Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances Read online

  It’s strange, bringing someone home. It makes you see the place you live as if you’ve not been there before. There are two oil paintings of me in the lounge, from my short-lived career as an artists’ model (I did not have the patience to stand and pose for very long, a failing I know), blown-up advertising photos of me in the little kitchen and the loo, book covers with me on—romance covers, mostly—over the stairs.

  I showed her the studio, and then the bedroom. She examined the Edwardian barbers’ chair I had rescued from an ancient place that closed down in Shoreditch. She sat down on the chair, pulled off her shoes.

  “Who was the first grown-up you liked?” she asked.

  “Odd question. My mother, I suspect. Don’t know. Why?”

  “I was three, perhaps four. He was a postman called Mister Postie. He’d come in his little post van and bring me lovely things. Not every day. Just sometimes. Brown paper packages with my name on, and inside would be toys or sweets or something. He had a funny, friendly face with a knobby nose.”

  “And he was real? He sounds like somebody a kid would make up.”

  “He drove a post van inside the house. It wasn’t very big.”

  She began to unbutton her blouse. It was cream-colored, still flecked with splatters of ink. “What’s the first thing you actually remember? Not something you were told you did. That you really remember.”

  “Going to the seaside when I was three, with my mum and my dad.”

  “Do you remember it? Or do you remember being told about it?”

  “I don’t see what the point of this is . . .”

  She stood up, wiggled, stepped out of her skirt. She wore a white bra, dark green panties, frayed. Very human: not something you would wear to impress a new lover. I wondered what her breasts would look like, when the bra came off. I wanted to stroke them, to touch them to my lips.

  She walked from the chair to the bed, where I was sitting.

  “Lie down, now. On that side of the bed. I’ll be next to you. Don’t touch me.”

  I lay down, my hands at my sides. She looked down at me. She said, “You’re so beautiful. I’m not honestly sure whether you’re my type. You would have been when I was fifteen, though. Nice and sweet and unthreatening. Artistic. Ponies. A riding stable. And I bet you never make a move on a girl unless you’re sure she’s ready, do you?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t suppose that I do.”

  She lay down beside me.

  “You can touch me now,” said Cassandra.

  I HAD STARTED THINKING about Stuart again late last year. Stress, I think. Work was going well, up to a point, but I’d broken up with Pavel, who may or may not have been an actual bad hat although he certainly had his finger in many dodgy East European pies, and I was thinking about Internet dating. I had spent a stupid week joining the kind of websites that link you to old friends, and from there it was no distance to Jeremy “Scallie” Porter, and to Stuart Innes.

  I don’t think I could do it anymore. I lack the single-mindedness, the attention to detail. Something else you lose when you get older.

  Mister Postie used to come in his van when my parents had no time for me. He would smile his big gnomey smile, wink an eye at me, hand me a brown-paper parcel with Cassandra written on it in big block letters, and inside would be a chocolate, or a doll, or a book. His final present was a pink plastic microphone, and I would walk around the house singing into it or pretending to be on TV. It was the best present I had ever been given.

  My parents did not ask about the gifts. I did not wonder who was actually sending them. They came with Mister Postie, who drove his little van down the hall and up to my bedroom door, and who always knocked three times. I was a demonstrative girl, and the next time I saw him, after the plastic microphone, I ran to him and threw my arms around his legs.

  It’s hard to describe what happened then. He fell like snow, or like ash. For a moment I had been holding someone, then there was just powdery white stuff, and nothing.

  I used to wish that Mister Postie would come back, after that, but he never did. He was over. After a while, he became embarrassing to remember: I had fallen for that.

  So strange, this room.

  I wonder why I could ever have thought that somebody who made me happy when I was fifteen would make me happy now. But Stuart was perfect: the riding stables (with ponies), and the painting (which showed me he was sensitive), and the inexperience with girls (so I could be his first) and how very, very tall, dark and handsome he would be. I liked the name, too: it was vaguely Scottish and (to my mind) sounded like the hero of a novel.

  I wrote Stuart’s name on my exercise books.

  I did not tell my friends the most important thing about Stuart: that I had made him up.

  And now I’m getting up off the bed and looking down at the outline of a man, a silhouette in flour or ash or dust on the black satin bedspread, and I am getting into my clothes.

  The photographs on the wall are fading, too. I didn’t expect that. I wonder what will be left of his world in a few hours, wonder if I should have left well enough alone, a masturbatory fantasy, something reassuring and comforting. He would have gone through his life without ever really touching anyone, just a picture and a painting and a half-memory for a handful of people who barely ever thought of him anymore.

  I leave the flat. There are still people at the wine bar downstairs. They are sitting at the table, in the corner, where Stuart and I had been sitting earlier. The candle has burned way down but I imagine that it could almost be us. A man and a woman, in conversation. And soon enough, they will get up from their table and walk away, and the candle will be snuffed and the lights turned off and that will be that for another night.

  I hail a taxi. Climb in. For a moment—for, I hope, the last time—I find myself missing Stuart Innes.

