Infidelities (9 page)

I say that now – ‘of course’ – but that’s because I have always been the oldest. Older than Bill even though he acted so grown up and six years older than my sister who, as I said before, was always just a little girl. And ‘of course’ I write, because I know now that my cousin was telling stories, but also knew, I think, back then, that stories were maybe all he had. So thinking of them as lies then? Something far from truth? I can’t answer that, remembering. Sort of, I suppose, is what I could say. Some part of me understanding that Bill could have never spent time with Uncle Robbie in that way, that Uncle Robbie had died before he could have taken Bill anywhere, done any of the kinds of things Bill talked about – but another part of me swallowing the stories too and being the one who was believing. It was who I was, those summers. The kind of cousin who said ‘Yes’ when Bill asked me if I believed him. Saying ‘I believe you’ when he told me that his father was killed by a murderer, a mean farmer who used knives on him or poison or a rope. Or that someone else had pushed his dad, and robbed him first, then lied about it because he was jealous. Because his father was much too strong and clever, Bill said, for anyone to dare to be his friend. Did I believe that? In that father of his who had loved him best? ‘Yes,’ I said. Always, to everything, ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’

And Ailsa, she just watched and listened. With Bill’s dad dead, well and truly, driven off the edge of the cliff down on to the rock one night when it was late only none of the adults talked about it. So it was Bill’s stories
we were left with, and nothing like the real one, that his father was a failure and lost his money and couldn’t care for his family at all … Only these other stories instead, that got bigger and more exciting and the stories changed. With the poison, say. Or a strangling. Or saying that the motorbike his father rode was racing, not his own, and someone fixed it, like in James Bond, or some other film, so it lost control. Or how Bill and his dad were out late one night and a helicopter came down and took his father away.

So my sister listened and she didn’t say much. When Bill told her about him and Uncle Robbie getting lost in the snow sometime and Aunt Pam had to send out the whole village to look for them. Or about Bill’s dad being charged by a stag so he had to wrestle with it, bring it down on to the ground and its antlers had sliced up his arms all the way down to the bone.

‘What do you think about that, girls, eh?’ Bill asked. ‘What do you think about me and my dad being so tough and strong?’

‘I think it’s good,’ I said.

But Ailsa just looked at him, she didn’t reply.

Thinking about this now, writing it down … I can see those stories of my cousin must have started long before this particular summer I’m talking about here. For years we had those holidays, in that house where Aunt Pam and Bill and Uncle Robbie used to live, way up in the top of Scotland. Every July we went up there, my sister and I, while our mother had to stay in town and work.
So we were used to it … We were used to Bill’s stories. That place, you see, that farm where my cousin lived, was so known to us, the house and paddocks and the hills … Everything about it … was familiar. Even when it changed and the house felt different and the farm too because the farm was taken away from Bill’s family and it didn’t belong to them any more, it turned out – though that’s another story and not one to tell here – it never had.

For sure there was no longer the same feeling of being able to play all over the fields like we used to – with the animals gone, and the land was going to be used by some other man for his own farm and his own family. So that then we had more time inside. And maybe thinking more. Making up other, different games. And after a while there was Aunt Pammy starting to pack up all their things in boxes, the house already half empty, she and Bill getting ready to move away. ‘From memories,’ Aunt Pammy said to me. ‘I can talk to you girls about this,’ she said. ‘But I can’t tell Bill.’ She was tucking us in at night and Bill was already in his room with the door closed. Aunt Pammy was sitting on my bed and I could smell her lovely scent, the thin cotton feel of the pretty dress she was wearing. ‘It’s hard for Bill to be here without his dad,’ she said to Ailsa and me. ‘It’s why we have to leave. You girls understand that in a way my little boy can’t.’

Even then, Ailsa didn’t say a thing but she nodded then. She did understand. More than Bill who was nearly
ten. ‘It’s because’, she said to me, ‘they have to leave his ghost.’

