Offcomer Page 8

  “Told you.”

  “Jesus.” Claire felt the water move as Jennifer rolled into the crawl, swam a few strokes. Tiny flecks of water hit her face. Then suddenly the surface was dazzling, concentric ripples overlapping, interlacing, the spray flung from Jen’s movement bright, suspended, frozen. Claire looked round: car headlights swept across the sky, then the rattling splutter of a diesel engine.

  “Car!” she said, unnecessarily.

  “Shit.”

  A couple of strokes back to the bank. Claire’s hands found the edge of a low rock, and she levered herself up. Jen was already ahead of her, on the top of the dam, crouching, fumbling for her clothes. The headlights swung again, focused, and the car rounded the bend. Spotlit, they looked at one another, Claire crouching down near the water’s edge, Jen up on the dam, hand on mouth, naked. Then the car turned and coasted along the lakeside road. The light swept away, up across the fellside and over the runoff channel. Claire’s eyes swam with ghost lights.

  “Ooops,” Jen said.

  And Claire, standing up on the damp rock, putting out a hand to steady herself against the bank, began to laugh.

  Dressed, their clothes dampened from their skin, they slid back down the hillside through the sharp old bones of bracken. Loose pebbles skidded out from underfoot. Jennifer’s heavy breath in the dark; yellow lights from the houses below. Claire could pick out Jen’s house, and the vicarage, and the darkness where the parish hall was, and nearer, the back windows of the pub. But she couldn’t see her house, not from there. Other end of the village. Dad sitting by the fire and Mum with half an eye on the telly and half on her knitting, but she couldn’t go home and sink down by Dad’s feet and slip into whatever it was they were watching, because there was nothing there for her now. Her mum had said so. Said so time and time again. Claire, stumbling on the sheep path, swallowed the thought, refused to think it, because if there was nothing there for her now, then there was, really, almost nothing at all.

  Her foot found a toehold in the drystone wall; she gripped the top and swung herself over, into the carpark. Braithwaites’ battered Land Rover, Nick’s motorbike, dark against the pale gravel. Claire, half a pace behind Jennifer, crossed the carpark, slipped in through the back door. They pushed past the door into the ladies’ toilet.

  A small, cold, familiar room, one cubicle with a dodgy lock, a mirror, an electric hand-dryer on the wall. Liquid soap oozing like mucus, encrusting the pink ceramic basin. The air smelt of air-freshener and cold peat water. Jennifer switched on the hand-dryer at the wall, then crouched underneath, reaching up from time to time to bang the chrome button again, then sink back into the hot air. Claire turned on the hot tap, let the water run over her fingers. The cold had left them numb. They looked like they belonged to someone else.

  Jen slipped out from underneath the dryer, uncoiling herself cautiously in the narrow space.

  “Your go.”

  Claire shuffled past her, squatted down under the hot air. She watched, deafened by the noise of the dryer, as Jen tugged a plastic tube from her pocket, spun the lid off. She dabbed creamy-coloured liquid onto her skin, smearing over the cold sheen of her cheeks and nose. She fished out a kohl pencil and lined her eyes. She coloured in her lips with plum-coloured lipstick. Her features became defined, clear, bright. She smiled neatly at herself. Claire edged in beside her.

  “Can I have some?”

  “Help yourself.”

  Claire blotted on foundation, smudged her eyes, greased her lips with lipstick. She could feel Jennifer’s warm and smoky breath beside her. She blinked at herself in the mirror. They had nicked Jen’s mum’s new lipstick, she remembered. It had been placed neatly on the doilied dresser; a sheeny cylinder of blue and gold. They had lifted it down for a closer look, and found it irresistible. The name, printed neatly on a little golden sticker on the base, was what did it for them: Pink Paradise. They peeled off the cellophane, unscrolled the stick of vivid magenta and drew it thick across their mouths, kissed tissues just to have the kissprints, kissed each other and admired their pink-smeared cheeks in the mirror. Then Mrs. Rothwell hollered their names up the stairs and suddenly everything shifted, and Claire saw the stained cotton doily, the spilt talcum, the mushed and broken stem of the new lipstick and wondered, briefly, how to disappear, considered hiding under the bed next to Mr. Rothwell’s slippers.

