Stoneset Odds

By Gordon M Burns

Five years ago, Asa was a happy child but now she teeters on the brink of self-destruction. At seventeen, she worries about her obsessive pebble collection and a hidden secret past. Asa gathers evidence, which points conclusively to one fact - Asa will become another one of a line of notorious and abused females.

Asa is popular, attractive and gifted in her own way - an autistic tendency inhibits her to recognise inference and innuendo – and a tense relationship with her jealous sister, Jane, and her cold-natured mother, Inga, have created an underlining emotional fragility in Asa. Left alone as a child while Inga meets men, Asa’s granny and her Norwegian friend, Oskar, bring some stability into Asa’s life but the old couple have retreated from the world. Asa’s friends, Rosie and Julietta try to bring her into the world, but they are too forward and self-assured and the incidents the three girls delve into with boys end up in disaster for Asa.

Soon to leave to Glasgow - from her island home in sight of the north of Scotland - Asa is anxious to find out what type of woman she will become and after two difficult relationships with a policeman, Lachlan, and a young farmer, Dave, she is firmly convinced she will end up callously bouncing from one empty and abusive relationship to another. Resigned to this, she considers she might as well begin behaving as the women of her family’s renowned reputation. However, a last hope remains - the essence of the Island. This wisdom was not formed in fact, so how can Asa understand how it could save her?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gordon M Burns
• Release date: Jan 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311512352

Gordon M Burns

Writer living in Abernethy Perth Scotland. see my website for more details.

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STONESET ODDS

G M BURNS

©January 2014

Disclaimer : This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

©Cover design by G M Burns January 2014

Published by G M Burns at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

THE CHAPTERS

1.THE ISLAND

2. RINGS

3. ROSARY BEADS

4. MOBILE PHONES

5. INTERACTIONS

6. APPORTIONING BLAME

7. TEETH

8. WINTER DARKNESS

9. SIMMER DIM

10. REVELATION

11. CODA

12. INVITATION

CHAPTER I

THE ISLAND

There was a start, be sure of that.

A sun-shiny way to open and actually I liked it. Pure pleased, for sure. Yes, I read it over, I was okay with it, so I sucked the mint and tried to get the wording right. Words with me - just are - there can be no hidden meaning. None that I could ever see.

There was a plan here for me, and actually I’m clued into pre-match procedure. I have mine set. The same six-fold warm-up, every time, to get things right and it invariably works to make the match go tickity-boo. Which way to shoot, net height checked, sweep the court of this and that and find the bib that’s made for you, rose-pink, a colour sweet. Then sort your hair, tie it back, all pretty-peng and neat and next, huddle round the team and let them know you’re good to go.

Handshakes first then positions to receive. That’s proper order now, innit? For some, for heaven’s sake its like, hi, its me, that’s you, let’s get going at it. What way is that to play, I ask you now? As if that is the sort of thing that I’m about to do. Klutz-bumpers, rough-shop players, what-they-like? Solo push-panting up and down the goal third, rubbing up against you, see you, you’re dead. No way to connect or procedure into any set event. And where’s that going to lead you, I ask you, tell me that? Sent right off, that’s where. Right out of the court to watch the action from outside of the game. Watching it all go by you, just knowing you could do it so much better if you were in play. We should all know how to take our places on the court. To be fair, a little mutual eyeballing can be made between the opposing sides before the centre pass gets played. If a pass is made at all. It’s not that I am radic-glad out there, a sportive ding-bat if you like, but even I know that’ll be sugary-bright. The pass is always up for grabs. It’s always hanging out there, be universality-sure on that. It’s game control that brings boundless problems that, and can you take the pass. Okay, I can let it drop for as I said, as I did, I’m no mega-sporticious amazeball on the court. I fuss-fumble for the ball most times. A throw-in given to the other side, it’s all in the game. Mind you, swing a half-formed pass my way and watch me steady, set it up and cucumber-cool-like, stroke it towards the pokie-net. A belter, a right ring-melter and one for the farmers’ market from me, the goal shooter. Dench, like game on, now let’s see you try and scoop one off me.

