The Visitors (10 page)

Aye, right.

I had double Spanish in the morning, then English either side of lunch, and study periods in the afternoon. I visited the school library during breaktime. I wanted to research Broch Books and contact them about the Mutch stories, but I checked my email first. I had one new message, and it was from Richard.

Dear Flora
, it said.

He’d never called me Flora before. All my life, he’d only ever called me Flo. At that moment I knew exactly what was going to happen.

He went on to say that Bristol was exciting, and sunny, and he was starting to find his way around and that he’d changed his course to Philosophy. He’d met loads of new people already, and made some good friends, and this was hard for him to write but he’d been doing some thinking and look, babe, he was sorry but he simply didn’t see how a long-distance relationship could work like this, he really did love me, he really did, but this relationship wasn’t fair on either of us, and it was too far, and it was for the best if we moved on from
here as friends, you know, blah blah blah, and he couldn’t wait to see me at Christmas.

Love, always. Ciao, Rich. Xx
.

He actually wrote ‘blah blah blah.’

Two days away, and he was calling himself Rich.

Love, always.

All the stories I’d ever heard about university magnified in my imagination. I could just see his room in student halls, and a procession of leggy freshers passing through, comparing A-level results, giggling in English accents and taking off their clothes, the room reeling with pot smoke like a caricature. The thought left me blind with sadness. Stuck there in the school library, helpless as a little girl, seeing everything the colour of dark red. For dull, furious moments, my vision darkened. I breathed out, careful in the exhalation, forcing myself not to care. I made a fist and let it go, watching the fingers uncurl as though on a screen. It felt like someone else’s hand, rather than my own. A different body.

I steadied myself.

My anger wasn’t for Richard. That was only a fleeting thing, a distraction. And it wasn’t even anger. It was jealousy.

Going out with him was an escape – my route to freedom, a cord that connected me to the world outside. Richard had cut that cord, and I felt robbed and hollow, the cavern of my stomach writhing with tiny, wormy things. Frustration, envy, sadness. It should have been me who’d escaped into a new life, drinking in bars and meeting new people. It should have been me doing the breaking up. The dumping.

I shouldn’t have felt so bad. Everyone knew it was coming. I’d known it before he even left. But still it made me sad.

I turned off the computer without emailing Broch Books. I simmered through my afternoon English class, barely paying attention as Mr McLaggan waxed lyrical about the
Dostoevskian scope of
The Silver
bloody
Darlings
. Then he dropped some Shakespeare on us: expectation is the root of all heartache.

I thought a lot about that. I turned it every way, working it out. It didn’t make me feel any better. The moment the school bell sounded, I was out the door and gone. I needed to burn. I wanted to explode, just for the sake of something different.

Ailsa sat on a bench by the harbour wall, sketching. I stomped across and sat seething beside her. She glanced up and nodded, but didn’t say anything. I took out my headphones. After the music, gulls and cars and people sounded peculiar. A small black cat, greasy with sea salt, detached itself from a crate and wound between my legs.

‘Well, Richard’s dumped me.’

She didn’t look at all surprised. ‘Right,’ she said. Almost as an afterthought, she added, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘I think.’

Ailsa flipped her pencil and erased a mark, then continued drawing, her pencil scratching lightly on the paper.

‘Are you OK?’ she said.

In light, confident lines, she was sketching the gaggle of gulls that populated the harbourside, poaching chips and sandwich crusts. Under the mark of her pencil, their heads and backs took shape, all their stupidity and arrogance springing from the page.

‘I’m all right. It was going to happen sooner or later.’

She pulled a face. ‘Probably. But if something’s that inevitable, you should get it over and done with, you know?’

‘Aye, maybe.’

‘Just accept it, and move on. You never know what’s coming next.’

She smiled, sympathetic, and turned back to her pad.

I put my headphones back in and watched Ailsa draw. I felt frustrated whenever I thought about Richard, but her work was mesmerising, and it calmed me down. In her hands, the gulls drew charcoal life from a sky-white page. I found myself hypnotised by the movement of the pencil, the dabs and lines and dots. She was very good. Abruptly, the pencil paused. I looked at Ailsa, then followed her gaze. Behind me, outside the Ship Inn, a gaggle of men yelled and jostled at each other.

