Ten

The McAllister brothers, April Cowan, and poor Moped faded a little as I rolled up to the home to see Nicky. It was always my favourite bit of any day, rolling up to the home to see Nicky. Even Miss Drumm was like family now after ten years.

It used to be that I’d stop in on her every few days, let her know how Walter Scott was getting on, reassure her about the stone, share news of the brambles in the hedgerows and how the potatoes were doing. I sometimes wondered if she knew that I had never made a pot of bramble jelly in my life and wouldn’t know potato blight if I caught it, but I thought maybe she liked the pretence, found it harmless, since she’d never see the garden again or find out that the vegetable patch was overrun with those sunflowers and the great-great-grandchildren of her last lettuces.

Besides, since they were in adjoining rooms, I could hardly visit Nicky and ignore her. It was good of her to have him, really; he still cried out back then, and it wasn’t a noise you’d choose to hear if you didn’t have to. It wasn’t all that different, when I came to think of it, from the noise Walter Scott made when I tried to get him to leave her behind, the few times he visited. Miss Drumm turned her head away, her mouth trembling, and Walter dug his toenails into the polished floor of the hall and sat down hard. If the doors on that side of the corridor were open and the morning sun was shining, you could still see the scratches on the parquet where I’d dragged him.

But Walter hadn’t been here for nine years now and Nicky had stopped making any sounds at all about six years back, so now the arrangement worked perfectly for everyone. Miss Drumm listened in on the nurses to check they weren’t teasing him, and he was the only resident who didn’t mind a connecting door with “that chopsy old B” as Mr. Ainsworth called her.

“Do you know, Gloria,” he’d said, “she had the cheek to tell me well-done steak was wasted beef and I might as well have a slice of luncheon meat and leave the fillets for more discerning palates.”

“Why did you tell her?” I asked him. “She’s blind. You could have said it was oozing with blood and she’d not have known any better.”

“She could tell from the sound of me cutting it,” Mr. Ainsworth said. “She’s got ears like a bat.”

But it was her bat ears that I valued most, her chopsy ways too, and even her hectoring. I couldn’t think of anyone better to be looking out for Nicky all day.

Little Deirdre was sitting on her stool just inside the front door as ever. She was only in her fifties, but her hair was like thistledown, her cheeks as withered as week-old balloons.

“Hello there,” I said.

Deirdre beamed at me. Her teeth were gruesome; she’d neither brush them herself nor let anyone else brush them for her, and a rinse with strawberry mouthwash twice a day over the years had fallen far short. When the pain got bad, they sedated her to get her in the car and then knocked her out completely at the dentist. It wouldn’t be long before the next visit was due.

I usually paid no attention to the house as I made my way to Nicky and Miss Drumm, but tonight I found myself wondering about all it had seen in its years. About when the Drumm family used to hold balls and shooting parties in the winter, about the soldiers from both wars who recuperated here, the years it stood empty, ringing with silence and filling with cobwebs, then those children at Eden and the morning that Miss Whatshername was screeching and the kids were terrified and the police were at the gate trying to get in. And a boy in a bright orange anorak was facedown in the river, turning with the current, all his secrets locked inside him forever.

“You’re late,” said Miss Drumm. She put out a hand and slapped the outsize button of her clock. Five-fifty-three, said the robot voice.

“Are you bursting with news for me?” I managed to get my tone very breezy, but even just asking had made my pulse beat faster. Could I fake surprise if it had broken?

“News?” said Miss Drumm. “In this place? Chance’d be a fine thing. Then I could give up on those soap operas that are rotting my brain like ergots.”

“So no gossip then?” I asked.

She moved her thumb over the nodule on her chair arm that controls the direction until she had swung round to face me. “What is it?” she said.

The light shining in from the bright corridor bounced off the lenses of her spectacles and hid her eyes. If I hadn’t known she was blind, I’d have sworn she could see right through me.

“What?” I said. “Nothing. What do you mean?”

“Is Walter all right? Have you had the vet out? Has some nosey parker come sniffing?”

“Walter’s fine. No one’s been anywhere.”

“Are you rocking the stone?” she said.

“Of course,” I said. “I did a wedding today. Two lovely boys who’ve been together for seven years. And old Mr. Thorne died. His children are coming to register it tomorrow.”

