I grip the window, rattle it with all my might, and he’s swearing and grappling with the button. The window glides down again, giving me room to lean in and grab the front of his shirt.
‘You listen to me, you little shit!’ My spittle lands on his cheek. He shies away from me, moaning about an injured shoulder, but I tighten my grip, shake him like Max worrying a rabbit. ‘You don’t realise what you’ve done, do you? Your brain is in your pants. You never once stopped to think what this would do to me. You broke my heart – made me into something I’m not, a monster, and I can never forgive you. Or her! Never!’
I realise Reuben is staring at me with his mouth open. I can smell fear, like old meat, on his breath. I relax my hands, smooth his shirt and pat him on the cheek. ‘Anyway. I’ve said my piece. You’d better get out of here, laddie.’
At some point the engine has stalled. He squeezes the steering wheel again, guns the car into life. ‘You’re crazy. Fucking mental.’
My fingers caress the paper in my pocket, trying to remember what it is. As realisation dawns, I begin to smile. Lucie’s poem to person unknown. But we know now, don’t we?
‘If you want to know what you’ve done, maybe you’d better read this.’ I wave the slip of paper at him. ‘This is what happens when you mess with a woman’s feelings – with two women’s feelings. You’re playing one sister off against the other, just like young Musgrave . . .’
But I’m talking to myself. The car has already lurched forward, wheels spinning a little in the mud. I feel cold spray from the puddles on my ankles. Reuben is staring grimly ahead, but his window is still down. On an impulse, like posting a letter, I pop the poem through the gap. Fly, little bird. Who knows where you will land?
Lucie
It starts to rain as Reuben leaves, and I watch the first big watery splatters on the glass. What have I done? Those things I said . . . I never wanted to hurt him and now he’s gone, angry and rejected, just like the last time. I see him again in the hospital bed and feel overwhelmed with guilt and sadness.
I go to the back window of the kitchen. There’s a clear view of the track from here, and I’m surprised to see that his grey car has come to a stop at the end. Is he coming back? But someone else is there. Mac is leaning in to speak with him. What does she want with him? What can she possibly have to say? Alarm bells sound in the depths of my being. Something doesn’t feel right. She appears to be arguing with him; I can hear her raised, angry voice, though I can barely make out the words.
Horror and shame flood through me. Has she figured it out? Does she know my secret? Surely not . . . I tell myself that this is just Mac being Mac, interrogating a stranger on her property, being her usual rude and irritable self.
Reuben revs his engine and the car shoots off in a spray of rainwater and pebbles.
Mac’s left standing out on the road, watching the car disappear. I step back from the window. I don’t want her to see me looking.
Despite the rain, I feel an unavoidable urge to get out of the house. I end up sitting by the pond, and remain there for a long time, taking root on the damp bench like a stubborn twist of ivy. The rain doesn’t come to anything and I feel slightly cheated. There’s thunder inside me. As the shadows get longer, the landscape stirs into life. A fight breaks out in the high trees across the pond – crows flexing some black-feathered muscle – and beneath them the water splits into rings and spirals as the fish rise.
Mac will fire me, for sure. She’s a very black-and-white sort. She won’t approve of what I’ve done. She’ll ask me to leave, just like my mother and I’ll have to start all over again. No home, no job, no Reuben. It’s almost too much to bear. Maybe I’m disappearing into the landscape. I’ll end up as a smudge on Arthur’s crumpled map. Lucie used to work here. Instead of a little castle icon, or a church cross, there’ll be a hunched matchstick figure, sitting on a damp bench, smoking a fag.
Mac
Arthur arrives at two minutes to ten. I’m still in my study and his car headlights play across the glass, illuminating the desk, the notebook. My pencilled words spark silver and come to life for a split second.
In the middle of the wedding feast, a stranger comes to the hall. He is cloaked and dragging something heavy in a jute sack. When questioned, he says he brings the gift of music, for shouldn’t every bride be blessed with music? He is given a seat at the table, and food which he doesn’t eat. Bella thinks he seems familiar, although his hood obscures most of his face. She cannot see his features, merely the shadows cast by them, and she’s suddenly afraid to look too closely in case that’s all there is . . .