  “A Rusty Nail, I think,” Jennifer said. Claire smiled.

  “A Rusty Nail would be fab,” she said. Her lips felt tacky.

  Tom and Nick were sitting at the bar, half-drunk pints of bitter in front of them, each with a packet of cigarettes open on the counter. There were no other customers. Mrs. Hall was watching TV in her sitting room upstairs. Claire could hear tinny American voices, synthetic music, drifting down the stairwell. Mrs. Hall didn’t much like having customers in her pub.

  Jennifer hitched herself onto a barstool, Claire climbed awkwardly onto the next. They waited. Tom nodded at them, smiling:

  “Alright?”

  “Fine,” Jennifer smiled back at him.

  “Cold night.”

  “Cold enough.”

  Claire, conscious, pushed a strand of hair out of her face. Tom continued grinning at Jennifer. Nick blinked at them, swilled his beer round the glass. Mrs. Hall appeared behind the bar, the adverts being on.

  “Well?”

  “Two Rusty Nails please.” Jennifer smiled at Mrs. Hall; Mrs. Hall grunted and turned towards the optics. Nick put down his glass, asked:

  “You see anything of them mermaids then?”

  Jennifer raised an eyebrow. Claire shifted, waited. Nick went on.

  “Tom here’s been saying how he saw two of them up the reservoir. Completely starkers. Wondered if you’d caught sight of them.”

  “Hide nor hair. You’ve been at them mushrooms again, eh Tom?” said Jennifer.

  Tom laughed, apologetic, shook his head at her, smiling.

  Mrs. Hall placed two glasses of greenish-gold liquid in front of them. Jennifer paid and Claire followed her to the table nearest the fireplace. A crumbling log fire glowed in the hearth and Mrs. Hall’s old lurcher was roasting his skinny body in front of it. Claire squeezed in between the table and the wall, sat down on the wooden bench. She brought the glass to her lips, just touched them with the liquid, then licked them. It burnt her lips and tongue, but was sweet. She leant against the warm flank of the chimney breast and inhaled deeply. The sharp smell of burnt doghair, peaty whiskey, woodsmoke. There was a faint perfume from the lipstick. She could almost taste it.

  Jennifer had taken out her tobacco and was flattening a cigarette paper.

  “My arse is frozen,” she said. “Colder than the rest of me.” She gave Claire a smile. Claire felt as if she’d been scooped up and held close. Jen’s smiles, Claire thought, when she gave you one just for you, let you know where you were, what you could do.

  “It was your bright idea anyway,” Claire said.

  “Aye, originally.” Jennifer looked up grinning, her fingers still teasing out tobacco threads. “But it was yours, tonight.”

  Nick called laboriously over from the bar:

  “We’ve got to drink that water, you know.”

  “Shame we pissed in it then,” Jennifer sang back. Claire snorted.

  “And when did you last have a drink of water, eh?” Tom asked. “I’ve never seen you drink anything but Mitchells.”

  “Aye well I’ll be sticking to it from now on.”

  Tom lifted his pint from the counter and wandered over. He put the glass down but didn’t sit. He placed his hands on the tabletop, on either side of his beer, leaning in beside Jennifer, his head crooked round to look at her face, one thick dark forefinger slowly tapping the wooden surface of the table. His fingers were scraped and scarred, the skin harsh. There was permanent dirt beneath his nails. Claire looked up at his profile. He was smiling, his face creased. Tom Braithwaite was a stonemason. He had washed the dust out of his hair.

 
“So you’re finished at university then,” he observed. “What’s next? Any plans?”

  “Loads,” Jennifer began. “I’ve been offered a job. A friend’s opening a club in Birmingham. He wants me to come down, help him run it. Or I might go travelling. My friend’s off to Indonesia and I …”

  Claire leaned back against the warm stone. She slowly closed her eyes until she could just see Jen through her lashes; bright, happy, gesturing as she spoke, waving away Tom’s stumpy Embassies and rolling herself another cigarette, her attention caught between Tom’s face and the tiny roach she was tearing. The whiskey was making Claire’s cheeks burn; her eyes felt gritty. Cigarette smoke caught at the back of her throat. Claire listened to the deep vowels of Jennifer’s words, heard the glottal stop she had caught from new friends. She shivered.

