Bluff, p.7
Bluff, page 7
‘Jeezy peeps. The legendary Lynne Byrne,’ Tatey muttered back. He turned to his phone. ‘Well, this was shite.’
‘Tatey,’ I warned. He needed to keep his voice down.
‘My sister’s going to drive us home. Says she’s in the castle car park already.’
‘Wait,’ I replied, breaking away from the door queue. ‘I just want to say hi.’ I had tried to find the humour in coming back to church, but the truth was, guilt flooded my body. I felt it tingling in my arms and legs. I felt it creeping up my spine. I wanted to say sorry to someone, whoever it was. The saints in the stained glass, their eyes rolling back in their heads. The Jesus on the cross, looking down at me with pained disappointment. I had not kept the promises of Confirmation.
I was halfway across the pews to Lynne when Tatey called after me, ‘Morris, come on!’ jerking his head towards the night outside.
Everyone looked round.
Lynne’s hawkish eyes were on Tatey and then me, glaring. I raised my hand and smiled, but her expression didn’t change. She seemed not to recognize me, even though I imagined I still looked enough like the fifteen-year-old boy who used to pray here. She turned back pointedly to her conversation with Father Thomas and I followed Tatey out of the church as quickly as I could.
Tatey showed no signs of embarrassment, as the pair of us walked down the narrow, cobbled street towards the castle. I, on the other hand, was mortified. But, then, I hadn’t been kicked out of the church as a teenager. Maybe he was trying to prove a point. As for Lynne, perhaps her eyesight wasn’t what it used to be.
I studied the ruined castle walls that were perched on the rocks. ‘Do you remember when we visited with the Sunday school?’ I asked Tatey, pointing to the crumbling stones. A tour guide, dressed as a monk, had told us the place was haunted by a Catholic cardinal whose dead, naked body had been hung from one of the towers.
‘I remember that big well thing they had. In the dungeon,’ replied Tatey, as we approached Tatey’s sister Cassie, leaning against his van in the castle’s car park.
‘Yeah,’ I said, nodding hello to our designated driver. ‘The oubliette.’
I remembered how Joanie had screamed down into its vertiginous walls to see how much it echoed.
‘No rush,’ Cassie said sarcastically to her brother. She looked frozen in her navy trench coat. ‘Not like you owe me.’ She whacked Tatey’s shoulder playfully as we got into his van. I took a back seat by one of the little curtained windows. Tatey passed me yet another can of beer.
‘Do you ever clean this thing?’ Cassie screwed up her nose as she backed out of the car park, past the visitor centre and its poster for the terrifying oubliette.
Now I thought about it, the word ‘oubliette’ sounded so pretty for something so chilling. From the French word for ‘forgetting’, it was a deep stone well of a prison, only accessible from the rusty black grate that covered the top. The kind of place in which you were left to rot before being burned at the stake, something else in which St Rule did a good line. It was certainly more than the St Gregory’s Sunday-school teacher had bargained for. The feeling of being thrown down there in the dark was not something you forgot easily.
Extract from ‘Who’s Afraid of the Dark?’ by Joanie Sinclair, 2012
After a minute or two, there was another bang downstairs. I clutched the duvet, startled. The crash was followed by movement. Creaking. My house is small and sound carries. I grabbed my remote control and turned off the TV. The room turned black. I didn’t want the person downstairs to know that anyone was home. No light came through the thin gap under the door. Slowly and carefully, I got out of bed. Cara? I texted. Are you awake?
13
Joanie, June 2013
So, are you in Vancouver now? A text message from Cameron popped up on Joanie’s phone. She had been hoping Cara would text. Irritated, she stopped wiping the café’s countertop to reply. It was her first day on the job.
What do YOU think? she began typing, then deleted the words. It was exhausting to explain. An apology would have been nice. In a way, Cameron was partially to blame for this. How could he have seen Adam and Mia go off together into the shadows and not stop them or at least not try to warn her?
She still hadn’t heard from Adam.
