November 17-18, 2017

I’ve saved the hardest part for last. I change my clothes, head for the train. I whisper to myself that no matter what happens, I’ll have told the whole truth, set myself on an honest path. If I am left standing with my hand on another closed door … I shake my head, refuse to allow the thought to gather its own story. Instead, I watch the sea roll as I pass.

The sky glowers as I step out of Central Station. Diesel hangs in the air, replacing the pungency of the seaweed I left an hour ago. The roll from sea to city. A sky that sometimes touched the earth. Within me, the girl who loved it all. What about now?

Vic and I felt like a pair of girls banished from society, walking around as though we were part of it all, but feeling cast out. Vic wore it all on the outside, a reflection of her experience as the daughter of a scandalous woman daring to raise all those bairns with not a man in sight. I, her opposite. As far as anyone could tell from the outside, I was the brainy daughter of a clever man and a beautiful woman. No one knew the swirl of Mum’s incessant cocktails and cutting words, of the brother taken, of my own illegitimacy. No one knew the darkness I feared within. Except Vic. I hated myself. Vic didn’t, though. She’d loved me all the more. But there were secrets I kept, even from her.

My throat clenches as I enter the thick crowd in the street, and for a few seconds I forget where I am, which direction I need to go.

Everything seems changed.

I keep walking, appearing to be just another Glaswegian confidently striding to her destination, as I have always done. Not always the Glaswegian part, or the confident. But that I’d always appeared to be something I was not. Still the girl dressed in a costume designed for another character, making her way, without a map or a clear memory of how to get to the only person who has ever seen anything close to the truth of me, wondering if, when I reveal everything, I will still be able to count on her.

As I turn up Hope Street, an understanding of the direction arrives, wordless. I can’t explain it, but I have the solid feeling that I can trust myself to take the right steps.

Outside the door of The Corbie, I take a deep breath. Hands on the heavy wooden door, hair curling in the dampness, I press in. Couples and threes and fours dot the tables in the room. A stage at the front, wire curling across, instruments wait. I take my seat at the bar, hoping I look as though I’ve casually popped in.

“Vic in?” I ask the bartender.

She smiles in a way that says I am not the first woman to sit at the bar and ask this. My stomach rolls. Jealousy. To which I have no right. She angles her head towards the stage. “Bit busy at the minute.”

I turn, find her hunched over the sound board. Same curve of the spine, same spiked hair, same long fingers. I feel them, as real as the thump of the speakers and the wood of the bar under my hand, as though those fingers are on my arm again.

Close the eyes. Almost imperceptible shake of the head. Let go.

“Won’t be long, I wouldn’t think. What’ll you have?”

Guinness. What a typical, stodgy old woman would order. Behind the times. Or, I think, too wise to blindly follow. What a crone would order. I don’t need to go for something Belgian, served in a curved glass that looks like a wine glass that wishes to be something bolder.

“Maybe you could tell her I’m here? If she isn’t too busy. I’m Alison.”

“Alison? From America?”

“From Strathnamurrah, originally, though now I live in America,” I try a smile.

“She didn’t mention you were coming.”

“She doesn’t know.”

“Right. She’s getting things sorted. As she does. I’ll tell her you’re here, though.”

I watch her bustle back and forth, checking wires and directing the woman who’s helping her. The bartender stills her with a hand to the shoulder. She leans in, whispers. Vic turns. My eyes want to close. My chin wants to tuck. I resist, hold steady, raise a hand. She begins to move towards me, briskly, as though I am another item on her checklist to be organized. The lift of her hand to her hair gives away anxiety or anger. She always checked the spike or the quiff before she took to the stage or started the argument.

“Al. What are you doing here? Are you okay?”

I stand. “I’m fine. I should have phoned. I’m sorry.”

“No. It’s wonderful to see you. It’s just. Well, you’ve just popped in from 3,000 miles away, and you’re fine?”

