by Bella Pollen
52
It was a night of freefall insomnia. To Letty it felt as though the room itself was conspiring to keep her from rest. The sofa cushions were lumpy and unyielding, a vicious west wind yowled through the chimney, the blankets were scratchy and a taste of stale ash coated the back of her throat. For the first hour, she lay supine, trying to clear her mind, but gradually every unfamiliar creak amplified to a point where it jolted her body like an electric shock. She turned and sighed and sighed and turned, all the while trying to identify a nagging pinprick in her consciousness. She couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something out of place, something important she’d overlooked. Twice she threw back the blankets, once to check that the small gas lever was turned to ‘off, a few minutes later to make sure the pilot light on the Raeburn hadn’t blown out. When eventually she broke the shell of sleep, this unease followed her into a viper’s nest of dreams where she could only stand and watch, powerless to act as disaster after disaster befell her family. First it was the Peugeot rolling backwards with Jamie at the wheel. Then it was Gisela struggling to keep her head above the currents of the Elbe. Finally it was her turn. They were going to miss the ferry but damn it, Macleod wouldn’t give her the car key. He stood in his garage, dangling it out of reach. I can pull it out for you now if you like, he was saying. That plywood of yours . . . Except it wasn’t Macleod’s voice any more, it was Alick talking, Alick’s face leering at her.
The wall has a secret place, he said, just like the one in that car. And she woke with a start, her heart beating fast.
She hadn’t needed the torch – the moon was out and almost bright enough to read by – but she was scared and the torch in her hand felt familiar and reassuring. She walked swiftly to the Peugeot, fighting a sense of unreality. A secret place, Alick had said. A secret place. The day Georgie had crashed the Peugeot was the first time she’d been allowed to drive the car on the main road. Letty had been away, down on the south island visiting her father’s old cook. All summer she’d argued that Georgie hadn’t been ready, but Nicky had taken her anyway. Barely a mile beyond the church loch, Georgie had whipped over a blind summit and swerved to avoid a duck. It was typical of Nicky’s efficiency that he arranged for the car to be mended, the telephone company be appeased for the breakage of their pole and for parts to be ordered from the mainland before presenting her with the situation as a fait accompli on her return. There had been nothing for her to do but be thankful that neither of them had been hurt and allow Alick to get on with the repairs. Damn her naivety. She turned the key in the boot lock. The 404 boasted a spacious luggage section, or so Nicky always claimed when it came to the packing of the car. At the beginning of the summer this job had fallen to the girls and the fact that the boot had taken fewer cases than usual Letty had put down, in the fleeting second allotted to the thought, to the girls’ rookie status. Nicky would have taken everything out and begun again, rigorously matching size and shape to space available, but she hadn’t cared. The weight of inherited chores was just another measure of his loss. Grateful that the children had taken the initiative in the first place, she simply strapped the remaining suitcases on the roof rack and hoped for the best.
Her watch read quarter past four. It was cold and damp and the wind blew her nightdress round her legs. Shivering, Letty worked her way along the floor of the boot towards the back seat, feeling around the edges of the carpet. On the right-hand side the seam was more or less intact, but the car had gone into the river at a tilt and the left side must have taken in the bulk of water because here and there the carpet edge was disintegrating and between the new tacks of Macleod’s repairs, shreds of glue came away under her fingers. She ran and fetched a screwdriver from the outside room then prised the staples out one by one until she was able to get some purchase on the corner of the carpet – enough to give it a good yank – and underneath, shining like the golden ticket in Charlie Bucket’s chocolate bar, was the yellowy chip of plywood.
That plywood of yours . . .
That plywood of Nicky’s . . .
It had been done so cleverly you would never know it was there, cut to exacting standards and fitted at a slight inward slant, creating a false divide between the boot and the void underneath the passenger seat.
A void big enough for a person.
The wind was making a whistling noise through the hinges of the open boot.
