by Mairi Wilson
“Go away!” Helen shouted back through the door. “I don’t want you here!”
“Please! I need to know. I … There’s no one left to ask. My mother … Ursula … they’re dead. I don’t know …”
The words faded as Helen shook her head to try to clear it. Ursula? Ursula was dead too? What had happened? Why? How? This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be. If Ursula was dead, and Izzie too … Oh God. She couldn’t deal with this. She needed time to take it all in.
“Please! Open up. I’m not going to leave until I’ve talked to you. I’m going to sit here on this bench all day, all night if I have to, but you will talk to me.” The woman was clearly crying, her voice catching as she forced the words out. Helen was stunned. Unsure. Frozen to the spot.
*
Lexy shivered. Despite the watery sun on her face, the air was cool and damp and chilled her. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting there, but her legs were stiff and her back was beginning to ache. The wooden slats of the bench groaned as she shifted her weight, stretched out her legs, wondered if she’d be able to make good on her threat to stay here until Helen agreed to see her. She knew Helen must have worked out who she was, so why wouldn’t she speak to her? If she’d been prepared to talk to Izzie then why not to Izzie’s daughter? It didn’t make sense. But then very little about this whole crazy scenario made sense. She opened her eyes, let them settle on the mountain ridge in the distance, a faint shimmer of silver on the sea beneath them in her peripheral vision. It was so peaceful here. If she could just stop her mind racing and relax, if she could just pretend none of this was happening, if she could—
A movement to her left snapped her out of her reverie. Sitting upright, she swivelled round, just in time to see the door of the low adjacent building click shut. Someone had been watching her. She shivered again, not from the damp this time. Hugging her coat tightly around her, she stood, waited.
The door creaked a little, then opened a crack. Fingers appeared bent round its edge, then a head stooped to peer out at her. A man. Middle-aged, yet … It had to be him.
“Hello, Ross,” she said, gratified to see the face break into a smile. If she’d needed any further proof, she had it. Helen couldn’t keep up this pretence. Not if Lexy had Ross on her side, and he looked a good deal friendlier than Helen had. “I’m Lexy.”
The man’s grin spread even wider and he pulled the door fully open, stood filling the doorframe. He was tall, broad, thick-haired, with just the beginnings of grey at the temples. They might have had different fathers, but there was a clear similarity between him and David. Ross was what a fit and healthy David might have been and David what a pampered, monied Ross could have become.
Ross was twisting something over in his hands, looking down at them, with just occasional glances up at Lexy. Shy, she realised. But then, how often did visitors come to this remote hideout? Or was it something more …
“What’s that?” Lexy asked, starting towards him, stopping abruptly as he clasped his hands to his chest and stepped back from the threshold, shaking his head vigorously.
“It’s okay.” She realised she’d frightened him. “I won’t come any further unless you say I can. I’d just like to talk to you. I’d like you to be my friend.”
Ross kept his head down, but Lexy could see that he was grinning again.
“Would you like that, Ross? To be my friend?”
He looked up at her, nodded briefly, then dropped his head again.
She took a step nearer to him, holding her hands up in front of her. He swung his head to one side, looked up at her. The grin was gone, but he didn’t look frightened so she took another step, and another.
“Can I see that?” She pointed to his clasped hands. “Is it something special?” He opened his hands a little, looked at whatever it was he was holding, turned and stepped back into the narrow building.
Lexy paused at the threshold, then pushed the door fully open. It was a workshop, a studio of some sort. She slowly took it in. Canvasses: blank, half-finished, full of rich and exotic colours that were a far cry from the landscape that surrounded them. A smell of turpentine and something else she wasn’t familiar with but which seemed appropriate to the setting. A greyish dust covered most of the floor; her eyes followed it to where it was thickest and saw a potter’s wheel, and then noticed the shelves running across the back wall, packed with small figurines, some painted, some glazed, some still pale grey, almost all of them birds.
“Can I come in?”
Ross looked at the object in his hand, then up at her again, head on one side. Then shook his head.
