by Zoe Strachan
Besides, he said, I think all the possibilities have been exhausted. Don’t you?
20
The hedge seemed to have grown already, Richard thought, but now that it had been trimmed away from the gate it wasn’t enough to screen his car from the Manbys. He saw Mrs Manby – she hadn’t confided her given name – look up from her weeding and then scramble to her feet and hurry inside. Her husband had left a terse voicemail which Richard had listened to before going to bed the night before and then completely forgotten until he was looping off the main road to an isolated café designated ‘Local Services’. He’d taken his mug outside and sat on the car bonnet, enjoying the open space and relief from the large and grumbling English family whose Scottish adventure seemed to have already disintegrated amidst tug-o-wars over burgers and chips. He texted Stephie with his ETA and then called Gerald Manby, who proved belligerent and unwilling to accept that it was contradictory to insist that Loren was an adult who had taken advantage of his son at the same time as complaining that she was a young person whom Richard had failed to adequately supervise. Pointing out that the boy was over the age of consent had done little to ease the situation. Richard found it hard to believe that he had only been a year older when he’d met Luke. Looking back, it seemed they’d been more mature, more formed.
Richard switched off the engine and got out of the car, locking the door behind him; a city habit he thought he’d managed to shake. He could see Gerald Manby approaching the gate, opening it and coming to a stop, arms folded over his quilted gilet. Their conversation earlier had been truncated by an expedient loss of reception, just after Richard had felt forced to make clear that there was no impropriety in having two young women to stay when one of them was your wee sister and what’s more, you happened to be gay. And even if neither of those caveats applied, it was none of your neighbour’s business; something which was satisfying to say, even if the line had by then reverted to the empty silence that indicated there was no longer anybody there to hear.
‘Sorry I didn’t call back,’ Richard called. ‘The signal didn’t improve and I wanted to get on the road.’
‘Yes well, another matter has come to my attention,’ Gerald Manby said.
Richard tried to conceal the slump of his shoulders. ‘Oh?’
‘Alcohol and,’ Manby looked around, as if even the hedge had ears, ‘drugs.’
‘What kind of drugs?’ Richard asked, realising that a note of enthusiasm might have entered his voice as he remembered the excesses of the DaCapo night out.
‘Marijuana.’
‘And you think that it came from Stephanie or Loren?’
‘They were the source of the alcohol,’ Manby said.
This time Richard did nothing to hide his sigh. ‘Well, I think it very unlikely but I will ask them about it.’
He didn’t say that he thought it unlikely because otherwise, he was sure, these drugs would have made an appearance before now. Although if Loren had found her way into town, he doubted it would have taken her long to locate anything she needed. He slung his bag over his shoulder and went into the house, aware that Manby hadn’t moved.
‘Stephie?’
He walked through the kitchen, where plates and cups were stacked waiting to be placed in the dishwasher, and saw Stephie sitting with a textbook on her lap and her eyes closed.
‘Stephie,’ he said again, then noticed that she was wearing her iPod. He went a little closer, anxious not to give her a fright, but the vibration of the floor under his feet was enough to rouse her.
‘Hey,’ she said, pulling out her earphones and jumping up, the wires tangling around her elbow. She threw her arms around him and squeezed. ‘Oh, I’m glad you’re home.’
‘Me too,’ Richard said. ‘Except for the welcoming committee.’
‘What?’
‘Next door. Going on about drugs or something? I think he’s waiting for me to go back out.’
Stephie groaned. ‘I’m sorry. Bloody Loren. I just want her to go away now, okay?’
Richard nodded. ‘Did she give the boy, what’s his name, something?’
‘No. Well I mean like a bottle of beer, maybe. Anything else was his. He’s a total stoner, apparently.’ She looked at Richard. ‘Don’t you believe me?’
‘Of course I believe you. I already said that it had nothing to do with you.’ Richard pinched his temples between the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, circled them for a minute. ‘Right. This is really starting to piss me off.’