Letty stared at the panel for a minute, then, putting the sole of her gumboots to it, kicked as hard as she could.
Afterwards she found she was shaking. First her hands, then her whole body. She hunched over, clasping her bare legs to her chest.
‘Damn you, Nicky’ She blotted her eyes on the sleeve of her nightdress. She was cold through to the bone. A percussion of rain started up on the metal roof, yet still she couldn’t move. God knows she understood the dangers of smuggling someone out of East Berlin, especially under the radar of the British Government. Nicky would have had no official cover. No safety net.
Whatever you’re doing, involve no one, Tom had warned. Except that Nicky hadn’t involved no one. He’d involved his own daughter.
53
‘It’s so warm in here!’ Georgie sketched a smiley face in the condensation on the bus window. ‘I know. I’m sorry,’ Aliz said.
‘No, it’s wonderful. Like being in some really exotic country.’ Aliz’s father was a genius, she’d decided. He’d converted a van into a shop/library and an old yellow school bus into a greenhouse. The bus had solar panels inserted into the roof and the rows of seats had been exchanged for trays of seed beds from which a tangle of greenery was rising like some John Wyndham-inspired jungle.
‘Tomatoes, chillies, green beans . . .’ The first time he’d shown her around, Aliz had pointed out every plant in turn. ‘And these in here are herbs: coriander, parsley, fennel.’
‘Why don’t you sell all this stuff?’
‘No one wants it.’
‘I thought it was impossible to grow vegetables in island soil?’
‘You can grow anything here but my father says the islanders are too feckless and, besides, they don’t like vegetables.’
‘My mother loves them.’
‘So take her some.’
‘No, no,’ Georgie had said. She’d only just returned with the change for the Fruit Pastilles.
‘Take something and come back with the money tomorrow.’
She cast a quick curious look at him. Was this a game they were both supposed to be playing?
‘I don’t think I can come back tomorrow.’
He’d slipped some tomatoes into her hand. ‘You have to, or my father’s books won’t balance.’
Aliz’s eyes were the colour of a peat bog. Georgie had looked down at the ripe tomato in her hand and had come back every day since.
She sat down on the slatted bench. The sun felt like honey on her back. She found it hard to believe that the island sun was the same as every other country’s sun. It had always presented itself as a weaker, less dazzling member of the solar family. ‘What’s that?’ She touched a finger to a purple bulbous-looking fruit.
‘Aubergine. My father makes kuku with it but he complains it doesn’t taste right. He says the aubergines don’t get enough sun here, even in a greenhouse, so most of the time he strokes their skin and admires the colour. He likes to complain that the food on this island is all the same colour. White, grey or brown.’
‘Last night my sister made spaghetti with Branston Pickle sauce.’
‘And you ate it?’
‘I had to! You have no idea what she’s like.’ Alba’s cooking was consistently inconsistent. She’d taken enthusiastically to food experimentation, rebuffing all questions about what was on the menu with the ominous ‘A little something I’ve thrown together.’ At mealtimes she stood over the table, gimlet eyed, wielding her spatula like a fly-swat, determined that every last mouthful should be appreciated. Even so, Georgie found the tyranny of her kitchen preferable to th
e tyranny of her moods. Her mother, too, seemed prepared to sacrifice her digestive system for the newfound truce between her children and Jamie had never been happier. Sticking rigidly to the smallprint of her contract, Alba had excused him from her more ground-breaking recipes such as Razor Clam Omelettes or Cottage Cheese Bake on the grounds that he was too ignorant to appreciate the subtlety of their flavours. Georgie knew she should consider her manipulations a success but Jamie’s rekindled hero worship of Alba made her both jealous and uneasy. Time and time again she had watched Alba open fire on Jamie’s hopes and the fallout was always the same – he would lapse into misery, withdraw into a subdued state until he forgave or forgot, at which point he would thrust his singed fingers back into the very same fire. Each time, however, the process took a little longer and each time she wondered whether Alba would one day go too far. There was something about her sister’s born-again sweetness that felt like the lull before the storm. Sooner or later, Alba would revoke Jamie’s gift voucher of love once and for all and Georgie was filled with a sense of foreboding. Then again, if she hadn’t made the deal, she would not have met Aliz. Aliz who smelt of earth and minerals. Aliz who was sitting so close to her now that she could feel his breath on her cheek.
