by Denise Mina
Leon seemed surprised, tipped his head at me and said, ‘How do you know?’
‘I just know.’
‘But how do you know her name?’
I realised my mistake.
‘Oh Mr McKay keeps us up to speed with all of that.’ It was a stupid thing to say, as if Albert would run the staff through a list of people who weren’t members.
I saw Leon smile and look at my mouth. I was suddenly aware that my accent was slipping around. It was because he was a Londoner–I’d mimicked his vowels without meaning to. I was supposed to be a chambermaid from Aberdeen.
Scared, I mumbled something about not being supposed to talk to guests, anyway. Maybe he should just go inside.
Leon left a pause and then he said: ‘Nah.’ And dropped it.
He didn’t pry about how I knew Gretchen Teigler’s name but maybe he already knew. I have a scar across my eyebrow that is pretty distinctive. I’m recognisable if you know what to look for and Leon was from London. He would have heard about the scandal. It was pretty hard to miss.
Anyway, Leon rolled his eyes and moved on to talking about smoking again. I thought he was just in this moment with me, his new friend, smoking and telling stories. Then he came back to it and said, ‘Bollocks to Nazis, anyway.’
We both laughed at that. Then we laughed because we were both laughing, apparently at nothing, but we understood each other quite deeply, and it was fleeting and laughing was a way to keep it alive. But then it was over. We wiped our eyes and he sighed and I said, ‘Hey, Leon, did I tell you about the boys swimming in a salt lake with their mule?’
And he looked greedy-eyed, and growled ‘AHHHH!’, telling me to give him the story. I did. It was a good one. Then he gave me one back. It was a peach. I can’t remember what happened in his story, just that it was small and round and the tail tucked neatly into its mouth.
Our stories weren’t disguised curriculum vitae. We didn’t tell them as a way of boasting or declaring our relative place in the social order. There was none of that crap. These were stories to entertain, told for the shape of them, for the sake of them, for the love of a tale. It was all about the stories and the shapes of the stories. Round ones, spirals, perfect arcs, a ninety-degree take-off with a four-bump landing, and one of his, I remember vividly, was an absurdist finger trap. Whatever happened afterwards, whoever he turned out to be really, at that point it was pure with me and Leon.
I trusted him a little. When no one came to kill me the next day, I trusted him a little more. During the day I saw the manager, Mr McKay, and he made no mention of Gretchen Teigler so I knew Leon hadn’t mentioned my slip-up. Maybe it meant nothing to him.
The next night by the bins he told me about his daughter. When men talk about a daughter it’s often a coded way of saying they are not planning to attack you. Mothers are a different code. Mother stories can go either way. Leon had divorced the girl’s mother and abandoned his daughter. The girl grew up in terrible circumstances, her mother was a drug addict and the girl’s upbringing was wild. He only found out later. It was a bitter break-up and he was so wrapped up in himself he hadn’t even thought to find out how she was. He was in his late thirties when she was born, he didn’t know what it was to be a father. He was supporting them now but his daughter was very angry with him. He thought she was right to be.
It was honest, clearly true and he felt awful about it. I felt he was making himself vulnerable. He asked me if I had family and, for some reason, I told him the truth. My mother died of breast cancer when I was seventeen. She was everything to me. My father had killed himself when I was young. I didn’t remember him. Leon tutted and said that was dreadful. He wasn’t being judgemental, just, it was a terrible thing to deal with. He said my father should have waited, that it would have passed, usually does. Then he took a deep draw on his cigarette, burning a half-inch stub of ash. It felt as if he had considered suicide and talked himself out of it. I liked him even more for that. I never forgave my father for what he did. Suicide is virulent. It can rip through families the way TB used to scythe down whole streets. He brought the pathogen into our home. Especially towards the end, when she was terribly ill, my mum struggled because of what he did. Some days, my own staying alive felt like an act of defiance, like a big fuck you to my dad.
Then Leon went back inside.
He was there for a week. He came out each night and we smoked and told stories but he wasn’t afraid of being quiet and he always left me time for a smoke alone.
