Bluff, page 5
‘Mia!’ Tatey butted in. Joanie’s friend, Cara, I saw now, was standing further behind him, looking away, as if trying to find someone better to talk to. I nodded, but she seemed not to see me.
Mia. Of course. I remembered now that she’d spent a lot of time studying, wearing bigger, chunkier glasses than those she had on now.
‘Bet you or Cameron will know this one,’ Tatey said to her. ‘Cameron, does “bi-weekly” mean once every two weeks or twice a week?’ It was a classic Tatey non sequitur. He was the kind of guy you wanted on a pub quiz.
‘Excuse me a sec,’ said Mia, putting her hand on my back as she moved away. She barely looked at Tatey or Cara. I felt as though I was missing something.
My thoughts scrambled. Cara had always been with Joanie, driving around in her old car. ‘Both?’ I asked.
‘How can it be both?’ Cara asked. ‘“Bi-weekly” means twice a week.’
‘Well, what do you call every two weeks, then?’ asked Tatey.
‘Fortnightly,’ replied Cara, ‘Stop being such a numpty.’ I had a memory of Cara and Joanie, stargazing on the bonnet of the little green car. They had given it a funny old lady’s name. Deirdre perhaps. Or Dorothy.
‘Oh, ho-ho-ho. “Fortnightly”, is it? Is that how we talk in Edinburgh, now?’
God, Tatey was a charming bastard when he wanted to be. I had forgotten that side of him.
‘Look, St Rule is way posher than Edinburgh, anyway,’ replied Cara.
‘I’m not from St Rule,’ Tatey replied. Here we go.
I pivoted round to find Graham – surely he had bought me that drink by now. When I went over to the bar, I saw Mia again, smiling.
‘What are you up to, these days?’ I asked.
‘I was going to ask you the same thing,’ she said. She had a way of speaking that put me at ease. ‘I came back here for a PhD.’
‘Let me guess,’ I said, trying to sound like Tatey and failing. ‘Biology?’
She looked taken aback. ‘Wait, how did you …? Marine biology.’
‘Aha!’ I said, triumphant. A memory surfaced. ‘I remember once you did this project on eels. You told me about it in the library. Or was it seals?’ I wished I could remember these little details. And act a little less keen.
Mia smiled. ‘Probably both. One likes eating the other. I can’t believe you remember that … I actually did maths for my undergrad degree.’
That was it: she’d got the Dux for Sciences. ‘Well, you were good at maths too.’ Was I flirting?
She smiled. ‘You should have told me I preferred seals.’ Was this flirting?
‘A seal of approval.’ OK, I ruined it. Kill me now.
‘And you?’ She was playing with her corkscrew hair, seemingly unrepelled. Just then Chloë passed by, studiously ignoring us, and Mia gave a little wave.
A cold chill ran down my spine. Mia had been with Adam that night. The reason Joanie had run off. Damn it.
‘Me? Er, I’m a French teacher,’ I said, looking around. Where had Donaldson gone? He’d probably drunk the pint himself by now. ‘I’m looking for Donalds—’
‘Here you are, Morris,’ Donaldson said, pushing the cold, full glass into my hand. My one excuse to exit this conversation.
‘It’s getting late,’ said Mia, to my relief. ‘I’ve gotta be up early tomorrow.’
‘Open those presents from Santa,’ said Donaldson, with the kind of squint that belonged in a blizzard.
‘Ha! Something like that.’ Mia looked up at me. ‘Hope to see you again.’
A wave of exhaustion swept over me. I was done in. I needed to get back to Tatey, my ride home.
‘Hey!’ Tatey said, almost shouting in my ear. The pub had become rowdier. ‘How about we swing by midnight mass? “Ding dong merrily on high”!’ I could tell from his voice that he’d had a few beers.
‘It’s – I’m gonna get a taxi,’ I shouted back, looking at him and then Donaldson. ‘Got no sleep on the way up.’
‘Sure,’ replied Donaldson. ‘I’m offski. Maybe we get in nine holes before you leave or somethin’.’ I wondered if he had ever tried ventriloquism. An image of him talking to Joanie, with the same indiscernible expression, came back to me from some dark recess. Donaldson and I had been talking at the party, then I had gone off with Chloë, hopeful. But where was Joanie now? I had never seen her again. Not even at church.
