Read And the Land Lay Still Online
Authors: James Robertson
And the Land Lay Still (75 page)
Ellen went to the bathroom and was sick. She ran a bath, as hot as she could make it. She took off her clothes. It was like peeling
dead skin. She got in the bath, slowly letting herself down into the scalding water. She took her facecloth and the soap and began to scrub herself. Everywhere. She scrubbed herself raw. She knew what she was doing. When she let the water out it was pink. All the evidence drained away.
The landlady’s bedroom door was firmly shut. Ellen put all the clothes in the washing machine and set it to the hottest temperature. Then she shuffled to her bed.
This was a Wednesday. Every time she thought of him planning it she came close to vomiting. She spent Thursday in bed, nursing her aching body and trying to make the bruises on her face go down. The next day was rubbish-collection day. She took the crumpled bundle of clothes out of the washing machine, put them all in a black bag and dumped it on the pavement.
On the Friday she had a call from London. It was a coincidence. She knew it was a coincidence but it didn’t feel like one. The editor was sorry but he’d changed his mind. Her column wasn’t working. He’d give her a kill-fee for the next two weeks but that was all he could do. The arrangement had always been on an ad hoc basis. He said again that he was sorry. It was good of her to take it so calmly, philosophically. Some people would have gone berserk at him.
On the Saturday her landlady was waiting for her when she emerged from her room. ‘I meant what I said,’ she said, arms across her chest. ‘I want you out this weekend
.
’ She didn’t seem so frightened any more. ‘I’ve nowhere to go,’ Ellen said. ‘What about your boyfriend?’ the woman said. Ellen stared at her, turned and went into the bathroom, locking herself in. ‘I mean it,’ she heard through the frosted glass. ‘I’ll put your stuff on the street.’ Eventually the landlady went out. Ellen waited another ten minutes, then went looking for her diary. It was too shaming, too much of a defeat, to speak to her mother. And she was afraid to go to her because of what Charlie had said. She thought of Adam. Maybe Adam. But she was afraid for him too, because he stayed not far from Borlanslogie. She found Robin Piggott’s number and dialled it. When he picked up she said, ‘Robin, it’s Ellen Imlach. I need your help
.
’ Then she started crying. He said, ‘Don’t go anywhere. I’m on my way.’
He came in a taxi. By the time he arrived she’d managed to get dressed. She saw the shock on his face, the way he resisted asking
what had happened. She said, ‘I have to get out of here,’ and he understood exactly what she meant – not that she had to get out for an hour or two, but permanently. He made the driver wait and they packed a few of her things in a suitcase and he took her back to Joppa. The sun was shining on the sea, she noticed that. ‘You’re safe now,’ he said. He didn’t even know what she was safe from. He didn’t seem to care what danger or insanity he was bringing into his home. He made up a bed for her and ran her a bath and later she slept for hours between the fresh, clean sheet and the duvet. When she woke up she put on a dressing gown that was laid across the foot of the bed and went through to the kitchen, drawn by the smell of rich cooking. Robin said, ‘Here you are.’ ‘Yes, here I am.’ ‘Come and see,’ he said, and took her to a box room, which miraculously contained the rest of her possessions. ‘Me and a mate went and got it all in his car. We’ll sort it out later.’ She pointed at a rather nice mirror in a tilting mahogany frame with two wee drawers underneath. ‘That’s not mine.’ Robin looked a little horrified, then he laughed. ‘It’s not going back.’ She saw the yellow-and-black bruise on her face in the mirror. She started to cry. Tears poured from her and she could not stop them. She was powerless and when Robin went to put his arms around her she said, ‘No, please,’ and shrank against the wall away from him. He said, ‘It’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you.’ She knew he was telling the truth but it didn’t help much. He didn’t touch her.
She couldn’t eat the good food he’d cooked. The smell of it made her feel sick. She went back to bed. He left her alone. She managed to get up and make a cup of tea and he came into the kitchen while she was there and she found herself standing as far away from him as possible. She said, ‘I’m sorry.’ He said, ‘You’ve nothing to be sorry for.’ She said, ‘I’m sorry. It’s not you. It’s me.’ She started to cry again.
