Valentina: A Hauntingly Intelligent Psychological Thriller (5 page)

“
Impressive,” she said, eyes wide. “I wouldn’t know a rock from a lump of wood.”

We’d reached the jeep. I unhooked my arm from hers and clicked on the key. The lights flashed, the doors unlocked with a thunk.

“
No way,” she said. “Is this yours?”

“
I hope so, otherwise we’ll be in big trouble with the police.”

She laughed, the way you do when you don’t know a person well, and climbed in alongside me. “I tell you what,” she said, buckling herself in. “Nah, forget it. It’s a crazy idea.”

“
What is?”

“
Nothing, forget it.”

“
You want to go clubbing, is that it? Twenty-four hour whisky binge? Go on, out with it.” I was wiping my side of the windscreen with my sleeve pulled over my hand. Now that we were together in the car, I found it hard to look straight at her
–
she was too close range, the space too cramped for the both of us.

“
I so love this jeep.” She bounced on the seat. Like a kangaroo, I thought, but didn’t say. “Reminds me of back home. I feel like we could roll over all the little cars like a tank. Get out of my way! No? Crush!”

“
Aye right, it’s great for traffic jams that way.”

She laughed again while I concentrated on getting the key into the ignition. “What’s this crazy idea you’ve had anyway?”

She rubbed her hands together. “I was thinking, what if we get a couple of takeaways and you can show me that lovely cottage of yours?”

“
Really? You want to go to my place?” I’d only just got out of there and didn’t exactly have going straight back in mind. But I’d never had anyone take an interest in where I lived before.
Wow, you live in a flat, I’d love to see it
, isn’t exactly a phrase you hear every day but maybe
wow, you live in a cottage in the country
was. “Are you sure?”

“
Listen, I’d invite you to my place but it’s three floors up, no lift, and the pavements are full of litter. Union Grove, you know? Bloody seagulls are terrible, tearing through the trash, waking you up with their squawking. I’d love a place in the country.”

“
OK,” I said. “You’re on.”

On the way to the cottage, we spoke mostly about our babies. Valentina seemed to find everything I said amusing and I guess I was flattered by that. Being with her wasn’t like being at the mother and baby group back in Glasgow. I guess, if I’m honest, no matter how friendly everyone had been there, a lot of what they said was really all about what clever parents they were.
Daisy walked her first steps yesterday; Hamish has twenty words now
– that kind of thing. When Valentina talked about Zac, she admitted to a more flawed, a more real experience.

“
He’s like his dad,” she said. “Whines on and on and on until I’m banging my head against the wall and it’s all I can do not to throw him out of the goddamn window. The baby, I mean.” She gave a sad laugh.

“
I totally know what you mean,” I replied. It was true, I found such relief in what Valentina was saying I could have rolled down the car window and shouted the words to the wind.

We’d reached the South Deeside Road. To the left, a grand, leafy driveway, all that was visible of Ardoe House Hotel; to the right, the River Dee, flowing down from the Cairngorms out to the North Sea, to the rigs, to Mikey.

Valentina tucked one leg up under the other, turned to me as I drove. “What do you do to get Isla to shut up, you know, when she won’t stop crying?”

I thought for a second. “I mostly use duct tape.”

She giggled.

“
Masking tape, forget it,” I continued, “not strong enough, they rip it off. Anything wider and they fucking suffocate on you.”

“
You’re terrible,” she said. “I won’t ask how you get her to eat her vegetables.”

I raised my eyebrows, leant back a little from the steering wheel. “Let me just say we live in a very remote spot.”

We exchanged a glance and chuckled. The jeep bumped over the potholes of the lane, the overhanging branches trailed over the windscreen and there it was: the cottage.

Valentina gasped. She actually caught her breath, audibly, and said, “My God, Shona, it’s even lovelier than I imagined.”

For a second I thought she was taking the mickey, or play-acting. Then I thought she was going to jump out before I’d even stopped the car. As it was, she opened the door just as I pulled up and got out the moment I cranked the handbrake. I locked the car and made my way to where she was standing, open-mouthed, like she was admiring the Taj Mahal or something.

