The Closet of Savage Mementos (6 page)

Chapter Six

I
was belligerent the day of Dónal’s funeral; anger choked me like a neck brace. I wasn’t angry with Dónal for going and dying on me, but with the grief stealers who had lurched out of their caves to come and gawp. We knew loads of them growing up, but they never bothered with Dónal and he would not have wanted them there. A girl he had shifted once – Audrey – sat at the end of the first pew, sobbing like a madwoman. I was putting snowdrops for Dónal by the altar when I spotted her.

‘I’m going to box that Audrey,’ I said to Robin. ‘What’s she sitting there for?’ He went over and asked her to move, telling her that pew was for family only. She shuffled out of it, and when she came near me I saw that she was wearing swathes of blue eyeliner and raspberry lipstick. I hated her for that. ‘What fucker puts on a face for a funeral? Who is that poxy-well shallow?’

‘Shush, Lillis,’ Robin said, and shoved me down the aisle towards the door.

A lot of the mourners were home for Christmas and, since January had come, they were getting ready to go back to America or England or wherever they had returned from. Still, I couldn’t believe the people who turned up; it was like the whole parish had hurried out to feed on gossip. Had Dónal Spain driven his motorbike into a wall on purpose? Where was he off to so late on New Year’s Eve? Was he
on
something? Did the bike skid on ice or was he driving that bit too fast, the way fellas like him always do?

The older people irritated me as much as the younger ones. Outside the church, while we waited for the hearse, our neighbour Mrs Cantwell stood beside Robin and me, rubbing her mittened hands together and blowing her breath out like a horse. She had the ease of the serial funeral-goer.

‘He’s in a better place now,’ she said, ‘he’s with Our Lord.’

‘Dónal didn’t believe in God,’ I said.

‘I heard he was in a bog of depression, God love him. He’s happier now.’

‘How could he be happy?’ I said. ‘He’s fucking-well dead.’

Robin grimaced at Mrs Cantwell, took me by the arm and brought me back into the church. ‘Don’t mind that old gee bag,’ he said.

‘They’re annoying the shite out of me, Rob. All of them.’

‘I know, I know. The things people come out with. Macker said to me last night, “I always knew Dónal Spain would die young.” How I didn’t reef the head off him.’

‘Macker’s an arsehole. Why couldn’t he have died instead?’

‘Ah, come on, Lillis. Shush.’

‘I mean it! It’s so fucking stupid that Dónal is dead, so pointless.’

I looked around. We were standing under the station of Jesus nailed to the cross; his skin was waxy, his mouth silent, the same as Dónal at his wake the night before. He had looked like an effigy – a weird, still version of himself. His coffin stood in his mother’s front room like an outsized ornament; Mr Spain was perched beside it, worrying the satin by Dónal’s head with his fingers. I stood on the other side of the coffin saying, ‘I don’t believe this’, over and over again. Dónal’s older brother, Cormac, had made it home from Australia that morning. He slunk in the corner, watching me; his arms, sticking out from rolled-up shirtsleeves, were covered in tattoos.

Verity brought me home early because I couldn’t stop crying. I stayed by the coffin for ages, sobbing, with my hand on the suit that covered Dónal’s broken body; Verity said I was upsetting the Spains. Cormac hugged me hard before we left; he stank of new sweat on top of stale, but he had his brother’s shape, so I let him hold me and weep into my hair. I liked the feel of him wrapped around me; I could pretend he was Dónal.

Dónal came to my bedsit the week before he died to look at some pictures I had done. I was putting together a project on men’s faces for my photography course. I had shot Dónal and Mr Spain together; Robin and Anthony sat for me too.

Dónal perched on my bed and flicked through the photographs. ‘There are no pictures of you,’ he said.

‘It’s called “Men”, my project. I told you that.’

‘My face looks real wide in all of these.’

I snatched the album back. ‘Don’t be a sap. Why can’t you say something nice? I think they came out great.’

‘It’s not your fault that I’ve got a humongous head. Quasimodo,’ he said, and lurched across the room. He mooched around, poking at the snow globes I had lined up on the mantelpiece. ‘Lillis, when are you going to go with me? Properly, I mean.’

‘Ah, Dó, we’ve been through this. We’d drive each other mental.’

He came and knelt in front of me, took my face in his hands. ‘You wouldn’t drive me mental,’ he said, and kissed me.

