The Writer and the Rake

by Shehanne Moore

  “The fact that despite everything, it’s worth the ride.”

  “Well.” She didn’t even trouble herself to smile. “I’ve had my shot on the carousel. Shot was all it was. Now? The paper . . .”

  It slipped across the table towards her. Slowly. He was dragging this out. Her mind wasn’t just entirely made up. It was set in tablets of stone. He could wheel in Mitchell Killgower, she still wouldn’t change it. Her life was perfect. Everything she’d ever dreamt of. It was more. Eight whirlwind months. Clothes that fitted, boots that fitted, soap that smelled like soap. As for these poor, doomed mutants who had fallen through cracks in time? She was doing them an enormous favor. If Mort was anything to go by, they were carrying the weight of several worlds on their backs.

  “Now then.” She smiled.

  “May I just say one thing, before you sign?”

  “You may not, but you will anyway.”

  “Mitchell Killgower is a lucky man.”

  “Mort, if you are about to give me another lecture on choice, this is—”

  “To get shot of you.”

  She lowered her eyelashes. She wouldn’t rise to this bait, despite what imploded in her middle. She dug in the pen.

  “Not half as much as I am lucky to get shot of you. There. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d honestly prefer if you went outside. You won’t mind if I don’t join you this time. I would, but I’m rather busy.”

  He drew the paper towards him. She wanted him to go in her moment of triumph. The last thing she needed was a bolt of lightning striking in here. It might hit her. Everything was in order but maybe he couldn’t believe his good fortune. Maybe, in leaving it, he saw he did love this world. That life, even as a time-mutant was precious. Whatever the answer was, the pen hovered between her fingers. She itched for her next signing.

  He glanced at the paper, then he raised his tortured head.

  “There . . . There’s just one more thing, Brittany.”

  She would never have guessed. She did her best to look interested. “And what is that, Mort?”

  “My name. See?” He stuck the book down on the table. “You always leave off the ‘e’. Do you think you could amend it?”

  ~ ~ ~

  Of course Brittany could amend it.

  Finally close the door to her lovely riverside apartment with its panoramic views up-river and down? Across the river to Newport-On-Tay, a bright diadem of lights, hugging the shore too? Of course. Unzip her boots? Pad across her hardwood floor to the two-inch pile rug, without a single pain in her feet because she hadn’t been wearing eighteenth century torture instruments? Of course. Pour herself a drink from the cabinet? Watch the ice swirl round the bottom of the glass? Of course. The odd drink was allowed in this alien new world she inhabited, because it was non-alcoholic. Sink down on her plush white sofa to admire the shining vista of window and view? Road and rail bridge standing on bright pillars of reflected light? Of course. Watch the evening growing interesting, hot, cold, bloody boring, around her? Absolutely.

  “There you are, Brit. I didn’t know if you’d be in yet, or not. Or if you’d have disappeared off somewhere.”

  Suffer the clatter as Rab deposited his sweaty gym holdall and his six pack—the alcoholic variety on the lovely hardwood floor? Almost shoot through the softly lit ceiling? She swilled the dwindling ice cubes around in her glass.

  “Oh, my disappearing days are done.”

  “Well, never mind me saying so, but that’s something anyway.”

  She settled back into the comforting arms of the sofa. She’d had to give Rab a home. Where else was he going to stay? As he clattered his way around the kitchen, spilling saucepans onto her immaculate stone-tiled floor, jangling cutlery drawers from their sockets, a park bench seemed a good possibility.

  “You all right there, Brit?”

  “Me?”

  “Aye. You seem a bit quiet like.”

  “Oh, there’s no sense in us both making noise.”

  He wouldn’t get that. He never did. Any more than she got this. Morte. The man’s name was Morte. She raised the glass to her lips and swirled ice around on her tongue. Cold as the river. Melting as her thoughts. Crushed as she was here, with bloody Rab invading her space. She must get rid of him. Morte too. The man must surely . . . surely be dead? Right?

