Back at the house Niall leans on the counter by the oven and thinks of Christine using it for her bakes. They inherited the house from his childless uncle when he died of a heart attack. Her relatives from the west coast were always sending her things for the house. He decided it was why she seemed to get away with so much, the way she was comfortable with being indulged. It gave her an unshakable confidence but there were times he loved her for it.
He remembers how mesmerized he had been that first day they spent together after meeting at the grocer’s. How she took his calloused hand in hers and traced his dry palm with her little fingers. The way, without blinking, she looked into his eyes and told him he had experienced trauma but that he had a good handle on his emotions. It was the first time they touched. He laughed and clasped his hand over hers and looked into her ice-blue eyes. ‘That’s not true,’ he said and kissed her.
He doesn’t speak to her family, only exchanging a few emails when Christine’s mother Lillith passed away last June. Every December a Christmas card used to arrive for Lauren, but there would be nothing for him. He always meant to take Lauren to visit her grandmother but he never managed to. He told himself that work was getting in the way and then it was too late. Deep down, he was scared there was too much suspicion hanging in the air, which kept him awake at night.
Standing on a Shaker chair he has made himself, he unsticks a thick recipe book called Cooking Up a Storm! from the top of a kitchen cupboard.
He fishes out his well-thumbed graph-paper notebook, filled with precise, pencilled measurements of flooring and cabinets. Biting his lip, he copies down a list of ingredients.
The supermarket, a Co-op, is twenty-three miles away, in the town of Duthac. Lauren loves their trips to buy food and he feels a strange guilt going there without her. There is something about the abundance, the neat arrangement of perfect vegetables, the brightly lit aisles of magazines, cleaning products, toiletries, and the choices offered. The synthetic smell of baking. She loves the supermarket café, or rather canteen: its chairs attached to tables with iron tubing; the yellow glow from the metal serving hatch; the steam of overheated meat and swirls of Danish pastries; the comforting smell of the coffee machine. On Saturday mornings in mid-winter father and daughter will sit with steaming drinks looking out at the snow.
Niall does not like the overhead lighting today, however. It is too bright and makes him aware that he hasn’t showered. He tries to glimpse himself in the thin side mirror of the dairy aisle, but only sees part of his unkempt beard. He goes to the magazine rack, his heavy, chapped hands fumbling on the bottom shelf to pick up a copy of Pony magazine with a pink cellophane package stuck to the front. The handles of the basket feel too thin and the wire digs into his palms as he walks past a huge display of boxed fireworks. He finds onions, flour and cider, but misses out some herbs: ‘one bay leaf’ doesn’t sound like it will make much difference. Perhaps he can find something in the garden. He hasn’t considered the pastry itself until now. He asks a teenage shop assistant, Kayleigh, where he can find its ingredients. She gives him a doubtful, blue-eyeshadowed look and suggests he buy a roll of something pre-made from the chilled aisle.
He buys some extra things: instant coffee, more budget cornflakes, blue milk, own-brand beans, apples for Lauren who loves them, like her mother. He stands in the queue behind a family scanning Catherine wheels.
Driving back through Duthac he stops by the ironmonger’s, a dark shop cluttered with floor-to-ceiling tools and materials, with its own familiar smell of chalk and rust. Squeezing between tins of paint, plant pots and power drills, he buys caulk, nails and sandpaper to fix the leaking roof.
At home, he dumps the ingredients on the kitchen counter and sits frozen on the sofa in his coat, summoning up the energy for the meat of the dish.
He claps his hands together, then heaves the sliding patio door open to the chilly garden. He hoists himself up on to the first concrete ledge, bedded with shrubs, and walks up the path to the bushes at the back that lead to a sloping field. Here he keeps a small vegetable patch that mostly animals benefit from.
At the edge of the bushes by the fence, he crawls on his hands and knees and feels around for a wooden box. It is cuboid and weathered, about two feet long and eight inches wide. His knee bones ache when he crouches and his tightly laced boots cut into his ankles and feet. His hands are almost as rough as the box, which has darkened with algae. The door board of the box, which he built himself, is closed. He drags it out, feeling the weight at the end twitching. He stands and up-ends it, then opens the sliding door and peers into the black.
