Bluff, page 12
23
Joanie, September 2013
A couple of days later, Joanie met Vik after her shift. This meeting had played over in her head for three days with a current of anxiety. He greeted her with a cool hug; his grungy vintage clothes smelt of detergent. After such a build-up, it felt anticlimactic. Joanie tried to study his expression from beneath her blue baseball cap: he seemed preoccupied, no longer the joker from the dinner party.
There had been so many things she had imagined them talking about, but now they were walking to the beach all conversation slipped away, like the land into the sea.
‘Thanks for the lift the other night,’ Joanie said, finally.
‘No problem,’ he replied, his eyes on the road ahead.
‘What you been up to?’ she asked, as casually as possible.
‘Not much,’ Vik replied. ‘Been helping David with this manuscript translation. He does have some lofty ideas about it. We’re going on a research trip at the weekend, over to the Isle of Maeyar. He hasn’t by any chance talked to you about a seabird, has he?’
Joanie laughed. ‘Yes. You guys are such nerds, honestly. I can’t believe he’s still stuck on that.’
As they turned a corner, a wind-lashed grey obelisk came into view. Joanie had known it all her life, but it appeared only now as something interesting to talk about to this out-of-towner. ‘That looks like a war memorial, right?’ she said, searching Vik’s face in profile, waiting for a reaction. ‘It’s actually for people who had been burned at the stake. Back in the day.’
Vik laughed. ‘“Back in the day”. The Middle Ages, you mean?’
‘Yeah,’ Joanie said. ‘The martyrs.’ All she knew of the martyrs was their burning.
This was clearly Vik’s topic. Of course he knew about it. ‘It was a kind of war, the Reformation,’ he said. ‘A war of beliefs.’
‘How do you know so much?’ Joanie said, nudging him.
‘It’s my field. Besides, I think that’s pretty common knowledge,’ he teased back.
She stood for a moment to look at the stone structure. It was imposing, no matter how long you had lived here, looming ten metres tall, overlooking the golden expanse of the South Sands beach.
As they walked side by side, Joanie was acutely aware of her body falling in time with his. They were close, without touching. What did he think of her? He didn’t behave like the boys from school. He made her laugh. Did that mean he liked her? He walked with purpose as he spoke at length. ‘Everything in this town turns out to be where someone got burned or tortured. Do you find that weird?’ he asked. ‘Or do you get used to it, you townsfolk? I was walking down by Salvation Street the other day, and someone says to me, “Oh, you do know we are walking the route of the Veiled Nun?” The Veiled Nun!’
Joanie laughed, unguarded for a moment.
‘And do you know why she’s veiled?’ he asked.
Who had he been walking with? Another girl? Mia? She nodded to give the impression that she already knew the story.
‘Behind the veil she is bloody mutilated. Mutilated herself for love. Love is very overrated. I blame medieval France.’ He was smiling that smile again. Joanie wanted to push him over. They were leaving the old town now, crowded as it was with turrets and steeples and stories. They were out in the open, by the famous golf course that sprawled alongside the wide sandy beach ahead of them, bright and dry.
As they walked closer, Joanie could make out two black dogs running in and out of the waves. A couple in anoraks catapulted tennis balls.
‘Are you religious?’ Vik asked, prodding her shoulder. ‘You look mad at me. Nuns are a touchy subject?’
‘Oh my God, Vik, stop it.’ She pushed him then, playfully, and he jumped off the high ridge of road on to the beach.
‘I’m only asking!’ he called up. ‘There are so many different kinds of Christians here, man.’
Vik held up his hand for her to leap down with him. I see, thought Joanie. His grip felt strong. The sky was clear and blue, and sometimes that was all you could ask for in summer.
‘You’ve got your Baptists, your Quakers,’ he said.
‘Your candlestick-makers,’ Joanie finished, making him laugh this time. Look at me, on a date, she thought. She wanted to talk to Cara about this man. Her last messages were still sitting unread.
The beach usually made her feel good. She looked around to check for anyone she recognized from school, but the sand was practically empty, a cream canvas, stretching for miles. She watched two figures walk out of the dunes and on to the beach, a man and a woman.