“Please? I won’t touch anything. I just want to look. You have such beautiful things here. I’d like to see.”
Ross was looking down into his hands again, mumbling something Lexy couldn’t make out, but her heart leapt. It was a start.
“I’m sorry, Ross, could you say that again?”
“See-cret.” He said the word slowly, two distinct syllables.
“Secret?” Lexy prompted.
“See-cret.” Ross was nodding now. “In-side.”
“Oh I see. But I can keep a secret. I won’t tell anyone. I promise. I just want to look. Can I come in?”
Ross frowned for a moment, then smiled and nodded his head, stepping back to let her pass him as she walked towards the centre of the room. The low ceiling had had glass panels fitted along its rear, south-facing slope and the watery sun filtered through dust to fill the room with as much light as possible. Lexy recognised the other smell as her eyes landed on the gas heater in the far corner, its heat welcome but having little effect on the overall temperature of the room, on the damp of years that had seeped into the thick walls.
She stepped over to the birds clustered on the shelves like migrating flocks on telegraph wires. Like starlings, she thought, but they were seagulls and puffins, mainly. She realised as she stood closer that there were other items too, not just birds. Small bowls and plates decorated with thistles and heather; miniature croft houses and byres, not dissimilar to this one, in bas-relief against mountains and hills; even a few sheep and the odd Highland cow. Tourist fare, she thought, wondering if this was how Helen survived if money ever failed to arrive from Malawi. And another shelf near the bottom was filled with familiar green-and-blue vases, thistles freshly glazed, and exactly like the one on Ursula’s draining board, the one in Izzie’s hallway.
The paintings were different, though. Not at all what she would associate with the Scottish Highlands. These, she realised with a shock, were African. A more refined version of the prints that had adorned the walls of the hotel in Malawi. Leaning forward to look more closely, she was surprised to see the initials in the corner were not those she’d expected but “RM”.
“Did you do these, Ross?” she asked, looking back at him over her shoulder. He nodded. “They’re very good.” He nodded again, then came over towards her.
He opened his hands, and on his palm sat a figurine of a small bird. No seagull, this one. No stranger either: she’d seen one before. Two, in fact. Identical birds. Honeybirds, she now knew.
“Ross! This is … Where did you get this?” She looked around her. There were no others like this in the studio. “Ross?”
Ross put the bird down on the bench in front of them. He stepped back. Watching him carefully, Lexy reached a hand tentatively towards it.
“May I?” When he didn’t react, she picked it up, turned it over in her fingers. It was exactly the same as the ones she had seen in—
“I asked you to leave.”
Lexy spun round, felt colour flood her cheeks.
“I was just—”
“You should leave. Ross, come here. Give me the bird. You know you’re not allowed to play with that one.”
“She. Asked.”
“Did she.” Helen’s eyes were black as she kept them fixed on Lexy; she reached her hand out to Ross and drew him in beside her.
“I’m sorry,” Lexy began.
“I did. But I was curious. I’ve seen one before. Two actually. My mother had one. And there was one in Ursula’s flat. Identical. So I wanted to look. Bit of a coincid—”
“It doesn’t mean a thing. I’ve been making and selling birds for years. All over the place. Anyone could buy one.”
Lexy looked around her. “Birds, yes. But not honeybirds. It’s special, isn’t it? Why would Ursula and my mother both—”
“Leave us alone! Just go. Get out. I don’t want you here.” Ross began to whimper. “Shh, Ross. It’s all right. I didn’t mean to frighten you. Let’s go into the house. Come on, darling.” She turned the hunched man towards the door, pinned Lexy with one more glare. “See what you’ve done? Get out. And don’t come back.”
Helen waited outside the door, Ross hiding his face in her arms, until Lexy reluctantly stepped outside. Helen then locked the door, pocketed the key and led Ross slowly into the house, without another word.
