Island Skye

by Fox Brison

  When the hell had she called for a cab?

  A second later a waft of Yves St Laurent’s Splendid Wood was the only memory of what had been.

  That, and of course, one rather humungous insurance claim.

  Chapter 5

  Skye

  The storm swiftly passed, both meteorological and metaphorically speaking and a shaft of sunlight pierced the gloom. I flopped back onto the sofa staring at the snowy white ceiling. Twelve months with the same person was my longest relationship and it hurt now it was over, but it definitely wasn’t worth fighting for; Stacy knew it, I knew it and honestly, I didn’t have it in me. The music on the iPod reached a crescendo and the next piece cued up, The Ride of the Valkyries. Apt. Stacy had swooped down from the heavens and had taken me for a ride and it was good whilst it lasted. I smiled at the memories. It had been very good for both of us but now…

  Stacy called it right, I was closed off, sometimes even cold. Add to that how defensive I was, and it was a wonder I ever got laid never mind made it passed three dates.

  I sighed.

  It was too early and I was too damned tired to be so introspective. Breakfast was calling, coffee, black and strong accompanied by, hmm. What am I in the mood for? I opened the door of the nearly empty fridge. There was no bacon and no chocolate cake. I toyed with the idea of going out to eat, but the news of both Stacy leaving and the fiasco with the car would have spread faster than soft butter on hot toast, so that option was out. And then my eyes widened as they lit upon a glorious dark amber, curling at the tail. Yum. I forgot I’d snuck them into the basket when Stacy wasn’t looking, and I began salivating at the memory of their deep, salty goodness.

  The microwave pinged and my Manx kippers were smoky perfection. Stacy banned me from buying them not long after we started dating seriously, she couldn’t stand the smell which, in fairness, permeated every nook and cranny long after the last morsel of fish was consumed. So, rather than mourning the end of my relationship, I celebrated being free to eat whatever I wanted, wherever and whenever I wanted it.

  A small victory, but one which I savoured, almost as much as my breakfast.

  I sipped my coffee, treasuring the quiet, relishing the caffeine hit coursing through my veins. Now wide-awake I settled down to my work; two documents were open, one serious and life-changing, the other my escape from reality, or as Stacy liked to put it, granny-porn. Okay, it wasn’t pornographic, it wasn’t even erotic, but my historical romances paid the bills and a little more besides. I was reasonably successful, even if my obsessive need for historical accuracy sometimes overcame the plot, but in the last few years I’d perfected my style and won a few rave reviews. Most importantly they allowed me to continue working towards my ultimate goal, my opus, a doctorate from Durham University.

  From the age of eight I’d been obsessed with saints Cuthbert, Oswald and Aidan. Miracles and cults; bodies that never decomposed; a man that would sit for hours in silence just being. I honestly thought Mrs Hargreaves, my teacher, made it up, a fairy tale like Jack or Cinders, but this tale wasn’t written by the Brothers Grimm. As a lonely child, with an imagination that was sometimes referred to as mitty-like, the legend of St Cuthbert swallowed my youthful scepticism and spat out a lifelong adoration. Throw in some Viking invaders and their mythology for good measure and was it any wonder I was hooked? For this reason (and a few others beside) I was somewhat of an oddity at school, and honestly, if it hadn’t been for Sara Jeffries and my propensity to throw myself at a small round projectile hammered at me from only inches away (also known as being the goalkeeper in the school hockey team) my life would have been unbearable.

  Sara was a rock star helping me to negotiate the hurdles and obstacles my obsessive compulsive tendencies placed in my orderly life. When I was seventeen and finally acknowledged I was a lesbian, she was the first person I told. I remember the agony, the turmoil I went through in the months leading up to the moment when I would bare my soul to the one person I could rely on and couldn’t bear to lose, the tension ratcheting as each night I lay in bed going over in my mind every possible scenario, from the ultimate best case where she would hug me and tell me nothing had changed, to the petrifying worst case, where I no longer had a best friend. When the time eventually arrived it was unlike anything I could have imagined. Sara simply smiled and said, “Took you long enough.” The normality of her reaction, as if I’d told her my favourite ice cream was mint choc chip, or my favourite colour was blue, took my breath away and I absolutely loved her for it.

