Valentina: A Hauntingly Intelligent Psychological Thriller (2 page)

A sharp snatch at my hand. The rustle and tear of a paper bag. I cried out, covered Isla’s head with my arm, staggered back and fell. My coffee dropped to the ground, pooled, and was sucked away by the sand. Immediately above me, like shears sharpening against a blade, came the jealous scream of the gulls. Still trying to figure out what the hell had happened, I looked up and saw my breakfast in the greedy beak of one as it flew away, hanging and limp as dead prey.

“
I can never go back to Govan now, Isla,” I said, chafing my hands together to clear off the wet, gritty sand. “I’ve just been mugged by a seagull.”

The first few days run together in my memory, to be honest. I know I found the pool pretty quickly, being a bit of a water-baby myself, and took Isla there. I know I tried to make eye contact with the other mothers, all as sleep deprived and bedraggled as me, that I tried to communicate through a roll of the eyes that here we all were, getting through the day. We were colleagues, weren’t we, floating and distant in the world’s biggest office? Surely we could talk to one another? But as their cubicle doors closed behind them with a bang I realised that, no, we couldn’t.

I drove up to Beechgrove Terrace. I wanted to find the BBC, thinking I might look for work there. I found it, made a mental note of where it was and resolved to drop off my CV in a couple of months’ time. I found a park nearby and, thinking I might find a friendly face, went in. A woman about my age was pushing her boy on the swing so I carried Isla over on my hip. Bear in mind, won’t you, that at this point I’m still smiling away like I’m on Prozac or something. Looking back I must’ve looked like an axe murderer but I was only trying my best.

“
How old is he?” I said, nodding at her wee one.

“
Eighteen months.” She did not take her eyes from her child.

“
This is Isla,” I said, swinging her forward a little. “She’s four months now.”

She glanced at Isla but said nothing so I added, “We’ve just moved here actually. From Glasgow.”

It appeared to be killing her to turn her head in my direction. Maybe she had a stiff neck. She almost smiled before she moved away, before she strapped her son into his buggy and made for home. I felt like shouting after her:
don’t flatter yourself, Doll. I only wanted a wee blether, for fuck’s sake, not lifelong fucking friendship.

But that’s not exactly the way to meet people either, is it?

I fed Isla on the bench, my face by now set in a rictus grin. I burped her and stood her on my lap, felt her push against my thighs with her tiny feet. I made faces, asked her who was a lovely girl and all the daft things you say to a baby until I realised my hands were growing numb. My nose, too, felt almost damp with a wintery cold and, when I looked up, I saw the sun had gone. Wait
–
the sky had gone. In its place a thick white mist had descended all around me like dry ice.

So this was the Aberdeen haar, I thought, the famous sea fret that lowered its dank weight onto the city without appointment, without warning. And here I was, right in the middle.

By the time I got Isla to the car, I was shivering, the fog even thicker than before. I set the GPS for home, turned the heater on full blast to take off the chill. Even once I’d put on my sweater, I was still trembling, my hands spread against the fan. Outside, the haar pushed against the car windows, swallowed whole the end of the car bonnet. Headlights on full beam, I hooked myself over the steering wheel and set off.

On the road, I could see no more than the tail-lights of the car in front. On the other side, the other cars bloomed from the fog, headlamps like police searchlights. In the rear view mirror, Isla’s baby blue eyes stared out, as if she’d been alarmed by a sudden psychic event which, to be honest, is what it felt like. I crept in second gear back towards the river. At the Brig O’Dee roundabout, I took a right towards Banchory. I drove on, tight-shouldered, vigilant. The haar seemed to dissolve a little. Two cars ahead had formed now as if born from the ghostly mass, now the houses at the side of the road stepped from the dissipating white, clumps of woodland, fences, gateposts.

And then the air cleared. Completely. Just like that.

I sat back from the steering wheel, turned off the headlights and eased my foot down on the accelerator. But when I checked my rear view, I saw the cloud had not, in fact, gone. It had simply not followed me. It had waited at the edge of the city and had shaped itself into what looked to me like a monstrous paw, the thick swollen hand of an ogre, grasping but not moving forward, as if thwarted not by any physical boundary but by fear of what lay ahead.

