by Ajay Close
When he got off the bus, the camera followed his progress up the street. The sea of pedestrians parted before him, children laughed and pointed. Still he didn’t crack. No smile, no complicit glance at the lens. I was worried for him, embarrassed by the cheesiness of the stunt, afraid he’d been set up by Scott. So far so wifely. But was it wifely to notice the pornographic gleam of sweat on his skin, to experience his deadpan look as a delectable threat? The man striding down that Sicilian street had been hidden from me for a decade, and had to be hidden: around me, he could not exist. You couldn’t share a home with such a man, or divvy up domestic tasks, or undress together and just fall asleep.
Not that Frankie and I were really bedmates by then.
If I couldn’t feel grateful, it was nonetheless a wake-up call. Somehow, amid his obsession with work, my resentment about it, the stand-off over who was going to travel to whom, my failure to come clean about quitting the clinic, and my flirting with Kit, I had failed to see what was happening to us.
By the following Wednesday Frankie was growing a hipster beard and wearing a skinny fit, peacock-blue suit.
‘God no,’ I said.
Margo was dozing in the other chair. She opened her eyes and, not recognising him, snorted with cheerful malice, ‘Where do they get them?’
Surprisingly, the show worked as a two-hander. An on-screen partner gave him licence to ad lib. Scott was quick on the draw but Frankie was funnier. Apart from having two presenters, the format was much the same: a panel discussion of the night’s match highlights followed by a location report on Inverness Caley Thistle. I did the crossword with half an eye on the screen, until a woman walked on set babbling in Italian. I recognised her straightaway. Christina Agostino, the production assistant, born and bred in Shawlands. She was dressed in a short skirt and tight top instead of her usual jeans and T-shirt. I’d never noticed she had a figure before. She was pretending to have travelled from Palermo to convey her city’s gratitude for the exemplary conduct of the Scottish fans, and who better to thank in person than my husband, tottering on her silly heels as she closed in for an enthusiastic sequence of cheek-kissing? The credits rolled over Frankie’s face covered in scarlet lip-prints as he touched a steadying hand to her waist.
A smell of burned toast reached us from the kitchen. Back from an evening at the Drover’s, Kit poked his head around the door.
Shout
The Indian summer gave way to an early cold snap. The days grew shorter. Without street lamps and shop windows, teatime felt like dead of night. After the table was cleared, Margo and I sat on in the kitchen, talking over the complacent murmur of Radio 4. One moonless night she surprised me by suggesting a walk. From indoors, the darkness appeared blank as an unplugged screen but, leaving the house with her, I discovered a new world. There was a solidity to the sweetened air with its scents of rotting leaves, baled hay, the yeasty breath of cattle, the spoor of deer or fox. Groping for a wall, I touched shadow. Unnerved by my own footsteps, I stopped to find the quiet rushing in my ears. Crossing the farmyard on our way back, I heard a sound like a hundred sweaty fingertips squeaking against a window pane and, looking up, saw nothing, even as my blood felt the skein of geese flying south.
Those night-time walks became a habit. Soon I was going out before breakfast too, the moon in the blue-black sky bright enough to blind me, the concrete yard glittering with rime. While the foxhound slept in his kennel, dreaming of the chase, rabbits foraged around the barn. I had never seen ice crystals on a spider’s web, never felt the cold freeze the tears in my watering eyes. It was fierce, but exhilarating too: I knew I had breath in my gasping lungs and blood in my searing fingers. And it was wonderful to come into the warmth of the kitchen just as Margo was lifting the bacon from the pan, to sit at the table and coat my chapped lips with that salty grease.
Kit told me I was paranoid, Nikki suspected nothing, but I locked myself in the bathroom whenever her Fiat pulled up in the yard. The strangest thing was, the clinic never rang to ask why I’d stopped coming. Nor, as far as I could tell, had they contacted Frankie. He phoned most nights, but we had less and less to say to each other. I told myself the one subject of burning interest to us both was best avoided until we could discuss it face-to-face. The whole situation was unreal. Every night I swore tomorrow I’d book an appointment with the consultant or go back to my old responsible life, but another week would pass and still I’d done nothing.