This went on for weeks. She never went out. She hardly ever got dressed. Robin went to his work and when he came back she would still be in bed or she’d be sitting in the dressing gown staring out of the window at the grey sea, the blue sea, the black sea. She grew impatient with herself and tried to stir herself to action, but nothing happened. She grew impatient with Robin’s patience. She wanted him to shout, give her an ultimatum, but he put no pressure on her at all. He persuaded her to eat small, easy meals, and that
was the extent of his pressure. He said she could stay as long as she needed to. There was nobody else in the house, it was easily big enough for the two of them. ‘I’ll pay you rent,’ she said, after she’d been there a month. ‘You don’t have to,’ he said. ‘I’m happy that you’re here.’ ‘But I have to pay you rent,’ she said. ‘It’s just that …’ He waited, as he always did. ‘At the moment I don’t have any money.’ Tears again. ‘What am I going to do?’ ‘You don’t have to do anything.’ ‘Aye, I do. I’m pregnant.’
She’d missed two periods by then. She reckoned she must be ten weeks gone or more. It wasn’t the rape, it was before that. Another thing to face up to. Robin said, ‘What do you want to do? Whatever you want, I’ll help you through with it.’ She said, ‘I can’t ask you to do that.’ He said, ‘You’re not asking me, I’m just saying.’ And then, at last, she was able to tell him what had happened. Everything that had happened. Everything. He listened and watched, and they talked through the possibility of involving the police, and the time that had elapsed, and the absence of witnesses, and the almost nil chances of a successful prosecution. ‘Why am I such a coward?’ she said. ‘We can’t leave a man like that out on the loose. Who’s he hurting now?’ Robin said, ‘Let me talk to someone.’ ‘Who?’ she wanted to know. ‘I know a guy in the police.’ ‘No.’ ‘I promise I won’t tell him who you are. Let me ask him about Lennie.’ And at that it came to her like the sound of a bell across still water: she knew in that instant, without a flicker of doubt, after what he had done to her, after the collapse of her life, after the way she’d had to throw herself on the mercy of another man, after all of that she knew with an astonishing certainty what she wanted, and it was the last thing, the last thing …
‘I’m going to keep the baby,’ she said.
Robin looked at her. ‘You are?’
‘Aye. I’m not killing it for that bastard.’
‘Okay,’ Robin said. ‘Then that’s what we’ll do.’
She almost resented the way he said
we
, as if they were in it together. Then she didn’t resent it at all.
‘I know it sounds mad,’ she said. ‘I mean, why would I? I can’t explain it.’
‘You don’t have to,’ he said. ‘Either way, you don’t have to justify yourself.’
She stared at him. She saw him clearly, as if for the first time. Robin Piggott.
‘Who are you?’ she said. ‘Why are you so kind to me?’
He smiled. ‘It’s not kindness,’ he said. ‘I can’t help it. It’s not me, it’s you. I’ll do anything for you.’
§
‘I talked to my policeman friend,’ Robin said, a week or so later. ‘I told him about something that happened to a woman I know, a month ago. He listened very carefully. He shook his head a lot. He thought the procurator fiscal wouldn’t even think it worth preparing a case. So I told him she knew the guy who did it to her was into other bad stuff and maybe they could get him for something else. I gave him Lennie’s name. It’s another force’s area, but he said he’d ask around.’
‘And?’
‘The police in Drumkirk have Charlie Lennie on their wish-list. They’d love to pin something on him. But he’s clever. Clever and scary. There are never any witnesses to anything he does. Or none that are prepared to stand up in court.’
‘What about what happened to me?’
‘It’s what we thought, Ellen. It’s too late and even if it got to court you’d only be a witness. Your word against his. “Why did you take so long to report it? Why did you throw out your clothes, any evidence?” The bruises are gone. No jury would convict him.’
‘That’s it?’
She felt the sense of failure welling up again. But something else too. She was going to have the baby. Lennie didn’t even know it existed. She had something of his and she was keeping it. It was his but it wasn’t his, it never would be. She was going to be strong again.
‘He’ll get what’s coming to him,’ Robin said. ‘I know he will, sooner or later.’
‘Sooner,’ she said, ‘would be my preference.’
