12
I t is a sweet-scented, settled evening in Carso, after a winter full of towering storms, great sweeping gusts of snow and rain pounding them relentlessly from the west, gathering fury over the Atlantic.
There is a bleak excitement to it, Janey always feels: to watch the waves leap up, higher than the walls of the esplanade; to see the ocean boil in fury – it’s fun if you’re properly dressed, and on your way home to your nice wee cosy house from which you can already see the woodsmoke coming; then it’s nice to marvel at the extraordinary power of the sea, as the windmills out in the water whizz endlessly, harnessing power under noisy skies.
It’s exciting, when it has a nice hot cup of tea and a biscuit at the end of it.
Not so much when you have to go and fish in it for thirty-six hours, as Janey’s father had done, once upon a time.
But tonight it feels as if the winter gods have blown themselves out, at least for now: the evening is soft and gentle, with just a breath of chill beneath it; there is a sense on the air that summer will come, a promise often made in Scotland, in its ravishing springtime, even if this is not always fulfilled in its rainy July (as many a bride, telling everyone it really didn’t matter, it was the people who were there that counted, could attest).
Janey has made a decision. She can’t keep on like this with Essie; they will end up rerunning her teenage years, and surely neither of them wants to do that.
Even though they are theoretically both adults, she knows it doesn’t feel like that to Essie, holed up in her room with Pot Noodles and wearing her dressing gown all day.
And it is the night of the Carso quiz. They have ditched the unreliable needle gauges after a fight nearly broke out, and the rounds about identifying aeroplanes and airports by their codes after Morag MacIntyre and her grandfather Ranald, who run the tiny planes that hop around the local islands, gleefully cleaned up every single time.
It is a very popular village event, but not without its controversies.
Suggesting Essie just come along to the quiz worked precisely not at all, so Janey is going to have to bring in the big guns: Essie’s beloved brother Alasdair, who takes life lightly, who is always fun and popular, and who is just, in general, easier; absolutely not, as Essie screeched at her mother many times during her adolescence, her mother’s favourite, but he is certainly easy to get along with.
It is almost impossible to say no to him.
And so it proves. When Janey gets home from work that Thursday, she hears something she hasn’t heard in a while: Essie is laughing.
‘Come on, sis,’ Al is saying, both of them hanging out in the tiny kitchen in an easy way that makes Janey’s heart soar. ‘Come on. It will be the formidable triumph that starts us on the road back from Pyjama Land .’
‘Maybe I like Pyjama Land,’ Essie is grumbling, clutching her cup of tea.
‘No, you don’t,’ says Al. ‘You think you look like a cute American college student in a television show. But you look like a depressed person who’s nearly in their late twenties.’
If it were Janey saying that, she’d have had her head bitten off, Janey thinks, as she sticks her bag down in the kitchen.
‘That’s what I’m going for !’
‘Hey, you guys!’ says Janey. She always thinks, with secret pride, that the fact that her children get on means she couldn’t .
. . it couldn’t have been all bad. Of course they’d had to rely on each other maybe more during the divorce .
. . no, she wasn’t going to think like that.
They had a lovely relationship. Maybe, just once, she could stop exhausting herself with everything she’d done wrong and enjoy one of the few things that had gone well.
Al turns to her with a grin. ‘Hello, Janey.’
‘Just call me Mum, thanks. Mummy is also acceptable.’
When they’d been younger they had thought calling her by her Christian name was utterly hilarious, and Al has never quite shaken the habit, even though he’s here in his work clothes, looking like a proper grown-up.
He works for the council, managing the deer populations, which is a euphemism, he has to point out quite often, for killing all the deer before they strip every last leaf in every last forest and decide to move on to eating babies.
‘Is Zara not coming?’ she asks pleasantly.
She tries to keep a handle on Al’s posh girlfriends, and knows Jacinta has passed by the wayside, but they come and go so regularly.
Sometimes she worries about Al messing about too much with his busy ‘hot kilted woodman’ internet nonsense (thank God Lish had set the parameters firmly out of his age range); sometimes she thought it was amusing, and sometimes she thought it was his own way of dealing with the divorce, which, while worrying, wasn’t quite as bad as Essie’s territorial warfare.