He plunges his hand two feet down into the narrow space until he feels fur jolt against wood and grabs velvet ears, dragging the rabbit out as it kicks its thick hocks. Quickly Niall grips its soft neck with his other hand and, before it can bite him, he jerks the rabbit’s head right back. He feels the neck snap and the body fall slack. He checks its liquid eyes for any signs of myxomatosis, then takes hold of its feet and stretches its dangling body downwards before lying it out on the garden path. He has to admit it looks cute.
When he has squeezed out its urine, he takes a knife from his pocket and makes a shallow incision in the animal’s chest, careful not to break the slick white skin underneath that houses the guts. He sticks his rough fingers under the brown fur and tears a straight line down the animal’s stomach, splitting the pelt. Alive only a few moments ago, its body is still supple and skinning it is easy, like stripping thick wallpaper, until the body is naked and red.
Niall opens up the animal’s insides and cuts out slippery black intestines, then kidneys. These he will give to Jameson later. He cuts off the head and the feet, tossing them over into the field for the foxes and buzzards to get to.
He takes the small red body to the kitchen, where he rinses and butchers it, leaving him with meat for the pie to braise and bake in the oven.
He sinks back into the sofa for a break. The clock ticks; the ceiling drips, reminding him of sand slipping through a timer. Feeling tired, he listens to a curt answering-machine message about tiling from Catriona on the hallway phone. He left before she came home today. Her voice is cold, but still syrupy. He doesn’t know how long it will take him to fix this leak in the utility room. He thinks he’ll probably have to climb up on the roof and check the vents and flashing. It can wait. To mask the dripping, he plays an Iron Maiden album on the paint-flecked stereo. He lays out the cans and packages on the worktop and begins to slice carrots, cutting in time to the music. There isn’t much to it; cooking isn’t so different to joinery.
The clouds shift and a bright day comes through the kitchen window, catching dust motes and things that need to be replaced or fixed. After an hour’s work, the light fades and the house feels emptier. He watches the dark oven and the bulb that has been dead for years behind the murky glass door.
When Lauren gets off the bus the light is dim and there is a sharp bite in the air. Billy has been away for three days. It is Bonfire Night and as she walks alongside the mossy drystone wall on the road to her house, she smells dry branches and leaves burning somewhere. Vairi passes her on the road, walking her two tiny dogs. Lauren greets them, nervous of their yaps.
‘That’s you from school then?’ says Vairi.
‘Yes,’ says Lauren. The wind rises and she begins to feel her eyes sting in the cold.
When Vairi coughs, Lauren remembers she might die soon.
‘Back in my day, of course, there was no school bus,’ says Vairi, pointing down the road, a gnarled finger sticking out of her long twill coat sleeve. ‘I had to cycle in, past that forest, down the big hill, rain or shine. Aye. You kids are lucky now.’
Lauren says, ‘Is that right?’
‘That’s right. That bus started ’bout thirty year back, aye. This is too cold for November. I think we’ll have snow soon. Mind how you go.’ She begins to totter off down the road in her lace-up brogues.
‘Vairi?’
She turns.
The dogs stand stock-still.
‘I just wanted to ask. Ann-Marie’s back now.’
‘Yes, I’ve seen her come and go.’ She frowns as though the wind is too strong and starts to turn away.
‘She says you knew my mum. You were her friend.’ She has to raise her voice against the rustling of the trees and bushes.
Vairi looks at her and smiles like a pumpkin. ‘I knew your mammy, aye. I still know her.’
‘What?’
‘Someone like her. She was a special lassie.’ She licks her wrinkled lips. ‘I don’t know what your daddy’s told you, but someone like that never really leaves, ken. I thought you’d realize that.’ The wind sets the leaves in an orange papery swirl around their feet.
The back of Lauren’s neck feels itchy against her scarf.
