by Claire Askew
Before she unlocked the peeling front door, she stood with her back to the house, looking out. From here, she could see North Berwick Law, out where East Lothian curved round into the Forth. Along the horizon she could see the huge freighters crawling through their shipping lane. Beyond them, a grey-green smudge that lit up at dusk with a string of pin-prick lights, was Fife.
A woman in a hot pink shirt walked by, a portly old chocolate Labrador plodding beside her.
‘Beautiful evening!’ The woman raised one hand in greeting, and then tilted it towards Birch. ‘Something in your garden smells delightful.’
Birch grinned.
‘The roses,’ she called back from the path. ‘They’re enjoying this sunshine.’
The woman hadn’t stopped, but her voice trailed back to Birch as she moved beyond the hollyhocks – a hot pink backdrop between their leaves.
‘Long may it last,’ she said. ‘Cheerie-bye!’
Birch turned to the door smiling, keys in hand.
She’d quite forgotten about the injured boy. It wasn’t until she was truly settled in for the evening that he came back to her. She’d kicked off her shoes, changed into her yoga pants, and uncorked some wine. The house faced roughly east and, deciding she needed a little sun on her bones, she headed out to the back garden, where some of the day’s heat still lingered. The only bit of garden she’d cleared so far was the slate-coloured patio: a few flags wide but big enough to accommodate a garden bench, which, like everything here, had seen better days. Birch had dragged an IKEA coffee table out – she’d only paid £15 for it, so a little rain-damage wouldn’t hurt – and now she was looking at a wavering red spotlight on its surface as the late sun shone through her half-filled glass.
Oh God, she thought, remembering the boy. Please don’t let that come across my desk.
She closed her eyes, tried to focus on the sun’s heat, the sound of the waves as the tide crept back towards the house. Beyond the garden wall, cars buzzed by at intervals, like bees. Somewhere, someone had a barbecue going – the smell of smoke drifted over the rooftops from the twilit beach.
I’ve got enough to think about right now, Birch thought, opening her eyes again. As if on cue – somewhere far off in the blue evening’s calm – came the panicky call of a siren.
13 May, 8.59 p.m.
Above the matte Astroturf of the high-school playing fields, and above the ponytailed heads of the girl footballers, moths and midges birled and hung. At this distance, they looked like flecks of glitter swimming through liquid. Swifts dived in and out of the floodlights’ glare, their calls carrying over the car park in the warm evening. Ishbel Hodgekiss zipped up the electric windows of her Nissan Qashqai. She wouldn’t risk a midge bite, even at this distance.
The dashboard clock read 20:59, so she flicked on the car stereo to catch the headlines. She’d expected the Radio 2 announcer, but instead she was treated to a blast of cheesy jingle: Abigail had tuned the stereo over to local radio again.
Questions are being asked, said the newsreader, about an industrial accident that happened earlier today in the centre of Edinburgh.
Ishbel bent over the steering wheel, trying to see how to retune the station, the newsreader’s bouncy speech pattern grating in her ears.
The site developers claim, he was saying, that the man was not following correct safety procedures when he fell ten feet into the building’s foundations. Our correspondent Jenna Buckie has more . . .
Somehow, Ishbel found the right button, and flicked through stations until she heard a voice she recognised. She settled back to listen, and began to scan the football fields for any sign of Abigail. Practice had just finished – she’d heard the full-time whistle – so any minute now her daughter should come sauntering out through the gate in the tall, green chain-link fence, and over to the car.
Ishbel didn’t entirely approve of her daughter’s continued interest in football. After-school clubs were all very well, but now Abigail was in college, her mother felt that any extra-curricular activities ought to be more academic in nature. The fact that Abigail still lived at home brought Ishbel a quiet, if guilty, joy: it was perhaps the only silver lining to her daughter deciding against attending proper university. But she couldn’t help but feel that this weekly return to high school – to practise for an under-25s team that included girls far younger than her – was doing Abigail no favours.
‘You can’t put football practice on your CV, you know,’ Ishbel had said, more than once.
