Billie's Kiss

  It began to rain again, this time in a thin drizzle, a mist that came across the bogland in yellow curds. The sun was low, on its gradual downward roll along the tops of the mountains. The drizzle settled, and thickened leaves, stems, the folds of Billie’s skirt. She watched it silver Hesketh’s black waistcoat.

  His long, black overcoat was on the road. Billie went to get it, picked it up, and put it on. She was unable to turn up the sleeves to free her good hand. She tried, rubbing her forearms together. Then she stopped what she was doing and looked back.

  Rory Skilling was standing behind her. He said, ‘Where is it? Where is the gun?’ Or rather Billie understood him to say that, though the sounds were quite different. Rory had changed. His eyetooth and its neighbour were smashed, his top lip was torn all the way up to his cheekbone, over which the flesh was furrowed, like a fissure in a cake baked too quickly, or at too high a heat. The white of one eye was red, a window to a chamber flooded with blood.

  Billie picked up the split tail of the coat and walked backward. Rory followed. As he came on, he cast about for the gun. A number of times he lunged at her, but his balance was impaired, and he lurched to one side, one shoulder drooping as though he dragged a weight. Billie couldn’t turn and hurry, she had to keep him under her eye, so she circled, glancing behind her only to check the state of the ground. She crept backward, and Rory shambled after her. They kept an equal distance, like dance partners. Then Billie saw his figure begin to lose colour, to fade, become thin and grey, like the shadow cast by a secondary light source. Rory disappeared. The yellow cast left the air, which grew cold. Billie stared. The mist licked her eyeballs, and insinuated the tip of its forked tongue into her nostrils. She stood still and listened, but the limping rustle was everywhere. A scrape, breath bubbling through thickening blood.

  They listened to each other.

  Billie was fume, she was something unknown, she was air leavening submerged sand. If he didn’t step on her, she wouldn’t breathe. She would stay put. She would leave later. She would wait for the open air.

  Billie heard Rory lunge and blunder on. Had he seen her, or only a momentary change in the consistency of the mist? She ran, facefirst, the tails of Hesketh’s coat fidgeting after her, each little catch like imminent capture, like a hand rising out of the heath.

  Billie saw a hand. It was long, bare, and had a bloodied cuff. She stopped beside Hesketh, not just her only human company, but her only landmark. She sank down beside him, took cover by his body. After a moment she noticed a regular stirring, the rise and fall of his chest. She was afraid to look, so lifted her face to watch her own fingers walk up his shoulder, where the black wool of his waistcoat was still silver-beaded, resisting water. His shirt was soaked, his skin showing pink through it. There was blood on his collar. Her hand crept behind his neck to pull the stud. She pulled his collar away and unfastened a button or two. The shirt was torn where it wasn’t reinforced, open already in a rent where threads were mashed into a bloodied contusion in the hollow where his shoulder joined his chest. Billie’s breath came in shallow jumps. She focused on her hands, laid them on his bare bloody throat. She felt pulses – carotid and jugular in fact – but to her more than one life, or one life and the possibility of several more. She looked into his face, took an instant inventory: jaw, lips, nose, cheekbones, eyelids, moth brown silver-tipped eyelashes, forehead – all intact and unmarked. A streak of blood severed one eyebrow, and there was a thick patch of blood, black in its centre, above his ear, his hair crimson there, then pink where it touched the heath.

  Billie lay against him and felt his life, the warm breath loitering above his parted lips. She remained quiet. The light began to go, but by notches, as the sun passed along the stony crests, the impositions of each stone having its effect, but diffused through the mist that was flowing north along the road and the channel of the valley. Before long the mist was blue, and cold.

  Billie would have stayed put, but it started to rain heavily, and the mist began to go down like the head of foam on a glass of beer as lemonade goes in to make a shandy. The mist was pitted and sank. The air became transparent, and a little way down toward the road Billie saw a big rock stir – Rory lowered the jacket he’d held up over his head and straightened, looking at her.

  Billie began to haul at Hesketh. She told him to get up, to please get up at once.

  Hesketh rolled over onto his stomach, got his knees and hands under him. Billie pulled him onto his feet and toward the abbey.