‘Look, look at that bird over there – that buzzard.’ Vairi points over the road. The bird perches like a lost glove on a fence post, its sharp yellow talons almost invisible. ‘She is watching you.’ Vairi’s voice croaks. ‘And your mammy will be watching you too. Just like that birdie. They’re very territorial. And your mammy is wise, like these ones. They may not look it, but they are. And that one over there knows how to help folk too.’
‘Buzzards help people? How is she your friend?’
‘They appear as a warning sign, of sorts. To watch out for what’s ahead. And the truth is’ – now that there is a story to tell, Vairi has resigned herself to the pavement in the silver November light – ‘your mother and I didn’t get on at first. I thought she was wild. And she was. Wild. She didn’t have any family near by, they were from somewhere else, further north, on the west coast.’
‘I know,’ says Lauren.
‘But I could see that she understood some things. Eventually, I saw that.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Oh, traditions and the like.’ Vairi stops, and looks ahead down the road, then back behind her. ‘Things my granny used to do for good luck. Y’know, superstitions, perhaps.’ She looks down at her two dogs as they pull on the leads. Then Vairi whispers: ‘She still does. I still talk to her.’
Lauren recoils and looks at the long road towards home. ‘How?’ She is daring herself. The curiosity is feeding a skinny part of her. She finds the antler handle, deep in her jacket pocket, and clenches it in her fist.
‘How? She’s … present. In my dreams, and in the evenings recently I’ve seen her. I know you see her too.’ Seeing Lauren’s disbelief, she goes on, ‘I know Christine. She’s visiting to say there’s trouble afoot. Most don’t remember seeing her though, do they? Most don’t want to, that’s the thing. It’s a kind of shock that passes over and they push her away out of their heads. I can see from your face that you do see her though. I’m right. After all this time, she’ll be back for a reason. Protecting you, like her over there.’ She gestures to the buzzard. ‘You see your mammy. And you remember her, of course.’
This is too much. Lauren turns and starts running towards home, her school shoes slapping on the broken pavement as the wind draws tears from her frozen face. That auld wifey. She hears her father’s voice in her head. That maddie. The day has almost faded. A timber lorry passes, piled with rocking logs that look set to roll away. She starts walking, out of breath. Her creased black Clarks pinch from the running and she wonders whether to ask her dad for a new pair. She is nearly home now and can see the kitchen light through the shrubs. She’s visiting to say there’s trouble afoot.
As soon as she twists the back-door handle, Jameson starts barking. ‘Jame-son,’ she says, then louder, ‘Jame-son.’ A guitar album is playing quietly.
She runs upstairs and hears her father call her as she goes. The temperature drops when she reaches the landing. She prises off her tight shoes and wiggles her toes in the chill. Her socks are odd, one striped yellow and the other pink camouflage. All her socks seem to be separated from their partners and have to make do together. That’s how she thinks of herself and her dad: a pair of odd socks. Sometimes Niall won’t notice she has run out of clean clothes until it is too late. Maisie, with her perfect Chelsea boots, has whispered to other children that Lauren doesn’t wash. She can’t bear to tell her father that they call her a scaff. Lauren dumps her bag and coat in her dark bedroom. The dark makes her less-than-real. She feels around for the softness of her dressing gown to slip over her school uniform and take the day away. Downstairs is quiet.
She creeps over to her father’s room and slides on her belly under his bed. The floor is thick with dust. She pretends she is a car mechanic fixing up a lorry. In the dark, her dressing gown is a deep-blue boiler suit, with her name embroidered over a top pocket. She reaches around for the bumpy plastic shell of her mother’s vanity case. It isn’t in the usual spot. She has the urge to put on her mother’s lipstick. It makes her feel safe, almost protected.
The festering, flowery smell has crept up on her and she slides out again, sneezing with the dust, and looks at the bed from this different angle. The room is too gloomy, so she fetches a rubbery black torch from the hall cupboard, kept for power cuts.
Peering under the bed again, she sees the make-up case pressed against the back wall. As she tries to slide back under, the torch wobbles and falls, rolling into a couple of bin bags. She heaves them out, and finds they are full of her father’s muddy boots and trainers. Back under the bed, she also prises open a battered shoebox full of electricity bills and bank statements. Her father would go nuts if he knew she was here, but that’s partly why she likes doing it.
