The Day She Died (14 page)

He didn't. He just softened against me and lay back down, shifting me right into the hollow of his body, all four limbs wrapping me.

“Brilliant,” he said. “That's perfect.”

We breathed in time with each other for a while. Drifting. Only I didn't like where I was drifting to.

Love needs trust, and trust needs honesty. I can't remember which one of the therapists told me that, but I believed her. Kazek wasn't Becky's other guy, and there was no excuse for keeping quiet about him. If I got it in the neck for putting Ruby and Dillon in danger, it was no more than I deserved. I opened my mouth to start speaking, but he beat me to it.

“Can I ask you a great big favour?” he said. I nodded. “I know it's a lie, but could you not tell Gizzy we only met on Tuesday? Tell her we're friends from Dumfries. Or tell her we've been seeing each other for months. Whatever. Tell her something she'll understand, though eh?”

“It
would
be quite hard to explain,” I said. “I'm having a bit of trouble with it myself.”

“I'm not,” said Gus. He shifted his weight on top of me again, pushing my knees open with one of his. “I don't care. I don't even really care what Gizzy MacInstry thinks either.” He lifted himself up away from me and manoeuvred to the right spot. “Nobody else had to live with
Becky
but me.” And as he said Becky, he pushed inside me, all the way in, slick as I was from last time, and my stomach turned at the same time as everything south of it melted. “This would have happened whenever I met you. Just because I met you on the worst day of my life, it makes no difference.”

I wrapped my legs around his back and my arms around his neck, and I didn't ask why he wanted me to lie to Gizzy if he didn't care what she thought of him. Just enjoyed the feeling of his skin against mine—I'd never done it without a condom before. And thinking about that, imagining what was happening inside me, looking forward to him crying out, looking forward so much to that moment when I was the most important thing in the world to another person, one split second when you can be sure they wouldn't be without you, no matter what came after, and then remembering that it wasn't a split second—Gus cared and even the worst day of his life didn't get in the way—and I felt everything that had melted start to burn, and then I was shaking and making a noise like a camping kettle and Gus was laughing and shushing me and my whole body bulged and then burst like a boil (except nice, though) and I yelled, and Ruby shouted “Dad?” from her room, and Gus shouted back “Wait a minute!” and then I started laughing and we stopped. Breathing like bulls, the pair of us, giggling like kids.

“Ruby?” Gus called softly. There was silence except for our breaths. “She's dropped right off again,” he said and settled his head into the crook of my neck.

“That's the first time that's ever happened,” I told him.

“Ever ever?”

“Ever … like that.” I hoped he wouldn't need details. I was shy now and I had a bit of a feeling I'd farted.

“Me too,” he said. “First time I've ever done it … ” He was shy too. “Without any … ”

“Fiddling,” I said, making him laugh again.

“We're meant to be, Jessie C.” And then he said it. That word. “Love at first sight,” he said.

And so even though I knew it was love at fourth sight, really—he hadn't thought much of me at all the day of the Disney cakes, and he had barely noticed me in the Project and the library—I didn't tell him. And I told myself that word only counted when it was a verb and it came between
I
and
you
. What he'd just said was just something people say.

“Night-night, Gus,” I said.

“Night-night, Jessie-cakes. Sweet dreams.”

Fourteen

Friday, 7 October

Needless to say, they were anything but sweet dreams. But I kept on top of it all. I'm good at staying in control of my dreams, even though the one time I told someone about it, which was Steve at work, he looked at me like I was green with purple spots.

“Your dreams are your
sub
conscious, Jessie,” he'd said, like he'd just invented the word. “Out of your
conscious
control.”

“Fair enough,” I'd answered. “Maybe it's my sub-subconscious that controls them. I'm just saying that I don't dream about stuff I don't want to.”

“The problem with positive thinking as a therapeutic device,” said Steve, “is that it's so depoliticized that it, in effect, privatises misfortune and translates it into blame.” Which was a very typical Steve kind of thing to say and ended the conversation like only Steve can.

And it's only that one thing anyway. I can't stop myself dreaming about being late and naked and legs like putty. I certainly would have put the stoppers on that one sex dream I had about Steve after I'd broken up with Mike Finlayson and Steve had been really kind about me crying in the laundry room and hadn't brought politics or ethics or anything into for once (just went and got me a bacon and egg roll and a hot chocolate with hazelnut).

But if I find my dreams veering towards a metal framed bed, I can turn right round and walk out the door. And if my dream self walks up to a pile of something on the ground and it's waving a bit and the light's shining through it, it always ends up being bubbles or an anemone or something, and no matter how hard the wee sneaky poltergeist that lives in my head tries to turn it into a big pile of them, it never quite gets there.