  Alan didn’t ask Claire to come with him. He didn’t even tell her that he had been called for an interview. He didn’t think that she deserved to know, quite frankly. It was a rush job, anyway. He had to work on the thesis right up to the last minute, and he would, he knew, have to start preparing for the viva on the way home. It was only on the long and devious bus journey from Oxford to Stranraer that he had a chance to organise himself for the interview. He sat two rows from the back of the bus, muttering his presentation to himself and eating sour-cream-and-chive Pringles, four at a time.

  The interview was in the central teaching block. They had done it up since he was a student. The corridors were clean and echoed as he walked along them. The room was on the third floor. There was an empty seat outside. Alan could hear low voices from behind the door. He sat down, glad for the chance to catch his breath, and waited to be called. After ten minutes had passed and he was beginning seriously to wonder if he was in the wrong place, the door opened and a young, tired-looking woman came out, a leather folder clutched under her arm. “Good luck,” she said. Alan smiled at her.

  There were five people on the panel, three of whom he didn’t recognise. Professor Hughes was there, and Dr. McIlveen, but they seemed to be pretending that they didn’t remember him. Professional distance, Alan thought, persuading himself not to be offended. Only appropriate in the circumstances. He settled down into his plastic chair, crossed his legs, listened attentively to their questions. He described his thesis, his articles, and the imminence of their publication. As he spoke, his eyes flickered from face to face, to the cream-painted wall, to the blue squares of carpet on the floor, back to the faces.

  The interview passed quickly. He enjoyed it, on the whole. It was good to flex his new-won qualifications in front of his former tutors. He hadn’t quite forgiven them his 2.1. If he had got the results he’d deserved back then, he would have almost certainly been awarded full funding for the Ph.D., if not for the B.Phil. He wouldn’t have had to scrape by all these years on his parents’ meagre allowance.

  It was a bit of a rush to catch the bus back. He didn’t have time to visit his mum, so he didn’t call her. It would only complicate things. And things were complicated enough already. Claire was preying on his mind. Whenever he thought of her, he found himself gritting his teeth. It had started to give him headaches. He had been good to her, he thought, so she should, in return, be good to him. And she most certainly wasn’t being, not at the moment. He was going to have to put her straight. She couldn’t go on neglecting him like this. But that row would have to wait. Right now, he had to get straight back to Oxford. He had to knuckle down and concentrate on the viva. That had to be his priority. He could deal with the Claire thing afterwards.

  He bought refreshments at the Spar on Bradbury Place. Striding down into town, towards the docks, a green-red-and-white carrier bag swinging from his hand, he smiled to himself, smiled at the women that passed by him. Travelling light, Claire-less, he felt cool and confident and sexy. He passed new cafés, new bars that had opened since he’d left for Oxford. He noticed the customers: affluent, chic, besuited, and he thought to himself, Belfast, at last, is catching up with me. Belfast is getting ready. It is almost time to come back. In the low autumn light the city looked, he thought, almost beautiful.

  During the crossing, he munched Tayto cheese-and-onion crisps and swigged brown lemonade from a two-litre bottle, oblivious to the rock and swell of the boat. He ate and drank as a salute, a communion. He found himself feeling tearful, and even a little holy. He would, he knew, be coming back. He would be coming home.

  “Of course, it depends on the viva, but there’s no worries there. Unless they completely fail to understand what the thesis is about.” A moment’s pause. “Wouldn’t put it past them.”

  “So you’re taking it? The job?”

  “I thought I would. Why not? No reason not to.”

  The voice was deep, unfamiliar. Alan on the phone. Perhaps for the first time. She leant back against the stair rail, swallowed.

  Jen would be off, soon enough. As soon as she’d got bored with Tom. And that wouldn’t take long, Claire thought. Jen was too bright, too brilliant, too beautiful for Tom. There was very little to keep her there, and so much luring her away. That job she’d been offered, the friend who’d asked her to go travelling. Either way, whatever she decided to do, Jen was out of there. Leaving, and never looking back.

  And what did she have? A headachy uneasy job in a shop that hardly paid the rent, and a 2.1 in reading books.

  What about me, she thought.

  “What about me?” she said, and immediately felt hot and wrong.

  There was a moment’s static silence. Alan cleared his throat. He said:

  “You can come too. If you want to.”