  Rory Skilling staggered stiffly after them.

  Billie clasped Hesketh’s arms around her neck, draped him over her stooped back, and supported him as he stumbled. She looked back. A rag, a fast-flying hag of mist moved between them and Rory. Rory stumbled, fell, and said, ‘Ah Jesus!’ in despair and pain.

  Billie slowly skirted the abbey wall on a path the sheep had made. She could see the sheep going along the braided paths on a hillside above her. She envied them their calm, their absence of effort.

  It began to pour, and Murdo Hesketh seemed to revive some, to support more of his own weight. It was he who led her off a branch in the sheep track and into shelter, first a narrow, wet stone room, roofless, but its walls filtering the rain, then under a lintel, one great slab of stone, beyond which was neither dim stonework nor another green, flower-filled room, but complete blackness relieved only by the gleaming fringe of water falling from the lip of the lintel. He faltered and fell against her. Billie caught their combined weight and inclined against a neat angle of obstructing stones. But Hesketh pushed as well as leaned, and Billie found her hand on a smooth, gritty surface – a step. She stepped up. Her right hand found and identified a stone column from which stone steps fanned. They were in a tower and on a winding stair.

  MURDO COULDN’T place his own feet. His head jarred hugely, but there was a hand on its crown. He heard a stifled cry when he lifted his head, and her knuckles hit the underside of the steps. He said he was sorry. There was absolutely no light. She dropped behind him and helped him set his hands on the steps’ cold, abrasive surfaces. The farther in they moved the colder it grew. Then there was light – the deep notch of an arrow-slit window. Beyond the window Murdo saw mist pulsing with shadows, then a slanting squall of rain over the abbey’s smaller roofless rooms, and the gravestones that had accumulated over hundreds of years in the ruin, still consecrated ground to the Catholics of Skilling.

  There was no mist now, and no ground below, only rods of rain. The tower was the abbey’s sole shelter; Rory knew that as well as he did.

  ‘Can you see him?’ said Billie Paxton. Then she asked if he could ease his arms into his coat. She shook off the rain and threaded his good arm into its sleeve. Murdo felt her fishing for the hand of his injured arm, and bit his lip as she eased on the sleeve. He sat on the stair and drew Billie up between his legs, pressed her to him, and closed one side of the coat around her, too. After a moment she took its other edge, hooked two fingers through a buttonhole, and drew it closed.

  Murdo slumped and dropped his face onto her shoulder, into the throat-catching ozone of her damp hair.

  They didn’t move. But the narrow window disappeared. When Murdo lifted his head again there was only blackness, the loud rain, water running on the outer edge of the steps, the splash of water above them, a breeze on his face. Then he saw a spark of rain. The window was there, and it was dark outside, the fullest dark of a night utterly overcast.

  Billie Paxton put her hand on his cheek, he felt the wind cold between her colder fingers, then their warmth gradually surface, a circuit of warmth close where her flesh lay against his.

  ‘Where is he?’ Murdo asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Murdo was dizzy, and his head dipped again and bumped against hers. She held him still. He said he thought he’d be better once he was sick, then he was, neatly, onto the step below. There was very little in him – only tea and bile. He was sleepy, and tried to stretch out on the steps.

/>   ‘You’ll get wet,’ Billie said, and wrestled him upright. She braced him, and he drifted into unconsciousness.

  He came to – he wasn’t sure how much later – to find her trembling with cold and effort.

  And with fear.

  Murdo heard a hoarse, bubbling whisper, magnified in the tower’s stone throat. He didn’t understand what was said and supposed Rory was speaking Gaelic till Billie answered him. She said, ‘If you had the gun, you’d be up here already, Mr Skilling. Besides, I know you don’t have the gun because I have it.’

  Billie was visible. There was a small amount of light coming through the window, a mealy dark grey – morning was on its way. Billie’s hair was plastered to her head, so that her ears appeared as interruptions in the smooth mass with its striated shades of soft pinkish red, and gold, and silvery gold. Billie’s skin was so white her faint freckles showed. Her lips had no blood in them, were puckered and dry, although she was wet through. She turned her face from the dark stairwell and looked at Murdo. He saw her lips shape, ‘Please,’ and knew she didn’t have his gun.

