Everything She Forgot (16 page)

George felt tears prick in his eyes but held his breath and forced them to bide their time. Even during the belting at school he had not cried, which was why Sister Agatha had been so harsh.

Brendan began to circle the table. “Which hand do you write with? Show me.”

George held up his left hand.

“NO!” Brendan shouted so loud that George almost fell off the table. “That's the hand you
did
write with. What's the hand you write with?”

George held up his right hand.

“What's the hand you did write with?” Swallowing, George held up his left.

“What hand is that?”

“Left.”

“Right.”

George bit his lip.

“Show me the hand you write with?”

George took a breath, then held up his right hand.

“Which hand is that?”

“Right.”

“Right.”

“Show me the hand you did write with . . .” George again raised his left hand.

“What hand is that?”

Remembering the lesson from the last time, George answered, “Right?”

“Wrong. What are you, an idiot? You think you have two right hands?”

George swallowed. “Left?”

“Right!”

George began to cry. Brendan put a fist in front of his face. “No son of mine cries.”

George took a deep breath, wiped the tears from his cheeks, and somehow managed to stand up straight.

“Let's start again.”

It continued, until the mince was cold on their plates, small globules of fat hardening on top of it. Richard actually fell asleep at the table, his cheek pressed against the placemat, his lips pursed like a fish and saliva drooling. His mother and sister were both crying silently.

“Show me the hand you write with . . .” George raised his right hand.

“What hand is that?”

“Right.”

“Right.”

“Show me the hand you did write with . . .” George raised his left hand.

“Which hand is that?”

“Left, no right, right . . . no left.”

Finally, his father slapped him. He hit him with the back of his hand and sent him toppling off the table and onto the range, where he burned his newly belted left hand, if only for a second, before he fell to the floor.

As soon as he landed, Richard woke up and dragged his chair out, so that he could see him more clearly, on the floor.

George swallowed, holding his burned hand in the other. His mother was a white-faced statue, arms at her sides. His sister was holding her knife and fork in two hands as if she was bored and only wanted her dinner. His brothers were smirking.

Brendan walked around the table and stood next to George. George sat on the floor, knees up to his chest, looking at the white bubble of skin on his purpled palm. The skin of his newly burned hand was tighter now, as if the palm was pulling the fingers in on itself. From his position on the floor, George could smell the leather of his father's good shoes.

“Get up.”

George got up and stood, arms at his sides, accepting his fate. He wondered if his mother would carry a bowl of bloody water from his room in the morning.

“What you've proved,” said Brendan, hands in his pockets, “is that you're an idiot. You can't write, you can barely read, and you're not ever likely to be able to write because you can't even figure out what hand you're supposed to write with. Right?”

George nodded.

“Right?”

“Right,” George whispered.

“The nun that belted you's an idiot too, if she thinks there's any point in trying to knock some sense into
you
. If I were her, I wouldn't even bother.”

George nodded and turned for the door.

“Where do you think you're going?” said Brendan, taking off his tan jacket and putting it over the back of the chair.

George hesitated.

Brendan sat down, loosened his tie, and downed the rest of his lager. “You'll sit and eat your dinner.”

George turned and took his seat again at the table. He felt a strange itch near his temple and nudged it with his knuckle. When he lowered his hand there was blood. He had knocked his head when he fell on the range, but not noticed because of the burn. George sat with both hands under the table, each of them throbbing and feeling twice their normal size. He wondered how on earth he was supposed to hold a fork, in either his left or his right hand.

Brendan's chair creaked as he sat down. He raised his fork to eat and the family also raised their cutlery. Brendan touched the food to his lips and then threw it down, the fork clattering against his plate.

“What the hell is this? Are we animals, that we eat cold slops now?”

“I'll heat it up,” said George's mother, gathering in the plates, while Brendan narrowed his eyes and lit another cigarette.

T
he cigarette was finished before George wanted it to be. He smoked it down to the butt, then tossed it into the brush. He turned to the car, expecting Moll to be asleep, but
she was tossing and turning in the back seat, curled in a ball alternately on her left and right, then sitting up to smooth his jacket over her.

“Can't you sleep?” he whispered to her, through the car window.

“I'm too cold. I can't get comfy.”

He opened the back door and rearranged everything, so that she was sleeping on half of the traveling rug with the other half pulled over her, and his jacket on top. After a few moments she said she was still cold.

“You'll be fine when we get you some new clothes tomorrow. I'll buy really warm ones.”

“My head's cold too.”

He peered into the car at her; her shorn head was almost bald in places where he had cut too close to the scalp.

“When I go to sleep I have my hot-water bottle,” she said. “My mum wraps it in a towel.”

George sighed, closed the door, and turned away from her. He placed another cigarette between his lips. Even though the windows were shut and the car doors were closed, he was still aware of her tossing and turning as he smoked. The car rocked gently against the base of his spine.

Finally, he opened the back door again.

“What is it?” he said, accidentally exhaling smoke into the car.

“I'm cold.”

“Still cold?”

She nodded, clutching her arms.

