  ‘You can’t just walk away from this.’

  He comes round to my side of the table. I lower my head to my arms. The tablecloth is cool against my cheek. I don’t want to look at him, to think about this. His hand finds my hair. His touch is soothing but makes my system jump at the same time. The oilcloth turns damp beneath my cheek. ‘Look at me.’

  His voice is lower. He’s crouching down, his hand on the back of my neck, not moving, just warm, gentle. I don’t want to turn my head. I turn my head.

  I don’t know who kisses who first. It just happens. No logical explanation. I want to stay here forever, close up against him, my lips on his, breathing him in. He breaks away to thumb a tear from the soft spot under my eye. My smile is shaky. We knew this would happen. As soon as I opened the door, we knew this was inevitable, but I suppose I had to turn on the chill, make both of us suffer for a while, because it’s too easy. There lies the problem. It’s always been too easy.

  I get up from the table, and he has to step back. We stand a little apart, gauging each other’s reactions. I’m not quick enough to hide mine, and we end up clinging together – so tightly my ribs feel bruised. My heart is bruised. I can’t let him go. I loop my arms about his neck and stretch against him, catlike. He’s shaking, and the vibration bleeds through us and suddenly this is all that matters, just this. There are things I want to tell him. I want to rage at him: I can’t go home because of you. My mother thinks I’m a whore and my sister is always just one heartbeat from learning the truth.

  But the things I want to say fall out of my head. I don’t say anything. I press against him, and whisper in his ear. ‘You missed me then?’

  He whispers back. ‘Let me show you how much.’

  I have a lost place deep inside me. I feel it when I lie down and press my palms beneath my ribcage. It seems to go on forever; a deep, oozing loneliness that only I can feel. Reuben, who has touched every part of me, can’t feel this. Even if he could, he’d never manage to fill the gap. He’s still asleep, breathing deeply and evenly beside me. I love the sound of his breathing. My thigh is warm and slick where it’s pressed up against his, but the rest of me is shivery. My hands are splayed across my naked midriff, searching for the lost place, examining it. Loss moves in me and makes me want to cry. I turn my head on the pillow. Reuben is nearest the window and sunshine is spilling through the gap in the curtains, illuminating his nose, his chin – as familiar to me as my own. His lashes are spidery black, fluttering slightly in sleep. I wonder if he’s dreaming, and what he’s dreaming about. Who he’s dreaming about.

  Mac

  I’d found the old book I was looking for: Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. It was like sitting down with an old friend – the feel of the dusty linen boards beneath my fingers, thick yellow pages. Historical and Romantic Ballads, proclaimed the subtitle. A line engraving of a knight emerges from behind a tissue paper flysheet.

  I’d skimmed through the index: ‘Lady of the Lake’, ‘Fair Helen of Kirkconnell’, ‘The Cruel Sister’. Flicking to page 352, I’d begun to read. Scott had collected the tale from a lady who, in turn, had heard it from an old woman. Such is the nature of such ballads – a fragment here, a line or two there, and you have an entire picture stitched together from scraps. I grew up with a homespun version of this narrative, but I hadn’t thought about it in years, not until Lucie walked through the door carrying her untold story like a suitcase.

  Now, I long to revisit it. Reacquaint myself with those other long-ago sisters who played around the mill. I close the book, invite the pair to run through my imagination once again on bare, sturdy feet.

  But there’s a blockage somewhere, sticks jammed across the mill lade. The words won’t come. There’s something stopping them, and I think it’s because I know the ending. The truth. It shimmers at the edge of my vision like the dart of the kingfisher on the burn.

  Yes, I can picture those two little girls, even though I’ve never had a daughter myself. I’d thought about having another child; company for Arthur. Jim was keen, but the boy had been a handful. Always on the go, demanding attention when I had none to give.

  He always loved to bake, Arthur. School holidays were the worst. He’d get up at first light, and somehow the sound of him tripping down the stairs would filter through my sleep-fogged brain. Immediately I’d be imagining scalding water and electric sockets and matches and all the usual perils we mothers torture ourselves with. I’d haul myself out of bed and stagger through the cold house in my candlewick dressing gown, hearing the sound of a kitchen chair being dragged across the flagstones, and I’d go in and he’d be up balancing on the damned thing with the cupboard doors swinging open, stripping them bare of ingredients. How big everything looked in his small hands: white parcels of sugar, glass jars of sultanas and tubs of cherries. The flour in a vast enamel bin on the dresser. The flour came from the mill.