That is what she said. Those words. And when my sister spoke you noticed it, you listened, because, as I said, when I started this story here, my sister, well … Mostly she kept her thoughts right in. This night, though, when it was late and after Aunty Pam had been in and said goodnight and then she’d gone out of the room and I was just lying in bed and through the window I could see the outline of the hills against the sky that was a sort of green so it wasn’t dark at all, not really, but trying to get dark is what the dark was like in those long high summer nights up north in those days, long ago … Just trying … Ailsa sat up in bed and told me what she’d seen.

The ghost of Bill’s dad, she said. He was in the house.

‘He’s in the old bedroom,’ Ailsa said. It was scary. The room where Auntie Pam and Uncle Robbie used to sleep. ‘He’s in there and Bill knows about it. He’s been in there and he’s seen him too.’ She was sitting up on her bed in her white nightdress and with her blond hair sticking up like a little bad fairy. Something about her strange and queer, something in her seen a scary thing.

‘The ghost’s in there now,’ she whispered. ‘I could show you. Sometimes he goes into Bill’s room. I can hear him in there too.’

All this … I’m saying. Writing it down. Out of her silence, suddenly there were my sister’s words. Knowing these things. Telling them. How the ghost had always
been in there, and that’s how Bill knew the stories. Because the ghost had always told him what to say, his father always told him. That ghost had been with Bill for just about as long as Bill remembered, she said, telling him things, talking about adventures, giving him instructions. So Ailsa had been listening around the place, and seeing, understanding somehow something I dared not believe in, though I knew, too, that she could not be lying – so … I asked her would she show me, take me there and I could see him for myself, that man who’d once been married to my mother’s sister, was father to her child, though no one had ever seemed to know him at all. I knew I couldn’t sleep then, not possibly even close my eyes, until I could prove to myself something about this, find out about this thing though I was scared and it was like I couldn’t swallow and my heart had got big in me and full up like I wanted to tell someone else, a grown up, but there was no one around to tell.

So quietly we got up, Ailsa and I. She held my hand and went ahead into the dark that was not dark but was quiet and full of shadows and that darkest green. It was like Ailsa was the big sister and I was just the one who would follow. Even so, through we went to Aunt Pam and Uncle Robbie’s old room where they used to sleep together once, maybe, in the big old bed that belonged to Uncle Robbie’s mother and then she gave it to Aunt Pam as a present on her wedding day. There in the room it was, that same great big bed, with the matching set around it, the chest of drawers and the cabinet and the big old
wardrobe in the corner and the door of it a bit open. And it moved.

Ailsa gripped my hand. ‘There!’ she whispered, and pointed. The door seemed to open a bit more, creaked, and inside the wardrobe, sure enough, I saw a man’s form, the old tweed shape of a man called Uncle Robbie. He was standing there with his back to us and murmuring something, he was speaking the low words a ghost has to say.

The light was deepening in the room, from green to grey as though the room itself may as well have been a coffin, with the window darkening and only open the tiniest bit to let in some air, but everything dusty and closed in and silent – apart from that creaking wardrobe door moving just a bit and the thing inside it talking to itself, Uncle Robbie’s tweed suit that he was wearing.

‘Shhh,’ Ailsa said to it. ‘Shhh. We’re not here to hurt you.’

The suit may have been his favourite suit. It might have been the suit he wore on those days when he was still a father, those days that I could not remember. When he’d been a husband and he had a farm and he lived there with his wife, my mother’s sister, and her little boy. Before he went off on his own and before he went off and left them for good, driving himself off over the edge of the cliff at the bottom of the paddock and everyone knew he did it himself, on purpose, that was the story that was true … Before any of that, there was the suit that Uncle Robbie used to wear on sale days or when he went out with the
other men, the farmers, to go to the Agricultural Fair and the Highland Show, the thick tweed suit he was wearing now to come back and visit us all.

