Offshore: A short story collection Read online

  Broadband connected immediately. I ran through the messages quickly, deleting the spam that had got through the filter. Nothing from my agent or from the scriptwriter, who was as eager as I for the television project to proceed. As always, there were a couple of messages from readers, who’d reached me through my website. I reply to all these, even to the people who are shocked by my books and write to complain. I have a standard response: you know what’s coming from the jacket and the first page; nobody makes you read on. In fact the first letter was very positive and just contained a query about the publication date of the next book.

  The final, unread message was entitled Killer of the North. This is the name of my latest novel. It’s set in Gateshead on the River Tyne, and the title is a play on words. There’s a famous piece of public art there called the Angel of the North, a giant sculpture that embraces visitors who approach the town by road or rail. I was expecting a review – either thanks for a tight and pacey story that kept the reader guessing until the final page or a rant about ‘gratuitous violence’. But the message was very short and to the point: Go home. You’re not welcome here.

  No signature and no way to guess the identity of the writer. The address was [email protected]. Simeon was the name of the central character of Killer of the North and certainly not sufficiently common to be the real first name of anyone living here. Most islanders have signed up to shetnet broadband. Even if I were to ask a computer geek to track down the machine from which it was sent, I’d guess it would be from an Internet cafe or the library in Lerwick. I felt as shaky as when my hire car had skidded on ice. My visit was secret. That was the deal. I’d created an alias for the car hire and the flight. Highly illegal, but during the course of my researches I’d come across people who could create a forged driving licence that would satisfy the cursory glances of officials checking in passengers for internal flights. I’d gone to considerable lengths to cover my tracks, but I should have realized that secrecy would be impossible here. Shetland is a place where gossip flourishes. I reached out for the wine behind me and poured a large glass. Soon the bottle was empty.

  I’ve never been a good sleeper, and that night it must have been the early hours of the morning before my mind stopped fizzing. In summer it would long since have been light. That summer of ten years before was golden – there were weeks of unbroken sunshine, and the low-lying meadows close to my home were yellow with flag iris and marsh marigolds. Pictures of that time clicked into my head as I finally fell asleep.

  I woke to a violent banging on the door. My heart was speeding as I pulled on a sweater and climbed down the ladder. The empty bottle and the remains of my makeshift meal were still on the table. John Sinclair was standing there. He’d been a teacher before he took the post as Arts Trust director. I’d known him well in those days – he’d taught me English – and he hadn’t changed much. Same round belly. His nickname at school had been teddy bear. Certainly he’d changed less than I had, it seemed, because he did a double-take.

  ‘I’d never have known you,’ he said, ‘if I’d met you in the street.’ The street is what we call Commercial Street in Lerwick. The main shopping centre. The place to catch up with news.

  ‘Aye, well. It’s astonishing what a good hairdresser can do.’

  In those days I’d had a mousy, tangled thatch. I’d thought the wild curls made me look like a Pre-Raphaelite heroine. Now I was blonde and sophisticated. The short cut fell back into place even after a night of disturbed sleep.

  ‘Come in,’ I said.

  There was nobody about, but I was taking no chances. Besides, it was still cold. There’d been another scattering of snow in the night and a frost on top of that. Everything glistening, and the air sharp and clear.

  I put on the kettle. ‘Sorry about the mess,’ I said. He made me feel as if I was still a pupil, that he’d wandered into our home-room to see unwashed cups and rubbish everywhere. He’d have had me on bruck duty.

  ‘It’s your home.’ He smiled. He’d always had a startling smile. ‘For the next month, at least.’

  ‘Who knows I’m here?’ It came out sharper than I’d expected, but I couldn’t take the words back.

  ‘Nobody. Complete anonymity. That was the deal. A place to stay and write in peace. And in return a short story from the famous Jacobina Tait.’ He smiled again. It’s a Shetland tradition to give girls a feminized version of a male relative’s name. In most families the practice died out ages ago, but mine was old-fashioned. Jacob was my maternal grandfather. I’ve always been called Jackie, though, and that’s the name I write under. ‘I’m the only person who knows you’re here,’ he said. ‘Honest.’