More than a wee bit creeped out, I pushed on. Before me, the landscape spread and to my relief I recognised where I was. The road narrowed and I knew I had to take a left. No houses now, only the lone horse in the field
–
the signpost that I was not far from home. I slowed the car and took in the tender dip of the horse’s long back, the slide of its neck as it tore at the grass in a chaos of quivering lips. I thought of
Gulliver’s Travels
, which I’d read when I was about thirteen, of how the Houyhnhnms had blown my teenage mind. I’d always wished I’d known how to pronounce the damn word, even to myself. Whiminims? Hooeyhunhums? Whatever, what I remember most is that those magical horses had to say
the thing which is not
because, in their world, there was no word for lie.

After tea, I put extra locks on three of the downstairs windows with the battery-powered screwdriver my dad had bought me for my twenty-first birthday. While Isla kicked about under her mobile, I even managed to screw the bolt onto the front door and still have time to stand back and admire my handiwork.

“
No one,” I said to Isla, “not even the Big Bad Wolf could get through that.”

I never did put the bolt on the back door. Which is a blessing, now I think about it.

The hour came for Mikey to return home from work, to kiss my neck and reach into the fridge for a beer.
Hey Shone, what’s for dinner?

“
Three jumps at the cupboard door for you, pal,” I answered aloud, watched
him laugh in my mind’s eye.

I switched on the radio, twiddled the tuner until Adele came crackling through like some spooky chanteuse from the afterlife. I sang along at the top of my lungs but when the song finished, I felt even more bereft. I wanted so badly to call my mum or Jeanie but I didn’t want to sound sorry for myself. This was the life I’d chosen. This was the dream.

At 7:30pm I was about to try Isla in her cot when the landline rang.

I lunged for it. “Hello?”

“
That was quick.” It was Mikey. “How’s it going?”

“
Ach, we’re fine.” I jiggled Isla about to stop her from whining. “I’ve got my wee pal, haven’t I? How’s the rig?”

There was a pause. I listened for the sea.

“
So,” he said. “Seen anyone today?”

“
I spoke to the cashier in the supermarket. She was nice.”

He never asked if I was lonely. Probably afraid of what I’d say. Maybe I was afraid. If he’d asked, I might have said, maybe should have said
yes, I am lonely. I’m going off my head here
. But I kept it in when I spoke to him and saved the tears for when I was on my own. Nothing major, just eyes filling here and there, the odd shoe thrown across the room.

There was one time I really went for it though
–
shaking, snotters, the works. It was that very first trip. I was washing up the breakfast things, staring through the low, square back window out over the lawn to the leylandii at the far end. Hands in the suds, I was giving myself another sink-side pep talk:
It’ll get easier, Shone. Early days are always tough. If anyone can make this work, it’s you.
But no sooner had I said the words when I burst into tears. Funny, how one minute you’ve got your colleagues in hysterics with some joke you’re telling by the coffee machine and the next you’re in a cottage in the middle of nowhere talking rubbish to yourself.

And then I remembered ‘dry your eyes’. It’s something my mum always used to say. I’m not sure if it’s Scottish or what, but it’s for when someone’s feeling sorry for themselves when they’ve got nothing really to be sorry about. I had a loving partner, a beautiful baby daughter and a fairy tale cottage
–
more, much more, than I’d ever dreamed of. Self-pity, that’s what this crying at the sink business was all about and I knew it. What was going on here was not death, not divorce, not anything I’d even bother writing about for the paper, it was no more than
nae pals, pal
.

So I walked into the hall where I’d hung the mirror and I looked at my silly, red, swollen face.

“
Dry your eyes, Shona,” I said. “Get a life.”

I had to act. If I was going to find work once the dust settled, I needed childcare. I’d have to get Isla used to someone other than me sooner rather than later and, besides, at this rate I was going to end up in a special ambulance. I needed friends too. And I certainly couldn’t make any of those by sitting at home waiting for a neighbour to come and borrow a cup of sugar, could I?

We had no neighbours. And I didn’t have any sugar.

