Orkney Twilight Read Free Page B

table end, Sam’s two sisters sat cawing raucously, snow-white faces and crow-haired heads rocking. The Coyle girls: three of them born at eighteen-month intervals. Sam looked different from her sisters – a smudgy sandy summer to the clarity of their dark and light icy winter – yet you could tell they shared a bond, unable to move as individuals without creating a ripple across the surface of the whole. And now here they were on the verge of going their separate ways. Helen, the eldest, had been desperate to find an excuse to move out of the family home and had been handed it when she landed a job in some shop in Camden selling post-punk, gothic glad-rags to her nightclubbing friends. She had moved out to a bedsit on the north side of the river that April. Jess was working part-time stacking shelves at Iceland, a job that just about paid enough to keep her bike on the road with a bit left over for a pint with her mates. As for Sam, she had surprised herself and everyone else by passing the Oxford entrance exam the previous autumn. Hadn’t really taken it seriously at the time. Jim had laughed when she had told him she had been accepted, and proudly explained to anyone within earshot that she had managed to pull a fast one on those old farts in their ivory tower, a girl from a comp no less, sneaking her way into the country’s top university. You could tell, he had declared, from which side of the family she had harvested her talents. He was right, she had suspected; she was a fraud, not really cut out for the bright lights, the glittering prizes. A bit of a cowboy when it came to academic endeavour.
    She sat silently, caught up in her own doubts, trapped in the space between competing conversations, on the edge of everything as always, never at the centre, beginning to think no one would miss her if she weren’t there. She poured herself another glass of vinegary white and turned automatically, sensing eyes on her back again. The rider was watching her from the far end of the bar. He lifted his helmet in the air, a half salute, and then he was off, through the door and out.
    ‘Who was that bloke then?’ Jess asked – her radar attuned to any man in leather.
    Sam shrugged. ‘He came over and started talking to me when I was outside waiting for Becky.’
    ‘What kind of bike was he riding?’
    ‘Black.’
    Jess rolled her eyes. Sam rolled hers back. Helen laughed, or perhaps it was a sneer.
    She drained her glass. Everything was moving in slow motion now, voices raucous, not quite in sync with mouths, conversations increasingly incoherent. Jess was explaining that she wouldn’t fancy being a barmaid in the Coney’s Tavern because everybody knew that ‘coney’ was Anglo-Saxon for ‘cunt’ and she certainly wouldn’t want anybody to get the wrong idea and think there was more on offer than a pint of lager and a packet of crisps.
    Liz’s head swivelled round. ‘Cunny.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Seventeenth-century. Pepys. He used the form “cunny” in his diary. “His wife caught him with his main in his mistress’s cunny.”’
    Jess frowned at Liz, momentarily perplexed by the reference, then continued to rant about her best mate being a bit of an old slapper. Sam watched Helen half-heartedly chasing a lettuce leaf around the plate with her fork.
    Jess reached the end of her diatribe and followed Sam’s gaze. ‘Why did you order a salad?’ she asked. ‘Are you going anorexic on us?’
    ‘I’m just not hungry,’ Helen snapped.
    ‘We’ve always used food as a weapon in this family,’ said Liz and sighed.
    ‘Food does make good ammunition. It’s surprising how painful a roast potato can be if it hits you at speed.’
    ‘I didn’t mean it quite so literally.’
    Sam chipped in. ‘Helen’s not anorexic. She’s not hungry because she’s just shoved a line of speed up her nose.’ Helen kicked her under the table and caught her shin with the pointed toe of her buckled stiletto boot. Sam yelped