by Kirsty Logan
For Elodie, September smelled sour with loss. Since losing Luc-Pierre, she could not eat. She could not sleep. She snapped at her maid for forgetting to polish the sugar-spoon, for opening the door too vigorously, for scuffing her feet as she walked. Lying wide-eyed in the insomniac moonlight, she realised that she even missed the wails of Claude di Haviland and his feline choir.
After several weeks of mooning around the city, both hoping and fearing to spot Luc-Pierre on the arm of another lady, Elodie decided that enough was enough. Nora was her best friend and would surely understand. She would march into A Boy For All Seasons with her fists full of coins, if that was what it would take.
When the maid announced Mme. di Haviland before breakfast was even on the table, Elodie was so surprised that she had nodded without thinking. She tried to smooth the frown from between her brows so as not to insult her friend.
My dear, what a pleasant . . . Elodie began, her words failing at the look on Nora’s face. But what is wrong?
Nora’s jaw was clenched so hard that her lips had turned white. She did not remove her velvet pork-pie hat or sit on the chaise-longue. You must come now. There is no time to wait. Claude, he . . . I thought he was working on the repairs to a boy, you know, so I left him to it. For weeks and weeks, Elodie! I just let him do it. I could not know! And now, he . . . Standing in the dimly-lit doorway, Nora seemed luminescent with panic. You will see for yourself. But you must come. Please, Elodie.
Without waiting, Nora stepped back into the hallway and opened the door herself. It was all Elodie could do to pull on her hat and coat before Nora bustled off down the street.
Elodie had not managed to keep pace, so by the time she arrived at A Boy For All Seasons the door was wide open and Nora was nowhere to be seen.
Mme. di Haviland? Elodie called as she stepped into the shop. Her gaze swept from left to right: past the polished glass of the counter, the closed door of the back room, the shoes and cravats and handkerchiefs in a dozen shades of blue. In the corner of the darkened shop Luc-Pierre slouched, picking at the skin around his thumbnail. He was hatless and the edge of his shirt was untucked.
In her surprise, Elodie cried out before she knew what she was saying. Luc-Pierre! You look so . . . Imperfect. Awkward. Repulsive. . . . different.
It was not until he approached her that she realised what was wrong. There was a depth to his gaze and a roll to his walk that was out of character, and yet utterly familiar. With a jolt that pressed all the air from her lungs, Elodie realised why she recognised his manner. He was a man – just like the dozens, hundreds, thousands of other men peacocking messily around the streets of Paris. She wilted to her knees on the floor.
Elodie, called Nora from the back room.
Elodie stumbled to her feet and walked through the door to the back room. There, perched neatly on the edge of a chair, was Claude. His cravat was ruler-straight and his eyes shone flat as a pond in summer.
Good morning, Mme. Selkirk, said Claude neatly. How do you do?
Elodie could feel the heavy presence of Luc-Pierre at her back. She stepped forward to sit beside Claude, but Nora grabbed her hands.
Do you see? she shrieked. Do you see what you have made?
But how did he . . . how can this be?
Nora let out a wail and gestured to the workbench. It held the nicks of a decade’s toolmarks, and when Elodie looked closer she saw that each groove held dark red stains.
The mechanism is a simple one, said Nora. I’ve never known someone to perform the process on their own flesh, but it . . . I mean, it must be possible. The evidence sits before us.
I have been waiting, Mme. Selkirk, said Claude, standing up and taking Elodie’s hand in his own. I was waiting for you to come and collect me.
Not knowing what to do, Elodie let her hand be taken. Through her glove, Claude’s skin was as cool as morning dew, and she could not help but let out a sigh.
My own brother, croaked out Nora. My own flesh and blood. And now he is . . .
Now he is not, said Elodie. The words felt heavy with realisation. He is something else.
Now he is nothing at all, said Nora. Her eyes met Luc-Pierre’s as he stood in the doorway.
Luc-Pierre creaked out several coughs before he could speak. His voice sounded fleshy and wet, as if he had half-chewed liver caught in his throat.
What shall I do, Mme. di Haviland? Where have I to go?
