The Art of Not Breathing(10)

“I’m Elsie. Are you a friend of Dillon’s?”

The boy blinks. “Who?”

“Never mind. What’s your name again?”

“Tay,” he says slowly. “You’ve got a bad memory.”

“Like the river?” I ask. “Did you know that an earthquake once reversed the flow of the Mississippi?” I know a lot of rivers, thanks to the encyclopedias that Granny gave Dillon one year. When I was younger I used to read about all the underground rivers around the world and wonder if that’s where Eddie had gone.

“Yeah, like the river,” Tay says, seemingly amused. “And no, I didn’t know that. Thank you for educating me. So you must be the mystery squatter. It’s quite the setup you’ve got here.”

“Have you touched my stuff? This is my spot, you know.”

Even though he seems okay and is named after a river, this is my secret place. The joint makes me feel lightheaded, so I pass it back. I quite like the taste of it, though.

Tay tilts his head back and blows smoke rings, which float up and last for ages. I stare at them until my neck aches.

“I think you’ll find this was my spot before yours,” he says when the rings have dispersed. “I’ve just been away for a while.”

“Really? Where’ve you been, then?”

“Just away.”

“You must’ve been away at least a year,” I reply. There was no sign that anyone had been here before me when I discovered this place.

“Over five years. I moved away when I was twelve,” he says.

Five years. Prison, I bet. I wonder what he did. Although twelve is pretty young to go to prison, even a youth one. Maybe it was some kind of boarding school. This is actually good news, though, because he likely won’t know about Eddie.

“I have to admit,” Tay says, “I thought a small child had moved into my hideout.” He holds up an empty sweets bag as evidence.

“I don’t just keep sweets.” I point to the packet of cigarettes on the floor by our feet. Tay seems to find this amusing.

“Nothing wrong with sweets,” he says, and flicks the empty bag behind him. “So, you go to school in Fortrose?”

“Yeah, but I hate it. There are these girls that are always horrible to me.”

“I hated school. Girls were horrible to me, too, so I gave it up,” he says, laughing. “I go to the school of life now.”

“Is there a school of death?”

Tay sits forward and grins at me. His long eyelashes flutter and somehow soften his angular face. His teeth are shiny white and his lips look smooth. I wish I could apply another coat of lipstick.

“School of death? So you can learn to die?” He seems amused. I hope he can’t see how red my cheeks are.

“Maybe,” I mumble, trying to think of something else to say.

“You’re very interesting, Elsie.”

We smoke for a bit. I watch the way he maneuvers the joint to his lips and back down to the floor. I watch him cross and uncross his legs and play with a torn bit of leather on his shoe. He tells me that he once ran all around the Black Isle in a day and got attacked by farm dogs. I tell him that I once hid in a bus shelter during cross-country at school and only joined in for the last lap. He commends me on my initiative but says I should practice running in case farm dogs come after me. I tell him I’m not scared of dogs. I don’t tell him what I am afraid of. When the joint’s finished, he says he has to go.

“We should hang out again soon,” he says. “I’ll swing by.”

He slides gracefully through the panel, and I suddenly wish I hadn’t moved away from him before. I lie down on my back and smoke with my eyes closed, breathing in the tobacco, the cannabis fumes, and the lingering smell of Tay’s aftershave. I no longer care about Ailsa Fitzgerald or that scummy school, or even the flashing images. Eddie is deep inside me, laughing. I remember one of his favorite jokes.

“Why are there fish at the bottom of the sea?” I ask him.

“Because they dropped out of school,” he replies.





9



EDDIE AND I GOT JOKE BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS WHEN WE WERE EIGHT. Mine was red, Eddie’s was blue—his favorite color at the time—“the color of the ocean!” Eddie loved the water even more than I did. I liked looking at it from the shore because I was afraid of getting tangled in the seaweed, but Eddie always wanted to be in it, have the waves break over his head. He was fearless when it came to the waves.

That Christmas day, we sat on the sofa together to open our presents. I was uncomfortable because Eddie was sitting on my leg, but he was so excited about Christmas, I didn’t want to upset him. So I sat still and let him cover me in ribbons and tinsel. Mum gave us the presents from Granny and we tore off the wrapping paper together. A joke book each. On the front they said Jokes for Eight-Year-Olds. I had to read the title to Eddie because he couldn’t read.

“It’s full of sea creeeeeeeatures,” he exclaimed as he flipped through it wide-eyed, looking for dolphins. “Look, look!”

He pointed to every page and illustration and held the book right up to my face so I could see. I remember feeling the shiny paper on my nose and the weight of it when he dropped it on my foot.

We hadn’t seen Granny for a while. She lived somewhere near Loch Lomond on the west coast and apparently we went there lots when we were small, but I don’t remember. Most of the time, she came to us but the visits were becoming less frequent because she was getting too old to travel. The last time we saw her, she visited us here on the Black Isle for Christmas, when Eddie and I were nine. On her last night, she and Mum had a fight. I never knew what it was about, but from the closet Eddie and I hid in, I heard Granny say to her, “I didn’t know I’d raised a wee liar.” On her way out she hugged Dad and told him to visit and bring us kids. He never did, though. She died in January this year, and Mum hasn’t spoken about her since.