31
Another seven days gone. She’s marked them off, the scratch marks taking up most of the wall. Five years, fifty-two days a year. Nearly 2,000 days. The first scratch in each group of seven is the deepest, to mark delivery days, the only external event to disturb the monotony. She calls it Monday, but it’s just a name. It could be any day at all.
That aside, the days have passed in their usual way: cooking, chopping wood, calming Janice’s fears when they get too much of an evening. She wouldn’t want to be in Janice’s head, the horrors that visit. Though it’s not as if she’s immune to them herself, the shadows that creep sometimes under the door she tries so hard to keep locked tight.
At least there’s something concrete to do today, walking to the pier, collecting the box of food. They put in their requests the week before – now’s the time to find out if they’ve been met, or if the organisation has gone rogue again. If only she could get used to it, the uncertainty. The unpredictability. She strives for radical acceptance. Easy enough if the stakes weren’t so high. If they keep delivering the whisky, there’ll come a day when Janice kills Marie. Or herself.
The house is quiet when she sets out. For once, Janice hasn’t woken. Let sleeping alcoholics lie. It’s early still, the sun slowly emerging from beyond the hills, a pale disc of grey against the darker clouds. No warmth, though; she’s glad of the fleece she’s zipped up to her neck, the thick boots on her feet.
Down the hill, past the tendrils of bracken, brown now and dying back. Sheep are scattered here and there, their droppings glistening black on the path in front of her. One of them turns to watch as she passes, the eyes black too, a bottomless void. She shakes herself free of the thought she always has, that sheep are evil, but a sense of it lingers with her even as she leaves the animal well behind, the eyes burning into her back.
The loch opens up before her, vast as any sea, the water a pure mirror of reflection, with the mountains reaching down as far as up. She pauses for a moment to take it in, the peat and the heather, the tang of woodsmoke that’s sometimes in the air. So far from everything.
Enough. The box is down near the pier, as it always is. Her heart is thumping. Even after all this time, she’s still scared that this week there’ll be nothing, or something that will ensure the next week of her life is hell.
At the beginning, it was hunger that dogged them. Scurvy, too. Bags of rancid oats, wizened vegetables, as if they’d pulled together leftovers from compost bins left out on the street. She took to foraging, boiling down nettles and hunting for berries. Funny to think now how alien it was, this corner of isolation of which she now knows every inch. Where bilberries can be found in summer, brambles in autumn, the best leaves to gather year-round.
The first weeks, she’d wandered far. That was before she clocked the direct effect this had on the supplies they were given. The further she went, the worse they were. The first time that she kept close to the croft, they were rewarded with cheese and bread, tucked up in the box with a heap of fresh fruit and vegetables, and a notebook and pen on which she can make requests, occasionally granted.
Actions have consequences. Sometimes. They like to keep her on her toes.
She’s nearly at the box now. No whisky immediately apparent, some bags of fruit. A flutter of excitement grows inside her. Bramley apples were on her list, the idea of crumble taking hold of her as she wrote. There’s a hint of green – perhaps that’s them, in season now. Assorted tins, a loaf of bread and yet another carton of almond milk for Janice. A flash of white and orange, too, almost like some flowers have been put on top of the box. It can’t be, though. She’s never added them to the list. They never send her flowers.
But now she’s at the box, and she’s not wrong. It’s a bunch of supermarket lilies, their petals just starting to unfold. She stops dead in her tracks. Lilies. Reaching her hand out with some reluctance, she picks them up, turning them around to see if there’s any note on them, any explanation at all for their presence.
Most of them are closed, but one has opened fully, and the scent of it hits her at the back of her throat. Suddenly, she’s back ten years, standing at the back of the crematorium, lilies lined up along the sides of the chapel. The scent had clung to her hair then, even after she left, almost causing her to retch every time the wind blew it across her face. It wasn’t long after that she was arrested, the police waking her at dawn to bring her in.
