It was now high morning on a bright day in late March, the kind of day when
the earth begins to release scents it has kept pursed all winter long, and
it seems as if, finally, the year shows a little fight. Up in one of the
red sandstone tenements a woman was plumping the cushions of the
window-seat in an otherwise empty room. Frances: A study in sallow blotches
against white, puffy, slept-in skin, pale hair knotted at the nape of her
neck, a jumper tucked in heavy black folds into a red skirt, under which
rumpled winter tights, no shoes. She was at that moment kneeling on the
hardwood floor. She was not praying but, powered by the purity of the
sunlight on that late March day, attempting to clean. Under one cushion of
the window-seat she discovered a small, stiff, brass handle. Frances tugged
on the handle, and up came the wooden lid on a secret cache of her
daughter’s things: up came a scuffed tin with a lighter, rollups, three
squashed filters and a wiry clump of tobacco inside, which she sniffed –
just tobacco, fine. Up came an old glasses case, the one her daughter had
told Frances she had lost – this was years ago, when she was still in
school. Other shifting debris, none of which struck Frances as more than
dimly poignant, until she got in her hands from its position at the bottom
of the cubby, the black ledger.

The black ledger said ‘encase me in gold’ in gold glitter on the front
cover, and Frances, running her fingers over the letters, supposed they
must be from a song lyric her daughter had found. She opened the book and
the spine of it creaked in protest, and Frances ran her fingers down the
inner leaf. Mayhem and Death, it said in a serious font, and
underneath that, A Nightmare Chap, lettering this time a black
scrawl, marked over and over again in the same lines, until a groove had
formed. Frances, repelled at first by the naked angstyness of the main
title, tried mulling over all the meanings of ‘chap’: An old fashioned word
for a man. To knock. To split or crack. A small book. It was, she thought,
silly, the wrong word, something Madeleine would have picked.

She licked her finger and turned to the first page. It was a crabbed list
in one corner with dates next to each. She looked at the first. 7 ^th of November, 1999. That was the day Madeleine had started
primary school. Later than everyone else because of that strange sickness
that had for the early part of the term kept her tiny body sunk in fever.
The teachers said she would always be a little behind of the other
children, the doctors said she might even have been damaged by the
sickness, a lasting damage, and Madeleine’s father put on his
grave-and-knowing act, but Frances would not take her daughter out and have
her wait at home until the next class started, growing bored and tetchy.
Madeleine, she argued, belonged with her peers. Even as Madeleine was
called in to the head teacher’s, repeatedly, for kicking students, for
crying, for getting confused and loud when her spelling was corrected, for
making strange drawings and gifting them to other children like an omen of
their futures, for telling lies – as if a child of that age had anything
worth lying about or worth punishing for lying about – for never being good, according to the fussy standards her teachers and peers had
all somehow come to agreement upon.

And yes, because of this rough start, her daughter had always been a little
behind, awkward. Frances had waited, first unconcerned and then impatient,
then resigned, for the static to disperse from her daughter’s personality;
the obscuring details of herself that got between her and other people. But
it never had gone away.

Frances got up creakily and moved to the kitchen. She filled the kettle,
she watched the kettle boil, she poured herself a tea. Too weak to stream
in as it would in the summer the sunlight hung suspended in front of the
tall window, held back from her by the thin glass of the pane. The tea
turned the hot water reddish brown, the milk, added with care, turned it
the colour of a cat Frances had once seen sleeping on a doorstep in a
provincial French town. Frances sat herself at the kitchen table with the
book and looked upwards at the airing beam hanging overhead from which a
crimson bed sheet and pillow slip were drying. After the list of dates,
there were drawings of sea animals over the first few, wordless pages,
fantastic creatures with giant eyes, backwards pointing teeth, and long
tentacles. Recognisable as subaquatic beasties, boneless and sprawling
their soft bodies outwards across the blankness. It was all a bit beyond
Frances, but her daughter always loved the ocean. And that love, with its
attentiveness and autodictatic seriousness, was what redeemed Madeleine,
made her a worthwhile creation.