Joanie shoved the phone back into her pocket, looked at the calm green walls of her new workplace and felt a bit better. It was 7.55 a.m. and she had just watered the plants that twisted around the bookshelves. Morning sun fell on their leaves from the high windows. An earthenware mug of herbal tea sat on the countertop. This wasn’t Vancouver, but it was a small step in a new direction. She was wearing a black apron over her favourite daisy-print dress. Adam had said it made her legs look good.
In five minutes, customers would start to trickle in, postgraduates and lecturers grabbing hot drinks for the library next door or taking a seat at one of the small tables. She read through labels on glass tea cylinders, trying to memorize each one: Cosmic Chamomile, Metaphysical Mint, Sacred Green. She was about to take a photograph when Erin’s voice stopped her.
‘Hi, Joanie. I wanted to introduce you to Mia. You guys will be working shifts together.’
Mia.
The words smashed into her gut, as Joanie slowly turned around.
‘Hey.’ It was the same Mia. Mia Martinez the life-ruiner, her new colleague, head tilted towards her feet.
Joanie bit her lip and blood rushed to her face. Her hand itched to reach over the counter and yank the girl’s ponytail so hard she fell to the floor, with a loud WWE thump. She knew she could do it.
‘You guys already met?’ asked Erin.
Instead of answering, Joanie made a beeline for the bathroom, slammed the door and sat on the closed toilet, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. Fuck you, she thought, fuck you, fuck you. By ‘you’ she meant Mia, Adam and the world at large. Why couldn’t she have this one thing? She wanted to text Cara, but Cara was still annoyed with her. She dug her thumbnails into her temples. One two three four … Erin’s voice had sounded so smooth by the side of the road that night. Was it all a sick joke?
After a few minutes, Joanie pulled open the bathroom door and walked straight back out into the sunshine of the Divinity Quad, without a backwards glance, her footsteps reverberating on the flagstones, like an anxious heartbeat. She wanted to carry on through the dark university doors on the other side of the grass and disappear for ever.
‘What’s going on?’ Erin had caught her up outside, her face contorted with concern.
‘I can’t,’ said Joanie. ‘She’s the girl.’
Erin looked blank.
‘She’s the girl I told you about. Mia. At the beach. When I met you in the car. She and Adam were …’ Joanie didn’t want to cry again. ‘I told you.’
‘Oh, Jesus,’ Erin said. ‘I’m sorry.’ She reached out and Joanie let herself be hugged. ‘Look, Joanie. You can do this. I really want you to be on our team. I know you’re tough. I like that about you. I’ll find a way to make this work. Come back this afternoon.’
She left Joanie standing alone in the manicured garden, staring at roses and fighting violent thoughts.
For the next few weeks, Erin tried to keep the peace. She swapped Mia’s shift with Vik’s, the student who had served her the free drink. While Mia worked, Joanie slept in and watched reality shows on the TV in her bedroom. She had a whole year to kill before she took up her place at Aberdeen to study English. It might as well have been a decade.
Mia was often finishing her shift when Joanie started hers. Instead of feeling anxious, Joanie would try to pretend that Mia was invisible, something drifting out of the building, like an ugly ghost. Joanie made a point of being friendly to Vik while they worked together. She wanted an ally. It didn’t hurt that he was good-looking. Mia was a speck of nothing. Less than that.
‘Is everything OK?’ Vik asked one day when Mia had left.
‘Yeah, why?’ asked Joanie, trying to play dumb.
‘There seems to be an issue between you and Mia,’ he replied.
‘Really? I don’t think so,’ she said, flicking her hair over her shoulder.
Vik nodded and got to work, but she caught him looking askance at her now and then.
Despite telling herself she didn’t care, Joanie found herself checking Mia’s social media at the end of each day, her fingers automatically typing before she could stop them. The girl hadn’t posted anything for weeks. The last photo was the day before the beach party. It was simply a picture of a bike and some flowers, overlaid with a heavy filter. Joanie began to hate the bike photo, yet she looked at it again and again. Did Adam like Mia because she was into bikes? Were the flowers significant? It was too much and not enough.