I hear the car door slam and a lot of bad-tempered jangling of keys at the lock. Oh dear. I sit back and wait for the darkness to enter.
‘You were making no sense on the phone whatsoever, Ma.’
‘I merely called to tell you that Lucie had a visitor.’
‘That was hours ago, Ma, and anyway, I’m more concerned about the other stuff you were saying. It’s the other stuff . . . that’s why I’m here at bloody 10 p.m.’
‘You didn’t have to come. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
We are nose to nose in the study, Arthur still twitching his keys as if he’s in a hurry to get away. There’s a smell of petrol and night air about him. But what’s all this? He’s repeating things I don’t remember saying and my heart is juddering like an old locomotive. I feel taken aback. Surely I said nothing of the sort?
‘You were banging on about the mill. Again.’
‘I was not.’
‘You were.’
‘I never mentioned the mill, son.’
I hadn’t. Had I? Something is lodged in my throat. It’s hard to swallow, to breathe.
‘You said Reuben had come to the mill. Just before we came back.’
‘Yes. Yes, he did. That’s why I called you.’ I feel for my chair and lower myself into it. Anything to unhook myself from Arthur’s hardest stare. I pick up my pencil and begin to doodle on the open notebook. ‘I only went in there to get my watch. I must have left it there last time.’
‘I don’t really care why you were in there, Ma. It’s what you said. You said you were very tempted to “fix Lucie’s little problem, once and for all”.’ He makes quotation marks in the air. ‘Do you remember now?’
A flower takes shape under my pencil. A child’s flower: five oval petals and a round middle. The pencil is shaky. ‘I would’ve sent Reuben packing. That’s all.’
‘You really don’t remember what else you said, do you, Ma? I worry about you.’ Arthur’s eyes soften. He’s looking not at me but at something beyond the window, something that makes him rather sad and pensive. He’s still talking but I’m not really concentrating on what he’s saying. I get bits of it. See someone . . . mention it to the doctor next time . . . memory loss . . . dark thoughts . . .
I’m staring at the notebook. Below the flower, a single name is printed in a careful, schoolgirl hand. Bella.
I don’t remember writing that.
Lucie
It doesn’t take long for the pond to freak me out. I don’t like it down here when dusk starts to fall. I don’t trust this landscape where the trees crackle with secrets and the water smells wild and the midges and the bugs and the birds take on a new urgency.
I get up from the bench. Walk, and keep on walking. The path is littered with snails that crunch beneath my feet, making me wince with every step. Maybe I should go and have it out with Mac, find out what she knows. If she only knows half the story, maybe I could fudge things. The rain starts up again. A sparrow swoops too close, the vibration of its feathers a frantic chord that tears at my nerves. It would mean even more lies. The lies are now following me from place to place. When will it end? The urge to keep moving is overwhelming.
Skirting past the cottage, I find myself heading up towards the road, negotiating the rough track in my unsuitable sandals. I’m hunched up, hugging myself, and the rain is slick and cold on the expo
sed parts of me. It’s late. Maybe Mac will have gone to bed. But postponing the conversation until morning will just prolong the agony. I feel sick, a bit green around the gills, as Mac would say. But I’ve been that way for months. I close my eyes as I walk, tilting my face to the rain.
Light floods my vision.
Headlights, nosing out of Mac’s driveway, and the rain floating soft and yellow in the harsh beam. I am a rabbit, caught, standing there with my hair plastered to my scalp, in my wet top and with my dirty toes. A car door bangs and Arthur is suddenly beside me, solid and warm, smelling of damp wool, holding out a folded umbrella.
‘Are you crazy? First Ma and now you. What’s going on tonight?’
‘It’s raining.’
‘I can see that. Where’s your coat?’
I don’t have to answer that. Just because Arthur took me for a drive doesn’t give him the right to treat me like a child. Or a friend. We’re not mates.
‘I’m just . . . taking a walk.’
‘Get in the car, and I’ll take you home.’
‘You get in the car.’