‘That’s him,’ Ailsa whispered, and just then I remember the feeling exactly – it was like a spell that was cracked.
That’s him
. In the second of those words I took a step towards the wardrobe so I could see …
Him
.

And not Uncle Robbie at all. Not who he was. Just his suit hanging, that’s what was there. Just hanging cloth and thick and tweed and warm but no body in it to wear it. No man. No ghost. I went closer, and closer, right up to it, to touch it. To put my arms through. And as Ailsa stayed behind at the edge of the room – even as I touched the suit, for I did touch him, what was left of my uncle – I felt for myself how thin he was and not there, how there was nothing there.

Yet still the murmuring sound went on. Though I had by now my arms among the empty arms, the jacket against me like a chest that was collapsed and flapping, that had never had a body or a heart inside … Still I could hear a murmuring on. Secrets. Stories. What I thought had been the ghost’s quiet talking to itself, my uncle telling all his secrets out, about why he’d left his family in the way he did, his own child … All his secrets … All his talking quietly in the grey, darkening room, just a low hum, of talking, murmuring, just the sound of him was all that was left of him, of Uncle Robbie, of his awful, lying ghost …

I knew then that it was coming from my cousin’s room. The voice was there. Bill in there, in his own bed with his
dad’s old jersey that he’d taken in with him like he did every night since he was a little boy, to sleep with him. And it was Bill talking to his dad I could hear – making up the stories he would tell Ailsa and me the next day, and fill the air with them, fill the day. ‘My dad said’ and ‘My dad and I’ and ‘My dad told me’ and ‘My dad is going to’ … All of the words to fill the space, to make the stories real, whispering them out on his own in the night that by now was going green no more and into grey but into dark.

‘See?’ Ailsa whispered to me now, as I went over to her, where she stood at the doorway, but I was a big sister again, taking her hand and leading her back to our room. Passing the closed door of Bill’s bedroom and hearing his low voice coming from behind it.

‘See?’ Ailsa said again, as we passed his door, and her hand tightened on mine.

‘Shhh.’ I was the one who told her now. Not wanting her to speak. For enough of speaking. Enough of words. Of stories and of lies. Of saying someone was a hero when he’d killed himself, not died at all those other ways, like in a film, but did it himself, because that’s what he most wanted, what he chose, to plan it for himself to be that way, leave his family, be alone. Leave them without him on their own.

‘Shhh,’ I said again – but not to quieten her. Because in a way Ailsa had not made it up at all, about Uncle Robbie and what she had seen. It was true. What she’d thought. What she knew. That he was like a ghost exactly
in that house, that man. The clothes still hanging there but empty. Only the jersey, like a body brought down, in a little boy’s bed.

Was parked up. Right there on a lay-by off the old north–south highway, the far western side of the country. And O but it was cold there. The seas were big. Turquoise in colour in winter – with the eleven days of this story taking place in winter and this was the eleventh day.

And the caravan not so old but it looked abandoned. By which I mean: ‘Quite broken’. Rusted, well, not rusted, maybe, but with an appearance of rust. A
semblance
. All that salt water, you might say. All that cold weather coming in off the sea. The window had been knocked through by a stone and the door banged half on and off its hinge whenever the wind blew, and yes, the wind blew. Inside the caravan it was dark and wrecked and damp with cold. There was broken glass, a bit of sodden cloth on the table, some playing cards. This was, remember, the eleventh day.

On the tenth day the caravan stood next to a calm sea. There on the lay-by, beneath a pale blue winter sky. The gravel upon which it was sited was wet, gutted in places
with puddles. The caravan on its blocks as though it had been there for years, for years it looked like.
Years?
Yes, as I say, it looked like that. A semblance of years, for sure. A ‘permanent fixture on the landscape’ one might describe it – one who lived in this part of the country, who knew its lonely roads and the beaches no one visited and the sea in which no one swam. ‘That caravan has been there for as long as I can remember,’ that person might say. O really? O yes. For as long as I can know.