He pushed my legs apart and jiggled towards me. I could feel his cock hard against my pubic bone. I kissed him back. Part of me loved the familiarity of being with him, but he was Dónal Spain. Good old Dónal. He was too close to me for the mess and upheaval and sparkle of love. He had peed in my tea set when I was six; set fire to my doll’s house on purpose, and given me Chinese burns almost weekly since we were tots. We had swapped duffel coats so often as kids neither of us knew who owned which. And we were different: he was laddish and cheery; I was melancholic and bookwormy. We had little in common but our long history and the place we had grown up in.

The shadows from the bedside lamp made Dónal’s face look puckish. He stood up and swung on top of me and pressed his hands to each side of my head. He bounced up and down, making the bedsprings grunt. I laughed and struggled against his grip; the mattress valleyed under our weight and Dónal moved again, pushing his body down on me. His thighs felt strong along my sides and I thought how beautiful he looked, so rounded out and well made, like a grown-up cherub. I pushed my hands against his and swung him over, so that I was on top. He thrust against me.

‘No, no. Be still,’ I said. I pulled off my T-shirt, unclipped my bra and swung my breasts over his face; he lunged upwards, but I pulled back before his mouth could reach them. I did this again and again until he clamped his lips around one nipple. I laughed, let him suckle for a moment, then unhooked his mouth with one finger. I looked into his face. ‘I want to tell you something.’

‘Hmm?’

‘I’ve been offered a job in a hotel in Scotland for next summer,’ I said, straightening my spine and pincing him with my knees.

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah.’

I wriggled and he let go of my hands and I lifted off him; I lay down and put my head on his chest.

‘Are you going to go?’ he asked.

‘It’s something different. An opportunity. I don’t know.’

‘What’s not to know? A summer in Scotland.’

‘I suppose.’

Dónal combed his fingers through my hair, down my neck. ‘It’s a mistake, really, isn’t it, to fall in love with your fuck-buddy?’

I squinted at him. ‘Is that what we are? Fuck-buddies? I thought we were friends.’ I opened his shirt, pushed up his vest and ran my finger down the line of hair that tangled from his belly button to his crotch, then looked into his face. ‘Do you love me, Dónal?’

‘I think so. Yeah.’ He kissed my nose. ‘I’d marry you, you know.’

‘Oh stop,’ I said, sitting up and pulling on my T-shirt. ‘You’re too young to be talking about marriage.’

‘And are you?’

‘I have years ahead of me for all that.’

He hugged me, burying his nose in my hair. ‘I
do
love you, you know.’ Dónal smiled, took me by the waist and pulled me back onto him. ‘Marry me, darling,’ he said, in his film-star voice.

‘Shut up.’

Dónal turned my body over; he pulled my T-shirt over my head again and mounded his palm over my bum, along my spine, up over my shoulder blades. He fingered the tattoo of a quaver that nestled on my neck just below the hairline; a crooked image with blurry lines, like all badly drawn tattoos. It was a folly I had hidden from my parents but which, for me, sang to my love for music. Dónal kissed the tattoo.

‘It’s like a little sperm,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Your quaver; it looks like a swimmer. A spermatozoon.’

‘Trust you to come up with that.’ I shrugged him off, crawled to the end of the bed and sat there.

‘Come on,’ Dónal said.

He stripped to his vest and boxers and we got under the covers. He nosed at my neck saying, ‘Nuzzle, nuzzle, nuzzle’ – a silly saying we shared – and I laughed and pulled his vest over his head, tossing it onto the floor. I loved to feel his chest flush with mine; it was familiar, heavy, comforting. We kissed for ages, then moved together, contemplatively and carefully, taking our time. Afterwards I could smell the bitter salt of our sex from his body. His face was lopsided on the pillow and his cheeks pink in a way that they only ever were when we lay in bed together after sex. He pushed one hand through my hair.

‘Think about what I said, Lillis. I want you to be my girlfriend, officially like.’ He kissed my lips. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do if you say no. I might go away myself.’

The day after the funeral, I wore Dónal’s vest to bed, trying to slip him on like a second skin. In the middle of the night I woke, worried that my smell would cancel out his smell, so I took off the vest, rolled it up and used it as a pillow. I couldn’t cry; I hadn’t cried since the wake. Robin wept throughout the funeral Mass and I held onto his waist, feeling responsible for him but also irritated by him. He and Dónal had drifted over the years – what was making him cry so much? What right had he to act like he was the one suffering?

