Every Seven Years (3 page)

I think about asking how unattractive
can she possibly be, but that's a quip and
my lips aren't very agile. Nor is my brain.
And then the moment for a joke is past.
So I just smile and say, Auch, well. People
are nuts.

Tam says, Yeah, people are nuts and
gives a sad half shrug. Still, he says, not
nice to be the cause of hurt, you know?

He means it. However nasty she was to
him, he still doesn't want to be the cause
of hurt to her. That's what Tam's like. Like
my mum. Better people than me. Good
people.

I put my hand on Tam's to say that he's
a lovely person, that he always was a lovely
person, just like my mum. But he looks at
my hand on his and he's a bit alarmed, like
he's worried I might be coming on to him
and he'll have to explain something else
about being gay and how gay isn't just a
sometimes type of thing. He's afraid of
causing me hurt maybe. So I get out of my
seat, sticking my tongue right out and sort
of jab it at his face while making a hungry
sound. Tam gives a girlish scream and pulls
away from me and we're both laughing as
if it's seven years ago and we're that whole
bunch of different atoms again.

But then, as I'm laughing, I catch a
fleeting glimpse of him looking at me. He
is smiling wide, his uniform shirt unbuttoned at the neck, his tie loose. His hand
is resting on the table and he's looking
straight at me through laughing, appreciative
eyes. I know that look and I feel for
the jilted girl from the other side of the island.
Tam would be easy to misread.
When I'm not drunk I might tell him: you
come over as straight, Tam. It's an acting
job, being who you are. I am good at acting
and Tam isn't. He's sending out all the
wrong signals.

I'll tell him later. When my lips are
working.

We're different people, I slur, every
seven years, d'you know that?

He says no and I try to explain, but it's
not going very well. Words elude me.
When I look up he's very serious.

He says, Else, you're drunk. It's a change
of topic from the seven years and he's not
pleased I'm drunk.

I can get drunk if I want. You're not the
goddam boss, Tam.

Yes, he says, seriously. I
am
the boss.
I'm a police officer. You're drunk and
you're driving a car. It's all banged up at
the back. I am the boss. Where were you
going?

I look at him and I think he knows
where I was going but I just say nowhere.

I knew when she died you would do
something, he says, as if I'm a loose cannon,
a crazy person who can't be trusted
not to mess everything up unless my
mum is there to tick me off. I look up
and see the Smirnoff bottle and know
that I wouldn't be drinking if she were
still alive. The world has been without
her for less than twenty-four hours and
I'm already drinking and driving and trying
to kill people. Being so wrong makes
me livid.

I say, So, Tam, you didn't come to see
me, you came to
stop
me? I call him a
sweary name. What kind of person are
you? You don't give a shit about me or my
mum.

But Tam's face doesn't even twitch.
Don't even try, he says.

Don't even try what,
Tam
?

Don't try to make me feel guilty, Else.
You haven't been in touch, you never even
wrote to me. You didn't call me and tell me
she was dead. What happened to her is the
reason I became a policeman so don't
even try that crap with me.

But I'm still angry because I'm so
wrong and I say things to him that are just
crude and mean. A drunken rant and I'm
cringing even as I'm shouting. I start crying
with shame and frustration because
I'm saying things so unkind and nasty. I'm
not homophobic. I don't think policemen
even do that. I'm just really drunk and my
mum's dead and they were so mean to her
and Karen had the book all along and it's
not fair.

I'm furious and drunk and ashamed
and wrong and it's making me cry so
much that I'm blind. I can hear Tam
breathing gasps. Confusing. By the time
the tears clear I can see him doubled over,
holding his stomach. I think he's being
sick but then I realize that he is laughing,
very much, at the things I said about policemen and what he might do with
them.

If you saw them! he says, the other policemen!
You couldn't, even for a dare!

My mood swings as wildly as a change
in wind direction over the open sea. I
hope that coffee is for me.

