Local Whispers

by C K Williams

  And I thought Alice felt the same. And then we came here, and Liz told us that she had slept with that friend of her father’s. And that it had backfired, massively, because she got pregnant. But that she had had an abortion.

  So then we didn’t know what to make of that. Beth didn’t know what to make of that.

  I thought she had done it basically to pray the gay away. And Liz wanted to talk to Beth about it. She was going to. That night. They were going to have dinner that night. I would have, dunno, gone for a really long walk or whatever.

  I would have walked and walked and walked in the snow. I like walking in the snow.

  But then they couldn’t.

  They never will now.

  She’s dead, isn’t she? We will never know what she really wanted. We will never know if she loved my sister back.

  They never had dinner. I never went for that walk. Betha never found out the truth.

  She never will.

  10:32

  There is a hand intertwined with mine when I wake up. It feels familiar.

  When I look up, it is into Kate’s face. She is sitting by the side of my bed. We’re alone. There is no sign of Daniel. My heart gives a tug as I realise that he isn’t here, but then I look back at Kate. She’s wearing her grey suit. The one she wears for comfort.

  “Did they let you drive home just to get that?” I ask, looking back at the ceiling, just enjoying her presence and the feel of her hand in mine.

  “Let me?” she asks, her voice scratchy. “I’d like to see them try and stop me.”

  “So would I,” I say. “I have to say, though, they are very kind here. Whatever they gave me to help me go to sleep, it worked like a charm.” I close my eyes, bathing in the warmth of the blanket and the after-effects of the drug. “I might still be dreaming, actually. Maybe I did get shot under the yew tree after all, and this is the afterlife.”

  Kate squeezes my hand. And then, to my surprise, I hear her giggle.

  Offended, I open my eyes to glare at her. She is trying to keep a straight face but failing miserably.

  “Oh, thank you very much,” I say. “No, really, I’m touched.”

  “Sorry!” she calls out, letting go of my hand to cover her face in hers. “It’s just so fucking absurd. We’re so lucky that Daniel woke up when he did. Olivia interviewed him, and she hadn’t forgotten about the threats. She was onto Elizabeth Adams already. When Daniel confirmed he’d seen her that night in the graveyard when I was hurt, she told Kwiatkowski. And then they learned you’d gone home. They made straight for the house. Arrived just in time.”

  So I was right. Daniel had been lying. I wonder what made him want to protect her.

  She shakes her head. “And you said it from the start, didn’t you? That it may have been a woman who hit me over the head. Bit fucking mad, that. Elizabeth Adams.”

  I turn back to the ceiling. “She wanted to keep the past alive for just a little bit longer. She even wanted to bring it back.”

  From the corner of my eye, I can tell that Kate is lowering her hands, sobering up very quickly. “I wish people would stop wanting to bring the past back in this country. Or that they’d at least not shoot each other over it.”

  We sit beside each other in silence. Words are difficult to come by. Kate runs a finger along the bed sheets, drawing a pattern on the white fabric that I can’t decipher.

  “I like to think that this country is different now. That it changed. And it has. But you know, it wasn’t changed by the people who shot each other. It was changed by people who campaigned for civil rights, for women’s rights, for marriage equality. By the people who pushed back the influence of the church.” Kate’s fingers still. “When I was a child, there were so many decisions that society made for you, that you couldn’t make on your own. Now, this is so different.”

  I cannot help but think of Alice Walsh. It was not so different for her. When she made a decision of her own, she was murdered. And Kate was nearly murdered over it, too.

  So was I.

  “Is it different?”

  Kate nods fervently. “It is. It is. And we’ll know how to defend our rights when it comes to it.”

  “How?” I ask. “When they turn up with guns at your practice, at a clinic?”

  “By not being afraid,” she said.

  “I was afraid,” I admit quietly. “I was afraid to die.”

  “Aye,” she says. “Me too.”

