by Zoe Strachan
Are you going to university, by any chance?
I rehearsed the line in my mind, then convinced myself that it was too gauche to ask and looked out the window instead. The grass was the same shade of green as at home, the hills had the same low curves. The ripening fields and scattered sheep were familiar too, though I’d never made this journey before. We sped by a converted mill, a disused viaduct, four clipped thoroughbreds wearing rugs despite the mild weather, and each of these seemed like a sight I’d see going to Ayr to spend my birthday money. Then through the trees which screened it from the track I caught a swift glimpse of a derelict mansion house, roofless, its grey stone faµade tainted by fire.
Imagine that burning, he said.
With his words out there already, hanging in the air between us, it wasn’t long before I forced out my own line.
Are you going to university, by any chance?
Brave of me to speak, chicken to do so in my deepest, straightest voice. It was as if I’d suddenly got stuck in a lift with Coco from the 6th year (on whom I’d had a stupendous crush), though I couldn’t think of anywhere in Leckie that had a lift for us to get stuck in, unless it was a Stannah Stair Lift, and that wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. I wanted to impress this person who had sat down opposite me, to coax him into liking me. Revealing too much too soon seemed an unnecessary risk.
Yes, he said. Yes I am.
2
There was no knowing when Stephie might get up. The drive had taken longer than usual. Long enough to try her patience, Richard had thought, as they shared a monosyllabic dinner before watching television for an hour before bed. Ah well, a good night’s sleep and all that. He left the coffee things out on the worktop in the kitchen, along with a note, then slipped outside without locking the door behind him, imagining only belatedly Stephie’s anxiety if she discovered she’d been left sleeping in an open house. He ran up the hill and then down the curving road towards the old croft jetty. Low lumps in the ground nearby delineated where rooms and byre had been, mossy stones pushing through the grass like benign wisdom teeth. A gnarled tree, still clinging to a sprinkle of spring blossom, edged its crooked way out of what might once have been the hearth.
Reaching the jetty Richard slowed to a walk, following it out over the water. It was narrow and fragile-looking compared to the new ferry dock, better avoided if the wind was high or the waves likely to slop over and catch your feet from under you. On a calm morning though, like this, the smell of salt and seaweed seemed almost unbearable in its freshness. It wasn’t just a question of clearing your head, or so Richard felt, but more a sense that the world itself had been cleansed and rested overnight and was now hopeful about the day ahead. He used a rusting bollard for his leg stretches, listening to the waves brushing against the plinths below and thinking of Stephie sound asleep. How late would he have stayed in bed when he was her age? Midday, later?
His memory was, he thought, like a series of rooms. Rooms with white walls and cornices, smooth dusty floors and scuffed skirting. Each one empty, light filtering through blemished windows and catching on motes of dust in the stale air. And yet these rooms contained his life; stories written on the plaster in lemon juice, waiting for heat to flow through them, for flames to lick at the picture rails and expose images as charred as the flecks of paper and coal in the grates. He could walk through these rooms, seizing the handles and pushing open the heavy doors, until he reached the final one, where a speckled mirror hung above a high marble fireplace, and if he paused and looked beyond his reflection for long enough Richard knew he would see a chaise-longue with chipped legs and scraps of horsehair leaking from the tattered upholstery. And beyond that, life rippling through the other rooms, illuminating them and making them vivid once more.
As it happened, Stephie rose long before midday, though by the time she was washed and breakfasted and hair-straightened it didn’t seem so. Richard watched as she dabbed a spot of blush on the apple of each cheek, then quickly massaged it in. He’d been the same, when he first arrived in the village. Not with blusher admittedly, but changing his top to go out, running his fingers through his hair, checking there were no coffee stains on his trousers. He wasn’t sure how long it had taken him to realise that there were no handsome strangers to bump into, no Mermen singing at the water’s edge. Nor when he’d started to feel relieved rather than disappointed.
‘Will you be okay walking in those shoes?’ he asked, nodding towards Stephie’s thong sandals, the splay of her turquoise varnished toenails.
