Songs of Contentment Ended

This story is one of the winners of Issue 15 of Top in Fiction in the short story category.

No one will love me for myself. I give them my body and my voice and let them imagine me in the dark as they will. I ask only that they leave me alone afterwards.

It’s not a one-sided arrangement. Their story becomes my new song. I have a great many songs now, companions for the long summer evenings and long winter nights.

And Margaret likes me to sing. I call her that, my great aunt. My mother’s maiden aunt.

I came to look after Margaret a long time ago. I came with a trunk containing everything I had. I can still fit all my worldly goods into that trunk. The only things I’ve collected are my songs, and those I carry in my head. Their notes climb as high as the mountains and skim the shimmering surface of the loch, before diving deep into its dark depths. They fly through the air like a bird, but they are lighter than a single feather floating down to earth.

As a child I sang the recipe songs - the directions of my mother, grandmother or aunt put to music I made up. I moved on to multiplication tables, history dates, capital cities, kings and queens. I sang about the children at school who teased me or stared. No matter how much they tried to stop me with threats, kicks or punches, I kept right on singing.

Here at Margaret’s, the songs came from the stories she told me and I sang them back to her.

“That’s not the way it happened at all,” she would say.

And I’d have to experiment with some new lines until she was satisfied.

“It’ll have to do, I suppose. Tune’s a bit rough, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

“I’m still working on it. If you’re not careful, I’ll match your great love story to a funeral dirge.”

“Thought that’s what you were doing already. Might not be such a bad idea too. Don’t see why I should remember the bugger so kindly.”

After I got her up each morning, I put on the porridge and made our tea and toast. Then she dressed and I put out the breakfast. Often she talked about her youth or some of the old local gossip as I moved about clearing up, tidying, making her bed.

On washing days I hung the sheets out on the line, singing and looking up at the sky for fear the weather might change and the rain come bombing down. The sheets flapped and snapped in the wind in a rhythm to pace my song.

Margaret had once gone with a married man whose wife had not kept well. The two of them would meet at her back door after her family had gone to bed. On moonlit nights they might go for a walk along the lochside. I would always waver my song at this point to capture the image of the loch shimmering in the moonlight. Or they’d walk along the edge of the woods - here I used lots of s- and sh- words to capture the whisper of the trees in the quiet night.

When it came out that she was seeing him, her parents sent her to stay with relatives in Glasgow. She only came back when they needed someone to look after them. By then he was long gone.

When I sang outside it drew the attention of some of the locals. If they didn’t know about Margaret’s married man before, they certainly knew about him now.

Margaret basked in her newfound role as romantic heroine until she got bored and returned to her cranky, cantankerous self. But I could tell even then she was secretly pleased and liked to hear the story all over again. She said I could get in the practice singing it to her since her mind was liable to go any minute now and she’d need some reminding of it all.

“Ye’re a wee devil,” Angus MacAlpin said to me one morning as I weeded the garden.

I sang as I went along, a song about one of the locals who’d passed by earlier, slowing her pace so she could get a better look at me. Folk must think I’m daft if they think I don’t know their little tricks by now.

“I said, ye’re a wee devil, Annie MacBride.” He paused at the fence.

I brushed the earth off my hands as I got to my feet. “Aye, I heard you, Angus. I’m no going deaf yet. If you behave yerself I’ll bring you a pot of raspberry jam. Fresh made.”

“Aah, ye know how to keep a body sweet as well as how to keep them smarting.”

“Aye, well, they’re talents I’m still perfecting. I’ll bring the jam round later.”

“Was that Angus?” Margaret asked when I went in. She was sitting at her usual spot in the back room by the window. “He was a devil himself once upon a time.”

I took the jam to him and got to hear some of his stories. He showed me a photograph album where he was pictured as a young man with his wife, Ailsa. She’d died some years before from cancer. He said she was my height and build, and my hair was just the same length.

I left him eating thickly buttered slices of bread with the rich raspberry jam on top. The evenings were drawing in earlier and I had to get Margaret her supper before helping her to bed.

“Tell me about Angus and Ailsa,” I said as I set about making the tea. “What was she like?”

“She was a tiny wee thing just like yerself. Had a bit of a temper on her too. But they always seemed to make up.”

