I Lied When I Said My Daughter Lived Abroad by Elizabeth Leyland, bitter coffee

After that walk up and down a steep crag, I sat beside the fire and stretched my legs. The hotel’s luxurious warmth soothed my aching calves. A glass of mulled wine, passed to me by another woman in our party, diluted some of the discomfort of my mind.

Darkness fell outside and someone said, ‘It’s time for a story or two.’

Others in our little group laughed but no storyteller came forth. I kept a straight face, which was a mistake.

‘There’s something in your mind,’ one of the men said. ‘Go on, tell us.’

There seemed no harm in saying I’d been thinking of my daughter, whose favourite places included a Scottish crag or several. I told them how we used to walk together.

‘Used to?’ I was asked. ‘And now?’

That’s when I lied about where she lived, adding, ‘We don’t see each other often. I’ve no fireside tales, I’m afraid.’

The conversation moved elsewhere.

During our group’s walk a north-westerly wind had bitten at my lungs. During our descent from the crag, small boggy pools at its base had shone black and glassy like mementoes of cold, deep loch water.

In the hotel I must have appeared wrapped in reminiscence, because no one interrupted while I gazed into the fire. My daughter and her husband had lived in a pretty, rented cottage beside a Scottish loch, where sunshine often lit the south-facing house. But on my visits I’d found the surroundings gloomy. Beside the loch, a narrow pebbled beach plunged into the water. I thought how little light there’d be under the surface, even a few metres from the shore. The loch’s depth had been measured but what that ravine might look like was outwith my imagination.

My daughter became pregnant and had a little boy. Oh, what a joyous day six months ago when I drove to the hospital, heart pattering, to see my grandson. In hindsight, my daughter was too quiet, too distant from the start. Talking therapies didn’t help her bond with her son. Anti-depressants didn’t lift her. She stopped speaking. A planned admittance to a hospital met an administrative delay.

I’d never envisaged her pouring petrol inside the cottage while her husband and son were out for a walk. That stone cottage had timbers dry enough to stoke any blaze. My daughter, despite mitigating circumstances, was convicted of wilful fire raising and sent to a secure mental health hospital. She’s still there.

‘I did it to get help,’ she told me on one of my rare visits, for she didn’t want to see me often. ‘I thought the loch was my friend. Its darkness – that’s how I felt. But you’d never liked it and I couldn’t explain.’

I should have realised more, understood better.

Beside the hotel fire, someone started a ghost story and the party waited for pleasurable shivers. I watched the flames licking the logs, their leaps behind and around one another. I was already haunted.

About the author

Elizabeth Leyland writes short stories and microfiction and lives in the UK. She has been published by CaféLit, 50-Word Stories, Paragraph Planet and Fairfield Scribes among others. 

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There Was a Message in the Bottle All Along by Elizabeth Leland, gin

             Daisy and I go out for air before bedtime. On a pavement bench I sit and pat my skirt. She jumps up. I tell her – my fond habitual comment – that she’s the best Jack Russell in the world.

       Above us the quarter moon curves round its own haze. The streetlights don’t quite block all the stars.

       ‘Vincent Van Gogh,’ my mother used to say, ‘cut his ear off.’ She poured clear London Dry and raised her glass. ‘Cheers. Ears.’ Or she announced, ‘Time for a military march. Chop chop!’ and strode, with a sway, round the living room.

       Daisy’s growl is quiet. A handsome Collie approaches, his shoulders and ears taut with interest. Daisy, less than half his size, takes agin him.

       A gin. My mother: a comedy drunk facing down her audience even when it was only me. She had no escape from my father until he decided to leave us, and then no choice but life with me, a silent, critical daughter.

       I let Daisy jump off my lap. On her lead she jogs along and turns us towards home. I try never to make her stay where she doesn’t want to be.

 

About the author

 Elizabeth Leyland writes long and short fiction and lives in the UK. She has been published by CafeLit and Fairfield Scribes.

A Horse, A Queen, Some Crockery by Elizabeth Leyland, homemade lemonade

I’ve promised my kitchen crockery, or rather my dead mother-in-law’s kitchen crockery, for the coronation party. As usual with community events, awkwardness niggles at me. It’s not that people can’t be trusted with plates, bowls, teacups and saucers, but the village has centrifugal force. Anything loaned to the church fete or the boy scouts has a way of travelling to far-flung cottages and bungalows. Several weeks later I stand on doorsteps and am told, ‘Oh, sorry, Mrs Davidson. I hadn’t realised it was yours.’

       ‘Well, it was my mother-in-law’s,’ say I, trying to make a point about ownership but only sounding apologetic.