My eyes are trying to kill me. They're stabbing
my brain. I wake up in bed this time,
in the morning. I've got all my clothes on.
I have to keep my eyes shut as I sit up. I get
hold of the bedstead to steady myself and
tiptoe carefully towards the bathroom. My
mouth floods with seawater and I have to
run, even with my assassin eyes.

The smell of coffee lingers in the hallway.
I'm worried that I've broken something in
my olfactory system with all that vodka,
unaccustomed as I am, until I get into the
kitchen and find Tam making more coffee.

I feel awful.

Good heavens, says Tam, there's a surprise.

It's a nice thing to say, the way he says
it. Kind. I slither into a seat and shade my
eyes.

He's making scrambled eggs. I won't be
able to eat but I'm too comforted by his
presence to interrupt him.

You can't drive today, Else, he says.
You've still got high alcohol content in
your blood and your car lights are all
smashed.

I don't answer. I sit with my hand over
my eyes and listen to him putting toast on
the grill, scraping the eggs in the pan and
I think, if this was the fifties we could have
been happy in a sexless marriage of convenience,
Tam and I.

Who were you going to see last night,
Else?

The memory evokes a misery so powerful
it almost trumps my hangover. I tell
him: I want to kill Karen Little.

He's stopped cooking and is looking at
me. I can't look back. Karen?

He puts two plates of scrambled egg
down on the table. And takes the toast
from the grill and drops a slice on top of
each of the yellow mountains.

I pull my plate over to me.

Karen gave me the book back.

Tam is very still. Which book?

The Lichtenstein. She gave it to me at
the library yesterday. She said it was the
last book I ever took out of the library. No
one had taken it out since. The note was
still in it.

Tam sits down. His hands rest either
side of his plate like a concert pianist gathering
his thoughts before a recital.

Finally he speaks. I'll kill the bitch myself,
he says.

The hospital tells me that nothing can be
done about my mum today. They need a
pathologist to come over from the mainland
and do a post mortem, but the ferries
are cancelled because a storm is coming. I
can sit at home alone or I can go and confront
Karen. Tam says let's go.

I'm in Tam's work car, a big police
Range Rover. He isn't working today, he
says, so it's no bother to drive me around.
He's very angry about the book. He wants
to know how she got the book to me. I tell
him about the ceremony, in front of everyone,
how she turned and HAHAHA'd into
my face. He gets so angry he has to stop the
car and get out and walk around and
smoke a cigarette. I watch him out there,
walking in the rising wind, his shoulders
slumped, orange sparks from the tip of his
cigarette against the backdrop of the grey
sea like tiny, hopeless flares.

When he gets back in he takes a hip
flask out of the glove box. He has a sip and
gives it to me, as if drinking in a car is okay
now, because he's so angry. I drink to
please him. I feel it slide down into me and
pinch the sharp edges off my hangover. It
is comforting to have my anger matched.
He nods at me to drink more and I do.
The alcohol warms me and eases my
headache and just everything feels a little
easier, suddenly. Being angry feels easy and
the future feels unimportant. What matters
is stopping Karen.

When he finally speaks Tam's face is
quite red. He tells me that we will find
Karen and take her somewhere. We will
not even ask about the note or the book;
that would be a chance for her to talk herself
out of trouble. If we asked she'd say
she knew nothing about it. She'd blame
someone else. She'd plead ignorance. We
will simply get her alone and then, immediately,
we'll do it: we will stab Karen in
the neck. We will get away with it because
we'll be together. We will be one another's
alibi. We'll decide which of us will do the
stabbing when we get there. But I already
know.

He drives and he asks me about the
book and I tell him it had never been
taken out since I recovered it from the
gorse bush and took it back to school. He
remembers how upset I was back then. He
says it was devastating for him, too, because
I just left and I was his only friend.
She ruined his life, too, because she chased
me away. I know this is true. Back then
Tam became fixated on me to a degree
that wasn't comfortable. It wasn't always
benign.
In vino veritas
: if I hadn't had that
drink from his hip flask I might not suddenly
know that I didn't really leave despite
Tam. It was partly because of him.
He was too intense back then. His love was
overwhelming, and I never realized that
before.

