BLUEBELL

by
Mark Gallacher

�Aren't you afraid?� Mary asked.

�Afraid of what?�

She didn�t say. She laughed and she spun around, face into the storm and ran along the stone pier as rain clouds rolled overhead, and the great sea waves heaved and oscillated and boomed against the end of the pier.

Mary was beautiful and she was blessed, like no girl I had ever known or would meet again. I was seventeen then when I ran after her, and she was eighteen and so much older as she ran towards the lighthouse, her dark hair streaming behind her.

�He was soaked to the bone again.� Mother switched the radio off in the kitchen and sat down at the table.

Dad lifted his head and glowered at me. �He's dafter than a brush. Been running around with the Riding girl no doubt. Don't you know she's loopy?�

�There's nothing wrong with her,� I muttered and stuffed my mouth with bread.

My father had lived in rotten Girvan all his lousy life. My mother was a war child, moved out of Glasgow when she was five years old. My parents had that look sometimes, when money was tight and work was scarce. That pinched, tired look. The regret of an ordinary life winding down, the dreams turned to memories of longing.

My father shook his head and jabbed his finger in the air. �I mean, why aren't you hanging out with boys your own age? Where are you're pals? Football. That sort of thing?�

Mary's house was on the fancy side of town, set back from the beach a short ways, with a clear view to the shore and the jagged shape of the Horse Rock jutting out from the shore path into the sea. Black braids of seaweed hung fast to the rocks and in the pools and deep crevices cut into the rock and when the tide fell colonies of periwinkles and mussels glistened darkly in the new air.

Sometimes we�d collected the mussels in an old straw basket. We�d cook them in a big old iron pot Mary's state of the art kitchen. Mary's mother was a well-known food critic always in the middle of some project or other. So she was never around.

Sometimes we'd do our homework together, the two of us rotten at maths, worse with physics. We'd throw the books in a heap and make popcorn and watch Jerry Springer and Riki Lake, and laugh at the crazy Americans, the trailer trash and the rednecks, the transvestites and the tabletop dancers. We'd laugh and we'd be embarrassed for them, the cheaters and the liars, marriage breakers and religious crazies with cheesy philosophies.

But we never laughed as free as we wanted Mary and me, because we knew they weren't losers when they started out. The power that had defeated them was a force universal like the law of gravity and we felt it pull on us.

Mary kept a journal and she wrote stuff and drew pictures in it and kept pressed leaves in it, with the month and the season recorded and the kinds of tree she took the leaves from. She loved to walk through Andersons Woods, past Redbairn Farm all the way to Sundown Valley. The valley was deep, with sides too steep for farming, covered in wild rape and ferns. At the top of the valley were stands of old pine and larch and among these colonies of bluebells raised their blue heads in the dark grass and bobbed in the breeze. The bluebell was Mary's favorite flower.

She'd take the flowers home all the time. And sometimes she'd paint them and sometimes she'd make paint from the flower heads. She said when she painted, the world became very quiet, very still, like a breath you could hold forever inside.

Mary liked to phone in the middle of the night from her house, breathless, excited. I'd hear the paintbrushes chime against paint pots as she talked.

�What's the colour of snow at night?�

�I don't know. Eggshell blue. Or the colour of some of the shells we see on the beach�

�Okay. You were awake already. Have you read Robert Frost's poem? The one about the woods. I want to paint that poem.�

�Everybody knows that one. What about William Stafford's Travelling Through The Dark?�

�Is it a sad poem? You only like sad poems. When are you going to show me your poems? What's the colour of the sea in moonlight?�

�I don't know. I thought you were painting snow?�

�For next time. You're my best friend. If we fell in love it would be terrible.�

�Oh. I suppose. Maybe.�

�Don't be disappointed. Come over tomorrow. Bring your poems.�

I kept my poems in a beat up old folder in a leather satchel I'd bought in a jumble sale. When Mary read them she sat very quietly and pursed her lips and leaned close to the pages.

Mary said we were going to have special and interesting lives. She said we would be very different in two years� time, a years� time even, but not so different our younger selves wouldn't recognize themselves.

