‘Look at their stubby wings going like the clappers. They look too daft to be able to fly, but they can,’ she said. ‘It’s a shame they don’t come as close as when they were just out of the nest. I don’t blame them though. Ha ha, look at that one gobbling the fish!’
I glanced at the bird she’d been pointing at. I was grateful for the distraction. The police were searching for my father, plodding about with Alsatians with their noses in the bracken. I couldn’t stand the thought of it. Nor could I stand being at home. The house was brittle with waiting, the slightest cough or creak in the floorboards made us flinch. My mother put the radio on quieter than normal. Toby kept his bedroom door open. Everyone was tiptoeing around pretending not to be waiting to hear something, all of us picturing the same things we’d never admit out loud.
The air nipped our fingers. Sylvie and I plunged our hands into our pockets, turned our backs on the lighthouse and made our way to the harbour. The clouds were rolling inland. The shopkeepers were braced for a storm. We turned into the cobbled square, wondering whether to wait for the bus, or chance walking and being caught by a storm.
‘I’m all out of sour plums,’ Sylvie said. ‘I’ll just pop in and get some, do you want anything?’ I shook my head and she entered the newsagents. I looked in at glass jars full of boiled sweets stacked floor to ceiling, and dawdled along the street to the hardware store.
There was a red wheelbarrow in the window. I looked across it to the rear of the store where Zach was sealing a lid on a paint tin. I pictured buying the shiny wheelbarrow the way some say it with flowers. Zach and I never spoke about how we felt about anything, but we could speak the language of hardware. Sylvie once told me he considered the red wheelbarrow a beautiful thing. He hoped to own one just like it some day when he had his own place.
I saw the face in the window before I could turn around.
‘Hello beautiful. Have you missed me?’ Cal grabbed me from behind. There was a graze on his cheek. It suited him. Some faces look right with glasses or a suntan, for Cal it was a cut that made him complete. I hadn’t scrawled Lorrie loves Cal on my notebooks. I hadn’t thought of him whatsoever since our date.
‘The police have been sniffing about asking about the accident,’ he said. ‘We have to get our story straight.’
‘I won’t tell them anything,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t there as far as my parents are concerned.’
‘You were there, though. If anyone asks, tell them we weren’t drinking, at least.’ Cal gripped my arm. He was standing so close behind me I couldn’t turn around. A woman came out the chemist pushing a pram and Cal smiled at her, looping his arm around my waist. I stared at our reflections in the window in front of us. We were standing so close we resembled a couple plotting our happy ending. Anyone looking in our direction would assume that’s what we were.
‘You’re selfish.’ Cal’s smile tightened. ‘You could make it easier for all of us,’ he said. ‘All you care about is yourself.’
Zach glanced our way, prying open a tin of emulsion for a plain woman flicking her hair over her shoulder. He looked away, giving her his complete attention. Cal’s arm remained squeezed around me. There was nothing I could do. If I lurched away someone in the street would ask if I was OK. Yet I didn’t, I couldn’t move.
Cal continued holding me firm, his fingers digging into my ribs. He kissed my neck and whispered, ‘If anyone asks, say we weren’t drinking, or I’ll tell everyone we went all the way.’
‘But we didn’t—’
‘How are you going to prove it?’
‘How are you going to prove we did?’ I said.
Cal laughed, ‘I won’t be expected to, that’s just how it is.’
I despised him, but he was right. The island would believe any rumour he spread. Even if they weren’t completely convinced, it wouldn’t matter. People would look at me and wonder. Everything I wore, said, or did, would call into question my innocence.
Sylvie came out of the store putting up her umbrella. The rain was so fine no one could see it, only feel it, but Sylvie always carried an umbrella, even though she never styled her hair. She came over and stepped to one side, making way for me. I pulled away from Cal more violently than I’d intended. My mother didn’t know where I’d been. I intended to keep it that way.
‘See you around, ladies.’ Cal waved at us huddling beneath the umbrella.
‘That’s the guy I saw at your gate,’ said Sylvie. ‘Are you courting?’
