Wait Till I Tell You (6 page)

‘Thinking, aye, right enough. In America.’ He saw himself, thinking in America, in his mind. Since they were taking place in America these thoughts were unusually pure and free and big, with enormous cactuses and skyscrapers surrounding them. Everything was important in America. Those American thoughts of his were very important.

‘I’m just away to the toilet for a moment,’ said Elise. ‘I’ll not be long. It’s magic to see you again. You’ve not been looking after yourself though.’

Craig’s American thoughts receded. The cactuses disappeared behind the rainy hills of Loch Lomond, the skyscrapers fell like settling smoke. He thought of the deadly afternoon in the coach travelling back up, the video history of the clans playing on the screen at the front and the way the old people didn’t emerge from the chemical toilet for half an hour at a time.

He’d have one more try, before his habits closed around him and the old familiar things had won over the shiny new stuff he just knew must be waiting somewhere for him.

‘It’s just we were that young when we started, Ella. I just need a space.’ Aye, that was it, space was the word he’d been guddling for. ‘The space, Ella, I need it. To myself. See, you crowd me. I’m crowded. Stop crowding me.’ Will I never stop saying that, he thought. Let’s try another angle.

‘Just give me space,’ he concluded. Though all he could think of was a locked box without windows being took round corners he couldn’t see at a terrible rate while he listened to the past going round and round on a tape and his own dirt swilled around below him. ‘It’s a bit of space that I need. Just so’s I can see where I’m going. God, Ella, I don’t even know where I’ve been.’ In warming to his subject, he was blowing it away.

She’d seen at once what he was saying. It was lucky she was on the way to the washroom, any road.

The Ladies had a woman in a picture hat in silhouette on the door. Inside was a wee sofa with another of those daft dolls sitting on it. From the safety of the cubicle Elise let herself go and talked to it loudly to keep herself from crying.

‘Space. He needs space. It’s space he needs right enough. I crowd him out. See that, I crowd him out. We were that young when we began we need to go into
space
.’

Elise felt better as she came out. The lilac woman was waiting on the sofa beside the doll, looking unsurprised.

‘Whoever spouted all that blash at you must’ve been in America, my wee peat,’ she said. ‘It’ll pass over, right enough. Water under the bridge, I’d call it.’

Ring If You Want Something

‘The way we stop my mother coming around the whole time is we’re really friendly with my stepmother,’ said Alice. She held Fergus on her knee, sitting up in front of her like a delegate of her personality. He was in a towelling suit that left only his hands and face free but he still glowed more than anything in the room. He was just over the five months.

‘Why do you have to stop your mother coming round?’ Catriona had no children yet. She turned her tea-coloured hair over in her fingers as she spoke. Her high shoes were in front of the sofa where she lay; they were made of suede the pink of sugar roses. She tossed her car keys between her hands.

Fergus was not remotely taken, even with the keys. He could perhaps sense Catriona’s indifference to his appeal, his enormous eyes, the forehead full of ideas, his stalk of a neck, the feet that could curl like ferns.

‘When you’ve a baby your mother remembers having you and wants to make the same mistakes she did with you only on your baby this time.’

‘How come you know that?’

‘I guessed it and I’m taking no chances.’

‘Where does your stepmother improve on your mother?’

‘Because she’s not,’ said Alice, ‘and she’s generous with everything but advice. I want to make my own mistakes.’

‘Why make any?’ Catriona could see that a baby was just a person, that was all. No problems there, just treat it like a person, but smaller. She reached for her coffee.

Within Catriona’s bag, the telephone rang.

Fergus turned his righteous gaze on the bag. From his shining mouth bulged a bubble like another lip, made of sheer milk.

‘Oh, no,’ said Catriona, though she was relieved to hear the summons of the phone in the bag.

‘Don’t worry about us,’ said Alice.

‘I won’t.’

‘Catriona MacAllister,’ said Alice’s old friend, shaking her hair and hanging her head back in a way that told Alice there was a man on the line and that Catriona was thinking of him watching her while she spoke.

