by Ajay Close
What first comes to mind are the Christmas carols of her childhood. A humid, intimate warmth. The smell is surprisingly wholesome, the beasts’ steaming breath and the sweetness of straw dulling the pungency of their droppings. The cattle are penned behind horizontal bars, leaving a narrow walkway beside the cold stone wall. As one, they turn, their globular eyes following her progress towards them. The light has a thickened quality. It takes a moment for her vision to adjust, allowing her to distinguish between them: black and brown, plain and patterned hides, the gradations of wariness and curiosity that make this animal retreat from her while that one edges forward to take its place.
What if Brod just wants her out of the way?
She has never stood so close to cows. Bullocks, she means. Or, what is it the farmhands call them – stirks? Such enormous heads. Cavernous nostrils. Muscular slabs of pink tongue. She remembers dissecting a bullock’s eyeball at school. It was as big as an orange. She had a hell of a job hacking her way through the cornea. The thought brings another lapping of nausea. Even the timid beasts have closed in now. They press together, flank to flank, just the other side of the steel bars, the nearest she has come to an audience in weeks.
Locking her jaw, she drops into a demure, Home Counties staccato.
‘This can’t last. This misery can’t last. I must remember thet and try to control myself. Nothing lasts really. Neither heppiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long. There’ll come a time in the future when I shan’t mind about this anymore, when I can look beck and say quite peacefully and cheerfully how silly I was.’
The bullocks chew the cud, unmoved. She puts out a hand. Some shy backwards, but the nearest sniffs at her, consenting to be touched. She claps the solid neck, then, growing in confidence, spreads her fingers in the rough mat of hair.
‘You don’t want to do that.’
Jake is standing behind her, his face in shadow and darkened further by a day’s growth of beard. He must have been here when she walked in.
‘Why?’ she says. ‘Is this one a biter too?’
He doesn’t smile.
If that’s the way you want it, she thinks.
Since that morning by the paddock they have not spoken, though he has watched her from a distance, as she watches him when he’s looking the other way. No one minds a bit of spying, but damn him for eavesdropping on her Celia Johnson. If he’d spoken up earlier, or crept out without her noticing, she wouldn’t feel such a twit.
‘I was giving them a bit of Brief Encounter,’ she says. ‘You know, the old film?’
If he does, he shows no sign of it.
‘I played Laura at Chichester opposite Alan Bates.’
Bingo. It’s just a flicker, but she can see he’s impressed. No need to tell him it was only a matinee. Susannah had a terrible hangover.
‘You’ll be missing all that,’ he says.
‘A bit. Not much. It’s very different here.’ In the pen a bullock lifts its tail, voiding a stream of greenish shit. ‘Which is interesting.’
‘But not as interesting as your job.’
She wrinkles her nose. ‘Any job gets samey after a while. Yours too, I’m sure.’
‘What would you know about it?’
She gives him a long look, head to foot. His hair needs cutting. He’d get away with it in Edinburgh, with a lick of mascara and an Afghan coat, but that’s hardly his style. It’s on the tip of her tongue to say, I know all sorts of things about you, but neither of them would benefit from a declaration of war. They are going to carry on pretending they had never met before she came to the farm. For all his growling, she’s fairly sure he’ll collude in the charade. Thinking this makes her smile. Deliberately, while the smile is still warm, she looks him in the eye.
He nods at the bullocks. ‘What do you reckon they’ll fetch?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’
‘We’ll find out tomorrow.’ There’s a sly gleam in his eye.
She returns an enquiring glance.
‘They’re off to market. Next time you see him’ll be on your plate.’
Oh for God’s sake, he thinks she’ll be shocked. As if you have to work on a farm to understand that the powerful do as they please with the weak. As if one moment of squeamishness has defined her for ever in his eyes.
‘I don’t eat beef,’ she says.
He bares his teeth in derision. ‘You think it’s cruel?’
‘I just don’t like the taste.’
Why doesn’t he clear off? They have said all they have to say to each other. He has made his position perfectly clear. There’ll be no truce. The day they met they became enemies: her virtue his crime, his lightness her burden. Under the circumstances, they can only wish each other ill.
