Authors: Karen Campbell
‘Mm. I probably am.’ Michael nods. He shuffles out, kettle forgotten.
Later, in her basement room, after Ross is fed and bathed and bedded, Justine opens her wardrobe. Carefully, she lays her jumpers back on the shelf, shakes out her two cardigans and a single T-shirt dress, puts them on their hangers. The base, the bulk of her bag is carpeted with fifty-pound notes. What the fuck is she going to do with all this money? Tomorrow is too big a deal to think about right now. One hour at a time, one chunk of a day; if she slices it up in sections then she won’t be overwhelmed. Feed her body, unknot her mind.
Forty quid should do it. Enough to get a glow on. No danger of her slipping up or saying the wrong thing: she is an expert at holding her drink. She drinks the way animals sleep: one eye always open. Jesus, Johnny? That awful, snotty kid she scared the shit out of. She doesny want him anywhere near Ross. But she can’t stop thinking about him. Who picks wee Johnny up from school? Who tucks him in at night? Probably can’t sleep at all, because of the nightmares she’s given him. Man, she panicked. Is an idiot.
For one clean week in Kilmacarra, Justine has tried to live like she is nice, but the self-loathing is shoving up, filling her with cement. You’ll do anything to survive. You will cheat, lie, trample small children. You like to think you’re good, but humanity, in her experience, is pretty base. A man asked her once what she thought the definition of ‘good’ was. She couldny answer at the time (her mouth was full), but she’s thought about it a lot. She thinks it’s to behave like someone is filming you, when you know you’re on your own.
Oh man. Justine needs cauterising alcohol, and a nice long chat. If that freckly farmer-guy’s around.
Charlie Boy checks his watch. It’s a fuck-off Rolex, a real one, none of your green-wrist crap. He minds the cunt he took it off. Took his wedding ring and all. One nice slice and a permanent reminder.
Ho! Cunt!
You may live up in the Mearns in a big white house with four cars in the sweeping drive. You may wear cashmere coats and run a
legitimate
business which has paid for your weans’ private schooling and your new wife and her new tits. You may have mere cash-flow problems that you think a slap on the back and a twenty-year-old malt can fix. Do not mess with Charlie Boy.
Six thirty. One more visit to make and then it’s phone time. The grip on his ribcage returns, that moment when the thump-thump press becomes the thump-thump migraine and the tears start rising with the futility of the repetition. Only he canny stop.
Canny stop calling Justine’s phone. He knows how her mind works – well, no bastard knows how her mind works, but, aye. She’s done daft things before, got a wee bit spirit up and kidded on she’d balls on her. Then she’d crap herself. Coorie in all soft and greeting till he was fucking liquid with the power. And he never hurted her that much. He was good to her. Fucking good. He
liked
that she stood up to him. Aye. To a point, until it’s just pure cheek and far too close and then . . . Aye. Fuck. You have to take control, man. Have to fucking
show
them. So they know. And he knows her, the insides of her, the soft black bits that smell of blood. He knows she’ll be thinking he’s got an army out, scouring the countryside for her, pulling in every favour from every cunt who’s ever owed him anything. But how can he? He canny humiliate himself with this loss bleeding out his pores. Folk smell that on him, and he’s dead. So he rations the phone calls to once a day. Seven o’clock. Phone time.
He takes a wee dauner through Kelvingrove Park, Askit straining to burst at the ducklings, with the rim of algae round the edges of the pond and a lassie jogging by. Every time Charlie Boy phones Justine’s number and gets the message, it gets worse. Back to square fucking one. The scab’s ripped open, pus and blood and guts out. That her voice is out there. Is not breathing into her phone.
A grog comes up in his throat. He bullets it to the ground. Fuck: is that all he’s made of? Snotter and shite? Quarter to seven. He’s at the other side of the park now, near the scabby tenements as opposed to the swanky terraces behind him. Forty-four, forty-six . . . A nice round fifty. He chaps the peeling door. A minute. Chaps again, with the heel of his boot. It’s good to take your turn on the shop floor. Keeps you connected, know?
