Stronger Than Death

by Manda Scott

  I don’t think so. I live for my morning coffee. ‘I’ll bear it in mind, Mhaire. You were saying about Lee?’

  ‘It’ll wait.’ She stood up, dislodging the cats. ‘You’ll have some tea?’

  She’s kidding? She’s not. ‘Yes, thank you, Mhaire.’

  ‘Wait then. I’ll get it.’

  There were two doors to the living room: the one at the front through which we both came and a second at the back that led out to the privy corridor. In the old days, when they built these cottages, they put an outdoor privy twenty feet from the back step. Later, planning regulations forced everyone to bring their privacy indoors and the usual approach was to build a twenty-foot corridor from the back door to the smallest room, thus fulfilling the letter, if not the spirit, of the law. I followed her out through the back door and found that between them she and Lee had turned the long, useless tunnel into a kitchen. Not a bad idea. It has the advantage, at the very least, of keeping all the plumbing more or less in one place. I walked down to the end and back. She had been cooking, apparently, when I arrived. A kettle, bigger than mine, came to a slow boil on a two-ring gas cooker. A basinful of rough chopped vegetables sat to the side. From the look of the vegetable rack, she is living almost entirely on the output of the garden. It’s going to be a long, hard winter if she doesn’t get Lee back in time.

  The kettle boiled. She handed me a mug. It wasn’t tea.

  ‘Mhaire … ?’

  ‘Drink it.’

  I don’t think so. ‘Mhaire, I’m not—’

  ‘You’ll drink it if you want to drive back with your head still sat where it ought to be.’

  ‘Right.’ I don’t fight battles I’m not going to win. I followed her back to the living room. A red-eared white tom cat had my place on the sofa. I sat down a cat’s breadth to the left. The tea tasted the way you might expect bindweed to taste: a kind of desperate, delicate floral overlay hiding the choking death-hold underneath. Not healthy but then I’m not the one who’s into herbal teas. I could have been drinking hemlock and I wouldn’t have known it. No doubt they’d pin that one, too, on Lee.

  ‘I can’t reach her while she’s all walled up.’

  At least we agree on something. ‘None of us can, Mhaire. I thought you said they were going to let her out?’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘Can’t you talk to her then?’

  The fire was bright. Brighter than mine has ever been, even in summer when the peat is bone dry. It crackled. The cat spat. Mad Mhaire has eyes like a weasel, small and bright and hungry for blood. They shone red in the firelight. She took a long, long drag on the cigarette. In the relative bright of the room, the end of it glowed like the point of a laser. Her voice was uncommonly quiet. ‘I don’t enjoy your company any more than you enjoy mine, Doctor Stewart. Would you want me drinking tea in your home? Have you thought of that?’

  I can think of few things I would like less. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No you’re not. You don’t know what it is to be sorry. You walk through your life with your eyes shut and think the world owes you a living just for being there.’

  Is that right? ‘Am I so very different, then, to all the rest?’

  ‘We don’t all take our mark from the midden.’

  Fine. This, at least, is familiar territory. ‘So are we going to sit here and trade insults while your fake tea goes cold or are we going to do something about Lee Adams? Unless she’s another one who takes her mark from the midden?’

  ‘Not so far off.’ She smiled and it was not an enticing smile. The cigarette moved, a red light weaving like a snake. ‘She’s not so pearly-white as you’d have her be. She knows that, even if you don’t, and she’ll take what she thinks she’s earned for it if you let her. Remember that when you have to act.’

  I don’t have quite the right threshold for this any more. I moved sideways, displacing the cat. It was easier, for this, to sit face to face. ‘Mhaire, just this once, can you tell me whatever you think I need to know in plain English? If I know what’s going on, I can get out of here and do something useful. I’m sure we’d both like that.’

  She smirked. Or she snarled. Hard to tell without the teeth. ‘If I speak to you plain, you’ll sit there and argue till you’re blue in the face and the time for acting will be past. You do best when you’re not thinking at all.’ The cigarette stabbed forwards at eye level. ‘You need to learn to trust your elders and betters and don’t try to get clever with me.’