As the days stretched on, Erin would glance at Joanie whenever she checked her apps between serving customers. Cara was having a blast without her, it seemed. Cara’s parents had given her an SLR camera before she left and with it she captured the blur of neon streetlights, the sweaty bars, the white symmetry of Paris.
‘We’re trying to make this a calm space,’ Erin said one day, with strained politeness, ‘so people can concentrate. I know you’re going through a difficult time. I just don’t want you to lose focus. Some people find it helpful to keep their phones in the back room. And if you’ve got anxiety, it’s maybe not the best way to deal with it?’
Ouch, thought Joanie. She stopped checking her phone at work, but that left nothing else to stave off boredom except leaf through the battered paperbacks on the shelves. When the café was deadly quiet and Vik had his head in a library book, Joanie read about the life of St Columba and medieval plant remedies. The dream-controlling properties of betony. The use of hyssop against chest phlegm. The teas they sold were not dissimilar. Their Sacred Green tea was recommended for studying. Their Black Magic tea was recommended for hangovers.
Whenever a customer left behind a newspaper, Joanie would read Adam’s horoscope out loud to Vik and imagine unpleasant things happening to him. She wasn’t sure Vik appreciated it, but he humoured her. As late June slunk into July, she wondered why Hallowed Ground stayed open over the summer, tucked away from tourists who tramped through the town, hauling their cameras and golf clubs.
She got to know the few regular customers, younger academics who treated the space like an extension of the old library next door.
‘Didn’t you say the university thought a café would be more profitable than a library?’ Joanie asked Vik one particularly quiet day. ‘I think they made a mistake.’
‘Ha,’ he replied, not looking up from some journal article. ‘Just you wait until term starts. Everyone loves this place. Not just the Divinity department either.’
She wanted to get to know Vik better, but he was a man of few words. She understood he was a medieval historian from Chennai, who was learning Italian, but that was about it. She wondered who his friends were, if he was going out with anyone.
When she wasn’t trying to look clever, reading about monastic life on Iona or remedies for bruising, memories of school occupied Joanie’s thoughts. The band night in a draughty village hall where she had first met Adam. She and Cara had gone together, buying cups of value cola from the underage bar, then adding glugs of vodka from a smuggled-in flask. Lots of girls were talking to Adam, but he had taken Joanie’s hand and led her out of the hall, as though she had been chosen. They had talked for a little while, then kissed against a mossy wall. Things were never the same after that. Thanks to Adam, everyone forgot about her weird, overstuffed house. Overnight, she was one of the popular kids. She had even introduced Cara to the group.
Usually, when Joanie worked a shift with Erin, it was like her relationship history leaked out of her. She couldn’t help it. Somehow the conversation would turn to the fated night she had met Adam, the gut-wrenching betrayal of the beach and everything in between. Joanie even found herself telling Erin about his messy car, his sexist comments, the annoying way he rolled his eyes. She was trying to get rid of it all, but the memories would be waiting for her again the next day.
Erin said very little about herself. She was slightly older than Joanie had thought, studying for a master’s in medieval history. She had grown up in California, but didn’t mention her family often. The few times Joanie asked after them, Erin’s sighs and eye-rolls indicated they weren’t in close contact. Her love of nature had grown from hiking trails near her hometown, which sounded remote and hilly, full of sunshine.
Joanie gathered these small nuggets of information over the weeks she shared shifts with Erin, even though they talked endlessly. Their conversations were mainly about Joanie and helping her with her anxiety. Erin seemed to have unlimited time to listen and recommend relaxation and breathing techniques Joanie could try, often walking to the bookshelves as though she knew every title by heart.
Sometimes, Erin would put her hands on Joanie’s shoulders and encourage her to take deep breaths in and out, eyes closed, counting. Slowly but surely Joanie began to feel calmer in herself. Cara’s pettiness about Tatey wasn’t her problem. Good things could come into her life, if she was open to them. Joanie wasn’t totally sure if she could call Erin a friend; she was still her manager, but she was big-sisterly and safe.
