Marie wakes up and tries to remember the last time she called in sick. It’s not something she does. She’s the type of person who would rather hobble in to work on crutches and be sent home than call in to say she’d broken her leg. It’s the way she’s always been. Trying hard not to draw attention to herself, not wanting to elicit sympathy . . . and there’s plenty for people to be sympathetic about, although her mind always tries to tell her that there is no such thing as sympathy – only nosiness and smugness and one-upmanship.
She knows she is damaged.
She remembers arriving in Banktoun all those years ago. Her wrist still stinging from the small tattoo she’d got in that place in Gorgie. She remembers sitting there, her and two others. One of them a biker, with arms the size of her legs and whole sleeves filled with nude women and Celtic symbols. The other a neat-looking businessman who, when he removed his jacket, unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a series of cartoon characters across his bony chest. He’d smiled at Marie, displaying two rows of yellow teeth, and she’d looked away. Disgusted. You never knew what people had hidden beneath the surface.
She knew what tattoo she wanted. She explained it as the tattooist rubbed a small alcohol-soaked pad across her wrist.
‘How old are you?’ he said, not looking her in the eye.
‘Old enough.’
‘You know, I don’t normally do these on the wrist. Not unless you’ve had a bit of ink before. Are you sure you don’t want it somewhere you can hide it more easily?’
‘I don’t want to hide it. I want people to know.’
He laid down the tattoo gun and looked up. ‘Know what?’
She looked at him, and she knew that underneath his craggy face and tattooed forehead he was a kind man. Marie had an instinct for people now. She’d learned the hard way.
‘I need them to know that I’ve escaped.’
The man looked at her pityingly and switched on the gun. The noise reminded her of a shaver. She blinked away a memory. Took a deep breath. He’d already outlined the design on her wrist. It was small, but it was clear. A tiny outline of a swallow. Freedom. She’d done her time.
‘This will feel like a small scratch. Tell me if you need me to stop.’
‘Don’t stop,’ Marie whispered. She closed her eyes and felt herself go numb.
That pain was nothing.
Marie rolls over in bed, rubs at her wrist. The bird is more green than black now, fading away like everything it was put there to signify. But today it seems to hurt, a phantom itch.
She feels sick. Picks up the phone and texts her boss: ‘I can’t come in this morning. Got a migraine. Sorry.’
She scrolls through her other messages. Knows that she needs to contact Davie or he’s going to start wondering what the hell is going on – asking too many questions. She can’t deal with questions, not yet. Not until she knows what’s going on.
She sends a text to Davie: ‘Having a quiet day. Call you later.’ Then she gets out of bed and realises that she’s about to be sick.
After some time spent hugging the porcelain toilet bowl, she splashes her face with cold water. Drinks a pint of orange squash. Tries to stop shaking.
Graeme’s letter is on the kitchen table. It emanates some sort of aura, and she knows she can’t read it again. She picks it up and stuffs it into the kitchen cupboard, where she has a tray of junk mail and other things that she hasn’t got round to sorting out yet. On the floor, a small trail of round biscuits tells her that Cadbury has managed to find her own breakfast again. She scoops them up and throws them in the bin, remembering the hairball from yesterday – thinking it was odd, as the cat was generally quite well trained and tended not to spit stuff out like that in the hallway. She wonders if maybe the cat had eaten something bad, berries or something it had found out in the garden. She knows that checking the small lump she’d picked up in the tissue would definitely make her sick again, so she closes the door of the cupboard that houses the bin and decides to deal with it later.
This is becoming a pattern. Why can’t she face up to things head on?
She picks up her swimming costume and towel that are hanging on the radiator from the day before. There’s a chance that someone might see her at the pool, but as no one really knows which shifts she does every week, it’s hardly an issue. Besides, Bill isn’t going to sack her for taking one morning off.
Making sure the kitchen window is open just enough so the cat can get back inside, she picks up her swimming bag and leaves the flat.
In the hallway, she pauses by the mailboxes again. Opens her own. Nothing. She sticks her hand into Number 9 but can’t tell if anything new has been put in there or not.
Forget it, Marie.
As she walks out of the main entrance, she senses a movement to the right of the building, at the part where the alley disappears around the back to the small piece of garden that is shared between her and the other ground-floor flats. There’s a gate there, but it’s never locked. Her skin prickles.
‘Cadbury? Is that you?’ She doesn’t expect the cat to answer, but if it has been lurking around in the alley, there’s always the small chance it might appear at the sound of her voice. She hasn’t seen her much in the last couple of days and she’s probably sulking. There’s a faint rustling, but it might just be the leaves on the trees that are overhanging from the house next door. She’s about to walk round and have a look, but something stops her. She shakes her head and walks down the path towards the street. Stupid.
The swimming pool is heaving. School kids on holiday fill the main pool as well as the kiddie pool, and Marie realises she’s not going to get much of a peaceful swim.
She finds a space against the far side, swims ten lengths while hugging so close to the pool wall that she can only do front crawl to avoid smacking her fingers against the side. She stops in the deep end for a breath. This is pathetic. Drinking the rum has affected her stamina. The upside is that the cool water is soothing her fuzzy head, even if the echoing shrieks of the children are trying hard to counterbalance it.
She leans one arm in the drainage channel and gazes out across the pool, towards the café, where a few people sit drinking coffee and watching the swimmers. Without her contact lenses, she can’t make out any of the faces, but some of the shapes of people look familiar. At the table at the end, a man stands up from his seat and steps closer to the window. Marie peers. He’s probably trying to find one of his kids. You see them sometimes, the anxious parents. They bang on the glass and a child in the pool starts waving. Then the parent sits back down, pleased that they’ve shown their vigilance.
But the man doesn’t bang on the glass. He just stares out at the pool. Marie scans the bodies in the water, waiting for someone to suddenly spot him and wave. No one does.
She turns back towards the café. He’s gone.
Marie slides down the wall to the bottom of the pool, holds her breath for a few seconds, then pushes off the wall and into her final length. She tries not to think about who the man might have been.
Who he was watching.
Why there was something disturbingly familiar about him.