I was demolished by Dónal’s death; I couldn’t understand it. How could he be gone? It did not make sense. People like Dónal didn’t die. I drifted back to sleep where I dreamt he was with me in my bedsit; I couldn’t reach him and he wouldn’t speak when I spoke to him. But he was alive and with me. Still, I felt uneasy in the dream, knowing there was some untruth in it; that something impossible was taking place. I woke suddenly, sat up in bed and laughed aloud at the idiotic notion that Dónal was no more. No. It couldn’t possibly be. But my face was tight from the strain of the previous few days and Dónal’s vest was on my pillow and I knew it was true.

Chapter Seven

I
stride ahead of Struan, up the track. Globs of heather tuft from the verges and the hills above us lie like resting rabbits.

‘Will we stop for a wee minute?’ he calls.

‘Are you wrecked?’ I say, turning to look at him. He sits on a rock and pulls on a cigarette. ‘Look at you puffing on that thing like a dirty dragon. It’s no wonder you can’t keep up.’

‘I can keep up; I want to maintain a certain pace, that’s all.’

‘What’s that – old man pace?’ I walk down and stand over him.

‘Less of that now, girlie.’ He swipes at me with his hands and drags me onto his knees so that I straddle him. I can feel the prick of his leg hairs along the backs of my thighs. I look over his shoulder, down to the sea loch, which glisters like mica under the sun.

‘How far have we walked, do you think?’ I ask, rubbing Struan’s shoulders; they are turning paprika from sunburn.

‘Well, if you consider that a Kinlochbrack mile is actually two and a half miles, I’d say we’ve done about five.’ He pushes me off his knees and gets to his feet.

‘So two normal miles. It feels like more. Is it too early to have our lunch?’

Struan sucks the last blast from his cigarette, stubs it out and puts the butt under a rock.

‘Yes, Miss Yourell, it’s far too early for lunch.’ He grabs me around the waist and kisses me deeply. ‘You look sexy in that vest. Maybe we should find a soft spot among the heather.’

‘We’re supposed to be doing something different today.’

‘Outdoor sex
is
different.’

‘I don’t want spiders and things crawling on me; I wouldn’t be able to concentrate.’

‘OK, OK. We’ll go on.’

We walk hand in hand further up the path. The higher we go, the more of Kinlochbrack we can see, spread like a toy town below us, its streets a perfect grid. Struan tries to point out his house to me, but all I can see is a blur of rooftops. He counts the streets back for me to get to Clanranald Street and I pretend to see his house to keep him happy. We see Tom’s white van drive away from the Strathcorry.

‘There’s Tom, delighted now after giving Dulcie the old one-two in the walk-in fridge,’ Struan says.

‘What? I didn’t know Dulcie and Tom were together.’

‘More like untogether.’

‘Funny, I thought Tom was married.’

‘He is. But you might as well try to tie sand with a rope as understand the love life of the average Kinlochbracker.’

‘Well, that’s for sure.’

We walk on and the muscles in my calves pull and ache. I can feel the sun parching my face and I stop to rub on sunscreen; Struan refuses to use any and I am telling him how foolish he is when an obese rat runs past us along the verge, quickly followed by a stoat. I jump sideways and squeal. The rat lollops like a squat pony and disappears into the heather, the stoat chasing close behind.

‘See what could have run over us if we were having sex on the ground? Ugh!’

‘They have more on their minds than a couple of humping humans. That rat is dinner.’

‘Now you’re turning me off my lunch.’

The pine-soaked air is thin and cool in my nostrils as I trot ahead of Struan into a stand of trees. My skin feels like a shrinking balloon when the cold of the forest instantly dries the sweat on my body. Struan jogs up behind me and closes his arms around my waist.

‘I’ve got you now,’ he says, close into my ear.

I shrug off my backpack and let it fall to the ground; I turn to him and we kiss fiercely. Struan pushes me towards a tree and spins me around to face it; he places my two hands on the trunk. The bark is gnarly under my palms and the damp smell of old wood envelops my face. Struan’s fingers fumble with the button on my shorts, so I undo it for him and let them slip to my ankles. I can feel heat radiating from his body to mine and his breath spurts on my ear in short, sharp blasts. He kneads my breasts with both hands and slips his cock inside my knickers, making me gasp; I push back against him and he groans. Our sex is furious, quick, my knees buckle forward and I press my hands into the tree to stay standing. When Struan comes, we break away from each other panting.

‘Whoo!’ he says. ‘If the hike didn’t kill me, that would have. Mother of Divine.’

I laugh and go to kiss him, but he is already bent over his bag and taking out the picnic blanket. He tosses it on the ground and lies down.

‘
Now
can we have our lunch?’ I say, pulling up my shorts and re-hooking my bra.