The dates corresponded with stories. She opened the book at the first date
(page 6). The story there was a retelling of a dream, she thought, of
darkness all around and a terrible pressure. It did not seem like something
a child of that age could have dreamed, or even if so, articulated in the
words in which it was written. But the form of the writing, familiar as
Madeleine’s, was childish enough that it looked as if it had been written
at the time it proclaimed. Steam came off Frances’ cup and travelled in a
fine faint skein up towards the ceiling. Frances tugged at the neck of her
jumper, then at her neck itself. After she had finished the story, she did
not know how to feel. She couldn’t imagine her daughter writing it.
Madeleine, who was, outside her one burning interest, discomforting but not
in any way precocious, and in her schoolwork nothing more than lax,
blissfully uncaring of deadline, Madeleine who was a shrug personified. A
shrug and an indignant curse, maybe. But hadn’t Madeleine used to like
films, noir films, thrillers with the kind of atmosphere of this story? If
nothing close to the surrealist air. Mayhem and Death. Perhaps it
hadn’t been right to show her such films from when she was so young, but it
had been the one thing they enjoyed together. They had watched films, every
night, Frances’ choices. Madeleine with toast, and coconut oil cheese
melted over apple slices, lying full out on the white imitation sheepskin
throw-rug, in utterly engaged consideration of what she was watching. You know you can’t swim that deep, no human could survive it.
Madeleine’s dog-faced slippers kicking up and down. Her rejection of
failure to communicate what was true, even when she knew it was for the
purposes of fiction, it had to have truth in it, or be a waste of time. Her
long glossy hair cutting over her shoulders.

There’d be bubbles in your blood, and you’d choke to death on blood in
your lungs

. I want to put something else on. And the iron hissing as Frances
sprayed a school shirt with scented water, performing a delicate perfuming
she had never known growing up and that still felt like a ritual to do, and
asking, off-hand, do you have any homework for tomorrow? And Madeleine
sitting up and scowling. Then the arguments that always followed, and
crying, and the days following tarred with her sullenness. Madeleine was
like that, like a storm cloud poured into the shape of a girl, able to make
a whole room feel atmospherically the tortured static of her moods. She
wasn’t unaware of it, either. God, Frances hated her. Had hated her.

Frances rubbed her forehead, and hurriedly turned the page.

She was out walking towards Queen Street station with her bulging cotton
shopping leaning into her side and too many folk going up and down the
street. She had decided because she had no commitments she might as well
take a train somewhere; Mallaig, as it turned out, about five and a quarter
hours distant from her life. She wanted to think fresh things, nourishing
thoughts. However flaky that sounded in her own head – at least, the
thought would go nowhere else. After all the waiting, the phone call, the
letters, the interviews and the silence that followed there remained the
need to pull herself free, the impulse to move at least physically forward,
even if in actuality she had not one thing in her life that held her since
she had made her last partner, Madeleine’s father, move out.

Frances sat at the window seat and, feeling ridiculous, took a selfie with
the vivid soak of Garelochhead behind her, the mountains misted and hefty
like they would never die. But even a mountain dies. Think of all the
mountains that must have, before apes walked. Or during the ice age, when
the white came down and levelled them, when the slow rivers of ice tore at
their sides. Think of them, shifted of their green tonnes and tonnes of
soil, rock, plant, squealing braying animals, shivering, falls and breakage
and rockfall, silence, steady patters on the ground, someone coming at them
with explosives, eating away at their bodies for commerce of ores and
quarrystone. We are all just barely holding on, she told herself, looking
at her face on her phone, always more asymmetrical, more frail than in
mirrors. Permitting herself a smile that, for god’s sake, could look that
pitiful.

She had a small tray table, and the possibility of a cup of bad coffee
brought to her from down the aisle, and until it came, she leaned her
elbows on the table and rested her head on the trembling window. The
country gave the impression of crooked rowans and what else, white bark and
pale green lichens prickling from branches the further north the train
crept. There was Rannoch Moor with its waters shining silver. There was a
whole other country in this country, grasses trembling in the winds, great
big eroding lonely rocks, if you just kept going.

