Love is Hell Read online

  “How about you?” I asked, wiping my hands on my skirt. “Do you—”

  Someone coughed. I looked up and had to hide my groan. Instead of Robbie it was Sholto McPherson: the boy most likely to annoy. He thinks because he’s tall with blond hair, blue eyes, and clear skin every girl in the world is in love with him. Maybe some are, but not for long—half a conversation is enough to fall out of love.

  “Where’s your garland?” he asked.

  “My what?” I asked, pulling my skirt down to hide it and hoping he would take the hint and go away. Fi giggled.

  “If we’re gunna handfast, we have to swap garlands first.”

  “We’re not going to handfast.”

  “You what?”

  “I don’t want to handfast with you, Sholto. Not interested.”

  Sholto stared as if I was suddenly speaking the language of the cows. We’d gone through school together (until I had to leave), and in all that time I’d never said a kind word to him. He was a bully—conceited, mean, and without any sense of humour.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t like you, Sholto. Never have.” You are no Robbie, I thought.

  “Well,” he said, clearly wondering if the fairy folk had possessed me. Sholto doesn’t believe there’s any girl who doesn’t want him.

  “Not even if you were a tourist. And richer than the queen.”

  “But—”

  “Not if it was handfast with you or die.” I grinned at Fiona. I was almost disappointed when he shook his head and told me I was possessed.

  “You’re not right,” he said, walking away. Halfway down the hill, he stopped and asked a girl I didn’t recognise.

  She must have been from one of the other villages, but she seemed to know enough not to say yes.

  Fi laughed and pinched my arm. “Well done.”

  “He’s an idiot.”

  “He is. Oh, look. There’s Sholto’s brother, Charlie.”

  “What’s he doing here?” I asked.

  “His dad says he’ll kill him if he doesn’t find a girl soon,” Fiona said.

  “But he doesn’t like girls.”

  “Do you think his father will take that for an answer?”

  I didn’t. No more than my parents would let me go back to school. “Poor Charlie.”

  Fiona nodded. “Poor Charlie.”

  “So are you planning on ’fasting with someone?” I asked to tease her. Fi smiled. “I’m just here to watch. Like always. Can you imagine what my parents would do?”

  Fiona’s parents weren’t like mine. They had a car and a radio—and a television. When I was little, I used to sneak over to watch it sometimes. Stories of girls living lives nothing like mine. It was the first time I saw what a doctor was and that I could grow up to be one. Or I could if I’d been born somewhere else to different parents. Fiona’s parents wanted her to go to university in the city where her mum’s parents lived. They thought fifteen was too young for handfasting or marriage. And sixteen and seventeen and eighteen, too. Her dad had grown up in the village, but he’d gone away and come back with a wife and plans to bring more tourists and all sorts of beliefs that did not match my parents’.

  There were others like them who just pretended to be quaint for the tourist money. They liked the surface of the old ways, not their guts. Unlike my parents, folks like Fiona’s family didn’t believe in fairies or in girls being married before they were old enough to know what they wanted out of life.

  But there weren’t enough of them; my parents’ way was still the majority way. It was changing, but not quick enough for me.

  “You’re lucky,” I told her.

  Fiona didn’t say anything. What could she say? She knew it.

  “My garland’s drooping.” I pulled it out from under my skirt and dropped it in her lap.

  “It is. Does this mean you’re here to handfast?” Her voice wobbled, as if she was trying to sound happy for me when really she was sad. I wished Robbie would hurry up. Fiona was afraid of me becoming a child bride.

  Lots of the tourists look at us like that. Once one of them asked me how I could stand it. I told her lies about how happy I was and how wonderful and fitting and pure and traditional our ways were and how I didn’t want any other life. That tourist girl had short hair. No heavy cord of plait down past her arse. She wasn’t wrapped in too long skirts and scratchy shirts. I’d wanted to hit her. Or find a way to steal her life.

  And now Fiona was looking at me the same way that tourist had. She felt sorry for me. Where was Robbie? He didn’t feel sorry for me.

