Read an Excerpt
A L I S O N
A li s o n k n eel s b e s i d e th e r a b b it. Its right hind leg is
clamped into the trap and it takes quick, shallow breaths,
heart pumping, lungs expanding and contracting. The
surrounding field is thick with pale tussocks and crispy
heather, the neighbour’s cottage and the road to the village
just beyond the hill. It is early still and Alison is out here in
the cold because last night she dreamt of her mother, who
served her three chanterelles on a dinner plate. In her dream,
the mushrooms glowed, and when her mother—looming like
a cast-iron statue in the centre of a colonised city—opened
her lips to speak, the grotto of her mouth glowed also, her
tongue orange and bulbous and radiating light. When Alison
woke at dawn, she rose and went out to search the woods. She
found no mushrooms, but she did find this, the rabbit. She
applies pressure to the levers of the trap until the steel jaws
open and the rabbit’s mangled leg is freed. A hissing sound
escapes its mouth as she presses her palm to its throat. She
does not speak to it or soothe it with soft, maternal clucks. It
stares up at her, eyes pink as tourmaline, but doesn’t struggle
until she presses down with the same swift motion she uses
when cracking Patrick’s back on the bedroom floor when he
comes to her, weary and tense after a long day hunched over
piano keys.
She gathers the rabbit by its back legs and rises. The joints in
her own legs are stiff and she rolls each ankle. Usually, it feels
good to walk, early and in the spring, when it’s no longer cold
enough to preserve a corpse, but she is too warm in Patrick’s
shearling coat and sweat dampens her chest. Though home
is only a short walk past the woods and the stables, she’s hit
with the inexplicable fear she has strayed too far and won’t be
able to find her way back again. The illogical ache of home-
sickness, of feeling far from where she is safe. She closes her
eyes and imagines herself suspended in a bubble of liquid,
gummy and unthinking as a jellyfish. She tries to leave her
body and hover above the feeling world, but her brain is hot
and swollen, its weight gluing her to the earth. When she
opens her eyes to find she’s still earth-bound, a gush of vinegar
surges up her throat and she leans over to be sick. She hasn’t
eaten breakfast and a viscous puddle coats the rocks at her feet.
Forty-eight years old and pregnant for the first time. For her
entire life she’s been nothing but careless and until last week,
when the test she ordered arrived in the post, assumed she’d
been blessed with sterility. The baby is a girl, she can feel it.
Not that it matters. She’s not going to keep it.
Alison brushes hair from her eyes. With the rabbit knocking
against her calf she tramps through the brambles, the wild
thistle, the velvet grass towards home, where Patrick will be
waking up, wondering where she’s gone.
They live outside a small village north of Edinburgh, Patrick
and Alison and, as of two months ago, Patrick’s daughter,
Neve, who is on a gap year after graduating high school last
November. Alison bought the house for her mother, Frances,
almost ten years ago now. It is solid, grey stone, three storeys
high and severe. Even with the heating on, it’s always cold
inside; the geriatric parts rubbing up against each other sound
like the breathing of something ancient. Yet for all that, it’s
not so grim. In the summer, raspberries burst from ragged
bushes in the garden, dense and sweet. The landscape is lush
and crisscrossed with trails. (Sometimes, a pair of enthusiastic
walkers will wander off path, trudge down the hill with their
hiking poles and ergonomically designed backpacks. Alison
does not enjoy small talk with strangers—or with anyone,
really—but if Patrick is around he greets them warmly and
nudges them in the right direction, recommends the better
pub in the village while waving off occasional looks of recog-
nition.) They own a very impressive car but only Patrick drives
it. Both their appetites are enormous and they eat and drink
constantly and with gusto. Because he is the better chef, Patrick
does most of the cooking, but once a week or so he’ll go into
town and return with a parcel of fish and chips and a tray
of oysters. If they don’t keep track of the days he’ll go on
a Monday by mistake and return with a curry because the
chippery is closed, which is fine, Alison thinks, but not as
nice. Her irritation is as gentle as a gland swelling, retreating.
She hasn’t felt real anger in years.
After crossing the driveway lined with pines, she cuts
through the garden. The grass is getting long and scratches
at her ankles. She makes a mental note to remind Patrick to
call the gardener. Patrick is a useful person and takes care of
all things practical, almost like a housekeeper, but one she is
extremely attached to and does not pay a wage. She descends
the steep set of steps, enters the house through the side entrance
that opens to the kitchen. She scrapes the peat from her boots
on the doormat and forces the stiff door shut behind her.
The sky is breaking, dusty light filtering through the higher
windows and spotlighting the table. Patrick and Neve sit at
opposite ends. Patrick is slathering blue jam on toast, and
there’s a plate of scrambled eggs in front of Neve. They wear
the matching tartan dressing-gowns Patrick bought Neve as a
welcome gift when she arrived from Sydney at the beginning
of February. They are hideous and Alison has been meaning to
steal both from the laundry and set them alight.
She strides towards the deep copper sink. The mammal smell
of musk and urine is beginning to ripen, but now that she’s
home her stomach has settled. She slaps the carcass down on
the benchtop and turns to Neve. ‘Does your mother like rabbit?’
Neve looks up from her eggs. An ellipsis of pimples dot the
crease in her chin and the colourless tangle of hair is bird-nested
atop her head. Like her father, she is tall. With her dressing-
gown and bad posture she gives off an air of malnourishment
and resembles a shrivelling pensioner, like Patrick perhaps will
in twenty years. ‘Did you kill that?’ she asks. Her expression
is characteristically inscrutable and Alison can’t tell if she’s
revolted by the rabbit or deeply uninterested.
