The figure was indistinct but familiar.
‘Ash?’ I said to myself.
I leaned closer to the windscreen and dropped down into second gear.
‘Ash,’ I said again, certain now that it was him, huddled against the downpour.
I came to a halt at the bus stop. I slid down the passenger window, and the noise of the rain and the street rushed into the car.
‘Ash!’ I said loudly to the figure with its back pressed against the Perspex wall of a shelter that was offering scant protection from the rain.
He heard me and ducked down to look into the car, his face wet and wearing a look of puzzlement. He had only ever seen me in the shop. I was a familiar face in unfamiliar surroundings. Then he recognised me.
‘Giselle?’ he said, a question mark in his voice.
‘Get in!’ I ordered.
He pulled open the door and slid into the passenger seat, shaking his head and spattering me with droplets. He brought with him the fresh smell of the outside.
‘Thanks, Giselle,’ he said, drying his face with the palms of his hands.
He turned to me and smiled, and his eyes were shining.
Like June said, both of us were drawn like moths to a flame. It was as if we couldn’t help ourselves.
June: As far as Rab was concerned, it was as if I had never been away.
‘Not interested!’ Rab said. ‘Don’t care what you did when you were away. You’re back and that’s that.’
We were sitting on an ancient, overstuffed sofa in the living room of Rab’s flat. The television was muted and I was trying for the umpteenth time to share with him the stories of my adventures in London. It had been six weeks since I had returned to the crushing ordinariness of life in Kilbirnie. London was a memory, one that I was now painting with a veneer of glamour it probably didn’t deserve. I had become something of a heroine to my circle of friends because I had escaped small-town life, albeit for only a relatively short period. They demanded that I regale them with tales of London life, which I was happy to do, and bask in the reflected glow of their admiration.
Rab, on the other hand, seemed determined to obliterate my brief bid for freedom, ordering me to ‘shut up’ whenever I broached the subject. As far as he was concerned it was as if it had never happened, as if I had never been away. Any lingering sense I had of being special for having escaped the monotony was quickly stifled.
I was here, we were together, and that was an end to it. Nothing and everything had changed since I had been away. Rab had also left Kilbirnie for a little while, travelling to the Highlands, where he worked briefly for the Forestry Commission. He, too, had come home, and with enough money to rent a one-bedroom flat. He had quickly got another job.
Rab was a workhorse; he never shied away from labour, but he was too much of an outdoorsman to be dragged into an office or succeed in business. He had grown up on a farm on the outskirts of Kilbirnie. Like me, he came from a big family. He had four brothers and two sisters. His father, Alexander, was a successful businessman, with many interests locally.
Compared with my upbringing, Rab’s early years appeared to me to have been privileged. While my father walked to work, Rab’s dad drove large, flashy cars. There did not seem to be any lack of money in the family, but, according to Rab, love was in short supply in his home and he claimed his childhood was miserable. His father, he said, had been tough and often brutal, thrashing him regularly with a horsewhip for any and all small acts of disobedience. I could never equate Rab’s description of his father with the jovial man whom I came to know. But as my granny – a woman who loved her homilies – was wont to say, ‘Who knows what goes on behind closed doors?’
Rab also insisted that his mother, Helen, was a cold and unemotional woman. When I met her, I certainly found her to be undemonstrative and not the type to encourage a kiss or a hug. She was by nature reserved, a woman seemingly overly concerned with what ‘outsiders’ thought of her and her family.
I could never be certain if Rab was telling the truth about his early years or whether they were the lies of the ‘black sheep’ of the family. That was certainly Rab’s place in the scheme of things. While his brothers and sisters did well for themselves, Rab was the one who never quite made the grade. His reputation, such as it was, was for being a very hard worker in a series of undemanding outdoor jobs. He had another, less respectable reputation for an explosive temper and a volatile nature. He fought with everyone: his brothers, his so-called friends, strangers in the street, in fact anyone who penetrated his thin emotional defences.
I was now part of Rab’s world, for good or ill. I was sitting in his flat. It was inevitable that I, too, would soon be calling it home. Rab raised the volume on the television, signalling an end to our conversation.
‘Forget this London shite … what about my tea?’
Giselle: Ash was swamping me with his kind of ‘love’.
He asked if I liked the perfume.
‘I’m sure it’s lovely,’ I said, unscrewing the silver top from the clear glass bottle and holding it to my nose. Lemon, orange, mandarin and grapefruit exploded in a citrus burst.
‘It’s lovely,’ I murmured, inhaling the fragrance.
‘It’s Happy,’ said Ash.
‘Happy?’
‘It’s called Happy,’ he said. ‘By Clinique! I saw the name and I thought of you. You make me happy.’
I laughed, caught between pleasure and self-consciousness. To my untrained ear, Ash’s compliments still sounded contrived, but what did I know? This was all new to me, being fussed over by a man. It was the fifth bottle of perfume Ash had bought for me in as many weeks since that night in the rain. The others were in the drawer of my dressing table. Ash and I were still a ‘secret’, even from my mother. Especially from my mother. She would go to town and her teasing would reach epidemic proportions. If she had anything to do with it, my burgeoning relationship would be the talk of the town.
‘I want you to wear it!’ Ash said, taking the bottle out of my hand and spraying perfume in the direction of my neck.
I recoiled instinctively.
‘Don’t you like it?’ he said.
There was urgency in his voice, an edge that hadn’t been there a moment before.
‘Of course I like it,’ I said, pushing away a sudden sense of unease.
He smiled and seemed relieved.
‘You’re sure?’ he said.
‘I’m sure,’ I replied, taking the bottle from him and spraying perfume onto my wrists.
I didn’t particularly like the fragrance. I preferred floral perfumes.
He was looking at me intently. I sprayed more perfume, this time on my neck.
‘See,’ I said. ‘It’s lovely!’
It just seemed easier to please him. He relaxed. I replaced the top on the bottle and slid it into my bag.
‘That smells nice,’ said a new voice. A waiter had materialised at the side of the table.
We were in the dining room of a small hotel on the outskirts of the city. Our relationship had thus far been a series of such assignations. When Ash finished work in the evening, I would be waiting for him in the car, somewhere