‘Not really, not any more.’ She didn’t quiz me for more information. I was grateful.
‘You’re a good friend,’ I said.
Sylvie looked unsure what she’d done to deserve it. I couldn’t explain. She was here with her pea-green umbrella dotted with rain. She was simple. She was reliable. She was Sylvie. We plodded on, passing the small swing park just outside the village.
‘That’s where Mrs Campbell saved my life when I was little,’ Sylvie said. ‘She wasn’t Mrs Campbell then though. It was before Fraser Campbell met her at the fair, so she was just Bonnie Sales then, walking along with her groceries.’
‘What happened?’
I couldn’t picture Sylvie not looking both ways before she crossed, not even as a child. I couldn’t picture Bunny not keeping her on a leash. We followed the winding road, a delivery van charging past at a speed only visitors took on blind bends.
‘It was just like that.’ Sylvie pointed at the road. ‘Someone almost knocked me down and she saved me.’
‘How?’ I asked.
‘I’m not sure. I just know she saved me.’
Sylvie offered me a sour plum and popped one in her mouth. I knew I would get no more out of her and it was fine. There was plenty I didn’t want to talk about myself.
The Day I Left the Sandpit
Lorrie wasn’t here the day I wandered out the sandpit. I keep trying to remember just how it went, and it’s fuzzy. The day feels like something that has been in my pocket forever and has got all woolly with lint. The way I remember it is kinda like this…
Ma leaves me in the park while she pops off to do her messages. Off she goes, flitting to some sort of kitchen emergency over the road. I can’t remember just what the emergency is. It might be a bride who just moved into a place with a cherry tree and is dying for a stone pitter. Or a wife with so many apples she needs something that peels and cores at the same time. Or some lassie forced to suddenly make forty sandwiches for her stepdad’s wake. In any case, Ma’s got to save them with gadgets and plastic boxes to stop all their tattie scones going stale. She’s leaving me with a spade and strict instructions to stay in the sandpit. I have to promise I’ll speak to no strangers. And not wander off into the street.
I have this wee bucket I’m filling with sand. Pouring it out, and filling it up, over and again. The sand’s too dry to make a castle. I sit in the pit just looking at the shape my hands make in the sand. There’s a wee lad not that far away staring at some kids playing rounders. The steel on his legs sparkles in the sunlight. The shiny metal looks like a cage.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I say.
I’ve seen him before. Always in the same place, knuckles white, clutching the wee guitar his ma makes him take everywhere. He plucks it. The kids bounce their balls.
‘I had polio,’ he says.
I’m so wee I’m not sure what that is, but it doesn’t sound fun. I wonder if it means no one will throw him a ball. I look at him and his sulky little mouth that looks like it’s never tried smiling. I want it to learn. I want us to be pals. I clamber out of the sandbox and kiss him. Just as he’s opening his gob about to say something, that’s when I do it. I squish my mouth to his so I won’t see it looking sulky any more. I half close my eyes and see my own eyelashes catching the sunlight. Then I pull away.
The wee lad drops his guitar. He looks sorta dozy, just staring at me, his mouth catching flies. He stays that way until his ma calls him to the ice-cream van.
�
��Joe? Come on, I’ve got ice lollies!’ Sticky orange juice runs down her hands.
The lad hurries towards her without looking back. And everything’s swimming. The swings, the sandpit, the bit of cat poo in the corner, the path under my feet, the lady wandering along with a straw bag full of groceries, the cars on the road. I can see Ma leaving someone’s house across the street. Tucking change into her purse, skipping down the steps. I’m so dizzy and sick. My legs feel so heavy it feels like I’m plodging through treacle. There’s a taste in my mouth fuzzy as green mould. And I want my Ma to make it all better. I stumble towards her. One step, then another, across the street. Bam! I’m swept off my feet. The lady with the shopping is swooping in and dragging me off the road. The delivery van blares past honking its horn. Ma’s rushing across the street. The groceries are all over the concrete. Tins of peas roll on the path. The eggs are all smashed. The lady’s standing over me asking ‘Are you OK? Jesus, are you are OK? That came out of nowhere. It missed you by an inch!’ I squint at her. My eyes are so heavy and everything’s so bright the light is a brass weight forcing them shut. I don’t remember any more. I only know it’s the last time I’m allowed in the sandpit.