‘You can, Mum,’ her daughter would reply. ‘It shows you’re a team player.’
Ishbel still hadn’t come up with a suitable response to this.
Girls began to trail out of the long, low buildings and back across the Astroturf to be met by their lifts. The younger ones climbed into cars like Ishbel’s: family saloons and people-carriers manned by parental taxi-drivers. But older girls, the ones more Abigail’s age, tended to walk up to empty cars – tiny Ford Kas and rusted Citroën hatchbacks – slinging their gym bags into the passenger seat and driving away on their own. Abigail hadn’t yet passed her driving test, though the constant switching of the radio station was testament to her practising. Every week there were a couple of girls who were picked up by unsuitable-looking boyfriends. These young men would sit in their decked-out Imprezas – engines running, music shuddering through the tarmac – and then peel out with a hiss of air from their full sequential gearboxes. Ishbel shuddered.
‘There’s a boy,’ Aidan had said to her one night, about a week ago. He’d said it in a breathless voice that Ishbel remembered girls at school using to divulge information while swapping lipstick in the French-block loos. He said it as though he were a co-conspirator – there was no trace of paternal concern.
‘What do you mean, there’s a boy?’ She’d known exactly what he meant – she just didn’t want to admit it.
‘I mean,’ he said, ‘I think our daughter may have a boyfriend.’
Ishbel went quiet. Abigail had had boyfriends before, of course, but that was in high school – back when Ishbel could reasonably lay down rules and curfews and ask Aidan to help her enforce them. Now, Abigail was nineteen. In her head, Ishbel heard her own voice saying no, no, no, no.
‘How do you know that?’
Aidan had smirked at her. He’d been standing in front of the dressing table, shrugging on a clean shirt, and in the wrap-around vanity mirror, Ishbel had watched his three-times-reflected torso disappear into the fabric. For some reason it had occurred to her then – for the first time in what must have been years – what an attractive man he was. Still was. A spike of some old anxiety bothered at her.
‘She told me,’ he’d said. ‘She talks to me, you know.’
Ishbel had been folding laundry. She remembered looking down at the white cotton T-shirt in her hands and seeing it turn pink as anger clouded her vision. She was angry with Aidan a lot lately – they were angry with each other. She’d had that thought and then verbalised it, almost without meaning to.
‘Aren’t you angry?’ The words had come out sharp, an elastic band snapping.
‘Angry?’ She’d amused him, it seemed. She pulled in a breath. Is he just making this up, she wondered, to rile me?
‘I just . . . In the past, you’ve been one of those “no one’s good enough for my baby”-type dads. You’ve hated her boyfriends. We used to joke about it.’
He looked away from her, and pulled his hands down the front of the shirt to smooth it.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘And you know as well as I do that if this young man decides to break her heart, then I’ll go for his knees.’
Ishbel had rolled her eyes. As a young woman, she’d loved his gallusness, his masculine swagger. Now she found it grating, and he knew that. He was still speaking.
‘But she’s an adult now. Protective dad needs to know when to take a step back.’
He’d paused, and shot a glance back at her. ‘Neurotic mum could learn to calm down a bit, too.�
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Ishbel had closed her eyes. These small barbs were part of the daily routine these days, the double-act shtick the two of them seemed to have established. Why do I stay? she’d wondered to herself, more than once. Abigail, was the answer. Abigail, who adores her dad. She’d never forgive you.
A long silence opened out between them. That old anxiety swished around inside Ishbel like dirty water, until she’d felt like she had to speak.
‘She talks to me, too.’
Aidan had made a maybe face at her. Not for the first time, her palm itched with the desire to slap the expression away.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘But you’ve been pretty distracted lately.’
Ishbel shook herself out of the memory. Across the road, Inverleith Park was blurring into a dark mass under its trees. If she looked in the rear-view mirror, she could see the spiked turrets of Fettes School silhouetted against the dimming sky. It wouldn’t be properly dark until after ten, but beyond the football field and its ring of artificial light, the city was an indistinct jumble of gables and spires. Streetlights began to flick on. The clouds turned pink: another fine day tomorrow, Ishbel thought.