But Nora could not reply. Luc-Pierre held her gaze for ten beats of his heart, then turned and walked out on to the street.
Elodie neither saw nor heard any of this: all she knew was the calm, clean angles of Claude’s face.
Is this what you wanted? she whispered to him, under her breath so that Nora would not hear. Is this what you wanted all along?
I want nothing at all, said Claude.
Over the following months, the happy couple were never out of one another’s sights. Nora closed the shop for a week and the city’s gossips revelled in the slump of her shoulders and the reddened skin around her eyes, but when she re-opened the shop they soon forgot. Business was as breathless as ever, and Nora had to take on two ladies to help with the shop floor while she worked on repairing the boys in the back room.
She did not call on her friend, but Elodie barely noticed, too busy staring into Claude’s shiny eyes and selecting new items for his trousseau. She also did not notice Luc-Pierre lurking in the alley outside her apartment in the moonlit hours.
The neighbourhood cats circled around his ankles hopefully, willing him to break into song so that they could join in, but they were left unsatisfied. A few times Luc-Pierre tapped on the front door, but always hurried away before the maid answered it.
When Elodie heard that Luc-Pierre had been spotted jaunting around the town with Cara O’Donohue, her only thought was a gladness that she would never have to tell a fortune again. Every night she removed the stash of gold coins from Claude’s belly, and every morning she fed them to him once again.
By mid-winter, both Elodie and Cara sported eye-wideningly large rings on their engagement fingers.
One January morning, barely two weeks after Christmas, the happy couples happened to pass one another on a street corner. Elodie and Claude strolled in perfect rhythm, their hat-brims parallel to the sky; Cara and Luc-Pierre trotted in a mass of frothing ribbons and ruffled shirtfronts. As they passed, the ladies tucked their gloved hands further into the crooks of their lovers’ arms, bobbing their heads to one another in congratulations. Their smiles were as wide as crescent moons.
Good morning, Mme. O’Donohue, trilled Elodie.
And good morning to you, Mme. Selkirk, replied Cara.
The men blinked an acknowledgment of their prizes. They all saw Luc-Pierre’s foot edge out into the space between the couples, but it was too late to stop Claude from toppling into the leaf-choked gutter. Luc-Pierre kept Cara’s hand caught in the crook of his arm and walked away without blinking, his back pointing straight up to heaven.
Girl #18
Girls #1-17 were no good at all. They’d been coming to the door in the weeks after the accident, but never for anything in particular. There was nothing left to bring, nothing to say. The bouquets had withered days ago and the cards still perched on the mantelpiece, the same as our birthday cards had for the last eighteen years. I wondered if we were supposed to send thank-you notes to acknowledge them. A part of me wanted to enjoy it. When else was I going to have every girl from school knocking on my door? But the absence of Ishbel weighed on me, weighed in me, like I’d swallowed a handful of pebbles, and that made it hard to feel anything at all.
But now I’m shoeless on the beach and it’s spitting with rain and the wind is pushing screeches into my ears, and there’s Girl #18. She’s standing a few metres away along the shore. Right away I know she’s different from Girls #1-17. I open my mouth to say hello, but
the words won’t come. I try for a polite cough, but it sounds like dropping gravel down the gutter. The girl looks up and I almost bite off my tongue.
All the other girls had had plenty to say. Ishbel’s room, they’d said. Just a wee look, to remember her. I made – At this they tugged something out of their handbags, like a piece of card busy with scissor-curved pictures of the two of them, faces flat and open. I used to know the girls’ names once – used to chase them around like a puppy after a stick. Now they were just a mass of shiny hair and shiny shoes and shiny handbags. Come in, I said, and moved out of the way.
I expect the same thing to happen with Girl #18. The forced words, the distance between us. But instead I can only stare at her. The scar splits from her right temple to the bridge of her nose, like her face is a badly-done sketch that the artist crossed out. The scar-crossed eye is sewn shut, but the other one peers at me flatly, blue as an enamelled dish.
