by Lucy Foley
The Bridesmaid
Seeing Charlie again reminds me of how I used to moon about after him. It was only a few years ago, really, but I was a kid then. It’s embarrassing, thinking of the girl I used to be. But it also makes me kind of sad.
I’m looking for somewhere to hide from them all. I take the track past the ruined houses, left over from when people used to live on this island. Jules told me that the islanders abandoned their homes because they found it easier to live on the mainland, that they wanted electricity and stuff. I get that. Just the fact of being stuck here would drive you mental. Even if you managed to get a boat to the mainland you’d still be a million miles away from anywhere. Your nearest, I don’t know, H&M, say, would be hundreds of miles away. I’ve always felt like Mum and I lived out in the sticks, but now I’m just grateful that we don’t live on an island in the middle of the Atlantic. So, yeah, I can see why you’d want to leave. But looking at these deserted houses with their empty windows and tumbledown appearance, it’s hard not to feel like bad things happened here.
Yesterday, I saw something on one of the beaches; it was bigger than the rest of the rocks, grey but smoother, softer-looking somehow. I went to get a closer look. It was a dead seal. A baby, I think, because it was so small. I crept a bit closer and then I got a shock. On the other side, which had been hidden from me before, the seal’s body was all open, dark red, spilling out. I can’t get the image of it out of my head. Since then this place has made me think of death.
It only takes me a few minutes to get down to the cave, which is marked on a map of the island in the Folly. The Whispering Cave, it’s called. It’s like a long wound in the ground – open at both ends. You could fall into it without realising it was there because the opening is hidden by all this long grass. When I came across it yesterday I nearly did fall in. I would have broken my neck. That would ruin Jules’s perfect wedding, wouldn’t it? The thought almost makes me smile.
I climb down into the cave, down the rocks at the side that resemble a flight of steps. All the noise in my head dials down a notch and I start to breathe easier, even if there is a weird smell in this place – like sulphur, and maybe also of things rotting. It could be coming from the seaweed, lying all around in here in big dark ropes. Or maybe the stink’s coming from the walls, which are spotted with yellow lichen.
In front of me is a tiny shingled beach, and the sea beyond. I sit down on a rock. It’s damp, but then this whole place is damp. I could feel it on my clothes when I dressed this morning, like they’d been washed and hadn’t quite dried. If I lick my lips I can taste salt on my skin.
I think about staying here for a long time, even overnight. I could hide here until after the ceremony is over, until it’s all done and dusted. Jules would be livid, of course. Although … maybe she’d pretend to be angry, but actually she’d be secretly relieved. I don’t think she really wants me at her wedding at all. I think she resents me because Mum gets on better with me and because I have a dad who wants to see me at least occasionally. I know I’m being a bitch. Jules does do nice stuff for me, sometimes, like when she let me stay in her flat in London last summer. And when I remember that I feel bad, like there’s a nasty taste in my mouth.
I take out my phone. Because of the rubbish signal here my Instagram is stuck with one photo at the top. Of course it would be Ellie’s latest post. It’s like they’re mocking me. The comments underneath:
You GUYS!
OMG sooooo cute.
mum + dad
#mood
so can we assume its official now, yeh? *winks*
It hurts, still. A pain at the centre of my chest. I look at their smug, smiling faces, and part of me wants to lob my phone as hard as I can at the wall of the cave. But that wouldn’t sort my problems out. They’re all right here with me.
I hear a noise in the cave – footsteps – and almost drop my phone in shock. ‘Who’s there?’ I say. My voice sounds small and scared. I really hope it’s not the best man, Johnno. I caught him looking at me earlier.
I stand up and start to clamber out of the cave, keeping close to the wall, which is covered with thousands of tiny rough barnacles that graze my fingertips. Finally I put my head around the wall of rock.
‘Oh Jesus!’ The figure stumbles backwards and puts a hand to her chest. It’s Charlie’s wife. ‘Christ! You gave me a right shock. I didn’t think anyone was down here.’ She’s got a nice accent, Northern. ‘You’re Olivia, aren’t you? I’m Hannah, I’m married to Charlie.’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I got that. Hi.’