It’s the only time I kissed a boy, or someone saved my life. It’s also the first time I reckon I really knew something I’d been wondering for a while.
Lorrie
The search came up drier than the laughter of the men in the hardware store. There was more water on the island than hours, more mountains than men. A man could be anywhere out there and no one would know until he washed in. I dawdled in the hardware store on Saturday, staring at Zach at his counter and wishing I could convey what I was thinking with a look. ‘That guy you saw me with is nothing to me. He’s a practice guy until I can go out with you,’ is what I wanted to tell him but, of course, I told him nothing. I fingered the brass hooks and listened to customers gossiping.
‘Did they find anything in the loch?’ one man asked.
‘Tyres. Oilcans. Boots, I saw boot after boot being dragged out the water. They weren’t his it turned out, when they showed his wife.’
I knew the police showed some of the things they’d found to my mother. I heard her and Grumps speak about it in hushed tones.
‘They found a watch, but it wasn’t his, and boots – so many. I wonder who owned them?’ she said. ‘Did all those men drown?’
It didn’t seem likely. The island was the sort of place where if anyone were to drown it wouldn’t be long until it became legendary. It would turn into a whisper about phantoms in the mist, a story of the spirits of wives dragging faithless men to their deaths.
‘I doubt it,’ Grumps said. ‘Some fella probably got sick of them pinching his feet, kicked them off and said “fuck this”.’
He wanted to make her laugh and it worked, laughter found its way to the surface of her. When she fell quiet again, I could still hear it in the air.
The customers in the hardware store offered no theories about why there were boots in the lake. They were more interested in the last time anyone in the store had seen my father.
‘He came in the day before he disappeared, you know. He wandered up to the counter, laid down his wallet and asked, “What will it take to get in on that card game of yours? Cash? How much? Take it. I don’t care.”’
‘No way!’ Seth’s customers leant forward.
‘That’s what the man said, word for word. I didn’t take him up on it. I don’t know the man well enough to play cards with him. There was something off about it.’
I dropped a coat hook. Seth cleared his throat, directing his customers my way. They coughed and looked at the ceiling. I left without buying anything, though I didn’t want to go yet. My mother would be clearing out the kitchen cupboards, scrubbing her worries away. Toby would be practising escapology. Bunny had dragged Sylvie to a lecture about ladylike manners at The Island Mothers’ meeting. There was nothing for it but to kill time in the chemist, sampling stubby lipsticks and comparing home perm kits. One of my classmates, Marjorie, had recently bought one. It gave her curls so tight everyone called her a sheepie.
Mrs Munro was standing at the lipstick display drawing slashes on the back of her hand.
‘Lorrie, hello! Help me.’ She waved a lipstick. ‘What do you think? Too lurid for a woman my age? Can I get away with it?’
‘You can get away with anything you want,’ I said.
She smiled and squeezed my arm. She was so pleased to see me it was painful.
An Evaluation of Mrs Munro
Nose: Her favourite scents are the kohl she dots onto a freckle above her top lip each morning, and the crisp sheets she wafts onto beds in the hotel where she works, barely making a footprint on the carpet after the guests have left. The coins they stack on the dresser with requests for more soap smell like blood to her. They jangle in her overcoat as she pushes the toiletries cart to another door, another floor, the copper growing heavier by the hour.
Palate: The chocolate mints she lays on pillows and stuffs in her pocket are a perk of the job she scatters around her lounge. She bites into the chocolate, then tastes the end of her pen, writing to the court for the maintenance not sent. There’s a waxy flavour to the lipstick she paints on. She puts it on slowly, covering her mutters of ‘men are all the same’, getting the sentiment out of her system before she puts on a love song, sweeps on rouge, and leaves for a late supper with men who are widowed, still single, or just bored.