With all the other girls, I had let them upstairs and gone back into the front room. Dad was watching the telly with his hands cupping his knees and Mum was polishing the little crystal animals again. I slid down on the couch so the leather farted and tried to hear what the girls were saying over the drone of the TV. They probably weren’t saying anything at all, because what do you say to an empty room? I wondered whether I should ask if the girl wanted tea or something, because although no one really likes tea, we all make it for one another out of politeness, like shaking hands. I rubbed at my throat where it hurt. There was a fat line of scar and stitching and I avoided that, but there was also a shiny-soft bit, the size and shape of an acorn, where the stubble wouldn’t grow any more. I stroked that soft patch with my thumb until I couldn’t feel it.
After each of the other girls had left, I went into the kitchen and made four cups of tea, then threw one into the sink. Then I remembered that I hate bloody tea and threw another one in the sink too. Then I remembered that Dad would only let his go cold and Mum would try to polish hers like the crystal animals, so I chucked the whole sodding lot in the sink and sat in the back garden where the wind dragged the water from my eyes.
Girl #18 stands with her feet in the water and smiles at me, so wide that her scar crinkles and makes the tip of her nose flatten. Then she turns and walks forwards, into the sea.
She used to stand on the shore. Ishbel, I mean. She planted her feet on the sand with the waves sucking at the soles of her wellies and she told me about all the other shores she could see.
Reykjavik. Svalbard. Cape Farewell.
Once she said she could see Labrador and I said that sounded even more made-up than Cape Farewell but she insisted that it was real. She said it was in Canada and I still thought she was bullshitting me but I couldn’t say for sure because Ishbel read maps like storybooks. She was getting off the island, and no one was going to stop her. That was all just romance, just fairytales, because anyone can leave the island. Since they built the bridge, leaving should be as easy as sticking your keys in the car ignition. But leaving is never easy.
Girl #18 is in the water up to her knees, and I’m struggling towards her through the freezing shallows, the sand tugging at my soles. With every exhale, like a mantra, I say Ish. Ish. Ish.
I passed my driving test on the day after my 17th birthday – our 17th, it should have been, but Ishbel always liked to be difficult and had hung around until after midnight to be born. She had never managed to pass her test, though she’d tried five or six times. She couldn’t do all the things at once, like changing gear and pressing the pedals and looking in the rear-view mirror. She was too busy looking forward, trying to see over the next hill. She always lost her concentration and her foot slipped off the pedal, and the car grumbled to a crawl, and she could never understand why. So she made me drive her. She jangled the keys in front of me in a way that was supposed to be fun, to tempt me into adventure, but when I scrunched up my face her expression slipped.
Please, she said. My eyes ache. My feet itch.
And I still thought she was being melodramatic but I took her anyway because all my mates were chatting up girls round the bus shelter and I had a cold sore that I didn’t want anyone to see. We’d already made an excuse to our parents and clicked on our seatbelts before I thought to ask where she wanted to go.
I don’t care, Angus. Just keep going until we bump into something.
Like Labrador?
Like fucking Labrador.
I turned the key and headed away from the lights.
Girl #18 is in the water up to her chest now, but I’ve made it in deep as my waist. Her scarred side is turned away from me, and in the fading light I see that she is not beautiful. Maybe that’s when we see the truth of things, when all the beauty is stripped away.
Tourists laughed at the BEWARE OF SHEEP road signs, like the sheep were in armed gangs or planting terrorist bombs or something, and we laughed at them too. So when I hairpinned the car round a corner and a curly-horned blob of wool was stood slap-bang in the middle of the road, my first instinct was to laugh. That can’t have lasted more than a second because then Ishbel’s hand was on the wheel and I felt it tug under my palms and my head thudded against the window and then the ground was the sky was the ground was the sky was nothing, nothing at all.
The sea is cold enough to push the breath from my lungs, but the girl’s head is still above water. When I drag her out I’m shivering so hard I think I might choke. She follows me back home, her feet soft on the sand, her hand held tight in mine. The whole way my heart throbs in my ears but she is quiet, so quiet. In my bedroom she stands in the middle of the floor and peels off her dripping clothes, letting them fall to the carpet. When she’s finished she doesn’t look naked. Not sexy or vulnerable. She looks like she is meant to look. She raises her head, gazing into me with that one blue eye, so close I can almost see myself reflected.
