Rise (22 page)

From across the bed, Hannah nods. ‘Bit hot,’ she mouths. She comes back to sit on the chair beside Michael. ‘Need to get you a bed-bath, young man.’

‘Nnng-yae.’

‘Yes, way.’

Euan fires the TV volume even louder. Ross has returned to the foot of the bed, where he is lassoing his bare foot with his sock.

‘Do you want to head now?’ she says to Michael. ‘I’ll stay with him for a bit.’

The muscle in his jaw starts twitching.

‘So, this stone-chest thing. Are you going to use that in the book?’

‘Definitely. It held human remains, the professor said. I mean, you know how I said before, that it was coming out too worthy?’

‘Hmm.’ No, he thinks sadly. You must have said that to someone else.

‘Well, with this whole school thing, each chapter having a topic for discussion, and classwork and blah?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Every sentence just about, when I was writing, I was thinking . . . ooh what topic can we take from this? Teenage pregnancy, displaced peoples, blah blah. Then I went the other way, focusing too much on the emotions and it all went a bit . . . I’m forgetting about the story, you know? Just letting it come as it comes. I can worry about themes and stuff afterwards.’

‘Yes.’

Her left knee is jiggling, she is excited. It is almost touching his, there, there, it did touch, is touching.

‘But when I saw the cist—’

‘Kissed?’ He freezes.

‘It’s what they call the stone-box thingy. Right off, I had this idea. At first, I thought she might lose her . . .’ Hannah glances at her boys. ‘I thought someone might die.’

Euan shifts on his pillows. He lifts his hand to rub at his collar, and the opaque cord of his drip shivers all the way back to the plastic bag. It swings on its hook. Michael should be used to it by now. Writers are vampires. There’s a tinny clink as the hook rattles off its T-bar. He stares at the quietly plopping liquid. Saline and sugar. Milkshakes are all very well, but it is this that is feeding his boy.

‘Here, son. D’you want another wee drink?’

Euan shakes his head. His eyes half-shut. Glazed.

‘But then I thought: how about a murder?’ continues Hannah. ‘I think I’m going to make her kill someone.’

‘Is that not a bit extreme? For kids, I mean.’

‘We’re talking teenagers here. You’ve no idea the sort of stuff kids read nowadays, Michael. Not everyone goes to Bible Class when they’re sixteen.’ She nudges him. It’s a soft nudge, encouraging him to nudge back. ‘Come on. You and Ross go up the road. You could maybe give old Donald John a bell, eh? Ask him about the land deal.’

‘I’ll need to think how I’m going to approach it.’

‘Fair enough. But you will ask, though?’

‘I promise.’

‘When?’

‘Soon.’ There is no point in telling her about their run-in today. Which Donald John would call ‘motivational agenda-setting’.

‘Do you not want to get up the road anyway? Check on Justine?’

Hannah wants to write, he knows she does. Knows that hunger, radiating in the unstill leg. The pitch of her voice, her too-wide eyes. And she wants rid of him.

‘Why would I want to check on Justine?’

She shrugs. ‘I don’t know. We still haven’t got any references for her. D’you think you could chase them up? Or get me a phone number even, and I’ll call Myra myself.’

‘OK, OK. I’ll do it. D’you not trust me?’

Trusst
.

‘Yeah. Of course. But I mean . . . she’s wandering about our house unsupervised. I think she’s been using my perfume . . .’

He bursts out laughing. ‘Oh Hannah.’

‘You’re hardly there. How would you know anyway?’

‘Look. Do you want her to go?’ He calls her bluff. ‘I’m sure we could manage . . .’

‘Och . . . just on you guys go home, eh? Let me sit with Euan a while.’ Hannah looks slyly at Ross. ‘I could bring chips in for tea . . .’

‘But we had chips already today. With our Burger King.’

‘Oh Jesus. Well, I don’t know then.’ She reaches for her eldest son’s hand. ‘Stop and get a bloody cabbage if you want. I was only saying.’

‘We’ll have the casserole,’ says Michael. ‘The one Miss Campbell brought. I froze it.’

‘No but Justi made us hotchpotch, Mummy. Remember?’

He hears her mutter ‘Oh for Godsake’ as she takes Euan’s hand.