Finish: Capri pants and pumps that can be kicked off at the end of the day in the manner of a girl who wants to dance, or a woman with blisters on her soles. She is both. In the chemist her face flickers from worry to hope, swinging between the two. She carries the air of a woman grieving and falling in love at the same time. It’s the strangest thing I ever saw.
Overall: The mother of my friend, a woman with a demeanour that makes me feel, the more I see it, that if she were twenty years younger it would be her who’d be my friend, rather than her daughter.
I was the closest thing to having a conversation with her daughter she had. Mrs Munro latched on to my presence. The more she spoke, the more I became aware of it.
‘You remember Mr… Ned,’ she said. ‘You met him. Yes, carpet cleaner guy! He’s introducing me to his parents in Moray. I want to make a good impression.’
‘Then I’d go with this one. It’s subtler.’ I put down a lipstick called Vixen and picked up a shade that made me think of tinned peaches and Carnation.
‘You’re a star. Have you been to visit Blair lately?’
I hadn’t. I hadn’t seen her since I bumped into her mother last time.
‘That’s OK.’ Mrs Munro wiped lipstick off her hand. ‘They don’t know if she can hear us. I visit and just read to her.’ She gestured to the romance novel jutting out of her handbag. It had a picture of a highwayman and a woman in a corset on the cover. It was the sort of thing I used to smuggle around to Sylvie’s, laughing at the love scenes.
‘I only read the highlights, of course. That’s all Blair would be interested in.’
Mrs Munro smiled. When she spoke about her daughter her face forgot her age. When she stopped talking, it remembered it again within seconds.
‘They’re starting to say she may not wake up. They’re not sure why, a fracture on her skull in the wrong place. I don’t believe them,’ she said. ‘Blair will wake up, I can feel it in my bones. A mother knows these things.’
Mrs Munro held a finger to her eyes, making a wall between her tears and her powder. The lipstick samples on her hand left an oily stripe on her cheek.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.
‘You don’t have to be sorry about anything, Lorrie. Doctors get it wrong it all the time. The leaving dance is coming up, right? That’s all you should be worrying about at your age.’
Mrs Munro was sixteen again, or, at least doing her utmost to be. She asked what I’d wear and if there was anyone special I wanted to go with. I found
myself describing Zach, though I wasn’t sure if I was going to the dance. He hadn’t asked. No one had.
‘There’s one guy,’ I said. ‘A quiet one. The sort whose idea of heaven is a cold beer, a pot of paint and a long weekend. I never know what he’s thinking, but, I don’t know.’ I shivered. ‘He looks at you and your toes curl.’
‘Oh, those guys! I’ve known one or two of those in my time,’ Mrs Munro said.
I joined her in a moment of silence for toe-curling guys.
‘Well, I suppose I should be going.’ She put down all the lipsticks but one. ‘I’m meeting Ned. Are you sure this is OK? I want his parents to like me!’
‘What’s not to like?’ Her clothes, her air, her divorce, I saw them all flit across her face. ‘If you want someone to like you, all you have to do is say what they want to hear. Compliments, that sort of thing,’ I said.
‘Oh, Lorrie! If only you knew, it’s not that simple to make someone like you!’
‘Yes, it is. It’s as simple as you want it to be.’
Mrs Munro made her purchase and left, saying she hoped I was right, and, if I was, good grief, where had I been all her life? I lingered in the shop trying out lipsticks, striping my wrist red and pink, letting what she’d said sink in: Blair might not wake up. The pharmacist started sweeping the shop and I didn’t move. I continued trying out lipstick after lipstick until he flipped the CLOSED sign and rattled his keys.
8th June 1960
The nurses are knocking off their shifts and squirting perfume on their wrists to get shot of the hospital stink. I pass them on the steps, buttoning jackets with fur collars over their uniforms and folding their hats into their bags like wee paper ships. There are a hundred places they could be flitting off to, up and away from all this sickness. I watch one lassie get on the back of a motorbike and wish I could join her. I can. I don’t have to go in. I don’t have to do nothing. Why should I? Blair. Blair with all her snidey comments on my clothes and a laugh like a demented horse whenever she sees me in that jumper Nan knitted with arms like King Kong.
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