Chapter 30
The first year, that was the hardest for Marie.
The most shocking, for sure. The weather was terrible – the weather is always terrible – and it was cold when they arrived, bitterly cold, and the holes in the walls not yet filled.
Cameras she could see, cameras she couldn’t, but they knew all right, they knew everything she did, wherever she went. Pretty much all she thought, too.
The air chilled, the days short. Woodsmoke smouldering from the low stone building she’s still learning to call home. Electricity from solar panels, water from a nearby burn, a cesspit for waste – all the basics – but miles from anyone else, a long walk or a boat trip away.
It’s safer this way. That’s what she’s always told herself.
Now it’s all she knows.
She’s built muscles cutting logs, building fires, rebuilding the walls and patching the roof.
The grey has gone from her skin, the softness gone of all those hours confined, motionless, nothing but an endless maw for the processed shit they fed her.
Now she’s brown, strong, weather-beaten, her hair hacked out of her eyes by blunt scissors.
She’s become attuned to the seasons, the rise and fall of the sun. A time to till, to sow, to harvest. To preserve against the winter ahead before spring comes again and the thaw.
That first year was the bleakest, yes. The larder bare, the wood store too, once the few logs that were left for them ready-chopped were burned. It was a long week until a pile of logs appeared at the pier. It took days to chop and carry them back to the house.
Janice didn’t help.
Janice never helps.
Other than Mondays – or rather, the days they call Monday, every seventh sunrise.
That’s when Janice gets up first, paces the kitchen until Marie’s ready to go.
They walk down to the loch together. She forces herself to think that Janice is being friendly, but she knows it’s because Janice wants to get to the whisky first. If they send it.
It’s not always there, but if it is, Janice isn’t going to risk losing it.
Five winters they’ve been here, the days bleeding into one another, no idea of time or the world outside of this; the movement of the sun and the stars is how she moors herself now.
In the spring, the leaves start to appear on the few, bent trees, the scrubby hawthorns that surround the croft softening under a fuzz of green.
The days slowly lengthen and, for one month, maybe two, it’s as close to peaceful as she could ask, before the midges arrive and render it unbearable.
There’s a pattern to her days, a pattern to the months and years, outside of any human control. She’s learned to wait, to watch. To expect nothing; to be prepared for anything.
Like Mondays. The delivery always comes, but that’s the only certainty. She never knows what’s going to be delivered, whether they’ll eat well that week or if they’ll need to live off the reserves she’s managed to build up over the years.
Or whether she’ll have to spend the next seven days dodging Janice drunk or cleaning her up once she’s sober.
As ever, Janice is ready, waiting. It’s only just gone dawn, the sun still low in the sky.
They walk down together. Marie looks sideways at her companion, always surprised at the pace at which she can walk when they’re going for the delivery.
Normally she’s stooped, slow. Now she’s moving at speed, glee in her face. Today she might be lucky.
Lucky for Janice; not so lucky for Marie.
She doesn’t understand why Janice doesn’t make a run for the cardboard box on her own, why she always waits for Marie to go with her.
One day she won’t wait, but until then, Marie’s normally the one to win the contest for the booze.
Janice has been conditioned never to be alone.
Terrified by the huge skies above them, the louring hills.
Her fear’s even greater than her love for alcohol.
Whisky was Marie’s drink, before. Spurred on by her dad’s dismissal, whisky’s not for girls, she’d made a point of drinking it, forcing it down her until she learned to love the taste, the pungent scent of the deep amber liquid.
But since that night, so long ago, she hasn’t been able to smell it without it taking her straight back to the point where she came round, encrusted with vomit. Blood.
She was free of that sensory trigger for years. Maybe the biggest upside of that time. But now it haunts her, every time she sees the green bottle with its white label, sticking out of the delivery box like a challenge.
The first time she found a bottle in the box, she made the mistake of taking it back to the house with her.
She thought she could ration it out to Janice, a small glass a night.
It could have lasted weeks. But Janice got hold of it before she could put it away, drank half of it pretty much in one go.
That was a long night. A lot of crying. A lot of vomit, too.
None the week after, nor the week after that, but the third week, a bottle appeared again.
This was before Janice made sure to come down with Marie for the collection, so Marie got to it first, opened it and poured it out into the loch.
Janice was trailing down to find her when she caught sight of the emptied bottle.
It took all Marie’s strength to push Janice off her, loosen her bony fingers from Marie’s neck.