Lexy looked after them, angry and frustrated. But above all, puzzled. It wasn’t the reception she’d expected. None of it had gone quite as she’d thought it would. And the honeybirds had really thrown her. She’d assumed they were some souvenir Ursula or her mother had acquired in Malawi. But what if they’d been made here, in a croft in the Highlands? Didn’t that prove that there was a connection between them all? How could Helen deny it?
Lexy walked back down the track to her car, deep in thought. She leant against the bonnet and looked back up at the small, low croft house, thinking about the people inside. Her grandmother and her uncle. She was sure of it. She’d find a way of forcing Helen to acknowledge her. Her grandmother owed her that much at least. She sighed and pushed herself off the bonnet, turned towards the driver’s door, searching her pockets for keys. As her fingers clasped the metal, though, she realised she was too restless, too upset to go back to the hotel. She needed to regroup, work out what to do next, true, but she’d been cooped up in lawyers’ offices, planes, cars, hospital rooms for days. She looked around her at the towering mountains, the wild expanse of heather-tufted slopes, and out over the glimmering ocean towards islands as quiet and tranquil as a lazy Sunday afternoon. She could think while she walked. She needed air and space and to feel free for a while. Dropping the keys back into her pocket, she brushed her hair back off her face and turned down towards the beach that curved like a smile beneath her.
An hour later and she was feeling better as she climbed up the path back towards her car. Her breath came in heavy spurts as she planted one foot above the other, hands pressing down on thighs to give herself leverage. She still didn’t know what she was going to do, but she felt clearer, more confident she’d find a way of making Helen acknowledge her. As the track toward the car evened out, so did her breathing. Up ahead, she noticed for the first time the bank of rhododendrons to the left of the croft. Not azaleas, blazing in glorious colour in her imagination in African sunshine, but Scottish rhododendrons peeking round the corner of a white-washed Highland croft house. This was where the photo of Helen and Ursula holding a baby between them had been taken.
The car was silhouetted against the trees, the fading sun playing over the bonnet as the leaves and branches danced in the breeze that had sprung up. As she watched the patterns swirl ahead of her, she saw one darker patch that didn’t move, a small speck just ahead of the wing mirror. Intrigued, she quickened her pace. There was something there. It wasn’t until she had nearly reached the car that she realised what it was: one of the birds, the first one Ross had shown her. She picked it up, turned it over in her hand, then looked around her.
“Ross? Ross, are you still here?” she called softly, stepping towards the thicket of trees. “Is this for me? Ross?”
The trees danced and shadows swayed, but she couldn’t see anyone, until there was a sudden burst of cracking undergrowth and her uncle’s childlike face appeared from behind the trunk of an oak.
“Present,” he said, and laughed. “You.” Then he disappeared and she heard him running back towards the house.
* * *
Back at the hotel, Lexy lay on her bed, hands above her head, counting the circles that had been painstakingly crafted in the Artex ceiling. Wondering why. Trying to focus on anything except the fact that her grandmother didn’t want to know her. That her last living relative, her mother’s mother, had refused to acknowledge her. Weeks of grief and trauma, of death and shocks, of sweltering African sun and relentless Highland mist, and it had come to this: lying alone on a lumpy bed in a draughty room in a faded hotel in the middle of nowhere. Not even counting sheep, for God’s sake.
It would be easy to cry, to give in to the despair that gripped her gut, twisted it, wrenched it when she least expected it. It would be easy to feel sorry for herself, to howl out her anger, her fear. Easy to give in. But there was no one to hear her. No one to care. If she got herself into a state, she’d only have to get herself out of it again. Life didn’t just stop. Although right now she almost wished it had. Before she’d had to accept that her last living relatives had rejected her. Blood wasn’t thicker than water, although it was certainly more impenetrable. Why had she even begun all this? It was her own fault that she was lying here miserable and alone. She couldn’t blame her mother, or Ursula, for this. She was the one who’d gone haring off on her heroic quest to find the long-lost son, and look where that had got her. Idiot. She wanted to wave a white flag at the universe, at everything she felt was conspiring against her. Give up.
