When They Lay Bare Read online

  But when you pulled his head to yours and kissed him, you were on the wrong side of the border and what comes of it will be hard to tell.

  When the rattle and girn of his Land-Rover and the yowling of his damn hound faded in the wind and the road was empty again, she dropped her hand and stood vacantly on the briggiestane. She had meant to think doorstep or maybe threshold. Briggiestane – where has that word surfaced from?

  She looked over to the woods shrouding the gorge where a boy was terrified and Lauder fell or was pushed. And over to the west, in the next dale, was another fall, closer in time, closer to home … She felt again that metallic shiver forking down the back of her legs, the same as when she’d first looked on young David Elliot, when she first saw his ring and the gleam of the gutting knife at his belt.

  She stands on the doorstep, half in and half out of the cottage, and feels herself stepping in and out of two worlds. Back and forward, past and present, real and pretend. She could rock like this for hours as a child, especially when she moved to new parents.

  This place is ravelling and unravelling her. She knew it the first evening coming up from the river in the half-light, carrying the plates in the leather satchel because she didn’t trust the man from the village who’d dropped off her gear not to break them. Maybe it was the half-light that had her moving between two worlds.

  But she has always been that way. She has woken with a man’s skin as her own and smiled with pleasure and recognition even as it peeled away. There have always been day-dreams from which she would return with the taste of someone else’s mouth in her mouth. Sometimes whole sentences heard in her head that she didn’t know whose thoughts they were. And since her first lover moved in her, she has never been certain what is truly hers. She lacks boundaries. Perhaps that is why she is so often solitary.

  Standing on the briggiestane, she opens her eyes and for a moment can remember nothing. She feels herself radiant and calm, as though she has been born anew. Scraps of a possible past spin away, none of them very convincing.

  She steadies herself on the door frame, feels the wind stroke her face and her breath caress the inside of her nose. She is alive now, whoever she is or was. That’s all that’s certain. It’s such a relief to come back to this, unchallengeable and full of secrets as the bare ridges that ride against the grey-blue lift on the other side of the Border.

  A dreamer, Rita and Jim called her. Our little dreamer. They said it kindly. They were, they are, kind people. And when they found her standing at the bottom of the garden saying her name over until it emptied of all meaning and became a sound empty and forlorn as the wind and she was disappeared, when they brought her back to herself she saw the glance that flickered between them. Her last parents, the best of a long, bewildered line. The rest just called her liar.

  She shrugs. Sometimes her thoughts amuse, but now she’s hungry. She goes inside and gets busy, boiling another kettle and washing the cups and plates in the big sink. She switches on the radio to hear some friendly voices. As she leans to adjust the volume she says a name and it goes out on wave-lengths Marconi never dreamed of.

  Plate 2

  Like a set of divining cards, laid out where you might read what has happened, is happening, will happen to you, these plates are in several senses a service. As you wait for the kettle to boil, lay them out round the table as though for guests who have not yet appeared.

  Take this second plate. At a glance it has outlines and scenes you recognise from the first one – yellow hair, shaven-headed man, mystery woman, the waterfall, cloak and coin and shining blade – in different combinations. But also some new places and characters. Good, you like some novelty to draw you on.

  Take your tea and the plate to bed and let the day begin again. You like to think of yourself as an active agent, but you could be only a resonator, and your soul but a wind-chime hung in another’s draughty hall.

  A new day seeps through a curtainless window on a rising tide of light and smoothes away tracks on the sand. Dreams of fights and lovers, the usual. She opens her eyes, rolls her head and checks the little framed photo on the floor beside the mattress. She picks it up, the silver frame cool and smooth-greasy between her fingers, inspects it at arm’s length like the passport it is, then drops it on the duvet and rolls up and out.

  Today is colder. The stone floor makes her shins ache, her numb fingers chap off the stove, and she needs to slow down as she hacks kindling with the gutting knife he left behind.

