Swansong
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
Copyright
ABOUT THE BOOK
In this stunningly assured, immersive and vividly atmospheric first novel, a young woman comes face-to-face with the volatile, haunted wilderness of the Scottish Highlands.
Polly Vaughan is trying to escape the ravaging guilt of a disturbing incident in London by heading north to the Scottish Highlands. As soon as she arrives, this spirited, funny, alert young woman goes looking for drink, drugs and sex – finding them all quickly, and unsatisfactorily, with the barman in the only pub. She also finds a fresh kind of fear, alone in this eerie, myth-drenched landscape. Increasingly prone to visions or visitations – floating white shapes in the waters of the loch or in the woods – she is terrified and fascinated by a man she came across in the forest on her first evening, apparently tearing apart a bird. Who is this strange loner? And what is his sinister secret?
Kerry Andrew is a fresh new voice in British fiction; one that comes from a deep understanding of the folk songs, mythologies and oral traditions of these islands. Her powerful metaphoric language gives Swansong a charged, hallucinatory quality that is unique, uncanny and deeply disquieting.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kerry Andrew is a London-based composer, performer, and author. She has won four British Composer Awards and is best known for her experimental vocal, choral and music-theatre work, often based around themes of community, landscape and myth. She has released two albums with her band You Are Wolf: Hawk to the Hunting Gone (2014), a collection of avian folk-songs re-interpreted, and Keld (2018), inspired by freshwater folklore. She made her short story debut on BBC Radio 4 in 2014 and she was shortlisted for the 2018 BBC National Short Story Award. She is currently working on her second novel.
For my little brother, Daniel
Come all you young fellows
That handle a gun
Beware of night rambling
By the setting of the sun
1
My breath is the loudest thing. And a thundering in my ears like a war drum.
On the evenings when rain and sun are tangled up together, I relive it. As if it were the first time.
The thundering is my bones, thumping either side of me, arcing strangely. The ground bumps and blurs and the sea-loch tilts, slipping away far below. My tongue curls in on itself and there’s that strange cry, brassy and elastic. It is mine. Me.
I am a girl, and I am flying.
Then, as always, a fisting blow. The pain in my breast. The ground see-saws.
Heat and sorrow and blood.
My heart, made metal.
I will always be a girl, flying.
A bird had been hit. The tarmac was pale and furry.
More roadkill. On the way here we had driven past rabbits in various states of squishiness, two foxes, and a badger – huddled up as if just having a kerbside snooze, except I’d looked back and seen the great marbled gash in its head. No corpse this time though, just an explosion of feathers, like the road had coughed them up. I took one, tawny and black-striped.
There was a jeep awkwardly parked on the verge up ahead. No one was in it but the lights were still on, and when I lifted one headphone off I could hear the engine’s sleepy, constant growl. Maybe the bird had done the driver in, landing one for the wildlife team. Cut to badgers and otters cheering, waving flags. I walked around to the side of the jeep and my heart belted me in the throat.
A man in a puffer jacket, sitting on a tree stump. A mass of feathers in his hands, and in the feathers something bright pink and purple and glistening. It was turned upside down, wings hanging outwards. Fluffy legs. The speckled head was tipped back, small black beak open, near-orgasmic. Red eyelid, pillar-box red. His hands were stained red.
He was – taking it apart.
I jerked back and almost fell, putting a palm out onto the bonnet. ‘Sorry.’
His mouth moved a little and I turned and walked away very quickly, my music raging in my ears, waiting for bloody fingers to encircle my neck. Don’t look scared. Don’t run.
My breathing didn’t return to normal until I shut the front door. All the way back to the house, I had waited for the jeep to cruise by and stop just ahead of me, was planning my made-up ju-jitsu moves and wishing I had pepper spray, but not a single car had passed. I sat very close to Lottie for an hour in front of the TV, Tyger on my lap. Mother–dog panic aversion therapy.