  “I might handfast,” I said and then when Fi’s face twisted, “I might not.”

  “Shall we make another garland then?” she asked.

  “There are enough daisies about.”

  “How long have you got?”

  “Till dinner,” Fiona said, meaning noon. “And after that, I said I’d help with the shop. You can come if you like. I’ve got a whole stack of new magazines.”

  “Sounds nice,” I said.

  We plucked all the daisies around us and then dug our nails through the stems, making a chain. The juice from the stems stained our fingers and gave them that slightly sticky, sweet smell of summer.

  “It’s not as bad as you think it is,” I told her, thinking of Robbie with his dark skin and green eyes, wishing he would come.

  “No,” Fiona murmured, plucking and threading daisies.

  But it was too late. The gulf that had opened up between us when I’d left school and she hadn’t, well, I could feel it grow bigger with every flower added to our chains. Fiona packed away her pickles and knife and said goodbye long before noon. I watched her go, and then the bustling and toing and froing of the villagers, the handfasters, the tourists.

  But where was Robbie? I turned back to the daisies, plucking and threading them together. The chains piled up beside me.

  Had he been teasing me last night? But it hadn’t seemed that way. Had I wasted this chance to escape? I was just the smallest fraction away from despair when a voice startled me.

  “That’s a lot of daisy chains.”

  “It is,” I said, looking up. His eyes were so green. “I’m going for the world record. How many do you reckon I’ve got?”

  “I couldn’t guess—a girl as nimble as you could make a dozen while I stand blinking the sun from my eyes.”

  “Is that so? A dozen a second? Then I don’t have nearly enough. I’ve been here all morning.”

  Robbie sat down beside me. I looked at him sideways, not meeting his eyes. His fiddle was slung across his back and his curly black hair was tied back with a piece of leather. I could feel how close he was to me, almost smell his sweat.

  “Sitting idle playing with flowers. How many days are there like these?” he asked. I couldn’t tell if he was looking at me. I was bent over daisy-chaining, piercing and threading.

  “Oh, not nearly enough. And this one’s more than half gone. Tomorrow it’s back to the bakery.” Air exploded out of me in a sigh. Was he going to ask me or not?

  “It’s not so bad, is it?” He picked up a handful of daisy chains and told off the flowers one by one as if they were rosary beads.

  I didn’t know how to answer. “I don’t like it,” I said, because it was as mild as I could be. Not the bakery, not this village, not this life. I wanted to be elsewhere. Learning, living, growing. Not covered in flour and making quaint to tourists.

  “I love it here.” He said it softly and—I glanced to check—he was still smiling, but the words made my heart slip a little. I’d hoped he was as desperate to get away as me.

  “Really? But they’re all so . . .” Most of the village shunned him, said his green eyes were too like the fairy folk. Never mind that half the village has green eyes. In some lights, mine are green, too.

  He shrugged, then turned to me just as I looked up.

  There. Him looking at me; me looking at him.

  I held my breath. He was going to ask me.
>
  He didn’t look away. I noticed the bumps on his nose.

  It must have been broken once. More than once. There was a scar, too, below his left eye. I’d never looked at him so close before. I let my breath out. “And where were you, Master Robbie? I’ve waited an age!”

  He laughed. “Building a house.”

  Now I laughed. “You never!”

  “We have to live somewhere. The mill is crowded.”

  He leaned a little closer. There was a light film of sweat above his upper lip. “I’m glad last night was real. I was afraid I’d dreamed it. Even though I never slept.”

  “Not a dream.” I was the first to look away, down at my hands stained green from the daisies.

  “I like how pale your skin is. Even your freckles are light.” Robbie put the mess of flowers down and reached for my hand. “Will you ’fast with me?”

  The words that had circled my ears and my heart all that day were said. I looked up at his eyes, green and sharp as jealousy, and I couldn’t think of anything but him. He leaned toward me and our mouths touched and our arms twined. The feeling of him, the smell, the taste; I thought I would explode.

