Just coming into view now is the well. Marithe eyes it, as you might a sleeping enemy. Her father took some planks from the barn – her mother had been annoyed when she saw, said she had been saving them for something – and hammered them down over the wet, mossy mouth. Marithe thinks she can remember what the well looked like before, when it used to open, when the cover used to lift off. Someone – was it Ari, her father, her mother? – had lifted her so she could see down, down, down, a tunnel into the earth and there, at the bottom, was a distant, watery girl, gazing back up at her.
It must have been Ari who lifted her. Marithe has a memory of her father sprinting out of the house towards them, shouting something, snatching off his reading glasses and chopping them down through the air. No, he was saying, no, get away from there, put her down, and Ari saying, s-s-s-sorry, s-s-sorrysorry.
Marithe bends at the knees, selects a stone from the path and hurls it towards the covered well. Its arc, she sees, as soon as it leaves her hand, is all wrong. Too high, too short. It falls between her and the well. Marithe sighs.
The words une autre femme slide unbidden through her head. She turns her head, first one way then the other, almost as if she expects someone near her to have spoken them aloud. But she is alone. She mouths the words silently, making them into one continuous sound, then separating them into three. Une autre femme.
She bends and tries another stone, then another, but both of them veer off to the side and she hurls a handful, wildly, up into the air, without even bothering to see where they land.
She runs. Around the house, past the aspens, past the fairy den, past the barn, where she catches a glimpse of her mother’s feet in workboots, high up on the tiles, the leather toolbelt that Marithe covets and is sometimes allowed to touch.
She arrives at the door of the henhouse, breathless and hot. The hens are crowding and groaning at the wire, turning upon her their beaded, glistening eyes. They have a hen each, she and Ari and Calvin. Marithe’s is tawny, with a red comb and yellow feet, Calvin’s black and Ari’s white.
She unlatches the door and scatters the feed on the ground. Calvin’s is first out, clawed feet held fastidiously high, a throaty tutting coming from the glossy throat, then hers. At the sight of Ari’s white hen hesitating, scratching, then plucking at the feed, the fire that has been burning away inside Marithe seems to flare and crackle.
‘No,’ she says, to the white hen. ‘No, you don’t.’
She picks up the hen, her fingers closing about the breast feathers, and the ugliness of what she is about to do seems only to fuel the fire. The frail heartbeat flutters under her hands.
She flings the hen back into the henhouse and slams the door. The hen stumbles on contact with the ground, the soft curve of its breast pitching into the dust, but it rights itself and struts in a circle, letting out a mournful croon.
Marithe watches the remaining two hens eating the feed. She cannot look at Ari’s hen. She cannot. The sight of it falling like that into the dirt, its little legs folding: her fault, all her fault. And Ari had asked her to look after the hen while he was away. Her, not their mother, not their father.
The wail seems to come from somewhere else. It isn’t her making that noise, no. It must be some creature somewhere, in pain, in grief. All Marithe knows is that she is stumbling in her mismatched wellingtons away from the henhouse, towards the trees, and the grey scarves have unravelled from the mountains and the aspens are letting fall a shower of yellowing leaves and her mother is there. Her mother is there. She is catching Marithe in her arms and Marithe is being lifted off the ground and pressed into her mother’s neck, her mother’s heavy rope of hair. What happened, her mother is asking, are you hurt, did you fall, show me, show me where it hurts.
‘I was … I was horrible,’ Marithe sobs into her mother’s sweater.
‘You were horrible?’
‘To –’ she can barely say the name: oh, how awful, the way the bird stumbled like that ‘– to – to Iceberg.’
‘To who?’
‘Iceberg.’
Her mother sits down on the wall, with Marithe on her knee, her arms clasped about her in a circle. Marithe presses her face into the interlocked wool of her mother’s sleeve.
‘What did you do?’ her mother asks.
‘I – I –’ even to say it is too dreadful ‘– I didn’t let her eat. I shut her back in the henhouse.’