His thumbs had been in the bird. I’d seen bone, sticking out, and blood and maybe an intestine. God. Had he hit the bird on purpose? If I’d come by a minute later would he have been chewing on its liver? The man’s eyes had been wild, tar-coloured. It was as if all of him had been drawn with a heavy pencil lead – hair, beard, the movement he’d made when he saw me.
Lottie, her eyes on the screen, murmured something about apprentices and power heels.
The feather was still in my closed palm. I kept seeing the bright red swipe above the bird’s eye. Horror Movie Red. The wings, questioning fingers. A black tail like a broken fan, lots of it smashed into the road.
This place was not right. This place was dark.
Dead. Not dead. I stood at the window, fingering the feather in my pocket.
Rain again. Our first proper day on the west coast, further north than I’d ever been or ever cared to go, before, and it had done nothing but rain like a bastard. Scratching itself with a penknife onto the glass, idle but insistent. Slipping among the layers of the tune I was listening to, making loads of little extra hi-hats, filigree beats. Getting into my brain, folding in with the words.
Dead.
I ran my nails along the edge of the feather.
Not dead.
And back the other way, the fronds separating, little gaps between them like the one in my teeth.
I’d come here to get away from the dark. From the thin, serrated line of fear I felt when I swallowed. From the words, hurling themselves round and round my skull like bumper cars.
He might be dead. He might not be dead.
‘Polly?’
I turned from the window and took a headphone off.
‘I said, did you want some tea?’
‘Yeah. Thanks.’
I’d only gone into London because Stef had insisted that he would make everything better. Come be my hag, u lil deadbeat. ILL RESCUE U. Everything had gone wrong. A cascade of mini fuck-ups falling like dominoes behind me. Fuck-up One: my brain going into meltdown and me becoming the worst student in the year, maybe in the whole English department. Fuck-up Two: finding distraction in the valiantly jerking crotches of a few boys, including my housemate’s boyfriend. Fuck-up Three: moving back home early following housemate shitstorm, but still paying rent on my empty room. And then Fuck-up Four: running to Stef, my real friend, and doing the thing that made all previous fuck-ups seem like something on CBeebies.
We’d gone dancing in Dalston, me wearing Stef’s pork-pie hat and totally surrounded by gayboys, and Stef, with one of his classic, chipped-diamond smiles, had picked up this Spanish boy. He was cute, in a high street, touristy sort of way. Earnest head-nodding and peering at the coins in his cupped palm at the bar. A total drugs virgin – as far as we could make out with his Catalan and our half-arsed Spanglish with French bits mixed in – something we both found completely hilarious before force-feeding him an E.
We hardly prised his jaw open, but there was a hefty dose of cajoling. And faux-whimpering. And acting out that he was a wuss with street entertainer-quality mime. The night was hard and bright and brilliant until he had an epileptic fit at the bus stop. He went jump-cutty, like frames of him were being missed out. And we ran away. Just freaked and legged it, with him juddering there on the pavement, his head next to a load of scattered bits of fried chicken. We ran. Left him.
The next day, sober and pale, we’d gone back to scraps of chicken and a strange, sulphuric smell. And, right beside the overflowing bin, the ‘I heart London’ badge that had been pinned to his bag the night before.
On the train south, I’d held an Evening Standard on my knees, unbelieving and hollow, looking at the compact report of a man in his early twenties who had been taken to hospital in East London and was fighting for his life after being found alone on the street. I hadn’t told Stef. And we hadn’t talked since.
I put my forehead on the conservatory window and felt for the feather again. He was dead. Or he was not dead. If he was dead, we had killed him. I had killed him.
And now I was here. Where everything was greener and greyer. The fag-end of nowhere. Not much evidence of the new fighting spirit, you know, Scotland for the Scottish, Labour out on their arses. The sky looked smeary, as if someone had wet a tissue, wiped at it and just made it ten times worse. Who the hell could live here, miles from anywhere? Yodellers. Meditation experts. People wanting to practise their thousand-yard stares. I sat down and dug my toes underneath Tyger. He shifted and slumped his head onto my foot.
