The Monster's Wife(6)
May snorted. Her lips puckered, mischievous, “Damn. Ruined it.”
“What have you ruined?”
May laughed. “Never you mind.”
“Do the nails belong to those crates?”
May shrugged, turned on her heel and walked off, her laughter echoing into the night. Oona went in the other direction, shaking her head about sinking the doctor’s crates and Cormick kicking up a row and now some mystery of forgotten nails.
Another of May’s secrets.
5
Oona tugged the last peg off the last dishclout and dropped both in the basket. She looked around warily. No Granny and no Toby. She’d been avoiding the pair of them all day, since, in their different ways, they both had a keen sense of smell and the stench of last night’s mischief clung to her.
The storm, the crates, Cormick, all seemed like madness now. She slunk to the door of the croft and dropped her basket just inside. Granny was bent over her needles, darning a stocking and Toby snored by the fire, his paws churning the air as he chased dream spiders.
Oona turned from the dull scene and unbound her hair from its kerchief. The road beyond the croft was storm-churned, but the sky was a harebell. Even though the gate was open, she climbed the fence and plunged into the mud barefoot, loving the way it splattered her legs. More May. More adventure. She felt like a creature that slept away the winter and was only now stretching itself awake.
All day long, while she’d ground away at her small jobs of housework, she’d told herself the wild tale of last night: how they’d rowed out to sea in a vicious storm and helped the foreign doctor shake off his pursuers and flown from the dastardly Cormick. By the time she came to take down the laundry, their adventure seemed less like a rogue’s last confession and more like the ballad of Rob Roy.
When she’d tired of those fancies, she imagined May labouring in the big house, struggling to keep the grand fires lit and the great floors scrubbed, curtsying to the doctor, her cheeks tight and pink from leaning into the steam of a soup pot, her hair frizzed. She would be bidding him farewell at this very moment, coiled tight round the pleasurable scheme of a smoke and a gossip, lying arm in arm with Oona on the warm rock outside the Smokehouse.
Or a different scene: May whispering in the doctor’s ear, intent on their secret. The doctor taking May into his confidence.
This second image prickled her flesh like one of Granny’s brushwood hidings. She shook her head, flung the unsettling fancy away.
The Smokehouse sat on a narrow finger of land in the next bay over, surrounded by black rocks and sea. Oona crossed the burn and hiked through two crofts to get to it, squinting against the sun’s white point. Lifting her petticoats, she strode through small bogs and over cowpats, down into deep ruts gouged by the plough. When she arrived, there was nobody there. A quiver of temper gripped her, rising hot through her tired flesh. Sweat broke on her brow. May was always late, if she remembered at all.
She threw herself down on the large, flat stone where they often ate their piece and smoked while Stuart drank inside. Above her, the tavern’s emblem, Skittery Dick - a mackerel whittled from driftwood - scowled down. Oona scowled back. She held the place in proper disregard.
Once a curing house for the fish, it was now a soaking house for the men. They gripped their beer or whisky in heavy red hermit crab hands while fine threads of daylight filtered down on their faces from the holes in the roof. Whale teeth and shark jaws were nailed to the walls. Women weren’t to come in ever. The only reason Oona knew what the inside was like was that she and May had found the door open one night and stolen in and mixed a cog for themselves. They sat there, burning the fish-oil lamp and laughing wantonly and taking turns to drink until they couldn’t stand. All the reeling way home, they chewed on clover to hide the smell, but it didn’t save either from a thrashing.
“Been jilted?” Though carefree, the voice had an ironical undertone. Stuart. She hadn’t heard him walk up. She shrugged, willing May to appear.
“She said she’d be late this morning - we did pass her on the way to the sea.”
Reluctantly, she opened her eyes. There he was, May’s handsome fellow, weaving a little and a wee bit red in the face, his dark curls stuck to his temples with sweat. He bore an uncanny resemblance to May looked at from some angles. Folk said if they hadn’t been betrothed, they could have been brother and sister.
A shadow peeled out from behind him, smirking. Andrew. “Cormick’s out of his wits, then,” he said, rubbing his hands, “ranting in the alehouse like Ezekiel.”
“Out of the Bible, it was.”
“Old Testament madness.”
Oona sat up. Her neck ached and their cryptic talk was annoying her. Bloody twins, they were. Stuart with his big, lop-sided grin and Andrew lisping alongside him. All the women on the island found them charming except for her. Andrew and Stuart had been inseparable since they were boys. Oona felt certain if Andrew wanted a pish, he’d have to hand Stuart his old fellow first to make sure he was holding it right.
Stuart squeezed in beside her, needlessly cosy. “Who’d have thought it in our modern day, to see the plagues of Egypt washed up onto our shores?” He took out his pipe and stuffed it.
Oona snatched the pipe from his mouth. “What in God’s name are the pair of you jabbering about? Ezekiel? Plagues of Egypt? You’re soft-headed, both of you, and soused in the middle of the day, and—”