Her mother takes her face in both hands and tilts it up. She regards Marithe for a long moment, and when she does this, Marithe knows she is looking down, right to the bottom of her, that her mother can see all of her and thinks it will be OK.
‘When is he coming back?’ Marithe asks.
Her mother continues to look into her eyes. ‘When is who coming back?’
Marithe glances away, at the gravel of the path, at the tools slotted into her mother’s toolbelt. She picks at a loose thread in her mother’s cuff. ‘Ari,’ she says.
‘Half-term,’ her mother says. ‘Three weeks from now. Twenty-one sleeps. So, not too long to wait.’ She stands and puts Marithe back on her feet.
‘Would you like to go and let Iceberg out?’
Marithe nods. She takes several steps towards the henhouse, then turns.
Her mother is still there, watching her, hands resting on her tools. She smiles at her and nods, once, in encouragement, in acceptance.
‘What is a self-destructive streak and why is another woman a bad thing?’ Marithe asks.
Her mother’s face becomes puzzled. ‘What was that?’
‘Another woman. Why is another woman a bad thing?’ Marithe sees that her mother still looks confused so she says it in French as well. ‘Une autre femme.’
‘What makes you ask that?’
‘Pascaline was saying it. To Lucas.’
Without a word, her mother turns and sets off towards the house. ‘Maman?’ she yells. ‘Maman! Qu’est-ce que tu racontes?’ And now the secret language is shouted and fast, and Marithe cannot grasp it: it’s too slippery, too eel-like, it spools past at a terrific rate. Lucas is coming out of the back door after his mother and the three of them stand in the middle of the lawn, Pascaline and Claudette facing one another, Lucas trying to get in between.
Marithe turns away from them and goes slowly towards the henhouse where Iceberg is waiting, her head cocked to one side, her moist black eye full only of trust, of faith, of certainty.
Severed Heads and Chemically Preserved Grouse
Todd, the Scottish Borders, 1986
A wedding.
The bride and groom are young, newly graduated, and have the kind of open good looks that will last them a few more decades. They will be successful; they will have good-looking children; their house will have white floors, cabinets of glassware and bright toys in baskets. Their walls will display scenes from this day: their former selves, posing beside a lake, in an artful line with their families, in the centre of their group of friends. The bride will wish, in years to come, that she hadn’t listened to her sister in the matter of eyeshadow colour. Did her sister deliberately derail her appearance on this, the most important day of her life, by suggesting the moss green, which drained all hue from her complexion? Or was it an accident? The groom will rarely look at the photographs and, when he does, will be struck most by how many of the guests – considered, at the time, to be crucial presences in his life – he no longer sees.
What neither of them can know, looking at these photos of people dressed in their best, holding themselves together, presenting their faces and smiles to the camera, is how much their wedding, coming so soon after graduation, so early in their twenties, set off ripples of paranoia and fear among their peers.
Is this how it will be now? the lines of younger guests in the photograph are thinking, as they smile and pose, as they hold up their champagne glasses to the camera. Are people starting to get married? Have they really reached that age? Are they to attend weddings at weekends? Is this the start of it all? A stran
ge parade of ceremonies, rehearsal dinners, line-ups, after-parties, their friends unrecognisable in stiff, elaborate dresses and immovable hairdos. The unfathomable lists of required items. What are fish forks and butter knives and occasional vases, and why do their friends need them, and why must they buy them in exchange for attending this peculiar event?
The bride’s father does something important in a bank (no one is entirely clear on this point) and the wedding is taking place in the borders of Scotland, a locale the majority of the guests have never visited. There is, here, a turreted, moated country house, surrounded by woods so dense and green they have a vaguely menacing, fairy-tale air, crowding in where the manicured lawns of the house stop. One would do well not to wander into them, not to stray from the paths, not to follow music you might hear from somewhere among the trees.