Kit and I didn’t make love again. Not that we hadn’t had a good time – quite the opposite. We’d taken it slowly, touching, watching, nuzzling, smiling, stopping to share a distracting thought, starting again, stopping again, looking into each other’s eyes, to arrive at that unmappable place I’d only ever been with Frankie. Afterwards we were our ordinary selves – what else? I thought, It’s just that we’ve been married too long, we’ve lost the knack of casual sex, but remembering it scared me, and I had the feeling it scared Kit. There was a week of mutual uncertainty and another of injured vanity, before we settled back into our old routine. We still flirted, only now what went unspoken was not the inevitability of our coupling but its status as a one-off. He was the only friend I had within a radius of seventy miles. Who else was I going to talk to?
Every couple of days we’d trump up some errand and disappear for an hour or two. Sometimes to the pint-size swimming bath in Crieff, driving between threadbare fields strewn with turnip halves to feed the porridge-coloured sheep. A perilous diet. One afternoon he explained how to skewer a ewe’s distended guts with a knitting needle to relieve a life-threatening case of wind, while I squirmed in the passenger seat with my hands over my ears. Often we’d walk in the pine wood, looking up through the sepia-tinted spaces between the branches, gloating at the pattering of rain high above us and the magical dryness beneath. There was a stone circle in the thick of the forest, if you knew where to look, a modestly proportioned ring that reminded me of a gloomy boarding-house parlour I’d been forbidden to enter as a child. The stones were small and mossily domestic. Always a bobbin-shaped cone and a crow’s feather resting on the dominant boulder. Kit might mention some snippet he’d gleaned about his father – the keenness of his eyesight, his sentimental insistence on bringing the cattle in at Christmas – and we’d stand awhile, breathing in the resiny perfume of the trees, listening to the creak of a loosening trunk, until we were spooked by the clatter of a wood pigeon’s wings. Once we allowed ourselves a hungry kiss, before drawing apart as if nothing had happened. I would lean into the biggest stone, my belly pressed to the cushioning moss, and feel myself part of the long chain stretching between the bodies who had dragged that rock there five thousand years before and the bodies who would lean against it five thousand years’ hence. And always, underneath those afternoons, more poignant than our vanished fathers or our superseded lust, was our shared longing for a child.
Of all our expeditions, I remember best the trek to the Roman watchtower. We drove for miles without seeing another soul. No estate workers’ cottages, not even the tumbled stones of an abandoned shieling, only the shaggy-tailed hill sheep cropping at the sapless grass. We abandoned the Subaru by the side of the road and climbed a slope of rusted heather. The ground was a hybrid of pasture and moorland, littered with the clustered liquorice of sheep droppings. The watery sun lit the hills to the north and, beyond them, a line of peaks capped with early snow. Kit pointed to a barely perceptible mound in the heather. ‘We’ve come all this way to see that?’ I said, yet there was something in the timeless landscape that justified the walk. I had never been anywhere more remote. As soon as we stopped moving, the cold got its teeth into us. We hunkered down on the heather to avoid the worst of the wind, and Kit told me Pontius Pilate had been born to a girl in the next glen who’d slept with a Roman legionary. I knew of this legend, and had always counted it among the more laughably self-aggrandising Scottish myths, but it was credible that day, in that place. That a forgotten woman could carry history in her belly over those g
odforsaken hills.
The day was fading. I packed him off ahead of me, wanting a last unhurried look at the lonely view. I had not long begun my descent – Kit already far below, eager for the shelter of the car – when he turned, looking up at something. On the summit, hundreds of metres above us, a speck was silhouetted against the sky. I strained my eyes to make it out, and for a moment thought I saw a face. The next moment it was a speck again. Then I heard what Kit had heard: a sound so faint I almost doubted my ears. It came again, more distinctly, carried on a gust of wind.
