Offshore: A short story collection Read online

  There had been a dance in the community hall and they’d all gone along. It had been planned for weeks. The band was from Cullivoe; the boys were fine musicians, famous throughout the islands. In Holmsgarth, the women had baked, even Joan, who’d been working all day in the post office in Lerwick. They’d packed up the bannocks, the tray-bakes and the fancies into old biscuit tins and carried them very carefully along the road to the hall. Edie had got there early. She’d cut long sheets of white paper to make tablecloths for the trestle tables set at one end of the room, and the band was on the stage, tuning up. There’d already been an air of excitement. More than that – an air of tension. Like just before a thunderstorm.

  Joan turned back to her knitting. There was more noise on the road outside. She looked at the clock on the mantel shelf. Stuart must be working late tonight, or perhaps they’d invited pals along to a party in their house. They’d not be doing so much of that once the bairn arrived. Joan felt a sudden pang of regret. All her pals had grandchildren now, and she had to look at the photos and pretend to be interested. She turned her mind back forty years to the dance in the hall, saw James Mackie walking in. You could tell that he’d prepared for the party too, that he’d had a shower after work, chosen an ironed shirt. His dark hair was slicked back. Some of the local boys walked with a kind of swagger, but he moved lightly. Joan could see that he’d be a splendid dancer.

  She was jerked back to the present by a banging on the door. ‘Come in,’ she said. She didn’t want to get up and disturb the knitting attached to her belt. Besides, her door was never locked. She turned in her seat and saw a man walk in. He was dark and he walked lightly, just like Mackie. Perhaps because she’d been thinking about the engineer, for a strange moment she wondered if it was Mackie and if she’d slipped back in time somehow and into the world of her memories. Then she recognized the newcomer as the police inspector from Ravenswick. ‘Jimmy Perez, what can I do for you at this time of night?’

  ‘I need to talk to you, Joan.’ His voice was soft like cream too, but the accent was Fair Isle, not mainland Scots.

  ‘Well, take a seat by the fire, Jimmy. And you won’t mind if I take up my knitting. It’s hand-spun wool, and the Yanks will pay a fortune for a Shetland all-over jersey.’

  He nodded. ‘Stuart was working on the foundations of his new house,’ Perez said. ‘He found a body. Old, but preserved in the peat. Would you know anything about that, Joan? You’d likely have been living in this house when he died, and in those days that was Holmsgarth land.’

  She changed the knitting pin in the horsehair belt, and as the needles clicked she began to talk. She thought it was time the story was told, and this gentle man, who knew about grief, was the right person to hear it.

  ‘There was a dance,’ she said. ‘I was there with my sisters. And there was this soothmoother, an engineer at Sullom Voe. James Mackie.’

  ‘Is that the name of the man Stuart found?’

  She hesitated for a moment and then she nodded, thinking again that it was time for the truth to be told. ‘I had two sisters, Annie and Edie, and they fancied him, fought over him. You know young girls. And it was a wild time in the islands, Jimmy. The oil was coming ashore and we were overrun by strangers. It seemed kind of lawless. Like a gold-rush town.’ She knew that was no excuse for what had happened that night, but she wanted him to understand. He said nothing and she thought he would sit there all night, if that was as long as it took.

  ‘Most folk had been drinking,’ she said. ‘Not me. I’ve never liked it so much, but my sisters had been outside with some of the boys. They had bottles of whisky in the cars. You know how it goes, Jimmy. Much the same these days with young people.’

  Still he said nothing. In her head she relived the scene. Mackie walking through the door, the music starting and him walking up to her and giving her a little nod. ‘Would you dance with me, Joan?’ That voice which had haunted her dreams. Caressing. And she’d set down the plate of scones she’d been holding and he swung her onto the floor and the music carried them around, until she was dizzy with the sound and the excitement at having been chosen. At the end she’d been aware of Edie and Annie watching them, thinking he’d picked their big sister for the first dance out of politeness, waiting for their turn. Only their turn never came. James Mackie had danced with the old maid all night.