Peacocks pick their way over the gravelled drive and scream at their reflections in the parked cars. It is quite a lot colder than most of the non-Scottish guests – that is to say, the younger crowd, the couple’s friends – would have expected for June. The women, no more than girls, shiver in the mist that seems to roll all day long off the loch, in through the forests, their flesh goosebumped under their thin, short dresses, their ankles mauve above their strapped heels. The ones who thought to bring shawls or jackets clutch the fabric about themselves. The men cup their cigarettes in their hands, as if for warmth, shoulders raised inside the inadequate cloth of their hired suits.
They have travelled up, in groups, the previous night, from London and the south, some, the more organised ones, by train, the others in an assortment of cars, borrowed mostly from friends or siblings. They stopped, noisily, at various places on the way: York, then an unsuspecting village in Northumberland, at Holy Island, where they disembarked from their vehicles and waded off the causeway into the encroaching tide. They paused at service stations to buy crisps and chocolate, magazines and deodorant, cigarettes and contraceptives. They behaved, every one of them, in all of these places, in a manner so raucous it verged on shrill, so uninhibited it suggested hysteria. Someone got hold of a can of shaving foam and covered another’s car in white froth. The men picked up the women and they had a piggyback race to the toilets. A felt-pen was acquired from somewhere and anyone sleeping was decorated with a black moustache.
They are, all of them, unused to the ceremony they are facing. They are all keen to display – to each other, to themselves, to the world in general – their disregard, their reluctance, the lack of store they set by such a public commitment. They all want to say: we are too young for this, we will never come to this, not us, not ever. And yet, and yet, of course, most of them will.
Todd Denham, who has spent most of the night awake, on driving duty, at the wheel of a borrowed and antediluvian Nissan, wriggles his feet further into the bearskin rug and takes a gulp of his drink. The infernal circus of photographs is over for the guests and they have been allowed back inside, where they are being plied with drink and snacks, to cover for the absence of the bride and groom, who have been whisked away by said photographer to pose beside a stone lion or the small loch or in some other equally demented situation.
Inside, the place is all corniced ceilings, cloakrooms with deep basins, polished wood bars that reek of peaty whisky, stone corridors, trays of tiny foodstuffs arranged as daring acts of balance: dill on top of salmon on top of crème fraîche on top of velouté on top of caviar on top of oatcake. It is staffed by people dressed in tartan: the men in kilts, the women in sashes, which, to Todd, who has worked in a fair number of hotels himself, look restrictive and impractical for catering. He starts to count the number of times he sees a female member of staff hoick her tartan sash back to its rightful place on her shoulder. Just take the damn thing off, he wants to whisper to the one nearest him – a lovely thing of around fifteen with a low hairline and an oval face, a schoolgirl, no doubt, doing a weekend job for extra money. No one here will give a monkey’s.
As if sensing his stare, the girl blushes, a tide of red rising from the neckline of her blouse, past her jaw and into the roots of her widow’s peak. She is conscientiously not looking at him, he sees. The tray she is holding starts to wobble. He wonders, for a moment, what she does with the money she earns. Goes up to Glasgow after school on a Friday to buy – what? Nail varnish, cheap perfume, clothing of which her nice country mother wouldn’t approve, magazines that the teachers at her probably private school would deplore, rakish shoes, coloured nylon underwear. What do teenage girls do with their money?
Todd takes a canapé from her tray without registering what it is and drops it into his mouth, still musing about the girl. He wants her to look at him, just once, just to prove he exists. He has no sexual interest in her – he’s twenty-four, for God’s sake, and even when he was fifteen he didn’t want to sleep with fifteen-year-olds – but there’s something about her stolid poise, her determined refusal of him that makes him feel dangerously insubstantial, inconsequential. No one has spoken to him for a while, here in this room, which is teeming with conversation: people chatting, exclaiming, communicating. Look at me, he wills, as he explores the canapé with his tongue – it is damp-tasting, a hint of cheese, a dash of fish. Something herby. Revolting. He has to swallow hard to stop himself gagging.
She doesn’t look but whisks away her tray and walks off towards a group of middle-aged women, who are engaged in a mass exclaim over the bride’s shoes.