Like Vik, Erin seemed to have a lot of academic work to do, in addition to her day job: research for her upcoming dissertation. As July slipped into August, David, whom Joanie had learned was a junior lecturer, would arrive most afternoons with files and a notepad to sequester himself in a corner, surrounded by photocopied papers. The café remained quiet, and sometimes Erin would join him at the table. Joanie tried to listen in to their conversations, but it was like trying to decipher a new language.
‘Hard at work again?’ Joanie asked one day, when David was sitting by himself and Vik was manning the till. David nodded absent-mindedly. She placed his green tea on the small patch of table that wasn’t covered with papers, books and Post-it notes. She never saw him pay. Up close, she wasn’t sure if he was in his mid-thirties or if his tweed jacket added some years. His glasses looked mismatched to his square-jawed face, a Superman pretending to be Clark Kent.
‘Do you know Latin?’ he asked, as if snapping out of a daydream. His warm voice had a cut-glass edge that suggested an expensive education.
‘’Fraid not,’ said Joanie.
‘Remind me, are you part of the university, Joanie?’ he asked, confirming that he actually knew her name. ‘I’m so sorry, Erin talks about you all the time, but I’ve completely forgotten whether—’
‘I’m just …’ What was she? ‘I finished school in June.’ Two months ago now, and what did she have to show for it? She looked up at Vik, who was reading one of his books.
‘I see. Well, I’m giving a talk next door at the beginning of term, if you’re interested. It’s a week or two away, so I’m trying to drum up support. If you know anyone who would like to come …’ He pointed to what she now realised were printed photographs of a yellowed manuscript. ‘Pretty groundbreaking stuff actually,’ he said, waggling his eyebrows. ‘I remember now how much you knew about Maeyar. You’ll have to tell me more about your time there.’
No one had ever asked this before. ‘Really? I—’
Before Joanie could reply, the door opened and Mia walked in. ‘I left my bag,’ she said, smiling broadly. Joanie saw Vik look up from the counter.
‘Hey-ho!’ David called. ‘I forgot to give you that book earlier.’
He grabbed a green, clothbound hardback from the table, entitled Plant and Ritual.
Joanie felt as though the air had been sucked out of her lungs. She ran past Vik to the toilet and slammed the door, trying desperately to catch her breath.
When she emerged a few minutes later, feeling a little sheepish, she took her station back at the till while Vik served a new customer. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Erin had come in and was talking to David in a hushed tone.
Erin looked up at her, concerned. ‘What’s wrong? What happened?’ She moved closer, placing her arm around Joanie’s shoulders. ‘Are you still getting panic attacks?’
Joanie was mortified. It seemed so silly. David was poring over his documents, pretending not to notice. ‘Kind of,’ she said quietly to Erin as they went to sit together on the other side of the room. ‘I’ve had them for a few years now. It started when …’ She could feel her chest getting tight and dug her fingernails into the palm of her hand. She pushed the words out. ‘… when someone broke into my house. I was home alone and …’
Erin gave her a sympathetic look. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to say any more. We’ll just keep working on it. You and me.’ She pulled her close for a hug.
Joanie buried her face in Erin’s hair. It smelt of peppermint. ‘Thank you,’ she breathed. She hated that David had given Mia a book. Of course she was friends with them.
‘What is David working on?’ Joanie asked Erin, as they wiped down the tables at the end of the day.
‘A paper,’ Erin replied. ‘He’s an ethnobiologist. Maybe you could call him a fragmentologist these days. He’s translating a medieval manuscript. David was researching Aiden of Maeyar when new fragments of his writing were discovered in the binding of a fifteenth-century text.’
‘OK …’ Joanie wondered why Erin was so excited about papers found in a book, but she pretended to look fascinated.
‘He can explain all about it in his talk. It’s essentially about transformation. Being an ethnobiologist means he has a crazy knowledge of plants and how people used them in the past, particularly in medieval Europe. That’s kind of why we do all the herbal tea here.’ Erin bit her lip. ‘Listen, I’m worried about you. I know it’s not ideal that Mia works here too. I’ve noticed, from our conversations, that you’re a little on edge.’