“Yes,” I laugh. I am fine. For the first time in years, I am fine. “I’m fine and a tree fell on my house, and they said I had to find somewhere to stay while it’s sorted and I decided to stay here, in Inverkiven.” I realize how mad this sounds as the words leave my mouth. Mad and marvelous.

“A tree?”

“Yes. A birch, to be specific. But that’s not the point. I had things to take care of here, and I wanted to see you. I didn’t know how long the other stuff would take. If you haven’t time tonight, it’s fine. I can wait,” I say, though I’m not sure how. Now that I’m here, it all seems urgent. I’m an expert at not showing it, though.

Her hand goes to the quiff again. “Bit of a bad night for it, Al. This lot starts in half an hour. They’re just the openers. I need to see the headliner started okay and then I can maybe go. Be a couple of hours,” she sighs. “You really might have rung first.” She sounds the way I did when Tori arrived home late without letting me know.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mind waiting,” I say.

She leans in then hugs me. “Fair enough. Brace yourself. It’s going to get loud.”

I nurse one drink for the time it takes her to break free. In the chill outside the door, we stand close. The shriek of the band rattles within me, still, the sounds bouncing through the door into the street. I’ve turned the beer glass and what I have to say for the past two hours. Now, my whole body feels overheated, tight, vibrating with the music and bouncing between the idea that I might be free and open in the world or that this might be all wrong. I’ve drained my bank account for a fool’s errand. I’ll be exposed and left naked and abandoned and wrong. Again.

“Where to?” Vic asks.

“I’m not sure,” I say. Obviously, I have not thought this through enough. I pull my hair away from my face. “I have things to tell you.”

“So, you’re not fine?”

“I am. I just. There are things you don’t know.”

“Obviously.” She sighs. “We could go to mine, though it’s a bit far, and I’ll have to come back later.”

“I—you—” I sigh. “The thing is. I want you to feel free to get up and walk out if that’s what you need. And I don’t think I could stand it if you kicked me out.”

“Fifty years old, the stoic now comes with the melodrama. Jesus, is it that bad?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.”

She hooks her arm through mine. “I need a drink. I know a wee place. Quiet. Darkish.”

We follow our breath, making our way through the crowds and then away from them, up a side street where I’ve never been and through a heavy door, down to a basement bar together, as though we’re in a three-legged race.

The bartender greets Vic by name when we come in. “Early tonight.”

“Aye.”

“Usual?”

Vic nods. I wonder how much this bartender knows about Vic that I don’t.

“Two,” I say, hoping Vic orders the same pint here as everywhere else.

Two dark ales and two golden whiskies, Vic leads us to a back booth. Some song that might be Modern English drifts back to us, not so loud we have to raise voices.

Vic tosses back the whisky, places the glass gently on the table. “So, what is it that’s brought you all this way?”

“There’s so much, Vic. It all feels as though it’s here, right now, taking me over, things I thought I’d put away.” My eyes fill. Now it seems stupid to say it all. I should just be able to get on with my life.

“I’ll stay as long as you need, no matter what you say.”

“You disappeared before.”

“You left first, love.” She puts her hand on mine, gently.

I take a deep breath and let everything out, from the night in the basement with the trophies to the evening of our picnic by the shore when I’d just found out I was pregnant.

She switches chairs to sit next to me. “Still here.”

“The truth is, that night you brought the picnic, I didn’t want to love you.”

Vic sits perfectly still, her spine so straight she might be back in those hard, wooden pews with a nun standing in the aisle glaring down at some perceived sin. “Why?” she asks.

“The Happily Ever After—the story of the boy and the girl and how I became the bastard. If he’d just married her, it would all have been different. Wade was the kind of man I’d been raised to marry.”

Vic’s eyes tighten. “The kind of man who would marry the kind of girl you were—the princess in that house on the hill. And I was the wee lassie from the broken home. The whore’s daughter, might as well be: not fekkin good enough.” She pushes back in her chair. I reach for her elbow. She pulls away.

