Witches Sail in Eggshells

by Chloe Turner

  Ruth collected men, too, for many years. All sorts. The Barlow brothers, Jacob and Hughie; one not long after the other, though they all seemed happy enough with the arrangement. Then it was Mr Simmons (Junior) from the bank, who looked so uptight we couldn’t imagine what they talked about, let alone their lips meeting. For one long summer, she hung around with Iolo Beckett, who wore faded surf shorts and said ‘dude’ a lot, even though he was nearly forty. Even the quiet lad from the Co-op who did the deliveries: Alun, the one with the port-wine stain on his cheek like a broken heart. She told me that they’d kissed once behind the trolley rack at the end of their shift, that it was the sweetest kiss she’d ever had. It seemed as if she treasured something in all of them.

  Ricky put a stop to all that.

  They were at a Chamber of Trade dinner, the night they met. Ruth was polishing glasses behind the bar; he was polishing them off on the far side. Ricky was on his best behaviour—charming, as he could be—and afterwards she claimed he made her feel like the belle of the ball.

  After they started dating, Ricky humoured her collections, at least for a while. She must have mentioned the hippos because he gave her a little silver one on a chain on their first date. It was hidden in her bread roll, she said, like something from a film. He gave her some bottles for her windowsill, too, though they were new ones from the fancy gift shop in town, and the sharp tints jarred with the faded glamour of the old. In the café of the woollen museum one time—he’d wanted to sell the manager a new till, though there didn’t seem much wrong with the old one—she’d admired a framed photograph of some spools of yarn, with brown paper labels spelling out the names: Oatmeal, Scarab and Dark Apple. Robin’s Egg, which was the blue she’d always wanted for her room. Never short of money it seemed, Ricky bought it for her there and then.

  Back then, I still saw Ruth all the time. In the Co-op of course, but around town too, handbag clinking as always with all the charms she’d strung round the strap. But the changes had already started. She’d taken to wearing her hair scraped back off her face, which added ten years. And though she’d never been much into makeup, now her face was bare, and often there were smudges under her eyes. She’d be smiling still, chatting to everyone she met, but there were times when she wouldn’t quite meet my eye.

  People had already started talking about the way he treated her. I never witnessed it myself, but I’d not long opened the shop, and I was rarely out of it: business was good, and I couldn’t yet afford another pair of hands. Olwen, who’d knocked around with us at school, said she’d seen Ricky shouting at Ruth in the town hall car park—really shouting—until Olwen waved and he stopped and shifted his feet while they said an awkward hello. Someone else, I forget who, said they’d seen him pinch her arm, hard, when she bent to pick up a bundle of old silver spoons from the basket outside the antique shop on the hill. And that she didn’t say anything, just dropped the spoons and walked on. Then my mother said she’d heard the two of them going at it hammer and tongs when she walked past the house on the way back from church, one Sunday back in June.

  So people had started to talk, and we started to see Ruth around less and less. I kept ringing her, trying to arrange to meet up, but she always had some excuse. She sounded tired. I wish I’d tried harder now, but she always said that she was fine. In fact, I saw him more than I saw her. Though I’d got the shop, I still had a shift in The Crown on a Friday—it kept me in shoes, and I liked Patsy who ran the place—and Ricky used to come in about nine if he was coming. Usually he’d have a couple and then head off before the bell. But once in a while, he’d come in with his eyes red and rheumy, like he’d had a few before he even got in the door. On those nights he’d stay late and want to talk, with an audience gathered around. It seemed he had views on almost everything: migrants (‘scroungers’), athletes (‘dopers’), whether they should put a barrage across the estuary (‘do it, fuck the birds’).

  I don’t know if he knew that Ruth and I were friends, so I don’t know if it was deliberate when he started badmouthing her to me. It was a quiet night after an early rush. It was one of those nights—he’d come in with his buttons done up wrong, his skin leaching sweat, and one of his eyelids twitching. Without his usual audience, he pulled up a stool and sat right opposite me as I was cleaning the taps.