  I remember her on her knees in the graveyard. Remember the black cloth going over her head, swallowing up her face, as if she had never existed. As if she had already ceased to exist. Like Alice Walsh. Alice Walsh, who no longer exists. Alice Walsh, the only one of the three of us who had her whole life ahead of her still.

  “It is about not letting fear stop you, then,” Kate says.

  I cannot help but reach for her hand again. She’s so brave. She has always been able to look the truth in the eye. I could never do it quite as well as her.

  “You are right,” I say. Because she is. And I decide that I would rather be fearless, too. “Did I ever tell you,” I go on, even though the words will barely come. “Did I ever tell you that I have wanted to kiss you for years?” There it sits. The truth. “Just to kiss you. Nothing else.”

  She looks at me.

  “Not that that matters,” I hurry to add. “It’s all right. I just didn’t see what the point was of keeping it from you.”

  She leans up to kiss me.

  It’s just what I thought it would be. It’s a kiss, and it is easy and honest and after a few moments she is grinning a little and then I am laughing, and God, I have wanted to do this for so long. We separate, and Kate sits back down, still smiling.

  “Thank you,” she says after a long moment of silence.

  I shake my head. “What for?”

  “Well,” she says, turning towards me, a small smile on her face. “For being on my side. For not leaving me alone.”

  “Nah,” I say. “It’s nothing.”

  She buries her face against my upper arm for a moment. “You got shot at for your troubles,” she says, her voice suspiciously throaty.

  “Were you worried?” I ask, because I want to make her smile.

  She likes the way I say “worried”. It is the only word I routinely mispronounce. It’s even worse when it is preceded by “very”.

  She grins against my arm. “Very. And you?”

  “Very, very worried,” I repeat.

  She intertwines her fingers with mine once more. Then she sits up and looks out of the window.

  That is how we stay for a long, long while. The truth is smiling contentedly at the back of my mind. It is satisfied, for now.

  Although there is one last thing, it whispers to me. It is not just that I have not found Daniel yet, have not spoken to him yet, have not seen him whole and hale. No, the truth is whispering

  Do you feel that?

  And that is the moment that I do feel it. Kate’s shoulders are shaking.

  She is crying.

  And thank God, because so am I.

  We are safe.

  We got away.

  For a few more years, we got away.

  13:45

  On our way home, we make three stops: one at the hardware store, one at the florist’s, and one at the supermarket. Once at home, we finally board up the bedroom window to the best of our abilities, and the result isn’t half bad. Then we get the slips of paper we collected in the church, tie each around a single white rose, and put them in water until we can take them to Alice Walsh’s memorial, to the graveyard.

  And then we make dinner.

  Sauté potatoes with caramel and dried plums, one of the best winter dishes I know. I cut and season the potatoes with salt and rosemary while Kate melts the sugar. I put on my music. She starts swaying her hips, standing in front of the oven. I finish seasoning the potatoes and make my way to the sink to wash my hands. Under no circumstances would I say that I was dancing across the room.
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  Except maybe I am. Kate laughs at me, rightfully so. I take my revenge by wiping off my salty rosemary hands on her suit jacket. She shrieks. Actually shrieks. And then I’m the one who is shrieking, because she has jabbed her fingers into my sides and that is entirely unfair, because I unwisely revealed to her where I was ticklish one drunk night fifteen years ago in Australia and she still remembers.

  Then we go back to being real people, and I start making Knickerbocker Glory with crystallised pecans, from scratch. I watch the raspberries turn soft and mushy as I puree them by hand, their juice red and sweet as I lick it off my fingers. I smell the sharp scent of the lemon and feel the burn of its juice on the cuts on my hand. The powdered sugar is soft and light and white, as soft as the dried plums and as white as the sea salt and the snow outside on the ground and in the trees and in the sky.

  I don’t know what it is about food, except that it reminds you that you are alive.