‘What’s going on, Flora?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, studying the group. Then I worked it out. ‘It’s Lachlan again.’

‘Lachlan?’

‘The one in the sunglasses. Look.’

Short and mean and grinning ear to ear, Lachie stood near the centre of the group. Standing behind him, his gang jeered and cursed. In front of him, uncowed and radiating contempt, sat several of the Polish guys from the fish farm. There seemed to be some kind of standoff over the benches.

‘That’s the man with the motorboat, right? I saw him from the ferry.’

‘That’s the one. Lachlan Crane.’

‘Who is he?’

‘His dad owns Clachnabhan. The distillery. He’s next in line for the job. He’ll be my stepfather Ronny’s boss when the old man dies,’ I said, ‘and he’s a class-A prick.’

‘How so?’

‘Well, you saw him on the boat. He thrives on trouble. He fancies himself as a bit of a gangster. In fact, he fancies himself full stop.’

‘Somebody has to.’

‘Aye, well. It’s not me. He’s tried it on a few times, whenever I’ve bumped into him.’

‘So he likes you?’

‘He likes anything in a skirt. There’s rumours he’s been seeing some of the girls at school, but I don’t think any of them would be dumb enough.’

One of the Poles sprang to his feet, knocking his chair back, and the squabble rose an octave, the men bristling as they fronted up to each other. The landlord popped out from behind the bar, trying to placate both groups. Lachlan stood in the centre of the group, beaming as the men buzzed all around him. They looked like little wasps.

‘He actually looks happy,’ said Ailsa.

‘Men,’ I muttered. ‘Come on. Let’s grab the ferry.’

The
Island Queen
was halfway across the Bancree Sound before I noticed that Ailsa was even quieter than usual. Sketchpad stowed in her bag, she sat cross-legged, turned round in her seat, arms folded on the barrier, gazing out to sea.

‘Hey,’ I asked, finally, ‘what about you – are you OK?’

The wind was fairly low, but Ailsa had her hair loose, and it whipped across her eyes. She shrugged.

‘I suppose. Today wasn’t the best day at school.’

‘What happened?’

She picked at the gloss paint on the railing, working loose a blister of the enamel.

‘Someone asked me out.’

‘On a date? Who?’

‘Steven something.’

‘Sixth year?’

‘Aye. After art class.’

‘McLellan,’ I said, pulling a face. ‘All right, but nothing to write home about.’

‘I didn’t think so either.’

‘You said no, then?’

‘I said no. I thought I was pretty nice about it.’ Her nail
dug beneath the paint and pinged a chip of enamel into the Sound. ‘But I guess,’ she said, ‘that I wasn’t nice enough.’

‘Was he not too pleased?’

‘You could say that. He yelled down the corridor that I,’ and here she pronounced her words with a fierce, icy clarity, ‘was a frigid dyke. In front of my whole class and half the third year. That was fun.’

‘He’s a prick. Seriously. What a knob. The closest he’s been to a girl is the inside of his right hand.’

‘Ouch. Still. Maybe I should have said yes. I could have given him a chance.’

‘Did you fancy him?’

She shook her head, digging more paint from the pitted rail. ‘Not even a bit.’

‘So what’s the problem? You can’t make yourself fancy someone. You either do or you don’t.’

She pursed her lips. ‘I don’t know. I sometimes wonder if that’s true.’

‘Of course it’s true. You can’t force feelings.’

‘I think people can convince themselves of anything. Did you always fancy Richard?’

I felt a pang. ‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Really, though? You’ve known him so long. Before the age you know what it means to fancy someone. I just wondered, that’s all.’

I studied my shoes and gave this some thought. Richard was a handsome lad, that much was true. He was growing into pinup good looks. Loads of girls at school had fancied him, not least Tina Robson. He was considered quite the catch.

‘He’s good-looking. Everyone said so.’

‘That’s not the same as you thinking so.’

‘Look, I don’t know. We were together a long time. He’s just Richard.’

‘That’s not an answer either.’

‘Yes, then. Of course I did.’

Ailsa made a vague noise and looked back to sea. In the middle of the Sound, we passed a single swan, glowing white against the cloudy water. I studied my shoes and thought some more about Richard. It was mildly alarming, but already I could only remember his face as it was in photographs. After the cigarettes and smoke rings, everything about him felt so false.

