Bluff, page 10
As I heard the intruder climb the stairs, my heart became my entire body. There was no before, there was no after. Boom. Boom. Boom. Heartbeat. Footsteps. That’s the only way I can describe it.
19
Joanie, September 2013
When Joanie stumbled into the darkened living room, she thought she was alone. A long time ago, the light switch had been blocked off by a tower of cardboard boxes. Then, as time passed, the cardboard boxes had been buried under a layer of what Joanie called ‘ephemera’. Ephemera sounded like the name of a pretty Victorian governess, a character from one of the books she had read as a child. Ephemera was all over the house, on every spare inch of carpet. Ephemera covered the bags of baby clothes and unopened boxes of nappies and broken gadgets and gizmos that her mother claimed she was going to fix. There were towers of fast fashion and turrets of charity-shop knick-knacks. Standing among it, in the dark, made Joanie short of breath. She wanted to reach for the light of her phone, but it was dead. Somewhere among all this junk, to the right of the leatherette armchair, was a battery-powered light—
There was a cough, short and raspy.
Joanie clanked into something metal that clattered to the floor.
‘Have you been drinking?’ her mother croaked, from the direction of the armchair. At the click of a switch, her face illuminated: half harsh light, half grotesque shadow. Mother and daughter faced each other, gargoyle versions of themselves, amid the ragged edges of the ephemera.
‘Not even a hello?’ Joanie said, masking her fright with sarcasm. ‘No, I just tripped over. You could have left the light on.’
‘You woke me up,’ her mother said. ‘I was sleeping here.’
Of course. Her half of the bed was probably piled with stuff now too.
‘I can see you smirking,’ her mother went on. ‘If you wanted a hello, you could have told me where on earth you were. Anyone would think you don’t live here any more. Look at you. I don’t know what you’ve been doing, but you’re a mess.’
Joanie laughed then, a bitter exhalation. ‘I’m a mess?’ She looked around. She’d lost track of time, but surely it wasn’t that late. ‘I wonder where I got that from.’
‘You get it from your father,’ her mother replied. She was being openly hostile now. The gloves were off. ‘No wonder things aren’t working out for you.’
Her mother couldn’t have been talking about Adam. But she was. Joanie staggered back, as if she had taken a physical blow. Her heel hit the sharp lid of a plastic storage box.
‘At least I’m not a hoarder,’ she spat back, making for the stairs before she could see her mother’s face.
In her bedroom, she hit the switches of each of her nightlights, the argument still reverberating in her ears. Nobody brought up her dad. This was a new low. She wanted to phone him then and there, probably interrupting a make-out session with a girlfriend who was barely older than she was. That was unfair. She steadied her breath. He cared about her. Not enough for you to live with him, a voice in her head said. That was unfair. It just hadn’t worked out, partly because her mother had been so interfering. Her mother who barely saw her any more? Isn’t that what she had wanted? Joanie was simply a reminder of her previous life, along with all the other shit that hung around the house. She was the product of a holiday fling with a married man that had resulted in her mother’s religious conversion. Her come-to-Jesus moment.
Joanie picked up her phone to text Cara, then remembered that Cara thought she had stolen Tatey. How ridiculous. Anyway, her phone’s battery had died. No matter.
Joanie lay in the lamplight, breathing to a meditation track on her laptop. Waves rolled in and out of some other shore, beckoning her.
20
Cameron, Boxing Day 2023
‘Joanie, aye, she used to work at the uni,’ Donaldson’s older sister Sarah said to me, as we sat in front of the football, eating sandwiches his mother had made from their leftover Christmas dinner. Things had taken a turn on the golf course: I had ended up losing to Donaldson. My pockets were significantly lighter, so I was enjoying as much free food and drink as possible. They were the kind of family who ate exactly the same festive meal every year: turkey with cranberry sauce and chestnut stuffing. Sarah had told me so. My family weren’t so different, but part of what I liked about Graham and his were their reliability. They were also a family of golf fanatics. On the walls of their living room hung posters from the 1930s, depicting art-deco figures swinging clubs in plus-fours or cloche hats. ST RULE BY RAIL, one said, with a steam train puffing across the coastline in the background.