“Wrong.” I pull my chair closer. “This time. This one time, Victoria Nagle, you are utterly wrong.” Tears come. I speak through them. “Completely backwards, Vic. From when I first laid eyes on you, I’ve thought you were better. Stronger. Braver. Beautiful.”

She guffaws. The room feels as though it’s closing in on me. I’m closing in on myself. How ironic if the one time I try to be completely raw and honest, the time I want to be fully seen is the one time she won’t have it. All the half-truths and pretense I’ve pulled off over the last fifty years, and this. I reach for her again. This time, she allows my touch.

“That’s not even right—that I didn’t want to love you. I was supposed to want the Happily Ever After. The one with the man in it. I owe him, as much as you, an apology. I struck a bargain, no different than Mum did. He gets blamed for walking away, breaking up the family, but it was me—I violated the contract.”

She takes my hands. “No, Alison. You grew into yourself. And look at you. Who wouldn’t want you? You’re fit and clever. You own a house. A mortgage you pay on your own. Not the nonsense my mam put us through. Children who—unless that’s rubbish, too—get on quite well for themselves.”

“And what if I’m not those things, Vic? Not constantly proving it. What if I just want to fuck off to Patagonia, or wherever.”

“Don’t tease me,” she says.

“Vic.”

“Really, Al, don’t.” She takes a deep drink. “I’ve always seen you. Seen what’s on the inside. There’s never been anything wrong with you except the lies you’ve believed. And those boys. Those men. It’s them who are filthy and wrong.”

“I’m sorry.”

Her arms around me, as though I’m being held for the first time. “Just be you, Al.”

“I’m afraid I’m too old. I’ve missed my chance.”

She releases me, sits back, puts her hands on my face. “You appear to be still breathing.”

I lift my beer, drink the last of it. “Another?” I ask.

“I’ll get it.”

When she returns, she sits close. “You know, I was just sneaking out for a fag. That’s all I wanted—one sneaky fag in peace. I came around the corner and saw you, with your book in one hand and your fish and chips in the other and all those dark waves of hair flowing up and out in all directions and you in the middle of that wildness, pale and still and perfect. Three years, I’d been walking around that fekkin village, hands in pockets, kicking stones, wishing for a friend. And then wishing for a friend and a wee bit more. The only thing that was better about Inverkiven than Ireland was that I didn’t have to go to that one-room school with the Master beating out the multiplication tables on the desk—and sometimes on our bodies—with his yard stick. Willful girl that I was, I felt that stick often.

“That night, I rounded the corner and there you were on that wall. I ducked back, smoked a fag, watching from behind the building, for the first time needing to gather courage. You shifted. I was afraid you’d go. I’d miss my chance. I dropped my fag, lit a fresh one, summoned the willful girl.

“Mam had told me the world doesn’t like a willful woman. She was right, especially not one who loves other women. But if I lived the way the world liked, I wouldn’t like meself. And there’s no reprieve from that. I made a choice, a long time ago. Easier for me—regardless of what she said, Mam showed me that I could.” Vic sips her beer. She laughs.

“What?” I sit a little taller.

“I mind us being on the train and me telling you about the gays and you not having a clue what I was on about and me asking had I to teach you everything.”

“Where would I have been without you?”

“Or I you,” she pauses. “You just feel what you feel. It’s always right. And then you—only you—choose what to do with it. No bullshit fairy tale story to fulfill.”

A fragment of Eilidh’s letters comes to mind: Each moment must be fully lived, given its full voice. Then, it’s possible to let each moment go as we pass through it. The lessons of a moment not fully experienced return, in due course, to try to find their voice, to offer us what we refused to hear or learn the first time.

“I know. Now,” I say.

“So. Is there more?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“’Tis.”

“Where are we now?”

“I’m here, enjoying a pint, holding a friend, open to whatever comes next.”

“Ah Vic.”

In the dark with the drift of Siouxsie and the Banshees washing over us, we hug and release and sit in comfortable wordlessness until her phone lights up, calling her back.