Light was still glowing outside her curtains. Twilight now. Or the gloaming, as her mother had called it. Izzie had loved it. Said she’d missed it so desperately, the years she’d been in Africa.
“No time to readjust,” she’d explained to Lexy, “One minute it’s blazing sunshine and the next it’s darkest night. Like a switch has been flipped. Always one thing or another. I like things to merge a little, to let day seep into night, gently, so we can get used to the idea of change.”
Lexy had always throught she’d been black or white, one thing or the other, but now realised she would have liked to have had the chance to get used to the idea of change too, to say goodbye to her mother, to come to terms with her death, with the discovery of a family she’d known nothing about. She would have liked, most of all, the chance to ask them all why. Why had no one told her who she was? Why had she been lied to all her life?
She felt her brain chug into motion again, churning the same questions over and over, like a hopper straining to throw out an answer, a grain of truth or hope she could cling on to and feel it was hers. Not letting her give up and lie quiet. Exasperated, she rubbed her eyes, then flung an arm out to the bedside table to put on the lamp, banish the shadows that were gathering in the corners.
Water splattered over her arm and the bedcover as her hand struck the heavy glass she’d left there and sent it tumbling to the ground, her phone straight after it as her clumsy hand tried to snatch the glass back.
“Damn!” Throwing her legs round to stand, her foot kicked the glass and what remained of its contents, sending it spinning across the floor, leaving a darkening trail on the fuschia carpet, like blood splatter in a horror movie.
“Bugger, bugger, bugger and blast!”
It felt childishly good to vent her rage with words her mother would have pulled her up on. She caught sight of herself in the mirror above the chipped pink enamel sink in the corner of the room. She looked ridiculous. Her face pouting like an adolescent, panda eyes from the mascara she’d forgotten she was wearing, hair frizzed from the omnipresent dampness.
She sighed. Picked up the glass and set it down on the edge of the sink, looked for her phone. She sat back on the bed with it resting in her hands on her lap. She looked down at it.
No.
She couldn’t.
She threw it down on the bed behind her. Sighing again, she walked over to the window, looked down to the water in front of the hotel, then over to the mountain ridge that separated this small bay from the next, fro
m the red-roofed workshop and the low white croft house where her grandmother and uncle lived. She was sure of it. She had to find a way of getting through to Helen. Ross had seemed to like her, as far as she could tell. That was a start, wasn’t it? Maybe that was the way to reach Helen. Through her son. Her damaged son. Was that why she stayed hidden here? To protect him from … from what? Life? He seemed happy enough, making pots, painting the birds, his pictures. African scenes, locked away in his memory. How could he possibly know about those if he hadn’t lived there as a child? Helen must have known Lexy had seen them.
She looked round for her bag, pulled out the small ceramic honeybird, so familiar, identical to her mother’s. She ran her finger over the white initials on the base. HBM. Honey Bird Malawi, perhaps? Or something else? Did her mother’s have that on the base too? She’d never looked, but that would prove it, wouldn’t it? That they were connected somehow. It wasn’t chance. Her mother and Ursula had got their birds from Helen. She was sure of it.
She strode over to the bed, snatched up the phone and pressed the contacts button.
No. She couldn’t. It wasn’t fair. But she didn’t want to go all the way back to London. She couldn’t risk it. What if Helen took Ross away somewhere? If she was really rattled and thought Lexy was going to expose her, she might do something drastic. No. Lexy had to stay here. Had to go back to the cottage tomorrow to try again. With or without the bird. But better, so much better, with.
She tapped a contact, put the phone to her ear, paced up and down as it rang.
“Danny? Danny it’s me, Lexy.”
“As it says on my screen.”
“Danny, I want—”
“Fine, thanks for asking. How about you?”
It really irritated her when he did that, but she ignored it. He’d learnt it from her.
“Yes, sorry. Danny, hi, how— Oh, I haven’t got time for this. Danny, I need your help.”
“Now why doesn’t that surprise me?”