And there’s the light, extinguished. Shut your eyes.
Ssh
. Shut your hand over Ross’s wriggling toes, as you tug him, get his shoes on, and your head splits with the downward movement. Shut out this pounding in your head, the anger, the dizziness. Kiss your eldest boy goodbye, shut the door.

The Ghost slides his fingers along the hairs of Michael’s neck. He sees new, red light round the glowing buttons of the lift. Dabbles through the light, pressing buttons like his life depends on it. He is going to visit Ailsa; he’s asked one of the nurses about getting her in here for respite, and he’s a community council meeting to prepare for and he needs to go to Furrow to see a man about a roof.

‘Do you trusst her? There? Now? When she tells you nothing?’

‘I thought you’d gone,’ he whispers.

Ross frowns. ‘No. I am here, Daddy.’ Squeezing his fingers. ‘Silly.’ The lift comes, they get in.

‘Hurts, doesn’t it?’

Michael can see nothing save the frenzied glow. Red light, a squeezing hand. The voice in his ear, inside it.

‘Doesn’t it? Eh? I’m asking you a question.’

‘I don’t know.’

They travel downwards. No one speaking. The red glow abates, melts to a fanciful haze. Michael is compressing his throat. With his fist? It might be, or perhaps he’s only swallowing, but his other hand is firm in Ross’s. They get to the bottom. Doors open. Out.

‘Daddy. Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine, son.’ Michael crouches, grips Ross by the shoulders. ‘Listen, son. Your daddy’s feeling a wee bit funny, but I’m going to be absolutely fine, OK?’

Chubby fingers patting his face. ‘I know.’

Michael seizes the fingers, draws them to his mouth, so he can cover them with kisses, scratchy kisses – has he shaved today? It feels like blade-cuts, all across his lips.

‘It’s the silence that hurts, isn’t it?’ says the voice in his ear.

‘Please.’

‘We creep up to the silence. Fill it with our neuroses, our demands. Our pointless explanations,’ the tongue tickles, although Michael is nowhere near a face; he is all inside his booming head. ‘You left your wife in a vacuum. Didn’t you? Your wife and your weans. All the things I haven’t got.’

‘Daddy! You are hurting.’ He can hear Ross, distant.

With an effort that is bigger, far bigger than he is, Michael throws off the pain, which is looping round his neck. It feels like a cat’s tongue, all rough and urgent. This insubstantial air. With an even greater effort, he opens his eyes. Laughs. There is nothing there.

There is Ross’s hand in his. ‘Daddy?’

‘It’s fine, pet. Daddy’s fine. Let’s go get those chips. We’ll get some for Justine too, yeah?’

‘Aah,’ says the voice, as, head unsteady, Michael strides towards his car. ‘J-ust. Rhymes with lust. Just in case, just in time? Just? Not. Fair.’

‘But it’s not teatime. Dad. I need to go to nursery now.’

Michael straps Ross in to his car seat. ‘You do not exist.’ Hissed from the side of his mouth. Ross stares frantically ahead. His fingers are tight and troubled.

The Ghost unrolls like smoke, passes into a shape of air, or fumes from the hospital incinerator. ‘They burn babies in there, you know.’

Michael opens the driver’s door. He can’t choose which of the wavery seatbelts to grab. ‘I am begging you. Please. Leave me alone.’

‘No can do.’ The Ghost touches him lightly on his head. ‘I didny ask for this either, chief.’ He melts in the smoke, is waving now, from the top of the roof.

‘Bye now. Bah-byee.’

Michael starts the engine, and a CD of Disney tunes comes on.

Chapter Fourteen

‘
Go through a leafy tunnel,’ the ‘Crannogs and Kings’ leaflet tells Justine. The words are exactly right. A tree-tunnel. Oaks and rhodies and cellophane sky, flashing diamonds of light. As she moves forwards, the intermittent sun catches shadow, and leftover threads of raindrops. Everything’s polished and crackling: the gloss of evergreen, the buds, the lulling sun. It glistens, almost, and she has this sensation of standing on a moving pavement, where she is still and it’s all around which glides and flickers, moving on and catching her up, in continuous fluid lines. She is rushing in an artery. And then, she’s out of the trees, returned to the real world, where no time has passed at all and it is an ordinary afternoon.