He brandishes the umbrella at me. The rain is making his hair curl and he looks like he’s missing his warm kitchen. I suppose he’d rather be anywhere but here, trying to reason with a crazy person. I relent and snatch the umbrella from him, make a show of pressing the little steel button and pushing up the shaft. Its black wings flop about uselessly, and I suddenly feel very weary. I thrust it back at him.
‘I don’t want it. I’m perfectly capable of making my own way home.’
‘Take it anyway.’ His face is set, determined. Rain dribbles from his long eyelashes like tears. I wonder what’s wrong with his mother now.
‘You take it. You’re getting soaked yourself.’
The umbrella wilts as he realises I’m not going to cooperate. He changes tack.
‘So what did Reuben want? I mean . . . how did it go?’
Guilt paralyses me. Should I tell him that his mother knows my secret? That my time here might be running out? Rain trickles down my neck and my brow feels tight. ‘It’s still over.’
‘That’s good. Isn’t it?’
‘Is it? Is it?’ I give a harsh laugh which isn’t a laugh. ‘Go home, Arthur. Go back to your fairy cakes.’
I turn on my heel – difficult in thin-soled shoes. His sigh gusts after me.
‘Don’t be so friggin’ prickly. I’m concerned about you, that’s all. Aren’t I allowed to care?’
I swing around to face him. ‘No, you’re not! That’s how it all starts. Sympathy, caring, all that shite, and then you end up with a piece of your soul missing.’
‘I know!’ he snaps back. Then, softer, ‘I know.’
We regard each other like two feisty mutts spoiling for a fight. I manage some kind of sneer to break the contact and turn back to the track, intent on heading back down it with as much sassiness as my limp shoes will allow. I know he sees a girl who’s wet and bedraggled and lost. I don’t want him to see me lost.
I take a moment to glance over the boundary wall. The land and the sea are invisible. Everything is obliterated by a clammy curtain of rain, and the breath of the wind stinks of seaweed. The insistent peep peep peep of an oystercatcher drills into my brain.
Last time I noticed the field it was as neat as an old man’s corduroy britches, freshly ploughed. Now the bits that are visible are a rich, purposeful green. How did that happen? I’ve been sleepwalking: back and forth to Mac’s study, hypnotised by my typewriter fingers, sucked into her imaginary fucking world. She’s pulling me into it. My life is being played out by two sisters who don’t even exist. All my rage, my jealousy, my shame is being re-enacted, courtesy of Mac’s pen. I’m beginning to think it’s deliberate, like she’s punishing me. She’s messing with my mind. How long has she known?
Peep peep peep.
The cry stabs at my innards. I experience a sick jolt – where has the time gone? It’s gathering speed and I’m clinging on by my fingernails. I lay my hands across the lost place in my abdomen. I feel suddenly scared. Whatever crop that is, beyond the wall . . . it will flourish and ripen and then it will be autumn and I’m not ready. I’m not ready.
I think I hear Arthur call my name, but over the wall the bastard bird is still going peep peep peep.
‘Lucie!’ he tries again, just fierce enough to let me know he thinks I’m ignoring him. ‘Lucie. I could murder a drink.’
I’m dithering in the middle of the path, pretending to gauge a particularly deep puddle. I risk a backward glance. He’s standing in the car headlights, a dark lonely man-shape in a halo of gold and raindrops.
‘The pub’s still open,’ he says.
I turn back. ‘Go on then. I suppose we could have just the one.’
I begin to retrace my steps, walking back towards him just a shade too quickly. I hope he won’t notice.
Lucie
July
I struggle to open my eyes. Light is pouring through the window. Why hadn’t I closed the curtains last night? Frantically I backtrack, but something has forced me awake. My phone is ringing in the depths of the house. I sit up, but then the ringing stops, and I find that I don’t care enough to get up and investigate further.
I sink back into the pillows and look at the man snoring softly beside me. Arthur.
After drinks in the pub that first night, we quickly fell into a pleasant routine, away from Mac and Reuben and other concerns. We’d meet in the pub after work, just talk. Or Arthur would talk and I would whine or find fault with things. I’d order pints, determined to out-man the baker with his gin and tonic. It suited me to think of him as shy and boring, and therefore not quite worthy of my attention.
