Offcomer (10 page)

They hardly spoke for a month. She felt that she was barely there, that she went through her days like a ghost. Her lungs felt permanently sore, her chest cramped up into a knot. She had to get some fresh air. She would go home.

Alan was furious. He had never felt so angry in his life. His rage choked him. When she slung her bag onto her shoulder and kissed him, he just said, “Yeah, see you,” without turning away from the computer. He heard her footsteps on the stairs, then the street door slam shut. He half stood up from his chair, squinting out of the window. Her hair was glossy in the sunshine. Her bag didn’t seem to be weighing her down at all. He slumped back down at his desk. How could she abandon him like this, right now, when he needed her more than ever? How could she behave like this, making him so angry, so fucking furious that he couldn’t see straight, much less concentrate on his work? He banged his fist down on the desk. The screen blinked. His hand hurt.

A single-track road wound round the edge of the reservoir, slipped out through the pass in the fells. A car had passed a moment ago, skimming headlights across the water, defining it, coating it with a smooth silvery meniscus. As the lights swung across them, Claire had seen Jennifer clearly, blinking sootily in the light, shifting slightly in her plimsolls. Since then, they had been standing there in silence. Claire had run out of questions. She was desperately raking through her head for something, for anything else to say. Soon, if she wasn’t distracted, Jen would ask a question, and she would have to reply, and she wouldn’t be able to handle it.

“Well, what about it?” Claire said. Her teeth were aching.

“I don’t know. Can’t we just go down the pub?”

“If you want to.”

“You don’t, I take it.”

In the darkness, Claire pulled her lips in against her teeth.

“I’m sorry.”

“What’s the matter with you, Thomas? You’ve done nothing but apologise since you got back. What’s up?”

“Nothing. It’s just. This was your idea, you know.”

“Five years ago, it was my idea.”

“Well. I thought you liked it.”

“I always thought it scared the pants off of you.”

“No. Not really.”

“Well then. You go first.”

Claire, unbuttoning her coat, shrank at the thought of ploughing out across the dark water. On an old map, somewhere, she had seen the dots and lines of habitation, the simple cross that marked the chapel, a whole village deep within the swelling water. Pike hanging in the dark fireplaces, eels slipping down the stairwells, minnows clouding the branches of drowned trees. The dark beneath her always felt, somehow, populated. She saw herself thrashing through someone else’s sky, alien, ungainly, and it made her panic. Every time.

So why, she thought, grimly untying her boots, do this now. Why not go down the pub and sit by the fire and drink a couple of whiskies and just listen to Jen talk. And if she asks about Alan or Oxford or what next, spoof it. Lie. Because crying, Claire thought, tugging her jumper over her head, was a lot like kissing: it should never be done in pubs.

Halfway up the hillside a sheep let out a rasping, belch-like bleat.

“Are you ready?” Claire asked.

“I’ll follow you.”

The grit bit into her feet. Her skin puckered with
goosepimples. She hugged herself, felt her nipples hard against the softness of her inner arm. From the edge of the dam you could wade out slowly, stepping down from rock to rock, letting the water rise up from ankle to knee to hip with each step. That was on summer afternoons when there were damsel flies and sunbathing with an arm across your eyes, and the water taking the sting out of sunburn. But when it was cold, you just had to jump.

Claire jumped. In an instant she was deep, her hair lifted, legs and arms wide, breath knocked out of her, eyes open in the streaming bubbling dark. She crashed up through the surface, gasping, her lungs squeezed small. She pushed the flattened hair off her face.

“How is it?” Jennifer called.

“Fine.”

Claire, winded, treading water, heard Jen laugh. She peered through the grainy dark, saw the pale luminescence of Jen’s skin, the curve of her back as she bent to pull off her plimsolls. The water tugged at the unshaven hairs on Claire’s legs, slid between her fingers, dipped into the hollows of her knees. She stopped treading water, lay suspended, still. Around her, a thin film of water grew a little warmer from her skin. Faint and pale, Jen picked her way down to the water’s edge, paused.

“Cold?” Jennifer called.

“Just a bit.”

The figure on the bank shifted a little, finding a sure footing, then dived. The crash of body onto water, then quiet, and the backwash slapping against the bank, against Claire, washing her slight warmth away. Then a nearby splash and splutter as Jen surfaced.

“Jesus. It’s so cold.”

“Told you.”