‘Food is what my father misses most about home,’ he was saying. ‘He talks about it all the time. Ice creams scented with rose petals or made with pistachio nuts. Lamb seasoned with cinnamon and coriander or fried with apricots and figs. At night I hear him tossing in his sleep, mumbling about salted cheeses and bitter lemons or the minted lentil dishes my mother used to cook for him.’
It was the first time Georgie had heard Aliz mention his mother. She had presumed Aliz’s father was a widower. Alba claimed that he’d come to Scotland to find a new wife, although somehow the idea of Morag or Peggy being whisked on his arm through customs in their beige mackintoshes and emerging into the bustling streets of Karachi seemed a little far-fetched. She had less trouble imagining herself there, standing in front of some ancient mosque, waiting for a bull cart to trundle by. Accidentally, her knee touched his. ‘What’s it like in Pakistan?’ she asked dreamily.
‘No idea.’ Aliz took out his tin of tobacco and began rolling a cigarette.
‘You can’t remember?’
‘I’ve never been.’
‘Aren’t you curious? Have you asked your father?’
‘My father has also never been to Pakistan.’
‘What do you mean?’ She looked sharply at him.
‘We are not from Pakistan.’
Georgie’s city of sandcastles crumbled to the desert floor.
‘My father came here from Syria after my mother and brother were killed during the Six Day War.’
‘But I thought . . .’ she said, mortified. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know why I . . .’
‘Because everyone does. We’re the Pakis who opened the Paki shop.’
Georgie hung her head.
‘Don’t worry, it doesn’t bother me and my father likes the people here.’ Aliz flicked a corkscrew of hair out of his eyes. ‘He says many of the islanders haven’t even been to the mainland, so how could they know the difference between Syria, Pakistan or the moon?’
‘At the BHS, my school in Germany, we had American, English, African, Korean, Indian, even Finnish kids. The first thing we had to learn was which country everybody was homesick for.’
‘I’ve been here since I was seven years old. I don’t know where I should be homesick for.’
‘Maybe that means you belong here now.’
‘Well, everyone has to belong somewhere.’ He severed the stem of the aubergine between his nails. ‘Take this home with you, and some more tomatoes for your mother.’
‘I should pay you.’ Georgie didn’t even bother to check her pockets.
‘Yes. You must. Tomorrow my father will be completing his tax returns for the year.’
‘I thought tax returns were completed in April – that’s seven . . . no, eight months from now.’
‘My father hates to be late,’ Aliz said gravely.
Georgie rubbed the burnished skin of the aubergine with her sleeve. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow, then.’
‘Good.’ His chipped front tooth gave him an uneven smile.
Georgie smiled back. She felt young. She felt old. She had no idea what she felt.
54
He stood underneath the causeway, out of view from the road, and surveyed the dark expanse of mud in front of him. As a surface, it didn’t look safe for a creature of his weight but he was hungry and there was food out there. He stepped forwards. Sludge oozed up between his toes. Clumps of seaweed covered the rocks like mermaids’ hair. He threw one back, revealing a township of black mussels underneath. One yank and a dozen or so were in his paw. Hard to believe that such an odd-shaped shell constituted food, but he had watched the children throwing them into buckets and he had sorted through the empty shells dropped by the birds. They were food all right, but how to get into them? Closer inspection revealed a tiny hinged structure to one side and more dexterous fingers than his might have prised the halves apart, but he was too hungry for such niceties and instead stomped them underfoot. Inside was an orange fleshy thing that looked like an earlobe. He forced it down his throat as if he was a heron shucking an oyster. Shipwrecked sailors, too squeamish to eat the eyes of fish or the raw flesh of turtles, were said to die of malnutrition despite the entire contents of the sea being available to them and it was possible that this would yet be his fate. He ate several more dozen, but they couldn’t satisfy the cavernous void in his belly.