  “Tetchy aren’t we, tonight?”

  She rose, padded to the drinks’ cabinet. The real one. “You might say so, darling, but it’s really extremely difficult to think with you around.”

  “You know what you need?”

  “Peace and quiet.”

  “A night at Skinny Joe’s.”

  It would be nice, but who would she go with? It might be difficult to think with Rab blundering through her thoughts like a buffalo. He was the only one who was around. To think that all her magnanimity to Sebastian hadn’t brought a single reward. Sasha had proved a jealous cow. Luce totally disparaged her writing. Megan simply didn’t ask. Talked about themselves plenty though. Still, there was the fame, success and riches. Just look at this place. Who could ask for more? She clinked some ice into a glass, listened to the chill thrill of freezing vodka hissing over it. Also there was the matter of what Morte had shown her.

  “Oh, I’ve parted company with the people who hang out there.”

  “Still watching your reputation, are you?”

  She padded back to the sofa. “I’ve work to do.”

  “You could come with me.”

  “How very kind.”

  She’d sooner cut off her eyelids with a blunt razor. Rab made a mockery of that old saying, any port in a storm. Rab was no port at all. Rab was a ‘she’d sooner drown in a dark and stormy sea’, although there was a port for him here.

  Morte. Why hadn’t she seen the name was death?

  She took an ice-cold sip. “But my next chapter beckons.”

  It was all that did.

  “Well, I better let you get on then. Get—”

  “Yes.”

  She didn’t want the blow-by-blow account, him cooking his spag bol or whatever the hell he was zapping in the microwave and joining her with his feet up on the coffee table here. Her iPad was down behind the cushions. She set the glass down on the table where it swum like a river. Or maybe that was just the way it seemed in the silvery light beaming in from the river?

  She breathed deeply, reached for the iPad, waited for the familiar power up.

  Where was she?

  Oh yes, Roshilda, her new heroine, had just discovered her love for Czar who Rab thought sounded like a dog—the name anyway. She could write this, couldn’t she? Look at the red sky, the fiery clouds, the ripples spreading like pearl drops towards the great unknown. Not think about how bloody Mitchell Killgower had thought Ruaf sounded like the kind of noise a dog made. What was it about dogs? She let her fingers hover.

  “How do you define love, Brittany?”

  Easily. She was a writer.

  “There’s a hundred different kinds of it.”

  “Thank you, Morte. I don’t need a lesson from you.”

  She didn’t need to imagine his voice either, an incessant drone in the hollow tunnels of her heart. On a sliding scale of what she’d give to swat it, this would be a five, her eyeteeth, her bunions, still there, had been for years but weren’t so bad now she wasn’t wearing torture implements, her new Saskia’s dress.

  Her riches, her success, her fame.

  She struck another key.

  ‘But that person, by ways too complicated, too tortuous, too twisted to explain, becomes that very one you will never find another of, who you will perish without.’

  She wasn’t dying. Let her not be stupid.

  She wasn’t exactly living either.

  She cleared he
r throat, tucked the loose strand of hair behind her ear. Why had Morte tried to ruin her parade tonight? Hadn’t she found great love here in her world? This perfect bubble? Devoid of men, devoid of everything that could possibly contaminate it? Mitchell Killgower now, he’d been the contamination to end contaminations. It was why her heart might beat faster when she thought of him, if she let it.

  “Sorry, Brit, did you just say something?” Rab stuck his head around the freezer door.

  “I was just reading back what I’d written.”

  Mitchell Killgower.

  How did she define love?

  What an impossible question.

  Mitchell Killgower.

  The other half of her circle. The imperfect circumference she was imperfect without. Had he woven into the fabric of her soul so that sitting here now without him, was a knot in her throat, a fist in her chest, a great hand reaching down leaving only empty chasms, the knowledge that if this was all there was, this was not enough?