Vik stuck up his arm to get their attention as he walked towards them, grinning. ‘Come on!’ he said to Joanie, grabbing her hand again. She squinted, walking closer, to see the square posture of David and the tangled hair of Erin.
‘Race you,’ Vik said, and sped off up the beach. Joanie chased after him, her feet slipping in the soft sand. She hated him being just out of reach.
‘It was ridiculous,’ Erin was saying to Vik, when Joanie caught up. ‘Oh, hey.’
‘Hi,’ said Joanie, half-heartedly, raising her hand and panting for breath.
‘But you did it?’ asked Vik. ‘You have them?’
‘We do.’ Erin nodded, smiling.
‘Cool,’ Vik replied. Joanie looked for any sign that his attitude had changed towards David and Erin, but he appeared as enlivened as he had at the dinner party. She could picture them all, on a Highland road trip, drinking wine into the fire-lit evenings.
‘So,’ said David, turning to Joanie, ‘we’re hanging back there, in the dunes. Got quite the set-up already.’
‘Check you out,’ said Vik. The conversation sounded like an annoying inside joke. The salty wind made Joanie’s nose run.
‘So glad you could join us.’ Erin pushed her hair out of her face lazily. ‘We wanted to get to know you more before our trip up north.’
At once, Joanie felt stupid for ever thinking Vik had asked her on a date for just the two of them.
‘And for you to get to know us better,’ said David, languorously, as they walked to a sheltered spot in the dunes where a floral picnic blanket had been laid. David fumbled with a Thermos of herbal tea.
Vik sat down beside Joanie. ‘Too much?’ he muttered, in a low voice.
‘Erin? No …’ she began, trying not to sound disappointed. She had been expecting a real, grown-up date, just the two of them. That was what she really wanted, she realized.
‘You’re doing such an amazing job in the café,’ said Erin.
Joanie looked up. All three of them were smiling at her. She nodded. ‘Thank you. I like working there. With you guys. I’m so excited for our trip.’
‘We do stuff like this, come out to the dunes, to really connect,’ said Erin.
Nobody said ‘the dunes’. It was strange being at the beach with them. She had grown up with this large swathe of water and sand that stretched far away from the town’s jagged outline. She didn’t have to over-think: the beach was simply there, an eternal part of the town and her life.
She looked through their eyes at the long, pale grass. The dark, lapping sea. It was a different, slightly more beautiful place: not her beach, but its identical twin. These people moved differently from the townsfolk, their language elevated, their humour more refined. She wanted to move and laugh like them, clean and attractive. She watched the gestures of their hands, the shape of their mouths as they spoke about medieval history. Erin bitched about Mia, and Joanie laughed at her cruel sense of humour as she pulled her baseball cap a little further over her eyes. A crab tucked away in a different shell, drifting in and out of the conversation.
‘We get to chill and, you know, experience nature out here. That’s what we’re all about. Just feel it,’ said David, closing his eyes.
Vik laughed. ‘Come on, tell her. We’re getting high. You guys never get to the point.’
David was taking something out of his inner pocket. They were smiling at her again.
‘Mushrooms. If you didn’t know yet,’ said Vik.
‘I kind of knew,’ said Joanie. She hadn’t. Her surroundings were so familiar and yet so new.
‘Liberty caps,’ said Erin. ‘I knew you’d be down for this.’
It was her choice to join them. She hesitated for a moment, then accepted the small brown mushroom and put it to her mouth, like a communion wafer. She watched Erin and Vik do the same. She had wanted something to wash away her thoughts and feelings. Those of Adam and, in fact, everything, if just for a while. She wasn’t scared. These people didn’t need to convince her, but they tried to all the same, in their measured, reassuring way. They were academics. Their knowledge was deep, their interest scientific. They wanted to change the world.
‘I’m not participating today,’ David said, turning to Joanie, as if she had asked for an explanation. ‘The experience is better when there’s a guide.’ He sounded so uncool. ‘And someone needs to drive you guys home.’
