The Sea House: A Novel Read Free

their voices calling, doors slamming.
    I went out into the hallway and saw the tracks of brown mud being brought in by the police, staining the new hall floorboards before we’d had a chance to seal them clean with layers of varnish. Sounds of them digging deeper under the floor coming from the sea room. Trembling with anger, I went back into the kitchen and closed the door.
    ‘I’m afraid it will be at least two more days before Forensics arrive from Inverness,’ said Sergeant MacAllister, coming into the kitchen where Michael and I were holed up together eating lunch, pretending to live a normal life. ‘Perhaps it would be better if you moved out for a few days, until we can take the remains away.’
    The caravan felt damp and unused when we went back. It smelled like the inside of an old biscuit tin. And it was freezing in there, even with the paraffin heater on. Every surface I touched leached the heat from my skin.
    The day was now wasted. I sloshed formaldehyde into the prepared lizard’s tray and slid it into the bottom of the tiny caravan fridge.
    ‘I can’t believe we’re being driven out of our own home by that thing,’ I said to Michael as we lay in the cramped bed.
    ‘They’ll take it away soon, and given time, we’ll forget it was ever there.’
    He sounded so certain and so confident. We huddled together, waiting to feel warm, waiting for sleep.
    *   *   *
    The next day, high winds came in. I woke up to the stale smell of the caravan. The memory of the rusting trunk and the bones inside like the remains of a small animal made me feel too nauseous to eat any of the porridge that Michael had made.
    Michael went back to the house to carry on papering the upstairs bedroom, and so he was there when the call came in from the police about the forensic team who were supposed to be coming over from the mainland. I heard the wind slam the caravan door against the van. He came in looking gloomy, his hair wet and blown about by the squally rain.
    ‘Ferry’s being held up in Uig for the weekend.’ He sat down at the tiny caravan table, the water running off his yellow sailing jacket. ‘We’re not going to be back in the house any time soon I’m afraid, love.’
    ‘You’re dripping on the paper,’ I said, irritated that nothing was going right. ‘This is going to set us back weeks. Could jeopardise us opening in time for next season, and starting to pay off the loan.’
    I glanced up; saw Michael’s face anxious and white.
    ‘Well, there’s nothing we can do till they take the … you know … the remains away.’ He sighed. He turned a drawing of the lizard’s nervous system round and looked at it. ‘How’s it going? This looks beautiful, like the veins of a leaf.’
    ‘At least when these are finished we’ll get paid.’
    ‘I’d better get on too. We’re out of woodchip and we need more paint. Donny and I are going to drive up to the store in Tarbert.’
    I kissed his cold, wet cheek and dabbed at the sploshes he’d left on the table.
    For the next hour, I worked solidly on the illustration, absorbed in minutely delineating the nerve pathways and intricate blood vessels that lay ready to flood the lizard’s muscles with blood at the first semaphoring of danger.
    All the while, the wind thumped vengefully on the side of the van. I could feel the compressions of air like waves of dizziness, the vibrations travelling through the table. As I took up the scalpel and started to open the tiny muscles in the lizard’s forearm, a vicious blow thudded into the van; I jumped and sliced into my thumb, dropped the knife and swore.
    I found a plaster, struggled with the sticky adhesive.
    For a moment I caught a whiff of Mum’s talcy smell as she had unwound a strip of plasters; a memory of how she’d leaned over to wash my gouged knee, the lilt of her voice as she took out the playground grit. She was telling me about the island siths, the scattered boulders left by ancient glaciers that