You, Me & the Sea Page 15
She looks around. There’s nowhere to sit, apart from the bed. She shuts the door. He jumps back on the bed and sits at the head end, giving her plenty of room.
‘Can I sit down?’
He nods, watching her warily.
‘What are you listening to?’
‘Mohican Sun,’ he says.
She nods, as if she knows who that is. ‘Do you mind not being out watching the helicopter?’ she asks.
‘Nah.’
‘Not bothered?’
‘Nah.’
On the windowsill a glint of colour catches her eye. He has a collection of objects, presumably things he has found on the beach. A green plastic toy soldier. A plastic star with the remnants of silver paint and a hole at the top, through which a ribbon was once threaded, to hang it on a Christmas tree. And then, even prettier, scattered pieces of sea glass: various shades of green, white, frosted from the actions of the sand and the shingle, worn smooth by the waves. There is one blue piece, sapphire-blue. It makes her think of the Harveys Bristol Cream sherry that her gran used to bring out on special occasions.
‘Pretty,’ she says, looking back at him.
He’s chewing at his thumb.
‘You can talk to me, you know,’ she says, sitting down again. Smiling. It’s like talking to a scared child. ‘I’m not going to tell on you.’
He shrugs. ‘Tell whoever you want.’
‘I told Fraser I wouldn’t let anyone know you’re here, and I meant it. He’s really tough on you, isn’t he?’
He shrugs, picks at the duvet cover with bitten nails. On the back of his right hand is a tattoo that looks like something someone did at a kitchen table with a needle and a bottle of ink. It’s a blurred shape that might be a dagger, oversized blood dripping from it. Fuk dis underneath it.
Over the sound of the frantic beat she can hear a distant thudding. She pushes herself up from the edge of the bed. ‘Want me to bring you something? Next time it flies off?’
He looks up. ‘Can of pop would be good,’ he says.
‘From the fridge?’
‘Aye.’
She leaves him to it, shuts the door behind her. The air in the hallway is fresh after the fug of his closed-up little den. The kitchen is empty, the back door wide open. From outside, the deep thud-thud of the helicopter’s rotors.
Fraser
The helicopter has returned with two builder’s bags of gravel. He stays out of the way as James detaches them from the line and then reattaches the line to the second tank. Fraser is still fed up that the gravel has to be dropped a quarter of a mile from the tern terrace, but it can’t be helped. He will have to cart it all up there in several trips. Thankfully he has the quad.
Rachel comes back out just as the second set of gravel bags are landing.
‘Where did you go?’ he shouts across to her.
‘Just went to see Lefty.’
He’s standing next to her so she’s not looking at his face, which is just as well. What the fuck? He manages a strangled single word: ‘Why?’
Now she turns to him. He keeps his eyes on James, who’s busy detaching the line. Watching it being done, knowing he could probably do it better and quicker, is making him itchy with tension.
‘Just felt a bit sorry for him. Missing all the fun.’ She hasn’t turned back. ‘Why? Am I not supposed to be talking to him now?’
It’s way too fucking noisy to be having this conversation. They’re having to shout above the noise of the rotors.
‘Fraser?’
‘You’re better off leaving him alone,’ he shouts, eventually.
‘Why?’
He ignores the question completely because he can feel the fury in him rising up like a tide and if this carries on he’s going to explode and yell at her.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘It’s none of my business. I forgot that for a moment.’
And she smiles.
She pulls her camera out of her back pocket, and walks a few steps towards the cliff so that she can get a different angle of the helicopter hovering.
Rachel
Rachel lies still, trying to sleep, and failing.
It’s not the excitement of the helicopter visiting the island. It’s not as though she’s never seen a helicopter before, and after the initial interest of watching the line being attached and detached, and seeing James or whatever his name was descending the line and then being taken back up again, what she was left with was the lingering smell of shit, and the bird-watchers waiting for their jacket potatoes and soup. From Fraser’s room she can hear nothing at all: no snoring, no talking, no nightmarish shouts.
He had been mad, earlier. She had felt it, like a solidifying of his body as she stood next to him. She knew straight away that she had said the wrong thing. That going to see Lefty had been the wrong thing to do. She had been thinking it over in the observatory while she was making dinner, wondering if Lefty is actually a real threat to her – maybe he has some sort of mental illness that makes him dangerous? And that’s why he’s here, where he can’t do any damage, can’t hurt anyone?
But she hadn’t felt that. She knows what anxiety looks like, has lived with it long enough. Lefty is way more scared of her than she is of him.
And yet Fraser wants to keep her away from him. And, when he knew she had gone to talk to the lad, he’d been absolutely furious. He’d barely spoken to her over dinner. Answering her chatty questions about birds with one-word answers, not looking up, clattering his fork at his plate. Then she’d asked about the helicopter and the septic tanks and he’d stopped talking at all, ignored her completely, got up the second he’d cleared his plate – she was still halfway through – washed up at the sink, then whistled for Bess and taken her out, leaving her sitting there on her own.
No whisky tonight, then, she had thought.