In Mallaig Frances walked from the dead-ending train station to the wide
ferry port. At some point she had gone into a little white building and
come out carrying a plastic bag with smoked mackerel in it. Mallaig. It was
the kind of town where the sea is always grey and the swells of it flecked
with drizzle. It was where she belonged, yes, but there was nowhere she
could think to find a place to stay.

She passed time standing between a wedge of white lines, watching the white
and red hulk of a ferry shoulder across the waters. Ferry workers appeared
and their yells sent her in retreat. There was a small guest house on Lovat
Terrace, suggested a man in the lifeboat shop, try there. And tomorrow? And
tomorrow, Frances thought.

The room was papered with magnolia wallpaper over woodchip, the bed had a
rough blanket tightly bound over it. There was no tea to be had, so Frances
drank a glass of water and picked the oily meat from the mackerel’s almost
clear bones, putting the bones and the packet into the bag it had come on
and hanging it on the doorknob. She opened a window for the air; the view
from it was suburban, though two streets or so to the right, the grey abyss
swung under the white sky, until, by degrees, it swung under the navy blue
sky, and the lights of the houses went on, and Frances, eventually, lay
down to sleep early with her smoked fish stinking fingers making fists at
her sides.

In the early morning the seagulls shrieked into her dreams, and she too had
a nightmare. Though in actuality it was more of a daydream: she lay awake,
stroking her hair, thinking out the sequence of events and unable to make
herself stop.

It began with Frances taking a long walk along the top of a windblown
cliff. The sea was making a noise against the rocks like the salt in it was
hardening into crystals and these crystals were sharp, chipping away at the
foot of the cliff. Onwards Frances went down a path that led her into some
gorse bushes, bright with yellow flowers that in real life smelled to her
like suncream smeared on chilled butter, though here they smelled of
nothing, their scent transfigured into intensity of colour. The gorse, in
explosive yellow, was mature, with thick branches reaching very high, or
else she was smaller, and she lost sight of the cliff, or was in a
different place without the cliff, because she realised she could no longer
hear the wind or the salt-sharded sea, but where in most dreams
placelessness or a sudden change is quickly accepted, here she became
distressed, and wandered further into the spines of the gorse, becoming
trapped in this hedge maze, this labyrinth silent and scentless and far too
yellow to be borne. The dream-self saw no path through which there might be
a centre, no clue to a way outside, back to the place where she had begun.
But nothing, either, was chasing her, and the sun was warm, and the petals
between the spines were delicate, and nothing less than beautiful, though
it made her wince to think of such an unruly thicket of plants in that
flaky term, beautiful. She took nothing from its beauty as reassurance: it
was the absence of any real fear to the scene which Frances held on to when
these insistent, intrusive thoughts finally let her go.

The air was painfully cold and wet on Frances’s face: if she looked towards
the horizon, she could pretend she only wanted what was there, the island,
emerging in dusky purples, where the ferry would dock. There was a tall man
in a green waxed jacket on the red deck, talking to a companion, a short
mousy woman in a blue coat. She could want that – but the couple were
parting, the companion was moving off. They did not know each other, or
they did, and the woman to fetch a coffee, and there she went away
clumsily, pushing herself through the oval door to the stairwell. Down into
the bowels where the canteen was.

“Fantastic day, isn’t it?” the tall man was saying, arms pinned gripping
the white guardrail. Frances gave herself two options. She chose the
latter, and turned stonily towards the swells, going after that specific
power to be had, smaller than a grain of sand, in refusing to capitulate to
a greeting from a stranger. This power embeds itself under their skin, an
unscratchable itch and you’ve put it there, and if you have managed it once
successfully with no rancour on either side, then later you may allow this
act to be repeated, the act of keeping yourself to yourself, and others
accepting your actions.

“Fantastic, right?” said the man, “Right…” he clapped his hands and looked
as Frances had feared he would. She sighed and pulled out her phone. A
reminder that she had an appointment at two o clock with her grief
councillor. In Glasgow, however many hundreds of miles away. She brought up
a selfie of Madeleine at her last training session before launch day, which
Frances had not attended, or been invited to attend. Her daughter was
looking bold in her uniform, casual though it was, blue polo-neck with a
logo like she worked at a golf resort instead of a sociological and marine
research station. Behind Madeleine, hulking machinery covered in rivets
took up space to a mysterious purpose, but with kinship, distantly, to the
boat Frances was now on.