On his last night he came to the bins with two glasses of fifteen-year-old Springbank. He said it was the best malt ever made.
I thanked him and we drank and watched the hot-pink sunset lose the good fight over the bin shed. It was nice malt.
Leon said chumps go for the expensive whisky but this was the best. He told a long story about a millionaire who paid eight grand for a single measure of a hundred-year-old malt and posted a picture of the bottle. Experts replied and told him that the distillery didn’t even exist until thirty years ago. They tested it and the whisky was a cheap blend, the bottle was a fake. Leon liked that story a lot. I don’t really know why he enjoyed telling it so much. At the end he laughed with surprise and his laugh was full and deep. It came from his belly and he opened his mouth wide to let it out in gusty barks. And then he said, ‘I’d have paid that at one time. You can’t buy special, though. Cost me a lot of dough to find that out.’
I wanted to ask him what the fuck he was doing at Skibo Castle then, but he might not have found it funny, and I liked him, so I didn’t. Did he have money of his own or just a rich girlfriend? It was never clear, really. And then my break was over and the malt was gone and we had smoked our cigarettes down.
He turned to me, which felt weird, because we were usually looking out at the view, but he turned and looked at me and said, ‘You’re too good for this job, Anna. Promise me you’ll get out of here.’
I was already working my notice. I had been asked to leave because of the tray incident and several other things which, in hindsight, I’m astonished they tolerated at all. But Leon didn’t know that and I liked him so I let him have the win.
‘OK, I promise,’ I said. ‘And you should get away from that miserable Dutch woman. Find someone who likes you.’
He grinned and I noticed the gap behind his incisor. ‘Doesn’t she like me?’
‘She doesn’t like anything.’
He laughed again and told me to take care and he left.
When I came on shift next morning Leon was gone. He had driven away in the middle of the night without the Dutch girlfriend. She was in reception, very angry, giving the staff a hard time about the spa bill and demanding a limo to take her to the airport. I was sent upstairs to pack for her. I’m ashamed to say that I spat in her Crème de la Mer. I really was a poisonous little dart back then.
Sitting in my gleaming German kitchen, with my girls and Hamish asleep upstairs and the mug of coffee going cold in my hand, I looked at the photo of my friend Leon and wept. I was very upset that he was dead.
Grief is a scar. The tissue is tough and when it’s cut again, it heals poorly.
I thought that I needed to talk to my best friend, Estelle, that if I could describe Leon to her, tell her what a good bloke he was, what he meant to me, my sadness would be lessened. It would put it in the past. She was due to come by and pick me up for our Bikram class at nine thirty, but it was still early. I glanced at the clock and realised with a start that it was after seven o’clock. I had to wake up my family and begin my mundane suburban Monday.
I should have stayed under the sea with the ghosts.
5
I FIRST HEARD THE knocking on the front door as I was packing the girls’ lunches. I glanced at the clock. Five to eight. I assumed it was a lost taxi driver or a parcel with the wrong address.
Everyone else was upstairs, getting ready. I had lists and sports timetables running through my head: Jessica had swimming today and Lizzie had gym. J
ess needed her costume and shampoo because chlorine made her scalp itchy.
I heard the knocking again but I was ticking through lists in my mind and didn’t want to break my chain of thought. I ignored it.
I took the school bags and put them in the hall, called up to the girls that they had ten minutes, come on now, went to the airing cupboard and took out a swimming costume and a fresh towel, rolled one inside the other and came back out.
As I walked down the hallway, I blinked and saw Leon laughing against a pink sky. The memory was so vivid that it winded me. I slumped against the wall to catch my breath. Fuck.
I hadn’t mentioned the podcast over breakfast. Hamish didn’t know I’d worked at Skibo so there would be no straightforward way of telling a story about Leon, and anyway, we were barely talking.
I was in the hall, thinking about Leon, when I heard Hamish’s mobile ring out in our bedroom above.
A scuffle of feet as he hurried across the room to pick it up.