  When the potatoes are in the oven, sizzling in caramel and salt and rosemary, and the semifreddo in the freezer, turning sugar and lemon juice and raspberries into ice cream, I try not to look at Kate as I ask, as if it did not matter much either way: “Should we ask Daniel to join us, or would you prefer we didn’t?”

  I determine to pretend that I don’t see how she rolls her eyes at me in exasperated fondness before handing me the phone. “He should be out walking. Might mean you get lucky, and that he has a signal.”

  I listen to the ringing sounds on the line. There is sinking feeling at the bottom of my stomach.

  Daniel’s voice is scratchy when he answers. Scratchy, and guarded.

  “This is Jannis,” I say.

  An intake of breath.

  Nothing else.

  “Would you like to come over for tea?” I ask. And pray. Properly pray. In my head, begging God to be good to me.

  It is the first time in years.

  18:00

  Daniel is perfectly punctual.

  We sit at the kitchen table, the three of us, and we eat and drink, and all the while, I can’t take my eyes off of him.

  After dessert, Kate does something very kind. She rises, stretches, and says: “Right. I will go and sit outside now and pretend to look at the stars, and you two talk.”

  And then she leaves, and it’s just the two of us.

  Daniel huffs out a laugh. “Subtle.”

  I shrug. I’m nervous.

  So nervous.

  He looks at me. He’s wearing a grey sweater and grey jeans with black sneakers. He doesn’t say anything else.

  “We tied each message to a rose,” I say, pointing helplessly at the roses standing in buckets of water throughout the kitchen. “We want to take them to the memorial. Later. If we can work up the nerve, that is.”

  He nods.

  Still, he doesn’t say anything.

  “You saw her in the graveyard, didn’t you?” I ask quietly. “You saw Elizabeth Adams in the graveyard, when Kate was hit over the head.”

  Slowly, Daniel shakes his head. “Just her car. Then I found it too difficult to credit that she would have anything to do with it. I just thought that William or Tessa had driven her home that afternoon, and she’d left her car. I told the police when they questioned me in the hospital. Just in time, it seems.”

  I nod.

  “Do you know,” he says after a moment’s silence, “it was her who gave me the Tesla. She said she needed something smaller, something slower, with her eyesight fading. I wonder if that was true. Or if she simply wanted me indebted to her. If she did, it worked. I should have told the police right away.”

  Another silence.

  “You will have to move away, I suppose,” I say instead.

  “Yes,” Daniel replies. “Just like you will have to catch a plane and go back home. But that isn’t what Kate left us to talk about, is it?”

  I look at him. Still sitting there. Hands folded in his lap.

  And is that an innocent smile I see on his face?

  Tentatively, I smile back. “Who said anything about talking?”

  I have a bit of an uncompromising relationship with the truth, you see. I do not wine it dine it take it to bed. I tell it.

  But him? I would very much like to do all of that to him.

  21:15

  “There’s a flight at 7:15.”

  “In the morning?”

  “Yep.”

  “Too early. Far too early. Isn’t there one in the evening? Late? I could take you out to dinner in Belfast. That place where they serve vegan fish and chips.”

  “The one on Ann Street?”

  “Yes, that one. You know, the cute one.”

  “What was its name again?”

  “Fish Town?”

  “Fish City!”

  “Yes, Fish City! That’s it!”

  Kate and I are in the living room, bent over her laptop, looking at flights out of Belfast. I’m swaying gently to the music that’s on in the background. She is redoing her nails.

  Outside, the rowan trees scratch along the walls. They tap against the window. The wind is ruffling their branches. It makes them whisper.

  Inside, the room is warm and bright as I look at her. “Did I really flirt with the bartender, back in Seventeen Seventy-Seven?”

  She finishes off her pinky with a flourish. Red is the colour of choice. “God, yes.”

  “Was I any good?”

  “Well, I think it didn’t help your case that you were also flirting with me.”

  I shake my head. “Sorry about that.”

  “Don’t be,” she says. “We were very young.”

  “Still,” I continue. “You deserve better. Much better than the men you’ve been getting, Kate.”