She starts to move past him, towards the yard, but he does not step aside and now they’re standing too close.
‘Don’t put your hand between the bars again. I saw somebody do that once, a farmer. He should have known better. The beast reared its head—’
He flicks his own in demonstration, the movement made faintly comic by the swaying of all that hair. His hand catches her forearm, jarring it against the metal, not so hard that it hurts, just enough to send a jolt of adrenaline through her.
‘Snapped the bone like a matchstick.’
Card
It was six weeks before Frankie and I went to bed. After our midnight kiss in the taxi queue, he sent me home alone. The next night, too. And the next. After a week or so he came in for coffee and some clothing was removed, but it was all very unlike the runaway train that was sex with other men. In the end I asked. He had a girlfriend, a colleague who turned up for work in a silk blouse, tailored jacket, jeans and trainers. Garden-variety reporters were never filmed from the waist down. I tried to bear this in mind when I watched her on screen, but still she looked mimsy. He wouldn’t sleep with both of us and he wouldn’t dump her out of the blue: another fortnight of mood swings and she’d be ready for the bad news.
We finally did it on the night of my thirty-third birthday, in his riverside flat, with a bottle of bubbly and tulips in a vase and brand new sheets on the bed and, despite all this fuss, it was like we’d been lovers for years. No first night nerves. No watching myself from the ceiling or lying there walled inside my skin, wondering who on earth this other person was. He gave a soft gasp when I undressed. I was flattered, but also perplexed. Surely he’d seen it all before? Every inch of him was known to me. Those shoulders. The whiteness of his meaty buttocks. He laughed when I told him: he’d never guessed I was such a spy. I smiled and said nothing, because what was the point of explaining if it left him less pleased? I wanted to please him. It was a long time since I had given knowing the gift would be so gratefully received.
Our friends said we were made for each other, but still I panicked when we named the day, thinking of that Aberdonian girl at uni who first saw her fiancé in a dream, and the woman I overheard on a bus saying, ‘When we come I can’t tell where he ends and I begin’, and Lilias’s Ophelia at Dundee Rep. I can’t remember Hamlet’s name but I believed she really loved him, for that matinee at least. A week before my wedding I sat up till dawn with a bottle of Bowmore and an A4 pad, drawing a line down each page to separate the doubts from the never-quite-symmetrical reassurances. Fifty years with the television on too loud. Back-rubs on demand. Stability. Predictability. Newsprint on my white sheets. The cheesy odour of his thermonuclear feet. The soft weight of his balls in my hand.
By morning I had scored out almost everything, reducing three and a half pages to a single line. Waking up with my best friend.
For our first anniversary I gave him a Celtic shirt with Chomsky on the back. He gave me a framed print of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s forty-third ‘Sonnet from the Portuguese’. The artist had transcribed the poem in brown copperplate, embellishing the H of ‘How do I love thee’ medieval manuscript-style. In the border around the words were hand-tinted thrushes and finches, a tangle of briar r
ose and ivy, red admirals and fat furry bees. Barrett Browning would have had a great career in advertising. The breadth and depth and height my soul can reach – what a saleswoman! So, yes, I knew the gift was kitsch, but when I tore off the silver wrapping my eyes filled with tears.
From Lilias Cavalle’s daughter to Frankie MacKewon’s wife. ‘Culture shock’ doesn’t come close to describing it. I realise everybody’s childhood skews them in some way. Another personality might have survived – even thrived on – the same upbringing, but I emerged at the hard-boiled end of the sweetie counter. And then I married Frankie. How do I love thee? God only knows, but he did.