Aidan was right. The Telford case – the biggest complaint she’d ever dealt with at work – had thrown her totally off balance. Even now it was all over, nearly three years since the initial complaint, she was finding it hard to get back into her old work-life flow. She had been distracted. So distracted that she’d let a week go by since that conversation with her husband, and she still hadn’t spoken to Abigail about the whole boyfriend issue. Aidan had told her that this boy was on Abigail’s course at college, and he had his own car and some sort of job. ‘He seems to come from a nice family,’ Aidan had said, twisting his voice into a parody of Ishbel’s own. ‘I know that sort of thing is important to you.’ She’d shrugged off that particular jab – she picked her battles carefully these days. But she’d allowed herself a small eye-roll. Her husband always accused her of being too status conscious, yet she found his endless positioning and repositioning of himself almost too tiring to keep up with. ‘Now there’s a real man,’ he’d say, about some athlete or celebrity he approved of. For years, she’d found it charming – sexy, even. Exciting. Now, she was relieved they’d had a daughter, not a son . . . but she was also worried about what Aidan’s enthusiasm for this new boyfriend meant. She’d pressed for more information, but Aidan claimed that was all he knew.
‘I’ve seen a photo, though,’ he’d said, puffing out his chest, an I know something you don’t know gesture. ‘He’s the tall, dark and handsome type. And he’s got a twinkle in his eye.’ Aidan had grabbed his keys: heading out once again to some rendezvous Ishbel didn’t quite know the details of. ‘You should be worried,’ he’d said.
Around Ishbel, the car park emptied. The football coach walked back out onto the pitch in her coat to patrol for litter, for jumpers or mobile phones left behind. Ishbel watched her: a small, compact figure pacing the perimeter. Soon the floodlights would be damped out, and the feeding swifts would be replaced by bats. Abigail had not come out. Ishbel’s was the last remaining car.
The clock now read 21:19. Ishbel made a clucking sound in her throat as she pulled her phone from her handbag, and dialled her daughter’s number. The phone rang through to voicemail. Ishbel could have predicted this – if Abigail was rushing to change her clothes and saw her mother calling, she’d surely ignore it. She’d know the call was a tacit nag: get out here already. Ishbel caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the driver’s side mirror. She looked pale, her short dark hair – dyed, these days – a little mussed. God, I look old, she thought. In her head, she was still Abigail’s age, and she always got something of a surprise, looking at her reflection and seeing the thinning lips and crow’s feet of an older woman.
Ishbel was seized by the impulse to leave a voicemail.
‘Abigail,’ she said, ‘this is your mother. Remember me? I have half a report to write tonight and I’d hoped to be home getting on with it by now. Whatever you’re doing, please get a move on, okay?’
She flicked the display to end the call, and felt thwarted. The cruelty of smartphones: you didn’t get the satisfaction of slamming a receiver down.
Ishbel didn’t return the phone to her bag, but propped it on the dashboard, just in case it rang. As she looked up from its glowing screen, her eye was caught by a far-off movement, a quick swim of light. A block away down the hill, Comely Bank Road ran parallel to the car park: from her vantage point in the car, Ishbel could make out the lit canopy of a newsagent’s, and the odd car rattling past the crossroads.
What had caught her eye was a city bus – a single-decker with big plate windows, lit up from inside. Some glitch in traffic had caused it to stop across the junction, idling in the yellow box until someone blew their horn. Standing, hanging on to the bus’s overhead rail, was Abigail. Ishbel was a long way off, and the bus moved on almost as soon as it had stopped, but she’d recognise her daughter’s profile anywhere. Unsure of her next move, she sat in the car, her hands on the steering wheel at two and ten, scrolling through a cycle of silent questions. Why would Abigail be on a city bus? Hadn’t she been at practice? If not, then why? And where had she been?
There must be some reason, Ishbel thought. Come on. But she could think of none.
