The long delirious burni.., p.16
The Long Delirious Burning Blue, page 16
Laura tied her curly dark hair back in a ponytail and hurried down the stairs to tell Aunt Lizzie that she was ready to go. But she slowed down as she walked into the room; she remembered that Aunt Lizzie hadn’t been in a very good mood all morning, and if she found any fault with Laura she might do something to make her late, just out of spite.
She was sitting in her usual chair by the big square table in the middle of the front room, chewing at her finger nails and shaking her head as she muttered to herself. The customary grey hairnet clung to her head like a spider’s web. It toned with soft wavy hair that had been newly washed that morning, keeping it carefully in place so that it dried without sticking out at the back and sides. She was wearing a faded floral cotton pinafore dress over her short-sleeved summer frock; it was only on Sundays that Aunt Lizzie would take the pinny off, or on the very rare occasions that she went out somewhere. Laura sighed as she heard the angry mumbling. She had no idea what put Aunt Lizzie in her bad moods. Some days she was fine and she would even tell Laura funny stories – though usually they were funny at someone else’s expense. Other times she would wake up angry and stay that way all day. She changed like the weather, Uncle Billy said. He said not to mind her but Laura didn’t think he really knew what she could be like. Because when Uncle Billy was around everyone was nicer, even Aunt Lizzie.
The smell of baking wafted in through the open door that led to the small dark kitchen: raisin scones, sausage rolls, teacakes and fatty busters. Laura hoped there would be some for her tea. When Uncle Billy was home they would steal the bite-sized sausage rolls off the rack while they were still warm from the oven and Aunt Lizzie wasn’t looking. ‘What’s the good of me making stuff and you just eating it,’ she would squawk at them once she noticed they were missing, hands on her soft, wide hips and small black eyes flashing daggers through the air. Uncle Billy would look at Laura and roll his eyes. ‘What’s the good of you making stuff and us not eating it, now, Lizzie,’ he’d say, smiling his warm twinkly smile at her – the one that made even Aunt Lizzie’s mouth twitch up at the corners.
‘I’m going now, Aunt Lizzie,’ Laura said quietly. ‘Is there anything you need me to do before I go?’
‘Well, that would be friggin’ stupid, wouldn’t it, now you’re all dressed? If I asked you to fetch me a cone of sea-coal out of the coalhouse you’d only mucky up your best frock.’ She glanced away from Laura with her best long-suffering expression and shook her head. ‘It’s all right. You go out. I’ll do it myself. Never mind my poor old back.’
Laura immediately felt guilty but Aunt Lizzie was right: she couldn’t get her dress dirty now. But before Laura could slip away Aunt Lizzie turned around and sniffed loudly, looking her up and down. Laura’s stomach fluttered as she stood still for the inspection. She bit her lower lip.
‘Didn’t clean your shoes, then?’
‘Yes I did, Aunt Lizzie. I did them before I got dressed.’
‘I didn’t see you.’
‘You were in the kitchen, Aunt Lizzie. I did do them, honestly I did.’
‘Doesn’t look to me like you did. Look at the cut of them. You get that shoe polish out again and make sure you do them properly this time. You’re not going out of this house looking like a tramp.’
Laura’s heart sank but she knew it was pointless to argue. She might miss the chance to sit with Uncle Billy now, but she still had a few minutes to spare. If she was quick, she shouldn’t be late. She ran to the cupboard by the fire and pulled out the black woollen bag of shoe cleaning things. She slipped off her shoes and without thinking put them on the table while she fumbled for the flat round tin of Cherry Blossom and pushed off the lid.
Aunt Lizzie’s high-pitched screech cut through her like a knife. ‘Don’t put your shoes on the table, you half-soaked little get, you! Don’t you know that’s seven years of bad luck?’
Startled, Laura dropped the tin of polish and watched helplessly as the inevitable happened. It brushed against her skirt on its way down, leaving a long black smudge on the primrose yellow cotton before it rolled onto the floor and settled upside down under the table.
‘What’s the matter with you, you daft little bugger? How can you be so bloody stupid?’
Laura was frozen, horrified.
Aunt Lizzie folded her arms under her ample bosom and pursed her lips in satisfaction. ‘Well, that’s that, then. You can’t go now, can you, with your frock like that?’
