by Zoe Strachan
What the fuck happened to the right to roam, Luke said.
Doesn’t apply if you’re rich enough, I guess. So what will we do then?
You want your truth, don’t you? So let’s start with a dare.
What? I said, looking around.
Well – he hunched down to tie one of his laces that had come undone – Why should we let them stop us?
We skulked through the grounds, keeping off the road as much as possible. There wasn’t any sign of the works that required access, and we started to get cockier and to speak in louder voices, even when we reached the castle and saw piles of scaffolding in the driveway. We went round the back, as we had done before, and found that our window was still unfastened. I slipped in first, feeling a familiar twinge in my chest; that flash of imagining in which Luke turned on his heels and ran, leaving me there alone. But he followed me, closing the window softly behind him. We wandered through the service corridor, trailing our fingers against the tiled walls, before following the stairs up into the entrance hall, and then up again, the grand staircase, and along the long passageway that led to our light corner room.
Smell that, Luke said, sprawled on the chaise-longue like the model in a grubby fashion plate, beginning to roll a joint. He held out a pinch of grass and, still sitting cross-legged on the parquet floor, I leaned forward and sniffed.
Strong, I said.
He grinned. You bet, he said, and then he sat bolt upright.
What, I said, quietly, because I thought I’d heard a noise as well.
Luke shrugged but he was still whispering when he said, Old buildings, they always creak, eh?
I nodded, and we sat in silence for a second. He sighed, and ran his tongue along the edge of the Rizla, but then we both heard a bang.
Fuck, he said, dropping the half-made joint on the floor.
Was that a door slamming, I said. Was it?
Dunno.
Did you shut the window?
Yeah. I think so. I don’t know.
I stared at Luke, and then edged to my feet. I kept thinking I heard footsteps, but Luke stood up as well and laid his hand on my arm.
It’s the wind, he said. It was something outside.
Sure, I said, but my heart was pounding inside my ribcage.
We heard more creaks, and then another, quieter noise, perhaps that of a door closing somewhere.
Shit Luke, there’s someone here. There’s someone in the building.
I stared at the door, expecting it to open any second, my mind racing as I tried to think what I’d say, how we’d talk our way out of this, and then I noticed the key in the lock. I leapt forward and eased it round, so that it made only the slightest click as the lock fell into place. Luke nodded at me, and then we heard the sound, closer now, of another door closing. Someone was working their way along the corridor, checking the rooms.
Luke made for the nearest of the sash windows but it wouldn’t budge. I tried another but it was locked as well, the catch far too high for me to reach.
Here, Luke hissed, and I saw a chink at the bottom of the window he was struggling to raise and rushed to help him.
It’s going to make a noise, I mouthed, and he held his hands out as if to say, what else can we do?
Sliding our fingers through the gap we both pulled as hard as we could, until with a grinding noise that seemed deafening, we forced the window open by about a foot. I looked back at the door, expecting someone to start banging and shouting.
Fuck, Luke whispered. This time we pushed the window from below, until at last it was open far enough to squeeze through.
Luke shoved me towards it and I slung my right leg out, looking down at the grass of the drying green below. For an instant the glossy painted posts and cracked wooden poles made me think of home. The drop was only about ten feet but it was daunting enough for me.
Go, Luke said, and I managed to get my other leg through the window and clumsily flopped to the ground. I hauled myself to my feet just as Luke landed, knees buckling, beside me.
Run, he said, and we took off, round the back of the castle and away.
Adrenaline was still flickering across my synapses when we reached the pub, despite the chilly walk back into town, and it took a hastily swallowed pint to quell it. We relived each second of our narrow escape, making more and more extreme projections of what could have happened had we been caught. Maybe he had a gun, if he’d come from the farm. Maybe it wasn’t a person at all.
Some dare, eh? Luke said.
Yeah, some dare.
Want another drink?
Of course. But you’re not getting out of it that easy.
Out of what?