He explained that she had nothing to worry about. ‘Right now, your body is simply converting psilocybin into psilocin, which has a very similar chemical structure to serotonin, regulating mood, stress, sleep …’ Something about his voice was lulling. She liked that his corduroy blazer matched the colour of his tortoiseshell glasses.
‘That’s why this stuff is so interesting to me.’ He looked around at the group. ‘One thing we have in common is we’re all anxious people. I mean, we’re thinkers. It’s kind of an occupational hazard.’
Nobody she had met, not even Mia, talked like this. She wished he’d stop.
‘We want to heal. From modern life, the effects of technology,’ Erin said.
‘Psilocin unlocks something, too, in your receptors,’ David continued, looking at Joanie. She could tell he was enjoying this opportunity to explain. ‘There’s this thing we call the default mode network. Some people would take a tenth of this, three times a week. That tea we had at my house. That had a tiny dose of mushrooms in it.’
‘I didn’t drink it,’ Joanie said, trying to remember what he was talking about. Had Vik? Vik had driven her home.
‘People have been doing this since the dawn of time,’ David continued. ‘That’s partly what I love about my studies. You end up finding out we aren’t so different from, say, the druids or the Norsemen.’
David’s speech began to slow. Then, with time, she lay down. Summer was ending.
Softly the sand started to breathe. She swept it up slowly and let it fall in a golden veil. The grains glittered through her fingers and ran over her arms like friendly ants.
‘We like to lie in a circle, like this,’ Erin said, reaching for Joanie’s hand. Vik took her other hand and lay down too. Distantly, David carried on talking and the sensation of the wind became visible, carrying a bird up high. Joanie watched the bird hover and its sharp eyes watched her.
Joanie understood the breathing classes now. They inhaled and exhaled together as they had practised. She breathed until her body was simply shifting air. Her lungs grew and shrank against the bones of her chest. She was sharing breath between the sand and the sky. Her heart was so present in her body, her blood the rush of seawater. Her capillaries tiny threads of seaweed, gently shivering.
Joanie’s hands moved back through the sand, feeling the tiny shell grains. Over and over they stroked the hair of her arms. Through a hilly desert, the deep blue rippled and shone. David was asking her how she felt, but she couldn’t answer. The sky was too liquid and beautiful.
This place, this spot, had always been here. The world had always been like this.
With time, the fibrous dune grass grew steadily taller. It was the long hair next to her face, pushing upwards instead of down. The slow voices of her friends asked questions. Their worlds did not match hers. Erin was getting up and running to the churning water, her breath heavy, her bare feet changing the ground. Her gasps were waves of air.
Vik’s body moved close to hers on the sand and they stared into each other’s eyes. Then his mouth was on hers and they were kissing, his breath hot, his lip piercing, pressing into her skin. She had always wanted this. The kiss reverberated into the pink sky.
24
Cameron, 28 December 2023
A day later, in that strange no man’s land between Christmas and New Year, I found myself travelling in the back seat of a car to a party. My sister Kirstin had been invited by her ex-classmate Theo and had come back for the evening, fully recovered from her illness. She was a reassuring presence, her excitement at a night out almost palpable. Her friend Alison was driving and they started to gossip about people I vaguely remembered from school. Sitting there, watching the dark, rainy farmland zip by, I was a little brother, tagging along uninvited.
The party was at a large house in the countryside. Theo’s mother greeted us at the door. I looked through at the busy hallway, where people my parents’ age were talking animatedly in well-tailored outfits, wine glasses in hand. A younger version of myself would have resented these genteel surroundings, but now the place felt oddly welcoming.
‘I think Mum and Dad should have come,’ I said to Kirstin, who had made a beeline for the canapés next to the kitchen dresser.
‘I did ask them.’ She helped herself to a blini. Typical behaviour.
A familiar North American voice cut through the crowded kitchen. It set my teeth on edge. ‘Are those Tunnock’s Teacakes over there? It’s been a very long time since I had one of those.’ It was Adam again, lucky me.
‘Are they your Proustian madeleine?’ asked a man with a clipped Edinburgh accent, wild greying hair and an artfully dishevelled suit.