‘Of course I can. There are other dresses that I can wear. If I run up now and change there’ll still be time.’
‘Don’t you talk back to me – I said you can’t go now, you dirty little midden. Didn’t you hear me?’
Laura felt the tears well up and the lump form at her throat but she wouldn’t cry; she wouldn’t give Aunt Lizzie the pleasure of it. She swallowed hard. Her voice was soft, placating. ‘Aunt Lizzie, I can’t not go. Everyone else from school will be there, and Elsie was my friend. What will they think if I don’t go?’
‘Well, you should’ve thought of that before you spread shoe polish all over your best frock, shouldn’t you? How are you going to get that out? Ruined, it is. What do you think – that we’re made of money? Ruining your best frock like that.’
Laura didn’t know what to do; she couldn’t believe Aunt Lizzie really meant it. Surely she couldn’t mean it?
‘You get up them stairs and stay in your room for the rest of the day. That’ll teach you. And there’ll be no tea for you tonight. You just stay out of my sight. You’re not worth the time I put into you, you’re not. Useless little get. No wonder your mam and dad didn’t want you. And what thanks do I get for taking you in? None at all. Ungrateful little bugger. Get away with you now and get out of my sight.’
Laura spent the rest of the day lying on the high wooden bed in her bedroom at the back of the house, staring at the overblown cabbage roses on the fading wallpaper. She wouldn’t cry. She refused to cry. Just before tea-time she heard the sound of Uncle Billy’s return – Aunt Lizzie’s voice, raised and defensive; Uncle Billy’s, low and soothing. A few minutes later she heard his footsteps, slow and heavy on the carpeted stairs. The door opened and it was only then that she let the tears gush out, hot and salty, tickling her cheeks as they spilled down her face. Uncle Billy sat on the bed and took Laura’s cold hands in his; when she’d cried herself out he passed her a clean, pressed white handkerchief out of the breast pocket of his jacket. It smelled of the cherry pipe tobacco that he smoked. She inhaled the familiar comforting scent of it, blew her nose and wiped her eyes, and sat up.
Uncle Billy smiled faintly. ‘Come on then, my lass. Let’s go out to the garden and see to the animals. Then it’ll be time for tea.’
She sniffed noisily and a final stray sob hiccoughed from her mouth. ‘I’m not allowed any tea.’
‘I think you’ll find that you are, pet. Just mind you stay quiet, now. Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to. She’ll come out of it. You know what she’s like.’
Laura knew what she was like, but she didn’t think that Uncle Billy did. And more than anything else she wanted to protect him from the knowledge.
She crept behind him down the stairs, slipping straight out of the front door, round the back of the house and into the garden. They passed the old brick air raid shelter that she remembered so vividly from the years of the war. It shared a dividing wall with next door’s shelter, and there was a sort of a window in the wall – well, just a hole, really, with a raggedy old curtain over it that you could draw back to give you privacy. But little Frankie Bates from next door used to reach through the hole and pull on Laura’s pigtails when she sat on her mam’s lap in the old wooden chair next to the wall.
Uncle Billy had wanted to turn the shelter into a coal house now that the war was over and it didn’t look like there’d be another any time soon. But Aunt Lizzie wouldn’t hear of it. You wouldn’t catch her running in and out of the house in the wind and rain just for a couple of shovels full of coal. Uncle Billy had asked whether she’d rather have the coal man keep on carting dust all through the house when he dumped it in the cupboard in the corner of the kitchen, but Aunt Lizzie said she’d lived with that ever since they moved in and she didn’t see why she should stop now and what was the matter with him anyway – was he saying she didn’t clean up properly? So Uncle Billy had given up – he knew when to let her have her way. For the sake of a quiet life, he would say.