She was surprised by it more than anything. When she’d finished eating, she’d washed up and wiped the surfaces down, trying to work out if she wanted him to come back or whether she’d rather scoot off to bed and avoid him completely until his mood had improved. She had wiped the kitchen spotless and there was still no sign of him, so she came to bed, and only when she closed her door did she hear him coming up the stairs.
This afternoon, before dinner, she had WhatsApped the two pictures of Fraser to Mel, for her opinion. They’re not especially flattering, and, given that she was uphill from him, they don’t give a fair impression of his height, which Rachel – being taller than most herself – finds particularly appealing. But they are indisputably Fraser, complete with the frown, and the right hand curled into a fist as if he’s about to thump someone.
Wow was all that Mel said in reply. In response to that, Rachel had merely sent three letters: IKR?
He has walls, she thinks. He has built up walls over the years, big as you could possibly imagine, and now he’s trapped himself behind them and he can’t see out.
The island is like a wall in itself, a wall without bricks. Of course he doesn’t want a visitors’ centre. He doesn’t want tourists, he doesn’t want holiday cottages; why does anyone imagine he’s here? He looks after the wildlife on the island and, yes, he clearly has some affinity for helpless creatures – she’s including Lefty in this category, for reasons that she doesn’t quite understand – but he’s not here for the birds, he’s here because of the solitude; that’s what’s important to him. He’s not here because he’s the only person willing to do this job. He wants to be here, even if it isn’t good for his mental health.
She wonders if Marion ever asked him to look after the bird observatory.
She pictures that conversation for a moment, Marion (whatever she looks like; Rachel imagines a large, authoritative lady in a navy suit, rather like the Governess from The Chase) sitting at a desk smiling sweetly but forcefully; Fraser, feet planted, arms folded across his massive chest, chin up, jaw twitching.
Captain Haddock with a face like thunder – exactly how he’d been this afternoon.
She thinks, you’re not the only one who needs to brick yourself in.
She thinks, maybe you’re not the only one who needs an island to hide on.
Rachel feels the edges of tiredness, fluffy, cloud-like, a blurring of her thoughts. The island is like a prison for him, she thinks again, a prison made of fresh air and sea. And yet it’s joined to the land just the same, connected underneath the water. She pictures the sea draining away like something Biblical; she imagines walking across the salty granite from the rocky beach, downhill, sliding over glistening seaweed and looking at rock pools full of fish, and crabs; downhill, then flat and sandy for a while, her toes digging in … and she can see the shore, the houses and the strange black spire of the church on the hill, and she’s walking but it doesn’t seem to be getting any closer; and she never, ever, quite makes it all the way across.
Fraser
Fraser wakes up with a jump, heaving huge breaths in, sitting straight up in bed. Sweat cools on his skin as he comes back to consciousness.
It’s a dream, he says to himself. It’s not real. It’s just a dream.
‘Fraser?’
Someone is with him.
‘Are you okay?’
‘What? Fuck.’
It takes him several seconds to shake free of the confusion. He’s in bed, and Rachel is sitting there next to him. Perched on the edge. Her hand on his shoulder, which he shakes off as he reaches for the light switch.
‘What?’ he says again, squinting at her. Then the anger rises, pushed up by the shame. ‘What the fuck are you doing in here?’
She’s sitting next to him, against his thigh, in a grey T-shirt with a sheep on it, her hair over her shoulders.
‘You were shouting!’ she says, eyes widening at his tone. ‘I thought something had happened.’
‘What? Nothing. Everything’s … fine. Get out, will you?’
‘Well, yes, of course.’ She gets quickly to her feet. ‘Clearly you’re okay.’
He can’t look at her. ‘Maybe you could have knocked before, you know, just walking in.’
‘I did knock!’ She’s at the door now. ‘Anyway. Goodnight.’
He sighs dramatically and switches off the light again as the door closes behind her. His heart is still pounding with the residue of the dream, not helped by the shock of waking up to find someone in his room. He lies still for some time, not wanting to sleep, considering whether he can get away with never mentioning this again, and knowing with every possible certainty that she will bring it up as a topic for conversation the next time he sees her.
And in his heart, still, fresh, is Maggie: half-alive, holding on. Her face is a swollen mess of bruises and grazes, although he never saw her like that. He thinks maybe he’s looking at Maggie, and then he’s looking at Rachel, lying in Maggie’s hospital bed, and then he looks closer and it’s Maggie again. And he is shouting at her to stay with him, knowing that she is already slipping away.
Meanwhile in the dark, cold bedroom his heart is pounding so hard he can hear it, the blood pulsing and squeaking through his ears.
He slows his breathing by timing it with the dim illumination from the lamp as it passes overhead, sweeping round the island and the sea, reflected off the clouds and skimming the chilly black air. He turns on his bedside light because the images stay with him until the light chases them away; twists up slowly like an old man to sit on the edge of the bed, head in his hands.
Usually when he wakes like this he goes downstairs, drinks water, sits in the brightness of the kitchen and gets himself back to normal before he tries to sleep again; but Rachel might come downstairs, and then he will have to apologise for his behaviour. Late-night chats are dangerous. They go to unexpected places.
And still the nightmares keep happening.