‘No,’ she replies. ‘It was caught in one of Gareth’s fox traps.
Already dead.’ She flips over its body and stretches out its
limbs. ‘Patrick can make a stew for tomorrow night, when
your mother arrives. Something nice and stodgy.’
‘Mum doesn’t eat meat,’ Neve says. She fiddles with her
phone, places it screen down on the table. The case has rubbery
cat ears protruding from the top and its bulging, panicked
eyes watch Alison from across the room.
Patrick snorts. ‘Since when?’
‘Since forever.’
Alison watches Neve take in the rabbit. According to Patrick
she’s a genius, but Alison is yet to see any evidence of that.
Twice a week she cycles to her part-time job at Gareth’s cafe in
the village, returns with stale bread and pastries. She constantly
burns coffee grounds and sheds her hair throughout the house
like a husky. As a teenager herself, Alison had no interest in
teenage girls. She still has no interest in teenage girls, but that
cannot be helped.
‘I can take you hunting, if you like?’ Alison says to Neve,
because yesterday Patrick had again reminded her to make
an effort to bond.
Neve shakes her head. ‘I could never kill an animal.’
Alison shrugs out of Patrick’s coat and slings it over the
back of a chair. ‘But you eat meat?’
‘Eating an animal is different from killing it.’
Patrick interrupts. ‘Neve’s a Buddhist.’
Neve sighs. ‘I’m not a Buddhist,’ she says. ‘I’m not anything.’
‘If you insist.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Did you know Alison’s a pagan?’ he asks Neve. ‘She
descended from druids. That’s why she’s so . . .’ He magics his
fingers in the air, trying to snatch up the right word. ‘Esoteric.’
‘I’m not a pagan,’ Alison says, opening the refrigerator.
‘And I descended from gamblers and drunks.’ She picks
through the top shelf: thick wheels of soft, pungent cheeses,
a container of shaved ham, a depressed loaf of brown bread.
Craving something sweet, she takes out the rhubarb she stewed
last week.
‘Remind me to go shopping on the way back from the
airport tomorrow, both of you,’ Patrick says. ‘The menu’s
confirmed with the caterers for the party, but we’ll want
champagne as well as wine, obviously. A proper feast.
‘We can just go out to eat or something,’ Neve says. ‘It
doesn’t have to be a big deal.’
‘It’s already planned, Neve,’ Alison says, opening the
container and spooning up a mouthful. ‘Your mother is
expecting a party. And Gareth’s boy. What’s he calling himself
now? Estrogen? Epigraph?’
‘Elixir.’
‘It’s your eighteenth birthday,’ Patrick adds, clinking his
mug of green tea against Neve’s coffee. ‘We want to celebrate
properly, your mother and I. And Alison.’ He glances her way,
raises his eyebrows. ‘Think of it as your official welcome party.’
‘Five people isn’t a party,’ Neve says.
‘An intimate soiree then. Much more sophisticated.’
Neve picks up a crust. ‘I just don’t want you to go to any
trouble.’
‘It’s not about you,’ Patrick teases. ‘We haven’t let loose
in ages.’
Alison picks up Patrick’s coat from the back of the chair,
bats off the grass and rabbit fur. ‘You’re right, Patrick. I’ve
never understood why we insist on making birthdays all about
the child.’ She gives the coat a final shake and hooks it to the
back of the door. ‘The mother is the one who goes through
the agony of childbirth, yet it’s she who has to buy the gifts
and organise the celebration and bake a cake. We should be
throwing Shannon a party.
Neve slumps further in her chair. The sleeves of her dressing-
gown are long and she flaps them in front of her face in
exasperation. ‘You don’t have to bake me a cake.’
‘Of course there’ll be cake,’ Alison says.
‘Just as long as there’s drink and dancing,’ says Patrick,
draining the dregs of his tea.
‘No dancing,’ Neve says.
‘If there’s Shannon, there’ll be dancing.’
‘I don’t even know why Mum’s bothering,’ Neve says. ‘It’s
only been a couple of months.’
‘She’s your mother, Neve,’ says Patrick. ‘She misses you.’
Neve shrugs. There’s a scatter of crumbs on the table and
she gathers them into a small, neat pile with her fingertip. As
Alison spoons rhubarb onto Patrick’s plate, Neve points to her
hand and grimaces. ‘You’re bleeding.’
There’s a red smear across two of Alison’s knuckles, puffy
with arthritis. She glances back at the rabbit lumped on the
bench. Other than a broken neck and leg, its body is plump
and immaculate. As Alison moves towards the sink, she is
aware of Neve watching her. There’s something penetrating
about her gaze, as though she’s lapping Alison up. Alison
hasn’t told Patrick how uncomfortable Neve makes her feel,
always watching, staring; that it’s not been easy to have her
here, and she is self-conscious now of the way her body smells
after the strenuous walk, the faint smell of rancid food scum
wafting up from deep in the sink. They used to have a cleaner
come once a week, a pretty girl Patrick found from the village,
but she fell ill and they haven’t got around to replacing her.
Alison looks towards the window. The top of the earth is level
with her eye line. Though the ceiling is high and the furni-
ture spare, it feels cramped with too many morning bodies,
unwashed, cruddy with sleep. Patrick’s cough is hacking, like
a crotchety old man, though he is younger than Alison. She
turns on the tap to wash her hands. The plumbing is ancient
and the pipes inhale. The water is ice. It is a peculiar sort of
agony when her hands go cold and then numb.