  She sucks sluggish salty blood from her knuckles and recognises she’s furious with someone. That really was very unwise.

  Or maybe not. She stands in the kitchen with the knife in one hand and her shins turning blue, run through by a notion sprung fully armed from the shadowy woods.

  But she wants to get back to the plates, to lose and find herself there. So many ghostly selves, like so many voices slipping from one into another on the radio’s spinning dial. She’s not unusual, she believes, she just notices it more. As the kettle boils she lays the plates out on the table, selects number 2 and decides to take it back to bed while waiting for the stove to make a difference.

  The bedroom is cold but the duvet is warm. She lies on her back, tea at her side and the second plate held against her chest. Closing her eyes she focuses on the wind – fainter today – and the scuttering of mice playing football in the ceiling. Then outside the window a whistling bird – blackie by the sound – starts to scream. A hiss and a little thump and the screaming stops.

  Her heart is punted like a rugby ball up in her chest. Really, she doesn’t need reminding this is a murderous place. It is also home, for however long. As she lies with the plate resting face down on her chest like a book, the whole valley and dale is stirring about its business. It isn’t too hard to hear voices in the wind behind the song of birds as they proclaim the necessity of mating and territory.

  *

  I spent the morn round the village speiring after our new arrival. It’s a wee place and she wasn’t someone your eyes would slide by, not dressed like yon and with such proud gait. Some said she’d come off the bus, others that she’d jumped down from a truck, others that she’d stepped head high from a great black car.

  But when I speired more closely, the truth was none had actually seen her arrive. One minute she wasn’t there, the next she was walking into the hardware shop with a leather satchel and pack over her shoulder, and spending money in her hand. She might as well have stepped from the stoor that blows over the fields for all the name and history she had. Even our courteous and inquisitive bobby MacIver had got nothing from her, she just near-smiled and let our best gossip’s questions bounce off her and gone on asking for what she wanted.

  She’d bought or borrowed double mattress, bedding, gas-stove, kitchen gear. Coal. Enough food for a week, they said in the store. Then she sat on the high stool at the bar with a pint, friendly enough yet no one dared tell her whose seat that was. And when Neb Nixon came in he glared at her but she looked right back till that crabbit loun took his drink and sat himself by the window, muttering into his fist.

  Byordinar, was the verdict, not a common sort – and having set eyes on her I would agree. At the bar she heard some of the local clash about old and young Elliot, for there is still plenty of that talk in the village. Then she rounded up her buys and engaged Nattie Kinloch to take the gear to Crawhill Cottage. She named it, everyone agreed on that, and that vexed me more than I let on. She was no ordinary squatter. And Nat was sore taken aback, for all folks knew no one had bided there since Patrick and the wee girl had left after Sim Elliot’s trial was done.

  Crawhill Cottage, she’d insisted. You’ll find the door open. And Nattie took it Elliot must have changed his mind at last. You’ll be a relative? he speired as he loaded up his van. The lass nodded and shook her head both and repeated The door’s open. I’ll be up later. Lock up after you. And because I was away in the town and no one spoke to Elliot anyhow, he took the money and did as he w
as tellt.

  It was plain to see I kent nothing about her, and they teased me sore I had lost my grip on the old man. I drove away from the village vexed and bothered. Most likely I should have overridden young Davy the day afore and sent her on her way, for I was sure he lied when he’d said she had permission. But I didn’t want to cross him and I didn’t know my ground. So I went home and spoke with Annie and she didn’t like it either, though her reasons were different. Annie sees far, and she had it in her head this was about the estate. And me, I see wide and don’t like what I see at the edge of my vision.

  So I drove Annie to the big house for her work, went through the passageway but the door into the tower was bolted behind. I banged on it a while, though I doubted Elliot wouldn’t hear up in his bedroom. So I left word I had to speak with him soonest, and went back home again to sit up here at the work-bench with my rack of knives and rasps and diddlers.

