Island (14 page)

‘That’s a terrible story. Terri-bull.’

Calum wasn’t quick on puns. He said, ‘What?’

‘Why should the bull get the dirt?’

‘It’s an animal.’ He screwed the lid back on the thermos and stood up. ‘The rowan.’

I’d forgotten. ‘Is there time?’

‘It’s quick to pick.’ He
headed down to the ruined houses again. All three of the trees were stunted and misshapen, with their branches pointing towards the mainland. Calum handed me a plastic bag out of his rucksack and began stripping clusters of the red berries from a tree.

‘What’re they for? They look poisonous.’ I began to pick them anyway.

‘She makes jelly. Good for you.’

‘How does she know?’

‘Sh-she knows all the plants. She can make anything.’

‘Medicine, you mean?’

‘Good and b-bad.’

Sure, Calum. ‘What use is bad medicine?’

He shook his head mysteriously. ‘N-never touch it Calum it can kill you.’

‘She’s just trying to frighten you.’

‘N-no.’ He was so indignant he stopped picking and stood facing me, his bag dangling from his left hand. ‘She made me s-special medicine for my fits.’

‘Fits?’

He nodded. ‘I had f-fits nearly every month, she made me this special medicine out of h-hemlock.’

‘Really? Did it cure you?’

He nodded importantly and returned to
his picking. ‘If you drink too much it makes you die.’

I remembered the eye dropper and saucer of dead leaves. ‘Does she make medicine for other people?’

‘Yeah. She knows everything.’

Sadly true. But might poison be less predictable than me crouched behind the bathroom door with my knife? I remembered what I’d been meaning to ask him before. ‘Calum, does your mother have many visitors?’

‘No.’

‘Never?’

He snorted. ‘Only me.’ Only him. All the rest of the time, she was alone. So even if it took me a while to polish her off – she couldn’t expect any help.

The berries came off in clusters. ‘Don’t the stems matter?’

‘She s-sieves them.’ We worked in silence for a space then he said triumphantly, ‘See? She knows the good and the b-bad.’

‘What’re you on about?’

‘The poison’s in the seeds. See? She told me.’ He came to me with a cluster in his hands, squashed a berry between grubby thumb and finger to reveal the little yellow seed inside. ‘She cooks it then she s-sieves it and all the seeds go in the sieve.’

‘The seeds are poisonous?’

‘Yeah. It’s t-time to go.’

How could I get her to eat a load
of rowan seeds? Not exactly easy to disguise.

We got our feet wet going back to Aysaar, the tide was already coming in. I was thinking about poison. ‘Does she keep it in the kitchen?’

‘What?’

‘Your special medicine. Hemlock.’

‘On the t-top shelf in the pantry.’

‘How much does she give you?’

‘A little goes a long way,’ he recited like a parrot.

‘How much, Calum?’

‘One half-teaspoon every week.’

Probably he grew out of his fits anyway. Herbal remedies – crap. But it wouldn’t take much to polish her off. She looked half-dead yesterday when I brought her in from the shed. I had a sudden memory of her taking her medicine bottle from me; unscrewing the lid without even looking – putting it to her lips and tilting her head back. Glugging it like an alky.

What to do was as obvious as a gift. I was getting back on course.

Calum took the rowan berries to her. I sat in my room and read. I started
One Thousand Acres
by Jane Smiley, I got completely wrapped up in it until I noticed I was trembling with hunger. I made sandwiches and cocked an ear to the old cow’s movements. She was in the kitchen, her radio was on – and when I opened the outer door to have a fag her cat was stretched out on my doorstep as if it owned
the place. I kicked it off and sat there for a couple of hours until it got too dark to read. I finished the book at ten, and spent a while pacing and listening out for her. At 10.20 she crept to the kitchen, at 10.31 she turned off the hall light and went creaking up the stairs.