‘My what-now?’ Adam asked charmingly. He was wearing a fleece like it was a dinner jacket. I seemed to remember he had a brother in Kirstin’s class.
‘It’s a taste that evokes your childhood,’ I replied, a little too loudly, slipping into French-teacher mode. ‘Like the ending of Ratatouille.’
Adam didn’t look very impressed by my helpful Disney comparison.
‘Très bien!’ the older man exclaimed at me, existing – presumably – in a permanent state of academia. ‘Did you know, it only became a madeleine on the third draft of À la Recherche. It was, at one point …’ he paused to pop a mini quiche into his mouth ‘… a biscotto.’
‘Every day’s a school day,’ Adam said, looking around for someone less eccentric to talk to, which at this party presented a bit of a challenge. ‘I’m in tech.’
‘I’m a French teacher,’ I said, ignoring him. The acoustics in the kitchen were starting to hurt my ears. ‘I’m always telling my A-level students to read just a little Proust, even if it’s in English.’ God, I sounded like a wanker. I hadn’t read Proust since uni. I could sense Adam looking around the room and sloping off, while this man talked to me about a paper he had written: Involuntary Memory and the Madeleine. His teeth were yellow. The way he smelt reminded me of nicotine and mouldy roses. Kirstin had disappeared into the crowd.
I spent most of the evening talking to kindly parents of friends, and academics who were keen to tell me about the books they were writing and research they were conducting. I was happy to listen and gain insight into their esoteric worlds. It was enviable, actually. I started to entertain the idea that I could do a PhD, like Mia. Maybe I would stop brushing my hair and start wearing floral shirts or black polo necks. Every now and then I would see Adam’s head in the crowd and feel the inexplicable compulsion to talk to him.
The party turned out to be much more fun than I had anticipated: folk from school and their parents having an unexpected blast in the middle of nowhere. It was only after the clock had struck midnight, after Kirstin’s friend had played the bagpipes on the curving staircase, after the impromptu ceilidh dancing in the hall, after the whisky cocktails in the teapot, that I gained the courage to speak to Adam again.
We were standing by a slightly lopsided bookcase in the living room. I took a quick glance at a shelf that seemed to be dedicated to Danish philosophers. Cushions, blankets, lampshades and rugs made a bohemian patchwork around us. Guests were starting to leave, red-faced from good wine.
‘You get your Tunnock’s?’ I asked.
‘Ha! Oh, yes. It’s good to be back,’ he replied, scanning the other people in the room, as though he, too, was looking for someone. ‘You forget so much.’ The North American accent sounded softer now and his eyes had started to droop.
I cleared my throat. ‘I was kinda hoping I’d bump into Joanie,’ I said, waiting to see his reaction. I was sure he knew where I lived.
He did a sort of Gallic shrug and drank from the paper cup he was holding.
I pressed on: ‘Have you seen her about much?’ The question sounded ridiculous; I was aware of that, but didn’t care.
He looked performatively confused. ‘Have I seen her about? Here?’
‘Or, you know,’ I said, ‘after we left school.’
‘You asked me the same thing at the pub.’ He sounded annoyed now. ‘I went to Canada, and that was kinda it, ya know? It’s been such a long time. That’s all I can really say.’
I studied his face as he spoke. In the dim light of the room, he looked gaunt, his deep-set eyes in shadow. I wanted to ask about the Christmas cards, but I knew it wouldn’t go down well. Maybe it would create a scene, just as people were starting to leave.
Another question slipped out instead. ‘Was it awkward seeing Mia at the pub?’ I still felt a latent anger for the way he had betrayed Joanie, all those years ago.
He let out a short, surprised laugh. ‘You mean, after what happened? God, no one would let me live it down. Even now. That night was stupid. Really stupid. OK? God. You must have seen how out of it we both were. She had smoked too much and she was just very … insistent. That girl was … trouble. I know that’s not cool to say, these days, but it’s true. Seeing her again, the other night, I don’t know what I was thinking.’ He dropped his voice and leaned in. ‘I didn’t know how much she hated Joanie until afterwards. It was like she was trying to hurt her through me. What do they say? It’s always the quiet ones?’