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s not as close as it seems in the car.’
‘For god’s sake Richard. They’re dead comfy.’
He supposed his hiking boots weren’t strictly necessary for a stroll down the road to the village. Perhaps he’d been too rigorous in adopting the uniform of the countryside; he underwent a makeover whenever he had to attend a meeting in Dundee or London. He was expected to be a geek, sure, but a geek with quirky Japanese accessories and trousers that didn’t amount to a social faux-pas. Amazing what a whisper of hair wax could do, a hint of a fin, demi-quiff or side shed enough to reassure his colleagues that although he lived somewhere ‘simply hilarious’ (to quote Rupe, his commissioning editor), he was in fact capable of tapping in to the aspirations of ‘the socially-engaged but seventies-nostalgic post-PC sofa-adventurous consumer’ (that from DaCapo’s branding strategy consultants).
Richard led Stephie down the hill and past the shingle beach, taking a detour along the new jetty so that he could point to the ferry pulling out of the harbour on Tanera Mhor.
‘Not much of a village,’ Stephie said, as they got closer.
‘Enough people for two pubs. Garage, shop, village hall, church. Public toilets with showers, no less.’
‘I’d settle for mobile phone reception.’
‘There is down here. I should’ve said that you might have to go outside the house to speak.’
‘Texts?’
‘Maybe in the front room. If you’re lucky.’
‘Okay,’ she said, then: ‘It’s pretty here.’
‘Pretty in the sunshine. Come on, there’s a good view from up by the war memorial.’
Stephie made Richard pose for a photo with the sea behind him – ‘proof for Mum and Dad that you haven’t had a sex change or something’ – then stood, shifting her weight from one foot to the other and reading the names on the memorial. Richard stooped to straighten the faded poppy wreath from the previous Remembrance Day. After a while, she said, ‘I wouldn’t have thought so many people lived here.’
‘There’s surrounding settlements too, and the more isolated crofts. But this,’ he waved his hand at the primary school behind him, ‘is the biggest place for quite a way.’
‘But still.’
‘Makes you wonder who was left, doesn’t it?’
‘How they managed to produce enough men to be killed in the next war,’ Stephie said, pointing at the shorter list of casualties for 1939-1945. ‘Maybe someone from the Ministry came round and impregnated all the women.’
‘Don’t be grotesque.’
Stephie stuck her tongue out at him. ‘Come to think of it, some of the people here do look pretty similar.’
‘Stop it. It isn’t easy living here, you know.’
‘How do you manage,’ she asked, but her words got caught up in the wind behind Richard, allowing him to ignore them as he marched across the road and back towards the shop. He heard the flat patter of her sandals as she ran to catch up with him.
They bought ice lollies and walked back along to the shingle beach. The sun was brighter now, highlighting the peaty hills and glinting off the water. Beyond the headland the islands glowed green. Stephie picked her way across the bigger stones to a huge wooden beam, weathered over the years.
‘It’s more colourful in the sunshine,’ she said, unbuckling her sandals and wiggling her toes in the breeze. ‘Still bleak though. Kind of unforgiving.’
‘Not w
hen you get used to it. Have you got blisters?’
She examined between her toes. ‘Not yet. But I might do by the time we get home. Unless I can go barefoot.’
‘I wouldn’t recommend it. Too rough, and besides, the cute little baa lambs tend to shit all over the road.’
They watched as a Citroen and then a Renault skirted the bay and drove up the hill, bumping over the bridge then flashing out of sight behind a house. The cars reappeared a second later, sending the gulls flapping into the air as they crawled along the jetty to where the ferry was now docked and waiting for its afternoon seal-spotting cruise. The Citroen disgorged four children with blonde floppy hair, the Renault three more with brown curls. Both sets of parents quickly began the process of stuffing their offspring into brightly coloured sweaters. That done, they were all herded onto the Aquila Maris by old Rab, who would amuse them by leaping around the deck barefoot and shouting about sharks. Just as Richard was trying to formulate an anecdote about local characters, in case the silence between he and Stephie wasn’t entirely comfortable, she said:
‘Remember the caravan at Maidens?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘That time you got stung by a jellyfish on the beach and Mum said someone should pee on it.’