  ‘He walked us home,’ Joan said. ‘All three of us. My sisters were in a dreadful state. Angry.’ And she’d understood their humiliation. Of course they’d danced, but with the local boys and the roustabouts from the rigs. Not with the smart man in the shirt, with the soft voice and the polished shoes. Not with the object of their dreams. And on the way home they’d behaved like spoilt little girls again. Their father had doted on his younger daughters and given them everything they wanted. Joan, the child of a previous marriage, had been expected to behave. She explained all this to Jimmy Perez, who listened, nodding occasionally to show that he understood.

  ‘You were like Cinderella,’ he said, with a smile.

  ‘But they weren’t the ugly sisters!’ Joan paused in her knitting. ‘They’d always been bonny little things. Everyone loved them. Especially my father. They could do no wrong, in his eyes.’

  ‘You were telling me what happened when you were on your way home.’ Perez leaned forward to listen.

  Joan replayed the scene in her head. The girls, stupid drunk, egging each other on, taunting the man. ‘Why did you choose her to dance with, when you could have had us?’

  Then Mackie had stood in the middle of the track. Quiet and firm, his face lit by the moon. ‘Why would I choose a child when I could have a woman?’

  And then Edie had lashed out at him in frustration, the attack shocking and unexpected. She’d always been uncontrollable when she was angry, given to fits of temper. Suddenly she had a pair of scissors in her hand, the sharp scissors she’d brought from home to cut the paper tablecloths. The steel flashed in the light and then they were in the man’s neck. Blood everywhere. They knew death, all three of them. They’d helped kill their father’s beasts.

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘We buried him.’ Joan looked up from her knitting. ‘In the land that Stuart bought from us for his grazing. It never occurred to us that he would build a house there, that the body would ever be found.’

  ‘You helped them?’ Perez seemed shocked by the idea. He knew her as the former postmistress, a respectable spinster. ‘You didn’t think to tell the police?’

  Joan thought about that for a moment and shook her head. It had been an evening for her to remember, but she’d known she could never leave Holmsgarth to go south with James Mackie. She hadn’t lost that possibility with the man’s death. They’d sent Edie away to an aunt’s in Canada and she’d gone on to be a journalist on a woman’s magazine. Famous in her own way. Rich at least. Edie had sent Joan money for a visit, but Joan had never gone. ‘What would be the point in telling the police? Just another life ruined.’

  Besides, there would have been something hypocritical in that, when Joan herself was a murderer. She’d killed their father, after all. After his marriage to the new woman from Baltasound he’d treated Joan like a kind of servant, and Joan had had a temper too. In the end she’d had enough of it – being treated like a slave in her own home, while her sisters were spoiled and feted like princesses. She’d felt as Perez said, like a kind of Cinderella.

  One morning she’d risen early and drilled holes in his yoal before he set off after the fish they called piltock. She’d stood by the jetty and watched him drown. But that was a secret she’d never tell, not even to the police inspector from Ravenswick with the kind smile and the voice like cream.

  Stranded

  Hilbre’s my guilty secret, yeah? Nobody knows that I go there. How could I explain the attraction of the place to my mates or my screwed-up family? Three lumps of sandstone in the middle of the Dee Estuary, and you can only reach them at low tide by paddling across the sand and the mu
d, looking like some sort of twat. And once you’ve walked round Little Eye and over Middle Eye and you’re on the main island, what is there to do? You can watch the seals hauled out on a long sandbank towards Wales, or the huge flocks of birds that swoop and dive like a swarm of locusts, and that’s it. But it’s peaceful, and in our house and in my life there’s not much peace.

  I don’t always have the place to myself. Sometimes the keeper’s there with his wife. They live in a low white house, and I think it must be the best job in the world. Until there’s the first sunny Sunday of the spring and hoards of trippers march across the sand like an invading army, with their sarnies and their suncream and their screaming kids. I never go to the island on days like that. And sometimes the loud-mouthed sailing types turn up. They hang out in a wooden hut, called the Canoe Club, which is nearly a hundred years old. The date is painted over the door. Occasionally they take out the canoes. They’re all curves, wide in the beam like modern sculptures – much too interesting for the loud men who push them into the water. But mostly the canoe-club members have the sort of parties you see in films set before the war, with cocktails and fat men smoking cigars, and sometimes they dance on the grass to music from a wind-up gramophone. I first saw Vicky at one of those parties.