  ‘I should trust you?’ That’s ludicrous.

  ‘You should trust her.’

  ‘Is it not supposed to be mutual?’

  ‘Are you going to let her die if it’s not?’

  Right. There are games and there are games. Never before has she pushed this far. I swallowed a final mouthful of tea. ‘Just tell me what I need to know, Mhaire, and I’ll be gone.’

  ‘You don’t need to know anything. You’re the messenger, nothing more. She’ll listen to you when she’ll listen to no one else, so you go in there and you make it count. Do you understand?’

  ‘I don’t think she’ll—’

  ‘She will. Tonight she will. The police have got her now. They’ll let her out soon. If you call on her when she gets home, she’ll see you then. Tell her from me that just because she’s at the edge of a cliff, doesn’t mean she has to throw herself over. That’s all she needs to know. She can work the rest out for herself.’

  ‘You’re going to have to be more explicit than that, Mhaire. It doesn’t make sense.’

  The fire hissed this time, the cat and the woman with it. The room darkened, as if the clouds had covered the sun. Out in the kitchen, the vegetable pan boiled over on the stove.

  ‘Just tell her.’ It came spelled out, with effort. All I could see was the red glowing end of her cigarette.

  ‘Then what? Are you going to call her or do you want her to call you?’

  ‘Neither. I want her to come out from the coffin she’s building for herself and do something useful while there’s still time to make a difference.’

  ‘And if she doesn’t?’

  There was a pause. She leant forward. Her voice, when she spoke, was stripped of every vestige of humour. It was not pleasant to hear. ‘If she doesn’t, then you’ll be standing at another funeral before the month’s out and you’ll know the meaning of sorry then. Do you understand me? This isn’t a few broken fingers this time. This is a life for a life and a death for a death and there’s nothing you or me can do about it while she’s out there running hell-bent for oblivion like a lemming that’s late for the party. She needs to stop and she needs to think and there’s precious little time left to do it. You can tell her that too if you think she’ll hear you.’ The glowing end of her cigarette ground to nothing on the hearthstone. The front door swung wide. ‘Now get out of my home.’

  My head cleared slowly on the way down the A77. Cleared of the smoke and the tea and the madwoman’s rhetoric and the judgmental stare of her cats. Cleared also of the beginnings of a headache that had been hanging over, pressing in on my eyes, since Mike skinned up in the mortuary. She could be right, it could be the coffee, but it will take more than the say-so of Mhaire Culloch for me to give it up.

  It was late by the time I got to Lee’s flat. The traffic was bad from the moment I hit the main dual carriageway and didn’t get better all the way across town to the north side and then out towards the west end. I called the farm and left a message for Nina, telling her where I was going and not to expect me home for dinner. Somewhere around seven, I parked the car in the street outside Lee’s front door, and when she didn’t answer the land line, I put a call in to her mobile.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s me. Do you want something to eat?’

  ‘No. Thank you.’ She was out of breath, panting like a dog on a hot day. ‘I don’t want to go out.’

  ‘I’m not inviting you out. I got us a takeaway from Barelli’s. I was thinking I could bring it in.’ I hadn’
t planned on eating but I saw the sign on the way in from the motorway and it seemed like a good idea at the time. With Lee, sometimes instinct works better than logic.

  ‘Where are you?’ She knows me well enough by now, even with the fuzz of a mobile blurring the words.

  ‘Outside your front door.’ There was a pause. I heard her run up the stairs. A curtain twitched in the kitchen. I flicked the headlights on and then off, lighting up a couple of kids heading out of the grove.

  ‘Have you got the dog with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Come on in.’

  She was dressed for climbing: black leggings, black singlet, black Boreal shoes, white hands with chalk packed in under the fingernails, white streaks of it across her face where she’d rubbed her eyes. Her hair stuck out at odd angles as if gravity had pulled at it and then sweat had gelled it in place. Her armpits and the small of her back were stained a darker black. She smelled, strongly, of the climbing room—of rubber mats and hard-pushed sweat.

  ‘You don’t have to stop.’

  ‘Yes I do.’ She led the way through to the kitchen. ‘If I don’t take a break once in a while, it becomes an obsession.’