  He knew without question a second later when a shot hammered up the barrel of the stair, and a bullet chipped the wall beside the window.

  Murdo scrambled up, pressed himself against the wall right beside the raw, smoking chisel stroke of bullet just long enough to swing Billie Paxton around him on the narrow inside of the curving stair and out of Rory’s line of fire. He shouted to her to go up, then went up after her, away from the window, turn and turn on into smothering blackness.

  Red waves pulled taut by the weight of water. Murdo could see her, her hair like a beacon. He caught at her skirt and pulled her back out of the light of the next window. ‘Stop,’ he said. They pressed themselves, stooped, under the inverted staircase, the undersides of stairs above them. Murdo put his hand over her mouth and held his own breath.

  Rory Skilling’s newly resoled boots scraped and banged slowly up the stairs. He was moaning.

  Billie nipped Murdo’s fingers and, once her mouth was free, whispered, ‘I shot him. The gun broke my hand, and I dropped it.’

  He asked for her broken hand and she gave it to him. He felt it gently, rolling her tendons in the oil of flesh over her little bones. Her thumb was tender in its joint, the skin there hot and tight with swelling. He told her that she hadn’t broken it. The dislocated joint must have popped in again of its own accord. She could use it even if it did hurt. ‘You have to use it now, Miss Paxton. Go the top of the tower, carefully, because the stair terminates without a landing, and the drop is fatal. Find a loose stone. Or loosen one. More than one if you can manage, but hurry, don’t linger, bring them straight back down to me.’

  As soon as his instructions were finished she was gone. He saw her cross the light, then heard her scrabbling directly above him.

  Down in the dark a lisping voice said, ‘So – you’re awake now, Mr Hesketh.’

  Murdo didn’t answer, he didn’t intend to give Rory any help in locating him.

  ‘No one saw us together,’ the voice said.

  Murdo was silent. He counted several sounds, the rasp of boot sole on gritty stone, a splash. He subtracted three steps from the distance between him and Rory.

  ‘No one saw us together,’ Rory said again.

  Murdo bit his lip. A boy would answer – the smart boy he’d been, a long time since. There was the cattleman who saw us. And, Rory, how did you come by those injuries?

  ‘Are you another one who thinks that if a thing is carefully planned it will go according to plan?’ Rory said. ‘It’s all arrogance and error. None of you belong here. You could have chosen somewhere else to play your scenes. But I want to stay, and I’ve let our croft go. I had to think of my future, Mr Hesketh. I had to choose.’

  Murdo shouted then, ‘What are you saying?’

  Another shot struck the stonework above his head, and he fell flat and stayed quiet. He thought he felt the stone quiver – someone running. Above him. He turned his head up and saw her intent white face appear in the faint light. He yelled a warning. Heard himself and Rory Skilling both shout her name, equally concerned, his own voice tinged with horror and Rory’s with threat. Billie passed out of the light and dropped in a huddle behind Murdo. She placed one fist-sized stone in his hand.

  He whispered, ‘Help me get my coat off. Quickly.’

  Billie helped. Murdo felt the break in his collarbone grate and maybe even come apart, one edge perhaps passing behind the other, tearing muscle and pinching flesh between its splintered ends. At least, that was what Murdo imagined was happening. ‘Oh Christ!’ he said. He fainted momentarily, and his head smacked against the wall. The blow roused him some. ‘Jacket,’ he said. ‘Isn’t fine enough, I can’t make a knot. I need my shirt. Take it off. Yours won’t do – your sleeves are too narrow.’

  Billie didn’t bother him with questions. She removed his jacket and his waistcoat. Murdo heard a light, resinous, clicking music as the jet mourning fob and chain he’d inherited from Karl Borg slid down the steps. He saw Billie Paxton’s fingers on his shirt buttons, her head beside them. He saw the patches of blood on his wet, white linen. Somewhere during all this there was a flash – another shot. The bullet passed through Billie’s skirts, missing her feet, and hit the stair where she sat. Murdo could smell scorched wool as well as cordite. Billie got his shirt off. But it caught inside out on one hand, and Billie sobbed and fumbled it right way out again to remove his cuff links. Then it was free. Murdo took it, ran it through his hands, made a hard knot in one sleeve at the cuff, and dropped the stone in at the armhole.

