Orkney Twilight (3 page)

She sat silently, caught up in her own doubts, trapped in the space between competing conversations, on the edge of everything as always, never at the centre, beginning to think no one would miss her if she weren’t there. She poured herself another glass of vinegary white and turned automatically, sensing eyes on her back again. The rider was watching her from the far end of the bar. He lifted his helmet in the air, a half salute, and then he was off, through the door and out.

‘Who was that bloke then?’ Jess asked – her radar attuned to any man in leather.

Sam shrugged. ‘He came over and started talking to me when I was outside waiting for Becky.’

‘What kind of bike was he riding?’

‘Black.’

Jess rolled her eyes. Sam rolled hers back. Helen laughed, or perhaps it was a sneer.

She drained her glass. Everything was moving in slow motion now, voices raucous, not quite in sync with mouths, conversations increasingly incoherent. Jess was explaining that she wouldn’t fancy being a barmaid in the Coney’s Tavern because everybody knew that ‘coney’ was Anglo-Saxon for ‘cunt’ and she certainly wouldn’t want anybody to get the wrong idea and think there was more on offer than a pint of lager and a packet of crisps.

Liz’s head swivelled round. ‘Cunny.’

‘What?’

‘Seventeenth-century. Pepys. He used the form “cunny” in his diary. “His wife caught him with his main in his mistress’s cunny.”’

Jess frowned at Liz, momentarily perplexed by the reference, then continued to rant about her best mate being a bit of an old slapper. Sam watched Helen half-heartedly chasing a lettuce leaf around the plate with her fork.

Jess reached the end of her diatribe and followed Sam’s gaze. ‘Why did you order a salad?’ she asked. ‘Are you going anorexic on us?’

‘I’m just not hungry,’ Helen snapped.

‘We’ve always used food as a weapon in this family,’ said Liz and sighed.

‘Food does make good ammunition. It’s surprising how painful a roast potato can be if it hits you at speed.’

‘I didn’t mean it quite so literally.’

Sam chipped in. ‘Helen’s not anorexic. She’s not hungry because she’s just shoved a line of speed up her nose.’ Helen kicked her under the table and caught her shin with the pointed toe of her buckled stiletto boot. Sam yelped loudly and was about to kick her back when something made her pause – an almost imperceptible disturbance pulsing through the golfing crowd by the bar. A Mexican wave of hackles rising. Jim was standing at the pub’s entrance. He pushed through the crowd, his plaid shirt unbuttoned to the point of disreputability – perhaps a deliberate distraction from his burgeoning paunch below – his mouth pulled sideways in that lopsided smirk of his, hinting he had something on everybody sitting in the room. He could have them all if he wanted – one way or another. She cringed. Then felt a stab of anger: it was all his fucking fault she was so jumpy, saw death threats in every passing vehicle. He navigated a winding course between the dining tables, seemingly oblivious to the churning he left in his wake; swivelling faces caught between attraction and disapproval, gritted teeth and pink cheeks as he skimmed sports jackets and pretty waitresses. He pulled up a chair, swung his stocky form into the vacant berth next to hers; didn’t even bother to apologize for being late.

‘Where have you been?’ Liz asked.

‘Drink with Harry,’ he said. He didn’t work with Harry anymore; he just turned to him when he needed back-up. He ordered Sam to pass him the menu, grinned at her conspiratorially, peered theatrically at the plastic-laminated card.

‘Tell me what’s for dinner,’ he said. ‘I’ve forgotten my glasses.’

‘You don’t wear glasses,’ Sam replied. Jim had twenty-twenty vision. ‘It might help if you held the menu the right way up.’

He ignored her, rotated his head to gawp at the table behind, pulled a face, hailed a nearby waitress and said he wanted tomato soup. He certainly didn’t want what they were having, he added, gesturing his hand in the direction of the surrounding diners.

Jim’s soup arrived as everyone else was dispatching slices of sickly sweet cheesecake. He fished around in the bowl for a few minutes with no obvious intention of actually eating anything and then, with an unexpected urgency of movement, he lifted his spoon, waved it in the air and swiped it down on the side of a wine bottle. The resonant chime had the desired effect: all eyes round the table lifted and fixed on Jim. He searched the gathered faces, checked everyone was paying attention. Oh God, what next.

‘It is Sam’s eighteenth birthday,’ Jim said. She frowned at him, willed him to shut up; she could do without the benefit of his maudlin proclamations of the totally bloody obvious.

‘Thanks for pointing that out, Dad.’

Liz was trying to catch the eye of the waitress, writing an invisible signature in the air. Good move. Wrap it up. Time to go before Jim had a chance to embarrass her further. Too late.

Jim continued, slurring his words now. ‘I didn’t think I would make it this far. Still, here I am.’ He paused and his eyes swept the corners of the Coney’s Tavern as if he were, indeed, genuinely surprised to find himself there. Or perhaps he was searching for someone, she thought with slight alarm.