Todd swallows the remains of the canapé, rinses his mouth with wine, then looks about the room to see what he can do next. He sees the bride stick her head around a door and gesture frantically to one of her bridesmaids, who assumes an expression of bewildered fear. He sees the photographer, with increasing sweaty desperation, trying to get a small boy in some hideous sailor get-up to stand next to the bride’s mother. He sees, through the window, three or four post-graduate students, like himself, cavorting on a small patch of lawn, removing their shoes and throwing them at each other. He sees his flatmate, Suki, standing in the doorway, blowing smoke over her shoulder. He sees that no one is looking at him: not a single person.
Todd feels the familiar idea grip him. The dare, the risk, the chutzpah of it. His heart trips into a faster rhythm and his hand finds its way into an inner pocket of his jacket and begins to stray through the contents. A small bottle with a safety cap, its sides invitingly cool but no good in this one-handed instance. A foil blister pack, half gone, of – something? He doesn’t recall. Two, no, three, torpedo-shaped free floaters, one with an elastic give to its surface, the others powdery. A single round pill, possibly Valium, and three paper tabs.
Todd takes drugs at times like this not so much because of the tidal push and pull of the chemical craving, although there is that, but because he likes to test if he can. If he can pull it off. He gets almost as much of a kick from seeing if he can get away with it as he does from the drug itself. Can he stand in a room of an appallingly expensive, stupendously ridiculous charade of a party, full of self-satisfied people his parents’ age – doctors, lawyers, military men, auctioneers – and pop some pharmaceutical products without one of them having the faintest inkling what he is up to?
He opts for the single round pill. Maybe Valium, maybe something else. An upper, a downer, Todd doesn’t know. His hand moves in a swift swoop to his mouth; the hard casing fits beautifully into the arch of his palate. Then he swallows and it’s gone.
Undetected! Once again! Todd bares his teeth in triumph, exhaling loudly. A woman in a turquoise suit and matching hat turns and looks at him with concern and veiled fear, then away.
Todd doesn’t like to think of what he does as ‘dealing’. He has a particular dislike of that word. His cousin ‘deals’, operating out of a flat in Leeds, with a client list, a team of runners, an exclusive phone line, the works. What Todd does is small fry, by comparison. He hooks up friends. He sources particular demands, mainly from his cousin, who is always happy to help. He distributes – gently, he likes to think, car
efully, selectively – throughout the university. He is known to certain people; he gets calls from friends of friends, needing something for a party or a rave or a weekend away. He supplements his paltry grant with the resulting cash: he pays his rent, he buys winter shoes, he staves off his library fines, he feeds the electricity meter, he goes to the cash-and-carry for large bags of rice, tins of beans, packets of noodles. Survival stuff, really. No flash cars and clothes for him.
Unlike his cousin, he doesn’t look like a dealer. And he has the perfect cover: he is an academic, a post-grad, a supervisor, an expert in fictive non-fiction. He looks like what he is: a person on the verge of genteel poverty, a person who spends too much time indoors, bent over books, a person much wedded to libraries. He does not, by any stretch of the imagination, look like a drug-dealer.
He also operates under the strictest of rules. No drugs during the week: Saturday nights and special occasions only. He’s not an idiot. He knows his brain is his only asset, his only means of long-term employment, and he intends to keep it in good working order. Everyone needs a place to think, as Daniel is always saying.
He feels a jab at his back, and a voice close to his ear says, ‘I saw that.’
Suki? Todd looks over to where she had been a minute ago and the place by the door is vacant.
‘Saw what?’ he says, without looking round.
‘Give me one,’ she says, jabbing him again with something sharper than one ought to be carrying at a wedding.
‘One what?’
‘Whatever it is you’re having.’
He turns. Suki is behind him and the sharp object turns out to be the corner of her clutch-bag. He shrugs at her and grins. ‘Don’t have any more.’
‘Liar.’
‘I don’t. Honest.’
‘Liar!’ she hisses, stamping her foot.
‘But if you’d like to make a different withdrawal from the Todd Denham pharmacopoeia, you’re more than welcome to step into my office.’