Adam's Peak (15 page)

“What could you possibly have been talking about?” she whispered.

Downstairs, her mother's heels tapped furiously across the kitchen floor.

I
sobel turned on her side and felt a fresh surge down below. She reached under the covers and adjusted the thick padding then curled her legs up, securing the hot water bottle against her stomach. She called it her
stomach
, though she knew that that particular organ wasn't to blame. Stomachs were bland, pink, docile creatures that went about their business unnoticed, provided one fed them properly. The real culprit, whose very name repelled her, she imagined as an angry, nettled mass of plummy red, writhing inside of her, tearing at her flesh. For a few weeks each month it would lie still, mustering its energy and its wrath like the God of the Old Testament. Then, sometimes early, sometimes late, never truant, it would spend itself in a four-day fury, and she would bleed a sea that crested vermilion with thick purple clots and receded a rusty brown. In moments of sublime pain, she often imagined excising the villain inside with her mother's carving knife—enduring a single apocalyptic ordeal in order to free herself from this cyclical torture. This time, however, she closed her eyes and
concentrated on retracting her entire being into a tiny space at the very top of her head. She imagined the conscious, insubstantial
essence
of herself peeling back from tissue and blood and bone and gathering in that minuscule space close to the surface, from which it could then escape her body altogether, until the perverse punishment had passed.

She took herself to New York. She'd never been there physically, but with intense concentration she managed to transport her conscious essence to the block of Fifth Avenue featured on her cousin Archie's latest postcard. And there, amid the noise and towering buildings, with Central Park just in sight, she detached herself from her pain. It was still there, of course, still horrible and vindictive, but it wasn't part of
her
. They were separate. She stood a while outside the elegant windows of Saks Fifth Avenue, admiring the handbags and hats, then took herself, place by place, to the sights featured on the rest of Archie's postcards: Greenwich Village, Times Square, the Metropolitan Opera House. Archie had immigrated to America, and the short, scribbled cards he occasionally sent to the McGuigan family evoked a world so exciting and so
new
that Isobel had taken to fantasizing about it even when she felt fine. Over the past several months, in fact, New York, though an ocean away, had begun to cast increasingly dark shadows over the narrow, familiar streets of her town. Even on cloudless spring Sundays, when the Stanwick churchyards and high street were at their peak of colour and cheer, she saw shadows and wondered how folk managed to live entire lives in such a place. Her quiet despair was something no one else understood, not even Margaret, her closest friend. Though she suspected Patrick would, if she tried to explain it to him.

The thought of Patrick Locke brought with it a violent cramp, and Isobel, wrenched from New York, wondered if she were being particularly punished for her recent encounters with her father's apprentice. Just a few days before, she and Patrick had gone to the pond with a bottle of whisky, and she'd allowed him to thrust his hand up her blouse and inside her brassiere. He'd gone at it from underneath, stretching the band uncomfortably. Worse, though, was his tongue—thick and hot and invasive—plundering her mouth. Confused, awkwardly aroused, annoyed by both responses, she'd pulled away, and
Patrick had laughed. He'd pointed out that she was eighteen years old and asked her if she'd been living in a convent, in reply to which Isobel lit a cigarette and informed him that she'd be nineteen in a month.

She rolled onto her back. The water bottle, now lukewarm inside its towel wrapping, pressed on her bladder, so she pushed it aside. The pain had spread itself thinner, around her lower back and down her thighs. There was a dreary predictability to these episodes: first the writhing beast, which no pills could tame, then the settling in and spreading out—calmer, but still crippling, as if the treacherous organ had grabbed hold of every muscle between her navel and her knees and was clenching as hard as it could. Eventually, paracetamol would relax the clenching enough that she could do other things. In another hour or so, she expected, she would hoist herself up, open the window above the bed, and have a cigarette. She'd wobble to the toilet to change her pad and brush her teeth. Then she would join her parents and Jean for tea. In the meantime, though, she would endure her punishment as she sometimes did when nothing else worked, by imagining she was giving birth—for the pain of that ordeal, Isobel was certain, could not be any worse.

HER MOTHER SERVED OX TONGUE FOR TEA
. Recalling again her rendezvous with Patrick Locke, Isobel poked feebly at her food.

“Are the pains still troubling you, pet?” her mother said.

“Mmm.”

“I hope you'll be all right for the ceilidh tomorrow. Alastair's mum says he's keen to meet you again.”

