Borderliners (4 page)

I’d comforted myself with excuses. Without doubt, the local community had suffered. They bore a grudge against the ruling classes, and with good reason. I could just imagine what the place had been like in the eighties: miners’ strikes and mass unemployment ripped people’s livelihood out by the roots. Just like that. More than two decades on, it felt like the region had never made a full recovery. People turned up at the surgery to see my medical colleagues and their collective health was poor. Asthma, diabetes, lung cancer and heart problems were all far too common, probably more so than among the national populace. Although there was a tendency to put a brave face on it and joke with grim irony about how life had failed their community, there was a void beneath it all which I found alarming.

I thought about how some of the people I saw in the surgery would shout cheery abuse at me as they made slow progress with their walking sticks or sped along the pavement on their mobility scooters as I went for my runs through the village streets and the surrounding area. It appeared running wasn’t something they saw every day. But I hadn’t been hurled any cheery insults recently. I frowned for a second, realising that after a few of my hostile stares, some villagers might have given up on that. The braver ones had taken to sidling up to me at the butcher’s or the supermarket to say ‘I saw you running,’ in a hushed undertone. I allowed myself a quick smile at the thought of how brave they would really need to be if they only knew what I was capable of.

As the kettle boiled I flexed my arms, stretching my body into a couple of Tai Chi moves I often used to wind down. Although I’d been forced to do it as a youngster, I found it useful to keep up with my martial arts training and practice. Mid-stretch I stopped and frowned again: it occurred to me that even if I wasn’t running, people weren’t keen to greet me in the street these days. Even though I’d lived here for longer and my face was known around the place - I stood out like a sore thumb, I supposed. Probably a couple of inches taller than the average woman, men, in particular, reacted oddly towards me. Still, at least I’d had some sort of reaction when I’d first moved to the village. The lack of contact with local people had become more marked the longer I’d been here. Recently it had felt as though I’d failed some kind of test: I wasn’t one of them and never would be.

About half an hour after I’d crossed the threshold, the doorbell jangled. My head still full of thoughts about my status in the village, I set my mug of tea down on the kitchen worktop and looked at my watch. It was 6:30pm, now quite dark outside, and I wasn’t expecting visitors.

As I turned to peer through the glass at my uninvited guest, I caught my breath. It was Vince, a colleague of mine from the village council: I could tell it was him from his stance, languid but tense at the same time, and the slightly hunched over appearance of his shoulders as he shoved his right hand into his jeans pocket. I noticed him lift his other hand up to flick a strand of his coarse, chin length hair from his eyes as he waited. He would start tapping one of his feet soon. Although cool on the surface, he was like a tightly wound coil: his impatience tangible but unvoiced. I hesitated for a second before I remembered I still had a council report on some new playground equipment for which we were trying to secure funding.

I opened the door with caution.

‘Sorry, not a good time?’

I stifled a jump at the sight of my pale, wary reflection in the sharp green of his irises. ‘I'm just in from work,’ I said. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I thought I’d drop in for that report.’

I breathed out as I turned to move further inside, motioning for him to follow. A bead of sweat made its way down my back as I heard him step into the hall and close the door behind him.

‘Come through,' I said. 'I think I left it in here.’

His eyes followed me. ‘In here.’ I beckoned for him to come through. As he joined me at the doorway I flicked on the light switch and froze.

‘Elena?’

The report I had left on the coffee table that morning had been displaced to the edge. Instead, spread across the centre of the table were my grandmother’s Tarot cards, which should have been safely ensconced in the sideboard where I’d returned them the previous night. Vince’s gaze followed my own, his eyes coming to rest on the card reading. For a few long seconds my mind jumped about as I tried to think what to do next. I tried to ignore the way Vince was staring at the cards, his body loose but his eyes immovable as he fixed them on the spectacle in front of us. If he turned his gaze onto me, I’d be at a loss. He was a difficult man to fool and his clear, shrewd stare often made me feel as if he could see straight through my adult facade to the confused and troubled child I’d left behind.