I listened as Margaret told what she knew. And that night, in the big bed that seemed to stretch like a sea, I dreamt of the youthful Angus, and it wasn’t clear to me at all whether I was Ailsa, or someone else, or myself. The arms stretched out before me could have been my own; they had the same pale flesh and slender wrists. But these fingers intertwining with mine were not any I’d ever touched, and I thought this in my dream even as my hand moved on to stroke a bare muscled arm.

I baked scones the next day and took some round to Angus. I’d looked out an old dress of Margaret’s that she’d been fond of in her youth.

“Aye, it’s amazing how some fashions come round again,” Angus said when he let me in. “Yer dress, my mother had one just like it. Scones is it? I havenae had a homemade scone in I don’t know how long.”

As he put the kettle on for some tea, I picked up a photograph on the mantelpiece. It looked well cared for and lovingly dusted each day. Young Angus looked out, smiling proudly, with a young Ailsa on his arm. Their wedding photograph. I wondered if the sight of it took him back, whether the house still held some essence of her with the knick-knacks on the mantelpiece and windowsill, and the armchairs with their crocheted covers.

“Margaret says you play a mean fiddle,” I told him as he came into the room. “She says you used to court Ailsa that way and it used to drive the neighbours wild. You’d stand under her window and play something romantic. And when that didn’t work, you’d play a jig. And when that didn’t work, you’d play something really miserable. And when that still didn’t work, you’d play as badly as possible. Margaret said it sounded like a cat screaming. Eventually, Ailsa’s father came out and punched you, right on the nose. And then she came out before he punched you again. And that’s when she agreed to go out with you.”

“Aye, she took a bit of persuading, but I’m a patient man.” He smiled to himself, his thoughts in the past, and I wondered if they were on courting or loving or just Ailsa herself.

“So what was it you liked about her?” I asked as I made myself comfortable on one of the armchairs.

Angus leaned against the doorframe, listening out for the kettle. “Ah, where to start, Annie, where to start.”

I left Angus at his gate and turned in the direction of the loch. At the corner, I bumped into a boy of about twelve who had a habit of gawping at me. He jumped away and ran down the road, before turning briefly to shout, “My ma says ye’re like a doll with a broken face.”

Without meaning to, I put one hand up to my cheek.

“Come here, ye wee bugger,” Angus shouted, attempting to grab him by the collar as he ran past the gate. “Don’t you pay any attention to that one, the wee bastard,” Angus said, coming up to me.

I dropped my hand quickly. “I’ve got my own way of dealing with folks like that. Tell ye what, Angus, if ye’ve got any dirt on his mother, be sure and let me know.”

He laughed, but it didn’t reach his eyes. They were like a picture within a picture – they mirrored his sympathy, but if I stepped closer, within that, they would mirror my face.

The loch is like a mirror. It reflects the land around it, the mountains, the hills, the trees. It holds a mirror to the earth and sky and says: see how beautiful you are? Lying here on my stomach on a flat stone at the lochside, I often gaze in. Sometimes I look only at the surface and see myself, my face, before trailing my fingers across to break up the image. Other times I look deeper.

The loch once mirrored Margaret with her married man and, later, Angus and Ailsa. Perhaps if I could dive deep enough I could recover those memories from its depths. But they would be icy cold because the waters do not love, they only reflect. There is a beauty in that though, like the beauty of an Arctic ice floe, or a love song by someone who’s never been in love.

Airing people’s dirty linen in song can make you enemies. A porcelain doll with its face smashed in on one side was a sure sign of that. Angus and Margaret between then had come up with a few choice pieces of information. So the doll lay outside the front door one day. I suppose she who left it there thought I’d throw it in the bin in anger or upset. But I took it inside and put it on the windowsill so that it looked out on to the street. I could see it reflected in the window and occasionally in the eyes of her that sent it.

I made more visits to Angus. He told me that Ailsa often came to him these days in dreams and, though he never said, I knew what kind of dreams they were.

Sometimes when you look at an older person you can’t really see the young man or woman they were, time has changed them so. But not Angus. I could see young Angus in him. I could see what Ailsa had seen in him. And I knew that, in spite of my face, he could see young Ailsa in me. It was what I wanted him to see.

Age may be a leveller, but so is the dark. In the dark you can be anyone you want to be, or anyone someone else wants you to be. The only mirror then is the skin itself, the only song that of pleasure. This I knew from my dreams, where I was both myself and not.

