In short, I did not know what it was that I was doing.
And besides, my interest was not the same interest as the interests of real men.
So my actions cannot be categorised in the same way.
I heard Vivien upstairs again. She left her bedroom and went to the bathroom. She had put on the light. I could hear the breezy, oscillating hum of the extractor fan.
I got up out of my armchair and went over to the fireplace. I took the iron poker from its stand. Its handle had been too close to the flames and was hot to touch. I could only just hold it. I stabbed it into the heart of the glowing, fizzing coals. I held it there. I held it there for too long. The temperature of the iron was drawn from almost bearable to just unbearable and my grip instinctively loosed. The poker fell to the hearth and rang with a hollow harmony.
Vivien heard. ‘Is everything all right down there?’ she called.
I did not respond. Presumably, despite my silence, she was not concerned enough to repeat her enquiry nor to come down.
I thought about what I would need to do to get her to come rushing down. I covered my hand, still somewhat tender, with the sleeve of my pullover and reached down to grab the poker once again. I hesitated. It would be too much to use the poker to knock the coals onto the carpet. I was banking on the rug catching fire, or at least some strong charring, but knocking coals off the grate might do more damage than I could predict or control. All of Vivien’s furniture, paintings, books, could be incinerated. Then she would be forced to run down the stairs in her dressing gown or whatever.
I put the poker back in its stand and went into the kitchen. Vivien kept her best china plates on display on the upper shelves of an oak Welsh dresser. She had told me the maker once, and the age of the plates, and she had told me that they had been a wedding present to her great grandparents from a distant aunt.
They could all be ripped from their positions with one sweep of my arm. They would shatter on the counter surface of the lower cabinet, else cascade to the slate tiles and shatter there. The delicate, hand-limned indigo flowers and maroon leaves in disarticulated pieces on the floor. Vivien would hear the commotion from upstairs and come rushing down.
It would be thrilling, to be sure. But ultimately I knew that I would not be able to stand the censure. She would run down the stairs and see me standing among the shards of her family heirloom. My heartbeat would quicken, I am certain that it would. There would be a terrific excitement in it. But then the excitement would curdle. I would see her incredulity, her despair, her ire, and my guilt would first creep then rush to meet my elation, deep in the pit of my guts.
I took the kettle off its stand, filled it with water then placed it back and flicked the switch. At first the filament simply hummed but soon the water stirred. The gurgle of the water and the roar of the shooting steam were enough to mask the sound of my footsteps. I gently climbed the staircase.
Vivien’s bedroom was next to the bathroom and the door was half open. She stood in a bra and slip. The bra was black with lace trim. The slip was cream and silky. The thick tan waistband of her flesh-coloured tights was visible above the slip and it pinched her tummy. The place just below the thinnest part of her waist, where she would have kept her baby had she been pregnant, bulged against the cream satin. She had combed her hair and there was a slight, deliberate kink in it. The kink caught the incandescent light in her bedroom and turned it radiant gold.
She stood by the mirror and leaned as she applied mascara to her eyelashes.
She had not seen me. She had not heard me. The kettle sang. I backed away, back across the landing and down the stairs.
Half an hour or so later she came down in full dress. She was beautiful.
IV
I talk to Bill more than I should. I ramble. I distract him from the road. I talk to him about Cathy and about Daddy, about our house on the hill, about the woods and trees, about the food we ate and the cider we drank. I talk to him about the friends we made and the animals we kept. I tell him everything. Everything that happened that night.
I was tired of walking, and Bill was also travelling north. Meet her at the destination, he said to me. Find her at the end of the line.
I jumped up into his cab and we drove into the night.
I am his radio. I stutter and burble and fizz with the telling. And then I fall silent as I lose myself in thought.
It is rightly a two hour ride to Edinburgh, but this stranger weaves a crooked path. He takes back roads and diagonals and hops from town to town and village to village to deliver his cargo. I see more of the country than I had known was there. All the better to search for her, he said. You don’t know where she’s gone, he said. In that he might be right.
We pass over hills of heather in purple. We see the great rock illuminated from miles away and the ebb and surge of the grizzled North Sea.
Eyes blue like the North Sea, Daddy once said of my sister. Eyes blue like the North Sea.
Bill talks to me about the marks on his body. He once caught the wrong end of a lit soldering iron when he was still at school and the palm of his hand has melted like wax and stretched over the flexing bones. Part of his toe is missing on his left foot, lost to a mis-struck hammer. A jagged scar runs the length of his right thigh from when he fell while scaling a barbed fence. There are marks on his face from fights. Nothing proper, mind. Not like Daddy’s fights. Just scraps. There are peppered dots on his eyeballs from an infection when he was young. Otherwise the irises are the brown and grey of West Yorkshire sandstone, flecked likewise with the soot of industry.
I spot myself in the grimy rain-flecked wing-mirrors of Bill’s cab, leaning against the passenger’s window smeared with the grease from my cheeks and fingerprints and the grease and fingerprints of whoever has come before me. I am hollow. Distorted. Out of focus. Out of frame. The world rushes behind my image. Beside me Bill tells more tales. Issues with contractors. News from the world of haulage. People jumping out of the container when he opens up the back after a sea crossing. People even he did not know were there.
We stop on a back road somewhere in the Borders. We will continue in the morning. We settle for the night. He tells me that when he first saw me he thought I was a wee girl. A wee girl alone by the side of the road.
I turn out to face the window. There is mist on the pane. The street beyond is dark and damp and limned with a humble glow.
This man who is older than my Daddy takes my hand in his.
I hold my breath.
Chapter Fifteen