‘But I very much doubt whether I’ll live to see Sam’s next birthday.’

Helen tutted. Jess yawned ostentatiously. It wasn’t the first time their father had announced his impending death, although he’d never done it quite so publicly before. Jim dropped the spoon he had been waving like a sorcerer’s wand and let it clatter on the table. Jesus wept. What would her friends make of that performance? She caught them exchanging meaningful glances before Becky carried on talking as if nothing had happened. Sam breathed a sigh of relief. And then she seethed.

‘Dad,’ she said.

He didn’t respond.

‘Dad.’

She said it more forcefully this time. He turned towards her with blank eyes, carelessly knocked a bowl with his hand and sent a tsunami of viscous red soup rolling across the table towards Liz. Jess muttered in Sam’s ear.

‘Well, he might not live to see your next birthday, but I hope he lives to see the bill, because he’s the only person here with a credit card.’

Jess turned away and picked up her conversation with Helen again: the perennial debate about why the best-looking blokes in the room always turned out to be gay.

Jim was still staring without seeing. His mouth moved. He mumbled; indistinguishable sounds swallowed up in the clamour of the tavern. She leaned forward to catch his words.

‘Asgard.’

‘What?’

‘Operation Asgard.’

Sam repeated the words in her head. Operation Asgard; it sounded like one of Jim’s jokes.

‘I’m not sure,’ he continued, ‘I’m not sure… which side I’m on… I don’t even know who I am anymore…’

He really was going for it tonight. Hamming it up. She was about to tell him to stop messing around when she noticed his eyes were damp. She’d never seen the glint of tears before, not in Jim’s eyes. She didn’t want to see him cry, it didn’t seem quite right. Not Jim. She looked away. Looked back. And now all she could see was a half-cut, middle-aged, sweaty face glistening in the heat of the crowd.

‘So what’s Operation Asgard all about then?’ she asked, cheerfully.

He snapped out of his daze, scowled, reached for a napkin, dabbed at his soup-splashed shirt. ‘None of your bloody business.’ He jabbed his finger towards her face. ‘Don’t mention it again.’

She was about to protest, point out that he was the one who had mentioned it in the first place, but he didn’t give her the chance.

‘Where’s Liz gone?’ he demanded. She glanced across the table, clocked that her mother had disappeared, searched the room and shrugged – the toilet perhaps, or outside for some fresh air.

The waitress appeared with the bill, hovered nervously behind Jim. Helen reached over, snatched the paper and shoved it under Jim’s nose.

‘Time to cough up, face the damage.’

He examined the bill belligerently. ‘Do I really have to pay for this crap as well as eat it?’

The waitress flushed. Jess whispered loudly, ‘Cunny’s Tavern’, and started tittering uncontrollably.

‘It’s my birthday treat,’ Sam said. ‘Please just pay the bill so we can go.’

She could hear a wheedling hint of desperation in her voice and caught the beginnings of a sadistic smile playing at the edges of Jim’s mouth.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, hand your card over,’ Helen snapped.

Jim teetered precariously on the verge of explosion, then subsided just before the point of no return. He must have thought better of it, decided to back down. For once.

‘Where do you get it from?’ he asked. He addressed his progeny with a look of injured innocence plastered to his face. ‘Where did you lot learn to behave like this? Uncouth. That’s what you lot are, bloody uncouth.’

Jess leaned over, deftly dipped her hand into his pocket, fished out his wallet, extracted his credit card and handed it to the waitress. The woman walked off and returned a few minutes later with the imprint of his card on a paper slip. Sam shoved the pen into Jim’s hand and guided it toward the signature box.

‘There,’ he said as he handed the paper back to the waitress. ‘Tell your boss he can buy a new microwave and a couple more can-openers with that.’

‘You’re such a berk,’ said Helen. ‘I’d be surprised if you make it to next week, let alone Sam’s next birthday.’ She pushed herself up from the table, stalked away, stabbing the floor with her boot heels as she left.

Sam grabbed one of Jim’s elbows, Jess grabbed the other, hoisted him out of his chair, giving the golfers something to talk about as they dragged him through the bar and outside into the mugginess, her mates bringing up the rear.

‘What was your dad on about? He’s so…’ Becky muttered as she headed towards the bus stop. Sam strained to hear the end of Becky’s sentence but there wasn’t one. It wasn’t like Becky to be stuck for words.

Liz was waiting in the car, gripping the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands. They bundled the comatose heap of Jim into the passenger seat, strapped him in. Liz turned the ignition in silence, reversed and was about to leave the car park when the black bike appeared out of nowhere, burned up the road, cutting across their exit. Heading north. Back to the city.