For the caravan – it has no wheels, only those four cinder blocks – so it’s not going anywhere. A holiday home then, once it had been. A place to go to beside the sea. White, with a crimson strip – but it wasn’t new. The unexpected sun shone on the chrome of its broken window, the surround of its flimsy door. That was on the tenth day.

The day before had seen a large storm. O large! Terrifying! O the waves were like walls! For there is nothing like them, those storms they get over there on the west, those old west coast storms! O nothing!

And the caravan just shuddered, had to. Just bore the storm out. Bore the weather, remember? Coming in through the window? In through the half-open door? It was
as though
years passed. While the rain came down. While the wind battered at the roof. The playing cards blew about crazily, crazily inside. The Jack of Spades. Ace. A Red Seven. They flipped and turned. On the ninth day.

The eighth day was also windy. But not the same as the day before, for this day it was as though the wind were only practising, turning. It was only getting started. The boulders sat on the beach, they sat there. And the great logs that had been washed in from who-knows-where, how faraway … They lay there too, like waiting, while on the beach the wind practised, whistled up and down the pebble shore.

Wheee!
Like the sound of all the years passing.

Not that there was anyone to hear it, remember. O no. Just the caravan. On the eighth day. With something inside it, rattling.

Because on the seventh day an animal had got in. Through the broken window, or it came through the door when the door had been pulled wide open in a sudden gust. It ran across the floor and up the front of a cupboard. Some food had been scattered on the floor, on the bench, by the weather, by the wind, quite scattered. And maybe that had been what brought the animal in, had got it started. And O you wouldn’t have believed it – the brand names of that food! On the packets! Quite fancy? O yes! Tiny delicatessen crackers and pre-packed cheeses. Some silvery foreign tins. All this removed from a cardboard box in a small old fashioned caravan. On a lay-by, remember. In a place you can barely imagine in your mind less go out on a real road and see it. Cry:
Look!
As though you might cry. For this is an abandoned caravan and yet here are wrappers saying Fortnum & Mason, Zabar’s, Ladurree.
Be careful the papers don’t blow outside, get airborne and come to float on that cold enormous sea.

On the seventh day.

‘Be careful’

Is what she might have said to him, when he suggested they go there again.

‘Be careful we might end up there,’ she might have said. Parked up for ever by the cold and frozen sea. ‘Be careful that if we go there,’ she might have whispered, ‘to our caravan, we might never leave.’

And now it’s the sixth day and in the middle of the night the rain started, it fell. And the cloth, remember? On the table? It collected water like a bandage collects water. The tablecloth drawing water to it so that other parts might be dry.

O! O! O! the woman might have said, if she had seen it. ‘My tablecloth! Spoilt!’ And all for nothing – for damp is in the place, nevertheless.
Nevertheless
. And it’s wet and it’s cold here. And it’s midnight. And there is no moon. And the sound of the rain on the gravel, on the caravan roof … It falls. It continues to fall.

The day before was the fifth day and another of the almighty storms, wind now, all wind. The poor curtain fluttered at the window, ripped. There was nothing anyone could do. The cards were lifted from their places on the table. One here, lifted. One there. A whole pack of cards but nevertheless all of them are scattered. Fluttering
in numbers upon the floor across the bench, the table. Ace. Jack. Red.

That was the day the door came off its hinge and wouldn’t sit square again to close. And O the noise it might make! Banging!
Screeching!
That thin, thin tin!

When the wind stopped, the day before, a seagull came to rest on the roof of the caravan. It seemed blown on to the roof of the caravan from across the sea. The sunlight played across its white feathers, caught the gold in its eye.

They used to enjoy looking at birds, the man and the woman. It was something they used to do, together sitting at the small table. Hearing a great screeching through the window of the caravan as great packs of gulls wheeled and landed on the beach and on the water.

O! O!

Making sounds that were like crying.

Calling to each other, over and over, through the cold air.