I go into Ishbel’s room. All the furniture was pushed to the edges when we had the viewing, because even big bedrooms don’t usually have enough space for a coffin. No one has been in to put stuff back so I have to wriggle in behind the bed to get to the wardrobe. The first items I can reach are the most recently washed things. Ishbel’s favourites. I let my knees bend until I’m sitting on the bed, and I hold the pile of folded cotton in my hands. It doesn’t smell of Ishbel. It smells of laundry detergent and that faint mustiness of unaired clothes.
I edge out of Ishbel’s room and go back into mine. The girl is standing as I left her, and I want to say that she looks exactly the same except that she doesn’t. It’s like I’ve been away for months, years even, and in that time she’s grown and matured way past anything I could ever be. She’s an adult. A woman. That’s the thing about girls: they’re never really girls at all. They’re always women really.
I dress the woman in Ishbel’s clothes, and we’re only inches away so I can see her scar as close as I see my own face in the mirror. It’s the same colours as Valentine’s Day flowers: pink and white and red, swollen and rounded like petals. I lean in, my hands in my pockets, and press a kiss to the scar.
It is cold, because she is cold.
Outside, I put my keys in the ignition. The woman stands outside my car door, her hand held palm-up like she’s waiting for me to hand her something.
Right, I say, of course. Sorry.
The words come out clear and strong, and as I swallow I can feel the gravel shifting in my throat. I climb out and go around to the passenger side. By the time I’ve climbed back in and fastened my seatbelt, the woman has started the engine. The car grumbles against the soles of my feet. From the passenger side the world seems to have tilted, like that game where you close one eye and then the other to watch the world leap.
Behind me is the silent house, polished crystal animals, cups of tea topped with tepid milk-scum. In front of me is the twisting grey road to the bridge. The car moves forward, and it’s too late for me to stop it. Maybe it’s
always been too late.
A few metres from the start of the bridge, I start to cough. The woman pulls the car onto the hard shoulder, but doesn’t stop. She takes her foot off the accelerator so the car rolls forwards at walking pace, wheels chewing the loose ground.
I open the door and lean out, the seatbelt hugging my shoulder. I cough and choke and feel something scratch up my throat and clatter onto the road. Without thinking I close my mouth to catch the last of it then tuck it behind my bottom teeth. It feels hard and sweet.
On the road behind me, the things I’ve coughed up look like nothing, just a mass of grey that you’d kick over like pebbles. As I watch, it shrinks out of focus. I slam the door.
When I face forwards again, the car has crossed the bridge to the mainland. I am the only occupant.
I slide over the gear-stick to the driver’s seat and press my fingers to the acorn-sized scar on my throat. The whole of Scotland is blanketed out in front of me – and who cares that I’ll eventually just bump up against a different coast?
There are always other places.
There are always bridges.
I turn the key and head for fucking Labrador.
Una and Coll are not Friends
UNA
I’m not going to sit in here with Coll. They can’t make me, they just can’t, and they say it’s because I’m distracting but that’s not fair because Coll is distracting too, so why should I have to look at him? Shut away in this wee room together, like we’ve got foot-and-mouth or something. It smells like old porridge and permanent marker in here, and everyone else gets to sit in the big airy hall that’s got windows and radiators that actually work. I don’t want to be distracted either, and it’s giving me the boak the way that Coll’s tail-tip twitches like that when he’s thinking. I know that nothing on me is twitching, so I can’t possibly be as distracting as Coll.
Oh god, look at him now. Any normal person would be chewing on a pencil while thinking about that maths problem – and I knew it’s Question Nine he’s stuck on, because it’s a total doozy – but not Coll. Oh no, he’s sat up straight in his chair, totally motionless except that the tip of his skinny wee tiger-tail is quivering and jittering right at the corner of my eye. He’s tucked it through the hole in the back of his chair and it’s swaying in the air, curling up towards his head but way behind his line of sight. He probably doesn’t even know he’s doing it. Not that that makes it okay, obviously, because it still distracts me.