“I’m sorry. I need to go. You back to Inverkiven?”

“Yes.”

“How much longer you here?”

“A few days. I want to see Mary. I haven’t told her I’m here, either. And I’d like to see you again, as well.”

“Of course.” She leans in, kisses my cheek.

She slips her hand into mine and we walk in the dark, shoulder to shoulder, footfalls in synch.

~

In the dark before dawn, I rise, answer what calls me, making my way across familiar streets. Within me, I carry my daughter-self, mother-self, the filthy girl and the gypsy and the good girl who wanted to please her mum, to save her, and now, the beginning of the crone-self as well. All of them lie within, along with the great namelessness at the center. We walk the pebbles on the shore, where Mary came and Eilidh, and all those women who came before them, who survived, resting in this space made once again sacred through the telling of the stories I now hold.

The sea rolls gently, as though it has dropped from the sky—black wing, velvet night. I pull off jacket, sweater, keep going. I pile them on the rocks at the edge of the cove, step in, feel the waters deepen. No hesitation like the girl I have been.

I plunge down and down, frigid waters tightening around me. No flap of wing, no fluttering chirrup threatens to pull me from myself; there is only the shush of the water, the burbles of my breath.

When the body insists, I rise, breaking through as though greeting the open air of the world for the first time. Tiny white ripples float out and out and out from me. A bird overhead calls. Though I cannot see it, I imagine the wings sending out their own unseen waves.

Safe in the dark.

Safe in the water.

Safe, unseen.

Under again, smooth through the waters, I flow with them to the shore, hands against pebble and seaweed in the shallows, resisting rising until I must.

I pause on the pebbled shore: sky, still; earth, silent. Even the sea moves only slightly, here at the turn of the tides.

Safe, at last, here, on the land: safe to be seen, to tell my story. More than that, to write it.

Thick towel around me, a vigorous rub, the way Papa toweled me dry when I was small. I zip my jacket over my bare torso.

Last year, or last week, or perhaps even yesterday, I’d have skirted the edge of the village, tried to remain unseen, all my secrets safe.

All my life I have hidden. From the moment I left the liquid darkness of my mother’s body, passed into unknown hands and whisked into the bright white lights of the hospital, nursery, and beyond, I have been afraid. As a child, I ached not only to be outside but also to be near water. My toes, legs, hands, wrists, elbows, my whole body felt a tidal pull to submerge.

All my life, I have hidden, sought solace in silence and the safe whispers of the earth. The long Scottish winters with their velvet nights, the coal-blackened skies outside Papa’s window, the rhythmic ticking of his clock like a heartbeat on the other side of the wall. Safe within the dark city, the rows of tenements, this one building, one flat, one room, one bed, within and within, so many layers, so easy to let myself settle to the bottom of this internal sea.

All my life, I have hidden, swirling in the seeming safety of pretense, acting as the perfect daughter, wife, afraid to reveal myself.

Here, I remember, in my body, in my belly and hands and feet, the capacity to ground and reach at the same time. I remember that the sea and sky are part of each other—unseen molecules rise from the water, transform to cloud, swirl overhead, ever moving, transmuted into the nourishing waters that drop to soil, to the devastating storms that alter the shape of mountains, fell trees and even cities. All is possible, but only after succumbing to that first invisible joining.

Feet rooted on the pebbles, I feel the lift begin, a release from half a century of clenching, clinging, holding on, as though I am being held up for the world, alive now, with all of the women Eilidh wrote about, and Eilidh herself.

The air shushes, lifting my hair as though to help. The sea laps at my feet. I bend, scoop the waters, suck the salt from my fingers.

The raven, overhead, utters its cras, cras.

I turn towards the car, towards a change of clothes, the packing of my suitcase, and the journey over the moor. Fog blankets everything. I feel the ancestors at my back, my truth at last free. I understand, for the first time, that I choose how to tell my story and where it flows next.

Cras.

Not tomorrow. Now.