She can see scattered tools, a discarded pencil. Soft footprints leading out. The archaeologists must be in the pub, because if Mhairi’s closed the café, there’s nowhere else to go in downtown Kilmacarra. Unless they’re in that wee tent?

‘Hello?’

No reply. Justine’s nose is bothering her. She has always taken a cist to be a kind of warty growth. Her temper’s bothering her and all. She is vivid with anger, actually. That Hannah is a bitch. All:
Website? Ooh. Leaflets?
Toss of golden locks.
Och, that’s daft, you silly girl.

Total bitch. Simpering and greeting, fucking playing her – one of Charlie’s favourite phrases.
Think you can fucking play me, ya prick?
Usually at the moment before he lashes out. She takes off her shoes and socks. Man, it’s cold. Justine has never been inside a stone circle before, but it feels as if you should go barefoot. What if Hannah had been going to say about the leaflets? She could of forgot; all that hassle with the polis could have made her forget. Maybe she’ll remember, and thank Justine this evening. Maybe she should be flattered Hannah’s adopted her idea. Aye, and maybe Charlie Boy’s wishing she’d taken even more of his hard-grafted cash, because
she’s worth it
.

She stuffs her socks inside her boots. Right. This is what all the fuss is about. This is Crychapel. She wonders what will happen. Will she billow up like Hairy Mhairi, as all the power of Mother Earth flows into her veins, just at the moment her feet step on hallowed grass? Filling her up so she’ll never be weak again, but able to rise at will and smite her enemies and touch the sky? Hannah has a picture in her lounge, a vast, ethereal female called the
May Queen
, whose body is all loops and swoops. Justine imagines she too is wearing a diaphanous gown. Her toe hovers at the edge of the cobblestones. She has always wanted to touch the sky. When she was a kid, she’d sit on the swings at the top of the park near her house. They’d built them right on the brow of a hill, so the sweep of your swinging could take you out over nothingness. She’d drive her legs higher and faster, flexing her toes to points as her back buckled in its eagerness to impel. But it was the swing up, up and away, the anticipation of falling forward and then taking off that thrilled her most. One day, she vowed, she would let go. Course, she always crapped it.

The cobbles look smooth, except where the guys have been digging. She wants to get the full bhoona. She’s not going in naked or anything; just the bare feet. It says in the leaflet there’s a spiral on the northern stone: ‘a common talisman to symbolise and invoke light’. One step, two step. Justine stretches out her arms, tightrope-wide. Personally speaking – and if any bastard had bothered to ask her – she thinks there are too many words in Hannah’s leaflet. Wordy ones. She takes the cobbles like stepping stones, enjoying the spread of her skin on their solid curves.

A wobble. She steadies herself, takes it slower, searching her way round the perimeter of the circle. No idea which way’s north. She squints at the lemony sun, stopping every so often to see if she feels any different. Nope. Not a single tingle. Every standing stone has scrapes under lichen, pit-marks, dents. How would you know . . . then she finds it. A single, sunshine whorl, not in the centre of the stone at all. It is like a child’s finger-drawing of a Catherine wheel. Justine pictures a compass in her head: if that’s the spiral, this must be north. You have north at the top, you spell WE underneath – so, that side will be – east. If there was a side there. That must be where farmers took the stones. Enclosures, run-rigs – see, she remembers all that from school. She was good at history – and English. And French, mais oui. She excelled at that just to piss off her mum. School was all right. It was the bit after that was unpleasant.

At first, it was simple jealousy. For years, her mum and she had bimbled happily along, with an array of interspersions. That’s what she’d called them. Uncle Tim had morphed to Uncle Bill, who stayed longer and later, but was really quite nice. Uncle Bill had made Mum cry, and had become Uncle George, who was a builder that smelled of sweat. He had moved his toothbrush in, and his dog. Parked up his manky van. Kept funny hours, so was often home before Mum was, in that precious white space between end-of-school and tea. He’d have Sky Sports on instead of
Tracy Beaker
,
cause I bloody pay the bills. Make us a cup of coffee, hen.
Mum got pregnant when Justine was twelve. George did a runner, then came back when Christopher was a toddler. His business hadn’t been doing so good.
My. You’re a big girl getting. You’re never fifteen! Come and sit here. Say hello.
Within six months, she’d left home for good.