George turned his back on her. He pinched the cigarette between forefinger and thumb and took a long drag, before tossing it away. “For Christ's sake,” he said, exhaling into the blue-black pine of the forest.

He leaned into the car, whipped the traveling rug from her, then climbed into the back beside her.

Her eyes were large shiny pebbles. Each time he looked at her, George could not fail to be disconcerted by her squint eye. It was as if she could see all sides of him, as if he were transparent.

He took the rug and wrapped it around her shoulders.

“C'm'ere,” he said, pulling her into him.

At first she was just leaning against him, but after a while she tired and shifted, so that he was cradling her, swaddled in her traveling rug, like a baby. “Are you warm now?” he whispered to her, trying not to breathe in her face because he knew he would smell of cigarettes. Briefly, he remembered his mother kissing him good night, with the smell of the Woodbines on her lips and in her hair, and her soft whispered stories of a cottage by the sea.

“Warm,” she replied.

He could feel the weight of her in his arms. It was a precious weight. He pulled her tighter into him.

“Will you read me a story?”

“What do you mean?”

“My mum always reads me a story before I go to sleep.”

“We don't have any storybooks. I can get you some tomorrow.”

“Just read anything to me, even the paper.”

“I don't have a paper.”

“There's one on the front seat.”

It was true. George had bought it for the football scores.

“Who reads the newspaper as a bedtime story?”

“We have nothing else.”

“I could tell you a story . . .”

“OK.”

George hugged her tighter. The closeness with her resolved something within him, but he was not sure where or why.

“Once upon a time, there was a . . . little girl and she went to school one day . . .”

“I don't want to hear that story.”

“What d'ya mean?”

“That's real, that's me . . . I want a story.”

“A story . . .” George heaved a sigh. “Once upon a time, there were three bears. There was a little girl bear and she . . .”

Moll sat back in his arms to look up into his face, so that he felt the weight of her.

“You're rubbish at stories. Just read the paper. I like being read to. It makes me go to sleep.”

“I could sing to you.”

“I like to be read to. Read the paper.”

Holding her in his left arm, George reached into the front seat to pick up the paper. It was the
Daily Record
.

He settled into the back again, with Moll cuddled into him. He chose an article on page six with a picture of a polar bear. He folded the paper over and began to read:

“The polar bear at Glasgow zoo is very unhappy. The keepers have stopped giving him Irn-Bru on the grounds that it is turning his fur orange, but now campaigners say the bear has a right to choose his own beverage . . .”

Moll threw back her head and laughed and he rocked in the back seat with her. Her eyes were turning coins of mirth and her long limbs moved against his as she giggled. George saw again the sheer beauty of her: his own daughter.

“Stop it,” Moll said. “It doesn't say that. Read the real thing.”

“How do you know what it says?” George asked her, tilting her downward so he was looking right into her face.

“Because I can read it,” she said, still giggling at him. George took a deep breath.

Years since he had ever admitted it to anyone. “I can't,” he said, tossing the newspaper onto the floor, then hugging her close.

“What do you mean?” She was looking up into his face.

“I can't read.”

CHAPTER 15

I
T WAS STILL DARK, BUT IT WAS, FINALLY,
M
ONDAY
MORNING.

Angus slipped his bare feet into his Wellington boots, feeling them like cold, hard porridge against his toes. He was in his pajamas. He was planning on going back to bed after he had seen to Maisie.

With the passing of the Sabbath, Angus now crept out to the barn where Maisie had calved, to check on her. His legs felt cold in his cotton pajamas and his Wellingtons stuck in the mud. The day was just opening its eyelid. The Sabbath had passed and now he could tend to her.

On his way to the barn, Angus noticed that the thistles were blooming. They glowed white instead of purple in the waning moonlight. He slowed his pace as he approached, his mouth dry and his eyes wide.

He didn't care about the calf, he realized. The most important thing to him was Maisie. He was well prepared for the calf to be dead.

By the time he reached the barn door, his Wellingtons were dirty to the ankles with mud. Heavy rain had fallen while he was in Glasgow, softening the ground.

Everything about the slowly opening day was too clean, and made him nervous: the fresh tilth of the soil, the alertness of the thistles, the neat stack of feed by the barn door. Angus's head hurt. There was the brain-harrowing chirp of songbirds against the death crash of the sea.

The door of the barn creaked as Angus opened it. Before he entered, two fat flies flew in his face. He swatted them away. As he stepped inside, he inhaled the desperate smell of stagnation, of abortive hope.

Maisie was spread across the rank, bloodied straw of the barn, her tongue hanging out, white beads of evaporated sweat on her flank, and a dead, unbirthed calf between her haunches. The rear end of the calf was visible: a slick black tumor, but Maisie looked as she always had: pink-nosed and smiling, save from the protuberance of her tongue and the strange glaze of her eyes, like unset jam.

Angus left the barn and walked straight to the house, the back of his hand over his mouth. He vomited at the front steps, then almost immediately pushed it away with the yard brush and scoured it with bleach. Inside, he called the vet with the acid taste of vomit in his mouth, leaving a message asking that he come to remove animal corpses from the farm.