I was angry. When I rang Hamish he just let it go to answerphone. Sometimes he called me back later. Sometimes he didn’t and just said he hadn’t noticed his phone ringing. But when his office called he always answered immediately. Now he was scampering across the bedroom to answer a call at eight in the morning. Funny business, corporate law. The calls were day and night.
I could hear him murmuring urgently, his voice snaking down the stairwell. Then I heard him shut the bedroom door for privacy.
That made me furious and I couldn’t justify it.
I shoved the swimming kit into the bag.
The front door was knocked again, quite deliberately this time. Three knocks, equally spaced. Knock. Knock. Knock.
I walked over to the door and reached for the snib but darkness fell in the hall.
I looked back. Hamish was standing on the landing, blocking the light from the window. His outline was wrong. He wasn’t wearing a suit and tie but some sort of T-shirt with a horrible collar and disgusting beige trousers with pleats. I didn’t even know he had clothes like that.
‘What on earth are you wearing?’
He didn’t answer. His face was backlit, I couldn’t see his expression, but then I saw the suitcase sitting at his heel; a yellow roll-on cabin bag. I had put it away in the cellar when he came back from his law conference in St Lucia just a month ago.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
I knew. Just outside that door was the answer to his moods over the last year, to my paranoia, to everything. I reached over and opened it.
I didn’t expect it to be her.
My best friend Estelle, wearing a brand-new dress and quite a lot of make up for a Monday-morning Bikram class. And she had a little suitcase with her.
No.
Wrong.
I was in the wrong story.
I was in a family saga about a May-to-December couple and their two eccentric daughters. Our troubles were minor, our conundrums comedic. Only I wasn’t in that story at all. I was in a love story and I wasn’t even a central character. I was the ‘all’ their love would overcome.
‘Mummy?’ Jess galloped downstairs past her dad. ‘Can I have a smoothie in my lunch box?’
I wanted to scream a warning, bellow her out of this moment and back into the before, but I felt as if it was raining glass in the hall and I didn’t dare open my mouth to speak.
6
I’M NOT PROUD OF how I handled it.
There’s no way of describing it without me sounding mad and awful. It’s humiliating. I’d rather skip over all of it, but what comes next–running back to Skibo Castle, Demy and the thing in Paris and all of that–it only makes sense if I explain how brutal the morning was and how close I was to the rope.
I’ll tell it in vignettes. I’ll edit, not judiciously but self-servingly. This isn’t to trick anyone but some things are hard to admit about yourself. It was a death. Death needs padding because it is unbearable.
So: these are bits I can stand to tell, edited.
The girls were sitting at the table wearing their school uniforms. Seven and eight. Funny little scraps of nonsense. Hamish was telling them he had a new relationship with Estelle, Estelle was moving in and I was moving out to a shitty little flat he had bought me nearby. Mummy has got all this money to do it up. He held up the brick of notes. Estelle was not sitting at the table, she didn’t have a seat, yet. She was standing nearby, waiting for me to vacate mine. She smiled uncertainly, trying to seem friendly to the girls while avoiding my gorgon gaze.
Hamish outlined his plan: the girls were going to miss a week of school and go to Portugal with them to meet Estelle’s family and ‘get used to the new arrangement’. The girls were wary of Hamish. I saw that. He is emotionally distant and high-handed but they’ve always liked Estelle.
Hamish said that he wouldn’t make them go. It was their choice. Perhaps they would choose to stay here with me. Everyone looked at my shocked, red eyes and bloody, swollen right hand (I had punched a wall. I left that out because it sounds so bad). Or perhaps they would choose to go on a breezy November holiday with the sunshine couple. The choice was theirs. They were only seven and eight. They couldn’t choose socks on their own and they’d remember this, replay this scene in their minds for the rest of their lives.
I had the sudden feeling of being in an anecdote told by the girls in the future. He made us choose between them and we were very young, it was awful. And Mum, remember Mum? Mum just sat there while Dad made us choose and she just did nothing. And poor Mum, d’you remember Mum?