While Graham was monosyllabic, Sarah could talk enough for two people. ‘I don’t remember what Joanie did,’ she was telling me now, with her bright, freckly face, ‘but I remember I saw her around town when I worked at Altman’s. Wasn’t she with that Adam guy?’
‘No,’ I said, trying not to sound like a teacher. ‘They broke up at the start of that summer.’
‘Maybe it was Tatey,’ Graham said. I thought he hadn’t been listening.
‘Hmm, it was such a long time ago,’ Sarah said. She bit her thumbnail absently. ‘I thought I saw her with one of those guys in your year, when I was working that summer.’
‘She’s got a great memory.’ Their mum, Siobhan, entered the living room with a plate of pigs in blankets. ‘I’ve always said that, haven’t I?’
‘Do you even know what we’re talking about?’ Sarah said. She turned to me. ‘I’m hardly here. I stay in Dundee now. Mum, do you remember Lynne’s daughter, Joanie? Have you seen her recently?’
Her mother made a face, as she sat down in the armchair opposite me. ‘Och, they keep themselves to themselves, don’t they? Getting any chat out of Lynne’s like trying to get blood out a stone. No, I’m being unfair. Did her daughter go abroad or something? I’ll ask, next time I see her. But you know what she’s like. Barely comes oot the hoose. Miss Havisham.’ I could tell from the twinkle in her eyes that she was loving this unexpected chance to gossip.
‘Maybe I’ll drop by on my way back,’ I said, as if this wasn’t the entire reason I had invited myself over to Graham’s after our game of golf. I had been trying to summon the courage to do it, the whole time we had been eating lunch. My hand went to take the small Christmas card out of my pocket to show it to them, but I thought better of it. This is a warning. It was a horrible thing that would set people talking. I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted, at least not right now. Tatey or Adam: Sarah had seen her with one of them.
‘Right,’ I said, with a decisive knee slap. ‘That’s me away. If I don’t see you through the week …’
‘I’ll see you through a window,’ Graham replied emotionlessly, his eyes fixed on the post-match analysis.
‘Sounds creepy when you say it.’ His mother laughed. I pictured him looking out across the road at night, noticing when Joanie’s light was on and when it wasn’t.
When I walked into the cul-de-sac, a rush of memory hit me harder than I had thought possible. The nubby branches of the cherry tree in her front garden and breeze blocks shaped like flowers. The brown pebble-dashed walls, the crazy-paving path. As I stood on the doorstep, my reflection was distorted in a textured-glass panel. The doorbell still played the same cheery tune. I must have been to her home only a handful of times, but it was not somewhere you forgot.
I had, however, completely forgotten about Gary, her stony-faced stepfather, until he answered the door. I must only have seen him standing in the front row at church.
‘Hi,’ I stuttered. ‘Graham mentioned—’ For a split second I saw Joanie running up the stairs in the darkened hallway. Long hair, pale limbs. Unmistakably a young, teenage girl.
‘Mentioned what?’ the man barked. He had puffy cheeks, like a sulky bulldog.
‘I’m one of Joanie’s friends.’ I had planned to say I was researching former pupils of Hallow’s Hill, but it now sounded ridiculous in my head. ‘I thought I’d come over, just on the off-chance she was at home.’ I cringed at myself, sounding like a child calling in for someone. ‘I’m Cameron.’
His face grew even sterner, as his eyes gave me a swift once-over. ‘Cameron Morris? Right. Cameron, I kindly ask you to leave us be.’
I pulled the card out of my pocket and held it up. ‘Somebody sent this to me. Asking me to stop looking for Joanie.’
His face didn’t change, as he replied, ‘A Christmas card? I’m kinda in the middle of somethin’. So, if it’s alright by you …’ Before finishing his sentence, he closed the door with a firm nod. Was he angry? Grieving? I couldn’t tell. It seemed odd not to answer such a simple question. Kindly leave us be, he had said.
Once I was walking towards the local bus station, I looked down at the card again and shuddered in the winter sunshine. Leave things be. This is a warning.