“This is my daughter, Madeleine,” Frances said, holding up the phone.

“Oh, off to see her then?” The man in the wax jacket seemed unbreakably
earnest as he looked at the photograph.

“Yes, I suppose so,” said Frances.

“Does she live on Skye, or is she just doing a course –”

Again, Frances had two options before her.

“Oh no, she doesn’t live on the island. She doesn’t live on land at all,
actually. She’s dead, they tell me. But I don’t know if you can be alive or
dead, where she is. There’s no stone, no grave I can visit, though there’s
talk that they’ll make the underwater station a kind of memorial, but how
that counts as a grave if you can’t visit it I don’t know.”

After a time, the mousy companion came back, holding plastic cups. The tall
man was by then sitting in a red bucket chair in a row of red bucket chairs
planted on the red deck below the ferry’s white flank, his back turned to
Frances, peering at guide book to the best whisky distilleries in the whole
of the country, the truly unmissable ones.

Frances was in the spongy, spiky interior of the island, walking along a
gritty and uneven path lapped at by puddles on the edges. She had heard
there was a waterfall, but having seen it and being unimpressed, she had
continued along between the recently-planted sapling pines in their beige
plastic tubes, taking in all the shades of brown the unsprung spring
countryside had to offer. One day, she thought, raising her hood as it
began to smir again, I’ll live in places not riddled with the damp.
Somewhere clean, where the foliage snaps clean off at the beginning of
November and is covered in snow until April, nothing like this dying into
spore-y tangle and just staying there. Summers would be scorching hot: she
would walk out on summer days, all day she’d walk and at the end of the day
she would sleep well with a lightly burnt face and a head full of vistas of
blue sky and hills. She’d never been anywhere other than here, the mainland
and some of the outer-lying islands, and Ireland once – no use expecting
drier days there – and twice to France, the flatter parts, and where she
could really only remember the tawny cat sleeping on a step, and some
minutes spent staring at a water meadow from the car as her and her ex
butted heads about a missed turning and certain domestic inadequacies.
Right now, in the near-invisible rain, Frances couldn’t picture what a dry
landscape would even look like. Madeleine would have rolled her eyes and
pulled up something on her phone to show me, Frances thought. But no, she
wouldn’t have. Madeleine had moved away. Madeleine no longer loved her
enough to stay above the sea, above the fantastic disaster which had
claimed her.

Frances kept walking for a time until her nose began to run and she
stopped, looked at the beleaguered hillocks, breathed out, turned and
walked through increasing drizzle the eight or so kilometres back to her
rental car. She was staying in a white-washed inn with a great fire in the
fireplace that looked like it had been snapping and licking the grate since
seventeen forty-five. She sat by the fire and had a whisky and stared into
the pale flames. A few tables over, a group of hikers were playing
scrabble. They all had good faces; high cheekbones, skin red and raw from
the outdoors, with bright eyes and frizzy hair tied back, even the men.
Frances watched them, and felt herself thaw. The men young, but weathered.
The women acute, not smiling but with great purpose in their movements,
good speckled woollen jumpers in greens and navy, boots that had taken them
tramping round corries and scampering up all the sharp arêtes the mountains
had to offer. It was not good, this type of thaw in her. She might start
thinking of Madeleine again, in public. Better maybe she’d stayed in
Glasgow. In the flat, forcing herself to sit it out, sit out the walls and
the pace of one mouldering, pinched day and another, and another. Frances
focused on the bottom of her whisky glass, and the swilling golds
everywhere there, and the cheap burgundy carpet underfoot, the shadowy
antlers over the fireplace, the black book with the gold glitter writing
tucked safely in her bag. She thought of how there is no such thing as
‘safe’. Eventually she decided to go to her room before the scrabble
players could be done, so she could know they were there in the bar where
she had left them, where they were living and wholesome, even if it was not
possible to be like them.

In her room she washed her face and brushed her cold ash-yellow hair. In
her room she was in her room, as much as she could manage.