“
Come on,” I said. “It’s only a house.”

Valentina followed me up the drive and into the porch. When we stopped at the front door, she stood so close behind me that I could feel her breath warm on my ear. I became flustered, I couldn’t get the key to work.

“
Here,” she said, “let me.” She took the key and opened the door in a second.

“
Go on in,” I said.

But she already had.

***

You’ve not forgotten about her, have you? Out here alone in the cold and the dark? It’s been a tricky business out here tonight, she’d tell you that herself. There were moments when she couldn’t see the hand in front of her face and, of course, the lane is potholed to hell. The moon helped. Drifted out from behind those clouds long enough to light her way to the picket fence, to the gate. It was easy to sneak across the front of the cottage then. The back was more difficult
–
those flower pots no more than shadowy trolls on the mossy paving stones and the lawn reaching away into the blackness of an abyss. That got to her all right, but she didn’t make a sound. She knew when she planned this that everything would have to be done in total silence. She is an impostor, you see. This is not her home. These are not her flickering walls. This is not her life.

***

FOUR

In my cottage, the kitchen continues around to what I’ve always called the secret back door, making a kind of horseshoe. By the time I’d hung my coat up and stepped further inside, the secret back door was clattering against the outside wall. I stepped out and made my way to the patio at the back.

Valentina was a couple of metres away, twirling around in the vast grassy space like Julie Andrews at the beginning of
The Sound of Music
.

“
Wooh,” she cried out. “Wooh! Wooh! This is awesome.”

“
Glad you like it.” I kept my voice low, thinking she might lower hers to match. I figured this was what Australians must be like; they came from a hot climate, wide spaces. The truth was, though, with her twirling and her shouting, she was expressing so exactly what I had felt the first time I saw the place. Except that I lived here. This cottage was mine.

Back in the kitchen, I made coffee and cut some of the gingerbread I’d made, out of a desperate need to find something to do, at the weekend. It was my mum’s recipe
–
she’d read it out to me down the phone, ran through the instructions as if I were a perfect idiot. I’d done everything she’d said but it had still sunk in the middle.

Valentina took a big bite and closed her eyes, her eyelashes long, spider-leg thick with black mascara.

“
God, this is awesome,” she said. “Did you make it?”

“
It’s not awesome, it’s as heavy as a brick.” I took another bite all the same. “Playing with dollies does my head in, so I thought I’d pop my cake making cherry, you know? I gave Isla the wooden spoon to lick
–
that kept her quiet for a few minutes. I let her take the tape off her mouth, obviously.”

She smiled and shook her head, unwrapped her hippy scarf from her neck and placed it on the chair next to her. “Aren’t you worried about salmonella?”

“
I wasn’t. Until now, of course. Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

She clapped her hand over her mouth. “God, I’m such a moron.”

“
No, you’re all right. If only I’d thought of raw eggs before. Maybe I’ll try them on Mikey when he gets back from offshore, that’ll teach him to leave me here on my own in the middle of nowhere.” I pulled a mad face. “I’ve already threatened to put peanuts in his coffee if he’s a minute late getting home.”

“
Of course.” She laughed, then frowned. “You mean so he chokes, right?”

“
No actually,” I replied. “He’s allergic.”

“
Really? Poor guy. That sucks.”

Looking back, I can see that all this joking was no more than the novelty of one another, but it felt good too to reconnect with another old friend: me, my old self, Shona, the same and there all along, laughing darkly in her bright new life. There with Valentina that first time, I can remember it dawning on me that, yes, I had a child, but I could still joke around if I wanted and nothing terrible would happen.

“
So, you gonna give me a tour or what?” she asked when we’d finished our coffee.

“
Sure.”

The stairwell was ‘ripper’, the bathroom ‘darling’, the bedrooms ‘cute’. She was ‘in love’, she said, with every room. I thought about how, in Glasgow, they’d tell her to get to fuck. But being Australian, she got away with it. At least, I let her get away with it.