I checked my phone. I could hold up for a couple more hours. ‘Actually, Tatey, I’ll come with you.’
Extract from ‘Who’s Afraid of the Dark?’ by Joanie Sinclair, 2012
The night in question, I lay on my bed watching my Mean Girls DVD on the small pink TV in one corner of the room. Mean Girls is one of my favourite films. I have watched it perhaps fifty, even a hundred times. The glow of the TV illuminated my starry duvet while Cady and her friends danced across the screen to ‘Jingle Bell Rock’. I imagine them now, keeping watch over me, like guardian angels in mini dresses. At some point during the film, maybe during the Mathlete state final, I fell asleep.
9
Joanie, June 2013
On one of the residential roads from her house, Joanie pulled her phone out of her pocket. Her brain seemed hardwired to want it, no matter what she did. People from school would be talking about her. She knew some girls would be happy to see her brought down a peg or two. There were a couple of messages from Cara about the break-up. One was sympathetic, doused in heart emojis, followed by a cute gif. The next was rousingly motivational, telling Joanie how much better she was without Adam. He had never been good enough for her anyway. It certainly didn’t seem true, but her friend’s support meant a lot.
Then there was a text from her neighbour, Graham Donaldson, asking if she had arrived home safe from the party. That was sweet of him. He looked out for her now and again. She sent a couple of quick replies, then stuffed her phone back into her pocket. She needed to concentrate on where she was going.
Walking to St Rule’s Old Town meant navigating the maze of her sprawling housing estate. Cul-de-sacs repeated again and again, homes that were replicas of her own. Perhaps she would have been able to walk around them blindfolded, touching their parallel kitchen-diners and bedrooms. She often thought this symmetry would be pretty beneficial to burglars. If you’d broken into one, you could raid them all.
The day was soundless. A pigeon flew into the old doocot as she approached, a medieval throwback in beige suburbia. It would take twenty minutes to walk from here, the southern suburbs of St Rule, to the centre of town. It was Monday morning and most people, including her mother and Gary, had left for work. The clean, empty roads were designed for family cars and kids’ bicycles, not teenage girls on long, anxious walks. She shuddered. Adam would be picking up his backpack off a carousel at Vancouver airport right now. Not that he had spoken to her. Why hadn’t he? Her hand touched her phone again.
Many of the neat suburban gardens had their own cherry trees. They had been donated in the 1970s by a benevolent Japanese businessman, or so legend had it. They had bloomed pink each March, but if you looked up close a disease had started to creep in, deforming their trunks.
Compulsively, Joanie grabbed the phone out of her pocket again and swiped at the screen, furious with herself. A list of notifications showed a few nosy classmates, asking if she was OK. She pushed them away, one by one.
She had now reached the Mill Braes, a public footpath that led into town. Maybe she should post a hot selfie, to show everyone she was fine. She held up her camera and the face that stared back at her was tired and pale.
Another message flashed up from Tatey. In town – you about?
She used to tell people Tatey and Cameron were like brothers to her, but they weren’t, not really. They had simply grown up at the same church. An embarrassing, semi-secret fact. To Tatey, from Monypenny, Joanie lived ‘in town’. What had he written on her sleeve? In Heaven, all the interesting people are missing. What did that mean? She put her phone back into her pocket.
When they had exchanged a look at the beach party, she had felt a secret thrill that was almost like fear. It was the same feeling when he had asked her to play dead in the library, knowing Cameron was about to start his monitor duty. He had thought that Cameron was easy to fool.
Joanie jabbed at her phone again, once she had reached the crenellated town walls. Did Erin’s café even exist? There was no search listing for Hallowed Ground, no map pin, no social media, no reviews. Nevertheless, she continued through the arch into the Old Town, hoping to find it if she walked up East Street.