  It’s always been an obsession. I’ve never heard her admit it as such.

  ‘Anything special?’

  ‘I built a new route up the overhang. It’s as close as I can get to the E5 on Eric’s Cliff.’

  And so now we have a name. She has the right. The naming of the route following the first ascent is the leader’s prerogative. There was a time when she would have gone for something lighter, a parody of description—Oblivion Wall, perhaps, or Feeding the Sharks. I hadn’t imagined it as an epitaph. There was a time, too, when we might have talked about it, but she was already moving on, washing her hands, drying them, pulling out plates for the meal. It was like watching a piece of street theatre: a mime-dance, choreographed for the audience, none of it quite true to the source.

  I sat down at the table to wait. If she wants to act for me, let her act. Neither of us needs believe it is real.

  ‘How’s Claire Hendon?’ The question came out of the blue, out of the whirl of unnecessary activity. Like asking about the weather but slightly less relevant.

  ‘Alive.’

  ‘How long has she got?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t tell these things, Lee. I’ll be surprised if she lasts past the end of the week.’ And you won’t be there to do the post-mortem, so why does it matter?

  ‘How’s Dee taking it?’

  ‘Better than I thought she would. She’s followed pretty much the same emotional curve as the lass. While there was hope, she was angry. Now they both just want it over.’ And the rest of us with them. I haven’t felt this sense of urgency with any of the patients before but I feel it for Claire. The Unit will be easier with her gone.

  ‘You’re looking after her, aren’t you?’

  ‘Claire?’

  ‘Dee.’

  At the nadir of an entirely inane conversation, that was the most inane of it all.

  ‘I’m doing my best.’

  We lapsed back into silence. Her portable computer lay open in front of me, the modem still plugged into the phone line. Climbing, clearly, isn’t her only obsession. I tabbed through a Med-line file of published papers, three pages long, retrieved from the net. Names sprang out from the author list: Murdoch, H.S.; Dalziel, E.; Duncan, R.C.; Adams, E.K. Adams, Elizabeth Kathryn. You don’t often see her as that these days.

  ‘I don’t think so, Kellen.’ The screen blanked out in front of me, faster than any machine should shut down. She stood at my shoulder, her toe on the plug, a plate balanced in either hand. She smiled, or something like it, in the dusk. ‘It’s cooler through in the living room,’ she said.

  Fine.

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Better.’

  I lay back on the floor with my head cushioned on the arm of the sofa. The dog lay behind me, stretched out and replete, languishing on Anna Dalziel’s Scandinavian cushions. I can’t remember the last time we ate in the living room. Anna’s house-warming, possibly, an event of loud music and finger food and raucous testing of beds. Food was on the floor that night only by accident and only the most drunk of the party failed to clean it up before the lady of the house could see it. Even then, the dog wasn’t allowed to set foot through the door, never mind sleep on the sofa.

  Lee had claimed Anna’s rug as her space, her island in the unfriendly sea of the room. She sat opposite me, on the far side of the coffee table, one knee hugged up to her chest, her cheek resting sideways on her forearm. Her hands and her face showed stark white against the black of her climbing top, and the chalk on her feet marked a trail of footprints across the floor, stepping stones across the void. We floated on our separate islands and said nothing.

  ‘So do you want to talk?’ One of us has to say something or why am I here? But I am not sure, at this moment, if this is wise. I feel as if gravity has, without warning, stopped pulling downwards and I am no longer sure of the ground beneath my feet.

  ‘You’ve been to see Mhaire. You probably know more about what’s happening than I do.’

  ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘No one else leaves you looking quite so stressed.’

  ‘She could have come to see me.’ It has to be very bad before I argue semantics.

  ‘No she couldn’t. She’s stuck out at the cottage. If she had any kind of transport, she’d have been camped out on the doorstep for the past three days making a nuisance of herself.’ In the kitchen, she was wired, still high on the electricity of the climb. Now there is more of a distance, as if she has built for herself a wall and then moved behind it.

  I can’t reach her while she’s all walled up.