Extract from ‘Who’s Afraid of the Dark?’ by Joanie Sinclair, 2012
I had not known a time before this that I was so afraid of the dark. Even as a little girl, I would ride my yellow bicycle around the neighbourhood’s streets until the moon shone. In winter, when I was a little older, I would sledge in the pitch black with my school friends on Hallow’s Hill.
Now, the dark made me imagine a man in a balaclava coming up the stairs.
21
Joanie, September 2013
One day in late September, Erin invited Joanie to her flat for dinner. The café had become much busier now it was term time, but whenever she had a moment, Joanie would ask David how his research was coming along. In return, he had asked her to read through an article he had written on flora and fauna, as described by Aiden of Maeyar. Her heart had leapt at the mention of the mergus as ‘most likely a razorbill’.
‘I’ll be sure to add you to the acknowledgements,’ David had said, smiling, when she returned the draft. This was one hundred times better than being thanked for recording a talk.
The evening of the dinner, Joanie thought of Cara as she made her way to the Victorian housing that extended beyond the town’s medieval walls. She hoped they could be friends again. Judging by the photographs she posted, Cara was probably too busy to talk to her. I hope you’re OK, Joanie texted. It was worth a try. Thinking of you. So much to catch you up on. Turns out Mia works at my café too! Luckily my shifts are with a student guy I kind of like …
Hopefully that would be enough for Cara to start talking to her again.
Erin’s address was written on a scrap of paper. It led her to a grey stone terraced house with curling white gables, which sat near the disused railway track that must have been constructed around the same time. She wondered how often she had passed this old street on the way to work and school, without knowing who lived there. She pressed the doorbell to the ground-floor apartment, noticing the long black lines on the stone entrance, where past residents had struck matches for their tobacco pipes before they stepped out into the night.
Erin’s head bobbed out of the door. ‘Hey!’ she said. Her confidence was contagious. The first thing Joanie noticed, as she entered the high-ceilinged hallway, was a sound coming from somewhere inside. It was a low drone, similar to the kind they played in meditation class. The next thing she became aware of was the greenery: a mossy rug over pine floorboards, botanical prints on the walls and tall houseplants pushing past comfortable, if sparse, furnishings. Now she was out of the wind, Joanie’s face began to sting. ‘Let me take your jacket,’ Erin said. ‘And sorry to ask this, but can I grab your phone too?’
‘Sorry?’ Joanie wasn’t sure she had heard correctly.
Erin smiled and rolled her eyes. ‘I know. David just has a thing about phones. He thinks they’re too distracting and has this whole theory … Anyway, if you could just leave it here.’ She held out a small basket that had been sitting on a table by the door. ‘Sorry to ask.’ The slow pulse of sound was strangely relaxing, like they were about to get a massage.
Joanie dropped the phone into the basket. Now she thought about it, she had never seen Erin use one. ‘Is this David’s flat? I thought …’ Then it hit her: David and Erin lived together. Of course.
‘Is Erin trying to steal your phone?’ It was Vik, walking out of the kitchen in a baggy Aran cardigan. He sounded in unusually good spirits. ‘You know she sells them on the black market?’ His whole manner was looser, more relaxed than at work.
‘Come and have a seat,’ Erin interrupted, guiding them through to the new, open-plan kitchen, with a large table, where wooden chairs screeched against the quarry-tiled floor.
The evening was still bright in the garden, but the room was made darker by the tall flowers that pushed against the windows.
‘Hey.’ In rolled-up shirt sleeves, David looked ever the academic even now, stirring a pot on the hob. Erin lifted a small stack of white dishes from the island and started laying them on the table.
‘Vik, are you critiquing my phone policy?’ David said. ‘Sorry if it seems a bit odd, Joanie, I just find them awfully distracting, especially at dinner parties.’
‘I should really use mine less,’ Joanie muttered apologetically. ‘They are a bit addictive.’
‘That’s why I don’t have one at all,’ David said. ‘Not a mobile at least. Same reason I don’t have a TV, really. Vik’s making a joke about it, but he’s the same way, aren’t you, Vik?’