Well, it’s truth or dare, remember? You owe me.
He laughed. Okay. Now I think on it, maybe there is something that’s up your street.
We were interrupted by someone I recognised as a friend of Lucy’s; not Diane, but perhaps the girl who’d been beaten that night, before we started our own game of doubles. She was looking for pills, but Luke flashed a glance towards the sharp-eyed barman and gave her a hard time for approaching him in public.
Come round the flat tomorrow, yeah? he said, at last.
Aren’t you in Herrick?
Nah. Not any more.
She found a pen and he scrawled the address on the back of a flyer for the dodgy club at the other end of town, which she then examined as if it was a museum quality artefact.
After my 12 o’clock lecture?
Yeah, whatever. I’ll sort you out then.
Idiot, he muttered, as she walked away. What the fuck would I do if I got barred from this place, eh?
And then he sat back against the reclaimed choir stall we were sitting on and began the story that he thought might be right up my street.
21
The sky opened as Richard left the town and although he had his wipers on the highest speed it was hard to see his way ahead on the single track road. Dips and hollows in the tarmac filled with water and even a sober driver could misjudge a turn and skite across the road into rock or loch or oncoming vehicle. When at last he reached the house his neck was rigid with tension. Hopping out of the car to open and close the gate was enough to soak him to the skin. Three sheep were cowering under the overhang of the Manby’s front hedge (his neighbours’ obsession with privet mystified him; surely it interfered with the view of the islands). One ewe issued a miserable bleat but they failed to muster the energy to skitter away from him.
He kicked his shoes off in the hall and ducked into the utility room to peel off his sodden t-shirt and trousers. Loren’s bedclothes and towels were hanging on the pulley already, as though Stephie had tried to wash all trace of her friend away. He reached up and straightened the corner of one of the fitted sheets where it was scrunched. He wanted a drink, he realised. A drink and the curtains closed and a game, nothing to do with war and nothing he’d made. One of those ephemeral Japanese things with pastel colours and compellingly repetitive tasks. Shivering, he realised that Stephie must have removed his clean clothes from the pulley, and he couldn’t bear to take the wet ones out of the machine and put them on again. If he was quick he might get up the stairs and into his bedroom before she spotted him, but no, of course she was there, standing in the kitchen doorway, smirking at the sight of him in his M&S jockey shorts.
‘Did you go like that?’ she asked. ‘Or did Loren manage to strip you off en route?’
‘I’ve got to go and have a bath,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
Stephie looked hurt, and he quickly added, ‘What do you fancy for tea?’
She shrugged.
‘Sorry,’ he repeated. ‘The drive back was hellish and now I’m freezing. That’s all.’
‘I’m kind of in the mood for making something,’ she said. ‘If that’s okay.’
‘That would be really good,’ he said, smiling. ‘Brilliant.’ It was slightly too much to seem genuine, he realised, but he walked past her and went upstairs anyway, locked the
door of the bathroom and turned the hot tap on full so that it overwhelmed the noise of the rain beating down on the skylight.
When he came downstairs he saw that Stephie had decorated the kitchen table with tealights placed in glass jars from the recycling. With just these and the light above the cooker the room was dim and unfamiliar. Outside it was still raining, though not as heavily, and the sky was dark grey.
‘Pretty,’ he said.
‘Yeah well, in the absence of proper candleholders. Want a drink?’
‘I can’t tell you how much.’
‘Was Loren doing your head in?’ she said.
‘No,’ he said. Stephie twisted the top on a bottle so that it crackled free. ‘She was … fine.’
‘I bought more gin.’
‘Thanks, that was nice of you. Didn’t you get drenched?’
She shook her head, leaning over the table to check that her measures were equal. ‘Just missed the downpour.’ She topped the glasses up with tonic and handed him one. Just as he took a swig she said, ‘Did you sleep with her?’
He choked and it was a moment before he managed to say, ‘What, on the way into town?’
‘At any time.’
‘Of course not. Why?’