‘What are you doing down here?’ She does a quick glance over her shoulder, like she’s checking there’s no one listening. ‘Looking for a place to hide? Me too.’
I decide I like her a little bit for that.
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘that probably sounded bad, didn’t it? I just – I guess Charlie and Jules will catch up better if I’m not around. You know, they have all this history and it doesn’t include me.’
She sounds a bit fed up. History. I’m like 90 per cent sure Charlie and Jules have screwed at some point in the past. I wonder if Hannah’s ever thought about that.
Hannah sits down on a shelf of rock. I sit, too, because I was here first. I really wish she’d take the hint and leave me alone. I take my pack of cigarettes out of my pocket and tip one out. I wait to see if Hannah’s going to say anything. She doesn’t. So I go one step further, to test her, I suppose, and offer her one, along with my lighter.
She screws up her face. ‘I shouldn’t,’ she says. Then she sighs. ‘But why not? We had such a mental crossing over here – I’ve got the shakes now.’ She holds up a hand to show me.
She lights up, takes a deep drag and gives another big sigh. I can see she’s gone a bit dizzy. ‘Wow. That’s gone straight to my head. Haven’t had one for so long. Gave up when I got pregnant. But I smoked a lot in my clubbing days.’ She gives me a look. ‘Yeah, I know – you’re thinking that must have been a million years ago. Certainly feels like it.’
I feel a bit guilty, because I had thought it. But looking at her more closely I can see that she has four piercings in one ear and there’s a tattoo on the inside of her wrist, half hidden by her sleeve. Maybe there’s another side to her.
She takes another big drag. ‘God that’s good. I thought when I gave them up that I’d eventually go off the taste, or wouldn’t miss them any more.’ She gives a big, deep laugh. ‘Yeah. Didn’t happen.’ She blows out four perfect rings of smoke.
I’m kind of impressed, despite myself. Callum used to try that but he never got the hang of it.
‘So you’re at uni, right?’ she asks.
‘Yeah,’ I say.
‘Whereabouts?’
‘Exeter.’
‘That’s a good one, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I suppose so.’
‘I didn’t go,’ Hannah says. ‘No one in my family went to uni,’ she coughs, ‘except for my sister, Alice.’
I don’t know what to say to that. I don’t really know anyone who didn’t go to uni. Even Mum went to acting school.
‘Alice was always the clever one,’ Hannah goes on. ‘I used to be the wild one, if you can believe it. We both went to this crummy school but Alice came out of there with amazing grades.’ She taps ash from her cigarette. ‘Sorry, I know I’m banging on. She’s on my mind a lot at the moment.’
Her face has changed, I notice. But I don’t feel like I can ask her about it, seeing as we’re total strangers.
‘Anyway,’ Hannah says. ‘You like Exeter?’
‘I’m not there any more,’ I say. ‘I dropped out.’ I don’t know what made me say it. It would have been so much easier to play along, pretend I was still there. But I suddenly felt like I didn’t want to lie to her.
Hannah frowns. ‘Oh yeah? You weren’t enjoying it then?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I guess … I had this boyfriend. And he broke up with me.’ Wow, that sounds pathetic.
When I think about everything that happened in the last year my mind goes hot, and blank, and I can’t think about it properly or sort it all out in my head. None of it makes sense, especially now, trying to piece it all together. I can’t explain it, I think, without telling her everything. So I shrug and say, ‘Well, I guess he was my first proper boyfriend.’
Proper as in more than someone to hook up with at house parties. But I don’t say this to Hannah.
‘And you loved him,’ she says.
She doesn’t say it like a question, so I don’t feel I have to answer. All the same, I nod my head. ‘Yeah,’ I say. My voice comes out very small and cracked. I didn’t believe in love at first sight until I saw Callum, across the bar at Fresher’s Week, this boy with black curls and beautiful blue eyes. He gave me a sort of slow smile and it was like I knew him. Like we had always meant to come together, to find each other.