Uncle Billy clucked quietly as he walked, and soon enough Matilda emerged out from under the bushes with Jimmy Muck waddling noisily behind. Laura didn’t know why they only had one hen and one duck, but they seem happy enough together and the sight of the two mismatched creatures plodding around the garden, one behind the other, always made her smile. Laura found an egg that Matilda had laid in her favourite spot under the raspberry bush, and Uncle Billy put down a tin bowl of left-over mashed-up vegetables by their ramshackle wooden hut at the far end of the garden. Wallflowers self-seeded in riotous yellow splendour all around it; Laura closed her eyes and inhaled the sweet unforgettable scent that in years to come would always transport her back to this place and time. Bindweed grew up the back garden wall (‘grandmother, grandmother, pop out of bed’, Aunt Lizzie called it) and there was a neat square vegetable patch where Uncle Billy grew cabbages, cauliflowers, carrots and a few tatties. Laura liked to sit in the vegetable patch in the summer, picking the small green caterpillars off the cabbage plants, sniffing the sweet earthy smell of them before she’d throw them across to Jimmy Muck, who would quack gratefully on the lawn. She felt safe here in this garden – safe here out of the house and away from Aunt Lizzie’s critical gaze.
The rest of the weekend passed quietly and without incident. Aunt Lizzie was mostly silent and Laura crept round the house, heavy with dread at the thought of facing her school friends on Monday morning. She was as late as she could manage to be but Mrs Mason finally rang the bell and she couldn’t put off going into the classroom any longer. She walked through the door and the din faded away as, one by one, each of the other girls turned to look at her. Hesitantly, she began an apologetic smile but every last one of them tightened their lips and turned away. It would be a week before any of them would even look her in the eye, two before anyone would talk to her again. Margaret and Josie and Nan didn’t want to walk back from school with her any more; she trailed home behind them like an unwanted puppy. She had no chance to explain: no-one would listen. They wouldn’t even acknowledge her presence.
Only Uncle Billy seemed to understand. He didn’t say much, but when he came in from work on Monday night and saw her face, he rested his hand on her shoulder and pressed it gently. ‘Good lass,’ he said. ‘You’re a good lass, and don’t you forget it.’ But Laura knew that she wasn’t good at all, not really. Aunt Lizzie said so, and Aunt Lizzie saw things that other people didn’t. Nothing got past Aunt Lizzie; you couldn’t fool her.
Down by the lochside in the expectant stillness of this early evening, the landscape seems re-cast in silver. Coarse shingle gleams wetly in several shades of grey; jagged rock juts into the water like polished gunmetal. Tree limbs fallen during last winter’s storms lie stranded on the shore like the ribcages of beached whales. Autumn is over now; the leaves are all fallen, the trees bare as skeletons. A buzzard circles overhead, its questing shadow reflected in the quick-silvered stillness of the loch.
Laura has become so very aware of the elements on this remote and rocky Highland shore. You live with them and you work with them and they forge you and they shape you. You join them, Meg says, in the age-old dance around the wheel of the year. Meg says that everyone has their element: the element to which they are drawn, to which they are bound. And she has no doubt that Laura’s is water. And perhaps it is true, Laura thinks; there is a pull that is almost gravitational, and a sense of loss when she is away from it. She was born by the sea and she grew up by the sea. And here she is now by the sea again, surrounded by water in all its forms. The chattering burns that tear their swift way down to the shore, and mark out the boundaries from field to field. The ‘broom’ or drizzly rain that lasts sometimes for days, that brings a misty softness to the land and blurs the transition from sea to sky. And above all, the sea loch that dominates the landscape, reinventing and transforming itself from season to season, from day to day, from morning to evening. Changing with the weather and the light. It has always seemed to Laura that shorelines are magical places: anything can happen here in this borderland between water and earth – this fluid border that shifts with the tides, in perpetual motion and flow.
The tangy salt smell of seaweed fills her nostrils; she takes a last deep breath of it and turns back to the rusty farm gate that leads to the field and beyond that to the house. Startled, she steps back. Meg stands quiet and still as an apparition among the trees at the edge of the shallow trickling burn; she is wreathed in shadows like the Washer at the Ford.
But it isn’t the ivory shroud of some soon-to-be-dead soul that Meg holds in her hand: it’s a crumpled white plastic carrier bag. ‘Tide’s still out,’ she says, ‘though it’s on the turn.’
Laura nods, smiling at her over-active imagination.