Now, it always was a wonder to me, but some I knew and let in on this, found it all totes amusing. Like actually, you know, you nearly made me wet myself, Asa! Or else they would make foo-foo tuts and heaven-eyes at me, disparagingly. As if was all beyond their understanding. What was that hype about? Duh, what was their prob-blam? I couldn’t see what there was to smirk about or reproach me on. I never could. I thought everyone was like me, wised-up on good tactics. I’ve seen how others play around and will always maintain that, mutual team-play, supporting each player, will help to work the passes. This, in the end, allows for achievement in defensive protection and also offensive penetration. None of your try-that-for-size punt up the pitch and hope to score. Simples really, you should know the facts. The facts, the rules of play, are clear to read and follow. Get it right, then flows the game and fun for all. It is the warped and hidden motivation from other side that can turn the game into a wildness of back-digging, where-the-marker-gone, ouch-that-hurt and come-on-ref this game’s become a messy-mess. A total, blates-ball in the air that no one really wanted and not the way we want to go. Not like a practice session, take it as read from me.

Placing Netball aside and thinking about where-and-all, I was always aware that on this Island, where all seasons can appear a summer’s day and however welcomed it may be, I should never assume the fine weather would continue. The winter’s presence was ever a chill eastern wind. How-ever, it was possible to drop out of it, the wind, and escape into Stromby’s warren of narrow closes and streets, find a place where the sun penetrated its strength in warmth and the long, cold days of darkness told be but a distant memory. However, memory was never that short. The clever, outsmarting trick was to find a sheltered, south facing spot which was preferably secluded. For someone with bearings squiffed, and that was me in someways. it is not always easy to know where such a spot could be found. Even the local vegetation got it wrong. On this Island, trees and shrubs grew wizened and stunted, whipped west to east by constant winds because they never set their roots in a sheltered spot or, in many cases, someone planted them without a thought of how they would be protected from the snedding winds. Only the most tenacious plants can withstand those pruning winds. The year long winds, the moaning round the gable, down the chimney and up whatever-is-on-offer winds which, because they could and do, take a summer-huff and flip-up garden trampolines. What was with that wind doing that? Callously sweeping a child’s plaything, for goodness sakes, and toying away jusy like that? Then, wilfully bearing those air-borne hopes for kilometric-miles over electrical-enclosed, ruminating-fields of cud-chewing cattle and finally, ignoring the no tipping rubbish notice, tossing its spite by casting the child-treasure into a picturesque geo. There the ruined fabric remained and rotted within a twisted warp of metal frame. Leaving us trying read for clues on how on earth it got into such an undoing plixy-fix and where were we to help?

Aye, for when,

for why, for what

and like,

why that?

That was never asked

from him

the wayward wind?

Humph, poetry like that, was always beyond me. I’m still trying to reading into things, like who regretted the trampled trampoline? Reading between the lines was always beyond me. As was the ability to assess, gauge, and size up a siuation by what was said or what was to be taken as read by an expression. Duh, eff minus, for me on that subject. No one is perfect.

The reason for this was diagnosed and specified as nothing, which at the end of the day you could do anything about - Asa will be fine, Mrs Tait, if she sticks to figures - and at five years old, Miss Moncur had, with a trained well-there-you-are-look, told you all you would ever need to know.

Personally, I blamed the wind. I also knew that here on the Island we were more matter of fact. Quick to take, and seldom leave alone, the facts we learnt about the folks who swam in the millponds around us. What everybody on the Island knew about everyone else was indisputable fact, based on his or her knowledge of stock and grafting. When the furthest distance you can travel is not far, everyone can find someone who had an insight into your family and then of you. If not, then the cat next door would let them know. The nearer your relationship was to a point of grafting then the more they knew about your Aunt Cox. Your upbringing, what you were like as a child and how this will, spot-on-determine you will react in the given situation when the button is pushed Why not? They knew, full well, where your mother lived and worked, if not your dad.

Say what to that, a hint beyond the rough guide to grab the interest? Tourists? Don’t start me there with them, always with the curiosity, making with a deeper-delve then never finding out. In their pants like, as before you can whistle, As I Came Ower the Bonnie Brig of Banff, and become really personal, they are making with the rushy-rush, here’s the tip, considered it as I’ve met your Uncle Tammie and they’ve beetled-off elsewhere. They found you out. Heaven prserve them that they really got to know you. That experience might become unpleasant, tediously invovled or dull as it is can be here or hereabouts. Though why things should become unpleasant? I’m sure I cannot think, for here on the Island life can fine and safe. Also, there are good days here, not to be passed up days, when Island life was sweet. I aws, I felt, hardly tedious or dull and I could catch an eye as quick as bend and pick a pebble of the beach. A world’s welcome, sure as wheecky-wheeck, a siren of must-know-it-inquisitiveness who aimed to trap the sun. And I felt I could as sure as stroking cats makes with the pussy-purr, foresure I could.