§
Out of the smoking ruins that were her self-respect, her emotions and her intellect, a strange image began to emerge. She saw herself
with Charlie, she saw herself with Robin, she saw herself alone on a dark stage, rehearsing a play, an actress delivering lines. In the stalls a director was shouting at her. She hadn’t written the part but she’d learned the lines and now the director wanted to change her way of saying them. The role she was playing was Lady Macbeth. Then it wasn’t her in the role, it was another woman. Distance, perspective. Where was Macbeth? What was Lady Macbeth without Macbeth? What was she with him? Amazon, murderess, temptress, manipulator, schemer, victim, bully, coward, demented sleepwalker? A man had written the lines but the character had come alive, moved beyond the playwright’s grasp and beyond the lines he’d made for her, and now another man was trying to impose his will on her. On the character, on the actress. Suppose she, Ellen, understood all this, understood the politics of the theatre, of the play, of the interaction between the characters and between the players? Suppose she saw this as clearly as anything, and yet she bowed to the director’s will, played Lady Macbeth not by instinct, but in obedience? A strong woman trapped by the play she was in. What would that mean? Who would be to blame? And how many more Lady Macbeths were out there?
She began to sketch out a plan of something, a stage-set for a play she wanted to direct, not perform in.
§
She still woke in the night sometimes, heart racing, and reached out for Robin, and he was always there. ‘You’re all right,’ he’d say. As if he’d been waiting for it. She’d get up to check Kirsty, and when she came back Robin would be asleep again and it would be almost as if nothing had ever happened. But it had. Everything had happened. Kirsty was proof.
§
She thought, there’ll come a day when I seek out Denny again. She’d checked with her mother. What was the story about Denny? Mary said he’d been mixed up with some lunatic political group. They’d been trying to get weapons for a nationalist rebellion or something. Guns and raising money would have appealed to Denny, but Ellen couldn’t imagine him being interested in politics. Anyway,
the scheme had been smashed and the gang members had gone to jail. But Denny was out again in a matter of months. How come? Mary didn’t know. Good behaviour? Maybe he’d done a deal. Anyway, he dodged away between Borlanslogie and Drumkirk, and Mary reckoned he was constitutionally incapable of staying out of trouble.
‘Why are you so interested in Denny Hogg?’
‘I just wondered.’
‘Stay awa frae him. He’s bad news.’
‘Don’t worry, I will.’
She didn’t want anything to do with Denny, not for a long while. But one day she’d like to clear a few things up with him.
Maybe there’d be a day when she felt ready to clear a few things up with Charlie Lennie, but she doubted it.
§
Robin said, ‘If we’re going to be honest, with Kirsty I mean, then we’ll have to have an answer ready for her one day.
You’ll
have to have an answer for her. For when she says, well, if Robin’s not my dad, who is?’
‘Aye,’ she said. ‘I will.’ On the birth certificate she had left the space for the father’s name blank, as she was entitled to do.
‘And what will it be?’
‘It’ll have to be the truth,’ she said. ‘And when she knows and understands it, she’ll have to decide what to do about it.’
After a silence she added, ‘That day fills me with dread. To have to tell her whose child she is. But I won’t lie to her. Oh fuck, Robin. Did I do wrong, bringing her into the world?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You didn’t, and you know you didn’t. Look at her. She’s beautiful. Your beautiful daughter. And she’ll grow up with us, here, so she’ll only ever know love. She’ll be all right. She’ll do the right thing.’
The way he said it, she just about believed him.
Times came when you almost cracked under the weight of the questions. In the night you’d wake in the ruins of an old kirkyard, among the dead and the ghosts and the crying of hoolets, and there was the ink sky and stars in their hundreds above you and the questions would flood in, bombarding you like tiny meteorites. Who were you and what the hell were you doing and what had you done and why had you done it? And there were no answers so the questions kept piling up, bearing down. You’d get up because you couldn’t breathe under them, you’d run stumbling on tree roots, whipped by branches, setting off deer in the shadows. These were desperate hours when you felt utterly alone, and then dawn would slowly diminish the darkness and the blind running panic and again you’d be alone, but now calm and complete. To be apart, to be separate, was to be complete. It was the reason you were how you were. The estranged figures of the past faded in the light.