As he spoke to Gerald Manby he imagined that Stephie might be watching him through the double-glazed windows, waving his arms in a silent performance of anger. Pointing behind to his house, shaking his head. Pointing towards the Manby’s instead, nodding. An exaggerated, obvious mime, but one that he hoped would convince. As Manby’s face reddened Richard felt his own voice soften.
‘It isn’t unusual for boys his age to experiment. It’s probably just a phase.’
This was scant comfort, it seemed, and Manby marched off, muttering to himself. Richard turned back towards the house. There was no sign of Stephie at the window.
He found Loren upstairs. The door of the bedroom was open, but he still considered knocking. Instead he said, quite gently, ‘Can I come in?’
She shrugged, so he sat on the bed opposite her, moving Stephie’s pyjamas to one side.
‘Loren …’
‘You don’t have to give me my marching orders. My bag’s almost packed.’
Her bag was small and a tangle of underwear trailed from it as though it had burst free.
‘So what’s your plan?’
She laughed. ‘I’m not much of a planner. You might have guessed that.’
‘Are you going home, I mean?’
‘Home?’
‘Back to college.’
She separated a pair of socks from the underwear tangle and pulled them on. ‘Don’t worry; I’ve booked a room in a B&B for tonight. I’ll get the first bus in the morning then go and stay with a friend in Glasgow.’
‘I’ll give you a lift to town then, when you’re ready.’
‘I’m sure I can hitch.’
‘I’m sure you can, but I’d rather drive you,’ he said. He wondered if he should insist she stay another night, whether he should drive her as far as Inverness even, and why rejecting her advances seemed somehow to have conferred this responsibility on him.
‘Up to you,’ she said, and stood up and began collecting toiletries from the dressing table.
Stephie was sitting at the picnic table when he went back outside. Mist or drizzle softened the outline of the islands and he could feel the dampness in the air. He perched at the end of the bench and said, ‘She’s going to leave in a wee while. I’ll give her a run to a B&B in town.’
‘Thanks.’
‘It’s okay. She was ready to go anyway. I didn’t have to tell her.’
Stephie nodded. ‘I’m going to take my book down to that jetty place and have a read. I’ll tidy away her bedclothes and everything once you’ve gone.’
‘I don’t know if it’ll stay dry.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
Richard got up again, deciding he would have to eat something, a banana perhaps, before he got back in the car. ‘Aren’t you going to say goodbye?’ he asked, but Stephie had plugged her iPod into her ears again.
The car outran the smirr, and by the time they passed the bay where he and Stephie had picnicked the sun was beating down. His lower back twinged as he moved his feet against the pedals and he thought a swim might sort him out, although imagining the shock of the cold water made him shiver, even in the muggy warmth. As he followed the curve of the road he glanced back towards the headland; the clouds had gathered there and he could see lines of rain. If Stephie had gone as far as the jetty she would be drenched by now.
Loren wound her window down wide. ‘Do you mind,’ she asked belatedly, as the breeze chased around the inside of the car.
‘No,’
Richard said. ‘It was beginning to get stuffy. Might help keep me alert too.’
‘I could have hitched.’
‘Yes, you said. And I said I didn’t mind.’
The road twisted more as they reached the side of the loch with all its rock formations, and Richard wondered how long he’d have to have lived there to be able to take the corners as smartly as Rab. He’d always meant to look up whether the rocks were the result of glaciations. Given that he’d never done so he supposed he wasn’t that interested.
‘I’m sorry,’ Loren said, quietly.
Richard pulled into a passing place to allow another car by, raised his hand to acknowledge its headlight-flash thanks. He waited until they were moving again to ask, ‘Have you fallen out with Stephie?’
Out of the corner of his eye he could see that Loren had turned slightly away from him to face the passenger window. Strands of her hair were dancing in the breeze.
‘Did you speak to her?’ she asked.
‘About you?’