  Then I sit back in the seat of the taxi, and I let him go. I hope I can afford the taxi fare and find myself wondering whether there will be a check in my bag in the morning, or just another blank sheet of paper. Then, more satisfied than not, I close my eyes, and I wait to be home.

  Down to a Sunless Sea

  THE THAMES IS A filthy beast: it winds through London like a blindworm, or a sea serpent. All the rivers flow into it, the Fleet and the Tyburn and the Neckinger, carrying all the filth and scum and waste, the bodies of cats and dogs and the bones of sheep and pigs down into the brown water of the Thames, which carries them east into the estuary and from there into the North Sea and oblivion.

  It is raining in London. The rain washes the dirt into the gutters, and it swells streams into rivers, rivers into powerful things. The rain is a noisy thing, splashing and pattering and rattling the rooftops. If it is clean water as it falls from the skies it only needs to touch London to become dirt, to stir dust and make it mud.

  Nobody drinks it, neither the rainwater nor the river water. They make jokes about Thames water killing you instantly, and it is not true. There are mudlarks who will dive deep for thrown pennies, then come up again, spout the river water, shiver and hold up their coins. They do not die, of course, or not of that, although there are no mudlarks over fifteen years of age.

  The woman does not appear to care about the rain.

  She walks the Rotherhithe docks, as she has done for years, for decades: nobody knows how many years, because nobody cares. She walks the docks, or she stares out to sea. She examines the ships, as they bob at anchor. She must do something, to keep body and soul from dissolving their partnership, but none of the folk of the dock have the foggiest idea what this could be.

  You take refuge from the deluge beneath a canvas awning put up by a sailmaker. You believe yourself to be alone under there, at first, for she is statue-still and staring out across the water, even though there is nothing to be seen through the curtain of rain. The far side of the Thames has vanished.

  And then she sees you. She sees you and she begins to talk, not to you, oh no, but to the gray water that falls from th
e gray sky into the gray river. She says, “My son wanted to be a sailor,” and you do not know what to reply, or how to reply. You would have to shout to make yourself heard over the roar of the rain, but she talks, and you listen. You discover yourself craning and straining to catch her words.

  “My son wanted to be a sailor.

  “I told him not to go to sea. I’m your mother, I said. The sea won’t love you like I love you, she’s cruel. But he said, Oh Mother, I need to see the world. I need to see the sun rise in the tropics, and watch the Northern Lights dance in the arctic sky, and most of all I need to make my fortune and then, when it’s made I will come back to you, and build you a house, and you will have servants, and we will dance, Mother, oh how we will dance . . .

  “And what would I do in a fancy house? I told him. You’re a fool with your fine talk. I told him of his father, who never came back from the sea—some said he was dead and lost overboard, while some swore blind they’d seen him running a whorehouse in Amsterdam.

  “It’s all the same. The sea took him.

  “When he was twelve years old, my boy ran away, down to the docks, and he shipped on the first ship he found, to Flores in the Azores, they told me.

  “There’s ships of ill omen. Bad ships. They give them a lick of paint after each disaster, and a new name, to fool the unwary.

  “Sailors are superstitious. The word gets around. This ship was run aground by its captain, on orders of the owners, to defraud the insurers; and then, all mended and as good as new, it gets taken by pirates; and then it takes a shipment of blankets and becomes a plague ship crewed by the dead, and only three men bring it into port in Harwich . . .

  “My son had shipped on a stormcrow ship. It was on the homeward leg of the journey, with him bringing me his wages—for he was too young to have spent them on women and on grog, like his father—that the storm hit.

  “He was the smallest one in the lifeboat.

  “They said they drew lots fairly, but I do not believe it. He was smaller than them. After eight days adrift in the boat, they were so hungry. And if they did draw lots, they cheated.

  “They gnawed his bones clean, one by one, and they gave them to his new mother, the sea. She shed no tears and took them without a word. She’s cruel.

  “Some nights I wish he had not told me the truth. He could have lied.

  “They gave my boy’s bones to the sea, but the ship’s mate—who had known my husband, and known me too, better than my husband thought he did, if truth were told—he kept a bone, as a keepsake.

  “When they got back to land, all of them swearing my boy was lost in the storm that sank the ship, he came in the night, and he told me the truth of it, and he gave me the bone, for the love there had once been between us.

  “I said, you’ve done a bad thing, Jack. That was your son that you’ve eaten.

  “The sea took him too, that night. He walked into her, with his pockets filled with stones, and he kept walking. He’d never learned to swim.

  “And I put the bone on a chain to remember them both by, late at night, when the wind crashes the ocean waves and tumbles them onto the sand, when the wind howls around the houses like a baby crying.”

  The rain is easing, and you think she is done, but now, for the first time, she looks at you, and appears to be about to say something. She has pulled something from around her neck, and now she is reaching it out to you.

  “Here,” she says. Her eyes, when they meet yours, are as brown as the Thames. “Would you like to touch it?”

  You want to pull it from her neck, to toss it into the river for the mudlarks to find or to lose. But instead you stumble out from under the canvas awning, and the water of the rain runs down your face like someone else’s tears.

  “The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains . . .”