“Jesus.” Claire felt the water move as Jennifer rolled into the crawl, swam a few strokes. Tiny flecks of water hit her face. Then suddenly the surface was dazzling, concentric ripples overlapping, interlacing, the spray flung from Jen’s movement bright, suspended, frozen. Claire looked round: car headlights swept across the sky, then the rattling splutter of a diesel engine.

“Car!” she said, unnecessarily.

“Shit.”

A couple of strokes back to the bank. Claire’s hands found the edge of a low rock, and she levered herself up. Jen was already ahead of her, on the top of the dam, crouching, fumbling for her clothes. The headlights swung again, focused, and the car rounded the bend. Spotlit, they looked at one another, Claire crouching down near the water’s edge, Jen up on the dam, hand on mouth, naked. Then the car turned and coasted along the lakeside road. The light swept away, up across the fellside and over the runoff channel. Claire’s eyes swam with ghost lights.

“Ooops,” Jen said.

And Claire, standing up on the damp rock, putting out a hand to steady herself against the bank, began to laugh.

Dressed, their clothes dampened from their skin, they slid back down the hillside through the sharp old bones of bracken. Loose pebbles skidded out from underfoot. Jennifer’s heavy breath in the dark; yellow lights from the houses below. Claire could pick out Jen’s house, and the vicarage, and the darkness where the parish hall was, and nearer, the back windows of the pub. But she couldn’t see her house, not from there. Other end
of the village. Dad sitting by the fire and Mum with half an eye on the telly and half on her knitting, but she couldn’t go home and sink down by Dad’s feet and slip into whatever it was they were watching, because there was nothing there for her now. Her mum had said so. Said so time and time again. Claire, stumbling on the sheep path, swallowed the thought, refused to think it, because if there was nothing there for her now, then there was, really, almost nothing at all.

Her foot found a toehold in the drystone wall; she gripped the top and swung herself over, into the carpark. Braithwaites’ battered Land Rover, Nick’s motorbike, dark against the pale gravel. Claire, half a pace behind Jennifer, crossed the carpark, slipped in through the back door. They pushed past the door into the ladies’ toilet.

A small, cold, familiar room, one cubicle with a dodgy lock, a mirror, an electric hand-dryer on the wall. Liquid soap oozing like mucus, encrusting the pink ceramic basin. The air smelt of air-freshener and cold peat water. Jennifer switched on the hand-dryer at the wall, then crouched underneath, reaching up from time to time to bang the chrome button again, then sink back into the hot air. Claire turned on the hot tap, let the water run over her fingers. The cold had left them numb. They looked like they belonged to someone else.

Jen slipped out from underneath the dryer, uncoiling herself cautiously in the narrow space.

“Your go.”

Claire shuffled past her, squatted down under the hot air. She watched, deafened by the noise of the dryer, as Jen tugged a plastic tube from her pocket, spun the lid off. She dabbed creamy-coloured liquid onto her skin, smearing over the cold sheen of her cheeks and nose. She fished out a kohl
pencil and lined her eyes. She coloured in her lips with plum-coloured lipstick. Her features became defined, clear, bright. She smiled neatly at herself. Claire edged in beside her.

“Can I have some?”

“Help yourself.”

Claire blotted on foundation, smudged her eyes, greased her lips with lipstick. She could feel Jennifer’s warm and smoky breath beside her. She blinked at herself in the mirror. They had nicked Jen’s mum’s new lipstick, she remembered. It had been placed neatly on the doilied dresser; a sheeny cylinder of blue and gold. They had lifted it down for a closer look, and found it irresistible. The name, printed neatly on a little golden sticker on the base, was what did it for them:
Pink Paradise
. They peeled off the cellophane, unscrolled the stick of vivid magenta and drew it thick across their mouths, kissed tissues just to have the kissprints, kissed each other and admired their pink-smeared cheeks in the mirror. Then Mrs. Rothwell hollered their names up the stairs and suddenly everything shifted, and Claire saw the stained cotton doily, the spilt talcum, the mushed and broken stem of the new lipstick and wondered, briefly, how to disappear, considered hiding under the bed next to Mr. Rothwell’s slippers.

“A Rusty Nail, I think,” Jennifer said. Claire smiled.

“A Rusty Nail would be fab,” she said. Her lips felt tacky.