Alice remembered when she herself had behaved in this way. Now she could not think of a time before now, when Fergus’s gaze was all in all, even his father Fraser’s less important.

In the garden beyond the cottage windows, Fraser was tying up the daffodil leaves into knots now that the flowers had died back. Under the trees the knotted leaves stuck out like topknots in the grass. The sea beyond the parapet sparkled. The cannon on the castle ramparts were green with salt, the wooden guncarriages splitting and sinking under the weight of the green guns.

‘That’ll be just fine with me,’ said Catriona into her wafer of telephone that was like a mirror to her, telling her she was desirable, ‘but I’m over in Ayrshire at present so I’ll maybe not be with you till quite late in the day. Oh. Well, that’s fine too, as long as you know I’ll not be able for more than a quick meal and then straight home to my own place. Yes, I can eat meat. I carry low sodium salt. Uh huh, it’s beautiful here. The daffs are out, yellow everywhere. There are birds in the trees too. I’ll be miserable to get back to Glasgow.’

Dougan the Muscovy duck tapped at the window with his red beak that looked like it had barnacles and cold sores. The branches of the trees over the knotted, finished daffodils were on the verge of more than budding. They were empty of birds.

Dougan tapped again. His feathers were mottled, black and white, spatters of pigment not as artful as that of many birds, nor as reassuring as the markings of a cow. The narrow gap between the duck’s small eyes seemed to leave the space for a brain as wide as a broad bean, Catriona thought.

Alice had not turned round from nuzzling her son’s scalp to see what it was that Dougan wanted. The Muscovy walked to the side of the bow window, and took the chain of the cowbell that hung there, shaking it until he got the clapper chinkling inside.

‘I’d better see what he wants. It’ll be a sandwich,’ said Alice.

‘How would you know what it wants, that duck?’ asked Catriona. ‘How does it say what it wants? Surely it can only say that it wants attention? It’ll not be sure it wants a sandwich. It might want some duck food or something. It might just like the noise of the bell. It’ll just be used to your thinking it wants a sandwich. It’s come to link the bell with a sandwich, or so you think, but maybe it’s trying to ask for something different.’

‘You think it just eats the sandwich out of good manners?’ said Alice. ‘Like you with that telephone call.’

‘Eh?’ Catriona couldn’t see this link. She would have before Alice had had Fergus. Was it not that the obtuseness more usually settled on the one who had a baby, not her successful friend? So the magazines said.

‘Well, you went to the bell of the phone and accepted a night out.’

‘That doesn’t make me the Muscovy duck.’

‘No it’s him that’s the Muscovy duck. He’s the Muscovy duck, whoever he is.’

‘How d’you know it was a he? Can you sex phone calls now you’re so one with nature?’

‘Easier than poultry, yes I can. So can you. You were styling your hair at him down the phone, Cat.’

‘So why’s he a Muscovy duck?’ asked Catriona, not yet understanding, but suspecting that she was in some category now in Alice’s mind, as, undoubtedly, Alice was in hers.

‘Rings a bell and gets a treat,’ said Alice baldly, putting Fergus into his netted lobster pot and going to butter the duck’s piece for him. She did one for the wee boy at the same time. Marmite for Fergus, jam for the Muscovy. The duck would do the bread more justice, but Alice could eat Fergus’s bread when he’d mumbled it a bit. He was a big baby and solids weren’t that far off. She wished she could talk to Catriona about this. They had dissected the minutiae of the timings of courtship – when to let him do this or that, when to start calling him, all that – but had not yet been into the delectable curricula of its consequences, weaning, possetting, bottling, burping, changing.

Catriona had kept her face angry for some time after Alice had made her devastatingly stupid comment about the man who’d rung her, Fordyce Succoth from Dysart Graphics, being like that daft Muscovy duck. It was Alice and Fraser’s having moved out here to the sticks that made Alice say these things, she’d nothing to keep her on the ball. She was so dopey with the caretaking of the castle garden, the green fields of grass and sea – and the wean and the coastal views, Catriona thought angrily, that she couldn’t even see when a person was insulted. ‘Rings a bell and gets a treat,’ indeed, she’d tell Fordyce that later when they were better acquainted. She thought of Fordyce very carefully, leaving off some of the things about him like the holes behind his layered hair on the neck, where the acne had got him, and the way he drove with the backs of his hands laid on the thick thighs of his lower half. The car though was a superb machine, and Fordyce’s work at Dysart Graphics very challenging, Catriona reminded herself. Any road, she thought, I can’t cancel on him now.