  YOU ASK ME IF I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many things. For where I left him. For what I did. But I will not forgive myself for the year that I hated my daughter, when I believed her to have run away, perhaps to the city. During that year I forbade her name to be mentioned, and if her name entered my prayers when I prayed, it was to ask that she would one day learn the meaning of what she had done, of the dishonor that she had brought to our family, of the red that ringed her mother’s eyes.

  I hate myself for that, and nothing will ease the hatred, not even what happened that final night, on the side of the mountain.

  I had searched for nearly ten years, although the trail was cold. I would say that I found him by accident, but I do not believe in accidents. If you walk the path, eventually you must arrive at the cave.

  But that was later. First, there was the valley on the mainland, the whitewashed house in the gentle meadow with the burn splashing through it, a house that sat like a square of white sky against the green of the grass and the heather just beginning to purple.

  And there was a boy outside the house, picking wool from off a thornbush. He did not see me approaching, and he did not look up until I said, “I used to do that. Gather the wool from the thornbushes and twigs. My mother would wash it, then she would make me things with it. A ball, and a doll.”

  He turned. He looked shocked, as if I had appeared out of nowhere. And I had not. I had walked many a mile, and had many more miles to go. I said, “I walk quietly. Is this the house of Calum MacInnes?”

  The boy nodded, drew himself up to his full height, which was perhaps two fingers bigger than mine, and he said, “I am Calum MacInnes.”

  “Is there another of that name? For the Calum MacInnes that I seek is a grown man.”

  The boy said nothing, just unknotted a thick clump of sheep’s wool from the clutching fingers of the thornbush. I said, “Your father, perhaps? Would he be Calum MacInnes as well?”

  The boy was peering at me. “What are you?” he asked.

  “I am a small man,” I told him. “But I am a man, nonetheless, and I am here to see Calum MacInnes.”

  “Why?” The boy hesitated. Then, “And why are you so small?”

  I said, “Because I have something to ask your father. Man’s business.” And I saw a smile start at the tips of his lips. “It’s not a bad thing to be small, young Calum. There was a night when the Campbells came knocking on my door, a whole troop of them, twelve men with knives and sticks, and they demanded of my wife, Morag, that she produce me, as they were there to kill me, in revenge for some imagined slight. And she said, ‘Young Johnnie, run down to the far meadow, and tell your father to come back to the house, that I sent for him.’ And the Campbells watched as the boy ran out the door. They knew that I was a most dangerous person. But nobody had told them that I was a wee man, or if that had been told them, it had not been believed.”

  “Did the boy call you?” said the lad.

  “It was no boy,” I told him, “but me myself, it was. And they’d had me, and still I walked out the door and through their fingers.”

  The boy laughed. Then he said, “Why were the Campbells after you?”

  “It was a disagreement about the ownership of cattle. They thought the cows were theirs. I maintained the Campbells’ ownership of them had ended the first night the cows had come with me over the hills.”

  “Wait here,” said young Calum MacInnes.

  I sat by the burn and looked up at the house. It was a good-sized house: I would have taken it for the house of a doctor or a man of law, not of a border reaver. There were pebbles on the ground and I made a pile of them, and I tossed the pebbles, one by one, into the burn. I have a good eye, and I enjoyed rattling the pebbles over the meadow and into the water. I had thrown a hundred stones when the boy returned, accompanied by a tall, loping man. His hair was streaked with gray, his face was long and wolfish. There are no wolves in those hills, not any longer, and the bears have gone too.

  “Good day to you,” I said.

  He said nothing in return, only stared. I am used to stares. I said, “I am seeking Calum MacInnes. If you are he, say so, I will greet yo
u. If you are not he, tell me now, and I will be on my way.”

  “What business would you have with Calum MacInnes?”

  “I wish to hire him, as a guide.”

  “And where is it you would wish to be taken?”

  I stared at him. “That is hard to say,” I told him. “For there are some who say it does not exist. There is a certain cave on the Misty Isle.”

  He said nothing. Then he said, “Calum, go back to the house.”

  “But, Da—”

  “Tell your mother I said she was to give you some tablet. You like that. Go on.”

  Expressions crossed the boy’s face—puzzlement, hunger, happiness—and then he turned and ran back to the white house.

  Calum MacInnes said, “Who sent you here?”

  I pointed to the burn as it splashed its way between us on its journey down the hill. “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Water,” he replied.

  “And they say there is a king across it,” I told him.

  I did not know him then at all, and never knew him well, but his eyes became guarded, and his head cocked to one side. “How do I know you are who you say you are?”

  “I have claimed nothing,” I said. “Just that there are those who have heard there is a cave on the Misty Isle, and that you might know the way.”

  He said, “I will not tell you where the cave is.”

  “I am not here asking for directions. I seek a guide. And two travel more safely than one.”

  He looked me up and down, and I waited for the joke about my size, but he did not make it, and for that I was grateful. He just said, “When we reach the cave, I will not go inside. You must bring out the gold yourself.”

  I said, “It is all one to me.”

  He said, “You can only take what you carry. I will not touch it. But yes, I will take you.”

  I said, “You will be paid well for your trouble.” I reached into my jerkin, handed him the pouch I had in there. “This for taking me. Another, twice the size, when we return.”