  I pick up my latest half-carved hobgoblin – an ill-natured wee creetur – and turn him over and over in my hand, looking for the best way to set him free.

  *

  The kettle judders on the stove. The wind keens in the frame of the window that looks down to the Border from this place you have come to be alone in, and sometimes you hear in it her voice close as your own …

  You turn the radio down, then off. You sit on the wobbly chair with the plate in your hands and listen to the wind till you begin to drift and go behind it, as you learned to in earliest years.

  Behind the wind there are stories without end. The Border wars, raids, skirmishes. Family feuds, rapes and burnings, chains of betrayal and enduring loyalties. Cattle-thieving and summary justice. And revenge of course, hot trod or cold trod.

  Anyway she always wanted to be Mary. It’s a fine plain name.

  It’s good to be busy, to build up heat in the old stove and with full attention slice up the neeps, potatoes, onions. Add the stock then loads of pepper. Mushroom ketchup. Good to lean over the rising steam as the day creaks forward like a slow cart.

  She could say to herself this place is doing her head in, and perhaps that’s what she’s come here for. To be done in. To be resolved. She stands with David Elliot’s knife poised. To make a just end, she hears the voice murmur. Shut up below, she whispers. Be quiet.

  She turns on the radio and carries on chopping. Soon it will be time to do some research. She could go to the town, where the newspaper office would be a good place to find more detail on Jinny’s death. And the County Court should have transcriptions of the Elliot trial. Keep busy, stay solitary. Hear the voices but stay on the right side of the border.

  She brushes the back of her knife hand across her lips. They can’t be swollen from one kiss. Her knuckle slips under her top lip, she begins to rub against her gum. He didn’t back off, not at first. Davit Elliot liked it, he wanted it till he remembered who he means to be: a good man, an honest man faithful to the lady fair, anyone but his father.

  That first evening she’d yomped uphill at a lick, even with the load over her shoulder, up through the twilight towards the darkness of the trees around the gorge, towards the cottage she knew was there. Then she heard that long pirl-pirling cry. A shadow tilted in the dusk then disappeared like a thought had and lost. But she’d glimpsed the long curved beak and a word tilted from the back of her mind to the front: whaup. Curlew. How differently they taste in her mouth though they refer to the same. How different a father and son can be, and yet be the same in the end.

  She’d felt like an arrow homing in. Her laughter sent a clutch of rabbits scuttering through the lea. The words were coming back and they fitted the place and the place fitted her as a sheath fits the knife it was made for. The deep-cut ravine – heuch – and trees up on the right, the cottage on the skyline, the long ridges sailing down so bare and sleekit, they were all present and correct.

  And as she got nearer and put her foot to the crumbling dyke – again the word’s jumped out of somewhere and she giggles, light-headed, reminding herself that’s a wall not a common sexual orientation – the rooks clattered from the shaw of trees and the word came to her, corbies, and then the threads of this dreaming pulled tight around everything she carried on her back.

  She thinks a counsellor once told her she had a weak sense of reality, but that’s so wrong. She has too strong a sense of too many realities. Like her radio late at night, she receives too much.

  By the time she’d arrived at the cottage in the gathering dark, diddled the lock again and stepped across the briggiestane with a sense of returning, the stories had already begun. About a woman walking out of the river valley mist. About a factor who watches and hides. About the only son and heir with his hound, his ring, and a polished stone disc whose value he knows not. Who comes calling though he is actually being called. And his father skulking in the tower of the big house with whatever it is that connects him to the payments that have sporadically appeared in a trust account over the years and now stopped. Soon it will be time to get closer to him. Go canny. All will be well, you’ll see.

  She shakes her head, stands at the side window looking down the drove road. It’s empty, of course it is. Just a pair of corbies that bounce and strut along the dyke, their beaks grey and cold as chisels. He will not come today, she has frightened him away. Just as well, she has not come here for that.