He thinks her being here is what’s triggering them.
He suspects this, because he is dreaming of her now as well as of Maggie. Of bad things happening to Rachel. Of not being able to get to her in time. He couldn’t save Maggie, but now his brain is telling him to save Rachel instead.
After twenty minutes he is still wide awake, the sweat cooling on his naked back. He has been sitting on the edge of his bed, thinking through all the conversations he had with his sister and how he could have handled things differently, how he might have stopped it, and all that’s happening is that he is getting more angry at himself. He always tries to fix things and there’s no point, no point to it at all. In the end he gets up, puts on a T-shirt and some socks, and goes downstairs.
Bess is in her bed beside the range. The kitchen is warm and the lights, when he’s able to open his eyes, are bright. He puts on a pan of milk and rubs Bess’s soft ears.
A couple of minutes later he hears a movement, and Rachel comes in, wrapped in a faded blue dressing gown. He sighs heavily at the predicted interruption, yet is strangely glad to see her at the same time. She feels like an anchor. Real Rachel, in his kitchen, alive and well and yawning.
‘Cocoa?’ he asks her.
‘Only if there’s enough.’
He adds more milk to the pan, rubs at his face.
‘Sorry,’ he says.
‘What for?’
‘Waking you up. Telling you to piss off.’
‘Oh, that. I shouldn’t have just come into your room, though.’
‘Aye,’ he says. ‘Well.’
‘Look, if you’d rather be on your own …’
‘You’re here now.’
Fraser can feel her watching him as he stirs in the cocoa powder and the sugar and whisks it into the milk. Say something, he wants to yell at her. Out with it, whatever it is. But she’s sitting there quietly, waiting for him to bring the mugs over, and then she sips at the drink, and then, without warning, he’s started talking.
‘Maggie was my sister,’ he says. It comes out of nowhere, as if some unfamiliar part of him has just decided to speak up.
There is a long pause.
Then her hand is on the table over his, her thumb rubbing the back of it, and then it’s still, warm on his. He feels a sudden rush of emotion, unexpected, and it’s so gut-churning that he thinks for a minute he might vomit. The room spins sickeningly and he drops his head, pulls his hand away.
‘She died,’ he says. And then adds, ‘No – she was killed. Murdered.’
Her eyes widen. ‘When?’ she asks.
‘Six years ago. She was eighteen.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ she says.
If he looks at her, if he meets her eye, he will lose it. He has heard those words many times, from all sorts of people, and each time he’s thought, Aye, you might be, but you don’t understand, how can you? And he dismisses people because of it, he dismisses their kindness and their empathy. But something about the way she says it – the force of the feeling behind it, the quiet words – catches him by surprise and he feels that vast surge of anger and grief and pain rising in him again. He wants to get up and run away.
‘Can you tell me what happened?’
He shoves the feelings back down again, and he’s on safer ground because he can trot out these sentences without emotion; he’s done it often enough. Those people that asked. The people that read the local papers; everyone he knew back then, all the people in the town, his ma’s friends, Uncle Jack’s friends from the pub, the guys at work. That’s partly why he moved away. Because he got so sick of telling.
‘She was in a car with a piece-of-shit drug dealer she’d been seeing, called Jimmy Wright. He was off his face. Drove into a tree. Got away with a few scratches and Maggie was – killed. Not instantly. She died in hospital.’
> He looks at his hand, the way it’s shaking, closes it into a fist.
‘You dream about her?’ she asks.
This is unfamiliar territory, of course. Nobody has asked him that question before.
‘I guess I do. I don’t always remember.’
She lifts the mug and drinks her cocoa and it recalls him back to the kitchen, the drink, the middle of the night. For a moment he’d been back there, looking down at the skinny scrap of life that was his baby sister, tubes in her mouth and the smell of death in the room, and the sick feeling was back. He picks up his mug. The sugar in the cocoa gives his stomach something else to churn over.
‘I should have stopped her getting into the car. I should have been there, then it might not have happened.’
‘You blame yourself,’ she says. ‘I mean, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t your fault.’
He can’t respond to that. How can she even say something like that? She wasn’t there. Eventually he says, ‘Yeah. It was all a very long time ago.’
‘Six years isn’t all that long.’
There is a long pause. When he can stand it no longer he looks up and meets her eyes. Smudges of tiredness under them, the bright blue of her irises, regarding him steadily.
‘You don’t have to say anything,’ he says, and shrugs, trying to make it better for her. ‘It is what it is.’
They sit in silence for a while.
He’s finished his cocoa, and she has too. Now he wishes he’d never told her. Now it feels as though she has something to hold over him, and there will be consequences. But there’s no way to take it back. He picks up his mug and hers and takes them to the sink, rinsing them with the pan.
‘Will you be able to sleep now?’ she asks.
He looks round. She’s leaning against the worktop.
‘Probably,’ he says.
There is a long moment where she’s watching him and he can feel the weight of it; not quite judging, not that. He has not talked about Maggie, since he moved away. He has never had to. There is a weird sort of relief in it, as well as the pain of thinking about her, which never seems to get any better. The weight of the guilt he feels, stones in his pockets.