‘Not necessarily.’
They were approaching the end of the single track road, after which it would be a quicker drive to the town. Twenty minutes, if the road was clear, half an hour if he took it easy. Someone had told him that the distance between village and town was a mere ten miles as the crow flies. He wasn’t sure if that was true. He supposed that Loren wanted to tell him something, wondered if there would be enough time.
‘So how’s your game?’ she said.
‘Fine, thanks. We’ll be onto beta testing in a couple of weeks.’
‘Does that mean it’s finished?’
He could see the sea up ahead, one of the ferries coming in from the Hebrides. ‘No,’ he said. ‘There might still be problems. Either with the game itself or with the publisher.’
‘Oh.’
‘But it’s looking good,’ he said. ‘We played it for the first time yesterday.’
‘That must have been fun.’
‘Yes.’
His mind flitted back to the darkened booth at DaCapo, to the moment when he’d loaded the alpha and seen the screen morph from blank blue to vivid. He thought of the eerie silence as gunfire flashed, the soundless contortions of infantry falling back into the mud. He’d dropped into the office before he’d left that morning, seen a pinboard covered in screenshots ready for marketing to decide what to leak to which forums. They looked good.
‘Did Stephie tell you that she’d had an abortion?’
He kept his eyes on the road, allowed his speed to drop as a van overtook him. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Well she might want to. If there’s an opportunity.’
He wanted to tell Loren that there had been plenty of opportunities, or perhaps that now she was leaving there might be more. After a moment he said, more amiably than he felt, ‘Maybe. It’s up to her to decide though, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I love Stephie, you know. She’s been a good friend to me.’
Richard nodded, letting his eyes flit to the side to see Loren’s face as she said this. She was looking straight ahead.
‘I’ll miss her,’ she said, turning to him. He met her gaze for just long enough to see that her eyes were glinting with tears then returned to concentrating on the road ahead. They were almost in the town now and he could see the new sign up ahead welcoming them to the ‘Gateway to the Isles’. Some misspelling had delayed the partner sign that would offer the Gaelic translation, prompting a volley of letters to the editor of the local paper, all of them expressing their outrage in perfect English and one, Richard had noted, from a second-homer whose children were educated at the Gaelic school back in Glasgow. Still, it was nice that someone originally from Buckinghamshire should feel such a connection with the language.
‘Where is it you’re staying?’ he asked Loren.
She stretched her legs out to allow access to the pocket of her jeans, uncurled a scrap of paper she found there. ‘Seaview,’ she said. ‘Original.’
‘It’s a wild guess,’ Richard said, ‘but I think it might be down the front.’
He drove down past the ferry terminal, turned left onto the crescent that overlooked the bay.
‘There we are,’ Loren said, pointing. ‘Ah well, time for you to abandon me to the chintz pelmet and hostess tray.’
He looked over at the windows of the B&B, fussy with net curtains. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to …’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Not fair on Stephie otherwise. Time she had you to herself again.’
Richard nodded and swung the car round to park facing the sea wall. He switched the engine off but neither of them moved. The sea was a very deep blue, the waves forming hypnotic zigzags.
‘Strange effect,’ Loren said. ‘Like a Bridget Riley picture. D’you think people ever get mesmerised?’
‘And jump in?’
‘Mmm.’
He looked at the water. ‘Maybe.’
They sat in silence for a minute and then Loren said, ‘This is nice, isn’t it?’
‘Parking and looking at the sea?’
‘Like an old married couple. We should’ve brought a Thermos.’
‘I’ve got a Thermos,’ he said, sheepishly.
‘Ha,’ she said, patting him on the arm. ‘You would have.’
‘For when I go walking.’
‘On your own.’
‘On my own. Usually.’
‘Ever get lonely?’