‘Oh god,’ he said. ‘I screamed my head off at that, didn’t I? More than at being stung in the first place.’
‘But we went to the doctor instead.’
He nodded. ‘I guess it’s cheaper to fly to Spain or the Canaries now.’
‘Yeah, and it’s probably sunnier there than it ever was in Maidens.’
‘That’s funny. I remember it as sunny all the time. No, that’s not true. There was always that one day when it rained and we all had to stay squashed in the caravan until there was a big row.’
Stephie laughed, concentrating for a second on getting the final melting piece of lolly into her mouth without losing any. ‘And then Dad would take Jojo for a walk,’ she said.
‘So that we’d all end up crammed into a caravan that smelt of wet dog.’
The little ferry parped its horn as it cast off. They watched as it arced out into the bay and disappeared beyond the headland.
‘Richard?’
‘Uhuh?’
‘Why did you come here?’
He sighed. ‘I wanted a change.’
‘It ain’t exactly Vegas.’
‘I needed a place where I could really concentrate on my work. The first couple of commissions were lucky breaks. Following them up was crucial.’
Stephie wedged her lollipop stick into a crevasse where the beam had split around a rusting rivet. ‘I get that, but why here?’
‘I got a good deal on a long term lease for the house. And it’s worked out. I got the idea for this project here, as it happens.’
‘So what is it then, Virtual Village? I guess lo-fi is in.’
‘It’s a war game,’ Richard said.
‘What, like dungeons and dragons, elves and goblins – what was that thing that you used to collect the figures from?’
‘Warhammer,’ Richard said, with a slight shudder of embarrassment, although he knew a box of little painted figurines was still safe in the attic back in Leckie. ‘No, this is real, the Great War. Trenches. Going over the top, that kind of thing. Working title’s Somme, but that doesn’t really fit as the scope’s wider. And marketing will probably demand that we change it to World War X-Treme or something ludicrous.’
‘And I suppose you don’t have to be on the side of good and right.’
Richard hesitated. ‘It’s a non-linear environment. You can choose your character and storyline. That’s the way it works.’
‘I see.’
‘It’s a big project. They’ve even outsourced the German characters to a studio in Hamburg.’
‘Lovely. So all the neo-Nazis can get into it.’
‘It’s the first world war, you eejit. Didn’t you learn anything at school?’
‘Not in history. Mrs McGee was off all of the time. Stress, apparently.’
‘She was the same when I was there. Except it was called flu then.’
Richard reached for a pebble and started circling it between his palms, increasing the pressure to see if the sandy grey surface would rub off to reveal smooth black stone underneath. Stephie looked out to sea, then behind her to the single track road that wove between the mountains and after twenty miles or so joined the B road south.
‘It’s so far away,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘I thought you liked towns.’
‘We grew up in a town, remember?’
‘You went away to university in a town.’
‘It was in the countryside. By the sea.’ He got up, stretched his arms over his head, still holding the pebble. ‘We’ll have to move, I’m afraid. I’ve got a few things to get ready for a meeting later.’
‘A meeting?’
‘A virtual meeting.’
‘Right.’
Stephie grabbed her sandals, then hopped alongside him over the stones onto the springy turf. A battered old jeep tooted at them as it rounded the bend and rumbled over the small bridge. Richard raised one hand in salutation.
