Bluff, page 22
‘There’s stew in the freezer. That rabbit.’ His eyes are sad. This is how he looks when he isn’t talking or listening, when he is in his own thoughts.
The young woman rises, followed by her shadow. Lauren’s father gets up to face her. His eyes still have a dreamy, glazed look in the firelight.
‘Look at you,’ he says to the woman. She doesn’t reply, but sits back down on the sofa, as silent as a moth. Niall shakes his head and goes into the leaking utility room to take the stew from the freezer. He begins to heat the icy lump in the metal saucepan. Usually they eat easy things: mashed potatoes, scrambled eggs, sausages. Sundays he might roast a chicken or stew a rabbit in the big pot. He calls this a batch. Through the hatch, Lauren watches him take another whisky bottle out of the cupboard.
Lauren’s dad’s rifle is propped outside the kitchen doorway. He uses it to shoot rabbit, pheasant and foxes. She has never seen the deaths herself, but she has heard the shot in the woods. She has seen the rabbit pelts and their unskinned bodies hanging in the garden and laid in the kitchen. She has touched their matted fur. Careful, her dad always tells her, ticks. Jameson eats their insides, the bad parts. He likes them, the same way that if he finds a dead animal in the forest he will roll on his back in it. Watching this woman, Lauren thinks of those animals and their bad parts.
Lauren’s father kneels in front of the woman, who does not meet his gaze. He tries to make her eat from a steaming bowl, holding the steel spoon to her mouth. He blows on the food and holds it to her again. The woman keeps her mouth shut. He tries a third time, the spoon at her closed mouth, her closed face.
‘I’m so hungry,’ he says. He places the bowl by the armchair and sits with Lauren at the wooden table in the kitchen and they eat together without speaking. There is comfort in the stew. Lauren looks up. The grey bristle of her father’s jaw is working away, while his shoulders and head, with its blond and white ponytail, tower over the bowl. His hands are big and coarse from making things, mending fences and hewing posts, hitting them into the earth, unrolling chicken wire. He builds things for inside the house too. Chairs, boxes and shelves made from wood from a further part of the forest, which he collects from the sawmill. On his forearm is a tattoo of a blue rose.
When the fire starts to take, he holds the woman’s hand and leads her up to the chest of drawers in his bedroom. The temperature is colder up here. He takes out his black Motörhead T-shirt with flames on the back and tucks it under his arm. Lauren watches the woman shake with cold. Lauren pulls the tartan blanket from her father’s bed and wraps it around herself. He has not switched on a light.
Niall leads the woman to the bathroom and locks the door. They are in the bathroom for a long time. Lauren hears water running. She wants hot water too and the lounge fire. She presses her ear to the bathroom door and hears her father’s low voice, singing something.
‘Dad, can I help?’
‘No, love. Out in a sec.’
Lauren walks slowly along the dingy landing clutching the blanket like a toga. Her pumpkin bucket bangs against her knee. The house is never fully bright apart from the skylight over the staircase. A royal-blue carpet covers the floors throughout, including the damp bathroom. Net curtains veil the small windows and heavy velvet covers the entrance to the back room. Unopened letters clutter the spindly table in the hallway. The walls are clad in a deep-yellow pine. There are a few pictures of hilly landscapes, icy rivers and wild animals painted in soft, fantasy colours.
Lauren listens hard but only hears the drip downstairs in the utility room, nothing more. Droplets of water are falling from the roof into a red bucket that her dad put out the day before. He says he will fix it tomorrow. Outside the wind grows thick and it starts to rain. In her bedroom, there are outlines of horses on the walls, pages carefully torn from magazines. Dreamcatchers hang on her curtain rail, their feathers heavy.
When she gets into bed, she reaches down into the gap by the corner of the wall and brings out a small drawstring bag and an old battered notebook. The bag is printed with gold stars on midnight-blue velvet. There is a tarot deck inside. In the evenings she will often shuffle the cards, unwieldy in her small hands. She tries to read and learn the cards as best she can, but sometimes she dreams up the meanings when she doesn’t understand. On the first page of the leather-bound notebook it says SPAEWIFE’S BEUK. This is a book she found in the bottom compartment of her mother’s vanity case. She soon learned it tells secrets and explains powers.
Some of its yellowed pages are covered in scrawls made by her grandmother, her mother’s mother, who wrote her name inside the front cover. Others are written in a more old-fashioned script. Others again are written in bold, curvy letters that look friendlier to her, like a teacher’s writing. Some of the pages have been taken from jotters and glued or Sellotaped into the book. Many are dedicated to the reading of cards, with illustrations and diagrams.
She is too tired to try and concentrate on the deck, so she flicks through the pages of the book to see what she might find. Someone has sketched out pentangles, clubs, wands, an overflowing goblet and a dove and, in one beautiful illustration, a blindfolded woman crossing sharp swords.
Next to the notebook on her pillow is a thumb-sized box of worry dolls that she talks to each night. She has given them names. She takes them out of the box and lines them up against one side of her pillow. Stacey. Crystal. Spencer. Kendall. Silently, she communicates to each, asking them to keep her and her father safe as she places them under her pillow.
Her breathing is shallow against the heavy rain outside. She remembers she is wearing her mother’s lipstick and goes back along the landing to the bathroom. It is empty. ‘Dad?’ she calls out. There is no answer. She feels cold, so she runs the hot tap over her palms and wrists and touches her neck with her warm hands. In the dim light she sees tiny smears of blood in the sink. She is not sure for a moment whether there was a lot more and she has been washing it away. Sometimes when Lauren brushes her teeth she spits out blood, but this is not the same. She tries to wipe the smears away and, in the gloom, wonders if they were ever there to begin with.
She scrunches up her eyes at the mirror. A cold draught blows. There is a flicker and she glances at the bottom corner of the mirror to look at the room behind her. She once heard older girls talking about a woman who would appear in a mirror at night if you said her name three times. She looks back at her face to check it is unchanged. The damp has worked its way into her hair and the black kohl has spread around her eyes. She undoes the plait circling her head and her hair springs out in a shock. She looks stranger now than when she was guising. She rubs her blotchy eyes while the rain batters the frosted window. The wind sounds like a dog whose owners have been away too long.
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First published in Great Britain in 2025 by Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Francine Toon 2025
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Cover design by Beci Kelly/TW. Cover images © Shutterstock & Getty
ISBN: 978-1-473-58779-3
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