  ‘Perhaps I should get myself a new girl,’ he said, rubbing his thumb up and down his pint. Then he looked straight at me. ‘Mine’s tired out. Never stops complaining. You’d think she’d know a good thing when she had it, stupid cow.’

  Patsy came through the archway right at that moment, called me through to the back bar to clear tables, so that was all I heard that night. I got on the phone straight after my shift, of course, but Ruth didn’t pick up, and no answer the next day either. I couldn’t stop thinking about her, though, so I shut up the shop at lunchtime and ran down to their house on the edge of town.

  It had been Ruth’s place before he moved in, and it still looked like hers from the outside: the cherry tree was hung with all sorts of china birds, and there were old earthenware pots full of pansies on every surface round the slates out the front. The flowers looked parched, though, like they hadn’t been watered in weeks, and there was a china bluebird lying on the paving stones under the tree with its little red chest caved in. The bell that had hung on a silver chain below it now lay limp in the dust.

  No one answered my knock, and the curtains were pulled, but I had the feeling they were in. That Ruth was, anyway. I called through the letter box, almost lost my fingers over it, but I couldn’t prise the slot open far enough to see into the dark hall.

  I only noticed the recycling crate as I was opening the gate to leave. Whoever’d thrown the bottles in hadn’t cared much for them: dumped from a box, it looked like, and most of them had cracked or shattered. They were all there, though: that handled brown glass jug for Wharton’s Whiskey, the squat-shouldered grey carafe of Daffy’s Elixir Quack Cure which had sat at the end of the shelf, the miniature soda siphons in soft candy colours which used to light up the kitchen when the sun shone. The simple, clear glass vessels with the heavy collars which she’d dug up in the old vegetable patch were stacked roughly on one side. The flask of Mrs S. A. Allen’s World’s Hair Restorer, a precious gift from Ruth’s American penfriend, had sheared across its deep plum neck. But of her favourite—a square-based bottle with an owl embossed across one face, something from the Owl Drug Company—all that remained was some cobalt blue shards in the crate’s grimy base.

  A glance back to the curtains and then I reached in to snatch the Wharton’s Whiskey and the few soda miniatures which had survived unscathed. I was going to leave it there, but then those blue flashes caught my eye. I wrapped those fractured blue pieces in a tissue as best I could, slipping them into my handbag to run back to the shop.

  I didn’t give up on Ruth, but my calls always went through to the machine, and the next couple of weeks were hectic at work—trade fairs for the Christmas stock—so I didn’t get back to her place. I did drop into the Co-op a few times, but if she was still doing her shifts there, we always seemed to miss each other. I planned to drive up into the city, fit it round some deliveries, to catch her at the office where she used to work two days. But then Olwen said she’d seen her in a park nearby, sitting on a bench on her own, looking well enough. My mother told me to give her time, that she’d come back when she was ready. I told myself I’d wait a month and see.

  The weeks rolled by. Ricky came back in the pub; earlier in the week than usual, and it was obvious immediately that he’d been on it a while. A few of the locals were lined up at the bar, and it didn’t take him long to pull them all under his spell; as I said, he had charisma of sorts, even when drunk, although by then the sight of him made my flesh creep. That night, he was boasting about being flashed by the cameras down near the bridge, some obnoxious joke about mowing down pensioners. Then he started on about how it didn’t matter because his girlfriend would take the points f
or him. How she’d offered, and he didn’t feel he should turn her down, and after all, they needed his car if any money was going to come in. It sounded as if Ruth had dropped the office job, though this was news to me, and she’d always loved it there. Then he made a weak joke about the points and how ‘she’d collect anything, that girl’, and Kevin and a few of the other regulars laughed because he was buying.

  It seemed he was on a run of bad luck, because only a few days later he was back in The Crown with a similar story, though he tried to make out it was Ruth who’d got the points this time, for doing forty in the thirty zone by the school. No one was fooled. Then he muttered something about not being able to pay, which seemed strange seeing as how he’d stood the whole bar a drink the last time he’d been in.