0
Class bound us together, me and Luke, on our eager first day. Swallowing nerves as we walked up the main street towards campus, our rucksacks packed with soiled, second-hand texts and charity shop threads. The town was all a-bustle. Parents in country tweeds unloaded boxes from Land Rovers and Beemers; smacking kisses and braying voices filled the air. Bright young things monopolised the streets, scattering shy international students like pinballs. I’d read about Sloanes in the magazines my mum brought home from the waiting room at work, and here they were, in pastels and pearls. And with them came the floppy fringed public school boys and their soft leather billfolds. We queued for matriculation behind Torquil and Timmy, registered for Freshers’ Week alongside Jilly and Jocasta, and it was scant consolation to overhear that for most of them coming here was second best.
Seduced by the glossy pics in the prospectus, it had been my first choice. Partly, I confess, because it put me in mind of the reruns of Brideshead Revisited on the telly (and, unwittingly, of the wankfests that particular adaptation provoked), but also because of the accommodation policy, which promised an affordable escape from home. Goodbye Leckie, hello world! As Luke and I followed the route marked on the photocopied map we’d received along with our course enrolment details, we saw that the photos hadn’t lied: proud crests leapt from lintels and archways, occasionally a street or vennel revealed a sparkling glimpse of the sea or a sudden soar of ruin; sunshine rendered the glass and concrete of the library dazzling; knots of smiling students lazed on patches of grass.
Too good to be true? The same could not be said for the subsidised accommodation that had sealed the deal. Furthest from the lecture halls, furthest from the Union, Herrick House was a lopsided baronial villa flanked by gloomy conifers. Inside, the linoleum-floored hallways gently reeked of damp and old school dinners. The former probably explained by the mouldy patches which could be seen edging up the walls of the common room, the latter odd given that it was a self-catering hall. Here the Yahs were diluted by people who, like me, had a vaguely apologetic tone to their voice and started each sentence with ‘Em’, as in ‘Em, excuse me, but …’ The ones who, like me, received full grants and were unlikely to complain about grumbling pipes and erratic hot water. What made tired old Herrick absolutely perfect, on the other hand, was that Luke was staying there too. Our surnames were close, so we were assigned the same floor.
Far end of the corridor, take the stair on the left – I repeated what the Warden had barked at us – up four flights to the attic.
So up we climbed, until the final stair spiralled us into a narrow corridor with skylights on one side and numbered doors along the other.
At least the smell’s gone up here, Luke said.
Yes, I said, though my nostrils now detected somethin
g mildly foosty. I knocked briskly on my door, wondering if I had arrived before my roommate. No reply. As I slipped my Yale into the lock I glanced at Luke, wondering whether to invite him in to see my room, but he’d proceeded along the corridor and found his own door. He seemed to be sneering as he turned and looked back towards me but maybe it was just the light because then he said:
Got any plans for later?
I shook my head, resisting the urge to laugh. Of course I didn’t have plans. And so we arranged to go for a drink around six, the nervy lad from the ex-mining town and the prickly youth from the city scheme.
I chose the bed on the left, slumped down on it and shifted to hear it creak. My heart sank as I surveyed my new princedom. Under the eaves, with sloping ceilings and two recessed windows, a chipped wash hand basin by the door that acted as an inverse air-freshener, wicking the faint odour of drains into that corner. But what had I expected: a vase of sweet lilies, a view of the quads, exquisitely tooled panelling? The wardrobes were the oldest and most wooden thing there, and even they were made from veneered tea-chests, or so I noticed as I hung up my clothes.
For a second I felt homesick, if you can believe it, for that 70s semi with its paper thin walls and warm lamps. Here the overhead bulb seemed to be forty watt, heightening the unfortunate effect of the beige emulsion and carpet tiles the colour and texture of out-of-date chocolate bars. The heater, which occupied the wall between the two beds, was an electric bar fire with a meter demanding fifty pence pieces. Both desks were scratched with unknown initials, and I had brought no pictures to pin on the cork board. I placed my prized Oscar Wilde on a bedside table charred along the edges by forgotten cigarettes, as a sign to anyone who might come back for coffee (and, I thought, to my new roommate, whenever he turned up). I was soon to discover that the Complete Works of which I was so proud was little more than nursery reading for my new fellows, who had already rifled a library I hadn’t known existed.