  Arthur loved it when we ran out of flour. He would pester and pester, and I would huff and puff, and say, ‘Come on then, as if I’ve nothing better to do.’ And we would walk, hand in hand, down the drive and across the road and along the track, with the dogs going mad about the place and the grass soaking our shoes. My mind would be on my marking, or my latest funding application, or the chapter I was trying to write. Arthur’s nose would be turned up to the sky, watching out for buzzards, or listening for woodpeckers. Sometimes a blackbird with white feathers in its wings would appear by the mill door. Arthur was a dreamer back then. I don’t know if he much cares for it now.

  Halfway down the lane you’d hear it – the deep, throaty rumble of the millstones, the steady dunk and splash of the wheel. The boy would start to run, flying through the open door of the mill, into the dark, dusty interior to find his father. I cannot see the inside of the old place now without seeing Jim, sitting on a sack, sharpening this tool or that, wiping things down with an oily rag. There was a quietness in Jim back then, an acceptance. He was a countryman, old before his time. Steady. I thought he’d always be like that. I thought in twenty years the mill would still be rumbling and Jim would still be sitting there, on a sack, sharpening this tool or that. I was wrong.

  The flour, newly milled, would be all powdery and still smelling of the fields. We’d bring the flour up to the house in a tiny sack kept especially for Arthur. No wonder the boy grew up to be a family baker. A family baker without a family.

  That familiar urge drives me from my chair. This is the story’s fault. This is why I cannot settle, why my heart struggles to find the right rhythm, and I feel sick to my stomach. The story has a mill in it, and the mill calls to me from the page, calls to me in real life, real time. On mornings like this it pulls me from my chair. My pen rolls to the floor. The notebook flutters shut.

  I walk the familiar route, heedless, leaving the front door standing open and the dogs, whining, penned in the kitchen. I try not to visit the mill too often. I don’t like the way the door sticks on the stone threshold. You have to turn the huge rusty key in the lock and shove it with your shoulder until it final
ly gives and scrapes across the floor. The noise tears at my insides. That’s why I have a pain in my arm, no doubt. I shouldn’t be shouldering old doors at my age, not with the aches and pains I have – arms, chest, jaw – that could well be the symptoms of an imminent heart attack. It’s this place getting into my bones. As sure as there’s sap in the trees, I can feel something viscous and destructive moving through me.

  But here I am, with the big key in my fist. There are cobwebs clinging to the plank door, reminding me I haven’t been here in a while. I try to tell myself I’m just here to air the place, to throw open some shutters, maybe disturb the dust with the old besom broom. Arthur used to call it my witch’s broom. The village kids all wanted to borrow it at Halloween. But that was before the accident. Nobody wants to come here now.

  The interior is as grey and gloomy as the inside of a flour sack. The floor, the whitewashed walls, the oak beams – all wan and listless, as if nothing has moved here in a hundred years. As if the great wheel has never cranked into life, the millstones never turned. The mice have fled. The cat is dead. The blackbird with the white feathers has long since gone. The building is lifeless, and I’m glad.

  I head straight to the back wall, to throw open the shutters on the long window. To my right, the two great sets of millstones sit and slumber. To my left, narrow wooden stairs lead down to the basement. Through the window I can see the old bridge. The grime on the windowpane acts like a filter; the outside looks greener than it is, and it cheers me somewhat. The trees are bare but starting to bud. Spring is on its way. The days will be longer, fresher. I will have survived another winter.

  I open the window a crack and the fresh scent of water hits me. I crave it, sucking it in, letting my ribcage swell around it. Breathe. In, out; in, out. Only then, when I am in control, am I brave enough to turn and face the mill.

  Lucie

  I’m huddled in my bathrobe on the bench outside the back door. It’s too early in the morning, and when I light up a cigarette the smoke blooms in the air like frosty breath. Smoking is one of the many things I’ve always done in secret. My mother hates it. From my perch, I can see nothing but a mess of damp, tumbled greenery. My heart is skipping around painfully, while the rest of me is numb.