It took about a minute for her daughter’s small figure to round the corner at the bottom of the block. The twilight made the vision indistinct, but Ishbel knew it was her. The pale cloud of hair, the shoulders hooked inwards – no matter how often Ishbel nipped at her to stand up straight – the striped, drawstring gym bag slung on one hip. The figure she was sure was Abigail slipped into the grounds of the school through a side gate, and disappeared.
Ishbel’s phone buzzed, but the text was not from her daughter. It was Aidan.
Assume you picked up Baby okay? If you’re at shop, pls get dishwasher tablets. A.
Baby was a pet name Abigail hated – or she hated it when it came out of Ishbel’s mouth. For some reason, from Aidan it was allowed. When Abigail was born the two of them had struggled to name her. Back then, you weren’t told the gender of your baby ahead of time, but Aidan’s mother believed in all sorts of old wives’ tales and convinced Ishbel she was carrying a boy. When Abigail arrived – the most feminine baby ever, her long blonde lashes already fully formed – they were caught unawares, unable to use Nathan or Jackson, the names they’d prepared. So, for a long few days they called her Baby, and Aidan had never really stopped.
Baby late out. Back soon. I. Ishbel thought about adding an x to the end of the text, but the corners of her mouth turned down at the very idea. She hit send.
She watched Abigail open the door onto the pitch and step out into the floodlights’ yawn. As she got about halfway over, they blinked out, plunging the practice fields into darkness. Instinct caused Ishbel’s heart to miss a beat, but her eyes became accustomed to the new dimness in only a second or two. Abigail was still trudging towards the car, the striped bag thumping against her side.
‘Sorry, Mum,’ she said, swinging open the passenger door. ‘I got chatting with Ms Lessenger.’
Emily Lessenger was the coach Ishbel had just seen patrolling the empty pitch. She flinched at her daughter’s smooth lie.
‘No you didn’t,’ she replied. ‘Ms Lessenger’s been out here, checking the pitches. I saw her. She was on her own.’
Abigail ditched the striped bag in the footwell, and slammed the car door.
‘When, just now?’ The girl’s face was placid, moon-eyed: butter-wouldn’t-melt.
‘Five minutes ago,’ Ishbel said. ‘Or so.’
Abigail tossed her head, shaking her hair off one shoulder and onto the other.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Before that, then. I talked to her and then got changed. Sorry. I didn’t realise the time.’
Ishbel studied her daughter. Believing her would be easy: it had been some other girl on the bus, some other girl who snuck across the s
treet and through the school to the pitch. Just another girl with blonde hair and a stripy bag. Believe it. She could feel her daughter willing her to.
‘I phoned you,’ Ishbel said. She decided she ought to start the engine: the dash clock read 21:26. As Abigail rummaged in the gym bag for her phone, Ishbel reversed out into the road, and pulled away.
‘Oh yeah,’ Abigail said, lighting up the smartphone. ‘One missed call. Sorry.’
Ishbel made a left, and then an immediate right. She liked to drive along the park, past the Inverleith mansions with their oriel windows and electronic gates.
‘I’ve got a text from Dad as well,’ Abigail added, looking down at her phone – the pose Ishbel saw her in most often these days. ‘He says to say to you: dishwasher tablets.’
They paused at the ‘give way’ sign on Inverleith Row, waiting for another city bus to pass: the double-decker 23 to Trinity. Going my way, Ishbel thought. Typical. Now she’d have to follow in its chugging wake.
‘We don’t have time for dishwasher tablets,’ Ishbel said. ‘I’ve got to work on this report tonight, it’s due back to the complainant tomorrow. It’s late enough as it is. Text him to wash up by hand for once. It won’t kill him.’
Abigail snorted, but began thumbing out the text.
‘You know he’ll leave it for me to do when we get in,’ she said.
‘Yeah? Well it wouldn’t kill you, either.’
They drove on in silence. The 23 pulled up at a stop beside a row of takeaways: pizza, curry, Chinese. Ishbel glanced in the rear-view mirror, then nipped out past the bus and into the right-turn lane for Ferry Road. A cab driver pipped his horn as he let her go by. ‘Screw you,’ Ishbel hissed.