“Oh?” said Miss Drumm. She couldn’t care less about weddings, but a death in the village was always something.

“Yes, he went to a nightclub in Glasgow and snapped a vertebra break dancing.”

“Typical,” said Miss Drumm, grinning to show me she appreciated the joke. “I remember Sandy Thorne when he was a paperboy for Slocombe’s back when it was Ainslie and Sons. He used to bring our Times on his bicycle and leave it in a tin box stuck to the gate. I had a bit of a soft spot for him when he was fifteen and I was seven, and I used to swing on that gate for hours waiting to catch a glimpse.”

“I think that’s the box that’s on the gate at the Rough House road-end now,” I said. “For the postie.”

“Don’t interrupt,” said Miss Drumm. “And one day I turned up a bit late to find Sandy trying like billy-oh to stuff the Times into the slot. But it wouldn’t go. I had the key for the box, being a child of the family, and I opened it up.

“Well, lo and behold, inside there was a robin’s nest with two blue eggs and the fiercest little robin ready to defend them with her life.”

“How marvellous!”

“Marvellous indeed. Sandy Thorne took both eggs and pelted them at the trunk of a rowan tree, then he swiped the nest out of the way, put the newspaper inside, and slammed the door shut.”

“No!”

“I never spoke to him again. I can still hear that little robin crying if I listen.”

I should be used to her by now; Miss Drumm delights in the sort of mawkish stories even Thomas Hardy would edit out with a blue pencil in the second draft. Normally I can roll my eyes and ignore them, but the horrors of the day had built up inside me until I was fit to burst, and for some reason the two blue eggs and the grieving robin mingled in my imagination with Mrs. McAllister and the two dead boys, and suddenly tears were very close. I had never cried in front of Miss Drumm, who was savage about what she called blubbing.

“Gloria,” she said, “I’m going to ask you again. What is wrong, my dear?” My dear! “Has there been bad news about young Nicky? None of these nurses ever tells me anything.”

“No,” I said again.

“So why are you troubled? You have been rocking the stone, haven’t you?” This was what I hadn’t wanted to tell Stig. Miss Drumm and her stone. “Twelve times, mark you!” she said. “If you miscount and do thirteen, carry on till twenty-four, I mean it. Don’t you scoff at me, young woman! Don’t think I don’t know just because I can’t see you.”

“Every day. Twelve times.”

“Hmm,” said Miss Drumm. “And yet you seem to be exhibiting just the same malaise as engulfed our old shepherd’s wife when she stopped. They tested her for everything under the sun and none of the doctors could tell what ailed her. Then when she was too ill to carry out her duties anymore, and her husband took over, she rallied. She’d been to see that dreadful Billy Graham fellow in Glasgow, you see, and got the idea that rocking the stone was godless.”

“It’s good to hear a story with a happy ending,” I said, ignoring the sideswipe at Billy Graham, who’d brought me great comfort when I read his sermons.

“Happy ending, my eye,” said Miss Drumm. “Once she was better the stone was neglected again, and she died a year later with a growth the size of a medicine ball in her belly.”

“For crying out loud.”

“And even the hallowed place couldn’t save her,” Miss Drumm said.

“Lourdes, you mean?”

“Popish claptrap.”

“Walsingham?”

“Next door to the same thing.”

“Mecca?” This was just devilment but I couldn’t resist it and, recognising that, she smiled at me. “Well, what then?” I said.

Miss Drumm sucked her teeth for a minute. She had good strong yellow teeth, not many at the back these days (although more than Walter), and she sucked them with relish whenever she was thinking hard. “I’ve never told you about the hallowed place,” she said at last. “And I make no apology for that. You didn’t need to know.”

I had the oddest feeling I knew what she was going to say.

“But you must have seen it,” Miss Drumm went on. “The little place in the woods half a mile from the footbridge at William’s Leap?” She paused, but I knew if I tried to speak my voice would betray me. She really was talking about the huttie. “My uncle William leapt across the gap on my father’s mare taking a shortcut on the Boxing Day chase in 1920 and ribbed Fa about it until the day he died. Fa didn’t dare to try and couldn’t bear it that his brother had bested him. So he built a bridge—against my mother’s express wishes and his own better judgement. He built a wooden footbridge.”

I had calmed my breaths enough to talk again. “So the hallowed place is the crypt?”