Tam parks in a quiet back street in the
town. He has finished his cigarettes. He
needs more so he goes off to the shops
while I go into the school and look for
Karen. He says just pretend that you left
something in there. I watch him walk
away from the car and he is scratching his
head and his hand is covering his handsome
face.

Karen Little isn't in today. The librarian's
position is part time, the school secretary
explains. Karen only works Monday, Tuesday,
and half day on Wednesday. Then she
tries to segue into a rant about government
cuts but she can see I'm not listening.
Then she stops and seems to realize
that I've been drinking. She waits for me
to speak, cocking her head like a curious
seagull. Then she guesses: did I leave
something yesterday? I'm supposed to say
I did but, at just that moment, I think of
my mum laying in a dark drawer in a
mortuary fridge and, to be honest, I just
sort of turn and walk away.

Out in the car park Tam is waiting with
the engine running. I get in. Karen's not
there, I tell him. She's at home. He starts
to drive and I realize that he knows where
she lives. But he's a cop in a small community.
He probably knows where everyone
lives. And then I wonder why the engine
was running, before he knew she wasn't
in.

We drive out of town, onto the flat,
wind-blown moor. I steal a glimpse at
Tam. He's furious. He's chewing his cheek
and for some reason I think of Totty. Not
about her dying but what she said about
being bitter. Tam looks bitter and I pity
him that. I catch a glimpse of myself in the
side mirror and I'm frowning and I look
bitter. This is not what Totty wanted for
me.

I know this road. We're heading for Paki
Harris's house and I ask why. Karen lives
there now, says Tam. She was his only
blood left on the island. Karen was related
to Paki Harris. I've always known that.
Everyone is related to everyone here except
us incomers, but I didn't realize she
was so closely related to Paki. Second
cousins, Tam tells me somberly, just as
we're passing a small farmhouse by the
roadside with a “For Sale” outside it. The
sign flaps in the wind like a rigid surrender
flag.

“For Sale” signs are a sorrow on the island.
People are born, live, and die in the
same house here. A “For Sale” sign means
the house owner had no one to leave it to,
or maybe only a mainlander. Mainlanders
don't understand the houses here. They
sell them for cash or use them as holiday
homes for two weeks a year, a long weekend
at Easter. You can't do that with these
houses. They need fires burning in them
all the time to keep the damp out. To keep
the rot out. These island houses aren't
built for sometimes. They need commitment.
Karen Little has taken on the commitment
of Paki Harris's house.

It was an accident when my mother
killed Paki. She ran him over on the main
street on a Sunday afternoon in May, just
before I was born. The Fatal Accident inquiry
found no fault with her. She didn't
try to explain what happened. She just ran
him straight over, once, completely. She
never mentioned it to me, I heard it from
just about everyone else, with various embellishments.
But the note, that note in the
book, was the first version I ever heard
that made sense of it. Paki raped her. She
got pregnant with me. She killed him.
That's why.

Paki Harris was from here. My mother
was not. So the island took his side because
loyalty isn't rational and, in the end,
loyalty is all there is in a place this small.

In the seven years since I left I have
often imagined what it was to be my heavily pregnant mother and see a man who
had raped her day after day, standing in
church, shopping at the supermarket,
strolling on the sea front. I would have
driven a car at him. The note, though, the
note made me realize how deep the bitterness
is here. It had never occurred to me
that she had a motive until I saw that note.
And afterwards, I realized, if they knew, if
they all knew that he had raped her and
that's why, could they not have found one
shred of compassion for her? They spat at
her in the street. She couldn't eat in the
café because no one would speak when
she was in there. She used the library until
they banned her for “bringing food in.”
She had a packet of crisps in her bag. I'm
not leaving, she'd say, because wherever
you live, life is a race against bitterness and
staying makes me run faster.