‘Experience. And something she said.’
‘What?’ He took another mouthful, more carefully this time.
‘I don’t know. It was just, like, as if she knew something about you that I didn’t, or she knew you in some other way.’
‘No,’ he said, wondering how much Loren had told Stephie and whether he was about to be caught out. ‘There was nothing like that at all.’
Stephie nodded. He wasn’t sure if she believed him or not, or whether it mattered. ‘She’s gone now,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
Stephie picked up her fork and turned it in her hands as if she was checking for a silver mark, then replaced it beside her tablemat. Richard got up and went over to the oven, hunched down and peered through the glass door. ‘Lasagne?’
‘Yeah. Are you bored with it? It’s like my signature dish.’
‘No, I like it.’
‘Dad still won’t eat pasta.’
Richard laughed. ‘He’d eat macaroni cheese. As long as it had bacon on top.’
‘Yeah, you’re right. And it isn’t that far off, is it?’
The timer on the oven bleeped and she drained her gin and tonic before getting up to silence it. ‘Open some wine, would you? I’ll be mother.’
It was half past eight, he noticed. He wondered what Loren was doing, imagined her in the bar of the Albion, the fiddlers playing in the corner as she smiled her wide open smile, downed her drink and looked straight into the eyes of a backpacker with strong cheekbones and arms windburnt from long hikes and sunny ferry crossings. Feeling the gin beginning to course around his body he thought he’d like to be in that position, with those possibilities. He thought of Sam again, of their kiss goodbye in the doorway of the flat in that dingy Dundonian close. Loren might be alone in her B&B bedroom, lying on a slidey, static coverlet, flicking through the television channels and finding nothing to watch.
‘Loren told me something,’ Richard said. ‘I didn’t know whether to mention it or not.’
‘Well you have now.’ Stephie stopped eating and put down her cutlery.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was worried I hadn’t given you any time to talk.’
She sighed. ‘I wanted to listen for a change. There was this whole family thing that I missed, back then, and besides, I like hearing about how you went away and how you managed not to come back.’
‘I don’t think I could come back,’ he said. ‘But I want you to be able to tell me things as well.’
‘About the abortion, is that what you mean? I assume that’s what Loren told you.’
He nodded, reached for the wine bottle and topped up their glasses. If Stephie was pregnant she wouldn’t be able to drink like this, he thought.
‘What do you want to know? What it was like? Why I did it?’
‘Anything. Anything you want to tell me.’ He took a sip from his glass, then another. All of a sudden Stephie laughed, a bright peal of noise that would have shocked him if her eyes hadn’t been twinkling in the candlelight.
‘Oh god,’ she said. ‘You poor thing. You’re trying so hard, and I appreciate it, I really do. But honestly, you don’t have to worry.’
‘No?’
‘No. It was early, it was medical, it was the right thing to do.’
‘Medical? Isn’t it always medical?’
‘What, are you thinking about coathangers now? Medical means they give you a big dose of hormones. Okay, I felt a bit pukey and it wasn’t particularly nice, but it wasn’t like a major trauma.’
‘Tell that to the manic pro-lifers,’ he said, and then wished he hadn’t although Stephie didn’t seem bothered. ‘Oh god,’ he said, slowly, remembering a distant conversation about disappointments, an accusation levelled at him by his father, lots of sentences beginning with the words ‘your mother’. ‘Did Mum and Dad know?’ he asked.
She nodded, serious this time. ‘Dad was apoplectic.’
‘I can well imagine.’
‘He looked as if he was about to have another heart attack. Though I’m not sure whether he was angry at me or at Russell. That was my boyfriend, Russell.’
‘The one Loren …’
‘Yep.’
Richard rolled his glass around as though he was trying to release the bouquet at a wine tasting. ‘Before or after?’
‘Before I realised I was pregnant. I only found out after we’d split up and I didn’t want to tell him. But it’s surprisingly hard to keep secrets in that town.’