Now there was only one bird. Looking out to the sea to where it had come from. Perhaps. Hoping to catch a glimpse of another.
Perhaps
. That it might call to it as the others had called.

That it might be heard.

And the third day was a day for crying. The day the boys came, put a stone through the glass. When they forced the door of the caravan and went right in. Unpacking the food from the boxes, exclaiming at the fancy papers of the packets of food.

Not a day at all but late on the night of the third day, this. After drinking in the pub in town. There was beer and then tequila and then getting in the car and driving fast, with broken lights, down that lonely road beside the sea. The youngest boy, perhaps, the one who saw the caravan as they flew straight past, who noticed it,
caught sight
, and said to the others, ‘Stop! Go back!’ and they did: Backing up hard into the lay-by and piling out of the car. Approaching the caravan. Breaking the glass. Reaching in to take the lock off, push through, force open the little door. O yeah! They say. O wow! O check this out! They push and press against the little walls. One unwraps a pretty chocolate, eats it. One pisses in the corner before leaving.

Yet on the second day all had been so tidy in the little home.
Complete
. The curtains drawn. The door shut firm and locked against – against … All kinds of unpredicted weather. Snow on the mountains inland. Cold off the southern sea.

O be safe, little house. Be firm.

Sitting there, bright, in the frost, in the early morning. Of the second day.

Like you may sit there for ever.

Waiting for them to come back to you again.

For that is what they loved to do, the man and the woman whose caravan it was. They loved, more than anything, used to love, to return to that place. Return. Re-enter
together the little door. And wasn’t that first day just the kind of day that was perfect to come back to? The reason people keep caravans in the first place, keep little cabins by the sea? So to have a window on to all that sky? So to have a high winter sun, and enough heat in it, in the middle of the day, to remember summer?

‘O yes …’ he’d said to her smiling, drawing her gently out of the passenger seat of the car and into the wide air. ‘O yes, you see? You remember, what it’s like here? What it’s like for us to be here?’

For it is a caravan, after all. It’s just the place to sit in. ‘A caravan we’ve always loved. Where we can be at rest, my dear. Remember? How we love it here?’ So taking her, this very gently, by the hand and leading her, leading her … Towards the caravan door.

And, again, ‘You see, my love?’ he says again. ‘You see? How gentle it can be here? You and I together? This place we love? That you remember? You remember … See?’

But didn’t see, himself, and could never have predicted it – that the moment his back was turned, after putting her inside, seating her at the table with the pretty cloth that she had once stitched for him, for the caravan itself, its tiny table, and hemmed, and embroidered … Could not have seen it nor predicted … As he went out to the car for the cardboard box of special foods, for the chocolates from Fortnum’s that she loved, or the caviar from Zabar’s that he spread for her on toast – that as he brought the world out for her to that lonely place, she would be gone …

Run off towards the sea like she’s a swimmer! O! Like it’s summer and she’s running to the sea – O –

No!

Like she’s swimming and it’s summer –

No!

And this some kind of other, very different sea.

So he drops the box, and starts towards her, out the caravan and down the empty beach – but she’s run so far away from him by now, in the seconds, moments, that he left her, that it’s like he’ll never catch her, that he’d spend his life in trying – for she’s running into air is what it’s like, that she would be the cold wind herself and all the cold air …

O!

O!

Whistling, empty. Down the pebbly shore. Of the empty sea.

But he does. He manages to get there. To where she is in the water, wading in so her skirts and her coat is sodden, he pulls her away …

And the story finishes – or begins – there, with the man and the woman at the edge of the sea, at a beach where no one visits, on the western side of the country … And the sound of the wind – O! – and the draw of the cold waves on the pebbly shore the only other sound … And the man puts his wife back in the car and he drives her away.

The day before that with nothing in it. Nor the day before. Nor the day before.

Only, O …

and the draw of the pebbles on the lonely beach …

O …

O …

O …

O …