  FIVE

  It was a small bag, nearly empty, but nonetheless it had to go through the X-ray machine. Claire watched the security guy watching the screen, imagined the picture. A cat-scan of her brain. Soft, tangled stuff. Nothing clear or identifiable.

  She had packed it last night, in Grainne’s house. Stuffed in what clean clothes she had left. A couple of pairs of socks, pants, her balding cords. The bag had remained flaccid, expectant, lying open-mouthed on the bed. It had looked hungry. It had made her feel guilty. She should have more stuff. Surely she should have more.

  Claire shivered, pulled her jacket tighter round her. The lights were harsh, cold. They buzzed. She gritted her teeth, ducked down inside her collar.

  On the way down to the docks, she had noticed a sign. Blinding bright in the early-morning dark, illuminated by the taxi headlights. Never seen before. The word HEYSHAM and, underneath, a silhouetted lorry. She had realised, with mounting delight, that the way home was signposted. Not that Heysham was home, but it was close. Just a bus ride away.

  But she should have known that already. She had leaned forward in her seat, grown tense with irritation. Stupid. All this time she had thought home was so far away. That it was across the sea to Scotland, then a long meandering coach journey through tiny Scottish towns, along the carious sea-coast. Home had seemed so immeasurably distant and remote. When in fact home was there, just across the water. A glowing sign had been there all along, pointing the way. Stupid.

  They had pulled up outside the terminus and she had paid the taxi driver, walked into the bright-lit reception area, joined the end of a queue. When the woman behind the counter asked her, smiling, “Single or return?” Claire had suddenly realised that she didn’t know.

  “You’re travelling this morning?” the woman had asked, helpfully.

  “Yes—”

  “And you’re coming back …?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, you could get a return, and leave it open-ended …”

  Claire had nodded.

  “That’s thirty-five pounds. Or you could just get a single.”

  “How much is that?”

  “Seventeen fifty.”

  Claire had stood gnawing her lip. The woman had stared up at her, waiting. Claire had pulled her purse out of her back pocket, opened it.

  “I’ll take the single.”

  And
she had paid, taken her boarding card, and walked through to Security.

  “You can come on through.” The luminous-jacketed woman was smiling at her, beckoning. Claire stepped through the empty electronic doorway, did not set off any alarms. She walked down the short, sloping corridor.

  The chairs were blue. Except where they were red. Red seats were set out in a square at the far end of the room. If you smoked, you sat on a red seat.

  Claire walked awkwardly, hands pushed into her pockets, bag bumping against her back. Her jaw was tight, her shoulders high. She kept her eyes out of focus, did not turn her head at all. She was aware that the room was populated, did not want to see if she was being watched. A soft uninflected murmuring, the high shriek of a child, the hiss and trickle of a hot drink being made. The far corner was empty. She sat down, slid the backpack off her shoulder, dropped it at her feet.

  The sky was greying outside. The pot plants were plastic. A crumpled metal ashtray had a cold dead filter in it. She slumped deeper into her coat. Going home, she thought. Trying to get home.

  Sitting on their new concrete doorstep. She pregnant and miniskirted, he moustached and smoking a cheroot, reaching out to grab the dog, to turn its attention to the camera. Faded to a pinky-orange now, as if turning, as the years passed, from colour into sepia. There were two copies. One in a clipframe on Claire’s shelf, the other in one of the photograph albums at home.

  The photograph albums. They shuffled them quietly out from amongst the shoes and shoeboxes at the bottom of the wardrobe. Her mother lifted one up onto her knees. The sharp edge pressed into her soft round belly. They turned the pages cautiously, speaking in whispers. Dad mustn’t know what was going on.

  Her mother pressed a finger down onto the dimpling clear plastic. A little girl, her knees showing beneath a short green dress, a thick fringe across her dark eyes, frowning. Standing on the sun-hot pathway, in front of the doorstep.

  “That’s the day we took you to the Butterfly House,” Claire’s mother said. It was a familiar story, warm. Claire drifted along with it. “A great big blue butterfly, the size of a swallow, landed right on your nose. You went cross-eyed trying to look at it. I wish we’d got a photo, but we’d left the camera in the car. The old Instamatic was no good indoors.”