I am Asa Tait, root stock from Borgary, grafted from candy-gifters – and nothing wrong with that you’ld think, for who here doesn’t like sweeties? - who beguiled, from what I was told, encaged Italian Pow-Wowers captured in North African deserts in some wartime tank-about and imprisoned on the Island. Unfortunate for those Itie-tankies to be trapped on Borgary, if not my female primogenitors. So, there you are, you have it.

Only, you need to understand, that bar the name and place, none of that was my fact but what others gave as opinion. Well, bless my soul, such perspectives given as actual fact. Their point being, if those women were like that back then, it held the same for me. Held as truth by toute L'île, if that was the Grannie’s mum well then, what does that tell ye o the daughter’s daughter? People are so direct in their positioning of one don’t you find? Based on what, rootstock or heck knows, but to update, which supermarket you happened to shop at? People shop around, gathering unsolicited that-and-that and before you knew it, your loyalty card data was encoded and your pre-order sorted well and truly out. Honestly now tell me, for I would really like to know, is it the same where you come from and how does it make you feel? An unsettling thought, perhaps. Well it pi-pi ... Me? I never did that, swear I mean, its fact and anyway, it unsettled me, what folk thought you might have flushed down your toilet.

The Island was never remote, really. It was, still is, possible to see the mainland from my Island garden. The mainland was a place where no one knews anything about me. It was a different place or is it? To me, the mainland was a place where I should pass off anonymously in the vast cities and towns and only cause a little stir as a passing thought. The mainland waswhere no one knew of Asa Tait. Yet. Here. Island people would tell you all they felt you needed to know about me. She is Inga’s daughter, they would tell you, so much anyone could find out. They may be vague in commenting if I took after my mother or the father that I never knew. Such little information was all that they required for them to smile benignly and inform you that they had my measure and my life mapped out. A road followed by such and such a woman-type, the type I was bred from, it seems. Innuendo? Well what did I know of that? Whatever that was and leave it, it was one thing I’ll never get. No, give it straight up to Asa, and show her the club to join. Asa, with your background you’ll be well eligible and at seventeen, age enough to join that which actually, everyone expected you to take to like a duck in the water. And they are all internationally connected, the swingers have relatives in Hudson Bay so why, the folks in Peru are bound to have known. Everyone most aware of me but myself. I didn’t know a duh about myself at all. Nothing I could read within my blog. What were they looking to find in my Facebook page? The thought scared me.

What was it they could read between the lines? The inferential stuff? I looked up the meaning up, all that talking and nothing said but it flies like geese skiens well over my head. Mind you, I see expression, no hidden message there for fact. A smile means happy and frown means not best pleased. I knew they looked at me with a steady second-stare. Those straight-thinkers, male-chancers and cocker-hoopers, wishing to dander down any street with me, on the mainland, in yon Engerlandie, over in Europe, anywhere on the cakey-walky world. I knew exactly what they are thinking.

Why blow me down with a feather! How did I catch on to this cutie? On my shoulder, dreeping arm in arm with me, a swanlike, squeezing arm round my waist, giving it, like really giving it, big licks, the ice-cream that I bought for her.

Man or woman that is what you would be thinking and I do like ice-cream, who doesn’t? However, would that have happened with anyone of them? No, leave that off, they could wish but was still apple-pie-hopeful, ever garlandingly wishful-thinking bluebirds over the red-stane cliffs of Vosnaby However, to be fair was set up cool and breezy, and taken that those sizing-up, bigot-postulators could get lost, I was on the lookout for destra di signor. The cheek of others to judge or add it up their way and think other. I preferred my way of adding up and it usually it worked out, except I had no answer as to just who I was. Well-yes-like, I could have told you what I looked like duh, what my immediate plans were, what my future Audrey-Hepburn-in-the-bless-my-cotton-white-socks, sky dreams were. For and sure, I could. We are on a different Island here, it is not a distant planet. Fact.