‘She’s in Klosters,’ he says, then adding, ‘That’s in Switzerland?’ for Essie’s benefit.
‘ Too soon ,’ says Essie, frowning.
‘Well, you can’t come to quiz like that,’ Al says decisively to Essie, simultaneously kissing his mother on the top of her head.
‘Good,’ says Essie. ‘Because I’m not actually coming at all?’
‘Yes, you are,’ says Al. ‘We need you on young person stuff. Everyone else going is a gazillion years old.’
‘Oi!’ says Janey. Then she wrinkles her nose. ‘I just feel like a gazillion years old. That’s not the same thing at all.’
‘Well, if it helps, you don’t look more than a billion, billion and two, tops.’
Essie sighs.
‘There’ll be wine,’ says Al.
‘There’ll be the kind of wine pubs stock up here,’ says Essie.
‘You are such a snob now. Oh, my God, I knew it!’
‘That’s not fair,’ says Essie. ‘It’s not being a snob if the wine literally says, “Product of Several Countries” on the label.And “Do Not Feed to Livestock”.’
‘Yeah, it is,’ says Al.
‘And it’s not being a snob if it’s got the sugar concentration of tablet.’
‘The sugar concentration of tablet is perfect; what’s your problem? Come on. Go and get dressed. Have a shower first. I’ll buy you a gin and tonic if you’re going to flap about the wine. Gins and tonics, plural.’
Essie frowns. Janey realises she is holding her breath, so much does she want her daughter to take even a baby step towards getting out of her slump.
‘But Shelby McFlynn.’
‘I’ll handle Shelby McFlynn,’ says Al, who had always done well with the girls, and even more so these days now he has a trim beard and a job that requires a suit and tie and, for the more deer-killy days, a Barbour jacket and a Land Rover.
‘You couldn’t get Shelby!’ says Essie. ‘No way, man!’
‘I could get Shelby!’ says Al, horrified.
‘Prettiest girl in the school? No chance.’
‘Ah, that was school. And all those football club losers she was into then are now still losers. Whereas I . . . ’
‘ . . . shoot Bambi with a gun.’
‘Provide an important environmental service. While still in full possession of my hair.’
He shows her a picture of Zara.
‘Bloody hell,’ says Essie.
‘Yeah,’ says Al complacently.
‘Well, my boyfriend is lovely-looking.’
‘Does he know you’re wearing monster slippers right now?’
Essie has forgotten she is wearing her old monster slippers. She and her mother remain in a war of attrition over the thermostat.
‘Some men like feet,’ she says, frowning.
‘Yes, feet , not claws .’
Essie frowns to think what, exactly, Connor would think of the way she looked right now, her skin breaking out, wearing grungy old jimjams. She sighs. Janey looks the other way in case they catch eyes.
‘Come on, sis,’ says Al, his voice warm, as if he’s trying to coax a scared foal. ‘Come on. Get dressed. We’re going out.’
Essie makes the face again.
‘What is the big deal with Shelby, anyway?’ asks Al.
Janey immediately pretends desperately hard not to be listening and goes into the next room. Fortunately, as the house is the size of a well-appointed rabbit hutch, she can hear perfectly well.
‘Ugh,’ says Essie. ‘She was . . . when the divorce was happening, and my mates were being nice and the teachers were doing their best, she would walk in and go, “Oh, boohooing again? Poor little Essie,” and all her horrible mates would laugh. All the time. Wherever I went. “Oh, everyone, be sympathetic to poor top-of-the-class Essie.” I was absolutely terrified of her. Every day.’
Janey’s heart drops. Essie had spent those years yelling, sulking and slamming doors. She had tried so many times to get her to open up – always, obviously, wrongly. She should have got Al to do it.
‘She was probably just jealous,’ says Al.
‘Of my misery. Yeah, whatever,’ says Essie. ‘Anyway, even if she was, loads of people are jealous. I don’t go up to Taylor Swift and say, “Oh, boohoo, you only got to date Harry Styles for five minutes,” do I?’
‘I bet you would.’
‘I would not,’ says Essie serenely. ‘Taylor and I would make friends straight off.’