  Another few weeks on and Ruth was up in front of the magistrate, being handed out a great big fine, though I never knew it at the time. There was no sign of Ricky for a while, and in the meantime, it seems the fine went unpaid, though the first I heard of it was him lurching in the door one August evening when the bar was sweltering even with the windows thrown as far as they’d go. He looked the worst he’d ever looked: skin like day-old dough, and a vein zigzagging across his temple as if he’d been branded. He was bouncing off chairs and tables just crossing the room; he must have been on it for hours. But he was still cracking jokes about what Ruth might find to collect inside. And then about whether he’d bother to go and collect her when her twelve days were up. No one laughed this time, not even Kevin, who just stared from over by the fruity and then started punching the buttons like he wanted to push them through the back of the machine. Patsy asked Ricky to leave, and you should have seen him protesting like he was the one who’d been wronged.

  I drove all the way to Gloucestershire, which is where they send the wicked women of Wales, on the day she was due to be released. Coming down the back roads, past great shifting banks of pink rosebay willowherb, and once-a-year caravanners skidding round the tight bends, I did ask myself what I was doing. But then I remembered that little bluebird with its shattered china chest, and I knew it was the right thing to do.

  I had the timings—some online research and a little economy with the truth to a nice lady on the helpline—so I rolled into the prison car park with ten minutes to spare. But half an hour went by, and I started to wonder whether there was a problem. I’d got the day right, I knew that much, because I could see Ricky on the far side of the visitor’s car park in that beefed up Beemer he drove like he was on Grand Theft Auto. He was shifting in his seat and winding the window up and down, so I didn’t need to see past his shades to guess his patience was wearing thin. No sign of movement behind the big brown gate, though, so there was nothing else to do but wait.

  They let her out eventually, with no fanfare. The gate slid half open, and there was a pause for a moment, though I could see arms and activity on the other side. Then Ruth walked out onto the steps, sandals under blue jeans, pale in that yellow cardigan she always wore to cheer herself up. Only two weeks since he’d let her go in there, but autumn had snuck up in the meantime, and her shoulders were hunched with the cold.

  And then she stood still—stock still—as if collecting her thoughts on the prison steps. I hadn’t expected Ricky to bound up there, but surely even he could have got out of the car? There was no sign that she was looking for him, though. If anything, she was looking at the sky; watching the clouds, which were dense, structural things that day. Whole landscapes which seemed to seethe and grow while you watched, like milk bubbling over in the pan.

  A minute must have passed, and none of us moved. Then, at last, the black door of the Beemer swung open, and Ricky started towards her. He walked like the small man he was, swinging his arms in a suit that was too big for him. When he got close—one hundred yards or so—he shouted: ‘Are you coming, or what?’

  Nothing.

  ‘I’ve been sat here a pissing age. They said you’d be out by ten.’

  Ruth did look at him, then. She’d put down the leather suitcase she’d carried out with her, with its bright stickers and ribboned handle, but now she picked it up again. I could see that she was spinning the silver rings on the fingers of her other hand like she used to do when we were waiting outside an exam hall. Then she just started walking. Not towards Ricky. Not towards me either, if she’d even seen me, but past my car and straight for the security kiosk on the edge of the car park.

  Ricky seemed rooted to the spot, following her with his eyes. Then he started to walk too. Then to jog. To run, chasing her. He was gaining on her, and I knew he’d reach her before the barrier at the car park gate. I’d got my hand to the door handle, but then he stumbled over a kerb. He swore, throwing aside a traffic cone which had been there so long there was a thistle growing out of the top. He didn’t start running again. I saw him look up instead, and realised he was looking for cameras, of which there were many, strapped to every other lamp post. So instead he just watched her go: past the kiosk, and then out of sight down the lane which led to the main road.

  Ricky was so close to me, I could see the rip in his suit trousers, and the sheen of sweat across his forehead, despite the cold. I couldn’t move, but at last he turned and started to walk back towards his car, kicking up stones from the tarmac. That was when I started my engine, swinging out of the car park before he had a chance to get behind the wheel. She’d got as far as the bus stop. When I wound down the window, Ruth just stared. She was shaking her head as I leaned over to open the door, but then she sank into the seat beside me. It wasn’t till she’d pulled the door shut I allowed myself to breathe.