Callum said he loved me first. I was too scared of making an arse of myself. But eventually I felt like I had to say it too, like it was bursting out of me. When he broke up with me, he told me that he would love me forever. But that’s total crap. If you love someone, really, you don’t do anything to hurt them.
‘I didn’t leave just because he broke up with me,’ I say, quickly. ‘It was …’ I take a big drag on my cigarette. My hand’s trembling. ‘I guess if Callum hadn’t broken up with me, none of the rest would have happened.’
‘None of the rest?’ Hannah asks. She’s sitting forward, interested.
I don’t answer. I’m trying to think of a way to go on, but I can’t find the right words. She doesn’t push me. So there’s a long silence, both of us sitting there and smoking.
Then: ‘Shit!’ Hannah says. ‘Is it me or has it got quite a lot darker while we’ve been sitting here?’
‘I think the sun’s started to set,’ I say. We can’t see it from here as we’re not facing in the right direction, but you can make out the pink glow in the sky.
‘Oh dear,’ Hannah says. ‘We should probably make our way back to the Folly. Charlie hates being late for anything. He’s such a teacher. I reckon I can hide for another ten minutes but—’ She’s stubbing out her cigarette now.
‘You go,’ I say. ‘It’s fine. It’s not important.’
She squints at me. ‘It kind of sounded like it was.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Honestly.’
I can’t believe how close I came to telling her about it all. I haven’t told anyone the other stuff. Not even any of my mates. It’s a relief, really. If I’d told her, there’d be no taking it back. It would be out there in the world: what I’ve done.
AOIFE
The Wedding Planner
Seven o’clock. The table is laid for dinner in the dining room. Freddy’s got supper covered, which means it’s a free half hour. I decide to pay a visit to the graveyard. The flowers need refreshing and tomorrow we’ll be run off our feet.
When I step outside the sun is just beginning to go down, spilling fire upon the water. It tinges pink the mist that has begun to gather over the bog, that shields its secrets. This is my favourite hour.
The ushers are sitting up on the battlements: I hear their voices floating down as I leave the Folly – louder and slightly more slurred than earlier, the work of the Guinness, I’ll bet.
‘Got to send them off with a bang.’
‘Yeah, we should do something. Would only be traditional …’
I’m half tempted to stay and listen, to check they aren’t plotting mayhem on my watch. But it sounds harmless. And I’ve only got this brief window of time to myself.
The island looks at its most starkly beautiful this evening, lit up by the glow of the dying sun. But perhaps it will never seem quite so beautiful to me as I remember from those trips we took here when I was a child. The four of us, my family, here to stay for the summer holidays. Nowhere on earth could possibly live up to those halcyon days. But that’s nostalgia for you, the tyranny of those memories of childhood that feel so golden, so perfect.
There is a whispering in the graveyard when I get there, the beginnings of a breeze stirring between the stones. A harbinger of tomorrow’s weather, maybe. Sometimes, when the wind is really up, it seems to carry from here the echoes of women from centuries past performing the caoineadh, their keening for the dead.
The graves here are unusually close together, because true dry land is in short supply on the island. Even then, at the outer edges the bog has begun to nibble away at it, swallowing several of the graves until only the top few inches remain. Some of the stones have moved closer still, leaning in toward one another as though sharing a secret. The names, the ones that remain visible, are common to Connemara: Joyce, Foley, Kelly, Conneely.
It’s a strange thing when you consider that the dead on this island far outnumber the living, even now that some of the guests have arrived. Tomorrow will redress the balance.
There is a great deal of local superstition about the island. When Freddy and I bought the Folly a year or so ago, there was no other bidder. The islanders were always mistrusted, seen as a species apart.
I know the mainlanders view Freddy and me as outsiders. Me the townie ‘Jackeen’ from Dublin and Freddy the Englishman, a couple who don’t know better, who have probably bitten off more than we can chew. Who don’t know about Inis an Amplóra’s dark history, its ghosts. Actually, I know this place better than they think. It is more familiar to me in some ways than any other place I have known in my life. And I’m not worried about it being haunted. I have my own ghosts. I carry them with me wherever I go.
