Aaron Mullins
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The damp meter said eleven per cent, drier than Catriona Murray’s own kitchen, so the black rot on Mrs Gauld’s ceiling had no business being there. Catriona put the meter back in her handbag, beside the Extra Strong Mints, and took out the leaflet. Her kitchen ran wetter than this one because Neil had steamed its windows up at six o’clock every night for six years, and she meant to be back in it, coat still on, in time to kiss him at the hob.
‘It’s on his pillow as well,’ Mrs Gauld said from the doorway. ‘On the side he breathes on. Since New Year, dear. Since he stopped.’
The black festered directly above the pillow, a scab on the woodchip the size of a tea tray. Catriona knew it from the outside walls of half the town. Baudoinia. It fed on the angels’ share, the two per cent of whisky a year that breathed out of the casks, and it blackened stone like a smoker’s lung. Every gable that looked onto the bonded warehouses had it, which made Dufftown the only town in Scotland blacker on the side facing its employer. The distillery had paid a consultant for eleven pages on it, at what Catriona guessed was four hundred pounds a page, to say ‘cosmetic’.
‘Your window faces the bonds,’ she said, and held out the leaflet. ‘It’s all in there.’
Mrs Gauld took it and folded it in half without reading, as you’d fold a napkin you weren’t going to use. ‘It wasn’t in here while Kenny was in Aberdeen.’
‘It comes over on the wind.’
‘The window’s been painted shut since 1994. You can try it, dear, and then you’ll take a cup of tea, you’ll have been on your feet all day.’
Catriona didn’t try it. The pillow had a black drool-stain on the left, the width of a hand, and the right side was white as a ward sheet. The stain was still slick in the middle, and it smelled of the bonds, sweet and gone off. On a gable she’d have called it light colonisation.
‘That’s his side,’ Mrs Gauld said. ‘He lies facing the door, in case I need him in the night.’
Kenny was forty-six by the complaint form, and still on call for his mother. Catriona snapped a swab out of its sleeve and dragged it through the stain. It came up slimy, strung with black phlegm. On the label she wrote KENNY GAULD, then scored that out and wrote the address, because it was the house the council cared about. ‘Leave it with me.’
There was an Elgin City mug on the bedside table. She lifted it to her nose. Tea, gone cold, with a skin on it, nothing under it. She’d have known, as she’d known in the end with Neil. Six years ago she’d come home at four and found him asleep at the kitchen table with his face on the newspaper, a tin of Extra Strong Mints open by his hand. She bent to wake him. Peppermint, and under it, plain as a label, whisky. For eleven years she’d smelled the mints and stopped there. When he lifted his head, the date off the paper was printed backwards on his cheek.
She still had Kenny’s mug under her nose when her phone buzzed in her pocket.
Mince or fish tonight? x
She typed ‘Fish x’ with her thumb.
‘My husband hasn’t had a drink in six years,’ Catriona said to Mrs Gauld, who hadn’t asked. Her thumb had gone to the corner of her mouth.
‘Good for him.’ Mrs Gauld smoothed the black where the swab had been, gently, as if Kenny were lying on it, and wiped her palm on her cardigan. ‘For the ones who drink in the open, it stays on the outside wall. It only comes in for the quiet ones.’
*
On the Drummuir straight Catriona took the mouthwash out of the door pocket. The full-strength one, because the alcohol-free did nothing. Two miles on, her council Fiesta smelled like a dentist’s waiting room.
The quiet ones. Neil was as quiet as a man got, and these days she could smell past a mint.
The kitchen window was steamed to the top when she pulled in. She put the interior light on and flipped the visor down to check her teeth, as she always did, because Neil liked a kiss at the hob and she liked to give him a clean one.
There was black at the corners of her mouth.
It had rooted in the two creases where her lips met, thicker on the left. Black velvet, so fine it took the light, and wet underneath. She ran her tongue along her bottom teeth and it came back furred. The black was packed between them like grout in a student let, and it tasted of the bonds. Her gums itched.
Established colony, said the part of her that graded gable ends. The Latin wouldn’t come.
She put her tongue out and drew the edge of her bank card down it. The card scraped up a black curd, thick as boot polish. She took the duster from the glovebox. It crackled, stiff with old black, when she wiped the card on it.
She swilled the full-strength round her teeth and spat it into her coffee cup, onto the morning’s dregs. It dribbled out grey, with a thread of black that hung from her lip and stretched before it broke. She swallowed the next mouthful, black and all.
There was a word for what she was. She’d made Neil say it twice before she’d let him go up to bed.
‘I’m an,’ she said to the mirror, and stopped.
She folded the duster back into the glovebox and wiped the corner of her mouth with her thumb. Then she put a mint on her tongue and went in to ask Neil how his day had been.
Dr Aaron Mullins is a Scottish psychological thriller author and award-winning psychologist. He grew up in Wick, in the far north of the Highlands, and now lives and writes by the beach in Ayrshire. His fiction draws on his training as a psychologist, so the horror comes from how real minds behave under pressure. His collections include Mysteries and Misadventures: Tales from the Highlands and Ayrshire Stories: Tales from the West Coast, and his books have been bestsellers in mystery and thriller categories. He’s also the author of How to Write Fiction: A Creative Writing Guide for Authors. Website: www.aaronmullins.com
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