My father folded his newspaper twice and turned once and looked at my mother and then picked a piece of tobacco from between his teeth. �Excuse me? You're what?�

�I'm going to be a writer.�

My father stood up and jabbed his finger in my face. �You think you've got a choice? What about engineering? You think your mother and I brought you up just for you to throw it all away on a fancy? A writer? What good's a writer to anyone?

My mother held her hands out, one towards my father and one towards me.

�Think about it, son? How you going to live? Bring up a family? Who do we know any of us that ever was a writer?�

�I'll be the first then.�

My father stamped around, enraged. �You�re a bloody idiot! We never had any of this bother with Bobby!�

�Then why don�t you dig him up and send him to the university!�

My father howled and lunged at me. We fell over the coffee table. Something broke under us. My mother ran from the room. My father dragged me to my feet and threw me onto the couch. Then the anger left him. He sank slowly down on his chair and I saw for the first time the shape he would make as an old man.

**

Something happened to Mary or something happened to me, or the world in it's very turning changed. Mary began to stay alone in her house and not come out. There were weeks I didn�t see her outside of school. And in school she was evasive, cold even.

Days then I wandered the beach on my own or studied in my room and wrote till my eyes and head hurt. There began to be days when I didn't think much about her. But I kept my mobile next to my bed. Then one night she called.

�Are you mad at me?�

�No.�

�Good. Will you come over? Now. I know it's late. Just sneak out. You can do that. It's important. I want to show you something.�

�Alright.�

She'd made a huge picture of an angel and on the wings of that otherworldly creature were pieces of bright glass, colored stone, metal, the tiny white bones of birds, the delicate shells and vertebrae of unknown origins. And the face of the angel was the face of her mother, only delicate, in a flare of luminosity.

�It's beautiful,� I told her.

�Come upstairs,� she said.

In her room she'd lit candles. We undressed and we kneeled in the middle of the room. Mary had two black scarves and a tape-recorder. We blindfolded each other and Mary pressed the record button. Then we touched and we shivered and laughed and read the braille of our skins.

�You're shaking. What does that feel like? Oops! What did I touch there?�

�It won't bite you.�

�Maybe I'll bite it.�

It was a new game, it was a new world and Mary still beat at the heart of it.

They found Mary under the pine trees, at the top of Sundown Valley. Her clothes were scattered among the bluebells, the flowers like Mary broken and crushed in the last struggle.

The police asked questions, endless ugly questions. It's not so simple they told my father. They told him we�d made pornographic recordings together. They didn't think we�d made any films but who was to know? Maybe it was some sort of game that spun out of control. Better I told them everything.

Until they found the killer they tried to taint her, soil me. If I said could remember exactly the wind in her hair, the way she smiled, they�d shake their heads and laugh or they�d shout and say what a pervert I was. All these things were corruptible in their hands. Until they found him. And even afterwards, they held me suspect, something to be mistrusted by default.

Reporters from Glasgow came into town. Talked to anyone they thought might know something. MURDERED TV DAUGHTER'S SEX DIARIES was the headline in one newspaper. Everyone thought it was me, and even afterwards, none of them said sorry for the loss.

The killer�s name was Robert Ulven and he worked at Redbairn Farm and he was a man in his forties. They found some of her clothing in his room and they tested a blood stain on one of his shoes. Her blood. Later they explained how�d he�d watched Mary for a long time.

�Don�t you ever get afraid?� Mary asked me. She smiled when she said it.

�Afraid of what?�

We ran on to the end of the pier where the waves struck and rocketed skywards in great columns of water. We hid behind the pier lighthouse and held onto one another and laughed.

The water crashed around us and the beach and the town were hid from all sight, in all that fury. The seawater poured over the pier and a small rain followed, singing and hissing in the wind. That was long ago. I remember it still. I remember the colour of bluebells, the taste of sea salt. Mary breathless laughter itself a song.

And I am afraid. For the life that wasn�t lived, the love I cannot leave.

� Mark Gallacher
Reproduced with permission

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