“Never!” said Miss Drumm. “Monstrous! The Drumms wouldn’t dream of such a thing. Every Drumm there ever was is decently buried in the good earth at the parish church at Corsock, where I shall be before too long, I hope. Crypt! What nonsense.”

“Sorry!” I said. But still I was sure. And bewildered. In ten years she hadn’t so much as mentioned it until today, when April’s body lay under its floor.

“What do you mean, ‘hallowed place’?” I asked, trying to sound as interested as I guessed I should, but no more.

“Gloria,” said Miss Drumm. “You are unnerving me.”

“Is it a chapel?” I asked, guessing that would be as bad as a crypt in her eyes and, if I annoyed her, she might stop scrutinising me. But Miss Drumm, for the first time since I’d met her, looked—there was only one word for it—shifty.

“Consecrated,” she muttered at last through gritted teeth.

“And what is it you’ve never told me about it?”

“You’ve tired me out with your nonsense,” she said. “Get on through and see that boy of yours. Let me rest.” Then she set her jaw as though she would never open it again, slightly off-centre but tightly shut.

Nicky’s room must have been the old serving pantry, adjacent to the breakfast room, back when the care home was a family house. It was smaller than the others, so between that and the connecting door, I got it for a good price. Or rather the money I gave the home bought more one-to-one care than I could have afforded if I’d insisted on a bigger bedroom. He didn’t need the space. His narrow bed with the oxygen on one side and the fluids on the other left enough room for a chest of drawers where his pyjamas were kept folded. An armchair for me and a lamp to read by and there was no need for more. It was quiet, warm, tidy, and softly lit—my favourite place in the world.

“Hallo, my darling boy,” I said, bending over to kiss him. “Hallo, my little Harlem Globetrotter. That’s some excellent dribbling you’re doing today.” I picked the top pad from the pile of soft gauze we keep by his bed and wiped his chin. They used to use kitchen roll and once I was shocked to come in and see a toilet roll there. Then I was given these pads at the dentist one time after I’d had a tooth out, and they were so soft and so snowy white that I went back in and asked the receptionist for the company name and then told the home to buy them for Nicky.

“I’ve had quite a time since I left last night,” I said, settling down. “I don’t want to burden you with any of it, but believe me—it’s like a day at the beach coming here.”

“I’m not listening,” shouted Miss Drumm through the open door. “Say what you like and don’t mind me.”

“I spoke to an old friend,” I said to Nicky, ignoring her. “Someone I haven’t seen since I was younger than you. People don’t change though, do you know that? You haven’t changed since the first minute I set my eyes on you, not in any way that matters. And neither has my friend.”

“I have,” Miss Drumm shouted. “I used to have feet. And eyes that worked.”

“I thought you were tired out!” I shouted back and went to close the door, picking up the book on the way back again.

“Now then,” I said. “‘The Moon’. Except there isn’t one tonight. ‘The Moon has a face like the clock in the hall … ’”

The poem was so familiar after all these years, that I could let my mind drift, read it without thinking. What I should have foreseen, though, was that my mind would drift to that other night when children hoped for a moon as they lay in a clearing.

“‘And flowers and children close their eyes till up in the morning the sun shall arise.’” Stig and the dew and his moment of perfect peace. I remembered his voice saying I was wet through and never slept another wink until Van was shaking me.

“That’s not right, Nicky, is it?” I said. “If you’re awake you don’t get shaken. Why did he say that?”

I turned the page.

“‘The Swing,’” I read and felt a jolt inside me. A Tarzan swing used to hang over the river near the bridge. Stig had said the footbridge by the swing. And the huttie was the hallowed place half a mile away. And Dunkeld, where Ned McAllister had gone to die, had a huttie of its own, by a waterfall. Something about all of that bothered me.

I kissed Nicky again after I had finished reading, stroked his face, remembered his smile. Once, a year or two ago, I tried to move his face into a smile shape, pushing the sides of his mouth with my hands, but it was so horrible that I frightened myself, and that shocked me. And I went home and cried, hugging Walter Scott and bellowing into his solid side.

“Night-night, darling,” I said. “You’ve helped Mummy a lot tonight. Magic kisses. One on each eye to send you to sleep, one in each hand for you to keep.” Then I turned away.

Miss Drumm had wheeled herself over and pulled the door open. She was just sitting there.

“Helped you with what?” she said.