  ‘So you wrote this?’ I switched on the computer and showed him the email. ‘You’re Simeon?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course not.’ We looked at each other in silence. Finally he continued speaking. ‘I’ll check in the office, see if someone might have got word that way. I’m sorry, Jackie. Really. I’ll understand if you want to leave.’

  I considered and for a moment there was a flutter of relief, the possibility of escape. Perhaps I could drive back to the airport and by teatime I’d be back in the city. Anonymous and safe. But then I’d still have to live with the uncertainty, the scared sleepless nights. I shook my head.

  ‘Come and stay with us then,’ he said. ‘With Helen and me. So I know you’ll be safe.’

  But that was unthinkable. Besides other considerations, Helen and John had three children, two dogs and a Shetland pony. There was no way I could work in that sort of chaos. John left soon after. He had a meeting to attend about the grand new arts centre on the harbour. He was surprisingly ambitious in his new role. I made coffee, and a quarter of an hour later I set out in the car.

  My parents left the islands after all the publicity, but they weren’t suited to life in the south and now both are dead. Different illnesses, but both with the same cause: depression and irrational guilt. They were eaten away by that, just as cancer eats away at a healthy body, though how could they blame themselves for Billy’s death when they weren’t even there? The house where we lived was sold and I hadn’t seen it since I’d left. In my head it was always bathed in sunlight, and even today, in early December, the light was clear, reflected on the snow and the ice. It lies at the head of a voe and the water runs right up to the meadow.

  A couple from the south had bought the place, pleased at the price that was asked and that their sealed bid turned out to be the highest. In fact theirs was the only bid. Nobody from Shetland fancied taking it on. They knew its history. Or they believed they did; they’d read the crazy story in the papers.

  I parked the car at the top of the bank and looked down at it. The house was low and newly whitewashed, and it seemed that the newcomers had decided to play at the good life because there were sheep in the in-bye fields and they’d made a vegetable garden in the sheltered land furthest from the sea.

  I stood, drinking coffee from my flask and looking down at the place where my young life had been spent. Memories chased after each other.

  A fifteen-year-old boy died there. His name was William Anderson, known to us all as Billy. He’d hanged himself in the barn that still stands to the side of the house, with a noose made of fishing line. I found him the next morning as I carried the empty bottles to the recycling bin we kept in there. He’d had a lot to drink. That was clear following the post-mortem carried out in Aberdeen. We’d all had a lot to drink, which is why my memories of the night are so hazy and so unreal. I know the facts that I’ve been told, but the pictures are unreliable. That’s one reason why I accepted John’s invitation to spend a month here. I hope the place will make the images sharper and give me confidence in my recollections. The story that I’ve agreed to write during my residency in the Bod will be the story of Billy’s death.

  My parents were away at a wedding in Edinburgh. It was the first time I’d been left in the house alone, and of course I planned a party. That would have been the fi
rst thought of any teenager in my situation. It would be the end of my last year at school, so a kind of celebration. A rite of passage. This was going to be a glittering party, something that we’d all remember. ‘No jeans,’ I told my friends. ‘Glitzy clothes only. Just because we live in Shetland, we don’t have to look as if we know nothing but the croft.’ I was always a creator of dramatic stories. I dressed the house with fairy lights, raided the freezer for my mother’s baking, bought wine and beer. I was an only child and had been spoilt. My parents knew about the event; I wasn’t planning it behind their backs. My father thought it was great fun, and secretly he would have liked to be there.

  It was June. The time of the simmer dim, the long summer dusk that never really turns into night. We began our evening in the garden. My mother had been to the Co-op the day before she went south and bought bottles of cheap cava. Her contribution to the celebration. So there we were, the girls in their floaty frocks and the boys in shirts and jackets, drinking fizzy wine and feeling almost sophisticated. Did Billy Anderson turn up while we were still outside? I drank the wine too quickly and, before we moved indoors, I was already a little drunk. I don’t think he did. I don’t remember him on the grass. I remember the flag irises and the buttercups and the marsh marigolds in the boggy field beyond the garden wall, and the way the low sun caught the colours, but not little Billy Anderson. We weren’t expecting him after all. He hadn’t been invited.