While it was true that St Rule thrived on ceremony and tradition, its existence was also sustained by an economy of coffee houses, gloomy pubs and quaint bookshops. The places, in other words, where people spent their time between communion, lectures and the golf course. As Joanie headed towards the twin steeples of the ruined cathedral, the muggy air pressed at her temples and the summer rain spat down.
The rain was beginning to fall faster when she saw Tatey’s lanky figure shuffling along the pavement. He raised a hand solemnly, in greeting.
‘What are you doing up so early?’ she asked, instinctively looking around for the clapped-out van he drove. He sometimes transported bands’ equipment in the back, driving to and from local gigs, but Adam had always seemed intensely irritated by him. He looks like he sleeps in that van, Adam would say. It’s disgusting.
‘Stuff,’ Tatey said. ‘Y’know.’ He was looking at her differently.
‘Just saw you texted me,’ Joanie said.
‘Yeah. I wondered if you wanted to hang out.’ He didn’t break eye contact.
‘Maybe later,’ said Joanie, without really thinking about it. ‘Have you heard of a café called Hallowed Ground? I’m trying to find it. I’ve got to go there for a potential job thing.’
‘Gnarly,’ replied Tatey, with an expression she couldn’t quite read. She appreciated that he wasn’t mentioning the Adam Situation, as she now thought of it.
He cocked his head thoughtfully. ‘I think it’s part of the Divinity School.’
She felt a pang of uncertainty. The Divinity School. Erin had been so friendly. Was this something evangelical? One of those youth-recruitment drives, like the Jesus Bus that parked outside school and handed out plastic crucifixes? She wouldn’t know unless she tried.
‘Catch you later,’ said Tatey, as she made her way past him.
The Divinity Quad was beautiful in the light summer rain. In its centre stood a wizened tree with a plaque, certifying its eighteenth-century origins. Its spindly branches spread towards any passing students like a bony embrace.
At first, she couldn’t see anything other than the building: a patchwork of stone and ornate windows along each side of a slick, verdant square. Each window consisted of three long rectangles and within each were rows of smaller white ones. When Joanie tried to look at them all together, it was dizzying. The walls of the building were punctuated with architectural flourishes, such as weathered staircases, stone-crested doors, dinky turrets and curling ornamentation, green with age. As her eyes ran along the next wall, she spotted a small sign above a door in the corner that read HALLOWED GROUND in the university’s antiquated font.
She approached carefully along the glistening gravel path, past the climbing roses, wet with raindrops. The windows either side looked darker than the others. They were obscured now, she saw, by large arrangements of dried flowers, corn stalks and feathery sprays of deep yellow and orange. Underneath the sign, the door was plastered with damp posters for yoga and meditation.
At that moment, a tall man pushed his way out of the door, carrying a pile of books. Joanie stood aside to let him by, then caught the door as it swung shut. As his tweed jacket brushed past her, she realized it was the academic in tortoiseshell glasses who had been in the car with Erin.
She watched his face change in recognition and surprise. Yes, she was the messy, crying girl they had picked up on the drive home. The one who knew about birds.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Hunting down a peppermint tea!’
‘I’ve heard they’re good,’ she said, making him smile, as he staggered off under the weight of his reading list, his head bowed in the rain.
As Joanie pushed open the door, there was a faint smell of must, as though she were walking into a library. Unexpected light filled her eyes, from Gothic windows that sat high in the opposite wall. Bookshelves lined the edges, but the rest of the space was given over to second-hand tables and chairs, a large counter with an espresso machine, and house plants of different shapes and sizes.
Joanie’s eyes scanned across the tables to the handful of academics who were drinking cups of tea and reading. She couldn’t see Erin, so she walked up to the man at the counter. He smiled at her, tall and of South Asian heritage, a piercing on one side of his lower lip. His dark, unruly hair was just long enough to tuck behind his ears.
‘What does this get me?’ Joanie asked, placing the card in front of him.
‘A drink? Whatever you want.’ There was a lilt to his voice that confirmed to Joanie he was probably an international student, maybe even a postgraduate. It was hard to tell, but he still looked disconcertingly similar to her in age. The students of St Rule had always seemed so much older and more sophisticated, living hidden lives behind the university’s high walls, before jetting back to different parts of the world. Now she was the age of the incoming freshers, an interloper.