The door shunts open. A
WELCOME
mat appears. There’s a baby crying in the background, and a careworn lassie who is haunted by the ghost of her prettiness. She pulls her dressing gown tighter.
‘Please,’ she whispers. ‘I promised. I’ll have the money by the end of the week.’
He shrugs. ‘Hear you said that last week too, doll.’ He disny mind her name. They call her the merry widow. Charlie Boy comes inside. The wean cries louder, and Askit barks. He yanks the fucker’s lead. ‘Shut it!’ The lassie’s eyes are mental.
‘Please. I’m begging you.’
He does a nice wee sigh. ‘Listen, doll. I’m a reasonable man.’ Sits himself in the armchair. There is one mock-leather armchair and a couch. It’s a comfortable chair. Two clear tears run either side of the lassie’s nose.
‘You’ve absolutely nae money in the house?’
She sobs, hair in hands and hands in mouth. Charlie tuts, as if he is sad. Charlie unbuckles his belt.
The alarm on his Rolex beeps. He lays his hands on the lassie’s head. ‘Hold that thought, doll.’ Charlie’s not superstitious, but seven is his lucky number and it’s like your lottery tickets, know? The one time you don’t get your numbers is the one time your numbers come in. With his left thumb, he dials Justine’s number. With the right, he pushes the lassie’s neck down. Askit is panting. His dug’s a fucking pervert. The second before the recorded message kicks in, the hope, the fury; it’s like a fucking boil bursting, know? All this pus pure rushing out; he disny know what he’s saying fucking bitch fucking bitch; even imagines it’s ringing, ringing in his ears, fucking sobbing in his lap, the cow, all fucking cows, and there will be the silence after, the dead silence he cannot bear.
Only this time, someone answers.
Hannah takes a swig of water. She’s knackered, they all are. Some are garrulous. Some are very quiet. The police have just left Crychapel Wood. A TV crew’s come up from Glasgow, but they’ve not been allowed in till now, and there is much grumbling about not making the teatime news. There’s a clutch of local stringers, some snappers, and a man from Talk FM. Professor Tom is waxing lyrical about Druids and Celts, says fourth century BC a lot, and –
of course we can’t be sure –
but you can see how he is loving it, all this attention when his day is normally knee-deep in mud.
The men have uncovered a second grave. It is a stone-walled square, the size of a hearth rug.
One night, when they’d had too much wine, Mhairi showed Hannah the only painting she’d kept (stashed in her kitchen pantry). Two foot wide, it was a mass of splodgy purple and green, with the Crychapel standing stones looming from mist. It had been painted as if from underground, with tangled roots framing the scene. On closer inspection, you saw they were fingers. Bone-white and grasping, clutching at the stones or dragging them down, Hannah couldn’t be sure. The whole curve of stones lurched like drunken teeth in an open mouth.
My wacky-baccy phase
, said Mhairi.
There is bone-white grasping now; real and brittle, spread in the dust below her. Hannah looks into exposed earth, to where the newfound bodies lie. Two of them. Dusty, crusted like barnacles, curled side by side. The mother skeleton is curved round the little one, like she’s shielding it, or trying to hold it back inside her belly. There is the fine dot-dot-dash of ribs and spines, there is a haunch or shin. There are porous dips and open fingers like an iris flower. Ochre in parts; in others translucent. Neither body has a skull.
There are more interviews, more flashes. The police return, same two cops who should be looking for Euan’s . . . attackers? Yes. What else would you call the driver? A woman with white paper slippers crinkles past; the fiscal has already been, and a doctor. People come and go in a single, taped-off route, inspecting. Erecting. There’s a palpable vibration in the air. Clusters form and reform, Tom at the centre of it all, orating on how the head was sacred: a vessel for the immortal soul.
‘They believed the heads of the dead could intercede for the living.’
‘Like ghosts?’ asks a reporter.
‘No. More in terms of animism. Everything. They thought all natural forces had spiritual power.’
‘Like Buddhists?’
‘No—’
‘But where are the heads?’ asks another. ‘Did they eat them?’ ‘Was it sacrifice?’ says a third, then there’s a long-winded explanation of how, till medieval times, folk would exhume skulls; put them in confessionals or on top of towers, to keep watch on the living.