  Kate looks up at me. Red nails, red dressing gown. “Well, I picked them, didn’t I?”

  She puts away the nail polish and leans back into the couch. We listen to the music and the branches scratching at the window and the whispers of the wind.

  “I wonder at that,” she says suddenly. “Why I kept choosing men who didn’t really want me.”

  I make to protest, but she waves it away.

  “And places, too.” She motions around, indicating, I presume, Annacairn. “I thought I was doing what was right, coming to practise here. I was naïve.”

  I look out at the yew tree. “You had the best intentions.”

  “Ah, that may be true.” She shrugs. Looks out at the yew tree, too. It is an evergreen tree. “But what good are those?”

  “Road to hell and all that?”

  “Pretty literal in this case, wasn’t it? Nearly got killed under a yew tree.”

  We fall silent for a while. We are still looking at the tree outside. Still listening to the wind.

  Then Kate speaks up again: “Maybe all I was looking for was a fight, really.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The men. This place. Maybe all I wanted was to have something to fight for. Something to fight against.”

  “Is it such a bad thing, being a fighter?”

  She smiles. Stares at the snow, white on the ground. White in the bright light of the moon. “Maybe not. But is it such a bad thing, either, to just be happy?”

  I think of Daniel as I look at the snow myself. How the moonlight makes it glow and glimmer, how beautiful the Mourne Mountains are. How beautiful Annacairn, its church and its graveyard are.

  I think of how we were all nearly killed not one day ago.

  And then I think of Alice Walsh.

  “No,” I say. “You’re right. It really isn’t such a bad thing, just being happy.”

  We look at each other. Then I smile at her. “Still, I like that you’re a fighter.”

  She laughs. “I like that I’m a fighter, too.”

  Another silence stretches out between us. The night outside is noisier than this room, even with the music on. Trees are creaking. Branches are rustling. Animals are out in the woods, out in the snow. I turn back to the list of flights. Scroll dow
n.

  “Look, there’s one at nine.”

  “In the morning?” Kate asks, absent-mindedly.

  “In the evening.”

  “Perfect. Make a booking.” Then she grins at me, turning her gaze away from the snow and the moon and the tree. “And don’t forget to leave Daniel your number.”

  I laugh and go to fetch my credit card.

  21:32

  I’ve made the booking and put away the laptop. Kate is still sitting on the couch. She is looking out of the window again, at the yew tree outside, in the snow, under the light of the moon. The music has gone out. Branches are tapping at the windows. Scratching against the wall. Creaking. Crackling.

  “I’ll miss the house,” she says. “I’ll miss the garden.”

  The garden that lies still under the light of the moon and the stars. The garden that speaks and whispers. The garden that is alive, even at night.

  “Where you will go?” I ask. “You will have to go, won’t you? Give up the practice.”

  “Yes, of course. Innocent or not, the local whispers won’t die down.” She shrugs. “Maybe the other side of the Mourne Mountains is far enough. Or Dublin. Or, you know, Germany! Germany’s lovely, isn’t it?”

  “You’re always welcome,” I say, joining her.

  She smiles gently, still looking out of the window. “Yes, I know.”

  “Your parents are in Dublin, aren’t they?”

  “Close by.”

  “Right.”

  Kate nods. As if to a thought she has had. Then she looks at me. Looks away from the moon and the tree and the snow.

  “Wherever it is I go,” she says, “it will be somewhere that I am wanted.”

  Then she grins. “I’ve always liked Australia, myself.”

  I raise my brows. “Australia, yes?”

  She laughs. “Think about it! No snow. No yew trees. Lovely pub in Newcastle, by the Queen’s Wharf. Lots of beachgoers, too. Shirtless, all of them. Handsome views, they say.”

  “This time, don’t pick the one who flirts with the bartender, too,” I say. “It’s just poor taste.”

  She smiles at me. “Very true. But I was tempted, you know.”