  My mind wandered from Sara to Natalie. Natalie was Little Miss Popular back in the day. Clever, articulate, beautiful in an androgynous sort of way, graceful, athletic… the list was endless; every attribute needed to navigate high school successfully, Natalie Jeffries had it and then some. She was a sweet kid, but boy did she struggle with algebra! (I was being incredibly kind earlier, she would have failed maths without my help.) Once a week for three months I would sit next to her in the school library, her focussed on math, me focussed on Miss Mackie, the school librarian and my first girl crush. I did it as a favour for Sara, and by the end of the term I’d gained an insight into my future occupation. My day job was lecturing in the history department at Durham University.

  This was another thing Sara and I shared; love of teaching. She also attended Durham where she met her husband, Andy, but her degree was in sports, followed by a one year PGCE so she could teach PE. She and her children were currently on their Easter holidays. Sara was an incredible teacher, popular with the kids and their parents. She gave up a lot of her time running several school teams, aware how important sport was to children who may not have the best home life. Being a teacher also meant that she didn’t have to worry about school holiday child-care either!

  It’s a shame there weren’t more of the vocationalists like Sara around when I was at school. Maybe if there had been, those of us who were easy target would have had the protection we deserved, instead of having to suffer the slings and arrows as it were.

  I sipped my now tepid coffee and grimaced. I hadn’t digressed into the past for quite a while now, but seeing Natalie evoked certain memories. Memories I wished I could forget, like those involving good old Allison McNeil. She was the leader of the gang of girls Natalie hung around with. Ali McNeil was the alpha bitch, a mean girl who gave a whole new meaning to the term. Even though she was two years younger than me, for the three years we attended school together she made my life a living hell. Sticks and stones became my mantra as a teenager, and although words didn’t physically hurt, they left their mark on my psyche. I shuddered as I thought of the woman whose primary goal in school was not to get an education, but to psychologically torture me; MI5 could have learnt a thing or two from Allison’s wicked ways. In those days, the allegedly ‘good old days’, it wasn’t considered bullying it was just… playful… having a laugh… I swear our school motto was acid etched into my brain… ‘Can’t you take a joke?’

  And someone must have been having a huge joke at my expense seven years ago when she married my younger brother, Cameron.

  Natalie never joined in with the teasing, and I use that word in the loosest possible of senses, she wouldn’t have dared. Sara would have killed her for one thing and for another, she wasn’t the sort.

  When I escaped to Durham my life changed completely, and for once it didn’t cause heart palpitations and cold sweat to bead my furrowed brow.

  It set me free.

  ***

  The words flew from my fingertips, my hand/eye/brain co-ordination firing on all cylinders. I didn’t know if I was inspired by the mornings events, or if it was the omega 3 in the kippers, and truthfully I didn’t care one way or the other. I was cooking and I was cooking with gas. I was deep into the romance between a Viking raider and his conquest, a young fishing girl who looked remarkably like Natalie, when there was a furious knocking at the front door.

  I chose to ignore it.

  The pounding increas
ed and I heard a raised voice through my writing haze. Shit! I pinched the bridge of my nose; and I thought my day couldn’t possibly get any worse?

  Oh how wrong can one girl be!

  “Your car just ran aground!” Tam Morton, Tommy’s Dad, stood panting at the door.

  “Oh that’s,” I looked at his puce face, “erm… good?”

  “Good? Lassie, you’d better get your arse over to the beach. Your car just ran over Craig Thompson! He’ll need to go to the hospital.” I tried to stay calm, despite my rising panic. Oh. My. God. What if he was seriously injured? What if he was dying? Could I live with myself if my fucked up night out cost a man his life?

  “Hang on!” I checked and yes, my blue hatchback was still parked in its spot under the beech tree. “How the hell did my car run someone over? It’s never left the drive for two days!”