  *

  Up there among the hillocks and sudden mounds, the rickles of stones and unexplained dark outlines, root around and you may stumble yet on a corroded haft of a Pictish dagger, or pick up a worked stone from the time before metal, or clean the dirt off a Roman coin. Set among the stones at the base of the dyke is a carved altar to the god with the hammer in his hand, and his ravens at his ear. They are Rumour and Memory, and between them they tell him everything he needs to know.

  Pick up the plate again. Turn your eyes away from the high painted bluff with the two tiny figures clinging to each other at the brink, for you aren’t ready. But a thin gold line runs direct from it to a room with casement windows. A bearded man with long dark hair pulled back sits staring out, his eyes like black arrows, his cheekbones taut as drawn bows.

  Sim Elliot sat knees up in the window seat on the back stair between his study and his bedroom. His territory in the big house had shrunk to this by degrees insensible as the beginnings of arthritis in his knuckles. He felt safest here in the old peel tower, but the news Annie had given him an hour back had penetrated even its walls. A young woman had moved into Crawhill.

  The pain started at the hinge of his jaw then jumped to his chest and zig-zagged through it like lightning seeking earth. He gasped and slumped back against the wall, willed himself to relax, breathe deep while his fingers strayed down the side of the seat and lifted the little panel. He drew out a short fat joint, slightly bell-mouthed like a miniature blunderbuss. He put the match to the touchpaper and lit up. Jinny had taught him to roll, among so many other things.

  Draw deep, Sim. Relax. Be cool, love. Live in the moment. They said things like that back then, when the moment was all they had. Now the present is where he lives least.

  He exhaled, felt his head expand then steady. The window was a bit open and he heard David’s voice drifting up from below. He must go down and talk to him, find out about the woman. Probably it was nothing. He inhaled again.

  He could and sometimes did go into the kitchen to pass some time slicing vegetables with Annie, or sit cross-legged on the draining board in the yellow scullery watching her pluck pheasants, the small reddish clouds of feathers tumbling to the floor and drifting around her blue tennis shoes in the draught under the back door. He found it soothing like a memory of childhood, his mother perhaps not pictured but felt as a presence, young before death had kept her always young, a humming and a calm busyness, a glimpse of yellow hair and piano keys tickling in the corner of his mind. And at such times, with the rain tick-tacking on the little panes as Annie’s hands dived in and out of the birds, he felt nearly at peace and a child again – t
he child who doesn’t yet know what it has been born into, or how many people have yet to die before he too can cease. Then soon enough everyone who has known him will be dead too, and all personal memory of him will be gone from the planet like last summer’s leaves. Sweet relief.

  He exhaled that musty earth smoke over the window pane, stubbed out the joint and stashed the remains in its niche. Then he took a deep breath and went down to talk to the laddie.

  *

  The plate blurs. Perhaps you’ll strain your eyes like this, or your mind. Blink, and see the kitchen is full of steam and the condensation drips on the cold china. Push the soup pot to the edge of the stove, wipe the plate with your sleeve and look again. (For the hammer god, all events are simultaneous. Flames jump from flint arrows to bronze axe to steel lance.) The dark man and the yellow-haired youth are face to face.

  David stood munching toast at the dining-room window thinking sometimes weather is more than weather. Today everything is suspended and waiting. Cold too, the hoar frost steaming off the pear tree branches in the lemony sun. It must be freezing in Crawhill. He wondered what the woman was up to this morning. Maybe she’d cleared her few things and left. That would be smart.

  He sucked his bottom lip, feeling her bite yet.

  So who is she, laddie?

  Elliot stood in the door, head lowered under the lintel. However wasted, he was still a big man with a power about him. Or maybe that’s how a father will always look to his son. David took his time.

  Who?

  You ken fine – the lassie in Crawhill.

  He glanced at his father then away. It was hard not to take pleasure at the anxiety in the old boy’s voice.