After that, Marie tried to get down to the collection point on her own every week, but without fail, Janice would already be up, waiting for her, matching her step by step down to the loch.
They’re at the pier now and the box is here, as usual.
Janice takes one look and spits with disgust, a guttural sound.
No alcohol today. Marie hides her relief, kneeling beside it to go through the contents – the lentils she asked for, and a carton of almond milk, too.
Nice, Janice’ll like that. Once she gets over her fury about the lack of booze.
Janice read an article in a magazine that was in the box a couple of weeks ago and now she won’t shut up about being lactose intolerant.
Marie nearly put some butter in the peas last night just to test her, but then she stopped herself.
It’s best not to be unkind. They always catch her.
For once, the sky over the loch is blue, the summits of the surrounding mountains clear silhouettes as the morning sun throws purple haze up off the heather. It won’t be like this much longer, as the year turns to autumn. Winter is coming.
The kettle’s boiling on the old Rayburn by the time she gets back, dumping the box down on the table with a grunt before she starts unpacking it.
She freezes when she sees a glass bottle hidden at the bottom of the box under some greens.
Janice moves fast as a hawk to pull it out, thumping it down with disgust when she sees it’s a bottle of cordial.
She stands over Marie as if she’s about to hit her.
Marie’s poised, ready, her hands clenched under the table, but the moment passes.
There’s another magazine at the very bottom of the box and Janice pulls that out instead, slumping herself down at the table to read.
Only for a few seconds, though, before the colour drains out of Janice’s cheeks, and she pushes the magazine aside.
Fuck, Marie had meant to check what it was before she let Janice get to it.
She picks it up and looks at it. TRUE CRIME is emblazoned on the cover, with small headlines shouting KILLER MUM and BETRAYED BY THE TEACHER SHE LOVED underneath photographs of sad women.
She puts it on the table face down, covers it with a tea towel.
‘I don’t understand how people can bring themselves to read that,’ Janice says. ‘It’s not entertainment. It’s people’s lives.’
Flashes of Tyburn pass through Marie’s mind, the baying mob, the gallows. As it has always been.
‘I guess it’s how some people deal with their fear,’ she says. ‘Maybe their way of understanding it.’
‘I don’t want to understand.’ Janice is wringing her hands.
Marie looks at them, her gaze caught for a moment.
Those were the hands that . . . but Marie’s not going to think about that.
She’s going to drink her tea. She can’t control what they send, she can only control her reaction to it.
She’s learned the hard way that the worse her reaction, the more they try to provoke her.
Janice is perfect for torment, a puppet twitching on their string. Marie, less so.
Later, when Janice has gone back to bed for a little nap after her upset, Marie picks up the mag and reads it cover to cover.
All that complexity, reduced to a few paragraphs.
She tears it in half along the spine, stuffs it into the Rayburn.
It’ll be burned up soon, nothing to distress Janice anymore.
Janice comes down, calmer now. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she says, ‘while it’s still sunny.’
Marie stands up. ‘That’s a good idea.’
‘I thought we could wander up the hill. It’s windy, though. I need to tie my hair up. It’s all over the place.’
Marie watches as she picks at her sparse locks.
She’s clearly agitated. It’s that damn magazine.
Still, Marie would rather deal with her like this than off her face, the cycle of laughing to screaming to crying, the dodging of glasses thrown, the long hours spent watching to make sure the woman doesn’t choke to death on her own vomit.
‘I need a ribbon for my hair. Do we have . . . hang on!’ Janice says, as if seized by a sudden plan. She rushes through to the front room. Marie can hear thumps and rustles, as if Janice is digging around for something, and in a few moments the woman rushes back clutching a long piece of pink tape.
‘I knew this would come in handy one day,’ she says, her voice triumphant.
Marie takes it from her, wraps it round her fingers, forming the fuchsia-pink ribbon into a slipknot, pulling it tight around her thumb. Hanged by the neck until you be dead. The last time she saw tape like this was around her barrister’s papers in court.
‘Aren’t I clever to keep it?’ Janice says, insisting on praise.
‘Very clever,’ Marie says, getting the words out with an effort. She’s trying not to think about what this particular piece of ribbon was last tied around, the evidence photographs of Janice’s children, all three of them, laid out on the slab.
Janice takes the ribbon back and loops it round her head, tying it into a jaunty bow. Marie blinks, wipes her mind clean.