I stooped to pick up the report, trying to quieten the pounding sensation in my chest. My fingers shook and when I crossed the room to stand within his shadow, I couldn’t look him in the eye. ‘Sorry. Here it is. Did you want to discuss it?’

‘No,’ he replied and, taking the report to sling under his left arm, he made to turn on his heel.

‘Oh, I nearly forgot.’ He stopped in his tracks, his face a mask, half bathed by deepening shadow. ‘I came to ask you something as well.’

I stood in silence, waiting.

‘The girl who died - Martha, was it? I heard she was into black magic. That’s what people are saying around the village.’

The hall contracted slightly. ‘She was a troubled girl. Are they saying that round the village as well?’

‘Well, they’re saying lots of things, that’s the problem. For example, people want to know what you were doing at that New Age shop when you found her? Also, wasn’t it a bit late to be visiting a shop?’

‘Vince, I went because she asked me to meet her. I thought she was in some kind of trouble.’

There was silence as his eyes met mine. I opened my mouth and then shut it again, unsure of whether I could trust him, or even if I wanted to. His lip curled slightly.

Eventually he spoke. ‘Nothing else you want to share with me?’

I cocked my head onto one side, watching how he let out a long, drawn out breath before pulling his shoulders straight and shoving his free hand into his jeans pocket.

‘I’m not sure I can. I mean, I don’t know if the family would be comfortable if I divulged details of her life, of her issues.’

I took a step towards him, but he was shaking his head.

‘I don’t know why I bother sometimes,’ he muttered. ‘Lots of people round here think you’re a nutter, worse than some of the people you counsel.’

I didn’t like the nasty little smile which played around my lips as he said that, but I couldn’t help it.

‘Why would they think that?’

‘One of your neighbours’ friends Googled you a few months ago, and what came up was all round the village, or at least, round that lot. I get to hear their rumours sometimes - I have my sources.’

I felt sick. If I’d been Googled, then someone might have found that old article I’d written for my student newspaper about some of the more experimental research run in psychiatry over the last two hundred years. In the hands of others who read widely or studied the field, the piece might not have looked untoward, but the thought of my patients in the village getting hold of it made me feel dizzy. I slipped past him to open the front door.

‘Oh, you probably mean that article from my student newspaper about Carl Jung and the experiments of the early twentieth century. They were odd times, but much of what they did was significant.’

‘Yeah, well. You want to be careful around here with stuff like that.’

After I'd let Vince out, I paused for breath. The giddy feeling returned as I sat down to study what lay on my coffee table: five cards from my own Tarot deck laid out in a pointed formation. In the middle lay The Hanged Man beside which were The Hermit and Death. Below them sat The High Priestess and The Moon. I took a picture, watching as the image froze in the memory of my smartphone before sitting in silence. I needed to think.

In the Tarot The Hanged Man indicated a moral compass which was off kilter, and a time in which decisions would become clouded and truth unknown. I remembered this from my grandmother’s explanations all those years ago. Adjacent to The Hanged Man was The Hermit, a version of The Fool I thought, although The Hermit was a seeker, someone who was eternally looking for answers. As a child at my grandmother’s knee, I had liked to think of this character as the caterpillar in a chrysalis, the one who emerged resplendent after a period of hiding away.

Next on the formation was Death. I knew the card’s true meaning was transformation and change, but it made me uncomfortable nonetheless. I couldn’t imagine it was a good thing that someone had been into my house and placed the Death card on my coffee table.

The High Priestess and The Moon sat underneath the other cards on a separate line. I recalled what my grandmother had said about The High Priestess, that it signified the Tarot card reader herself. It showed you had choices but that you needed to trust your instincts and follow the signs in order to make the right decision. Finally, my eyes rested on a paragraph about The Moon, a card I didn’t particularly like. It warned of illusions and a world in which genius and madness stood back to back, an existence in which the real and unreal would be confused making the path of truth harder to follow. I shivered and looked away.

Heavy silence felt like a cloak around my shoulders, or worse, like a kind of a noose, reminding me of when I sat alone in my childhood home, years ago. It felt particularly close, as if the cards had opened up a door between the past and the present. Although I had chalked up the experiences of those days on the mental blackboard I kept tucked away for futile thoughts and feelings, I couldn’t shake this one. It was as if something in the village was at work outside of my ordinary powers of perception; as if something, somewhere was urging me to reawaken my other instincts.