  “Craig was fishing, minding his own business, thought for sure he’d caught a whopper and he wasn’t going to let it go without a fight. The thing is, it wasn’t a fish he’d hooked. Craig only went and landed that fancy Beemer ye wife drove!”

  ***

  Berwick hospital, as with most small hospitals, wasn’t exactly busy. But then they weren’t exactly quick either. The hospital itself was an amalgamation of an old Victorian brick built country hospital with seventies style cream rendered extensions. Serious injuries were transported to bigger facilities, but Craig’s, despite the dramatic entrance Tam had made, was deemed non-life threatening and he was currently being seen in the A&E department.

  The beige walls closed in on me; I didn’t like hospitals. I particularly disliked this one, too many memories and none of them good. I closed my eyes. The day was beginning to catch up on me and I willed the prickling in my eyes to hold off until I could get home and allow the floodgates to open.

  The cheap orange plastic chairs were so uncomfortable it felt like they were made from nothing but six inch masonry nails, and rusty ones at that. Clearly relaxing wasn’t encouraged, and there was no way you would hang around for more than ten minutes unless you really had to. I figured it was a deliberate ploy to cut NHS waiting times, sorting the wheat from the chaff before troubling a doctor. Every so often I would wriggle in place, trying to loosen the trapped nerves in my bottom and the two people sitting opposite must have thought I was waiting to see the doctor for haemorrhoid cream. After about forty-five minutes in Torquemada’s chair, I lost all feeling below my waist. It was a good job really; I’d been eyeing Tam Morton’s ancient tablet and was readying myself to jump up, tear it from his hands and play a few rounds of Candy Crush.

  As the afternoon dragged interminably towards a slow and painful death at the hands of the NHS, the warmth in the waiting room, coupled with the boredom from doing absolutely nothing but stare at the same poster telling me how to wash my hands correctly, resulted in a soporific effect that should have been bottled. My dreams of stunning Valkyries racing from the heavens in fiery chariots came to a crushing halt, the shrill beep of my phone stopping their charge. I had no idea how long I’d been out, and I surreptitiously wiped the drool from my chin, before reaching for my phone with an arm that was as numb as my bum. The paralysis was spreading. I was like a marionette whose puppet master had been sucking on a bong for the past hour. Two more miserable faces had replaced the ones who’d been waiting when we’d first arrived. I must have been truly dead to the world to have missed them being called by the nurse on duty.

  Let’s just say she wasn’t a shrinking violet and leave it at that.

  Or maybe they couldn’t suffer these damn chairs any longer and so the NHS won another round in their battle with waiting times. I eventually pulled myself together enough to not only locate my phone, but actually swipe across and read the text message left for me.

  I groaned.

  Now there’s something you ought to know about me. I deplore text messages as a whole, much preferring to actually speak to the person, but I accept them as a necessary evil of modern life. However, I really deplore text messages with abbreviations, recognised or otherwise. I’m anal about such things; my brief forays into social media requires me to write with perfect attention to grammar and spelling, even if I do only have one hundred and forty characters to say my piece. My friends know this about me, they even bow to my quirks and act accordingly.

  Stacy, on the other hand, didn’t bother.

  Bck hme, she texted.

  I felt like a contestant on The Wheel of Fortune trying to decipher the hidden phrase without the use of vowels. Good, I replied. Short and to the point.

  Im soz it ended this way, she sent next.

  Me too. And I was. The end of any relationship regardless of how broken it was is never easy. The finality of goodbye is hard to take.

  Can we still b frendz or do u h8 me 4eva. Oh for goodness sake. Punctuation woman! And stop using numbers instead of letters! And it’s an s not a z. You’re not a gangsta rapper from Compton, you’re a personal trainer from Surrey.