The smell is crawling into her brain, orange pollen scattering now across her skin. She throws the flowers away from her as if the stain is acid, wiping her hand furiously on her jeans to get it off her, the touch of it searing into her. She crouches down on the ground beside the box, poking through it gingerly to see if there’s anything else lurking in there, any more scorpions hiding in the depths.
Nothing. All exactly as it should be, down to the very last item she wrote on her list. Meat, fish, vegetables, bread, milk. She puts it all back together into the box and walks over to where she’s thrown the flowers, picking them up and looking at them again, trying to stay calm. No reaction for the watchers on the other side of the camera; poker face. She’s not going to dance.
She rams the flowers back on top of the other groceries and takes it all back to the croft, walking faster than usual so that the exertion pushes all extraneous thoughts out of her mind. When she gets back, she puts the bouquet on the side before unpacking the food. Once the bulk of it is put away, she sets to peeling the apples and rubbing flour and butter together for the crumble topping, ash in her mouth, decay in her nostrils as the scent from the flowers still clings on.
32
Seven days, seven scratches on the wall, again, again, again. There’s a rhythm to it, a routine that’s developed, the days stretching out endlessly before her. Marie’s obsessed with food, with cooking and preserving, finding ways to stretch the ingredients in case the next week the supplies are less than they need. There are jars piled on every shelf, pickles and ferments, cabbages sliced and brined, bramble jam glistening when it’s caught by the rays of the rising sun.
She barely recognises herself now, compared to the person she used to be; someone who despised domestic tasks, who only cared about academic success, the validation of her peers. It’s a perverse housewifery, mother not to a child but a child-killer.
Janice wouldn’t survive without her. Marie knows that. She feels the responsibility deep to her core. Sometimes, she dreams of leaving but the idea of Janice’s slow decline stops her in her tracks. Janice might not deserve an easy end, but that’s not in Marie’s hands. There’s enough blood on them already.
For months now, the food delivery has been stable. No alcohol, either. To her surprise, the predictability is sucking the life out of her. She thought she wanted routine, but now she’d do anything rather than unpack the same collection of chicken, cod, broccoli, onions. Over and over again, the repetition of it eating into her brain.Why do we always have chicken curry?Janice whines one night, and Marie has to restrain herself from throwing the saucepan she’s holding straight into Janice’s face, from picking up the chilli powder and rubbing it into Janice’s eyes. After all, it would only be serving Janice with her own medicine.
But Marie is above that. Or at least she tries to be.
The monotony disarms her. She gets sloppy. She lowers her guard. Spring’s on its way, the hawthorn hedge is in bloom, a couple of the sheep have had lambs. When she and Janice walk down to the pier, she’s forgotten to be afraid. Janice is a few steps ahead of her, and Marie doesn’t even bother to keep up, enjoying the view, the light breeze.
The peace shatters the moment Janice sees the box. There are multiple green glass bottles sticking out the top, the lids glinting in the sunlight. Janice lets out a yowl, a high-pitched noise that raises the hairs on the back of Marie’s neck. There is no stopping her. The woman grabs the drink from the box, all three of the bottles, and turns on her heel, marching back to the croft.
Should Marie go after her, wrestle her to the ground and confiscate the alcohol? She’s faster than Janice. Stronger, too. She could take her down.
But something holds her back: a reluctance to foist her views on Janice. Janice is her own person. If she wants to drink herself to death, who is Marie to stop her? She hovers for a moment more, before sitting down on the ground next to the pier, looking out at the loch.
The cameras are always watching, she knows that. Expecting her and Janice to fly at each other. Why give them a show? Two women slugging it out for booze, of all things. Fuck that.
She wraps her hands around her knees, the breeze picking up slightly now, cutting through her jumper. Standing up, she jogs on the spot briefly to get her circulation moving. She’s about to turn back up to the croft, brave the consequences of a drunk Janice, when she sees something unusual tucked into the side of the box. An envelope – large, brown.
Eyeing it like she would a cockroach, she reaches out to touch it. It’ll be instructions of some kind, maybe some maintenance that’s needed; a change to the usual routine.