He had what psychologists call emotional literacy. When he felt something, he told me: pride in my achievements, tenderness as he watched me sleeping, fury at the thought of anyone hurting me. He was a manly grappler with pals gay and straight, a cuddler of women, an unselfconscious kisser on the lips at meeting and parting. None of this was exactly sexless, but nor was it creepy: merely the overspill from a bottomless reservoir of affection. I had the knack of making him laugh. Silly things that had him collapsed on the sofa, emitting a high-pitched whooping I never heard him do on screen. There were times when I carried him with me, all through the working day, a secret warmth just under my skin. At lunch, hearing a colleague moaning about her unreasonable other half and feeling obliged to reciprocate (‘I know, Frankie’s the same’), I’d be struck by how soon my empathetic noises ran out. I didn’t know, Frankie was not the same. When Lilias urged me to invest in a tube of concealer or a pair of magic pants, or told me the gym was giving me ‘Russian shoulders’, instead of feeling crushed or enraged, I would look at her and think, you’ve never had what I have.
I don’t want to overstate things. Frankie and I remained different people who experienced what we had together in different ways. He was a born romantic. For all the joys of married life, he missed those decades of unrequited yearning. Two or three times a year he liked nothing better than an evening alone, some dingy hotel bar in Dortmund or Bratislava, his phone switched off, the camera crew not due until next day. A few delicious, lonely hours to stare into his glass and imagine me cooking a meal, opening a bottle of wine, back in Glasgow. And, if God choose/I shall but love thee better after death. I once asked him if he ever fantasised about weeping at my graveside, the minor chords playing softly in his head? He looked so horrified I let it drop, but I wouldn’t have minded. Nothing really mattered if you were loved.
For seven years we carried on this way. Laughing, making love, seeing friends, doing up the house, fighting from time to time. It wasn’t just his affections that lived near the surface, he had a temper that was quick to fire, but as quick to burn itself out. It’s amazing how happy I was – and even more amazing, it occurs to me now, that I took such happiness as my right. I believed in the fairy tale ending, the lifting of the curse. Love, generosity of spirit, ease in my own skin: I’d cracked it! And for a long time it really felt like that. Then we decided to try for a baby, and it became clear to me that I was no longer the object of Frankie’s romantic dreams. In fact, I was their impediment: the wicked queen to his lovelorn prince. Now, the one he yearned for was his unconceived child.
Meaghan blew a noxious-smelling bubble of strawberry gum and played the six of diamonds. I played the five. Torcuil stared at his useless cards, slapping a hand to his head in a nine-year-old’s mime of despair. It was Frankie’s turn. A glint in his eye promised mischief. The children waited, their faces primed for laughter.
‘Now, shall I be nice, or shall I…’
He placed the two of diamonds on the table. Meaghan whimpered, reaching for the deck to pick up her extra cards, but he wasn’t finished, he tucked in his chin to peer at his hand. Torcuil gave a snort of mirth. The two of spades was added to the pile. Meaghan squealed. Frankie squinted at his cards again, fingers hovering. Meaghan started to protest. He raised his eyebrows innocently and looked to me to play.
Five of spades. The queen. The nine. Frankie leaned over Meaghan trying to see her hand. She squirmed away from him, laughing, and got rid of the remaining three nines. The suit was now clubs. I played the Jack, Torcuil the ten. Frankie, casting a sly glance at Meaghan, put down a run of five, six and seven, which reversed the direction of play.
Torcuil warned us, ‘He’s nearly out!’
King of clubs. King of spades. Four of spades. Frankie played the ace, changing the suit. He had two cards left.
‘Anything but clubs,’ Torcuil instructed his sister.
Meaghan used the four of hearts. I’d followed her with the four of clubs before realising my mistake. Torcuil’s face showed disbelief but he did not make a fuss as he would have done with Frankie. He had known me all his life, I had soothed his colicky screaming fits and wiped his bottom more times than I remembered, but I was a grown-up, while Frankie was an honorary child. It would probably end in tears and someone else would have to pick up the pieces, but till then I was Mrs Boring and my husband was Mr Fun.
Smirking at Torcuil, Frankie played the queen of clubs. ‘Last card.’
Torcuil’s small features distended in horror. ‘We gotta stop him, guys.’
He played the eight. I played the three.
‘Pick up,’ they chorused.