I glanced out of my kitchen window at the double-fronted house which loomed beside mine. Today, as was the case every day, there was an assortment of cars parked outside and I supposed they belonged to members of their prayer groups, who were a regular fixture there. A ghostly version of myself looked back at me from my own desolate windows. I was as hollow and bleak as the window glass.

Outside, the trees in the garden grooved to an invisible beat as the wind outside whipped them up into a light, pulsating frenzy. My mind flickered. For a moment I thought about how I would love to rush outside and throw myself onto the dark expanse of lawn which stretched between the confines of my property and the next. But even that might attract a hidden audience. This home wasn’t enough of a castle, I thought.

Instinct told me to flee, phone the police, report a break-in, change the locks but instead, I went to the kitchen to pour myself a glass of white wine. More than an hour must have passed as I sipped at it in the sitting room, just thinking. I couldn’t ring the police, as they were suspicious of me already. They would take one look at this little lot and break-in or no break-in, I’d be on some kind of database by the next morning. Of that I was sure. No, I had to handle it some other way.

Once I’d drained my wine glass, I put it down and walked around the house looking for clues and checking doors, windows, locks. My throat felt dry and my feet heavy as I paced around searching for signs of forced entry I knew I wouldn’t find, and an uncomfortable, all-too-familiar sensation of déjà vu prowled around next to me as I went. I tried to quell a desire to punch through the doors and windows as I found one after another untouched and untainted. Once I’d been through the entire house I stood in my kitchen under the yellow glare of the spotlights, my mouth in a straight, grim line as I nodded and clenched my fists.

I had to concede there were no signs of breaking and entering.

The house was open, breathing out warmth, light and a gentle undercurrent of voices beyond. Despite its proximity, I could count the number of times I’d been across the threshold of Julia and Iain’s home on one hand. It wasn’t a doorway I stepped through lightly. The entrance hall was about as cold and uninviting as the open door had been appealing, and seeing no sign of my hosts, I moved forward and went into the sitting room. My arrival was noted by a shift in consciousness and I fixed a half smile to my face as I scanned the room for acquaintances.

There was a rustle and shift in the atmosphere directly behind me and I turned to see Julia, her long, brown hair now sporting caramel and honey highlights in addition to lazy curls. She was accompanied by a man in his mid-forties, possibly older, it was difficult to tell. His skin, red blotched and sallow by turns, looked ravaged by time. There were tiny creases at the corners of his eyes which were both sad and gentle although when he looked over in my direction the blueness of them caught my gaze briefly, cutting right through.

‘Elena, I'm glad you decided to come,’ said Julia, gesturing to the open door. ‘Come in and meet some people.’

‘Hi, I’m Tony,’ said her companion.

I looked at him and smiled whilst Julia moved off. ‘Hi Tony,’ I replied. ‘What brings you to our village?’

‘I live about half an hour away from here,’ said Tony, ‘But I'm staying with Julia and Iain for a while to study their community. I’m doing a paper on belief systems for my Theology PhD.

I blinked, wondering if he included charlatans within the ‘belief systems’ he looked at.

He continued. ‘I'm particularly interested in the nature of Purgatory.’

The non-sequitur took me by surprise. ‘Do you mean purgatory with a lower case ‘p’, a sort of limbo-land?’

‘No, I mean Purgatory - an actual place and time.’

He smelt of cigarette smoke, maybe something a bit stronger. As we crossed the threshold of the front room, the other guests there neither turned to watch us come in nor moved to greet us. I exhaled. On the one hand, I was keen to maintain professional distance between myself and the villagers but on the other, my involvement in local life still didn’t go far enough to satisfy them. But for now, this strange, sad-looking man had captured my attention. There was something ethereal about him, as if he was operating on a different plain from the rest of us. And there was something familiar too. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Having given up on the other people in the room who continued to show no interest in us, I decided to find out what I could about him.