I wasn’t going to be that Mum. I mean, I can do passive as a party trick but I will not raise girls to it.
Cut to: Estelle crying and shaking sugar out of her hair and eyes. The bowl had hit her so hard that she had a red crescent throbbing on her forehead. Granules of sugar were stuck in her lipstick, twinkling like glitter. In the ensuing silence Lizzie giggled nervously and Jess hissed ‘don’t’ at her.
Subsequently, things were said, largely about Estelle, things that could not be unsaid or unheard. In the final accounting that’s what I’m most ashamed of because all of those things were said by me. And I shouldn’t have because my kids will know her for the rest of their lives. And also, whatever she did, I’ve done worse. Hamish was married to someone else when I got pregnant.
Lizzie loved the sugar throwing and the shouting. She sat up tall, eyes wide with excitement. Jess is older and was less pleased. She still liked it though, or am I reading that into the memory to make myself feel better? Probably.
Then Hamish was leading Estelle out of the room. I reached for his arm and she swung around, spraying sugar from her hair. ‘Don’t you hit him!’
I reeled. I have never hit Hamish. I am angry, possibly a bit scary, but I have never hit him. He looked ashamed. I don’t know what he had told her.
I looked back and saw my girls sitting at the table, patiently waiting for someone to sort this mess out. They were looking to me.
Hamish did not know who I was. He didn’t know that I was using a stolen ID and wouldn’t go to court for custody of the girls. That would expose me and, more than anything in the world, I did not want the girls to know who I really was. Ever. I wanted to shield them and to do that, whatever Hamish did, I would make peace.
This is who I was for my children: I told them to go. I told them to leave me. I said their dad had gone a wee bit mad but he had decided to do this and there was no going back. Jess shrank in her chair. I squeezed her hand. Come on. It’ll be fine. Don’t be scared. It’s just change. We’re strong women, aren’t we? I looked at them. They looked blankly back. They weren’t women. They were tiny little girls. But I made them say that we were strong women. And I told them that I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to be away from them for a second but sometimes you have to fit into life, or waste a lot of time and energy wishing it would fit in with you.
Calmly, I told them to go with Daddy and try to have a nice time. Seven sleeps, that was all. And if it got too muc
h I would always have my phone with me, Jess could take my old one and she could call and I would come and get them. I could be there within hours. Just keep it charged and call me. I gave them the phone, a charger and a power bank. They were thrilled because I’d forbidden them to have phones.
Jess said, ‘But you don’t like travelling abroad.’
And I said, ‘Well, I will suffer it for you.’ With no idea how I could travel on the passport of a woman who was missing, presumed dead.
Cut to: Hamish and I alone in the kitchen. Hamish shocked and staring at my mouth, waiting for more words. I hadn’t rehearsed it, these were not things I was running over in my mind the whole time, but my mouth opened and they just fell out. Cold things: I’m going to shit in all your shoes when you leave. Rude things: you add nothing to the world, your intellectual growth ended at Cambridge, you have no eye for art.
That last one made him very angry.
Then he said his piece: you’re a fantasist, you’re a threatening presence in the house, you are deeply damaged. I mean yes, he did make some good points. But then he brought up specific instances of my rudeness, my selfishness, my shutting down. Like that time he was opening up about his feelings of inadequacy and spotted a book on my lap and realised I was reading it under the table. He said I was a cold bitch.
I stopped listening to the words and just watched him. His eyes narrowed, his cheeks flushed. I watched his mouth flap, saliva flecking. I remembered waking up next to him in the bed, knowing he hated me. Getting out of the bath and pulling clothes on over damp skin so that he didn’t see me naked because I felt so harshly judged. Him glancing at me as I ate and knowing he found me disgusting.
Suddenly I couldn’t wait to get away from him. ‘I need a piss,’ I said.
‘You’re doing it now! You’re shutting down, Anna.’
He followed me to the loo and accused me of ‘fucking off to read or something’, as if that was the worst thing you can do in the middle of a fight.