When They Lay Bare Read online

  So her mother and sister …?

  Uh-huh.

  How could her mother do that?

  Again that low skidding laugh.

  I suppose she wasn’t in her right mind. Marnie shrugged. Not her fault.

  Not her fault?

  Oh no. At the edge of his vision he saw her head turn his way. Her father was the one to blame, she muttered. He’s the one who left them. He’s the real murderer.

  David felt a dark stone fall. It fell till it settled somewhere deep, sending up clouds of mud and his vision dimmed. He turned his eyes away from the red-lit knowe and for a moment saw a pool of black water surround them, peaceful and still. Slowly it faded back into heather as his vision adjusted.

  Still, Marnie said and stretched, I’d say Carol’s quite well, considering. Though she never really got over losing her sister.

  Maybe that’s why … you two were so close. In a way you were her sister.

  Yes. She sounded as if this had never occurred to her before. I suppose I was, among other things.

  They stood up at the same time and faced downhill for home.

  I don’t know what you’ve heard about Dad and Jinny, he said. But best not jump to any conclusions.

  You weren’t there.

  Nor were you.

  Neither of them looked at the other. She was pale and motionless, just the breeze lifting hair from her forehead. His head was bowed and his heart going much too fast.

  He’s guilty, David said. Of plenty. But I cannot think he killed Jinny.

  Most folk round here do.

  Since when did you set store by what most folk believe? She shrugged, but looked away, point taken. If you want to know more – I suppose that’s what you’re here for – you should talk to Tat.

  Tat?

  She sounded genuinely surprised.

  He was living here then, must have been in his teens. He’s a distant relation and my dad kind of took him in.

  Interesting. Maybe I will.

  And she set off down. He caught up, opened his mouth to say more but she shook her head. So he walked home beside her, still wondering.

  So, ah, you and Carol?

  She was ahead of him, he heard her voice in jerks.

  We lost each other … years. Often … men. She managed to find me, and then …

  He stumbled over the ground till he was at her shoulder.

  And then?

  Her head went down and he wished with all his heart he hadn’t asked.

  And then she left.

  Where is she now?

  Carol? On the dark side of the moon. Marnie stopped dead, swung her arms out wide. On the other side of the world!

  Then she ran, and what came back to him sounded like laughter.

  *

  You tell him you once lived in a cave for three months, a cave above a raised beach looking out to a rocky coastline and two barren islands like battleships anchored on the horizon. The nearest neighbour was ten miles away. It had suited you well, for solitude feeds your spirit.

  So why did you leave? he asks.

  I could have been going mad and not known, you say. That’s what scared me away. (You were crouched over a clear clear rock pool, watching the life down there, and then nothing was out there, the contents of your mind and the pool were the same, and you sat back with sea anenomes waving in your eyes, and wondered for how long you’d been addressing snatches of your skull to the air. And you couldn’t know, not without someone to correct you. You picked up the biggest boulder you could lift and dropped it into the pool and left that cursed perfect place.)

  What you want and what’s good for you aren’t always the same, you say, and see his hazed eyes come clear and sharp, and then he nods, and then he blushes, and then he looks away.

  There’s no more talk about his father, nor Jinny, nor Patrick. Neither of you is ready yet. But louping down the last of the moor towards the drove road you’re both laughing and bumping into each other easy as if family or old friends, though you’re not, though in ways you are. And for that time you’re happy, all present and correct, almost like a real person.

  *

  She came out of the tiny bathroom towelling her hair as he moved around the kitchen, never too far from the door. She’d changed into a man’s red shirt that hung loose but forced him to see she was not a man.

  You said you’ve some proofs to show me.

  And so I do. I do.

  She stretched up, slowly and deliberately and almost insultingly, to hang the towel over the pulley. He moved back slightly as though the kitchen was already too small.

  Don’t worry, she said. I’ll not eat you.

  She stooped into the press cupboard and turned.

  These were Jinny’s picture plates, she said, and put them carefully on the table. You’ll have heard about them?

  He shook his head, leaning over them with his eyes jumping from panel to panel.

  They meant plenty to Tat – and to your father, I bet.

  And now they’ve come down to you.

  Yes, she said. Down to me.

  These must be Border Ballad plates, he said. I’ve heard of them but never seen a set, not even in a museum. Amazing …

  His fingers drifted lightly as though he could brush the scenes into life, then he glanced up at her.

  It’s The Twa Corbies, right? Only longer and more complicated.

  I think it’s the original source material, probably in a real incident. Perhaps between the Lauders and the Elliots – at least, that’s what I was always told.

  He nodded again. Figures, he said. They were aye at each other. These lovers … This looks like someone … This waterfall’s almost like … He shook his head then looked up at her again, his pupils big and blue irises flecked and radiant. Marnie, these are magic.

  She shrugged. I thought you weren’t interested in the past.

  But these are recent too. I mean …

  He tailed off, looked round the kitchen as if seeing it for the first time.

  My dad was here with Jinny. He must have seen these. Must have touched them. They must have … Here …

  She swiftly lifted the plates and put them on the shelf.