Best to get in the kitchen straight away – maybe she was about to make a habit of rising at 11.30 p.m. I waited till she’d finished in the bathroom upstairs and I’d heard her bedroom door click shut, then I nipped along to the kitchen. Turned on the light and shut the door. Her medicine bottle was in its place over the sink, and the pantry door was a couple of inches open. There were rows of bottles on the top two shelves; I carried a chair into the pantry and climbed on it to see them properly. Calum was perfectly right. Four bottles in the corner on the top shelf labelled
CONIUM MACULATUM HEMLOCK/WITH CARE
. I took the back one, and went over to the sink. Don’t stop, don’t think, just do it. Her own medicine bottle was half full. I emptied it straight down the plughole and filled it to just over the same level from the hemlock bottle. I put her medicine bottle back in its place and the hemlock bottle behind the others in the pantry. Put the chair away and closed the pantry door. The medicine I’d poured down the sink smelt nasty – I went to turn on the tap and remembered just in time how noisy her plumbing was. Poured the contents of the kettle down the drain to swill the medicine away, and got myself back to my room all in under ten minutes.

Good.

I stood by my door listening for a while but it was perfectly quiet. She would have to be clairvoyant to know what I’d done. Which quite probably she was, but on the other hand – if she didn’t think about her
medicine until she needed it – if she didn’t need it till she was as desperate as she was yesterday – then there was no reason on earth why she shouldn’t glug half a bottle of hemlock before she even noticed.

I felt good. I put myself to bed.

13
Enthusiasts

I fell asleep easily then
woke with a start at two. I had a sudden premonition she would come into my room and kill me. She would have spare keys – of course – to both my doors. There was a bolt on the outside one, which I drew. I left the keys in both locks, half turned so you couldn’t push a key in from the other side. And I pushed the big armchair in front of the door to the hall. Blocking doors and listening for footsteps in the middle of the night was like having Fear, but Fear is about the unknown. Whereas I was simply defending myself against her. I knew who she was and what she looked like, her skinny arms and legs, her wrinkled hands, her glittering knowing eyes. A fight would be easy as long as I was prepared; all I had to guard against was her creeping up on me. (And part of me knew she wouldn’t attack me
herself
, that would be far too simple – she would have a way of making something else happen, something that made it seem my fault, like I’d accidentally walk off a cliff or get run over by the island tractor.) But
still it felt purposeful to barricade myself in my room. When I was done I fell asleep again, I didn’t lie awake listening for anything.

In the morning it was raining hard. I lay in bed in the gloom for a long time listening to it pelting against the window, listening out for her. I didn’t hear the stairs creak. Eventually I got up and ran a bath, which gave me the excuse to prowl up and down the hall a few times. She wasn’t up. It was cold and dark as if the night had forgotten to end, but it was nine o’ clock in the morning. Why wasn’t she up? Was it possible – already – that she’d woken in the night feeling ill, fumbled her way downstairs to the kitchen, picked up her medicine bottle and poured it down her throat? I went to the kitchen door and listened. Nothing.

I had to be patient until Calum came. It would be too easy for her to be dead already. Far too easy. I locked myself in the bathroom.

It’s an old-fashioned white enamelled bath, very deep and stained yellow where the taps drip. Imagine always bathing in the same bath. Imagine growing up and knowing the shape of one bath. The wooden towel rail a bit wobbly on its feet, painted dark green; the washstand with the old-fashioned bowl and jug, the toothbrush mug made of that cloudy brittle early plastic. The big white towel, scratchy with washing and drying on the line, fraying at one end where it’s come unhemmed. A curly PM embroidered in the corner in pink. Imagine
wearing things out
. Or having things from new. Imagine the life span of a possession like a towel. Would she have had them as a set for her wedding? Thick initialled white bath towels? All the bottles and jars and tubes on the shelf were hers or Calum’s, they weren’t the leftovers of people who’d moved out last month and already been lost track of. No one else would use her perfume (I used it), she could
leave the pretty bottle of bubble bath on display (a Christmas present from Calum?). Imagine cleaning a bathroom and saying to yourself, ‘My bathroom looks nice and sparkling.’

After my bath I lit a fire. The house felt deserted. It began to seem possible that she really might be dead. I paced around my room waiting for Calum to come for his dinner. There was nothing I could do until he found her. The minutes crawled.