  My name’s Anthony Murphy and I live in Birkenhead and I’m not from a background where I’m supposed to like wildlife or walking across the shore early in the morning to get to Hilbre Island before the tide comes in. It’s 1978 and my mates are all punks. We hate the crap that’s prog rock, and our parents. I got a scholarship to the posh school, where the teachers wear gowns and think it’s good for poor boys to be humiliated. We wear blazers and learn Latin, and the lads on the estate take the piss every time they see me.

  So here I am, Anthony Murphy, caught between two worlds. Bright charity-case born of a docker and a cleaner, one of five brothers and desperate for peace. A Tranmere Rovers supporter in a household of LFC fans. Perhaps that’s why I like Hilbre so much, because it’s caught between two worlds too. Halfway between England and Wales and stranded like a sandstone whale between the land and the sea. I’m fifteen years old and I don’t feel like a lad or a man.

  When I first see Vicky it’s a weekend at the end of May. I leave the house early and get the first train to West Kirby. My mam thinks I go fishing with my mates. I never lied to her, but she saw the tide table in my room and jumped to that conclusion. She thinks I’m with lads from school and she loves that. ‘Our Anthony’s settled in ever so well there,’ she tells her friends.

  I arrive at the island at the same time as the Canoe Club party, but it would be too dangerous to go back now because the tide’s on its way in. They’re piled into two Land Rovers, which take the recognized route across the estuary, coming ashore just before Middle Hilbre and following the track onto the main island, bouncing too fast over the rocks. They’re shouting and laughing as if they’re already drunk, although it’s not yet nine in the morning.

  I’m reading The Great Gatsby for my exams and I take the book to the north of the island. Sometimes you find birdwatchers there, sitting in the wooden hide that’s built on stilts over the slipway, but they like stormy weather, north-westerly gales. Today it’s still and sunny, with the hint of a mist over the mainland. The tide slides in like oil. I can hear the noise from the Canoe Club, even from where I’m sitting, and I’m drawn to it, half-fascinated and half-disgusted. They’ve set up the gramophone and some of them are dancing an old-fashioned waltz on the grass. Again I’m trapped between two worlds, between the Long Island parties of Gatsby and this strange gathering on the Wirral. Then a group of men start talking about Margaret Thatcher and what a wonderful woman she is, and I come back to earth and hate them.

  Peering over the wall, I catch the eye of a girl of about my age. She’s wearing white trousers that are tight around her bum and her legs and reach halfway between her knee and her ankle, and a red and white striped shirt. Not trendy, but she looks good. She walks through a gap in the wall to meet me.

  ‘Come in,’ she says. ‘We don’t bite.’ From the way she speaks those words I can tell that she goes to the girls’ equivalent of my school, or somewhere even posher. A classy accent and the confidence that comes with money and education.

  I shake my head. The last thing I need is to be patronized by those tossers. She obviously understands what I’m thinking because she nods. ‘Just wait there.’

  She goes into the wooden building and comes out with a nearly full bottle of wine and two glasses. The adults are all steaming by now and nobody challenges her. We find a sheltered hollow on the west side with a view across the estuary to Wales. It’s past high water, and Hilbre is a real island. Her name is Vicky Macfarlane and her dad is commodore of the West Kirby Sailing Club. She lives in a big house in Hoylake and she has a younger sister. When I reach out to touch her, her skin is warm. I expect her to push my hand away because that’s what usually happens with posh girls, but she doesn’t. We kiss and she tastes of white wine. There’s a smell of crushed grass and of salt, and we feel as if we have the whole place to ourselves.

  I must have fallen asleep, because when I wake I’m on my own and in the distance I can hear the canoe club packing up. The tide’s out and members are climbing into the Land Rovers. Vicky’s helping a frail elderly guy into the passenger seat and I wonder if he’s her grandfather. I give her a wave and she pats the pockets of her white trousers, which seems to be a kind of sign. For a moment I can’t work out what she means, then I feel in the pocket of my jeans and there’s a scrap of paper. She must have written a note for me while I was still sleeping. Next Saturday? See you here?