‘What kind of bike is it then?’ Sam asked Jess.

‘Yamaha XT500. The noise of the engine is the giveaway; single cylinder. You can hear it firing. Pretty powerful bike; built to handle anything – mud, sand. It’s won the Paris–Dakar rally across the Sahara a couple of times.’ Jess narrowed her eyes, icy splinters. ‘I always think you can tell a lot about a bloke from the type of bike he rides.’

Sam was never quite sure where she stood on her sister’s philosophizing about men.

‘So what kind of bloke rides a Yamaha XT500?’

Jess pursed her lips, turned to look through the rear-view window. ‘The kind of bloke who likes a spot of trouble.’

Sam said nothing, events, faces and words churning in her mind, the spectral trunks of silver birch trees slipping past in the dark outside. Dutch. What did Dutch people look like anyway? Weren’t they supposed to be quite tall?

Liz parked the car in the damp garage of their boring forties red-brick and walked off in disgust. Jess and Sam eased Jim’s dead weight out of the car and managed to steer him as far as the kitchen where he aimed for the dog’s bed and tipped himself on top of the hairy black mutt already lying there. George the dog was a recent acquisition; a sly gift from one of his mates, a rejected bomb-sniffer who snarled and lunged at anyone entering or leaving the house with a bag in their hand, making the weekend supermarket run a bit of a nightmare. Jim was the only one who called the dog by his name and repeatedly excused its behaviour on the grounds that the animal had lost his purpose in life, didn’t like being an ordinary family pet. The dog shifted accommodatingly on its bed to allow Jim a bit of space. Jim belched.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jim said from his resting place on the floor.

It wasn’t clear for what or to whom he was apologizing. ‘I won’t do it again,’ he added. Sam sniffed, switched off the light, glanced back as she left. In the darkness of the kitchen, Jim had merged with the dog to become a single, grotesque two-headed beast.

Trudging up the stairs, mulling over the evening’s events: the biker, the self-imposed death sentence, the gobbets of secret information dribbling from the corner of Jim’s mouth. Operation Asgard. Perhaps it wasn’t a joke. Perhaps he was being deadly serious. Perhaps Operation Asgard really was the name of his latest mission. She wondered whether there was anything more than lack of imagination and hubris to the naming of their operations. Some not immediately obvious rationale, an alphabetical ordering perhaps like the naming of hurricanes or a link between title and mission objective. Asgard. It sounded like something out of
Lord of the Rings
. Or was it a name from Norse mythology? That was it. Asgard, home of the Norse gods. They were always raiding the storybooks for their stupid mission names: Merlin, Troy, Neptune. Asgard. She lay down on her bed. Asgard, Asgard, Asgard. She chanted the word into meaninglessness as the room around her rocked and the rising moon cast a gilded path across the floor.

A persistent tap-tapping outside the window woke her somewhere in the dead hours just before dawn. She panicked: an intruder in the garden. She crept across the thin carpet, carefully lifted the dilapidated bamboo blind slats an inch and peeked out. A corpulent thrush was posing just below the sill on the flat, leak-prone extension roof and was waving a half-smashed snail in its beak dementedly as if it were trying to flag an SOS message in her direction. She knocked sharply on the pane.

‘Go and do that somewhere else. You’re giving me a headache.’

It fixed her with its beady yellow-ringed eye and shook its head from side to side once more before flitting off into the apple tree. She sighed, relinquished the idea of sleep and opened the window wide, climbing over the sill and slumping on the roof, back against the wall.

The moon was casting a low-down hazy glow now from the far side of the railway line at the bottom of the garden. She shivered, despite the sweatiness of the dark. Jim’s words flitted through her consciousness, she couldn’t dislodge his voice; he didn’t think he’d live to see her next birthday. She tried to dismiss his pronouncement as the usual drunken rambling but she was plagued by the haunted look in his eyes, the tears she might have seen. He didn’t know which side he was on. He wasn’t even sure who he was anymore. She sat in deep contemplation, listening for early morning bird song, a hint of the dawn chorus. But there was no sound. And in the stillness of the dark she found herself wondering about Jim’s real identity, the true self beneath the cover. She hadn’t really thought about his identity that way before; his history, where he was coming from, what he was really like. She had always taken it as given that his past was no-go territory. Restricted access. Assumed it was part of the secret policeman deal. The family omertà of silence about Jim. She hadn’t really cared; she had her own life to be dealing with. She had grown up casually lying about her father, inventing the details of his history. But now, as she wrapped her arms around her knees, she wondered whether she should know about her own dad, whether she needed to know, whether she could ever know who she was, her own real identity, if she didn’t know about Jim. His job. She had a fleeting vision of herself at Freshers’ Week: the chatter, the clamour, the new faces, the personal questions, the endless need to provide answers. What could she say about her father? She sighed.