Skimping back to when I was five, those pink-princess-ribboned years ago, I skipped along and thought I know the girl I am. She was very happy, contented like, in being that carefree lass. A bonnie-wee, dance-the-fling with a curving smile lass was she. Happy to go into class and to mutiply and divide. Back then, when you lay in the sun in that sheltered spot, which didn’t need to be secluded, your mother didn’t cast her shadow over you and say disparagingly, Don’t you think you should cover up a bit? Alternatively caustically, Don’t expose yourself so much! What did those irking comments imply?

Time to get the facts about me, I would not want any invalid data be entered in about me. So, here how it was. Asa Tait, eighteen the next September when thesummer’s done. A stunbomb-Nordic-gleamer graced with a firmly contoured, sveltine (just call it sexy) body and making the matching set, a milk-white, flawless skin which in the summer sun (if we see it on the Island) turned into a golden, to-die-for honey-brown. The cute up-turned nose would really piddle you off or turn you on, depending on whatever sets your functions on to on. Even the slight scar tissue above my left eyebrow had its own mystique. My mum was a Scot in looks, attractive don’t get me wrong, but the Scots lack the elegance and delicacy of us Scandinavian types. It is just the way it is and was always. Some hated me for it. I had had a lifetime of angst from my sister Jane, about all that. Jane took after mum but just needed to look at a cake in Sandy’s, baker-shop window and she would layer the weight on like cream over butterfat. I would tell her it’s just puppyfat. Tits like hang-me-downs, her comment not mine. Even her name annoyed her.

Why do you get ca’d Asa but they named me Jane, plain Jane? Again said by her, not me. Despite what she thought, I tried not to annoy her. Jane talked in the Island way. The way you will still hear it spoken by the old or used as a code to keep ears at bay. Generally though the Islanders - seemingly naive - are approachable, welcoming, accommodating and trusting of those from the outer world. They open up to strangers. Well it would seem that way but if you lived here, you would learn how to keep your secrets behind the smile. That is also fact. Encoded in our way are words with guarded secrets so closeted we have forgotten where or what they might be. However I had one.

And what was my numero uno segreto?

Wha is me da?

Whaat whey is he unkent

tae me?

Whaat is my minnie hidin frae me?

For there’s mony a yin

that placed a tail tae be telt

intae her.

It seems.

I never knew where I found those words. From another place and time no doubt, sent to protect me, I felt. However, I had no conception where they came from - no-way. Words were not my thing at all, let alone words lyrically framed in passion and in need of interpretation. As sure as pretty-promise and dimpled-chiny, cutie-smiles it not the way I ticked. Grandpopsing-dead, antique words indeed, I tried to be be more update-global in my terminology.. What it meant was, that I had a problem with undersides of blankets, on dad’s side of the bed, in that he was unknown. Zilch all there. Now mum, so was spread about, was always up for a chaser or two and seemed to be keen on duvet-hopping. And who ever she is hopped about with, it wasn’t dad. Now do not get me wrong - I love my mum. And though she didn’y then agree, I was there for my sister. However, mum was mum and I didn’t want to taken for a slag. Nor did I want be taken me for a dotty-twit, as someone well out of this colourful archi-start, a spinhead all in a vortexal-flap about, clickty-click whole lack of a DILK-daddy-stuff. I hoped to have my own clear-cut, yellow brick to move along and find a song to sing that’s not just about myself. And I tried.

CHAPTER 2

RINGS

I asked my mother. She would not tell who was my father. I was young and had no knowledge of thresholds, of allurements, which overstepped by curiosity’s compulsions, took you in. If it indeed it was such as that. It may have been compulsion of another nature. A pressurised abasement, forceful, selfish and unkind. Then, as my understanding grew, my courage failed to ask again. I became apprehensive of what further questioning would reveal, fearful of the implications of what knowing meant for me and besides my mother was firm in her resolve.

Leave it be, Asa. It’s water flowed by lang ago, I hae nae wish tae tell you, be content as you are. Jane’s faither is now your dad, all things being considered. So, leave it be.

And so I let it be.

My mum and Jane’s dad were to marry after Jane was born. There are things you never get around to fixing, so they never are. Too busy moving on to make the arrangements for something vaguely ordered and then fearful of the reminders which, like a slumberer’s nagging cough, might return to hack you. And so I, like them, let it be. Fearful that in pressing them I would cause of hurt. That,