‘Oh, go on then,’ he says, and lights a cigarette. He has one arm across his eyes and is working hard to steady his breathing.

When he has smoked his fag, we sit and eat the egg rolls I have made and drink bottles of beer. I hand Struan a slice of Ecclefechan tart and I eat another; the fruit in it is juicy and the pastry heaves with butter.

‘Everything tastes so fine,’ Struan says, ‘after sex in the forest.’ He laughs, rustles in his bag and produces a Kendal Mint Cake. ‘You can’t go for a Highland walk without mint cake,’ he says, tearing the plastic wrapper and handing me a jagged white lump. ‘Even walkers on Everest have to have their Kendal’s.’

‘That sounds like a jingle.’

I let the sugary cake melt on my tongue then I breathe quickly through my nose to feel the sharp mint in my nostrils. We lie in each other’s arms on the blanket when we are finished eating and Struan snoozes while I listen to the sounds of the wood, the small rustlings and snappings. I hear the call and echo of a bird that I don’t recognise. The cold, clay smell all around reminds me of exploring woods with Dónal, until we were both scared rigid by stray sounds and the dark between the trees. Anthony had told me there were bears in the woods and though I knew it couldn’t be true, there was always that doubt. What if? Those thoughts caused a sudden need to pee, but I would hold it until we got away from the wood to the safety of the fields and sunlight. Once clear of the trees, Dónal would act like nothing frightened him, but his laugh was sour and nervy and I knew he was as jumpy as I was.

I kiss Struan’s mouth to rouse him but he keeps his eyes shut, so I poke him awake with my fingers.

‘Stop jabbing me, Lillis.’

‘I want to walk on.’

He groans but pulls himself up; we pack our things before moving through the trees. I slide my arm around his waist, loving the protective heft of him. The ground is springy like a good carpet and I bounce my feet to make the most of the feeling. I have that perfect after-food, after-sex heaviness: my limbs are dull and my stomach is packed, but I feel warm and free too. I gently bite Struan’s arm and he ruffles my hair.

In a clearing, we come across a group of pheasant huddled together like delegates at a conference. I stop, put my hands out and sing to them, a few lines of a country song that has been swinging in my head for days, about singing an old-fashioned song.

The pheasant patter about, knocking into each other, then huffle away like tiny grannies, looking put out.

‘We should grab a few and take them to Dulcie – get her to cook them up,’ Struan says.

‘I would love to see you catching a pheasant. Off you go.’ I push him. ‘Go on.’

‘I’m not in the mood,’ he says, laughing.

Tom has told me there is a heavy fog forecast; I want to catch it on film, so I get up at six in the morning. It is cold and my head feels swimmy. I fumble through my bag of clean clothes and find a thick, plaid shirt of Struan’s, put there in error by the girls at the inn’s laundry. It makes me smile to find it among my things and I put it on over a T-shirt and jeans; I take my camera and leave the staff house.

The fog sits like a quilt over the village; Loch Brack is obscured and so are the hills. It is as if Kinlochbrack has been sliced off the world and set adrift under a cloud. I like the feeling of that very much; it adds to the Sunday calm. The streets are silent and my footsteps bang and echo, echo and bang; it is nice hearing my own noise thrown back to me. In the distance, I can hear the tok-tok of the boats in the harbour; the fishermen are, as usual, the only other people about.

I walk up a silent Clanranald Street; the houses emerge from the fog one by one as I make my way along the terrace. I cross the road to take a picture of the brass ship’s wheel outside the chandler’s; its spokes drip mist like tears. A door slams and I recognise the bash of the brass knocker and the scrape-squeal of Struan’s front door. I turn to see if he will come along the path opposite me, heading for the inn; I lean forward, smiling, getting ready to call out to him. I form the shape of his name on my tongue. Sam emerges from the fog, her head bent low under the hood of her jacket. I slip back against the wall of the chandler’s and watch her disappear into the fog further along Clanranald Street.

A visiting play in the town hall has attracted a pre-theatre crowd to the bistro. We have never been as busy and while sweat slides down my face and back, midges eat me under my bra and inside my knickers. I keep having to leave the bistro and run into the kitchen to scratch. It is one of those hellish nights where the diners are high-spirited and demanding, the stereo is too loud, jigging out its Scottish tunes, Sam acts bossy and Dulcie is in a rage.

‘Lillis, table five are waiting an age for that wine,’ Sam says, shoving past me to scrape and stack plates for the kitchen porter, by the back sink. ‘The Pouilly-Fumé?’