At twelve he came in and went to the kitchen; after a while he plodded upstairs. And then I heard her voice – she was alive. A drone which very quickly got louder until she was screaming at him. His replies were low and rumbly. I put my ear to the wall, to the pipe – opened the door and stuck my head out – the words were still indistinct. Had she discovered the hemlock? Was she blaming him for it? There was a long low outburst from Calum and then a hearty slam. I heard him stomping down the stairs. I pulled open my door and waved him in.

‘What’s going on?’

He shrugged. ‘She’s cross.’

Der, yes. ‘What about?’

But he’d spotted my earrings on the mantelpiece and was picking them up and peering and turning them over to inspect. He dropped one and spent a while feeling around in the fireplace for it.

‘
Calum.
’

‘She just gets cross.’

‘Has she taken
anything – anything she shouldn’t?’

He looked at me strangely.

‘What’s wrong with her, for god’s sake?’

He glanced at the internal door as if he thought she’d catch us talking. ‘Cancer.’ I wasn’t expecting him to say that. He waited a few seconds then he went on, ‘And she’s always had – sh-she–’

‘Yes?’

He glanced at the door again. ‘Nothing.’

‘She’s in bed.’

‘We have to g-go out.’

‘It’s pissing down.’

He didn’t reply, just moved back towards the doorway.

‘I don’t want to go out.’

‘Can’t talk here.’ He thought it was possible to escape her influence by putting distance between himself and her. I was tempted to tell him how far away I’d spent my life, and how her claw marks were all over it. I put on my jacket and went after him but he stopped as I was locking the door.

‘Mac?’

‘This is all I’ve got.’

‘I’ve got an-nother in the cottage.’ He led the way; at the corner of the garden something made me look back. There was a movement at the upstairs window. She was watching us from her bedroom. Watching to see where we went.

I followed Calum. His hair was
tangled with a flat patch at the back where he’d slept, like a three-year-old. ‘The rain’s stopping, look.’

‘What’s she cross about?’

‘Sh-she didn’t like it when I moved out.’

‘So?’

‘I – I – it was my fault. I didn’t tell her.’ I followed him into his cottage. It was full. Food, clothes, piles of junk from the sea, sacks of potatoes and onions, mud, dirty dishes, old rags; on the table a heap of rocks like the ones on the shelf over my bed, and a packet of fish-hooks and a load of line and a trowel and a scattering of dirty mugs. He knew exactly where the mac was: he picked a cardboard box full of old fertiliser bags off a chair in the corner, rooted under a couple of blanket-type things that were over the chair, and pulled it out from underneath. It was green and blue with a
STORM
label, it was in good nick.

‘I found it last s-summer. Too short. You have it.’ There was a huge bucketful of ashes one side of the fire and a pile of driftwood the other. Not chopped into nice manageable logs like at his mother’s house, but in big lumps that you’d have to wrestle into the fireplace. A bundle of scrumpled up bloody newspaper resting on the cold ashes in the grate. He saw me looking at that and grinned.

‘F-five fish this morning.’ Next to the chair by the fire was an upturned tea chest and on it, dirty cup plate knife fork, half a loaf of bread and a tub of Flora, a jar with knives and metal things in it, to do with fishing I assumed. There was an open tin of metal polish and a heap of that pink wadding that comes in it, a saucer full of buttons,
a dirty comb, a little pile of sea-smoothed pebbles and shells, matches, two lighters, an apple core and a seed catalogue.

He was ready to go, he went to the door. I had this sudden wave of complete nostalgia for my room, my first proper room, the room I made a tip of when I was seventeen. I remembered the smell of it and the way it looked so dense and crammed and layered with my stuff like it was my nest my outer coating. I’ve never done that to a room since. Since that cow cleared it up. I’ve never
seen
a room like it since; sure, I’ve lived in all sorts of filthy untidy dumps but they were like that through vandalism or wanting to fuck over someone’s property or the room not belonging to anyone (sitting rooms in shared houses, filthy soulless tips); not through one person living in them night and day and gradually building up layers of nice or useful things all around them precisely they know where and no one else comes in or makes you change it and you can lay your finger on the cigarette lighter or the pen or the knife and you are as at home in it as in your own skin your own head your own round furnished world.