Back on Bancree, the post bus was packed with disgruntled biddies and a day trip of confused Japanese tourists. There weren’t enough seats for Ailsa and me to sit together for most of the route, and by the time a space had cleared, we were both engrossed in our music and our daydreams. When the space cleared, I moved across the aisle to the seat in front of hers, perching myself sideways so I could turn easily to talk to her. She smiled, but neither of us said anything. Jimi Hendrix played in my headphones, and I churned all the while at the question she’d asked me, chasing it over and over in my mind.

Had I fancied Richard? Or not?

It should have been a simple enough answer. You either fancied someone or you didn’t. I’d said as much myself. But the more I thought about it, the less certain I became. We were together because we’d always been together.

It had been the easy option.

The answer always came back to this: I don’t know.

I didn’t know anything.

I helped Ailsa launch the rib, and watched her scooting across Still Bay. Back in the house, I spied on Dog Rock with the binoculars, drinking in the cottage, scouring the garden. Small birds flitted in the gorse. Smoke trickled from the chimney stack. Ailsa’s dad was working on the pontoon. With a hammer and a mouthful of nails, he was fixing rotten planks. He worked efficiently and without pause, paying no attention to anything around him. I watched him for five minutes, trying to focus on his face, but the swaying pontoon made it impossible.

I sat on the sofa for half an hour, reading the Mutch selkie book. The man was crackers – I was sure it was a man, it read like a man – and his madness burned in every word. I could imagine him frothing and frenzied, carving the words into the page. The illustrations were something else, too. Long after I’d finished the raving and ranting, I was drawn back to the pictures. Sensuous and cruel, violent and obscene. The spread and flow of the ink made them organic. On every page, they crawled.

I closed the book with a whoomp and, for want of anything better to do, started to run a bath. The sound chundered through the empty cottage. I used all the hot water, eking every drop from the boiler, testing the tap till it turned cold. The water ran especially dark, and the tub filled murky. With the
taps off, the house was almost silent – just single drips tear-dropping on the surface, and the distant heaving of the sea. Our water came from the hillside behind the house. The peat was so dense it obscured the white of the tub beneath, and the bath looked as though it was full of mud. This was what we drank. This was what we washed in. I stripped off and inched myself in, gasping with the heat. I let the heat tease at my muscles, washing away the doubt.

Smothered in the hot, dark water, I let my worries sink beneath the surface. I let go of Richard dumping me, and of Ailsa’s challenge. I let go of Tina Robson and her gang of cronies. I let go of my History project, and the weird selkie book, and all my thoughts of escaping Bancree. Hypnotised by hot water and the distant rush of sea, I let myself be lulled.

The dream came to me slowly, as though from a darkness, with someone gradually turning up the light. Richard and I were having sex on my headland. The tide was out, completely out, all the ribs of seabed exposed to air. I was on top of him, my head bowed low and our bodies close together, our faces almost touching but not touching. Above us, the sun spun round so fast that the horizon became a flicker of sunrise and day and sunset and night. The sex was functional, mechanical, without pleasure. His eyes were aligned with mine. Our lips became fused, our faces joined at the mouth. His exhalation was my inhalation. When I breathed out, he breathed my spent air, and his eyes were peatbog blank. Even as I watched, they welled with dark liquid and spilled over. In my dream, I could feel the fluid fill my lungs. Tar. My breathing tightened. I looked again at Richard’s face. It was not Richard’s face. It was the man from Dog Rock. It was Ailsa’s father, and he was staring. He was staring right at me.

A chill clutched at my heart. Even in my dream, he was watching. I felt his presence, watching from inside those dark
eyes. The face morphed again, twisting into a grimace, showing a mouthful of nails. In a flash, the face lunged at me – but was caught in a layer of fur, of skin, the weave of it pulled taut. It was the selkie face from the monster book, and it wormed and twisted as though in agony, writhing like a slug in salt.

I jolted awake, startled, slopping water, filmed in sweat, suddenly alert to the sounds of the afternoon. My head was numb. The dark, peaty water had turned tepid. My core felt cool. My hands gripped the sides of the bathtub. Both my hands, each gripping one side of the tub. Beneath the surface of the water, languorous and as gentle as a lover, I felt another hand trace along my inner thigh.