I had grown up without a father, married Frankie and spent my working life in the fork-tongued but never less than civil service. I could count on the fingers of one hand all the men who had ever shouted – really shouted – at me.
‘What?’ I bawled, spreading my arms in a semaphore of incomprehension.
The shouting grew louder, as if goaded by my failure to understand. Kit had started walking again. I didn’t want to be left behind, but I couldn’t move. The hillside was huge around me, the now-sunless summit dark against a sky bleaching into dusk. I had seen birds swooping over the heather minutes before, now there were none.
‘What do you want?’ I yelled.
I knew the law, I had every right to be there, so why this uncertainty, this feeling of shame? The light was almost gone, the wind had chilled me to the bone, and still that Old Testament prophet cursed me from his mountain. It made no sense, but my sensible self was not in control: I believed he could hear me, see the expression on my face, even read my thoughts.
I was glad to get into the car, out of the buffeting air. We reversed over the grass onto the estate road.
‘Some pair of lungs,’ Kit remarked.
‘Is he dangerous? Or does no one get close enough to find out?’
He grinned as if I had said something funny.
‘What?’ I asked.
He still had a boy’s laugh, a four-note arpeggio that reminded me it was only six years since he had left school. The joke grew on him, his laughter ripening into a full-throated guffaw. By which time I had seen the sheep stampeding down the hillside, a couple of hundred fleeces converging, while a black-and-white dog traced a sweeping arc on the long leash of his master’s voice.
Test
There was sun that morning. Its white drill, levelled at my eyes, turned them to slits, turned the High Street shoppers to silhouettes and the spaces between them to chalk – though when I turned to peer after the faceless shape that had said hello, the sky was a perfect blue. I hadn’t had a proper period for two months. They had messed up my cycle with all those drugs. I told myself there was no reason to hope, but still I drove past the village where the chemist greeted his customers by name, and headed for Perth. Taking my money, the girl behind the counter barely drew breath from chatting with her friend.
A rhombus of light from the high window splashed warm across my naked thigh. I listened to the flushing cisterns, the drone of hand driers, the swing and slam of the door out to the shop. Someone broke wind, tentatively, as women do in such public-private places. A mother chivvied her young son into washing his hands. I looked down at the knickers nesting in the jeans around my ankles, the cardboard packet dropped on the floor, the white stick with its blue plus sign.
I felt like a woman I might notice on the other side of the road and think she just sails through life, a woman I would envy too much to make my friend. I felt solid, as if every cell in me had weight; and hefted, as sheep are to their estate; and full, as the sky is full of air. I felt inevitable. Unpreventable. Like a plumb line of honey twisting from a spoon, or the nanosecond before a mind-blanking sneeze. I felt ordinary, blissfully, magnificently run-of-the-mill, for what may have been the first time in my life.
I felt pregnant with the future.
PART II
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner
Nudge
There was standing room only in the bar. Holly along the gantry, mistletoe by the door, the inglenook heaped with glowing peats. Kit sat in the circle of musicians, watching his fingers on the frets, with so many buttons of his father’s shirt undone he was virtually undressed. His cuffs flapped loose, exposing the strip of leather I had knotted around his wrist.
In all those months I had seen nothing to counter my prejudices about this corner of the country: a backwater, the last market for winceyette nighties, where the gastro-pubs still served cod in parsley sauce. How had it taken me so long to discover this village with its ruined abbey and rushing river and eighteenth-century bridge? A hundred and one kinds of oatcake in the deli, designer hand-knits, celebrity cookware, and this bar: a spit-and-sawdust country pub with a Friday-night scratch band that could have sold tickets in Glasgow. My eyes travelled from the sweating fiddler to the white-haired pensioner on squeezebox, the curly-headed laird’s son on sax, the bodhran player in his black stetsun, the stockman coaxing liquid honey from the uillean pipes. Only Kit played like a hick, and still my blood reared at the sight of him in that sleazy nineties dress shirt, hamfisting his guitar.
