Wait Till I Tell You Read online

  The doctor was speaking just now, in the front room after the funeral, looking out through the window at the waves that pushed closer as the day advanced. The graveyard was in sight, stones leaning away from the sea and few enough in number to look sociable not military. If rain came suddenly, a family could picnic among the stones for shelter, passing around the salt for the hardboiled eggs. On the stones grew lichens like dried lace and damp velvet. The grave that was newest, around which the men had all stood at the funeral today and thrown earth down on to the coffin in quantities that did nothing to cover its nakedness, that new grave was bright and freshly made now, with a puffy quilt of mainland-grown flowers high upon it. The flowers would be taken by the rain and the wind even before the rabbits could get them.

  Between the two commitments, to take drink or not to, the doctor had taken the high road to heaven and was not drinking. From time to time he went out to his car to remedy this position he had assumed as a man deserving of respect, by taking a nip from the quarter bottle in his glovebox. There were further quarter bottles, to the total of two and a quarter bottles, in places known to the doctor. When it sank below the two bottles in reserve, he became edgy and was a less effective physician. Since there was but the one shop, it was known well what dosage of liquor the doctor prescribed for himself.

  So, today, he was not drinking, in contrast to the minister, who held it only right that he, in his position of confidant and comforter of the mourners, should share with them in the loosening and rinsing out of their grief.

  ‘He was a fine specimen,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Rare,’ said the minister, thinking of the broken heap of flesh and breath that Andrew had been in life. He’d had arms like the sides of feeding sows, loose and pendulous below the one defined strip of lean.

  ‘Rare? That he was. No one like him at all, at all.’ The doctor’s stern sobriety was catching up with him quicker than the minister’s dutiful boozing.

  ‘All God’s creatures,’ said the minister, seeing an opening to an area where no one could gainsay his superior rights of access, ‘are differently wonderful.’

  ‘Differently wonderful,’ said the doctor, who, truly sober, would have been turned away by the soap in the words.

  ‘Are you telling me,’ asked wee Ian, who had been drinking all the way since Glasgow, which made a train’s worth followed by the ferry’s worth followed by the welcome from the island followed by last night followed by the freshener before the funeral, the stiffener in the kirkyard and now the serious drinking, ‘are you telling me that you came over all the way, Carla MacDougall, just to do Andrew’s make-up for his coffin?’ If, in life, a man had worn make-up in sight of wee Ian, his voice suggested, he’d’ve laid him out cold. ‘Make-up,’ he said. Indeed the word did sound unseemly and dishonest in his mouth. He said it so’s you heard what make-up was, thought Carla; a made-up thing, a lie. She didn’t think lies were so bad. You might need the odd small one. Wee Ian was too big for the front room, though it was his wife’s; he worked on the mainland and came home for a long weekend once a month. He was in quarrying and wanted to get into stone reconstitution. The only work on the island was old-fashioned work, with no future. From time to time wee Ian stretched out his hand for a pork pie and popped it on the end of his tongue like a pill. The acids in his saliva made short work of it before even he reeled it in to the shelter of his teeth. Gratefully his stomach took the liquefied food and dismissed it, needing more soon after.

  ‘Andrew, now; did he look good, according to your estimation, when you’d finished with him?’ Ian seemed to be, thought Carla, quite interested in the technicalities, for a man who’d never taken her profession that seriously before. She sipped her wee drink, couldn’t mind what it was, she drank that rarely. Anyhow, it warmed her in the head, and she thought kindly of Ian as she spoke to him. He’d been a handsome boy for one summer, and beautiful light on his feet. She’d never had the luck. Now no woman would call him luck if he came her way; all the veins in his face had risen and flowered red under his big hide. Whereas she, who had been a mouse, was, say it herself though she did, transformed since a girl. Getting away from the island had started that. No one in Stirling knew what she had started out with, or why exactly she had each feature, like the people on the island did, on account of knowing every exact last detail of her ma’s pregnancy and labour. In a place as small as this everything was explained because there was nothing to do but talk and little but one another to talk about.

  ‘Jesus, Carla, you’re different fi how ye was,’ said wee Ian. She could not deny it. She’d been a plain kid with legs like pudding pushed in tight to its bag. Her hair had been a mat of turfy brown, and her teeth all over the shop. She’d known nothing of presentation and the art of making the best of herself. Her skin had freckled up like a blotched bird’s egg then and she’d no clothes to speak of. And absolutely no poise.

  She recrossed her legs and tugged at the jacket of the ensemble she’d ironed this morning on the same kitchen table where the night before she’d worked on the scunnered dead face of Andrew. She ironed at the table on an old yellow blanket so stiff it squeaked under the iron. It had been nice working at that table because of the view down to the churchyard and the flickering advances of the sea, lifting the small blue creel boat that was tied to an iron loop under all the yellow seaweed. She curled a sleek loop of red hair behind her right ear; it was a semi-permanent tint called Unfair Advantage. In her ears shivered silvery sections of what looked like chainmail for fish. These were cool against her neck, calming her when she made herself take another sip, for the conviviality. Her legs began to get the tense feeling they had when she’d held a pose for too long for the Stirling Amateur Photographic Club. She could feel all the tendons twanging for release. But, even though it was just Wee Ian, she decided to give him the full toe-balanced, calves-tensed treatment. As a matter of fact, she could do her exercises at such snatched moments, she’d found, and men never noticed, though women could deliver funny looks. It was pure envy.