‘I know what wine they ordered, Sam, and I’m getting it.’ I rub fiercely at midge bites through my tights.

‘Don’t bother,’ she says, going to the wine locker.

‘I said I’d get it. Can you just leave off?’ I grab the bottle from her hand.

‘Relax,’ she snaps, and stalks off.

‘Service!’ Dulcie shouts, and I know that if I don’t pick up the plates immediately she will roar at me. I leave the unopened wine bottle down as Struan swings past, with a tray of bread baskets.

‘All right, hen?’ he says.

I turn my back to him and go deeper into the kitchen to collect the order from Dulcie.

‘Table eight,’ she says. ‘Come on, come on, come on. Don’t stand there like a clump of muck.’

I take up the plates and serve table eight, a well-dressed foursome. One of the women lifts their wine bottle to refill the glasses.

‘Oh, look at this. The label says “Prosecco is the imprisoned laughter of charming maidens”. That’s hilarious, isn’t it?’

All four laugh and then they look at me, wanting me to join in. I force a smile but am reminded of table five’s wine, abandoned in the kitchen. I rush away and charge through the swing doors. Sam and Struan are there and she is dangling the Pouilly-Fumé in front of him.

‘I said I’d bring it to them and Lillis more or less told me to fuck off,’ she says.

‘That’s not what I said at all.’ I reach for the bottle and she pulls it away.

‘Ah-ah. I’ll handle this,’ Sam says.

I look at Struan and he raises both palms.

‘Jesus. Thanks, Struan. Just fucking thanks,’ I say, and, realising I am about to cry, I dash through the kitchen, out to the staff hut.

Two of the other staff are in there, smoking. I don’t want to have to talk to anyone so I sit on the step outside, wiping at my tears and snot with my shirtsleeve. Midges hang around the yard-light like a swaying puff of dandelion snow; I get up and swing my hand through the cloud to scatter them.

‘Little midgie bastards,’ I shout.

I hear Struan laugh behind me. ‘That’s a rubbish effort. You seem to be having a bad night all round.’

‘What the fuck was that with Sam?’

‘Sam gets het up; she wants it all to run smoothly.’

‘We all want that; I was doing my best. You might have stood up for me.’

‘Let it go, Lillis; it’s no big deal.’ He lights a fag, snorts and spits. ‘Ahhh. There’s nothing like a busy bistro to make me a happy, happy man.’

‘I saw her, you know, coming out of your house on Sunday morning. I saw Sam.’

Struan holds his cigarette in mid-air, then takes a drag. ‘And?’

‘What do you mean “and”? What the fuck is going on, Struan?’

‘There’s nothing going on, Lillis, and I’m getting kind of pissed off telling you that.’

‘Well, what am I supposed to think? It was half six in the morning.’

‘Sam meets her boyfriend at my house when he comes across from the commune at Scoraig. End of.’

‘Why does she meet him at your house?’

‘Because he’s married. Because they have privacy at mine that they can’t get at the staff house. Because there’s a double bed in my spare room. Because she’s a mate.’

‘She’s a sly cow.’

‘In your opinion,’ Struan says, and flicks his cigarette into the sand bucket that is spilling butts. ‘Back to work, eh? It’s busy.’ He grabs me in a hug and I endure it, though I want to thump him. He wipes at the tears that are slipping again from my eyes. ‘Your bladder is near your eye, Yourell.’

‘You sound like my father.’

Struan pinches my cheeks and stares into my eyes before kissing me hard.

‘Back to work. And take it easy on Sam.’

I arrive back into the kitchen in time to hear Dulcie shout ‘Service!’ and I go and pick up the plates.

Margaret reminds me of a half-mad, half-benevolent nun who taught me in school – she has the same stack of near-perfect teeth that Sister Albert used to grind robustly whenever she was annoyed with someone in class. Margaret frisses the fingers of one hand through her hair and spoons globs of baby rice into Charlie’s mouth with the other.

‘I just don’t believe that Sam is Struan’s type,’ she says.

‘They used to go out.’

‘Briefly. As in for a couple of weeks, if memory serves.’

‘I can’t stand her. She’s sneaky, you know? All sweetness and light in front of Struan, but bitching at me behind his back. And she’s a queer hawk – shifty. I wouldn’t trust her if my life depended on it.’

Charlie waves his arms – they are so pudgy it looks like there are elastic bands pinching his wrists and elbows. Margaret scrapes the spoon up Charlie’s chin, dragging at the mulchy rice he has burbled out through his lips.