You, Me & the Sea Page 19

  ‘Right?’ he says, leaning forward on his elbows, fidgety with the excitement of it.

  In exchange, she reaches up to the top cupboard and fetches the biscuit tin, the one that she keeps stocked with chocolate biscuits, and passes it over. Lefty lifts the lid like a kid at Christmas, smiles wide enough to reveal his missing teeth, picks out two chocolate Hobnobs and a little stack of Bourbons.

  ‘Seriously? I’m not sure it’s a five-biscuiter.’

  ‘At least a five-biscuiter. You don’t get triangles every day.’

  They have developed a completely arbitrary system of grading the sea glass that Lefty finds. Triangles are worth more than random polygons, although the most valuable one was an almost-perfect square. Ovals and circles are nice but they are common. Green glass is the commonest, then white – still common, but harder to find in the pale sand. Brown glass is never pretty – sometimes he leaves it where it is – but the best of all is the blue glass, the darker the better.

  He has found six pieces of blue glass in the past four weeks. Three of them he has given to her. They are sharing.

  She pretends not to notice that he always gives her the best ones.

  ‘Fair enough, then. Are you going to eat with us tonight?’

  ‘Nah.’

  She puts the Bourbons back in the tin and closes the lid and he looks up at her, mouthful of Hobnob crumbs, bereft.

  ‘No dinner, no biscuits.’

  ‘Ah, fucksake.’

  ‘Come on, you know you want to. I think it’s steak night. You like steak, don’t you? Everyone likes steak.’

  ‘There won’t be enough,’ he ventures.

  ‘That’s bollocks. There’s always enough.’

  ‘Not steak. He only gets the fancy stuff for you and him.’

  ‘I bet you he’s got three.’

  ‘What you gonnae bet?’

  ‘Brownies tomorrow?’

  His eyes light up at that.

  Now that she’s got a routine, Rachel has been doing some baking in the bird observatory. She makes things in the morning on Saturdays before the boat comes, leaves them in the oven while she cleans. When she has enough ingredients she makes two batches, one for the lighthouse, one for the new lot of visitors as a welcome gift. Muffins, cakes, brownies.

  To take her mind off other things, her new challenge is to fix Fraser and Lefty. As part of this plan, she has decided she needs to get them at the table together every evening. So far she has only managed it twice, and both times ended somewhat disastrously. But she is nothing if not determined.

  Fraser

  At half-past five Fraser takes the quad up to the bird observatory. It has taken him most of the day to think of an excuse. Having spent half an hour standing in the workshop looking vaguely at the tools and the equipment, he loads the trailer with some half-full tins of white paint, a ladder, and brushes. He can always plan to whitewash the exterior, in fact he has been talking about doing it for at least the past two years. The weather or something else has always got in the way.

  He has no actual intention of painting anything, of course. Although that may change.

  The weather has been beautiful for the past three days – warm sunshine, the evenings stretching out into glorious sunsets across the water – and today is no exception. The island is full of nesting birds. Terns have just begun to arrive from the southern hemisphere and a couple of them have been seen inspecting the newly constructed tern terrace. It crosses his mind to go further up the hill on the quad and have a look, just in case there are nesting pairs, but he has checked already today, twice, and he doesn’t want to disturb them any more than necessary.

  It’s good, though. It’s keeping him busy.

  At the bird observatory he unloads the tins of paint and carries them into the store. The washing machine and the tumble dryer are both going, the air warm and fragrant. When he comes out again, Rachel is leaning against the doorpost. Sunlight and blue sky and her, and he takes a deep breath.

  ‘Hello,’ she says.

  ‘Hello yourself.’

  ‘What are you up to?’

  ‘Just brought some paint up here.’

  ‘You want a coffee or something?’

  ‘What, that shit stuff? No way.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  She retreats inside and he stands in the porch for a minute, then takes his boots off and comes in. The main room smells of lavender floor cleaner, strong enough to make his eyes water.

  ‘You want a ride back?’ he asks.

  ‘I don’t mind walking. The sun’s shining.’