As she tries to turn around, her torch beam shines up towards the bedframe. The wooden slats above the vanity case have been marked with tiny drawings. When she looks closer, she sees there are perfectly printed stars, lines and circular symbols. Lauren traces her finger along the grainy surface of one illuminated slat. She can’t work out if the symbols have been inked on in the same way she inks stars on to her school bag, or if they are somehow burnt into the wood.
She gives the vanity case a push so that it slides out the other side of the bed. She clambers over the untidy mattress and unsnaps the locks on the case, catching sight of her own fingers in its internal mirror. She wants the red lipstick that sits in a top tray, the one she wore at Halloween, but there is only a small black obelisk in its place. She rummages deeper inside the box and finds it is filled with stones: fluorite and rose quartz and pebbles of labradorite, among her mother’s make-up. She finds a lipstick eventually, but it is a different colour, pale pink in a rose-gold case, rather than the deep red of Halloween. She picks out a small palette of silver eyeshadow and brushes it around her eyes until she looks like a girl from the future. She pretends she can read people’s minds.
In the back room downstairs, seventies rock thumps and the table is laid for two. She draws the hall doorway’s velvet curtain behind her but Jameson snuffles through and sits under a forbidden dining chair.
Her father calls from the kitchen, ‘Nearly done now.’
She leans through the steam of the food hatch. ‘What is it?’
‘Making a pie.’
‘Is … today special?’ She wonders whether he is drunk, like the summer he made pancakes at four in the morning.
A clump of hair is hanging between his salt and pepper eyebrows. ‘Nope!’
She hurls herself backwards into the main room like a rock star. Further away from the kitchen, she begins to smell something sour that isn’t his cooking. It is the same smell as under the bed, and when Ann-Marie came to babysit her. She keeps dancing. The same smell that is not rotting meat or dead flowers or a mouse trapped in the walls, but something like it. After a couple of minutes, she realizes her father is watching her dance from the kitchen hatch, his face pink like ham. ‘You know,’ he says, moving in time, ‘I should show you how to play this. I think you could pick it up, if I showed you.’
‘No I couldn’t!’
He disappears, and she hears the clanking of plates and metal. She stops dancing. A current of fros
ty air brushes her skin, even though the fire is steadily building. Shadows start to grow from under the doorway curtain, like a tide edging in. For a second she is sure she sees the shadow of a person behind the curtain, and then it is gone.
Lauren shivers and lights a stubby candle in a piece of carved antler. She can hear the utility room dripping under the clatter of cooking.
Niall carries in the gigantic pie ceremonially, the brown edges of the pastry bubbling with gravy. ‘Here we go. Like Desperate Dan, eh? But it’s rabbit, not cow.’ He raises his eyebrows at the burning candle. ‘You wanted to add a touch of class, did you, kiddo?’ In the candlelight each move Lauren and her father make is projected on to the wall as something larger and more theatrical. The sour smell is growing and Lauren wonders if he can smell it too.
She wrinkles her nose and makes shadow animals – a rabbit, a dog and a bird. Its wings end in huge feathery fingers, like a buzzard.
‘Ach, I forgot to cook vegetables and that,’ Niall says.
‘’S OK. What’s that smell?’
‘What smell? Your fingers look like feathers there,’ he says, pointing to the shadow. ‘Now. How much of this are you wanting?’
‘Don’t mind. However much.
‘Dad,’ Lauren says, chewing a chunk of meat.
‘Yes?’
She swallows it down and it sticks in her throat. ‘This is really good.’ It would be, without the smell.
‘Thanks, love.’ He tucks a napkin into his collar and takes a bite thoughtfully. ‘It is actually, isn’t it?’
‘Jameson’ll be wanting some.’
‘They’ll all be wanting some.’ He spreads out his arms happily.
‘Who’s they?’ Her teacherly voice is a way of showing him affection.
The patio doors opposite the table are now a deep-black rectangle. The room has a strange humidity.
Pine Page 12