  Ridiculous.

  Anyway, wasn’t he lucky to be without her?

  I will find you.

  Yeah, right.

  He’d have forgotten her by now.

  I know you, Brittany

  She leaped to her feet. Then she leaped backwards. Ridiculous didn’t even begin to come into it. Look at her iPad, the screen shattered beyond repair.

  She’d had to do these things. Had to walk away. Anything less was madness. For him too.

  It was also dust and ashes.

  Morte knew where to hit her with that remark about Mitchell being a lucky man, didn’t he? He’d avoided her face and gone for somewhere far worse. A slap would have been ringing. Aiming below the belt though? He’d nearly felled her on that table. Really, she wasn’t that bad. Really she’d done many nice things in her life. Look at her magnanimously giving Sebastian the house. If she was at times a brittle shell, wasn’t that because she’d been hollowed out? With nothing left to scrape a particle of dust from? As for Mitchell Killgower, the man was cut from the same cloth.

  “Brit . . . What? Your iPad.”

  She raised her chin. “I dropped it.”

  If she stayed here this would be her life, a bubble devoid of things that really mattered.

  When she thought of those times, those silly times, even those interminable evenings dining on Christian’s leavings, they hadn’t been so bad. What was it Morte had said about twisted paths? It was what it had all been. One step leading to another, to another, to this. The knowledge she had belonged and Mitchell Killgower must have loved her a tiny baby bit, or she’d never have been a prisoner of that design.

  If she’d met him anywhere but hundreds of years ago, he’d have been perfect. In every way. Was that what he meant by he knew her? And he’d find her? Things no one had ever said. Things she just couldn’t let him say at the time. Things she’d had to fight because these were things she couldn’t trust. Not after every stupid dream and hope she’d ever had had died, when she thought of every nightclub floor she’d ever lain on, every gutter she’d found her way out of. He had too.

  If she went back there—it was dizzying to think of—could she live there, for him? It could only be for him. Could she do that? Only she alone could take that step. Not him. Not Rab, kneeling at her feet turning the iPad over in his hands. Not anyone. She couldn’t. This was something she must resist. The most stupid idea she’d ever had.

  “Jeez, the screen’s broke.”

  “I know.”

  She glanced at the window and a shiver came up at the sight of the river rolling darkly to the sea. She could resist but in that second she knew what she must do.

  “Rab.” She took a deep breath. “I know this sounds stupid, but I need you to do something for me.”

  Chapter 19

  Her ticket to hell, the suitcase Brittany clutched tightly beneath the swaying pines, toppled on its side as she flicked her eyes open. It could have been worse. It could have rolled down the slope taking her with it. She wasn’t crossing the Styx empty-handed. The contents were her payment to the ferryman. Although her head was spinning, her stomach churned in that awful way, she reached down and fisted the plastic pull-up handle.

  She straightened. Killaine House rose like a stark ghost from the white sea of grass, looking as withered, as old, as beautiful as before. She took a long, deep breath. Even the scent was the same. Meadowsweet and drowsy bees. The sound of the river tinkling in the background. No wonder Mitchell Killgower loved this place so much. How strange to think she’d hated it. Now it was so good to stand here, she wished her arms were big enough to embrace it. Not just the house either.

  Eight months.

  Where to start? By smothering the fear that rose like a swamp monster and swept along her veins. If he was anywhere at all, he’d be painting down in the hollow where the lawn swept to the stream and a geriatric oak cast its shadow. It was early afternoon. She’d slept on last night’s decision. There were lots of things to see to. Oh very well, there weren’t. She hadn’t wanted to end up in any more strange beds by mistake.

  Eight months.

  Forget that. Now she was walking like a ghost through her own life, she couldn’t let the coolness she’d mustered the night she’d left to desert her, the what ifs to take over.