  ‘I’ve got the quad here.’

  ‘Well, thanks, then. If you can wait a few minutes.’

  He shrugs, as if it’s no bother to him either way. Watches Rachel moving around the kitchen, wiping the surfaces, putting things away.

  ‘I’ve asked Lefty to have dinner with us,’ she says, chirpily. No warning. Not even looking at him when she says it.

  ‘That so?’ he says, colourless.

  ‘I said you’d probably got plenty. I told him you wouldn’t mind. You don’t mind, do you?’

  There is a pause.

  ‘He’s not keen on green stuff.’

  She folds a tea towel briskly and slides it over the guard rail of the stove, looks up at him, meets his eyes. ‘I’m sure he’ll eat something.’ And then she does that huge bright smile out of nowhere. ‘And I’ll be grateful enough for the both of us, as usual.’

  Minutes later, Rachel is climbing on to the quad behind him, and he’s still prickly with it. She’s getting much more confident sitting on the back of the quad and doesn’t quite cling to him in the way she did the first few times, but now he can’t stop thinking about dinner, how it’s ruined before he’s even cooked it.

  Today is his birthday, not that either of them have a clue about that. Not that he’s celebrated it any time in the last five years.

  He had a text earlier, from Kelly.

  Happy birthday fella. Hope you’re having a good one. Give us a call some time? We miss u xxx

  He might phone her. He’s overdue a visit, really, but his trips to the mainland are usually dictated by other errands that need to be run and he doesn’t have any of those right now. He sends her a quick reply:

  Thanks

  Almost immediately she’s back with another:

  What u up to?

  He doesn’t respond to that. If she ever asks, he will say he lost the signal and then forgot about it. He hates texting. If pressed, he would tell you that he would far rather call someone, but actually he hates talking on the phone too.

  Steak, salad, a good bottle of wine. He’s even made cheesecake, a rare dessert but today he was worried that the meal wasn’t going to be hearty enough. And last week he made apple crumble and she clearly enjoyed it very much indeed.

  That was the day before Lefty sat down to dinner with them for the first time since Rachel arrived.

  No, not the first time, he thinks, as the quad bumps round towards the workshop. She had persuaded him to sit down with his plate of chips the week before. Fraser remembered him standing in the doorway, looking from one of them to the other, eyes wide. ‘Come on,’ Rachel had said. ‘You don’t have to talk, if you don’t want to. Just sit.’ Then she’d glanced across at him and seen the expression on his face and said, ‘Fraser …’

  He had looked at her and then down at his food. Duck stir fry. Suddenly his appetite had evaporated.

  Lefty had come and sat on the spare chair, tension making him rigid, picking at his chips. Fraser had kept his head down. After a few minutes, the chips half-eaten, the boy had skulked away.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she’d asked Fraser then, but gently. ‘Are you ever going to tell me?’

  ‘Nothing’s going on,’ he’d said. In that moment it had been true.

  Then, a week later, she had warned him in advance that Lefty was going to eat with them. Roast chicken. Apparently Rachel had asked, and he had said that he liked
roast chicken, and she had invited him to dinner. What could Fraser say? He couldn’t very well say no. Meanwhile Lefty has gone soft on Rachel, which is another thing that makes him seethe. He can see the way the lad straightens whenever Rachel approaches. And by the smell of him he’s even washing more, wearing clean clothes every other day instead of every other week.

  So he came to dinner, wordless, awkward. Lefty sat, Lefty ate, both of them silent and unmoving like blocks of concrete in their chairs while Rachel smiled and chatted away as if nothing was wrong. Neither of them spoke to each other however hard Rachel tried. She asked questions – puffins, seals, what’s the weirdest thing you’ve found on the beach – and Lefty would answer, and she would say, ‘Fraser?’ to prompt him to respond, and the best he could manage was a miserable shrug.

  Now he’s got that ordeal to come tonight, all over again, and he had been looking forward to tonight because steak and salad is his absolute best meal, his favourite, and it’s his birthday, and now it’s ruined.