‘And plenty of seaweed left behind.’ Meg steps out of the shadows, shakes out the carrier bag with fingers that poke haphazardly out of woollen gloves frayed with wear. ‘Which is what I’m after. A wee bagful to set to soaking for a while. Makes a good feed for the indoor plants at this time of year. Sees them through the winter.’ The old gate creaks on salt-corroded hinges as she pushes it open and steps through. ‘Years ago we used to carry it up the fields in baskets on our backs, to fertilise the potato patch.’
‘Slippery work.’
‘Aye, it was that. Heavy work, too, when it was wet.’ She points to the shingle down below. ‘See how it forms a kind of a barrier there, stretched out along the beach? That place beyond the seaweed, down to the water there, we used to call it the “Black Shore”.’
‘There’s something special about it, then?’
‘Aye, right enough. It’s a place where you’re protected from evil spirits. See now, they can’t cross boundaries or thresholds. And the Black Shore is an in-between place. The threshold between water and land. So you’re safe.’
‘I like that idea.’ There are so few places in this world that are safe.
‘At places like this you can cross into the Otherworld – or Fairyland, as they call it in some of the stories. Watery places – seashores, rivers, lochs. All of them thresholds between one world and another. Places where all the old Celtic mysteries occur.’
Laura looks out at the glassy surface of the loch. Silence surrounds them, the breathless air pregnant with nightfall. ‘I could believe in any mystery on an evening like this.’
‘Aye.’ Abruptly and with surprising agility Meg begins to pick her way down the rock-strewn grassy bank to the shore. Shrugging, Laura follows. She has nothing better to do; she may as well stay and chat for a while. Taking care not to turn her ankle on the slick uneven pebbles, she follows Meg across the beach. The seaweed changes colour as they approach from undifferentiated darkness to rich brown and orange and all the shades in between. Multi-coloured slicks of water gleam on its surface like spilled oil.
Meg stands for a while, looking out across the loch to the hills beyond. ‘In the islands they say that the hills were made by giant women who fell asleep, and they slept for so long that they turned to stone.’ Laura follows her line of sight and just for a moment in the dim light of evening it seems that she can make out a craggy grey face in profile, the soft swell of a belly, a long stretch of undulating green thigh and the gentle bulge of a kneecap. Meg shakes her head and turns to Laura with a smile. ‘But enough of all that nonsense. How’s it going now, your writing?’
Laura blinks; Meg’s conversations never quite begin where you expect them to.
And what can she say? She’s not used to talking about these times in her life. She’s not even used to thinking about them. And she doesn’t know Meg that well – not really. Does she trust her? Has she ever really trusted other women? A vision of Aunt Lizzie at Meg’s age swims before her, mouth set thin and hard, eyes like small pieces of sea-coal in a face lined with discontent.
But Meg isn’t Aunt Lizzie. Meg is the furthest from Aunt Lizzie that it’s possible to be.
Laura takes a deep breath. Jump, she thinks. You always used to be so good at jumping. Wasn’t that what you always wanted Cat to do? Jump, Cat – for heaven’s sake, just get it over with and jump! Well, take a dose of your own medicine, and remember how to jump now. But make it a calculated leap into the unknown, for once. Something chosen. Not just something that you do to stop yourself thinking.
‘It’s not easy,’ she says, and watches as Meg bends down and swiftly, efficiently tears away a small piece of rusty red seaweed and thrusts it into her carrier bag. ‘They’re not good memories, most of them. And so much that I’d forgotten; so much that I haven’t thought about for years. Haven’t let myself think about.’
‘Aye, well now, looking back is always hard.’
‘You’re not kidding.’ She laughs, a little too loudly. Then remembers that she means to do this differently. Honestly. This time she means to feel it – to really feel it and to see for herself what that feels like. And it strikes her: how many times in her life can she say that she’s honestly let herself feel what was real in that moment? Dear God, how many times has she faked it, covered it up with false laughter or a witty retort? And Cat, seeing through it every time. You’re always such a hypocrite, Mother. Always putting on an act, always putting on a face. Can’t you just be real, for once? And pushing away the desire to scream back at her, But I don’t know how to be real. I don’t know what the real me is. Is there such a thing? Does anyone possess such a thing? Do you? Am I real, Cat? Am I? If I hold on to you, will you make me real?
