The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Arthur is waiting for me at the top of the stairs. He’s angry. He doesn’t like me being here, and his mouth turns down
Mac In the gloomy basement, the small square window is covered in bluebottles, drawn to the light, all jockeying for position. I can hear their frantic buzzing over the groan and rumble of the gears. I can hear Arthur calling me too, from the front door.
I know I should respond, but down here, down in this basement, my shoes turn to glue.
I don’t know how long I’ve been standing here, watching the bluebottles.
This is where the flour ends up, trickling through a wooden chute into a jute sack. This is the end of the process. Dust to dust.
There is an array of machinery down here: sieves and fans and things that judder and hop; a rough timber partition, which screens off the business end of the mill; gears and cogs, levers and pulleys and steel shafts as thick as a man’s arm; the mechanism that links water to wheel to horsepower.
The unstoppable might of it vibrates the timber partition. I don’t have to see it to know what it can do.
That moment, five years ago, is seared on my senses.
I can still smell a ghost in the machine. Blood and oil and friction.
Something clogging up the works. I can hear an imbalance, a wrongness in the grinding of the gears.
Horror
If I look at the floor, to the left of the partition, I can see Jim’s serviceable, dusty work boot.
I am running to pick it up, as if that will make things all right, as if I can cancel out the horror by the neat ordering of things.
His foot is still inside.
“Ma? What are you doing?” Legs appear on the steep staircase, a torso. Arthur bends double to peer into the gloom.
He won’t come down here now. “Ma, come on up. I’m going to shut off the water.”
He disappears. I want to tell him about the bluebottles, but I can’t move.
Not until the water stops can I bear to move.
I hear him shoving the lever upstairs, and everything goes into slow motion.
Life comes back painfully into my legs, my hips. I rub my arms. I have an aching cold spot between my shoulder blades, as if I’ve been stabbed in the back.
The water has been diverted, and outside the wheel will dither to a halt like some abandoned fairground ride.
Down here, the mechanism judders to a full stop. All is silent, save for the buzzing of the flies.
Arthur is waiting for me at the top of the stairs. He’s angry.
He doesn’t like me being here, and his mouth turns down when I tell him about the bluebottles.
“Ugh. A dead rat under the floor boards, most likely. I’ll get some fly spray.”
He’ll buy some fly spray, but he won’t go down there with it.
“We’ll get Lucie to do it,” I say.
“You can’t do that,” he objects. “You can’t ask her to do all your dirty jobs. And anyway, she’s got company. Key.”
He holds out his large hand and I surrender the key. If Arthur had his way, he’d chuck the key into the pond.
“Since when?” I look at him sharply. “She never mentioned she was expecting company.” “Since yesterday.”
We emerge into bright, cold sunshine and Arthur struggles with the lock.
“And I don’t think he was expected.”
Stinging
I suck in a sharp lungful of fresh air. Dust is clogging up my nostrils and my eyes are stinging.
“What? She never mentioned any boyfriend to me. She’d better not be burning those bloody scented candles.”
Arthur’s mouth twists. He walks off with the key and I pointedly hold out a hand for it.
Now I see it: a strange blue car, parked a little way off to the side.
Behind the car, the ground drops steeply away from the cottage, and the slope has been turned into a rockery – by some long-forgotten miller, no doubt, using the biggest sea boulders he could find on the beach.
In summer, it’s very pretty, all sea pinks and lavender and pale, crystalline lumps of stone.
Today it is adrift with snowdrops. The blue car looks like it’s lurking.
I make a disapproving sound in my nose, dislodging flour and dust.
“He came into the café looking for her. Ordered a cappuccino.”
“A cappuccino? Father, brother?”
Arthur shakes his head. “Definitely a boyfriend.” As we walk past the cottage, heading for the track, I catch a glimpse of Lucie at the far corner of the building.
She’s a distance away, but appears to be wearing a dressing gown and wellies.
Another figure emerges from inside. A man, fully dressed.
There is some tense exchange between them and Arthur grabs my elbow and hurries me along, as if we’ve stumbled on some ruffians in a dimly lit part of town.
“It’s her business, Ma. Don’t interfere.”
I shake off his hand but keep on walking. “She’s a closed book. No good ever came of a closed book.”
Lucie
I’d told Reuben to go. Not to get in touch with me again. He could see the pain in my eyes, and he nodded to it.
Just that. A nod; an acknowledgement.
“You know I love you, right?”
“How can you say that? How can you love me and be with her?”
“You want me to choose you and rip your family apart? Is that what you want, Lucie?”
“No! No.” I’d turned away then, holding my face in my hands. My skin was burning up.
“I don’t know any more. I’m tired. I’m tired of this. Nothing is ever going to change, so just go.” “Fine. I’m going.”
I’d gone back inside, listening to the sounds of his anger from a safe distance: the slam of his car door, the gunning of the engine.
I stood for a long time, clutching the edge of the table.
The oilcloth sweated beneath my palms; the cherries began to run together as the tears formed. I refused to let them fall, but they welled up anyway. I felt like my insides had collapsed, and Reuben had driven his car straight through me for good measure.
The sound of his car engine, as he’d roared away down the lane, had stayed with me for a long time.
More tomorrow.