‘I miss you,’ I say, as I crouch down. The stone stares back at me, blank and mute. I touch it with my fingertips. It is rough, cold, unyielding – so far from the warmth of a cheek, or the soft, springy hair that I recall so vividly. ‘But I hope you’d be proud of me.’ I feel it as I do every time I crouch here: the familiar, impotent anger, rising up in me to leave its bitter taste in my mouth.
And then I hear a cackling, from somewhere above me, as though in mockery of my words. No matter how many times I hear it, that sound will never cease to make my blood run cold. I look up and see it there: a big cormorant perched on the highest part of the ruined chapel, its crooked black wings hung open to dry like a broken umbrella. A cormorant on a steeple: that’s an ill omen. The devil’s bird, they call it in these parts. The cailleach dhubh, the black hag, the bringer of death. Here’s hoping that the bride and groom don’t know this … or that they aren’t the superstitious sort.
I clap my hands, but the creature doesn’t budge. Instead it rotates its head slowly so I can see its stark profile, the cruel shape of its beak. And I realise that it is watching me, sidewise, out of its beady gleaming eye, as though it knows something I do not.
Back at the Folly, I carry a tray of champagne flutes through to the dining room, ready for this evening’s drinks. As I open the door I see a couple sitting there on the sofa. It takes me a moment to realise that it’s the bride and another man: one of the couple that Mattie brought across on the boat. The two of them are sitting very close together, their heads touching, talking in low voices. They don’t exactly spring apart on noticing my entrance, but they do move a few inches away from one another. And she takes her hand off his knee.
‘Aoife,’ the bride calls out. ‘This is Charlie.’
I remember his name from the list. ‘Our MC for tomorrow, I believe?’ I say.
He coughs. ‘Yes, that’s me.’
‘Sure, and your wife’s Hannah, isn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Good memory!’
‘We were going through Charlie’s duties for tomorrow,’ the bride tells me.
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Good.’ I wonder why she felt the need to explain anything to me. They looked rather cosy together on the sofa but I’m not here to cast any moral judgement upon my clients, or even to have like
s and dislikes, to have opinions on things. That isn’t how this sort of thing works. Freddy and I, if everything goes well, should simply fade into the background. We will only stand out if things go wrong, and I shall take care to ensure they will not. The bride and groom and their nearest and dearest should feel that this place is theirs, really, that they are the hosts. We are merely here to facilitate everything, to ensure that the whole weekend runs smoothly. But to do that I can’t be completely passive. It is the strange tension of my role. I’ll have to keep an eye on all of them, watch for any threatening developments. I will have to try and stay one step ahead.
NOW
The wedding night
The sound of the scream rings in the air after it has finished, like a struck glass. The guests are frozen in its wake. They are looking, all of them, out of the marquee and into the roaring darkness from where it came. The lights flicker, threatening another blackout.
Then a girl stumbles into the marquee. Her white shirt marks her out as a waitress. But her face is a wild animal’s, her eyes huge and dark, her hair tangled. She stands there in front of them, staring. She does not appear to blink.
Finally a woman approaches her, not one of the guests. It is the wedding planner. ‘What is it?’ she asks gently. ‘What’s happened?’
The girl doesn’t answer. It seems to the guests that all they can hear is her breathing. There is something animal about that too: rough and hoarse.
The wedding planner steps towards her, places a tentative hand on her shoulder. The girl doesn’t react. The guests are transfixed, rooted to the spot. Some of them vaguely remember this girl from earlier. She was one of many who smilingly handed them their starters and main courses and desserts. She cleared their plates and refreshed their wine glasses, pouring expertly, her red ponytail bobbing smartly with every step, her shirt white and clean and crisp. Some of them recall her gentle singsong accent: could she top them up, could she get them anything more? Otherwise she was, for want of a better expression, part of the furniture. Part of the well-oiled machinery of the day. Less worthy of proper notice, really, than the chic arrangements of greenery, the wavering flames atop the silver candlesticks.