Thursday night in Gus's bed was a close thing, though. In the dream, we were in his workshop and I was looking around at all the light bulbs, except they weren't light bulbs anymore (you know the way it goes); they were pencils with big bulbs on the ends. And my mother was there (as usual), and she was saying what a shocking state things had got to and where were the … then her voice would get fuzzy and I couldn't hear.
Imagine having all these pencils all over the place,
she said,
and their big glowing ends and no … on them
. So the symbolism wasn't exactly a puzzle. Because my dear mother would drop dead if she knew what Gus and I had just done, and she'd no more say the word
condom
than she would blow one up and draw a face on it at a party.

But as well as the sex thing (thank you Dr. Freud), it was novelty pen ends too, and Gus was saying they were all next door and he'd finished them. But if he opened the door of this workshop bit and then opened the door of the storage place too, they would probably catch a draught and blow right in.

So he opened the door and I was punching the buttons on the baby monitor to tell him to stop, except the monitor was a phone and I didn't know how to work it. A Fisher Price phone that played tapes too, and Ruby said
the battery's dead,
and I woke up.

Another night survived. Good old sub-subconscious. Well done. Have a drink on me. Have two.

And even if it had failed and I'd dreamed about them, breakfast with Ruby and Dillon was enough to drive any other thoughts out of my head. Most of the problem was Gus being so determined to get Ruby back to nursery for the day.

“Break her in gently,” he said. “Otherwise she'll start on Monday with five days straight.”

“But why?” I whispered. We were standing in the bathroom with the door pulled. The kids were in the hall putting their boots and coats on. “She could have another week off. Do mornings only, day about. Gus, think about it. Her mum's just died.”

“Miss Colquhoun seems to think she should be at school.”

“She never said that!”

“She threatened to come out here checking up on us if Ruby wasn't at school.”

“No, she didn't!” I could have shaken him. How could anyone misunderstand a simple conversation so badly?
Well, maybe if their wife had just driven off a cliff, Jessie
. So I took a big breath, counted to ten, and let it go. “I'll take her in,” I said. “But if she doesn't make it, you'll have to get her on the bus.”

“If she wants to leave early, I'll get her in the van,” he said, kissed my head and left me standing there.

“The same van I couldn't put the kids in yesterday?” I said, following him.
Jesus, Jessie, give it a rest
, I told myself, but I kept following all the way through to the kitchen, stepping over the children on the hall floor.

“You can't put
both
kids in the van,” said Gus. He was on his knees at the cupboard beside the door, rummaging in amongst the Tupperware and ice-cream tubs. “It's fine with just Ruby.”

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

He was stirring the tubs round, collapsing the neat towers and sending lids wheeling over the floor. “Flask,” he said, finding it. “It'll be brass monkeys in the workshop today.”

“What'll you do with Dillon?” I said. I bent to pick up a couple of the lids and got close enough for him to grab my legs and pull me towards him, holding my bum in his hands.

“He'll be fine in his snowsuit.” He put his mouth against the front of my jeans and breathed out hard, like when you're trying to melt ice on a window. I could feel the heat right through my clothes. “And he runs about a lot anyway,” he added, looking up. “It's me that gets freezing, sitting hunched over at the table all day like … ”

“Like who?” I said, smiling down, melted away to nothing again. “What are you making just now anyway, hunched over your table? I thought it was something huge.”

“Gepetto,” he said. “Bob Cratchett. One of them. Man, I need to see something that's not Disney one of these days.”

“Dickens, though,” I said, running my hands through his hair. “I'm impressed.”

“
Muppets' Christmas Carol
,” he admitted and got to his feet with the flask in his hand, went to the kettle.

It wasn't until Ruby and me were in the car bumping over the track through the caravan site that I realised he'd misled me. Or misunderstood me, anyway. I hadn't meant how would Dillon keep warm, I'd meant who was going to look after Dillon if Gus went to town in the van? But I shook the worry away. What did I know about their arrangements, really? Neighbours and babysitters and friends to turn to in a pinch? Except on Tuesday it hadn't seemed like there was anyone. And nobody had come round with a pan of soup or a bunch of flowers since the news broke about Becky. Funny that. How could a family be so all alone?

I swung round towards the shower block and shop and there was Gizzy, standing at the open gate of the enclosure where the big Calor tanks were. She had her jeans and fleece on, Crocs on her feet, but she had a look of bed about her, her hair flat on one side, pale pink fluffy socks.

I rolled the window down. “See you about four,” I called over.

“Four on the dot,” she shouted back, her voice croaky, definitely pre-breakfast. “And don't come dragging any weans.”

“If she didn't sell sweeties,” said Ruby, twisting round to watch Gizzy out of the back window, “she'd be rubbish.”

“You have got your head screwed on tight, Tootie,” I said.

“Is that good?” said Ruby. “Sounds ouchy.”

“It's very good,” I said. “Now, listen, Roobs. Don't take any crap today. If anyone does anything that makes you feel crummy, you go and tell Miss Colquhoun, okay?”

“Like if Jay McVitie shows me his scab he's pulled off?”

“More like … yeah, why not?” I said. Could she really have bounced right back already? Was she really not scared to be going back into school? Even the wet pants, never mind the dead mum, should still have been bothering her today.