  I never said yes out loud, but we went hand in fist, and that evening found him with me at my family’s hearth, and cloth binding our hands, and our year together had begun. Neither my mother nor my father nor Angus nor Fergus nor their brides smiled. Their faces were like stone. But they didn’t stop us.

  Here’s what was said about Robbie in the village: They said he was a fine, fine musician. And that was true.

  When he played, the whole set of his face altered and the look of his eyes was from another country. Somewhere far from here. We have some of the best fiddlers in the land, but not like Robbie, not like him at all. It was almost as if his soul were in his fingers when he played.

  Impossible not to cry when he played the ballads; impossible not to dance for his jigs. He was the finest I ever heard.

  Too fine, they said.

  They muttered that he only cut his nails on Sundays.

  Old Nick that made him and surely, they said, that’s where the skill in his fingers comes from. And who ever saw eyes that green in someone with skin that dark? They said that we would never last. Not even a year.

  Our first night together was difficult. It wasn’t that the house he built was unfinished. In twelve hours he’d built a hut with a roof, four walls, a floor, and gaps for windows and a door. Even a rough fireplace. I wondered if the fairy folk had helped. Even the mattress wasn’t any worse than what I was used to.

  It wasn’t the house; it was babies.

  I didn’t want any.

  We’d come through the doorway kissing. My mouth on his; tongue and lips and teeth. I could feel the hotness of it—of him, of us—in waves through my sympathetic nervous system. My hands were on his shirt, feeling the outline of his back, and then his shirt was gone and I was feeling his skin. He was tugging at my dress, pulling it up, and his hands were on my thighs and the feeling was so intense I let out a noise, and then caught myself, grabbed his wrists.

  “No, Robbie,” I said, forcing the words out.

  He stared at me. “No? But we’re ’fasted.”

  “I know. We are.” I let go of him, sat down on the mattress. There wasn’t anywhere else. No chairs. Just a wooden box with his things in it and a sack with mine. He sat down beside me. Too close.

  Both ventricles were pumping faster than they ever had. I was panting. I wondered if it was always like this.

  Did desire always make your heart burst?

  “I can’t have babies.”

  “You can’t? Really?” He looked at me sadly. “I’ve always wanted children.”

  I took a deep breath. His thigh was against mine. I could feel it through the layers of rough homespun dress and trousers. His shirt was on the floor. “I mean I don’t want to have babies.”

  “Not ever?” He was shocked.

  “Not now. I’m too young. And I don’t want to stay here—”

  “But we’ve just ’fasted! Why did you say yes if you don’t want—”

  “I do want! I do. I want to be with you. We can leave together. I want to go back to school. I want to study hard and do well. I want to go to university in the city. I want to be a doctor.”

  “A doctor?” Robbie said as if I’d just said I wanted to be a mountain.

  “Yes, but if we, you know. And if I . . .” Why was I too embarrassed to say the words

  “pregnant” or “sex”? If I became a doctor, I’d have to say them all the time. I blushed. I could explain physiologically what caused the blush: dilation of the small blood vessels in the face, leading to increased blood flow—but I couldn’t make it stop.

  “You don’t want to go at it because you don’t want to be expecting ’cause that’ll keep you from being a doctor?

  Is that what you’re saying?” He smiled, but it was lopsided. I nodded.

  “You know there are ways—”

  “Yes,” I said, my cheeks still hot. “But they’re not reliable. Or if they are, we can’t get them.” As far as I knew, no one in the village was on the pill. Most of them probably didn’t know such a thing existed. The chemist three villages over and he would not prescribe something he did not believe in.

  “So what are you saying, Jeannie? Are you saying you won’t kiss me?” He leaned forward and put his lips against mine and my heart started pumping hard, left and right ventricles both.

  “Yes,” I breathed, pressing my lips against his. There are more nerve endings in the lips than almost any other part of the human body.

  “Yes, you won’t, or yes you will?”