Rain began to batter the window above them. There was no menu behind the counter. ‘What kind of coffees do you have?’
‘We do normal coffee, of course, the usual, but really, we specialize in herbal teas. Many different kinds.’ He slid a small menu towards her, the sleeve of his jumper falling over his hand. There were glass cylinders behind him, filled with the dark fragments of dried leaves and flowers. The air smelt faintly of peppermint.
Joanie scanned the list. ‘I’ll have a Cosmic Chamomile. You guys are new?’ she asked, looking at the shelves lined with battered paperbacks.
‘We opened last year,’ he said. ‘This used to be part of the Divinity Library. The university figured they needed to make more money.’ He sighed. She watched as he began to prepare the drink, scooping out dried leaves from the clear container. ‘Low on staff today,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring it over. We just ask that people keep the space a digital-free zone. No phones or laptops if you can. Cheers.’
She took a seat at an empty table, unsure if this was all there was to Erin’s offer. She would take advantage of what she could. She wished she had known about this place earlier. It had a laid-back studenty charm. Her friends all wanted to go to shiny, minimalist establishments for people who liked flat whites, MacBooks and selfies.
Turning off her phone felt like pulling down a small shutter on the world. She saw a large painting to her right. A cottage on a steep rocky outcrop that plunged down to the waves. Its shoreline was dotted with flowers.
At that moment, two girls with backpacks entered, having a conversation in another language, soaked from the rain. The windows had steamed up. They peeled off their shoes and jumpers and curled up on a threadbare sofa, hair sticking to their faces.
There was still no sign of Erin. Perhaps it was her day off. Joanie browsed the bookshelves, which held paperbacks that looked like they had been pillaged from the local charity shops. They were divided into a hotchpotch of different sections. Gardening, Yoga, Scottish History. She ran her finger over the spines of the latter shelf and selected a title at random: A Life of a Saint: the real story of St Rule.
She sat down at a table and scanned the first page self-consciously.
St Rule, as the legend goes, set sail from Greece around 300 AD, accompanied by several virgins. According to varying accounts, Rule was either shipwrecked or told by an angel to stop intentionally on the shores of Fife at a Pictish settlement …
Someone was standing close to her chair. Joanie raised her head, smelling the chamomile tea.
‘You came,’ said Erin, holding the cup in both hands, her face like a pale, polished pebble. ‘I just arrived. The rain is ridiculous today. Here you go. How are you feeling?’
‘I’m OK.’ Joanie felt ashamed of her drunken behaviour in the car. ‘Thank you so much for the tea.’
‘Oh, of course.’ Erin stretched out her hands, in her cropped green T-shirt. ‘I love your outfit by the way.’
‘Oh, thanks, same,’ Joanie said, reflexively. She had actually forgotten what she had put on that morning. Her purple skinny jeans, a polka-dot top that Adam had bought her for a birthday present.
‘Are you still looking for a job?’ Erin asked. ‘We need a new member of staff right now.’ She paused. ‘I can get you a form?’
Joanie hesitated, absent-mindedly turning the pages of her book. She hadn’t thought about what she would do next. This place was much better than the Maeyar Visitor Centre. And she had already wasted a lot of money on air travel. The thought made her feel sick. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I’d be so grateful for a job here. It seems really nice.’ She gave Erin her best smile.
Erin moved to serve another customer and Joanie started filling in the form. It felt so old-school. Her mum had told her to hand out her CV around town, but she knew the world didn’t work like that any more. At least, she thought not.
The door opened and she looked up to see Tatey enter the café, his long hair wet from the rain. Oh, God. She hadn’t wanted him to come with her. It didn’t feel right. He looked too young and out of place.
She stood up, chugged the rest of her tea and plonked her application form by the till, while Erin’s back was turned. The other barista was talking to the two girls on the sofa.
‘It’s really raining outside, so I just thought I’d try and find you …’ he said, pushing his hand through his unwashed hair.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Joanie said. She couldn’t imagine anything worse than drinking tea with her classmate, this dude in skate pants, pretending to be grown-ups. She could handle the rain.