  A car drove down the narrow road behind me now and pulled me back to the present. I turned away from the track so the driver wouldn’t see my face. He’d notice that this was a hire car and have me down as a visitor. Simeon, whoever he was, wouldn’t have followed me from Scalloway, but best to take no chances.

  Billy had been a friend of mine, despite the difference in our ages. He’d been a surrogate brother, almost a mascot. He’d lived in the croft just up the road from ours and we’d played together from when he’d been tiny. Me the bossy one, and Billy not caring that I bossed him about. He’d been an only child too, but his parents were very different from mine. Throughout his childhood he’d lived with their desperation. There hadn’t been much money to be made in scratching a living from the poor land. My mother worked as a nurse in the Gilbert Bain hospital in Lerwick, so we always had a regular income, even when sheep prices were poor and the subsidies fell away. But the Andersons only had what they could produce and sell.

  Billy’s father was a drinker, one of those angry drinkers who pick fights in bars and then stagger home to shout at the family. He was stocky and strong, with a bright red face, his cheeks marked by burst blood vessels. I never knew, but I suspected he took out his frustrations on his wife, Eileen. I’d see her sometimes with a bruise to the cheek, and once she dislocated her shoulder. The police thought that Billy might have killed himself because of troubles at home, but that never made any sense to me. He’d lived with his father’s rages and his mother’s weakness since he was a peerie boy. Billy never talked about problems at home to me, but I felt that he shut them away at the back of his mind as soon as he walked through the rotting gate that marked the end of their land. Away from his house, he was quite a different person: a clown and a joker.

  On impulse I walked away from the car now and down the track to the Anderson place. Billy would fly up there to catch the bus to school, always waiting until the last minute, until he’d seen the bus on the brow of the bank, before leaving home. He’d be out of breath when he arrived, his face nearly as red as his father’s. But laughing. Away from the house, Billy was always cheerful. Which is why the suicide idea seemed so strange to me. The bizarre stories in the newspapers provided one explanation, I suppose, but I had them down as fantasies.

  The sun was round and orange and I had to squint against the light as I walked east towards it, so I didn’t see the Anderson house until I was almost upon it. It hadn’t changed at all in the ten years I’d been away. They could have been the same skinny and apathetic hens poking around in the yard. The same heap of rotting metal – a clapped-out car, a wheelbarrow with a hole in the bottom – rested, as always, against the door of a shed. Now I hesitated, suddenly scared. I’d assumed there would be new residents, that the place would be tarted up, just as my old home had been, but it seemed that Billy’s parents still lived here. They’d sold their story to a Scottish tabloid and blamed me for what had happened to their son. And perhaps they were right. Perhaps I could have prevented it. I might have been the cause of the tragedy that night. So how would they feel to see me today? The Internet threat didn’t seem their style, but who knows? We’re all online now. I wanted to turn and run, but stood, fixed to the mucky, pitted concrete. I’d come here to face the past. I should face these people too.

  I saw a grey face through the grubby downstairs window. Eileen Anderson was even thinner and more gaunt, but I’d have known her anywhere. She still seemed haunted by a fear of the world beyond her kitchen walls. She must have seen me, though she didn’t respond. She just stared out at me. Maybe she hoped I would go away. But I didn’t. I approached the house and knocked at the door. It occurred to me then that there should have been dogs. Every croft has dogs to work the sheep. But there was no sound of barking.

  It seemed an age before she opened the door.

  ‘Aye.’ A cross between a question and a greeting.

  ‘Mrs Anderson.’ I held out my hand.

  ‘Are you a reporter?’ The words sharp and accusing.

  I shook my head. ‘An old friend of Billy’s.’ Which was true enough.