Or maybe it was me. Maybe I had an aura around me that was strong enough to help a wee girl like Ruby going through what she was going through. When I got into work, I'd have believed it.

“Oh-ho!” said Dot. “Who is he?” I had done no more than come round the corner and take my keys out of my bag to open the door. She was waiting in the doorway, standing there in her good maroon moccasins and her good matching maroon coat buttoned to the neck and belted too. She always looked so trim. I hated to see her having to wait with chip bags blowing round her feet and nothing to read but graffiti. But dropping off Ruby and finding a place to park had slowed me down some.

“What? Who?” I said, blushing.

“
Who me? Says you
,” said Dot, mocking.

“What's this?” said Steve coming up behind me.

“
Couldn't have been! Then who?
” Dot sang. “Jessie's got a boyfriend,” she said to Steve.

“Is that his car you came in?” said Steve. “I saw you parking at Whitesands when I was coming over the footbridge.”

“God almighty!” I said. “Who needs security cams?”

“Oh, he might be a keeper if he's letting you borrow his car, Jessie,” said Dot as I got the door open and we all hustled in. “But it's a right old waste of money driving in from Catherine Street and paying to park all day.”

Not to mention stopping off for more new socks and knickers on the way
, I thought. In Dot's world, where your shoes match your coat, there's nothing about a new boyfriend that would make you come to work from anywhere but home, where all your clothes were. I slung my coat and bag behind the desk and went round putting the lights on for the day, took a duster with me, gave the shirt shelves a
flick as I passed them. They were black enamelled metal, from a
bankrupt art supply shop, looked great when they were clean (spotless, as Dot would say) but drew the dust like iron filings on a magnet. The pipes were starting to warm up, creaking and popping like old men's knees at mass, and I carried on round past the kids' section, the stands we'd scrounged from the garden centre in Castle Douglas when it closed down, meant for trays of annuals but perfect for babies' tiny clothes, rolled pairs of socks like sugar bonbons, sets of vests tied together with ribbon—that was Dot—looking like those potpourri cushions you get in the useless tat department on the ground floor of Barbour's—every posh department store probably, only I'd not been in enough of them to know. I stopped and ran my hand over a pair of Thomas the Tank dungarees and a matching jersey. Dillon would look cute in those. He'd suit blue with that white-blond hair of his. Then I heard Dot coming with the coffees and walked away before temptation got me.

“Everything okay in the Layette section, Jessie?” she said, putting down a mug with a jumbo scone balanced over the top of it, warm scones a la flour in your coffee—a Dot special.

“
Layette
is looking lovely, Dotty.”

“Dot,” she said. “Think I don't know when you're laughing at me, you young ones that know everything and what you don't know isn't worth knowing.”

But I wasn't laughing. She hated being called Dotty as much as I hated being called Jess. Her brothers had called her Spotty Dotty when she was fifteen and only got to wash her hair once a week and it hung on her face, she'd told me. But why was that story that Dot had repeated a hundred times making me feel so freaked out now?

“Soooooo.” Dot had a way of nestling her folded arms in under her bosom that made me think of broody hens. “You've got yourself a nice lad at last.”

“He's just a friend,” I told her, but I could feel myself blushing again, and she didn't believe me.

“Another one!” said Dot. Steve wandered up with a bale of shirts that had been tried on and needed refolding now. Needed sniff-checked and then refolding. I could feel my heart hammering. I had promised to keep it quiet and had made Gus promise the same, but I had to tell someone.

“The same one,” I blurted out at last. Dot's powdery face clouded. “Gus King. The sculptor. The one that's wife just died.”

Dot's face changed the way it does. Her eyebrows went up in the middle and down at the ends and her eyes went diamond-shaped and shiny. And it looked like her mouth had a drawstring round it, a tiny rosette of a mouth. A dot of a mouth.

Steve was standing with a shirt collar tucked under his chin, ready to fold the sleeves in and, with his mouth open and his eyebrows raised, he looked like a cartoon of surprise.

“What?” I said.

“Oh Jessie!” said Dot. “That poor girl!”

“No!” I said. “
She
didn't know! God sake, that's not how it was at all.”

“How can you be sure?” said Dot. “She killed herself. Oh Jessie!”

“Because—” I stopped. Because she was already dead when I met him, of course. But I couldn't say that after telling them yesterday that he was my friend. “Because—” I tried again. “Because even though they weren't happy, Gus loved his kids and he'd never have left them like his dad did, and he tried to make it work.”

“Can't have tried that hard,” said Dot. “The poor girl flung herself off a cliff.”

“Drove off the road, and not because of anything Gus did,” I said. “It was finding out she was pregnant again that did it. She didn't want to have another baby.”

“She was
pregnant
?” Dot whispered the last word. She always did. She whispered
cancer
and
asylum seeker
too.

“It's actually more common than you'd think,” said Steve, back on social statistics where he was happy, back out of the mess of the heart. “Women are more likely to commit suicide while they're pregnant than at any other time. More likely to be the victims of domestic violence too.”