For she had begun to think of the skin on the back of his neck, its pitted, red, angry texture pierced here and there by thin bore holes that looked as they could take a wire right in to the body. The skin was like something she would not translate into words from the picture in her head. Dougan the Muscovy duck’s shiny rough bill roofed with pustules, his two dry duck nostrils came into Catriona’s mind and she got more angry. How could Alice ruin her relationship like this? Was she jealous, stuck out here with Fergus and Fraser, one of them saying nothing at all in the house all day, the other doing the same outdoors?

There Fraser was, for example, tying knots in daffodils all morning. Why was that? Was he trying to remember a whole lot of things? ‘Oh deary me, I must remember Alice’s birthday. Let me see now, I’ll just tie back this clump of daffs. Then there’s Fergus’s. Can’t be more than seven months off.’ No, Catriona thought, it was not that, she had to acknowledge it; it was more likely something to do with the way you did things having to change if you lived in a part of the world where tying up daffodils was not just a thing you might as well do because you’d seen it done but a thing it was better never to omit doing.

Fergus was sitting on the ground now, by the coffee table, propped up by cushions. He had pink all around his lips, perhaps from some jam off Dougan the Muscovy’s piece, which seemed to be broken up on the floor indoors, though the duck itself was to be seen eating up its snack on the lawn moving its neck, like a typing finger, again and again, at the sticky white bread.

Alice, big and content, independent and annoyingly incurious about the life Catriona was leading now, that is the life Alice had once led too, was busy in the kitchen chopping, rocking a knife in a pile of parsley on a board. There was a smell of new coffee and mowing. It irked Catriona that she would have to move into the kitchen to talk to Alice. In that room, so securely Alice’s own, she would have to be a visitor, to take whatever conversation Alice considered suitable to her marital kitchen. Apart from Fraser, Alice no longer discussed men, as if the plurality in the noun might imply some wide-ranging sampling on her part that might offend the curtains, spill the water in a blush over the rosy tablecloth. The new, absorbing, potentially plural tribe in her life was babies, whose activities, reactions, characteristics, differences and needs were now of that relevance those of men had been.

Alice reached for two onions, tore off the skins with the noise of a cheap brown envelope being forced, and chopped them with the maddening efficacious calm that she seemed to have discovered for herself. She pushed the onion, chopped and weepy, to one side with the flat of the knife, and took out a patty of what looked like pink clay, socking it into a pyrex bowl and adding two eggs, the parsley, the onion, and a brusque grind of pepper.

‘More coffee, Cat?’ she said. In the old days, when they’d had a clash of mood or taste or will, Alice had been nervous that it was always she who offended her friend, and had spent hours padding up to her afterwards to check if she could make things better, in this way giving Catriona the opportunity to keep her unhappy and docile for a good while after, not relenting till she had negotiated at least one practical advantage, a lend of Alice’s grey silk stockings, or a go of her perfume, maybe even a whole evening of using it right out of her own handbag, at a restaurant or in the cinema.

‘That’s a delicious scent’ her companion might say.

‘My stepmother brings it me from Paris. It’s made up by a Russian,’ Catriona would say, in the very words Alice used when offered the same compliments. She never felt like a liar then, just as later today, in a restaurant, she would not feel badly when she told Fordyce how she had that afternoon at her people’s place in the country cooked a parsley, pork sausagemeat and onion stuffing for a duck that earlier in the day she had seen eat a jam sandwich, after ringing a bell for it.

Fergus sucked on at the heel of Catriona’s candied-rose pink suede shoe, pulling the colour out of it slowly and stertorously, with his milky circling lips, till it was losing colour like a frozen raspberry lolly, all its seductive pink going down the throat of the voracious puller at the ice.