But last night, something changed. Last night he was all I needed. We’d sat in a dark beery corner, under amber lamplight, shielded from real life by dusty tapestry curtains. I’d spoken about Reuben, about how much I hurt, cursing my fate while shredding beer mats. I couldn’t bring myself to mention Mac. That was something I needed to process in my own time. Arthur just nodded and cradled his tall glass and gazed at me as if the words spilling out of my mouth were really, really important.
I’d soon moved on to wine, which went straight to my head and made me think I was irresistible. Who doesn’t want to be irresistible? I never stopped to consider the consequences.
I remember both of us dissolving into laughter, Arthur putting his arm around me. We were sitting side by side on the banquette and it was easy for him to hug me. I let my arm snake around his waist and we sat like that as a new awareness bloomed between us. We had definitely crossed a line, stumbling together into new territory.
The rest happened almost accidentally. We ticked off all the required clichés: he walked me home; I asked him in for coffee and discovered an unopened box of almond slices. We scooched up together at the table, heads leaning in, mugs aligned. He went all Paul Hollywood for a bit, holding his cake up for inspection, pointing out the delicacy of the base and banging on about Madagascan vanilla. Finally, bored, I leant over and took a massive bite of his cake, leaving him holding a mere stub. There I was, giggling and spluttering crumbs, with him glaring at me, mock fierce, and telling me I was in big trouble.
Like the best of fights, we took it to the bedroom.
It was different. Reuben was still in the sad bits of my mind. I think Arthur knew that, and worked hard to banish him for good. He almost succeeded. I almost lost myself in Arthur, but a bit of my brain refused to let go completely. It watched me from a corner of the room, standing apart like a shy girl at a party. Afterwards, I lay cradled against his hairy chest. He kissed the top of my head, cupped my breast as if I were some kind of goddess, and a slow, sad tear trickled from my eye. It must have landed on his bare skin, causing ripples like something falling into the millpond, because he gave a start, twisting round to look in my face, determined to see the things I don’t want people to see.
‘What is it?’
‘Tears of jo
y.’ I stuck my tongue out at him. ‘Are you staying?’
The look on his face told me he’d never considered otherwise. ‘Fine,’ I said, rolling over to switch off the lamp. ‘Just don’t snore.’
I consider him now with something like sadness. I can’t afford to let him in.
When my phone rings again, a little later, I scrabble for last night’s T-shirt, haul on yesterday’s knickers and stub my feet into flip-flops.
My phone is doing that curious little jig in the middle of the kitchen table, disturbing all the crumbs. The inevitable cake box is still sitting there from the day before, and two empty coffee mugs. I grab the phone. I see that it’s Jane and my heart misses a beat. I think about not answering, but what good would that do?
‘Jane? Hi.’
‘Hi, Lucie. Is this a bad time? I know it’s early but . . .’
She sounds friendly enough. Her voice is tight, but not angry. ‘It’s as good a time as any. Are you okay?’
I know what she’s going to say. I know I have to pretend not to know. I’ve been waiting for this phone call, this conversation, since Reuben’s visit two weeks ago. She dissolves into tears, and I find myself trotting out all the usual crap. Maybe it’s for the best. Some things aren’t meant to be. Plenty more fish etc., etc. She ended it, finally – not him. But she doesn’t tell me why.
‘Will you come home, Lucie. Just for a bit? I know you’re busy, but I could use a friendly face. That’s what sisters are for, right?’
I take a deep breath. ‘You know I’m always here for you. I’ll see if I can get away this weekend.’ It would mean not having to face Mac. The idea grows very appealing.
‘Okay. Stay as long as you want. Surely you can take a week off? You’re entitled to holidays.’
This makes me smile somehow. I have a vague memory of Jane kicking off about rates of pay when she took on a paper round at fourteen. She always had a strong sense of right and wrong. We make arrangements. Jane promises to pick me up from the train station. I break off the call and stand for a moment, gripping the edge of the table.
Bone Deep Page 13