Jean giggled, and Isobel glared at her across the table. Sallow-faced, dull-witted, plain, her sister seemed a personification of everything Isobel despised about Stanwick. Alastair Fraser, the son of her mother's new friend from the Women's Guild, was another choice specimen. She'd met him during coffee hour after the Easter Sunday service. He wasn't a regular and he'd looked so awkward and out of place that Margaret's father, the minister at Stanwick Abbey, had asked Margaret and Isobel to go sit with him. But then
Margaret, who wasn't much good at small talk herself, had been called away, leaving Isobel alone with the fellow. He'd blushed furiously, even on his scalp where his blond hair was already thinning, and the only subject he'd seemed comfortable discussing was the knitwear factory where he'd been a foreman since 1960. He was very polite, though, which was something.

Isobel dug a pit in her mashed potatoes and filled it with peas. “He's too old, Mum.”

“Oh, aye, there's no getting away from that,” her mother said. “He's a grown man. But nobody's asking you to marry him.”

Again Jean giggled; Isobel sawed her meat.

Musingly, their mother continued. “Aye, these are modern times. You girls are young, and
I
believe you should get to know as many lads as you can before you settle down with one.” She glanced at her husband chewing silently across the table then turned to Isobel. “You might even decide to do higher studies, pet. Think of all the folk you'd meet there! Anyway, there
is
one nuisance with this Alastair, even if you
were
to fancy him.”

“What?” Isobel said.

“Well ...” Her mother paused, dabbing at her cardigan with her serviette. “Mrs. Fraser tells me he's very likely away to America. Perhaps quite soon.”

“Ooh, you should marry him, Izzy!” Jean squealed. “You could go to America, just like Archie! And I could visit you!”

“Don't be stupid,” Isobel said.

“Enough o' that,” her father muttered.

She gave up on her food and reached for the teapot, noticing for the first time the appalling dinginess of the crocheted brown cap it was bundled in. As she poured, she pictured Alastair Fraser walking down Fifth Avenue in his ill-fitting tweed jacket, and the image, though laughable, pricked her with envy.

“I don't even ken the man,” she said, her voice even. “And how does his mother know he wants to meet me again?”

“Oh, we were just blethering about this and that at the Guild meeting,” her mother said. “She's a
very
interesting woman, Mrs. Fraser. Apparently she used to be a Catholic. But she converted when she was
your age, Isobel. Just because she fancied the idea.” She paused again, waving a forkful of mashed potato lazily back and forth. “Imagine that—being one thing for all those years then just deciding one day you're going to be something else. I don't think I could—”

“But what about
Alastair
?” Jean interrupted, and for once Isobel was grateful for her sister's impertinence. “How does his mother know he fancies Isobel?”

“Aye, well,” Mrs. McGuigan continued, “she happened to mention that Alastair was thinking of going to the ceilidh and that he wanted to know if Isobel would be there. She said it took the poor lad all evening to get his question out,
and
that he'd never have troubled himself if he wasn't smitten.” She smiled teasingly, then ingested her hovering mashed potato and signalled Jean to sit up straight.

Isobel rested her teacup on her still-aching belly and pondered her mother's remarks. The idea of meeting as many men as she could, of sorting through roomfuls of them and enduring their groping hands and tongues in search of one who would satisfy her, was oppressive. Moreover, the task seemed impossible. A person such as Alastair Fraser could not possibly make her happy; she understood that clearly. But could
anyone
, she wondered. Did anyone have the power to make her one thing or another? She thought admiringly of Alastair's mother—deciding one day to become a Protestant, shaking off everything she'd been brought up with. She gulped her tea. It was bitterly strong, but it came from Darjeeling, somewhere on the other side of the earth. Repeating the magical-sounding name to herself, Isobel glanced at the cluttered sideboard, where her cousin's latest postcard had been deposited, and imagined herself boarding an ocean liner from a crowded, noisy port ... watching the trodden grey landscape of her homeland disappear over the horizon.

“W
e use only the tenderest of these leaves,” said Alec's father, the Tea Maker, employing expert fingers to pluck two pale green leaves and a bud from the waist-high tea bush. “Can you see the difference between the mature leaves and the tender ones, Alec?”

Alec nodded and dragged the back of his hand across his forehead, setting off streams of sweat. The difference between the leaves was obvious and, to him, uninteresting. He was bored. He'd been desperate for Easter holidays to begin, but now, tedious as school was, he imagined being back there, where at least there were boys his age and cricket matches. Powerless to change anything, he blew his hair from his eyes and watched the tea pluckers, bobbing like mermaids in their sea of green. They moved along the rows of bushes, deep baskets harnessed to their backs, each woman carrying a long rod, which marked the lower extremity of the tender leaves by resting atop the sturdier mature ones.

The pluckers' husbands and brothers were labourers in the tea factory, a two-storey light green building that overlooked the hills.
During the cold August holidays, when banks of cloud swallowed the hill country, Alec would have his tea lessons in the shelter of the factory. He would follow his father up the metal stairs to the top floor, where the labourers emptied bags of leaves into the withering troughs, spreading them out with their lean, muscular arms.