  Carla had evened out her skin tone for years now by the use of the sunbed in her salon. Honestly, she did not know how other women did without. Her whole skin’d a gorgeous tan, a deep colour, more rose-brown than holiday-brown, she liked to think. She tanned in her undies from modesty, not for health reasons. You did not know when a client might require an impromptu appointment, and readiness was Carla’s watchword.

  Wee Ian was as uncouth as most of these men, thought Carla; she could not have borne it if she’d lived here to this day. Not the way she was now, used to the gracious things of life and a certain style.

  Carla’d done nail extensions on herself after fixing Andrew’s make-up for his coffin. She did not want his family to feel she’d taken no care with her own grooming, like an operative, when they were all family if you thought about it.

  ‘Yes, I will, thanks,’ she called to Jessie, who was passing with a plate of ham sandwiches and a bottle, although with her back to Carla. Jessie looked at her in a startled way, and extended and poured. Picking up the sandwich wasn’t easy as it was the sort with a big edge on it, crust was it? Nail extensions meet more peaceably around a thinner sandwich. To eat the sandwich at all required two hands, of which only the thumb and forefinger could be used. The nail extensions perforated the bread otherwise, and collected butter and ham in their long copper-coloured arcs. The copper was an echo of the Unfair Advantage. It had been a wee treat to herself on turning forty, the colour change. A shift to the mellower register as a sign she’d no quarrel with anything life might send her way.

  Ian was watching her in several directions like a man watching a tank of fish. It was a sign of the way he could not hold his drink, Carla thought. His eyes strayed over her face and body and he looked as if he might cry or be sick.

  ‘Jessie,’ he called, ‘ye mind Carla?’ Ian had only married Jessie from necessity as Carla recalled it. He’d broken all the other hearts his one brief summer of flower, and Je
ssie was the sensible one of all the girls. Except that she’d married Ian, reflected Carla. ‘I do that,’ said Jessie. She was slight and had more grey than black hair and a plain old suit in navy wool with sheepdog hairs on it. Not one to set a living room alight, Carla could see.

  ‘Will I get yous a nice cup of tea?’ Jessie asked Carla, looking into her painted eyes with clean blue ones.

  ‘How did you guess?’ said Carla, socially, in a great swoop before she finished the rest of her glass, against waste.

  As Jessie left, Carla saw how Ian rubbed his wife with his shoulder, quite hard, as though he’d an itch, as she went past with her tray and her dishcloths and her used plates. Flat shoes, Jessie wore, and her face was weathered like spring petals late in the season. Jessie dropped a kiss on to the head of her husband. It was like going unclothed in public, thought Carla. How could a married woman do that?

  The doctor came in from outdoors, a healthy flush on him. It was colder than ever out now the stars were starting. Some people with children had taken them home. There was music, the sound of a fiddle from the upstairs room and something on the telly or the radio from elsewhere in the front room. No, it was worse. It was the minister, singing, quite a few of them singing. It was worse even than that. It was religious music, sung quite ordinary-style, as though it had any place in folks’ houses. ‘Be ye lift up ye everlasting doors, so that the king of glory shall come in. Who is the King of Glory?’ They asked the question of each other with their big drunken faces hanging down off their eyebrows. Then they answered the question, nodding, looking pleased as though they had just recalled a name they’d earlier forgotten from an important story. ‘The Lord of Hosts and none but He the King of Glory is!’ They looked very pleased about that. No one seemed embarrassed at this inappropriate moment to bring God up, when he’d had his way already in the graveyard and at the funeral with the tears being blown off their faces by the wind. Indeed, they were giving this singing their all. It is the way with drunk men, thought Carla.

  She took a glass from behind a photoframe with a snap of Ian and Jessie’s Rhona holding up a lamb with a face looked like it’d been drinking ink and the black had seeped all into the whirls of wool. The glass was half full; she took the stuff in it down in one and returned the glass carefully behind the now less interesting photo, tucking it thoughtfully in under the support at the back of the frame, so’s it wouldn’t disrupt Jessie’s decor. Such as that was. There was another glass needed tidying in this manner, Carla happened to see, just in behind the curtain that had not been drawn. The sea showed only as a crisping pale blur the size it seemed of a hand mirror under the white simple moon. Otherwise the water might have been sky, fallen down to meet the land. She replaced the glass behind the curtain. The creel boat bobbed on the lifted water or floated in the sky, whichever was which. No sound went on as long as the sound of the sea, that was always there. Two hundred yards from Ian and Jessie’s house, the graveyard had gone blue and then grey and was now silver.

  ‘If you give her the tea, Jessie,’ said the clearly drunken doctor advancing before the brown pot that loomed behind him, ‘I’ll try to help with the other wee bit problem.’