  So then I am not the only one. Perversely, there is some comfort in that.

  ‘She seems to think you’d be safer still locked away.’

  ‘She might be right. Was that the message? She did give you a message?’

  ‘She gave me several. I imagine that if you wanted to hear any of them, you would have been to see her by now.’

  ‘I’m glad you noticed that.’ Talking is like climbing. We move from one unsafe hold to the next, testing the placements, feeling for safer ground. ‘But all the same, we have to give her credit for trying. Did she ask you to fix the windows?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Fine.’ She smiled. A bright, scalding smile. ‘She’s not your greatest fan, Kellen. She wouldn’t have had you out at the cottage unless she was desperate. There’s only one thing would scare her that much and that’s the thought of losing her free building consultant before she’s had time to sort out a replacement.’ The smile mocked us both, denied the words any weight. ‘I take it she thinks I have a fairly limited life span?’

  Does it matter what she thinks? I shrugged. ‘Maybe she just doesn’t want to see you locked up for life for something you didn’t do. Has that occurred to you?’

  ‘It comes to the same thing, Kellen. Mhaire knows that if no one else does.’

  Jesus Christ. ‘You are a bloody lemming. What’s with the hard-wired attraction to dying, Adams? Has it occurred to you that there might be alternative options?’

  ‘Not recently.’ She leant back on the arm of a chair, chewed the inside of her lip and nodded quietly to herself. Her voice was hollow, devoid of feeling. ‘Well done, Kellen. It’s good to know where your loyalties lie. Herself would be proud of you.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It just came out.’

  ‘I’m sure it did.’ Her eyebrows arched black in the white of her face, lazy, laconic, infuriating. ‘And the rest? This was Mhaire after all. There must have been more.’

  ‘That was the only thing that mattered.’

  ‘You’re a really bad liar, you know that, Kellen Stewart?’

  ‘Really? And of course, I’m alone in that.’

  ‘I haven’t lied to you, Kellen.’

  ‘Only because you haven’t tol
d me the first thing about what the hell’s going on.’

  ‘I can’t. I thought you understood that.’

  ‘I don’t understand anything, Lee. To understand I have to have facts, and they’re pretty thin on the ground right now.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, but that isn’t my problem.’

  ‘Is it not? So what is your problem?’

  ‘Nothing that need concern you.’

  ‘Fine.’ I stood up, snapping my fingers for the dog. ‘Then I think we’ve taken this just about as far as it can go, haven’t we?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  I came as close, then, as I have ever done to walking out on her. She didn’t move, she didn’t say anything, she didn’t ask, she didn’t explain. She just sat there, looking at me, the black of her eyes flaring slowly in the light. The moment hung in the balance.

  Trust.

  Isn’t it supposed to be mutual?

  Are you going to let her die if it’s not?

  ‘I’ll go if you want me to. You only have to ask.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I haven’t asked.’

  I sat down on the arm of the sofa. The dog whined and pawed at the door, then stalked back and dropped down beside me, sighing her complaint at the boredom and the tension. Lee moved—not a smile, just a small twitch of the muscles around her eyes. She leant forward across the table and crooked a finger. The dog thumped her tail on the floor, stretched, yawned and made the three steps across the floor to her side. They met on the rug as if they’d been parted for weeks, and it was the most emotion I’d seen since I walked in the door. I stood and watched them for a while: a tan-in-white mess of enthusiasm and a slight, distracted climber who was once a part of the family. It never occurred to me that she might have been missing the dog, or that the dog might have been missing her. I went through to the kitchen and made myself coffee. Her computer lay on the table, dead to the world. I made no move to revive it.

  She was sitting on the rug again when I got back to the living room, not relaxed by any means, but less tense than she had been. The dog had settled in by her side, a pale body wrap, curling close to the black of her leggings. She ran a hand absently through the patched tangles of fur, teasing out the burrs from the farm, from the cemetery, from Mhaire’s chaotic mess of a garden. I sat and drank coffee. They lay together in the silence. The daylight waned and the heat with it until we sat in the cool of the dusk; two women, a dog and the unravelling threads of a friendship. I should be better at this by now.