Mayhem and Death
. Why had she written it thought Frances, running her thumbnail down her
daughter’s handwriting; she had never known either, in her life, not at
least as far as Frances was aware, though she couldn’t discount there might
have been secrets, suffering, wounds that her daughter had seen or
experienced and kept, in shame, to herself. It’s better never to have
children, she thought. Larkin, that poem – Madeleine had been reading
Larkin for school, more than a decade and a half ago, and certain things
must have stuck. There was in some of his poems something she recognised
and ached for, and knew her daughter had too. Just as when they had watched Inside Llewyn Davis together. A crisp, cold, nihilism, bracing as
winter, and just as reassuring. Frances thought she needed those sorts of
deep white winters, almost gone from this country, because of their shape,
their old feeling. Winters are older by a long way than springs.
Then life is older than death, she thought, because the latter needs the
first. That’s it. Life is the first thing out of the brace of winter, tiny
and pulpy, gasping – and a close second, death. And far, far after that,
the grass is growing, things are blooming sickly-scented and everything is
abundant, falling to mush with abundance, but by then it’s already too much
of an afterthought, a soppy, almost but not entirely false reassurance from
life of life’s success, that ought to be understood as such, in the face of
the second of all things. Madeleine hadn’t quite got to that point of
understanding, hadn’t quite made it beyond a teenager’s understanding of
death as a simple dramatic boom, drop to the floor, without this
sense of recursive, also-ran contradiction and self-deception. But, thought
Frances, I’m only up to her dreams and thoughts from when she was what,
fourteen? Nothing so far had proved illuminating, about Madeleine herself
or anything outside of Madeleine. How much have I missed of her, Frances
thought. Probably not much, not the things I want to know. What age, even,
was she when she died? Was she safe? She screwed up her eyes, then looked
out of the window in her room at the road and the loch some way back from
it, across the sodden, dead bog land. Frances, you are still going, she
thought. You are going to go to the place where it all stops, and then pass
through that gate, and all this will have clarity. You will just have to
keep going until it does. Or it doesn’t.

Frances had the map open on one of the tables. It was an old map, but roads
wouldn’t change much around here, she thought, and in any case, what she
was looking for was a sight older. Her finger traced a line in pencil to a
small x under the words Kilvaxter souterrain. She thought, is that a bit
much, to go down into a low house, where the dead might be thought to
dance, or the fairies? She scowled at herself, both the indulgent self, and
the self that threw up restrictions.

Well, something a little less obvious?

Like talking to someone?

No, but to be a woman on her own in her grief was to be the recipient of
the thickest, tar-like pity from anyone about who wasn’t immediately
repulsed: you could want that pity, sometimes, but it would leave her
weaker. She skipped most sessions; no one ever seemed to mind. None of the
other parents had written back to her when she emailed about the incident
that had taken their children too. She would – she would do as she had been
doing. You are an inch closer to the dead at this time, she told herself,
and not to take advantage would be boring.

Frances, though knowing herself at all turns constrained by the
expectations of those around her, stranger and familiar alike, and never
before wanting to upset anyone unduly by the force of her personality
knocking ripples across someone else’s day, had never wanted to be without
the option to, sometimes and without fuss, tear the whole world fucking
down. Even having a child – which, yes, she had resented – had not snuffed
these feelings entirely. For a long time she had been content to feel the
pulse of that desire without acting upon it, the tension was enough. Now
grief made it permissible, occasionally, for her to appraise a situation
and act beyond the normal acceptable standard, but not too much, too
loudly, or too long. Blanking on greetings, missing appointments, wandering
off out of her life, all this was fine. But what good was any of it, the
freedom to be here or there, a selfish arsehole here or a selfish arsehole
there? Frances pushed her hands down on the table top until her finger tips
were pale: how better life would be if instead, in pushing, the table would
give in, gently letting her slip her fingers through the layer of polish,
through grain of the wood. She felt someone watching her. It was a young
man with a beard, off through a doorway, seated at the bar, which should
have been shut (it was a Sunday morning) but was glowing merrily, light
trapped and dancing in the whisky bottles, even the cheap American stuff.
The man at the bar raised his glass to her. Frances ducked her head away.
And then softened: he was a calm looking sort, one of the hikers from the
day before – there was his green woollen jumper, wrapped around his waist
like a little boy would do. You never knew what might turn out to be
permissible, even cheering to other people, that you had spent your life
withholding from yourself. Ach well, she said to herself, the souterrain
then, while the weather’s for it. And before her eyes, a glitter as off wet
stone.