Vik shrugged at Joanie. ‘I’m trying it, for a while. He persuaded me.’
She felt a pang of shyness, now they were outside of the café.
‘And you admit,’ said David, ‘it’s helped your concentration, your sleep and no doubt your brain cells. Mobile phones, I always say, work in opposition to one’s intellect.’
Joanie nodded, wishing she had something insightful to add.
At that moment, there was a loud pop. Joanie turned to see Erin uncorking a bottle of champagne.
‘Congratulations are in order!’ Erin said, filling four glasses and passing them around. ‘David’s just had some fantastic news.’
‘Oh, come on now,’ said David. ‘It’s just some funding.’
‘Just some funding?’ replied Vik.
‘So modest,’ said Erin. ‘It’s like a lot. A big ass research grant. And for those tiny fragments, too.’
‘Well,’ said David, ‘they’re not tiny. At least not symbolically …’
‘Cheers, everyone!’ Erin exclaimed, cutting him off. As Joanie joined in, smiling, it was the happiest she had felt in a long time.
After the champagne, they took their places at the table, while Erin and David took turns to serve an assortment of baked vegetables and stews.
‘Butternut squash and bean gratin. Charred aubergines and courgettes,’ said Erin, pointing to each dish in turn. ‘Braised cauliflower. It’s all vegan.’
‘It looks delicious,’ said Joanie, with genuine surprise.
As they began to eat, the three academics exchanged departmental gossip, while Joanie followed along with amusement. Vividly told tales about the drunken colleague at a conference; an astonishingly entitled email from a student; how the Medieval Society’s last banquet had ended in food poisoning.
Within the walls of his own home, David was a charming yet more introverted host, while Vik became an entertainer, addressing the table with good-natured jokes. Joanie could see they were putting on a show for someone, before realizing it was her.
This was exactly the kind of flat Joanie wanted to live in when she finally moved away from home. Now and again, she noticed small details in the décor. The artfully arranged piles of books and antique ornaments would have made perfect photos for social media. She wished David wasn’t so eccentric about phones.
‘I really enjoyed your talk, David,’ Joanie said, when the conversation lapsed into silence. ‘Super-interesting.’
‘Thank you,’ he replied. ‘In my next one I want to talk about how Aiden of Maeyar, really, was a proto-ethnobiologist.’
‘What’s that again?’ she asked, trying to look interested. ‘Erin mentioned the fragments and—’
David smiled generously. ‘It’s someone who studies how people use plants, like myself. Aiden survived the attack on the monastery on Maeyar and he wrote about it. He noticed that the Norsemen seemed to be in some kind of altered state when they raided. It seemed unholy to him, terrifying. That was when he started to experiment with different combinations of plants to try to figure out what had happened to them. The berserker warrior has been such a mysterious figure. Now I am translating his manuscript for the very first time – actually reading it for the very first time since it was lost. That’s where the fragments come in.’
‘And the funding,’ said Erin. ‘So David can expand his research further. Less teaching, more travel! The manuscript contains so many eye-opening details about who these raiders actually were. How they understood the natural world. And religion.’
‘I’m planning to write a book on Aiden, too. Like Erin says, he studied plants here and in the north of Scotland and he also, I’m discovering, made predictions about the future. When he started taking these plants, he basically became a pagan. Or, at least, that’s the argument I’m making. He didn’t eat meat, either, because he was a monk. So that’s partly what inspired me to become vegan.’
‘Uh – as well as myself,’ Erin chipped in.
‘Well, thank you, darling. I’ve found it improves my focus,’ David continued.
‘You basically want to be him,’ said Vik, teasingly.
‘What did you mean by him becoming a pagan?’ asked Joanie.
‘He stopped following the Bible and believed in the power of nature,’ said David.
‘But …’ Joanie was confused ‘… what about the Vikings? Didn’t they murder all those monks and people? He was OK with that?’
David laughed. ‘Not exactly. No, he didn’t condone it. He just started writing about it, then became curious about their way of life. He didn’t become one of them, but he started to find out which plants they used, and that’s what I’m most interested in.’