  Of course we can still be friends. I replied. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

  Gr8. Im at ur place. Hve got all my stuff. Will do dinner when u cum hme. Hugs & xx

  What now? Firstly, I’m almost certain cum is not the usual abbreviation for come, and secondly, I rarely warranted more than six or seven words at a time. Was this message meant for me or someone else? I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. I deciphered the coded text again and once more for good measure, analysing each and every nuance, before giving myself a mental slap. Of course Stacy wasn’t cheating on me, I was allowing my own guilt to colour my reasoning. It was classic Skye behaviour. It would be good to remain friends with Stacy (hey I liked a good lesbian cliché as much as the next girl) she wasn’t bad company, we were just a bad fit romantically.

  The double doors leading through to the treatment area opened and Craig hobbled through with nothing more than an elastic bandage on his bruised foot, a prescription for ibuprofen, and stern instructions to remain off his feet for a couple of days.

  God. Damn. It! My phone beeped again. Trying to juggle a prescription, Craig’s size 11 left boot and my handbag, I managed to extricate it whilst Tam and Craig waited. I shooed them on and gave Tam my keys. Surely two grown men could manage to exit a hospital and get into a car, even if one of them was on crutches.

  Did u get my last txt? Left Skye on the iland. Cant w8 2 c u. xxx

  Wow.

  Okay.

  Guess there’s no need to reply to that one, I thought to myself. In the car back to the island, I barely said two words; Stacy’s text delivered parting shots, deliberate or accidental, were a slap in the face. So much for the amazing sex! I touched my hand to my cheek and wiped away a tear, hoping that Craig and Tam were too lost in their conversation about fishing off Brewer’s Point to notice me. It was disconcerting how dramatically my life had altered, and the speed at which these lemons were coming didn’t leave me much time to slice them for gin and tonic, let alone make lemonade.

  Stacy’s betrayal hurt like a bitch.

  By the time we got back on the island, almost getting caught out by the tide for a second time in twenty-four hours, it was gone six. I dropped Craig off safely, and popping in to say a quick hello to his wife, Hattie, I offered to do any shopping they might need for the next few days. She quickly made up a list and was effusive in her thanks, so much so I was redder than an overripe tomato and stuttering like a nervous schoolgirl.

  I hated the attention.

  When I was younger I volunteered at the local old folks home. I would sit and read to the residents, or just listen as they told stories of when they were younger and life hadn’t left them behind. I knew what isolation felt like and my time there alleviated both mine and that of a few lonely old people. I felt guilty whenever relatives or nurses would thank me, or tell me how great I was because, in all honesty, I’d have gone anywhere to get out of the house to escape my father who treated me like a devil worshipper. Doing a good deed was simply an incidental
side-effect of my entirely selfish needs.

  I opened the cottage door to silence and darkness. I dropped my keys in the bowl on top of the bureau and collapsed onto the couch. I was fit for nothing but the three b’s.

  Bath. Beer. Bed

  And not necessarily in that order.

  Chapter 6

  Natalie

  Hey Nat, how’d rehab go?

  Sara

  It went.

  Nat

  That good eh? I’m sorry, I wish there was something I could do to make you feel better.

  Sara

  Me too.

  Nat

  Well I can’t fix your knee but I do have some news that might cheer you up a bit.

  Sara

  Go on, I’ll try anything at the moment.

  Nat

  Guess who Aunty Mags took to Berwick train station today?

  Sara

  Not… Oh please God let it be Stacy. I don’t think all the beer in the Smuggler’s would allow me to suffer her tonight.

  Nat

  Ding ding ding we have a winner.

  Sara

  Woo hoo and my prize is not having to listen to that chicken head’s inane chatter.

  Nat

  Nat, I know we joke on, but I also remember a certain crush you had on your algebra tutor. Skye has a million and one things on her mind at the moment. Let’s try not to make it a million and two.

  Sara

  Jesus, Sara, I was fifteen years old and she’s just split up with her gf like two minutes ago. Give me some credit, I’m not completely insensitive.

  Nat

  I’m sorry, I just need us to be on the same page with this one, that’s all. I’ll see you tonight about 8ish. I’ll get the first round in.