Times too when you became aware of new people around you as you travelled. You noticed them first on your brief sojourns in the cities. In Edinburgh, bus drivers in turbans. In Glasgow, a group of quiet, brown, wary-looking men drinking tea outside a southside warehouse. Like you they kept themselves apart, or perhaps were kept apart. You passed corner shops, crammed with goods inside and with racks overflowing with fruit and veg outside the door, the women and men who ran them stoically sacrificing their days and nights to the future. Restaurants and takeaways with exotic, unchallenging names – the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall – appeared on the streets of unimpressed small towns. You walked past their steamy windows and inhaled their spicy announcements: here we are. Clusters of black-haired boys and their giggling sisters ran past you to or from schools. You walked on. Things fall into place. Once we were all strangers. Before these folk there were Pakistani pedlars speaking Gaelic to their island customers. Before them were Poles and Italians, before them Irish, before them Jews, before them English, French, Danes, Scots. The swart wreckage of Spanish warships floated in the blood of Lewis, the salt-sprayed vision of Vikings was in the eyes of Angus farmers. ‘My ladye
with the mekle lippis, that landet furth of the last schippis.’ Once were Irish and Picts and Egyptians and Britons and slaves and cave-dwellers and hunters of mammoths and gatherers of clams and berries and once they were not here and once they will not be here again. Only the land will remain. People dug it and cut it and burned it and built on it but the land remained. ‘It is we who must reconcile ourselves to the stones, not the stones to us.’ You picked up the stones and carried them for a while, then you released them. You yourself were released. You were a skeleton walking out of the jungle, you were a man, you were alive, you were dead, you were bones crumbling into the earth. You were a shadow on the land, someone else’s glimpse, their fading memory, then nothing.
§
There was a moment of clarity. You couldn’t remember when or where but you remembered the moment. A man said, What’s your name? A man who was giving you work, or shoes, or a mug of tea. Of course folk asked for your name. Of course you gave it. Jack. That was all they needed. That was all you gave them. But this time the man said, That’s my name too. Jack what?
And it came out of you. MacLaren. Jack MacLaren. You did not say it. It came out of you.
It was a miracle. MacLaren was not dead. He was home, here, now.
It crushed down on you, that miracle. It was a burden. Then it wasn’t. You saw that you could save him. You couldn’t save the others, they were dead. But you could save Jack MacLaren. That was his name. You were both Jack, like the man who asked the question.
He was home. That was all. You never had to say his name again.
Jack said, Fancy a stroll to India? It was a joke. You all laughed, to show it was a joke. But when you stopped laughing you fancied it. He saw that and together you made your plans. Together you and he went, out into the jungle night. You had a week. Then Jack got sick. He said to leave him but you couldn’t leave him. You took him to a village. That was where they found you. They brought you both back but only one of you was still alive.
Jack was too weak. He shouldn’t have gone. He was never going to make it.
You were going to die. That was why they brought you back. Jack was already dead but they brought you back to kill you. To make an example of you. All the other men on parade, three sides of a square. You and Jack in
the middle, in the blaze of the midday sun. You were kneeling, hands bound behind your back, blindfolded, head bowed, neck to the sun. Jack lay beside you, face down. You could just about touch him if you dared. You did not dare. He was dead. You were going to die.
Hours, you lost count of them, hours passed. The sun was a weight on your neck. Your mind was black with pain and fear. You were going to die.
The officer screamed at you. He screamed at the men all around you. This is what happens if you try to escape. You will be brought back. This is what will happen.
You heard the sword leave the scabbard. You felt the blade rest on the back of your neck. You felt blood trickle from where it rested. Then the sword lifted. You were about to die. Your head. You heard the sword in the air. You screamed. You heard the blade take off your head. Then you heard nothing.
You were in a bamboo cage. There was no room to turn, no room to stretch. You could just about crouch, just about curl. They must have folded you smaller than yourself to get you in. There was no room to be a man.
You were in there a long time. You never knew how long. When you came out you weren’t who you had been. You weren’t Jack Gordon. Jack Gordon was away. You were someone else. You didn’t tell them. You didn’t tell anyone.
The sword cut off dead Jack’s head but you thought it was yours it severed. They put the head on a stake for all to see. It was a way of saying what would happen next time. They would do it to you next time. They would do it to anyone.
The fact that you were away. You kept it to yourself.
Now – ever since the man said Jack what? – you knew. Now you understood why you left. You left because you could save Jack. You could do nothing for the others, but you could save Jack.
You told ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ to the hoolets. It was all you could do for Geordie. There was nothing you could do for Sim.
You were never going back. You were free. You were never going back in the cage.
There was no room to be a man.
You told ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ to the hoolets, and they cried back. You knew the meaning of their cries.
You knew the meaning of dogs barking.
You knew the meaning of rain, of wind.
You knew the meaning of stones.
You knew
.
You knew
.
You knew
.