  Rachel

  Lefty has had a shower and washed his hair, and combed it. He’s hovering in the doorway when Rachel comes down the stairs, and jumps out of his skin when she nudges him gently.

  Fraser is at the kitchen counter. The table is set for three. Two wine glasses and a can of pop, a bottle of wine already opened. He has made an effort. She thinks this is really rather lovely of him.

  ‘Anything I can do?’ Rachel asks, brightly.

  ‘Sit,’ Fraser says, bringing plates to the table. ‘It’s done.’

  His effort doesn’t extend to actually being cheerful about it, though. His face betrays the very darkest of Fraser’s moods. There’s nothing wrong with the dinner, nothing at all – a beautiful green salad, pink radishes, yellow pepper and ripe tomatoes nestling in the leaves like treasures; steaks for each of them, no evidence that two steaks have been hacked about to serve three. Additionally there’s a coleslaw, beetroot, fresh bread in chunks. He’s taken care with it. The dinner is amazing as always. But Fraser is hunched, not meeting her eye, certainly not looking at Lefty; just as he was the last time she attempted to get them all together.

  Maybe, if she does this often enough, he’ll come round, she thinks. If she just chips away at it.

  ‘So,’ Rachel says, pouring wine into her glass and Fraser’s, ‘apparently I’ve got a university professor coming tomorrow.’

  Nobody says anything. Lefty has taken a small, wary slice out of his steak and is chewing it as if it might be laced with rat poison. He’s helped himself to two salad leaves and a few bits of tomato.

  ‘Craig emailed me. Apparently this guy’s an expert on guillemots?’

  Rachel likes the black guillemots. She has just written a blogpost about them, which she might still delete, or amend, because she thinks it doesn’t sound scientific enough. She likes that there is another name for them, the Norse word, tystie, which sounds ridiculously cute for such a serious-looking bird. Fraser had pointed out one that had white markings on its black face – like elegant little spectacles. Apparently about five per cent of the birds, randomly, have these markings. She wasn’t quick enough with the binoculars and missed it; she is determined to get a picture of one before she leaves the island. She has been looking ever since, but only seen the ones with a pure black head.

  Now Fraser looks up for a fraction of a second, then back to his plate. There’s a bottle of wine on the kitchen counter that looks empty; Rachel wonders if he drank it all while he was cooking.

  ‘Craig said he’s been before. And there’s a couple of others.’

  ‘Two women?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  Fraser snorts at that.

  ‘What? What’s funny?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  Rachel drinks her wine, taking advantage of his refusal to look at either of them to drink him in. The way he’s holding himself, the amount of energy it must be taking to just not relax, is astounding. His huge hands, holding the cutlery tightly, the way he’s stabbing at each bit of meat.

  Is it a mistake, to try to make things better? At the moment it feels as if she’s making it all worse. She takes a deep breath in. Don’t say it, Rachel, don’t say it.

  ‘How come you two can spend all day together and get on with it, but when you sit down at the dinner table it’s like you can’t stand each other?’

  Lefty looks up, startled.

  Fraser’s knife clatters on to the plate. He looks up, at last, meets her eyes, chewing.

  ‘We manage just fine,’ he says.

  His eyes are calm, focused entirely on her. Something about the stillness feels dangerous. As if he’s about to blow.

  Her heart thuds, suddenly feeling exposed. She does what she always does when she’s possibly fucked up – paints on her best smile. ‘I know you do. I know you’re managing. But it would be nice if you actually spoke to each other like civilised adults instead of shouting all the time.’

  ‘I don’t shout,’ Lefty points out.

  Fraser carries on staring.

  ‘I know what this is about,’ he says to her. As if Lefty’s not there.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You want to fix things. Make everything nice, make it all pretty and happy. Sometimes things just can’t be fixed, aye?’

  Her voice all but disappears. ‘Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.’

  He takes a deep breath in, lifts the wine bottle, fills his glass. And hers. ‘Well, you’ve tried.’

  ‘These things take time.’