  He stood up with the weight dangling in his hand and edged down the stairs.

  Rory was saving his bullets – or bullet. But he was quiet, and it was no good Murdo going quietly. Murdo chose to trust what he’d always trusted – what he took as his birthright, his strength and agility. He jumped down, around the stairs and swung his shirt. It smashed into the wall. Murdo heard a gasp and hauled back – hauled back and dropped into a crouch as a flash came again and he saw Rory’s wide-eyed ruined face, his white-knuckled hand, and the gun barrel pointing up into the darkness with too much elevation. The bullet crashed and ricocheted above them. Then it was dark again, and Murdo swung the stone and the stone found something solid and yielding. The shirt and stone rebounded into Murdo’s shin. He caught himself against the wall, and heard Rory banging down the stairs. He heard the thump of flesh on stonework and several muffled, wet pops.

  Murdo slithered down the wall, the stones scouring his naked back. The rain made a thick hissing, and water trickled down the stairs. There was no other noise. Murdo edged his way downward. Once his own breath materialised before him, cold and grainy in the light from the lower window. The window’s notch was wholly covered by a glassy drapery of falling water. As Murdo went on into the dark, he heard a flutter that wasn’t flowing water, then touched Rory’s foot, a gritty boot that moved against his hand, in a prolonged spasmodic shiver, as if Rory’s soul still had him by that foot and was shaking him as a dog shakes what it refuses to drop. Murdo’s hand found Rory’s warm ankle, hairy, above his sock, and held it.

  In time the shaking stuttered away into stillness. Then Murdo tried to ease past Rory. But Rory had come to rest wedged with one leg facing down and one up, bent improbably at the hips, his head jammed into a window niche. Rory’s corpse had stopped up the tower stair.

  BILLIE SAT in the downpour at the top of the tower, her back against its broken crown. She was on a small platform, the ultimate step. Below her, far below, was a room floored with bright green moss coating tumbled stones. The rain made the same sound as surf on a shallowly sloping sandy beach, or a great organ pipe that the wind has got into. Through the sound Billie could hear the pinched song of fledgling thrushes in all the nests lining the inside walls of the nave below her. The birds were scolding the rain – or the din of gunfire.

  As her fright left her, Billie began to plan how she might defend herself.
Or rather, her instincts planned, till she felt the drop beside her as a surface, warm and inviting, and lay back against the stone, pliant and defenceless. Her hair lay in a pool beside her, suspended and magnified with rainwater. All the air was water, and Billie was adrift, weightless, and impressed everywhere.

  But it was Murdo Hesketh who emerged from the black well of the tower, carrying his jacket and coat, and the shirt, its bloodied sleeve still tightly knotted at one cuff. He knelt on the step below her and dropped the bundled clothes. Rain had cleared the blood from the broken crust of his injuries, above his temple, and on his shoulder. He leaned on his good arm, inclined over Billie. He told her that she was alive – which she seemed to remember him having told her once before. His hair was soaked. Its ends dribbled water on Billie’s face. She simply stared at him, because she had been waiting for Rory, her body a boat to be flipped, overturned, the drop beside her a warm sea friendly to swimmers and treacherous to those who couldn’t swim.

  Billie asked, ‘Can you swim, Mr Hesketh?’

  He said, ‘I am swimming.’ He touched her arm, her side, her throat, her face. ‘Are you hit?’

  ‘No,’ she said, she was only waiting for Rory Skilling. ‘I could do it again if I had to,’ she explained.

  ‘I need your help,’ Hesketh said.

  ‘Yes.’

  He put his good arm under her shoulders and raised her into a sitting position. He coaxed her out of the rain and back down into the dark. Before they’d quite left the light Billie relieved him of the shirt, unknotted the sleeve, and tried to help him with it.

  ‘I can’t,’ he moaned.