***

There’s still not enough light to make out the trees at the back of the cottage. But she doesn’t need to see them to know they are there: the leylandii and the pines, the beeches and the oaks, bunched like criminals at the limit of the land. There was a time when she didn’t know their names
–
they were simply trees. What she can see from here is the grey front door, the dense leaves and frilled velvet petals of the briar rose, the thorns that prick and draw blood. See how the tendrils reach around the windows. See how they grip on, claim ownership. Maybe the rose knows, as she does, that possession is nine-tenths of the law.

***

TWO

By the time Mikey called from the rig that evening, I was brightness itself.

“
Guess what?” I said. “I’m going to see a nursery on Monday. The Blue Moon, it’s called.”

“
Doesn’t sound like a nursery.” How lovely he sounded. I could have eaten that Scouse accent, that voice. “The Blue Moon, did you say? Sounds like a nightclub. Do they have strippers?”

“
I’ll let you know,” I said, laughing.

“
What time do you have to be there?”

“
Two o’clock.”

“
Two o’clock, right. And that’s this Monday coming? Sure you’ll find it OK?”

“
Cheeky sod. Of course I will.”

“
Shouldn’t cost too much, should it?” he asked.

“
Not too much. I mean, I don’t know. I didn’t ask. But it’s OK, isn’t it?”

I heard him hesitate. Not heard, sensed, and wished he could come home right away so I could chat to him in person. I pressed my fingertips to the mirror. Around my nails, the skin whitened. Mikey couldn’t come home. He was in the middle of the North Sea.

“
Mikey, listen,” I said. “You’re not here. You don’t know what it’s like. If you expect me to carry on like this with no one to talk to day after day ...”

“
I wasn’t saying that ...”

“
I was only thinking a few hours,” I rushed in. “Give me a chance to meet people. And once Isla’s settled I could maybe think about picking up some freelance stuff, set up some meetings.”

“
Shona, stop. It’s fine. Honestly.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment. All I could think of was that I’d never before had to ask permission to spend money, not since I was a kid. I’d always worked, since I was fourteen – a paper round, Saturday jobs, waitressing, babysitting. So I’d always had my own cash, always spent it how the hell I liked. But now, the work I did was important, yes, but it was not paid. I supposed I’d have to ask or at least discuss things like this in future.

Maybe I’d been oversensitive. Mikey had never mentioned a budget in all the time we’d been together. He was the extravagant one, not least of all because his parents always seemed to have lump sums to give to their precious only child, cheques that took my breath away flung out over restaurant dinners whenever they were back from the villa. Always on my best behaviour on these occasions, I would eat carefully while slowly his mother’s mouth slackened, the Mersey swelling her vowels, hissing against her consonants, her tanned eyelids thickening, drooping. She got so very drunk, drunker than any of the neds I knew from back home. So I sat and smiled and ate my strawberry parfait, his mother slurring wetly at my shoulder:
of course Michael’s twice the man his father ever was. Opportunist, he calls himself!
Her spit wet in my ear.
Cheating bastard, I call it.

Special Brew or vintage Malbec, drunk is drunk.

“
Shona?” Mikey broke the silence. “Come on, I didn’t mean anything by it. Besides, if they do have strippers, I’ll drop her off for you myself.”

Once we’d said our goodbyes, I stood for a moment staring at the five misty oval rings my fingertips had made on the mirror. Slowly, they vanished, a fading imprint of where I had been.

I got to The Blue Moon at five to two on the Monday. The sunny promise of the morning had given way to cold sky, heavy, graphite clouds. I’d caught the forecast in the car on the way in: rain, they’d said, possible thundery showers.

And there on the step, baby clinging koala-like to her hip, was Valentina.

She struck me the way women can strike other women
–
because she was pretty, I suppose, and dressed in a pink cheesecloth maxi skirt. At her waist, she’d knotted a plain white t-shirt, thrown a green woollen shawl over the top. I remember thinking she was one of those women who get away with throwing on any old thing and, running in luscious waves down her back, she had this magnificent auburn hair. Titian, I think it’s called, not the classic redhead you see more commonly up here.