‘Some churches have niches in the doorframe,’ smiles Tom with his tombstone teeth. ‘Just to keep human skulls.’
She listens to them chatter, these archaeologists that were content to scrape for fragments, and she thinks about her children. Eventually, there is an adjournment to the Kilmartin Hotel. Hannah declines. She said she’d wait for the guard to come. Imagine. They are employing a guard, until the bodies can be transported. For now, they’re swathed in tent.
After the circus packs up for the pub, she sits on the ground, leaning against the spiral stone. Stares at the trees, the scrubby grass, the rough, muddy cuts the men have made. Stares so long, the edges blur. It grows colder, duller. As the light fades, the colours switch off: green and brown become tissues of grey. In twilight, the glittering stones come into their own. Even the piled-up cobbles shine. Glimmering quartzes everywhere, like fireflies. There are no streetlamps round Crychapel, nothing to mediate the encroaching dark. The sky glows in front of her, dust-red, gold, violet. Soon, the stars will come out. She and Michael used to love it, lying on the roof of their car. They’d drive out to the dams at the back of Glasgow, and try to count the stars.
That’s how much I love you.
Out of the car, dark glade. That crick in your neck. Breathtaking. All those infinities, a billion million trillion swirls of stars, stretching in boundless reams.
There’s your proof!
He’d laugh.
And
there! And there!
Yelling it into the silence.
Deep, deep longing as her nails dig into the ground. Moss under her fingers, stones ridging her palms.
Can you feel it?
She used to sit here and be happy, and all the time, she was sitting on top of bones. Would you curl round your babies to protect them? Of course you would. The tarpaulins flit like ghosts. Still kneading the fibrous earth. The ground beneath, so dark. It cleaves. Fingers in with the worms. Like a kid in the sand, full weight of earth that presses down. Deeper. Kneading.
All the soft powdered loam. Pushing her fingers in the stones.
The Kilmacarra Hotel is dark and smoky – not cigarettes, they’ve been pushed to the extremities of every pub in Scotland. No, it’s peat burning, giving off its damp-earth warmth. Justine recognises the smell from the manse. There’s a rottenness about it she likes, how it borders on dirty. Three men are playing darts, another tugs the puggie machine, its cherries whirring wildly past the mark. A group of mud-streaked men, who must be the archaeologists, are whooping and laughing at the two corner tables they’ve commandeered. There seems to be an awful lot of them. Two old ladies sip sherry by the fire, the curves of their dainty glasses catching flame. One is Miss Campbell. Shit. No more interrogations on Clan Arrow. Please. Justine kind-of smiles, then turns to the bar, where a naked, tanned elbow rests. The elbow crooks out from a short-sleeved shirt, which is wholly inappropriate for the time of year. Behind the bar, the kilt-wearing Yorkshireman whose name is Roger but Michael says you must
call Rory, fiddles with his sporran as he watches Sky Sports.
‘Pint, please,’ says Justine, pushing into the huddle of the bar. ‘And a . . .’ she scans the gantry, ‘. . .
Grouse
.’
‘’Ow do. You the lass staying wi’ councillor?’
‘Stella’s fine, ta. Yup.’ She looks around for Duncan, sees he’s in with the crowd of archaeologists. He lifts his pint in greeting.
The unclad elbow moves along the bar. There is a delicious draught of air; she is drawn to follow the retracting elbow, honing in slightly on the space he has left. The bar counter has a beery moistness about it. She’s not had a drink in five days, hasny even missed it, but now there is a tingle in her mouth, there is the loose, wild feel of unfurling. There is the sound of the man in the short-sleeved shirt’s breathing.
‘A pint?’ Rory adjusts his sporran, so it’s centred exactly below his little paunch. ‘Furra lady?’
‘Tell you what,’ she says, allowing herself one brief and furtive glance up. Black-haired. Flashy. The man at the bar stares directly at the screen. Which is also perfect. A player, just like her. Sand-coloured Duncan is entirely forgotten, kindling at most. Justine is best when she’s a bitch. ‘Make it two.’
‘Two pints or two whiskies, love?’
‘Two of everything. And one for yourself.’