  The wine bottle slams on to the table, hard enough to make Fraser’s fork fall off the side of the plate. Lefty flinches, scrapes back his chair, and without another word he leaves the room. Rachel stares Fraser out, listening for the sound of Lefty’s door closing and, a few minutes later, the sound of the TV turned up high.

  ‘There,’ Fraser says coldly. ‘Happy now?’

  She shakes her head, gulps the wine, which is, she realises, very alcoholic and really very good. Lefty’s steak lies abandoned and half-eaten. Fraser tuts and spears it, adding what’s left to his own plate. Bess, watching everything from her bed, gives a little whine of protest.

  Rachel looks at him, determined not to cry. All she wants is to try to make things better, and each time she tries she just makes it worse. And now she has made Fraser angry, which is the very last thing she wants to do. He may be grumpy, but he’s been nothing but kind to her, helping her with the bird observatory, giving her lifts on the quad, even when it isn’t raining. And cooking all the time, not just chips and beans and basic food but proper fresh, elaborate meals that taste fantastic and make her feel …

  Hm. She thinks about it. Special? No, not quite. Wanted? Not that either. Valuable? It doesn’t work in the way she wants the word to work, but the alcohol is beginning to affect her brain, making everything just a bit less important.

  Deep, slow, breaths. Sips of wine. Don’t get pissed, she thinks. If she has too much of it, she’ll make a tit of herself, even more than she has already. She’s baffled by most of this, frankly, but one thing she’s sure of is that she wants to stay here, sit this out, not run off like Lefty. That would feel too much like giving in. She has a strong desire to not give in.

  Mel has developed a theory about Fraser. Well, not so much a theory, of course, since he exists for Melanie only in the descriptions Rachel has sent to her, plus those two photos she passed on, the ones of him striding up the hill. After the last abortive Team Dinner attempt, last week, Rachel had messaged Mel with the results, which were broadly similar to this evening’s, only with less wine-bottle-slamming and no actual raised voices.

  Mel had said in reply:

  Rachel has been thinking about that ever since, about Fraser’s anger. It’s pretty much the only emotion she’s seen him display, and he seems comfortable displaying it all the time, especially in Lefty’s direction. Tonight is the first time she’s had any of it directed at her – except it wasn’t, really, even though the thing that’
s making him angry – being forced to share his table with Lefty – is entirely her doing.

  Fraser tips the wine bottle up into his glass. It’s empty. Rachel has had a couple, no more than that, and she can feel the deep red glow of it inside her.

  ‘Fuck,’ he mutters.

  ‘Have we run out?’ she asks.

  The shopping runs in the past few weeks have included several bottles, and one bottle of whisky per week. Robert must think she’s got a serious drinking problem, since the alcohol portion of the shopping list only started once she arrived. Now Fraser is clearly the worse for wear and she is a good bottle or so behind him. She thinks about opening another one, seeing if a bit more wine will loosen him up further, but there’s something so sad in the hunched shoulders, the way he seems utterly exhausted all of a sudden, and she doesn’t want to make it worse.

  His hand on the table. Something makes her reach out and put her hand over it. He flinches, leaves it there for a moment, and then pulls his hand away. He collects the plates, begins to wash up.

  ‘Fraser,’ she says.

  He doesn’t answer.

  She gets up, takes the bowl of coleslaw and finds clingfilm to fit over the top of it, and she’s aware of him the whole time, the physicality of him, the tension in his shoulders and the attitude, whatever it is.

  She listens to him shouting in his sleep. Maybe once or twice a week. She has not gone into his room again, although each time she has thought about it. Once, she thought she heard him yell her name, Rachel, just once. She sat up in bed, heart thumping, listening in case something had happened, in case it was an actual emergency and he needed her, listening for him to call out again. And she’d heard a groan, like a … like a self-disgust kind of thing. And silence.

  And now here they are again. Fraser with his back to her, solid muscle and tension and looking as though he’d really like to punch something. She wants to touch him again, but she fights the urge. She’s not afraid of his anger, not put off by it. Not worried about it, not really, all the way to the moment when he says, ‘Here’s the thing I want to know—’ and then stops himself.