I took my punitive card from the deck. With a cartoon villain’s laugh, Meaghan played an ace to change the suit to hearts. Frankie mimed dejection, tutting and shaking his head, then turned his remaining card face-up. The five of hearts. The children yelled in gleeful outrage.
‘Another game?’ my husband said.
Ruth was pricking baking potatoes at the far end of her enormous kitchen-cum-living room.
‘Can I do anything?’
‘I think it’s all under control.’
‘Of course it is: you’re a mother. I bet you multitask in your sleep.’
A shout came from the other end of the room. The game of Switch had been abandoned. Frankie and Torcuil were wrestling on the settee.
Ruth saw my face. ‘It’s different when they’re your own.’
‘No? Really?’
She jabbed me with the fork. ‘You try original thinking when you’ve been up half the night rubbing somebody’s sore tummy.’
Not all my friendships had survived the experiential gulf that opens between parents and the childless. Ruth and I coped by caricature. In our pantomime, my life was all nights at the opera and issues of national importance. She was the earth mother who couldn’t remember the last book she’d read that didn’t begin Once upon a time.
‘Why isn’t Kenny getting up to do the tummy-rubbing?’
She pulled the rueful-smug face I’d seen on every mother I’d ever known, apart from mine. ‘They want their mum. Besides,’ she glanced down at her thickened waistline, ‘I’ll need to get used to it again.’
While Frankie and I had been fruitlessly fucking by the book, Kenny and Ruth had got drunk on sweet sherry at her Auntie Mary’s funeral tea, had a quickie before the school run and conceived what they called ‘The Afterthought’. Fortunately, the bond between the four of us was strong enough to withstand the stresses of this irony. Ruth and I had shared a flat at university, in the days when she was going to save the world as a feminist psychoanalyst, if I didn’t beat her to it as a Labour MP. She was, if not my oldest friend (Frankie was that), the only woman of my acquaintance whose husband Frankie could stand. Everybody loved Kenny. A whispering giant with a graveyard cough from forty a day, eczema from the patches, toothache from the nicotine gum, and the most therapeutic bedside manner in Glasgow. He was from Dublin, a first-generation immigrant to Frankie’s second generation but, unlike Frankie, a Protestant. The social assets were perfectly balanced: Kenny the more echt, with that mellifluous charm that was the birthright of the native-born Irishman; Frankie the better physical specimen, descended from the peasants Kenny’s ancestors had starved off the land. Every couple of weeks Frankie would wangle himself off work early, head for the bar around the c
orner from the surgery, and spend an hour humouring the star-struck drunks until Kenny shambled in mumbling about having lost track of time. It was just like Kenny to botch the contraception, forget to bring home a morning-after pill and heave his trademark sleepy shrug at the prospect of an extra seven years of child-rearing. Happy accidents were his forte.
‘Actually there is something you can do.’ Ruth rummaged through the bags on the counter. There was a moment of dead air and I knew she was searching for a new topic of conversation. Satirising the gulf between us didn’t make it any less real. There were vast tracts of our lives that held little interest for the other.
‘How’s work?’ she asked.
This was one of them.
‘A pain just now. Some guy who didn’t get promoted to prison governor thinks there’s a secret agenda. I’ve been over and over it: it’s rubbish. Now he’s got a Labour MSP accusing us of political bias.’
Ruth clucked and emptied a bag of radishes onto the chopping board. Although angled towards me, she had one ear tuned to the other end of the room. One of the drawbacks of Frankie being ‘good with kids’ was that other adults were forced into a supervisory role.
She handed me a knife. ‘I don’t suppose…?’
She had been asking me this for two and a half years.
‘No.’
Her face lost its optimistic cast.
‘Alice thinks I should try African moon magic,’ I said.
She looked like Meaghan when she laughed. ‘African what?’
‘You sleep with the light on to fool your ovaries into thinking it’s a full moon. It’s supposed to reboot your menstrual cycle, make you more fertile.’
‘If it doesn’t bring out your inner werewolf.’
Torcuil squealed. We both turned to look, but he was laughing. Frankie had a faux-quizzical expression on his face and a thumb and finger pincered on the tender spots either side of the boy’s knee.