      

I go to the post-office for stamps. Stuck to the door is a poster showing cakes and jellies, crowns and ribbons, all jumping up and down. I don’t look at it in case someone notices and asks another favour.

       The postmistress says, ‘Ah, Mrs Davidson. We were wondering if you could take Billy in for a while? Until he’s sold.’

       ‘I’ve come for some stamps,’ I say, with a prickling sense of failure hobbled to noblesse oblige.

      

A day later, Billy, piebald and shaggy, stands in the stable yard. My two bay dressage horses lift their heads over their doors and stare. Billy has been trained to pull a milk float and wait at people’s front gates, and now he relaxes a back leg and nods off. I stroke his thick-coated shoulder and tell myself not to feel put upon. A horse is a horse, the milkman died suddenly from a cardiac arrest, and Billy might be missing him. What’s more I have a yard with a spare loose-box, though none of it feels like mine. Everything belongs to the house my husband has inherited from his parents.

       I lead Billy into the loose-box. He tugs hay from a net and I listen to his rhythmic chomps and soft churn of saliva. A horse eating is always like balm. I’ve told Mike, my husband, that a sales notice for Billy will go in the local paper next week.

       ‘There won’t be any time to run up bills,’ I said.

       Two years of marriage yet it still seizes me that he pays for everything.

       ‘Stop worrying,’ Mike says, as if I haven’t adapted to married life fast enough.

       The large house is full of rooms and corners that don’t welcome me.

 

Next to the yard is a spare field and I lead Billy into it. It has a view across more fields. Billy looks at the grassy horizon as if seeing far-off plains.

       I know that horses trained to pull carts and carriages must learn your voice; it is how they receive commands.

       ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ I say.

       He bends his head to the grass.

 

Billy is so easy to manage – never skittish, nor needing to learn complicated steps. A few days later, in the field, I tell him, ‘I’d buy you if I had the money.’

       It’s a relief to say it out loud. I don’t have money even though the village sees me as the lady of the manor and implies I have everything.

       Billy is gazing far away again.

       Riding lessons.

       The voice seems to come from his throat. His mouth hasn’t moved.

       I’m steady with children. And good in traffic.

       The voice is deep and rolling. His lips are closed.

       I’ve spent too long on my own, with Mike at work all day and only horses for company. Even so I ask out loud, ‘But can you do paces?’

       I’m a horse.

       I pat him and walk away, a bit shaky.

       Later, going to the field to bring him in, I hear the voice calling.

       You’ll need a notebook for remembering who’s asked for what, and a bag for the money.

       I look at him but he’s motionless, gazing into the distance again.

                  

I put a different advert in the paper. When the children start coming they stroke Billy. ‘He’s so warm,’ say the girls and boys, fingertips buried in his coat. The girls kiss his nose and he stands looking patient and noble. I have a growing feeling he knows exactly what he’s doing.

       The parents trust my reputation as a horsewoman. One boy brings back a camp-bed I’d lent to the scouts.

 

‘We’ll have to go to the coronation party,’ says Mike.

       His parents would have gone, of course.

       Mike will need to make a speech. I tell Billy that I’m not looking forward to the attention, to being judged whether I’m a suitable wife for Mike and inhabitant of the village.

       I like an outing, he says.

 

When the day comes I saddle him up and put bunting round his neck. Mike walks beside us to the village green.

       A woman from the party committee says, ‘Not on one of you show horses, Mrs Davidson? For the new Queen?’

       The sarcasm is as clear as the glass tumblers lined up on a table, waiting to be filled with lemonade.

       ‘Naturally,’ I tell her, ‘I thought about it. But Billy is calmer.’

       A group of children runs screaming past us.

       ‘Well, yes,’ she says. ‘Of course.’

       She walks off and Mike whispers up to me, ‘She’s always been a so-and-so.’

 

By the afternoon’s end all the home-made food has been eaten and the drinks – soft and alcoholic – have been drunk. Mike has made his speech about the importance of tradition and identity.

       In the bright sunshine I’ve left Billy grazing under the shade of a tree. A few women are putting the crockery into boxes to be taken away for washing up. One of them comes up to me.

       ‘I don’t know if I’ve eaten too much jelly,’ she says, ‘but I heard a voice telling me all these plates and bowls and everything must go back to you. Is it all yours? It’s very generous of you to lend so much.’

       I smile and say, ‘Yes, it’s mine.’

       Mike tells me he’s going to help fold up tables and he will follow Billy and me later.

       I get on Billy and we walk home.

 

About the author 

Elizabeth Leyland writes long and short fiction and lives in the UK. Her microfiction has been published online by Fairfield Scribes.