  Grasping the handle tighter, she set off, trundling the suitcase through the clumps of bracken and lumps of earth, a lot harder than through an airport terminal. In fact she’d rather lug it through an airport terminal.

  Then, there was the dress. She’d folded it away as she’d folded away the memory of Mitchell Killgower, in the scented aspic of her wardrobe shelves. So now, in addition to trying to wheel this ton weight of a suitcase in the opposite direction from the one it kept veering in, she was wearing the cream confection that made her look like a blancmange. It would be a cream confection that made her look like a blancmange with her foot through the trailing hem, if she didn’t stop tripping on it and the long brown coat she’d bought this morning. Thank God for the flat suede boots she’d worn instead of those shoes that were several sizes too small. It meant she wasn’t likely to break an ankle in the potholes.

  She could do this.

  She could do this.

  She skirted the front of the house, trundled her way to the side, crossed the withered lawn. Her breath shortened with each step. The hollow was before her. Mitchell Killgower was there, sitting on an old armchair underneath the tree. A brown overcoat provided protection against the faint spring breeze that naturally didn’t ruffle his hair. He wasn’t just—sitting—the sight thudded through her body—he was dragging on one of her fags as he sat back contemplating the canvas.

  She jerked to a halt. My God, that was where all her fags went. Her fags. Her bloody fags. She smothered the amazement, the laughter that bubbled. This was as if Morte was paving the way. And not just that, Mitchell was such a sexy damned beast sitting down there, wreathed in white smoke rings, dragging on that fag, his brow furrowed in concentration—not that this was about sex, as such—this was as if she’d never been gone, when time and distance were such hard task masters. When she stood wondering how she could possibly have gone. Her heart missed a beat. In fact it missed an orchestra score load. She wanted this man so much. In her bed. In her heart. Most of all, in her life. She could hardly breathe.

  She was here now hardly able to wait to touch him, tell him, hold him. And she could only be here now, having kissed Rab to do it, if there was something for her, something to be earned, learned, something.

  All that remained was for her to walk down that hill. She grasped the case tighter, stepped forward, froze, about turned.

  He wasn’t alone. Laughter floated through the air. Brittany caught the giggled ‘Shh’s.’ Dainty and another woman in a pineapple colored gown were tiptoeing through the wither
ed bracken towards him. Brittany dived behind the nearest tree trunk, lugging the case. Dainty was giggling?

  Dainty was the least of her worries. At least all she did was edge what looked like a cup of coffee onto the table behind him. The woman, the pregnant woman in pineapple, crept up behind him and covered his eyes. Brittany froze to the suitcase handle, her breath hitting the air.

  What did this woman, this young woman, this pregnant woman think she was doing? On a sliding scale of one to five, with one being Brittany’s feet stayed rooted to the ground and five being she collapsed in a heap, this was seven. She was falling into a grave in pieces.

  Her throat dried so she couldn’t swallow. Of course he did have the inheritance to secure. It just didn’t seem possible that this was how he’d done it. With some young thing who’d leapt into his bed.

  “It’s you, Felicia.”

  Some young red-haired thing called Felicia whose laughter peeled as she removed her hands from his eyes. And yet, was it really so unsurprising when she thought about his moods? She hadn’t felt enough to keep herself here but neither had he.

  Oh God, at all costs Brittany mustn’t be seen here. Surely the world would spin and she’d be back in her life, in her world, the one she maybe shouldn’t have gone to in the first place but she’d wanted her fame, success and riches. The one she never should have left instead of standing like a cast-off crow in this one, doing her dignified best to cling to the tattered feathers of her calm? The one he’d had doubts about being with her in too.

  Eight months?

  Not that long surely? Oh all right, seven months and twenty-seven days too long by the looks of this.

  As if it wasn’t bad enough lurid images of him and that woman in his arms, in his bed, filled her head, and the words ‘doomed forever’ clanged—was that why she’d been in the snow, drunk again—the suitcase set off down the hollow on its wheels.