Richard nodded, thinking of Mr Sim’s headstone, its graffiti epitaph. ‘What did he say?’
‘He didn’t have any right to say anything. It wasn’t his business anymore.’
‘What about Mum?’
Stephie smiled, and this time it didn’t reach her eyes. ‘Mum. Well, Mum tried to talk me into going through with it.’
‘What?’
‘She likes children. She’d like grandchildren.’ Stephie tore off a piece of lasagne crust, nibbled at it and replaced it on her plate.
‘And I’m not going to give her any?’
Stephie sighed. ‘Who knows? Maybe you will.’ She emptied her glass and held it out to be refilled. There was only a dreg left in the bottle.
‘There’s more wine in the hall cupboard, I think,’ Richard said. ‘I hadn’t got around to putting it away.’
As he left the room Stephie said, ‘Do you see how your choices might have affected me?’
The electric light in the hall seemed lurid after the candlelight. ‘What choices?’ he said, tugging at the door of the hall cupboard. It needed planed, or something, to stop it sticking. ‘I went away, I got thrown out of university, I came back home, I went away again.’
‘And I stayed close.’
Lying on top of a tangle of walking boots and a golf umbrella he found a bag for life containing a packet of toilet rolls, three tins of chick peas and two bottles of red wine. They felt a little chilly but he supposed the wine would warm up once it was poured.
‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me sooner,’ he said, struggling to remove the cork from the slightly more expensive bottle. ‘About everything.’
‘My boyfriend somehow managed to impregnate me – ’ she caught Richard’s eye and added, ‘ – well, I guess it was in the traditional way. He also slept with my best friend so that I split up with him and have now fallen out with her. Amid all the hassle I fucked up my exams, and I’m terrified that if I don’t get away from that fucking town I’ll be stuck there forever, doing the dutiful youngest daughter thing.’ The cork sprang out at last, and Richard filled her glass almost to the brim. ‘So yeah,’ she said, ‘I’m actually not that keen on talking about myself.’
He felt there must be something he should say, laid his hand on her upper a
rm instead and squeezed. She put her hand over his and squeezed back. ‘So, when are we going on this field trip? I fancy a change of scene.’
‘Anytime,’ he said. ‘This weekend.’
0
It seemed that once upon a time Luke had met a man. An older man, a richer man.
Hang on a minute, I said. How old is older?
I don’t know, he said. Late thirties, early forties.
And what age were you again?
Just turned seventeen.
Yeah, I guess that is older.
This man took Luke for coffee in a gallery café after seeing him wandering around some exhibition or other, sheltering from a downpour and discovering a hitherto undeveloped interest in portraiture. They struck up a conversation about the rain hammering down on the lantern light above them, how both of them were caught without hat or umbrella, how perhaps they should sit out the deluge.
Noticing the haste with which Luke scoffed one of those famous scones (I didn’t know they were famous, Luke said, I mean, how famous can a scone be?) this new benefactor – just call me Dan, please – insisted on buying him lunch; it’s only a fucking quiche for heaven’s sake. Dan edited a fancy art magazine, apparently, and lectured part time. He asked why Luke wasn’t at school or college.
Was he a paedo? I said.
Fuck’s sake Richard, Luke said, d’you no think I could tell a paedo a mile off?
I stopped smirking and adopted my best listening expression, perfected during increasingly tricky philosophy of language seminars.
Two jet black coffees later and Luke had explained that he’d left school early, without the results he’d hoped for. Dan’s concern was heartening, and so Luke embellished his hard luck story with an extra sprinkle of thwarted ambitions and family problems, and before he knew it they’d arranged to meet the following week to see the student show at the RSA. After that it was Dada at the Dean (I liked that one better, Luke said) and a tour of those intimidating private galleries where you have to ring a bell to get in. A few glasses of fizzy at an exhibition opening, ignoring the raised eyebrows at his sportswear, and Luke was beginning to feel that he’d been missing out on a very good thing.