Grizzlies are omnivores, and not pernickety ones. Although fond of small animals, they will happily crunch down on anything from moths to root vegetables. Still, he was not an average grizzly and he did not like raw food.
Earlier in the week he came across a dead gannet washed up on the beach. He turned it over and over. It was, after all, meat – if the feathers could be discounted. Perhaps he should have eaten it, overcome his disgust and razored the flesh from the bones, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. How had it come to drown? Had it been too ambitious for its food? Smashed its skull against a submerged rock? He flipped the bird back over and waited for the sea to take it. The sea could absorb any manner of death and maybe, in the end, it would have to absorb his.
55
The betrayal lodged deep inside her.
And now all the tiny splinters of misgiving she’d been suppressing began rising painfully to the surface of her consciousness. Nicky’s frustration with pen-pushers. All those minor acts of bureaucratic rebellion that had seemed so innocent at the time. Diplomacy is a colourful profession which attracts maverick individuals, he had once told her. It’s a world rife with deceit, infidelity and murder. And now all the irreverent stories, the countless silly anecdotes came back to her as well. There was the Ambassador who’d spilled his country’s secrets into the ear of a famous French actress. The disgrace of a young diplomat in Bucharest, expelled, it was maintained, because with his lisp he couldn’t pronounce Ceausescu; there was the story of the ‘heroic’ Air Force officer who had entered the diplomatic service just after the Second World War. When news came to light that he’d been a collaborator, he was swiftly dispatched to Africa where the official who’d been assigned to him suggested a swim to cope with the heat and lost no time in pointing him towards the nearest crocodile-infested waters of the Limpopo. For some reason
Letty had always imagined the poor brute in a pair of candy-striped bathers, standing in his canoe. Then came the arc of his dive, the pattern of circles in its wake, the stillness, broken by a discreet bubble or two, the almost imperceptible rise of a snout to the surface and the sinister swirl and roll of the feeding beast . . .
‘A little unkind if all he did was tell a few secrets,’ she had commented at the time.
‘Well, that all depends on how you feel,’ Nicky had replied. ‘If you think that treason is the worst imaginable crime – as some do
– then surely the punishment for treason has to be the worst imaginable as well . . .’
So, finally she had it. What she’d been fighting for – what she’d been demanding of the government. Proof.
Your husband would not be the first official found guilty of corruption of some kind, Porter had told her. Well, now she knew on what flimsy, self-deceiving grounds her principles had been built. She hadn’t wanted the truth at all. Only a truth she could live with.
To Alick, she said nothing, other than to make him show her exactly what Nicky’s ‘modifications’ had entailed. She’d stood next to him, watching a watery sun light up the grasses of the machair and feeling her world distort and spin further out of control as he enthused about the precision required for making a plywood template; how the switch he’d installed would cut the Peugeot’s distributor and stop the car at any chosen moment. And if she marvelled at Alick’s unquestioning nature, she could only deplore her own. Alick had little curiosity about what his adaptations had been needed for, his only interest was whether he was mechanic enough to achieve them. She had no such excuse. Had she chosen to look on the darker side of the facts, the signs had been there to see. Nicky’s opting to take the car instead of flying, his resistance to taking Georgie with him. Then on their return hadn’t there been some problem with the car? Hadn’t the radio not been working or something? She forced herself to think back. Yes, it had definitely been the radio. Instead of making do with traditional speakers in the sides of the driver and passenger doors, Nicky had had the Peugeot upgraded some weeks before the trip, relocating the speaker cones on the wooden plinth of the back shelf and covering them with a strip of smart blue perforated leather. Now, at her insistence, Alick reluctantly cut through that leather and shone the torch downwards.