  I beam. The sort of beam that you’d get from a lighthouse, which would shine out across the Irish Sea between here and Dublin.

  The next Saturday high water is mid-afternoon, but I get there straight after the morning tide. Vicky didn’t put a time on the note and there was no phone number. I guess she wouldn’t want a scally with my sort of accent calling her at home, in case her parents answered. I wonder what her house is like and if there are servants to take phone calls. They’d certainly have a cleaner – someone like our mam. Anyway it might not be lucky. The weather’s not as good as it was the weekend before. It’s a bit damp and murky. Suddenly she’s there, walking across the island towards me. She’s wearing baggy trousers, rolled up to her knees, so I can tell she’s crossed the channel barefoot, and a jersey and an oilskin jacket. She’s carrying sandals in one hand and in the other a big brass key, which she dangles from one finger. It will let us into the Canoe Club.

  Inside, the hut smells of wood varnish and damp. I’ve never been in a boat, but that’s what it makes me think of. There’s a bunk room with blankets neatly folded at the end of each bed, and a common room with squashy old chairs and a long table. Vicky opens cupboard doors until she finds a bottle of whisky. I’ve never drunk whisky before, either.

  I ask her about herself. Not to be polite or because that’s the way I think I’ll get inside her knickers, but because I’m really interested. Her father’s a lawyer, not working in the criminal courts but advising businessmen on contracts and trusts. She goes to Calday Girls’ Grammar School, which is what I’d guessed, and she’s doing O levels, like me. Mostly languages. She doesn’t mind Latin. Then she grins. ‘But I didn’t come all this way to talk about fucking Virgil.’ It’s the first time I’ve heard a girl swear. This is a day for new experiences.

  We pull two mattresses onto the floor of the common room and lie there, the bottle in easy reach. We’re still talking, but about stupid stuff now – favourite colours and food, favourite books – and we’re touching and teasing. I pull her jersey off and see that she’s wearing a blouse underneath. I start undoing the buttons. That’s when she says she has to get back before the tide. ‘So get a move-on with those buttons, Anthony Murphy.’

  I know that we’ll have to leave the island before one o’clock to get to the mainland safely and I check my watch.
Eleven-thirty.

  ‘I’d like to stay here forever,’ I say. ‘Just you and me.’

  Then I forget what I was saying, because I undo another button and see that she’s not wearing a bra.

  When we go outside later a mist has rolled in and everything’s blurred and strange. We can’t even see the mainland. The keeper’s tractor isn’t in the yard, so he must be away from the island. Vicky and I are alone here. It occurs to me that we should wait until after the tide, when we know it’ll be safe to cross. I feel responsible for her. But she says that her parents are expecting her back and she’ll be in deep trouble if she’s late, so we set out together, hand-in-hand, like a brother and sister in a kid’s fairy story.

  The thing about the tide in the Dee is that it’s not predictable. It snakes through the gullies, filling deep channels that can cut off your progress to the mainland. People have drowned because they don’t show the water the proper respect. Just a hundred yards from the island I lose all my sense of direction. I can’t see land at all. The fog is dense and seems to shift like the soft sand under my feet, so I imagine that there are shadowy figures on the shore with us. No sound. Nothing solid to hold onto except Vicky’s hand, and she seems quite confident that she knows the way. I tell myself that she’s been crossing the estuary since she was a baby and she’s a sailor, so she’ll know about wind direction and the sun. But there is no wind and there’s no sun. I stand still and she stops with me. My feet sink into mud. Nearer to the mainland it’s all sand, so I realize that we’ve probably been going in the wrong direction altogether and out towards the open sea. Forty minutes have passed since we left the island and the tide will be well in behind us by now.

  ‘Come on!’ she yells and she tugs on my hand. It’s as if she’s high or drunk, or she doesn’t care what happens to her. It comes to me that she doesn’t have the sort of perfect home life that I’d imagined for her and that she really doesn’t mind if she lives or dies.