A small patch of bog myrtle was thrashing about and flattening itself and
springing up again. Surrounding the patch, wastes of dank brown grasses and
the heather with its little dry florets were doing the same on a smaller
scale and dictated by the physics and wiriness of their own materials.
Frances held her pale hair to her head so that it would not blow into her
eyes, and pressed on. She came to the stone hole which was the entrance to
the souterrain. It was small and low, not much to look at, not much to
describe to herself, except that it made her vaguely dizzy to stare into
it. She crouched down and pulled a torch out of her bag. Moorland wind in
uninterrupted force screamed in her ears but the hole was silent, and she
could feel its silence and dark held there below better than a human fist
can hold the silence and the dark, for this had been doing so far longer.
All it was, for centuries, was a tunnel of several metres leading to a
small chamber, and in the small chamber, if it was as they usually were,
nothing, discounting the gravel sprinkled for the visitor to tread on, the
welcome of the tomb.

For a little while, standing above the souterrain, Frances brushed the
lintel and the stone floor with the yellow light from her torch. She even
descended once and touched the roof with her bent back. And then she
thought of the young man at the bar. And thought between cold stone,
underworld, liminal passages, femininity, graves, storage or a buried
dwelling and what really, at the moment, drew her most urgently. The
living. The fleshly. The prickly. The cause. The tiles of scrabble
scattered and picked up by people she did not know and never would speak
to, and who would not like her and her great neediness if they did
(Madeleine hadn’t, had she?). The beat of her heart, which she could not
hear over the silence of this open mouth. A fact which made her feel deeply
angry and aggrieved with this place, above all other vexations. She pulled
her daughter’s book out of her bag and flicked the pages in agitation. Of
course she was meant to bury it here, now that she had read it, or enough
of it to see that Madeleine’s dreams or her accounts of them had been dark
ones, much as her teachers and her school peers had said, to drop it in the
dark and leave it behind, like her daughter’s body was in the dark even
now, far below the surface of the world. Not to drop the book here would be
a kind of failure to overcome her grief. But in whose eyes? Still holding Mayhem and Death, she turned and climbed out of the souterrain
back into the moorland and raised her head, feeling spits of rain on her
neck, and pulling her zipper up against them.

“Oh, fuck you,” Frances said to the souterrain, flapping the book at it
without bothering to look back.

She dropped off her cotton bag in the luggage rack and hesitated, holding
her purse in hand. She could do with a drink. But there was the issue of
intruders, blunderers, taking her seat when she was up, thieves taking her
things, even the useless things that were in that bag, or else the train
decoupling and going down extra tracks for reasons announced in some
intercom babble she might miss. The walls of the train shuddered as the
engine was turned on. Frances smiled. She briefly thought of the silent
base underwater thousands of miles away where her daughter had gone, and in
which all occupants, including her daughter, were now long held to be dead,
though permissions for retrieval – that much greater an expense than
bestowing the judgement of death – were an ongoing effort by the lawyers of
families richer than hers. And here she was, on a train, again! About to go
somewhere, through the open-air countryside, where all around things were
about to burst into life, grow fast, and whither and drop dead. And
Madeleine was not, because she already had. Frances left her place and
walked down the narrow hall into the lounge carriage, and straight to the
bar for a tiny bottle of vodka and a tiny bottle of tonic water and a
modest-sized plastic cup in which to mix them, no ice already. She sat by
the window of the drinking carriage, which wasn’t hard to do, and ignored
the people who had like her already begun filtering in, which was harder;
she so very much wanted, in all her stubborn unlovedness, unloveableness,
to love them. The train did not move, then the platform moved, then the
train with great labour began to depart.