  ‘I had a reporter around in the summer,’ she said. ‘From the Shetland Times. Wanting to mark the ten-year anniversary of Billy’s death with an article about teenage depression. I told him our Billy was never depressed.’ She’d said I, not we. Did that mean she’d found the courage, finally, to kick Malcolm out?

  ‘Is Mr Anderson not around?’

  She looked me up and down. It occurred to me that she’d worked out who I was. ‘He died,’ she said. ‘Five years ago. A neighbour farms the land now. I just keep the house and a few hens.’ That explained the absence of dogs then. She waited for me to tell her what I was doing there, what I wanted from her. But what could I say? I could hardly demand an explanation for the newspaper article – or ask for her forgiveness – standing on the doorstep. In the end I just muttered goodbye and turned away. I think Eileen was relieved.

  As I walked back to the car, the sun felt almost warm on my bare neck. I wasn’t sure what to make of the conversation or what to do next. I needed a plan of action. I work better when I have a plan. All my novels are plotted intricately in advance.

  I was so deep in thought that I didn’t notice the scrap of paper stuck under the windscreen until I was sitting in the car. It was obscuring my view, so I got out into the cold again and pulled it away. There was writing on it, in block capitals: GO HOME JACKIE TAIT. IT’S NOT SAFE FOR YOU HERE.

  In Scalloway I stopped outside the shop. My hands were shaking on the steering wheel. This wasn’t supposed to be happening – I was supposed to be in Shetland on my own terms, not at the mercy of a stalker. I wondered if John could be playing some kind of game, but soon I dismissed that idea. Why would he? It was in his interest to keep me there, writing my story. After a couple of deep breaths I felt a little calmer and went into the store. Nobody took any notice of me there. I was a stranger, but these days Shetlanders are used to visitors, even in winter. I bought lentils and vegetables and another bottle of wine.

  Back in the Bod, I sharpened the good strong knife, chopped onions, carrots and neeps and put the lentils to soak. It was time for comfort-food. When the soup was simmering on the hob I climbed into the loft, lay on the bed and tried to reconstruct the night of the party. Honestly.

  I first noticed Billy when we were inside the house. We’d eaten some of the food and Jerry Eunson had brought out a bottle of whisky. There was music in the lounge. Andrew was playing the fiddle, showing off as he always did, leaping about. But he was a fine pl
ayer and we all listened. Then suddenly Billy was there. I remember now that he was out of breath. He must have run from his house, just as he flew up the track every morning to catch the school bus. So he hadn’t been out on the grass with us earlier in the evening. I was right about that.

  His presence irritated me. He hadn’t been invited. I was growing away from him and I didn’t need his admiration any more. The friendship was starting to embarrass me. At school he was rather a figure of fun. I took his hand and pulled him into a corner. ‘What are you doing here? This is a sixth-year party.’

  ‘I need to talk,’ he said. ‘I can’t go home until I tell you.’ His face was red and there was snot on his face. His eyes were red and I thought he’d been crying.

  I was about to ask him what had happened, when Andrew came in. I’d fancied Andrew for years. I mean, really since he’d started at the school. I’d had other relationships, but they’d been unsatisfactory for one reason or another. He put his arm around me. The gesture was casual, but the pressure on my neck and my shoulder made me feel almost faint.

  ‘Just go away. Billy,’ I said.

  The tabloid paper that ran the story after Eileen and Malcolm talked to them claimed that we bullied Billy at that point. We taunted him and mocked him, and that’s why he wandered into the barn and hanged himself. In the newspaper story there’s the implication that there was some sort of ritual. Almost witchcraft. It was impossible for my parents to stay in the islands with that hanging over them; they’d always been regular worshippers in the kirk. I moved to England, where nobody had heard of Jackie Tait. But I can’t see why we would have taunted or bullied Billy that night. I might have been drunk, but I’d have remembered that. I just told Billy to go away. I never saw him again until I found him in the barn the next morning, and by then he was dead.