  It was the usual way for Carla. She was just looking about to see who ‘her’ might be, when she realized it was her own self they were on about. People never let up talking about her. It was why she’d left the island in the first place. No privacy. No time to yourself. No life of your own. No respect, for you surely could not have that in a place where you were too well known.

  ‘Milk, Carla?’ asked Jessie, ‘or straight?’

  ‘You go on and laugh at me,’ said Carla. ‘Laugh. I’m soberer than the lot of them. And prettier.’ The fat ugly drunken men in the corner looked at her and resumed their indecent singing of the psalms of David in metre.

  She felt the familiar powerful helplessness when she gave in to the instinct to do something wrong. As a rule, she did this late at night in the salon, and she would run around talking to her now absent clientele as she did within her head when they were present, answering with her truth instead of their own, anatomizing their faults and explaining why they were right to fear death. Another great advantage of loneliness was the freedom it gave you to meet yourself. And often the self you met was different from the one you’d met before.

  ‘You’re tired, Carol dear,’ said the doctor.

  ‘You look exhausted yourself, doctor,’ said Carla. ‘By the same token, if I may so say. And it’s Carla. I live in Stirling now.’

  ‘Is that right?’ asked the doctor, getting busy with a glass of water and rattling a glittery sheet of what she could have sworn were jumping beans. ‘You don’t have to change your name when you move house,’ he continued. ‘I know people who’ve emigrated down under and they’re still called what they were always called.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Carla. She wanted to know the name of someone who had gone all that way, down to Australia. If she’d’ve done that it wouldn’t have been anything as ordinary as Carla she’d’ve selected.

  ‘The name they were always called. Their first name. The name they had first. I don’t know. There are too many to think.’

  ‘You either know no one who has been to Australia, or you are a very drunk man,’ said Carla, and she fell to the carpet in a shining heap of orange limbs and pleated aubergine wool, thus avoiding the gelatine-and-insult placebos the doctor had been about to offer her. Her mixed hair, the mauve-red of neepskins and beetroots, lay more successful than the rest of her assembled self, in a rich fan on the carpet. Her poor disgraced faceful of paint had melted under the onslaught of the day.

  Jessie began to pour tea for the thirty or so people left in the room. Each time she went back to the kitchen to fill the pot again, she gave Wee Ian a new thing to do. While she poured and milked and sugared the first few teas, Ian carried Carla to the kitchen table, and laid her along it, rolling the tablecloth up against her so that she wouldn’t flop on to the plates of biscuits or curl up around the two big trifles Jessie had done in crystal-type bowls for when the last drinkers began to cry and need their pudding, around five in the morning that would be.

  While Jessie dished out the second wave of teas, Ian did as she’d told him and went to get cotton wool and glycerine from the bathroom. Carla had that horrible orange skin, he thought, skin that needs watering, it’s so parched, dried out to the colour of the sand in Bible lands. She was the colour of certain stones you got in quarries down in England, terrible thirsty stones that lasted less than eight hundred years.

  Mind you, he thought, Carla herself must’ve been thirsty. She was out like a light. As he remembered it, she’d not done this to herself as a girl, when she’d been nothing to look at and never been anywhere but the island. He shook the glycerine in its bottle. It sparkled and shattered like crazy jelly and then pulled itself together till it was back to looking like water.

  He was behaving sober but knew as he watched his careful actions from his brain that felt as though it was up on the dresser with the diesel receipts that he was not. He got very good at exacting tasks about a day into a blinder. But, God, he could take it. He was four times the size of the wee orange creature passed out on the kitchen table.

  ‘Undress her,’ said Jessie, pouring hot water into the shiny brown teapot that seemed to be spelling letters out of its spout in steam. ‘Not right the way down. And fold her suit.’

  The aubergine ensemble came away in three pieces. Each time he lifted Carla, he tried not to look at her body. This meant looking at her face, at the unpeeling animal-like false lashes growing off her eyelids, at the runs of mauve and fibrous black that had rained down her cheeks, at the awful shredded moustache of colour that had crept up from her mouth to her nose through the cracks in the orange mask that was like a dry riverbed. When he’d got down to her underthings, he saw she was orange all over except inside the plain flesh-coloured undies that were not the colour of her flesh. Inside them she seemed white as
candles. The tiny white hairs grew out of her hard skin the way a pig’s did out of a ham. The bottoms of her feet looked nice and soft and ordinary. He covered her with the tablecloth.

  ‘Here’s your tea,’ said Jessie. ‘Now go upstairs and fetch me one of Rhona’s magazines. Nothing too way out. I want one with a make-up page. You know, Ian, a step-by-step to teach the wee girls how to put on the war paint.’

  Ian had been about to start. He enjoyed the topic of his own daughter and make-up, especially if he’d had a dram. ‘Ye’ll not leave the house like a hoor!’ and so on. He had all the words ready in his head and had heard them said to his sister by his own father. ‘What d’ye want to paint your face for, to show it to laddies who’ve known you unpainted all your life? Eh? Wee hoor? Laddies that’re mostly your own folk? Speak out will ye? And don’t be insolent!’ He knew what to say.

  ‘Say nothing Ian,’ said his wife. ‘And don’t wake Rhona. She keeps the magazines on the chair by the bed.’