  “Yes, I’ll kiss you,” I said, kissing his upper lip and then his lower. His mouth opened just a little. I felt his tongue against mine.

  We kissed deeper. His hands were on my face, then in my hair, down my back. I could feel both where they were now and where they’d been.

  “Oh,” I said.

  I’d never felt like this. So heated. So overcome. So wanting. He was pushing the skirt of my dress up.

  “Robbie,” I whispered.

  “Just to touch,” he said. He leaned over and kissed my bare thigh, then looked up at me, grinning. “Can’t plant any seeds with just touching.”

  But it can make you want to.

  All night, we touched, getting close, pushing away, exhausting ourselves. It was past dawn when we finally slept. The next morning Robbie told me that he would wait.

  “I’ll never make you do anything you don’t want.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise,” he said, running his fingers down my cheek. I shivered. “But I can’t promise that I won’t complain about it.” He smiled. “You’re serious? It’s what you want?”

  “To be a doctor. Yes.” I’d never wanted anything else.

  Except for him, and he was a very new want.

  “To leave?”

  “Yes!” I could imagine the freedom of the city. A place where not everyone you met knew where you lived, where you worked, who your parents were, and all your other kin.

  “Well, then I’ll have to come with you,” he said slowly.

  “All I’ve ever wanted is to play my fiddle and find a likely lass. Now I’ve found her. I suppose I can play there as well as I can here.”

  “There’s music in the city, Robbie. Lots of it. But I bet none is as good as yours.”

  He laughed. “How could it be? None of those fiddlers have Old Nick in their back pocket!”

  So at night, we’d hold each other. We’d kiss, we’d touch, we’d twine, but nothing more, no matter how much we wanted to. During the day, Robbie took on more work: thinner than water sold tickets to the tourists, played for them, mended the McKenzies’ fences, the doors of the church, anything he was offered.

  They didn’t let me back in my old class, so no sitting next to Fiona. They stuck me in with kids a year younger than me.

  I didn’t care. I worked harder
than they did. My old teacher started loaning me books again, and this time I didn’t have to hide them. She gave me another copy of Goldstein’s Anatomy & Physiology—the book my ma had taken away. I wasn’t going to lose it twice.

  I was going to graduate. I was going to go to university.

  I didn’t care that in the history of our school only two students had made it to university and neither of them earned a degree. I would be different. Me and Fiona both. Robbie said he’d never met anyone like me. When I talked about university, about the city, he’d just stare as if it was impossible to imagine. Once he said, “And when you’re a doctor, you’ll come back here, won’t you?”

  That was our first fight. I couldn’t understand how he could love this place; he couldn’t understand my hate.

  “They loathe you,” I said. On our way back from church that morning, the Macilduy boys had spat at Robbie’s feet. He walked on as if nothing had happened.

  “Not all of them.”

  “They think you’re one of the fairy folk.”

  “They’re just jealous.”

  “Look what they did to your face,” I said, touching his nose, the scar under his eye. It was a guess, but he flinched. “No one would treat you like that in the city.”

  “You don’t know that,” Robbie said, picking up his fiddle and walking out the door. We did not sit with my family in the kirk. We were not invited to sup with them. It was months before Ma came to visit. She made sure Robbie was out.

  “Look how small your cottage is,” she said, sitting down on the chair Robbie had made. I sat on the mattress.

  “You could have better.”

  “I like it.” Robbie was at work on another chair and a cabinet, too, so we’d have somewhere to put the proper shop-bought plates and cutlery Fiona’s family had given us. They had little “Made in China” stickers on them. I’d never owned anything that came from so far.

  “He’s not good enough for you.”

  “I like him.” Every day I liked Robbie a little bit more.

  He didn’t just make me tingle, he also made me laugh.

  “He’ll beat you.”

  I snorted, then flinched, waiting for her to belt me.

  Then I realised it was my own home; she couldn’t touch me. “It’s not Robbie that’s violent.” I thought of his nose, his cheek.