Some dreams demand form, a life outside in the real world. I could give them form in song, and I did. But this was only the prelude. Sometimes Angus accompanied on his fiddle, but he liked best to listen. I sang the one I was working on about him and Ailsa. He was always quiet and withdrawn after. I sang too of lovers in the dark, nameless, faceless, and he was quiet then too in a different way.

Margaret still liked to hear about her married man. She had a photograph of him in her bedside cabinet. It was the only photo she had, so I looked out a good frame for it. Sometimes I caught her looking at it, then angling the glass to look at herself and she would shake her head as though the passing of so many years was hard to fathom, or perhaps she’d forgotten briefly that they had passed, and only the sight of her face reminded her.

“I don’t feel old,” she once said to me, “except in my body.”

Not long after I’d first come to look after Margaret, I tried on her old dresses and she told me something of what each one meant to her. For decades they’d hung in her wardrobe, gathering dust and the scent of age. I washed them carefully and made any necessary repairs. It was one of these old printed dresses that I looked out that first night. After putting Margaret to bed, I bathed, washed my hair, got dressed and, with the aid of a torch, found my way to Angus’s cottage.

The sky above was clear and starry, and the full moon was up. The cottage windows were dark.

I took the key from its hiding place under the flagstone at the back door and let myself into the kitchen. In the silence I tried to search for Ailsa’s presence in the house, as though she might signal in some way that I was trespassing.

There was nothing. Perhaps she was too busy in Angus’s dreams to bother with me. Perhaps she was lying with him there right now.

I crept through to the hallway and listened.

From beyond the bedroom door I could hear steady breathing. I laid my cheek against the cool wood before turning the knob and opening it.

Moonlight cast faint illumination through the opened curtains of the windows. Angus slept peacefully on his back.

I closed the door behind me. Under my feet, the floorboards creaked. The bed gave way beneath me. I leaned over him. The first notes, the first words, were sung low, almost a whisper as I unbuttoned the front of my dress. Gradually I sang louder and Angus began to stir in his sleep. I wanted the notes to reach right in and draw him out. His breathing changed and I sensed he was awake, listening, and I fell into silence.

After a moment, he said, “I thought you were Ailsa.”

In the dark, anything is possible.

“What are you doing here in the middle of the night, Annie?” But he knew.

“This isn’t right,” he said, but his fingers were on my face and I didn’t know if he was talking about my being here or what he could feel under his fingertips. I cupped his hand in mine, turned my head to kiss it, before slipping it through the opening in my dress and placing it on my bare breast. When I took my own hand away, his stayed.

These are things that words cannot begin to describe: the hunger of a man who has not touched a woman in years, who sees in a lover someone else and cries silent tears, but who still has the tenderness not to rush. A song cannot quite capture it, a piece of music without words would be a better way of describing it, something played on a piano, a harp or a flute. Words represent limits, the things I was taught at school, sentence construction, word order, like the sex in books, and then, and then, and then.

If words must be used then this is how I remember it… a hand gently gripping the back of my neck, my hair being unpinned, lips on my neck, the fabric of my dress brushing my shoulders as it was pushed off… a pyjama shirt unbuttoning beneath my fingers, palms running over my back and spine, as though trying to remember something, someone, tears squeezing from eyelids fluttering under my mouth, a pulse under fingertips, bare stomachs touching and parting over and over, a curved breast against a flat one, damp skin, a hand bending back my neck to kiss under my chin, my body curving like a bow, lips travelling down, lying backwards, thighs around his waist…

Better to think of notes gradually moving upwards, up and down flourishes climbing ever higher, like fingers slowly dancing their way up a spine. And at the end, notes, perfectly pitched, jumping one, two octaves, and my teeth biting into a shoulder where age has slackened the skin, but it doesn’t matter, words whispering in my ear, to me or someone else or maybe both, and then the notes slowly drifting down until, like a feather, they brush down to rest, gently, on the bed.

In the dark, all things are equal. Looks don’t matter, age doesn’t matter. Not my face or his silver hair.

In the beginning, he had doubts about the rightness of it all, mostly relating to our age difference. But I refused to let him dwell on the matter in my company. If he seemed to feel guilty about Ailsa, I’d tell him if I were her, I wouldn’t mind. Besides she’d come to get him in her own good time and then he could explain himself all he liked if he felt the need.

“Aye, ye’ve got a sharp tongue on ye sometimes,” he’d say, “just like her.”

