like we were never even here
Lindsay Johnstone
See in the end, it’ll be like we were never even here, he says from the long end of the L-shaped sofa. It’s an old conversation of theirs, but it hasn’t escaped her attention that it’s been occurring more frequently.
With a blunt bone-handled knife, she’s at the island unit cleaving untidy shards of butter from the pat. An hour in the fridge had been just enough to firm it up. She’s relieved it was her who’d found it first thing, abandoned on the worktop. Left any longer, a slick of yolk-gold oil would have leaked out, left a stain on the wooden surface. Cursing herself, she’d folded the packet in her cupped palm, placed it where it ought to have been, on the cold, glass shelf. She’d licked her fingers clean then dried them – ineffectively – on her bare thigh and held her mouth under the cold tap. Then she made a pot of coffee and waited for him to get up and join her in the kitchen.
She’s been struggling with sleep recently, which could be explained by perimenopause or by the state of things generally or by the weather. Most likely, it’s a combination of the three. The bedrooms in their rented cottage are in the eaves. Even with all the window stays levered open on their widest holes, there’s little that can be done with the day’s heat. The way it rises and intensifies and lingers all through the night. Downstairs isn’t much better.
Get this. Entire South American civilisations, he says, paraphrasing from the book she’s yet to get to, were eventually uncovered by archaeologists who’d been told they were completely made up. It’s absolutely mental.
She makes the right noises, quietly confident that archaeologists of the future won’t have quite the same trouble confirming the existence of today’s civilisation. Checking and finding him reading again, she presses butter shavings onto the flat side of a rough oatcake and bites into it. Suddenly, she is thinking of that dense and treacly loaf cake the Canadian girl agreed to sell her, unsliced and heavily-clingfilmed, during the lockdowns. The girl told her customers to serve it traditionally, the way her Dutch grandmother had, slathered in soft butter so thick your teeth left marks in it. Tandsmør, it was called: “teeth butter”. The children were taken with this and so she served them thick slices as a reward for doing their maths or language work. When he saw what she was giving them at snack time, he told her that using food as a reward was a hiding to nothing. She reassured him there would be plenty of time after to undo those associations.
Before the first oatcake’s finished, she’s lining another one up on the cellophane. Then another. Once they’re opened, these kinds of packets don’t keep, especially when it’s like this.
The wildfires have been frequent and widespread in the Highlands this summer and though she told herself years back she’d start to properly panic about climate breakdown when this happened, she finds she’s been calm. The worst of them was contained just before they arrived, though there might yet be more. There’s no saying how she’ll react then. She should have a think about that. She only saw how her anxiety about air pollution had rubbed off on the children that time on the school run. Wee soul, she said turning to the younger one once they were all on the pavement, you know you don’t have to hold your breath when you cross the road? She had a hard job that morning, and over the following days, convincing her daughter it was fine to breathe normally. Her wee girl now wasn’t so wee and likely wouldn’t remember any of that. Those small hands with their grubby nails and sticky-on tattoos. Those big eyes, questioning and trusting, as rush hour trucks and buses thundered past them as usual.
Yesterday, she picked her way along the shadiest route to the nicer of the two village shops looking for a light, easy supper. As the holiday-makers in front took their time at the deli counter, the shopkeeper with the southern accent told them about the relentless yellowy-brown peat smoke that had interrupted barbeques and picnics across the area for days. How when the wind finally changed, his wife could at least get her washing back out, so that was something. Bread, crisps, scones, oatcakes. None of it was what she’d gone in for but, along with everything else, it was what she left with. By the time she got back, her t-shirt soaked through, everyone was starving. She waited for comments about how long she’d been, how much she’d bought, but they didn’t come. What had they been doing while she was out, she asked her daughters. Basketball, trampoline. Dad had a nap, the younger one said.
The days are slow to get going and, this morning, the children are still in bed. Perhaps they’re scrolling or are finally in the kind of sleep the heat has been keeping from them. Either way, she doesn’t mind. She takes a sip of her coffee, remembering warm drinks in hot weather are meant to help. She plucks yellowing leaves from the potted geranium, hooks her tongue around the claggy clumps stuck in her molars then sucks them out and swallows them. How sweet they taste, she thinks. Like digestive biscuits, nearly, if not quite cake. Her gaze travels to the small picture window at the far end of the room and out to the bluish hills in the distance.
No sign of smoke this morning, she remarks, as though that’s been the conversation. He glances out the big window through which you can’t see the hills. Nods anyway. She feels a momentary curiosity about the composition of peat. How damp matter underground can dry out so quickly this far north; become hard to control once even just a small fire starts. It’s something she should probably look up, but now she’s just imagining traces of other ancient civilisations sequestered in millions of tonnes of soil going up in flames. Whatever’s buried deep beneath the heather is certainly nothing at all like the illustration on the Judgement card in her tarot deck. Its childlike, subterranean cross-section all bone shapes, whole cups and saucers and green glass bottles. She looks down at the knife she’s been using and wonders if it’s real bone or just plastic that looks like bone. In either case, what’s it going to take for that to break down?
The thing is, all of it’s just storytelling. Civilisation. All our rules. Morals and that, he’s saying, no longer reading from the book. They’re all just made up.
She can see him out of the corner of her eye, higher in his seat, craning his neck. Or is he just stretching? She chooses to imagine he’s lifting his eyebrows at the empty cellophane all opened up like that. Takes it all as his way of telling her again that, things being as they are, they might as well enjoy themselves, but she shouldn’t enjoy herself too much.
She knows at times in her life she’s denied herself pleasure. Cut it off. Shut it down. Told it to stop. As he reaches for his phone to look at something and she watches his face soften in a way she’s no longer used to seeing, she wonders what all that has achieved.
Hmm? she replies in that way she does, though she heard him well enough.
It’s not been her way to have carbs first thing, but she’s all in now. She tosses the caught crumbs back into her waiting mouth and turns the last oatcake over for the gluey top to grab at everything the hand under her chin has missed. It reminds her of last night’s toothpaste, though it’s not the same at all. Her attention elsewhere, she’d been brushing for far longer than usual. Snapped her head up as she felt a warmth pulse out of her slackened mouth. Watched, curious, as she let it dribble down her chin and onto her t-shirt. It was her and not her staring back in the mirror. The toothbrush in the wrong hand; her phone in the one she should have been using. Its screen illuminated in a way that’s not advised so close to bedtime.
I still can’t get over not knowing how it’ll all turn out, she says, pulling the last of the mess into a neat pile with the pinkie edge of her hand ready for the food waste caddy. He doesn’t look up from his phone as he tells her quickly that the sun will collapse in on itself creating a black hole that will consume everything in its orbit. That’s how it will end. It’s not what she meant, and he knows it. Beside her, her own phone vibrates and it could almost be the hot quiet of last night again, her the last one up, forgetting about the butter.
Well in that case, she says, her slick thumb hovering over the fingerprint symbol on the glass.
First published in Issue #33
Lindsay Johnstone is a writer based in Glasgow. She examines the midlife experience in her short stories and narrative non-fiction.