The umpteenth chorus of ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ petered out, and the piper started a traditional reel. Knowing his limits, Kit switched to beating out the rhythm on his sound box. I scanned the room. Nikki was at her sister’s in Livingston, but there was no guaranteeing the whereabouts of her pals. Kit had introduced me around – as a friend of his mother’s – so there were people I could talk to. I knew the barman’s name was Donald and that he worked online as an ethical fundraiser. Greig maintained the log cabins in the tourist camp. Niall was the fencer, having been a librarian in Edinburgh before he downsized. Hamish was something in the City Monday to Friday, and dressed his rosy-cheeked twins in miniature versions of the Barbour and tweed cap he wore himself. The fat girl whose grizzled lurcher slunk through the forest of legs sniffing out packets of crisps was Becca. Her sister Lindsey was the bar’s teenage mother, sinking a pint of lager while jiggling a podgy infant on her hip. When I caught her eye accidentally we smiled like old friends.
Why shouldn’t I belong? I knew the songs, and I knew why they sang them, the thread of self-definition running through the medley of Rabbie Burns, Ry Cooder and Steve Earle. I could parse the grammar of their hiking boots and leather waistcoats, the modish-mythic territory they claimed somewhere between Loch Tummel and the American south. Why shouldn’t I make a life here? Quit the government, cash in my share of the house, buy a three-roomed bothy and live off the rest, topped-up with the odd day of fencing or cabin-painting. A nightly visit from Uncle Kit, source of tickling and tractor rides and all-round over-excitement. Or I’d amble down to the bar, teach myself guitar and jam with the boys. Lindsey and I could go halves on a babysitter.
It was cold by the river, away from the beery fug. An owl screeched as it flew overhead. Kit was sitting on one of the picnic tables with his feet on the bench, smoking. I lay across the neighbouring table. All I could see were stars and black sky. I heard him walk down to the river, toss his roll-up into the water, and walk back, his boots crunching on the frozen ground.
‘How d’you do that?’ he said.
‘Do what?’
He brought his face down to mine. ‘Make me want to touch you.’
His skin was pale in the moonlight, the soft plum of his underlip almost within reach. He jerked back just in time.
‘There’s nobody here to see us,’ I said.
‘I’ve snogged in warmer places.’
‘Ach well,’ I shrugged, ‘if it was only going to be a snog…’
‘That’s me missed my chance of an al fresco shag, is it?’
‘It has been known.’
He grinned. ‘Like when?’
‘Every once in a while.’
‘In the park?’
‘The park’s full of gay guys doing it.’
‘Not up a close?’
‘In Glasgow, up a close counts as inside.’
He
climbed onto the table and crouched above me. ‘So old Frankie likes it out in the open, does he?’ His jaw jutted in a crude impersonation which nevertheless held some echo of my husband. ‘With the wind on his hairy balls?’
‘Don’t push it.’
There was just enough light to see the transgressive glint in his eye. ‘Do you two still do it?’
‘Why, did I seem out of practice?’
It should have been sad, this business of talking as if we were lovers, but somehow it was not. Love had always been problematic for me: was it too much of the body, or too much in the head, was it selfless enough yet invested enough, was it there at all? Kit and I bypassed these anxieties. Our love was a running joke. But a joke that kept surprising me with its sweet stabs of feeling.
I moved over and he lay alongside me on the table.
‘The passion must be gone by now,’ he said.
‘It must, must it?’
We listened to the fiddle notes leaking from the bar. I was glad of his warmth against my side. A breeze rustled the saplings that had seeded in the rich soil by the river. I could smell the white water gushing over the weir.
‘What are we?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know – what?’ The minute I said it I knew there was no punchline. ‘You mean…’