Angus was younger than Margaret. In his sixties. Sometimes when he slept I lay my head against his chest just to hear his heart, a heart that would one day stop beating, and I imagined it ticking away the moments of his life. Some nights, I imagined a whole world full of such ticking clocks, none of them keeping time with one another.

When I helped Margaret to bed in the dark nights when she liked to retire earlier and I said I was going out, she looked me straight in the eye and said nothing. She of all people knew better than to ask.

During the day, I visited Angus at least once or twice a week, as before. He had no family left in the village, so folk saw me doing a kindness. If Margaret saw him passing the house, she waved to him, and he blushed or ducked his head, not knowing where to look.

“Aye, there’s a rare spring in yer step the day, Angus,” she said to him on one occasion. “Why don’t ye come in for a wee cuppa tea?”

“Er, no Margaret, I have to be getting up the road. Things to do, like.”

Winter came, and the snow. It came again and again, layer upon layer until the trees began to bow under the weight and the sound of snapping branches pierced the quiet nights.

As the temperature dropped, the loch began to freeze around its edge. I still took my walks there, persuading Angus to come with me a few times. He would talk of the time a childhood friend of his had walked out across a frozen section of the loch and fallen in. Trapped under ice, he’d drowned.

Another memory temporarily brought up from the cold waters.

I knew that the loch brought other memories to the surface for him too, memories of Ailsa, though he said nothing. On one bitterly cold afternoon, Angus stood with his hands in his pockets, watching as a song breathed out and up from my lips in a cloud of steam, up towards the heavens. His breath floated upwards too. A kiss for Ailsa, I thought.

I looked for a place where the loch wasn’t frozen at the edge. I tried to smash through the sheet of ice with my feet, but it was too thick.

“What are ye doing?” Angus asked. Then, perhaps thinking of his young friend, he said, “Come away from there, Annie.” He took my arm. “What’s the matter with ye?”

I turned away. “Nothing. I was trying to see our reflection.”

The cold tightened its grip, the ground iron hard. The fire in the small hearth of the back room blazed all day as Margaret huddled under a shawl in her chair. Angus too was always drawn close up to his fireplace when I went to check on him.

The loch was now completely frozen over. I walked across it carefully, waiting to hear it crack. Some of the locals came out and played curling with makeshift stones, while the few children of the village tied skates on and cut across the shallower edges under their parents’ watchful eyes.

Tired of the place now that it was no longer just mine, I went home.

The loch thawed, the days moved towards spring and the hours of light got longer. But I didn’t ask for words of love. His hands gripping me in the night, his fingers stroking my face, these were all the words I needed. Still, he said it one night, in the quiet darkness.

“I love you lass.”

To me, or to Ailsa, perhaps.

I opened my lips but no words came. Later, I woke and I missed it immediately: the tick, the drumbeat, and the hiss of his breath.

I said his name. I said it again. I nudged him, shook him harder.

Nothing would wake him.

For long minutes I just lay there, running my fingers over his face. Then I got up and fetched a bowl of water from the kitchen and, still naked myself, I bathed him, kissing each part of his exposed body before covering it over again. I dressed, rinsed out the bowl in the kitchen sink, dried it and put it away. I took one of the photographs from the livingroom, before going back to the bedroom where he lay silently. Then I kissed his face, his lips, and left the house and walked home.

When I first came here, weaving songs around myself like a cocoon, I was content. I didn’t lie in bed, tossing and turning at my life. Between me and the notes of my songs there was peace.

And then Angus became my peace and I threaded the songs around us both. I tried to be like Margaret, carefully wrapping up the memory and, like her one and only photograph, and mine, taking it out and testing it from time to time to see if the hurt was still as raw, so that in time it no longer is.

It didn’t work, so I wrapped him up in songs where he has no name and repeated them over and over in my head.

In the mornings I get up, put on the kettle and the porridge, get Margaret out of bed. I listen to her talk and we say nothing about the time I came back in tears in the early morning to say that Angus had died.

At night, before sinking into sleep, I picture diving deep into the loch, to pick up the past reflections I imagine lie scattered on the bottom.

Sometimes I go to the local town or to the city for the night.

In the dark, you can be anyone someone else wants you to be, but then so can they.

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Originally written back in 1998/1999, this story was published in QWF magazine and later on Laura Hird’s showcase site. The image at the top is from Aleksandra at Fusion Dreams.