Angus stepped back inside the barn. He put a hand to Maisie's rear, as if preparing to do what he would have done: slide his hand inside and push the calf to turn it. He wanted to do it. He wanted to help her, but he knew that Maisie was dead and the calf was dead.

Instead, Angus knelt, smoothed a hand over Maisie's flank and took her tail in the other. He whispered words of prayer: “God of hope, we thank you that not even death can separate us from your love . . .”

When his prayer was finished, Angus staggered outside, his eyes wet. Day had not yet broken but dew had formed on blades of grass, the skies were loud with birdsong, and an army of flies was now forming at the barn door.

Angus went back inside the house, washed his hands and forearms with disinfectant, then went upstairs. Hazel was asleep: curled as a cashew nut. The children's alarms were set for six.

It was only four twenty-two in the morning when Angus entered his study. He felt no tiredness, only immense sorrow for Maisie. It seeped into him, like the cold on a wet night, right into his bones.

“You have to get on with it,” Angus said to himself, out loud.

He rolled a fresh piece of paper into his typewriter.

It was all he had been thinking of since he returned from Glasgow. He hadn't wanted Maisie to die but she had, and now that she was dead Angus felt sharper, angrier, ready to write his story: the story of George McLaughlin stealing Molly Henderson from Kathleen, his former lover and the mother of his child. It was like no other story Angus had tried to write. But he saw it clearly and he was willing to report it truthfully, as he saw fit.

Pushing the image of Maisie's death-frozen muzzle out of his mind, he began to type. He typed angrily. Angus was often angry, and there were many targets for his anger, but today his anger was clearly focused on one person: George McLaughlin.

George was a depraved criminal, who had kidnapped a young girl for God knows what perverse purpose. George was part of a Glasgow crime family that was familiar with torture, extortion, and murder. George was the tallest in the family: six feet three and big-built and Angus could imagine that he
used his size to intimidate others, to help him to carry out acts of violence. It was George McLaughlin who had caused Angus to take a trip to Glasgow to discover the sinister links to the Thurso abduction, coming home too late to save his heifer.

It was therefore possible to consider that George McLaughlin
had caused
Maisie's death, and Angus didn't know how long it would be before he hurt the young girl who was now in his charge, if she was not already dead, as Angus well expected.

He typed faster than he knew he was capable of typing: he could only type with his forefingers but he generated a sound worthy of a seasoned touch-typist. He referenced the court picture he had found in Glasgow, with the McLaughlins standing on the steps of the High Court after Peter's acquittal, and also referenced Brendan and Peter's criminal convictions. He had not found any note of George's criminal convictions, but he was sure that George was sly and evasive of the law, and that his clean record belied the gravity of his crimes.

Before the children's alarms sounded and before Hazel got up to make their porridge, Angus left the house. He drove into Wick and placed his newly written article on his editor's desk with a note:
Exclusive from Angus Campbell. This HAS TO BE in tomorrow's paper. The nationals will be all over it.

A
ngus returned to the farm just in time to meet the vet, who arrived in his Land Rover, wearing dungarees and long green boots. They shook hands and Angus led him out to the barn.

The barn door was now swarming with flies, and inside, Maisie's corpse had begun to smell. The barn was well ventilated, but the scent of rotting flesh was heavy in the air.

When he saw the sight, the vet, Branx Conlan, a young man with an old man's face, shook his head.

“It's been a while,” said Branx, stepping forward to touch Maisie's corpse. “I'd say she's been dead thirty-odd hours or so—rigor mortis is starting to wear off. What happened? Were you all away? You were so anxious about being here for her . . .”

“I know,” said Angus, pinching the corners of his eyes, to stave off tears. “I was in Glasgow. I hoped to make it back in time. It was only my wife and she didn't know what to do. She thought Maisie would be able to do it by herself, and just left her to it.”

“Did she not think to call me?”

“If Hazel thought of anything, it would be a miracle,” said Angus, forgetting himself.

Branx Conlan was a quiet man, and he was a heathen. When he had vaccinated Maisie he had told Angus, “I've been an atheist as long as I can remember, but some days I envy you believers. I envy your certainty.”

Angus had said nothing, but had privately sneered at him. There was no need to envy, because he had it in his power to believe!

Branx went back and forth to the van, getting animal body bags and laying out chemicals in the barn. He put on a plastic suit as he waited for his assistant.

“Is Maisie that dangerous?” Angus asked.

“It's just a precaution. She's passing out of rigor mortis, so decomposition is setting in, and the added aspect of labor and the trauma of birth . . .”

Mortis. Labor. Birth.

Again, Angus felt the horror and sickness of grief.

He wanted to ask that she be treated carefully, respectfully,
but as soon as Branx's assistant arrived, Maisie was hauled into the body bag and lifted by crane onto Branx's truck. She was lifted like butcher's meat, by the hook, the calf still inside her. Angus wondered about her burial, and if there would be one, and if the calf would be buried inside her.

For a moment, as the midday sun warmed the skin on his brow and the last whiff of Maisie left the farm, Angus thought of Kathleen. As he watched the truck pull away, and the tremor of the black body bag, Angus wondered what Kathleen would think when she read his newspaper article the next morning.