  There’s something else, she said to distract him. He shouldn’t look in the plates too long. He might riddle them out. He shook himself, something between a shiver and a dog throwing off water.

  Show me.

  She held out her hand. He hesitated then took it. She led him into the bedroom as that morning’s plate had foretold.

  *

  He looked round the bare room, curious and uneasy. Double mattress on the floor by the window, a few books, a backpack. Flowers and a lamp on the sill. His father and Jinny, in this room, on a bed like this?

  She nudged him. Here’s my other proof, she said and handed it to him.

  He gripped the silver frame and stared at the photo. The woman in the garden laughing to camera as she moved from light into shade. Long ringleted hair, feet bare, fringed hippie skirt and black crocheted cardigan buttoned across her small chest. A wee boy with a sword, and behind him the toddler pushing herself upright. The photographer’s shadow in the foreground was long and black. Right enough, in his memory the day was very bright.

  He looked at her. This is Jinny?

  Yes, she said, very quietly. That was her.

  I mind that plastic sword. The feel of its handle … There was a seam on it that rubbed my fingers. And that’s you?

  In a right bad temper, by the look of it.

  Who took it?

  She looked straight back at him.

  The invisible man.

  His hand shook slightly. They were standing very close beside the mattress. He felt the heat come off her, the scent of lavender and long gone summer.

  So they were here, he said quietly. My dad and your mother.

  They are here.

  Her words stirred dust in the corner. Her hand came up to touch his cheek, she turned his head towards her and he
didn’t resist as her dark eyes came closer. His mouth parted. This time they wouldn’t break away till it was done.

  She put her fingers to his lips. She bowed her head.

  You’re not the bad man, she murmured. Then she looked up. And if your heart was your own, perhaps I’d steal it.

  She took the photo from his hand, knelt to place it carefully beside the pillow.

  Time to go home, Davy. She looked back over her shoulder. Now. Please.

  *

  The book is heavy in my hand tonight.

  How solid everything has become – the sink weighs tons, the tea-pot flatly gleams like lead, the trees above the gorge are weighted down by moonlight. Real and solid too is the young yellow-haired man kissed out of mischief. Tonight he is surely in bed thinking of his true chaste love, due in a couple of days he said and seemed full of joy.

  Close the book, stack up the plates, put away my notes. Time surely for bed. I’ve been spending too much time on other people’s lives, real and imagined. Tonight I can lie and tell true stories of my lover, to mother myself to sleep.

  *

  A long time ago but still ever-present there were two girls, near-children really, who placed themselves in each other’s care. In the desolation of the children’s home, the one with green paint everywhere except the shower-torture room, they were each other’s only family. They told each other the very small everything of their lives so far. Especially they told each other all the cruelties and betrayals, and made solemn, fervent compacts for revenge, sealed in thumb’s blood.

  By day they stood back to back, the tall strong one and the light quick one, and fought off all comers. At night after punishment they clung together, and if there were tears they came then, smothered into the other’s shoulder. (Her little ribs melting into mine, I felt her going in, rib of my rib.)

  They became interchangeable in their hearts. Marnie-and-Carol, Carol-and-Marnie. Sometimes waking in each other’s beds with no memory of how they got there. Or creeping barefoot across cold linoleum, the hand outstretched, then chill feet on warm shin. (Learning to wake and creep back to separate beds before first light has left me this poor sleeper.)

  After Veronica lost her eye, it was very bad though nothing was proved because they were each other’s alibi. (She clung to me all night long, her head in under my chin. We swore to each other for ever, the kind of promises that can wear thin but remain, however faint. As though the soul was a sheet washed over and over then held to the light.)

  They were moved to the place for very bad girls, many of them older, and then it was a matter of survival and time was very short. But in those last months, between the beatings and the torments, they found the source of pleasures inside their skinny bodies. They were too close to need kissing, but the pleasure they learned to uncork and open like phials of streaming light, and with their fingers split the spectrum over the skin.

  They were caught one grey afternoon when they’d sneaked back to the dorm to make the sun rise yet again. (Believe me, there is no place for love in places like that.) The sheets were pulled back, they burrowed into each other and hid their faces till the Director and the Matron came to prise them apart. They were split up, sent hastily out to families with no forwarding address allowed. For good measure they were sent to different sides of the Border.

  But they took their revenge. The clever one worked out how before they parted, and they wrote the letters and spread the stories, and at the enquiry spoke so quietly and broken, and their evidence was so convincing along with the medical inspection which suggested repeated penetration (the sad experts of the body cannot distinguish pain from love and pleasure) that the Director and the Matron never worked in homes again. He may have gone to prison, I can’t remember. Useful to learn early the power of the powerless, and just how much can be done with sex and accusation. There was the loutish son in one foster home, the pinching bullying daughter in another – both snared, netted, dragged down from their high place.

  But after the first love there is no other. Not for some, in any case. Not for me.

  *

  The moon is heavy and pins me to the bed where I lie slowly wriggling. Love is not in question when sleep is not the answer.