Lottie brought a tray in, spoons and milk and sugar as though we were in a Georgian salon and not a conservatory infested with wicker. My mug had a cartoon lipsticked fish on it and the words ‘Master Baiter’.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time. The only solution. The further away I was, the less I’d have to think about it. Initially, I’d said no thanks to Lottie, but after two days of shitting myself, taking the train a few stops into town to get the free paper and speed-reading it with a lump like a gimp’s ball gag in my throat, I changed my mind. Green, grey escape route. Quick getaway. Lottie hugged me hard in the kitchen at home and said that we were going to have a real catch-up, quality time together, a laugh.
I had stood alone on the deck of the five-minute ferry to the bit of mainland just over the water, looking at the little gobs of spit flecked on the loch, wanting to add my own, feeling us pull further and further away from humanity. You couldn’t believe that anything was beyond that line of hills, just an aching void of mizzling sky. Everything had gone soft focus. Well, no one would ever be able to find me up here. I was being swallowed up.
Lottie sat down, sighing too loudly, her smile too wide. When I didn’t give her one back, the laughter lines were chased away underneath her chin and up to her ears. She raised her eyebrows at me instead and tipped her head on one side. I shifted my headphone off again.
‘You’re not going to be like this the whole time, are you?’
I shook my head and picked up the milk jug.
Dead. Not dead.
The cottage was owned by someone that Bev and Adam, her old London friends, knew. He was away for a couple of months in South America catching really big fish and comparing them to the length of his dick, probably. Tucked away off the village road – you could just see the roof from the driveway gate, AN EALA BHÀN written in blue paint on the paddle of an oar at the top – it had been pressed deep into the ground with a giant thumb, bending sopping pines and tropical-looking palms down towards it. Everything was wet and spongy. You could probably leave an imprint the depth of your calf in the grass.
My room was at the far end of the house. Baby-pink flower noodlings on the bedding, NHS-tight. A shiny chest of drawers in the corner, a mirror with a studded frame on top. And a white orchid with black-green, rubbery leaves on a small table between the twin beds. All it needed was a crucifix on the wall and my get-thee-to-a-nunneryness would be complete.
A single window faced the garden, full of ferns and plants that looked like they were dancing at a rave – arms up, ecstatic. You could just see a dark corner of the loch behind the branches at the edge of the lawn, past the bleak misery-memoir sky.
The guy who lived here seemed to be into angling, big, fuck-off mountains and pints that made him red-faced and greasy-looking. His interior design skills were seriously lacking. The living room was a disaster of clashing colours – salmon-pink sofas, tangerine rug and blood-coloured shagpile. There was an exposed stone wall, a tiny telly up on a bracket, and a cabinet full of mismatched glasses and retro cameras. The bathroom had an impressive patch of mould in the top corner. The outside slowly working its way in.
The small study next to my room was probably meant to be private. It smelled woody and a bit like fermenting apples. There was a desk, a beaten-up leather chair and more overexposed photos of the owner with his arms wrapped round massive, spent fish and a dirty grin on his face. The night before I had slid open the top drawer. Fountain pen, collected business cards and a tin of Mint Imperials, which rustled softly when I shook it.
Angling, mountains, pints – and weed. Loads of lovely weed. I decided that this guy wasn’t so bad after all and slotted the tin into my back pocket for a rainy day. Which, conveniently, was every day.
We got a drink in before the imminent welcome party dive-bombing by Bev and Adam. The hotel was a mile away, at the near end of the village, some little boats docked low in the loch beside it.
So this was going to be my den of iniquity. More pine panelling than you could shake a stick at, a log fire, swords on the wall, and a carpet that looked as though it had once been the kilt of some giant Highland man with thighs you couldn’t get both your hands round.
I worked out my Sex Order as we took a table in the corner. Sex Order had always been Stef’s game. Wherever we were – pub, gig, tube carriage, school playground back in the day – we’d chart all the guys, deciding that if you had to sleep with all of them, no vetoes, who’d be your first choice all the way down to the last, the ickiness factor getting higher. I’d be incredulous at some of the men that Stef would have at the top of his list. Thick necks, black fingernails, workboots, guys with uneasy smiles and hair sticking out of their collars.