The Cut by Ali MacLeod
Squinting into the darkness, I finally recognised the small, low-roofed cottage of the letting brochure. Silencing the engine after six noisy hours, deleting the radio, window-wipers and headlights, left everything black, blank. I was expecting elation, or even tears, at finally getting here but, tired and numb, I wearily forced myself to just open the door and step out.
It hadn’t occurred to me I’d need a torch. I stumbled over the roots of Scots Pine to the doorstep, fumbled under the mat for the huge, cast iron key. As it turned in the lock, I couldn’t tell whether the rusty, scraping came from within or without, perhaps both. Age-worn grooves in the heavy wooden door teased my fingers after hours gripping the smooth plastic steering wheel. There was no power, no heat, no furniture, but this unknown cottage, dark and damp under the overhanging conifers of Cardrona Forest, was as beautiful as I could have wished it; silent, anonymous and empty.
Earlier that morning, whilst my street was sleeping, I had locked our weather-beaten front door behind me and slipped out of the wet, redbrick, English city. From nine years of friendships, lovers, good and bad days, weeks and months, I drove silently away. There was nothing more to be said.
Now, at the end of that day, after a relatively short journey that, by January 1995, had taken five years to complete, I stare out of the leaded glass window to the black woods beyond. Blocking the view, in my overly tired reflection, the grey faces of my mother and grandmother stare back. As young wives we have all made this same journey. Three generations of women, all drawn to Scotland because of love, none listening to the other about how hard it would be. My mother and grandmother ran, unthinking, towards love; but my journey has been a much thought out running away.
The electrifying buzz of initial escape had tempered into dreamy autopilot as I passed Wigan, Blackpool, Lancaster and Carlisle. At each milestone, heart inflating, lungs relaxing, opening fully for the first time since his death, so incredulous but so crushing I’d held onto that first heart-stopping intake of breath for years. I’d become a meticulous museum curator for the home we shared, obsessively preserving his last traces; the stain on the stair carpet where he spilt a late night Guinness, messages scribbled on old envelopes, plectrums and used guitar strings, his shoes at the front door, moulded by feet that, after five years, showed he was still here, holding me close, but holding me.
Choosing what would ‘make the cut’ slashed too deeply, how could I choose between one memory and another. His shabby painting shirt was no less tender for me than a love-letter. Today our house’s new owners will have moved in, delighted by the furniture, crockery and curtains all included in the sale, bemused by the left-behind clothes, photographs, half-read books and that strange pair of shoes in the hall.
I lie on the bare floorboards in this freezing, dark cottage, so damp all smell of previous human life has muted; no possessions, no memories, no ghosts. I pull his jumper and sleeping-bag up around my head, parts of him I’ve lovingly invited into my house, no longer constant tiny heartbreaks of the fabric of our home together, and sleep more deeply, and peacefully, than I have in years.