Tom and Nick were sitting at the bar, half-drunk pints of bitter in front of them, each with a packet of cigarettes open on the counter. There were no other customers. Mrs. Hall was watching TV in her sitting room upstairs. Claire could hear tinny American voices, synthetic music, drifting down
the stairwell. Mrs. Hall didn’t much like having customers in her pub.

Jennifer hitched herself onto a barstool, Claire climbed awkwardly onto the next. They waited. Tom nodded at them, smiling:

“Alright?”

“Fine,” Jennifer smiled back at him.

“Cold night.”

“Cold enough.”

Claire, conscious, pushed a strand of hair out of her face. Tom continued grinning at Jennifer. Nick blinked at them, swilled his beer round the glass. Mrs. Hall appeared behind the bar, the adverts being on.

“Well?”

“Two Rusty Nails please.” Jennifer smiled at Mrs. Hall; Mrs. Hall grunted and turned towards the optics. Nick put down his glass, asked:

“You see anything of them mermaids then?”

Jennifer raised an eyebrow. Claire shifted, waited. Nick went on.

“Tom here’s been saying how he saw two of them up the reservoir. Completely starkers. Wondered if you’d caught sight of them.”

“Hide nor hair. You’ve been at them mushrooms again, eh Tom?” said Jennifer.

Tom laughed, apologetic, shook his head at her, smiling.

Mrs. Hall placed two glasses of greenish-gold liquid in front of them. Jennifer paid and Claire followed her to the table nearest the fireplace. A crumbling log fire glowed in the hearth and Mrs. Hall’s old lurcher was roasting his skinny body in front of it. Claire squeezed in between the table and
the wall, sat down on the wooden bench. She brought the glass to her lips, just touched them with the liquid, then licked them. It burnt her lips and tongue, but was sweet. She leant against the warm flank of the chimney breast and inhaled deeply. The sharp smell of burnt doghair, peaty whiskey, woodsmoke. There was a faint perfume from the lipstick. She could almost taste it.

Jennifer had taken out her tobacco and was flattening a cigarette paper.

“My arse is frozen,” she said. “Colder than the rest of me.” She gave Claire a smile. Claire felt as if she’d been scooped up and held close. Jen’s smiles, Claire thought, when she gave you one just for you, let you know where you were, what you could do.

“It was your bright idea anyway,” Claire said.

“Aye, originally.” Jennifer looked up grinning, her fingers still teasing out tobacco threads. “But it was yours, tonight.”

Nick called laboriously over from the bar:

“We’ve got to drink that water, you know.”

“Shame we pissed in it then,” Jennifer sang back. Claire snorted.

“And when did you last have a drink of water, eh?” Tom asked. “I’ve never seen you drink anything but Mitchells.”

“Aye well I’ll be sticking to it from now on.”

Tom lifted his pint from the counter and wandered over. He put the glass down but didn’t sit. He placed his hands on the tabletop, on either side of his beer, leaning in beside Jennifer, his head crooked round to look at her face, one thick dark forefinger slowly tapping the wooden surface of the table. His fingers were scraped and scarred, the skin harsh. There was permanent dirt beneath his nails. Claire looked up at his
profile. He was smiling, his face creased. Tom Braithwaite was a stonemason. He had washed the dust out of his hair.

“So you’re finished at university then,” he observed. “What’s next? Any plans?”

“Loads,” Jennifer began. “I’ve been offered a job. A friend’s opening a club in Birmingham. He wants me to come down, help him run it. Or I might go travelling. My friend’s off to Indonesia and I …”

Claire leaned back against the warm stone. She slowly closed her eyes until she could just see Jen through her lashes; bright, happy, gesturing as she spoke, waving away Tom’s stumpy Embassies and rolling herself another cigarette, her attention caught between Tom’s face and the tiny roach she was tearing. The whiskey was making Claire’s cheeks burn; her eyes felt gritty. Cigarette smoke caught at the back of her throat. Claire listened to the deep vowels of Jennifer’s words, heard the glottal stop she had caught from new friends. She shivered.

Alan didn’t ask Claire to come with him. He didn’t even tell her that he had been called for an interview. He didn’t think that she deserved to know, quite frankly. It was a rush job, anyway. He had to work on the thesis right up to the last minute, and he would, he knew, have to start preparing for the viva on the way home. It was only on the long and devious bus journey from Oxford to Stranraer that he had a chance to organise himself for the interview. He sat two rows from the back of the bus, muttering his presentation to himself and eating sour-cream-and-chive Pringles, four at a time.