“
We call these two rooms the kids’ rooms,” I said, “even though we’ve only got Isla so far.”

“
That’s so sweet, to have plans for another already. You guys must love each other like crazy.” She ran ahead
–
to mine and Mikey’s room. She went straight in, ran her fingers along the built in wardrobes, picked up the photo from the chest of drawers.

“
Is this Michael?”

“
Mikey, yes. That was us at my parents’ silver wedding.”

She put the photo back without a word. “I like your bed.” She sat on the edge, bounced up and down as she had in the car. “Oh, it’s perfect. Not too hard, not too soft. Just right.” She grinned. “I sound like Goldilocks, don’t I?”

“
You’ll be after my porridge next. I have to warn you – I take it salty.” I smiled and held my hand out to her. “We should probably be getting back. We said four, didn’t we?”

“
Sod that.” She threw herself back and spread her arms. Her hair fell over the pillow, bright as coral on white rock. “I want to stay here.” After a moment, she sprang up, eyes ablaze, that mischievous expression I was already getting to know making her mouth pucker. “Hey! I could move in! We could change the locks and when Michael gets back from the rig we could jeer at him from the bedroom window and tell him he can’t come in.”

“
So, hold on, what?” I shook my head at her. “I thought we were with Goldilocks, that sounds more like The Three Little Pigs, and anyway we have to let him in, don’t we? How else are we going to poison his coffee?” I reached for her hand. And this time she took it.

It all seems like such a long time ago now but it wasn’t. Months, that’s all. Less than a pregnancy and, God knows, a pregnancy can change your life overnight. I’ll never forget discovering I was expecting that summer, how I journeyed through the slow accumulation of facts as if I were wading upriver, arriving eventually at the source: the metallic taste in my mouth, the breathlessness if I so much as quickened my pace, oh, and the sick feeling if I even went near a glass of wine. It was that last thing that made me think something was up. I love a drink. But I’ve never been one for recording the dates of my cycle with a discreet letter P on the calendar or anything like that. So by the time I put two and two together, I was twelve weeks gone.

By this time we were living in Mikey’s flat in Hyndland but I actually grew up in Govan. In Govan you could hear your neighbours’ televisions through the walls, whereas in leafy Hyndland the flats were what I’d call apartments
–
high ceilings and original coving that Mikey told me was called Lincrusta, oak skirting three foot high. Mikey being from Liverpool, Hyndland wasn’t home to him either but we were settled enough, as settled as you can be, making a home after only three months together. We were each other’s home, you could say. Wherever he was, I wanted to be and he always said he felt the same.
Thing about you, Shone,
he used to say,
is you get me.

I’d bought the tester kit in my lunch hour and took it into the loo when I got home from work. I was supposed to wait and use the morning’s first pee but I couldn’t, I was too anxious to know. I sat watching the stick, my jeans around my ankles. The blue lines got darker: one, then two. My chest expanded like an accordion. I’d thought those things took ages but no, they’re quick. I checked the instructions. One line, the test had worked but the result was negative. Two lines, the test had worked and ... no mistaking, I was having Mikey’s baby.

I went to phone my mum but stopped myself. Jeanie had already texted:

Have you done it yet?

But I didn’t answer. Mikey had to be the first to know, and I had to tell him face to face.

Waiting for him to come home was torture. He was still working in a pub, still putting off the inevitable and now I was going to present him with that very thing: the inevitable. I worried it would weigh him down, that faced with the responsibility he would panic. And leave. I cleaned the flat from top to bottom, kept looking out the window for him coming up the road. Seeing no sign, I made spaghetti Bolognese, for something to do.

Mikey got in about eight o’clock
–
a lot later than usual
–
complaining that he’d had to cover for
some dickhead philosophy student
who hadn’t turned up for his shift. He came into the kitchen, kissed the back of my neck with a loud smack and reached for a couple of beers from the fridge. I said hi and carried on stirring the sauce like my life depended on it.