  ‘I’ve got something for you,’ I said, glancing in the wing mirror to make sure there was time. No sign of the Beemer, so I dug into the glove compartment and dropped the package in her lap. A moment to strip away the tissue paper—my eyes flicking up and down to the mirror all the time—and then she held it in her hands: her favourite, the cobalt blue glass even brighter against her pale fingers.

  The glue had dried clear, but she must have been able to feel it still, zigzagging between the bright blue shards, standing proud like that angry vein in Ricky’s forehead. But she just held the bottle to her lips and kissed it, just where the owl was embossed on its lettered drum.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. And then we started out for home.

  Waiting for the Runners

  When I reached the bottom of the hill path, there was a pumpkin on the corner, rammed onto the sawn-off lamp post like a head on a stake. A rotting, putrid thing; weeks old. It wasn’t even upright—it sagged towards the road, so the tea light inside was a silvery pool of rainwater. The stalk was furring like a baby rabbit’s pelt, and the smirking mouth was starting to pucker down at the edges, but I still felt it was laughing at me.

  I’d known she’d be there, up at the top, so I’d wanted to be prepared. To get up there before her, so there could be no surprises. Not like that other time: me stood there in an old vest and my painting jeans, watching them leave, not having to wonder too hard why he might want her over me. This time would be different. I’d find a vantage point. Pull a group round me. She wouldn’t have the upper hand.

  I was later than I’d have liked starting out, though. One of the chickens had woken sickly, stalking the pen like a drunk in search of hooch, and I’d had to wait for the vet to visit at the end of her rounds. Danny always said I was far too soft—he’d have wrung its neck before breakfast—but it’s the rest of the flock you have to worry for. Anyhow, it was a false alarm in the end. Just a sore on the wing thanks to that old bully Mabel, no doubt, who takes issue with any challenge to the pecking order.

  My heart was thundering as we climbed the path to the top. Arial was bounding up the slope as if he’d just been let out of a box: snapping at leaves, taking great gasps of air, and sniffing at the ivy berries, green and black starbursts like the fireworks last weekend.

  When we passed the little allotment at the back of the cottages, the sunflower g
rove I’d admired there just weeks back now stood sunken-headed and brown. Hunched seed heads of shame, unharvested and spoilt by the rain. And further up, that stubby-legged pony the children used to call to was standing in a sticky mire around the rusted trough. The ground was greasy there, and I had to grab at the handrail to heave myself up the steep bit. I felt my boots slide under me and tried not to yank on Arial’s lead. Bright yellow maple leaves fanned across the slick mud; lurid toddler handprints amongst the gritty rust of the beech masts.

  She was there first.

  Alone, but first. She had her back to me as I rounded the summit, sweat pricking the hair follicles around my face. I paused a moment to get my breath. Right beside the hole Annie used to call the fossil pit, where the cavity left by a fallen tree spills tiny clams and crinoids, and the occasional sea urchin, from its crumbling limestone. There was no time to pore over it today. I lifted the shirt from the small of my back, let the breeze flash cold against my skin. A blackbird flew down from the half-dead oak on the curve of the path, picked at something amongst the leaves, then stopped to stare at me with its unblinking yellow-rimmed eye.

  She might turn any moment. I had to walk the final thirty paces and join her at the finish line.

  Normally I’d have been delighted for my Benet to have made a new friend. My mother’s always saying that he’s a strange boy, but he’s only different from the splashy men she’s drawn to: jazzy trousers and clown specs, comedy turns once they’ve had a drink. Wouldn’t know they’d been slighted, their skin’s that rhino-thick. Benet’s not like that. He’s strong and healthy, never happier than when he’s out running, but he’s always been delicate when it comes to people. The first to cry after a playgroup scuffle; I don’t mean a tantrum—not just some toddler injustice—but a genuine sorrow that he’d been knocked back by another child. He couldn’t stand to be told off, was inconsolable if I lost it over the state of the playroom or something broken at home. His sister, Annie, used to tease him sometimes, but she knew when to stop. She could sense his fragile heart.