  *

  She woke at first light feeling not quite right, a slight pain nagging behind her eyes, and a dull ache in the lower back, the kind of symptoms one might get from sleeping badly after wrestling with something bigger.

  Yellow hair, golden hair – she thinks how often those motifs recur. She pulls out a book from the loose pile by the bed and flicks through it crooning With ain lock of his gowden hair / We’ll theek oor nest when it grows bare till she finds what she’s looking for: The Lament of the Border Widow.

  But think na ye my heart was sair

  When I laid the mould on his yellow hair?

  Maybe the yellow hair, the golden hair, isn’t a simple detail about colour. It could indicate gold, preciousness, dearness to the beholder. In the way that black meal, the black rent of the reivers, is black in nothing but heart.

  No living man I’ll love again

  Since that my lovely knight is slain.

  With ae lock of his yellow hair

  I’ll chain my heart for evermair.

  The finality of it makes her gorge rise. She wonders if the pun on ‘lock’ is intended. In one ballad a woman kills her man with yellow hair, in another she mourns him for ever.

  Perhaps it is possible to do both.

  The thought drifts round the chill room for a while like stoor raised by a passing broom, then settles into silent corners. She bends over the plate, thinking about meetings and yellow hair and love and murder. As love it might have been. As murder it might be.

  There must be some movement today, some certainty. Time to go to the town and do some research.

  *

  Close my eyes and the blow in the top nest of the birches is the sea breaking below a sunny headland I’ll never revisit. The sound of my own heart as I pick up a stoat’s skull and hold it to the ear.

  In lower Crawhill Woods the ravine broadens and the burn shallows into flat pools (linns, I think). A few shrunk crinkled leaves lie still on the surface. Only at the far end do the leaves and twigs begin to spin and look as though they’re going somewhere.

  Tall pale smooth shining beech trees by the linns of the Liddie, how may I ever forget them? The grass soft around, strewn with shells of nuts like rough brown empty chalices. This is where lovers come, hasty and silent in the shade on hot afternoons, or wrapped in a travelling blanket on a hard freezing night. Jinny Lauder and Sim Elliot lay here as many before them.

  Soft tearing hiss of wind through hawthorn, knotted and scraggy. Wizened haw berries like very old blood, exactly that shade.

  *

  Down by the road as she turns to follow it to the village, the river after rain is brown and swollen, lipping over the banks, white froth and yellow scum along the margins. Across the road, fields widen and shine. It is hard for her not to remember times when banks gave the river direction, times when her life was shaped by a lover’s walk. Times before her earliest friend and lover walked onto a plane and left her carrying the past and a chestful of water which she must find some way to shed.

  Her oldest friend, the only one to whom she’d ever entrusted herself and curled around in the dark so often like a blind, white root, had hugged her again, told her to bury the past, kissed her for the last time before Departures. I don’t want these things any more, she’d said. I’ll send you a card.

  Her earliest friend waited for her to say something but there was no breath left to speak with. Have a life, lover, her only love said. A swift Judas kiss on unresponsive lips. Goodbye now. Then lover walked through the squealing arch of the metal-detectors, one backward wave and was gone. Leaving her standing with nowhere to go but here.

  In the fields across the road, the floodwater is retreating. She squelches through loops of baler twine, scum, a fertiliser bag blown in
from somewhere trying to raise itself and falling back again, twitching in the breeze.

  A drowned skinny cat. White teeth, little grey twisted tongue. The hoodie crows stand on fence-posts, staring below their grey judges’ caps. She briefly wishes for a shotgun, or that she was a dead-eye with a catapult.

  She heads towards the village, walking parallel with the road but some way off it. She sclims a dyke – and where did that word come from, so antique and so right? – jumps down and almost falls on a sheep lying on its back. It must have been there for days, unable get up. A pool of sheep-shit round its rear, some bloody. She tries to wrestle it upright but her back hurts and the sheep is wet and heavy and unable to help itself. Then she sees it has no eyes. The crows have been at it already.

  She stands over it, sick at heart. The legs wave slowly, the head turns blindly, uncertain if she’s foe or friend. She looks away down the empty road. Where is Tat when he could be useful? Where is David when she needs him?

  Leave it, she thinks. Walk away. It’s all cruel and hopeless. The best we can do is put each other out of our misery. Even murder’s almost an act of love.

  The hoodie crows stand their ground, the rain does not relent and the wind is beyond indifference. It’s just wind. Stone is just stone. The dead are just dead and will remain so. There is no Spook, nothing means anything.

  She looks down at the black head turning, the worn green-stained teeth, blackened tongue. Something hesitates in her. Her chest is waterlogged but she cannot weep. She has not wept since the airport, and that just a small angry dampness stinging her eyes as she’d stumbled into the concourse book-shop with no idea where to go next.

  She is so angry at the sheep. Why doesn’t it die and be done with it? Kill it, then. How do you kill a sheep? With a big stone? Strangle it with baler twine? She should carry David’s knife at all times. Again she wonders how a woman is supposed to kill a full-grown man behind a dyke when she can’t even work out how to kill a blind dying ewe.