He opened the car door, but instead of going to get Loren’s bag from the boot he sat on the sea wall. The breeze played against his skin and he turned to look in the direction from which they’d come. The clouds were darker now, threatening to lower and wring themselves out over the town but equally likely to swoop out over the bay and away across the waves. When he turned back Loren was sitting next to him, her legs pulled up to her chest and her hands clasped around her ankles.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not really. I used to, years ago. But then … it was almost like I got so lonely that something overloaded and burned out. And now I don’t.’
‘Lucky,’ she said.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Maybe it’s safer that way, I mean. The sky looks amazing, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ The greys and purples were edging into black and the mass was sinking down over the peak of the mountain. ‘Loren,’ he said.
‘Yeah?’ she said, and then when he hesitated she groaned. ‘Oh, this isn’t about the other night, is it?’
‘I just wondered why,’ he began, and then he looked away to where one of the smaller ferries was docking. She swung her legs round so that they were dangling on the other side of the wall, started kicked her heels against it.
‘When is there ever a why with these things?’
Two cars and a van drove off the ferry, followed by a handful of backpackers. A shaft of light bleached their hair even blonder, and he couldn’t yet tell if they were boys or girls. They looked as if they came from somewhere Nordic, although he realised that the only Nordic people he’d ever known had been dark-haired and not very tall, like Tuula. He felt a pulse inside him, somewhere in his chest or stomach, and realised that part of him – or maybe most of him – wanted to stay in town, avoid any conversation with Stephie, go out and get drunk and try to pick up handsome backpackers.
‘Brr,’ Loren said, rubbing the goosebumps from her arms. ‘I guess that’s my cue to go.’
He wasn’t sure if she meant the chill in the air or the backpackers, who had stopped just along the road. One of them, a boy, was pointing up the hill. Richard could go over and ask if they were looking for the bunkhouse, he supposed. Loren could come with him. Four boys and two girls, what were the odds? But instead he jumped down from the seawall and opened the boot, handed Loren her rucksack.
‘Take care,’ he said.
‘You too,’ she replied, with a hint of archness that he found mildly comforting.
‘Will you be okay?’ he asked, even as he wished that he hadn’t.
; ‘Yeah,’ she said, and smiled wide enough to show the gap between her teeth. ‘Of course. I’m always okay.’
He met her eyes for a second and didn’t know if she looked grateful or sorry or ready to go to the bar that the backpackers would inevitably end up in, drinking real ales from the local microbrewery. She winked at him and turned away, swinging her rucksack over her shoulder. He watched as she loped across the road. She raised one hand and without looking back, waved.
0
This town’s too small, Luke said, stretching out his arms as if to delineate the bounds of some invisible cell. I need some space.
And so we found ourselves making a gloomy trek to the castle. The damp hedgerows, the dung on the road, water pooling in the muddy fields and the Friesians lumbering and gloomy rather than jolly illustrations from a child’s animal alphabet. I think we both had the sense that we’d outgrown the sparse pleasures of squatting, but perhaps we felt a duty to make a last visit, to close the chapter. Luke was wearing a 70s teal leather jacket with slim black jeans and looked thoroughly un-country. When he jogged ahead to keep warm I saw splatters of dirt on the backs of his trousers. My trainers were suede, old school, but done-in was cool and the puddles didn’t look much mankier than the beer swills on the dancefloor in the Union.
Fuck me, but it’s cold, I said at last.
Here, have a cigarette, he said, holding out his pack. I took one, stamping my feet to try and get the feeling back into them as he tried to find his lighter.
Remember the first time we came here? I said.
He nodded, clicking the lighter once, twice, until the flame caught. We drank cheap whisky and played truth or dare, he said.
Yeah. Well, this time I dare you to tell me a story. Something I don’t know about you.
I’m an open book. You know it all.
I doubt that.
We turned past the red brick cottages and began walking along the straight road towards the fence we climbed to enter the grounds. A sign at the side of the road said WORKS ACCESS, 100YDS, and then when we reached the gatehouse we saw that a new KEEP OUT sign had been erected below the previous PRIVATE.