Sheepskin

by Susan Elsley

I MET EVA AT A PARTY. I saw her first, in a dress cut so low that her pale skin dazzled against the black velvet. She had her back to the wall and was talking to a man who leant closer and closer until only her face was visible over his shoulder. When she saw me, she ducked under his arm and squeezed her way through a crowd of people dancing so hard the floor flexed under our feet. 

‘Hope you don’t mind. You’re my excuse to get away from a man who’s hunting prey. Anyway, we were destined to meet. Us witchy types,’ she said, gesturing to my ankle-length black skirt with its layers of ripped lace. 

‘You’re welcome. I’m Bridget,’ I said, and handed her a tumbler of wine from the table I was propped against while I waited for something to happen. We banged plastic and drank our way through a bottle of red. I was bolder than usual, throwing my arms wide when I described climbing a sea cliff in my bare feet. She clapped, and said I was an adventurer. I almost believed her.

Three days after the party we met up in a bar. The locals’ bar was livelier than the white-walled place that was my usual haunt. A band played soul covers and a couple of women got up and danced while everyone else weaved around them. Eva said, ‘Nice girls,’ with a curling smile and we held up our glasses and ordered more gin.

We let our lives tumble out. I shared more than Eva, flattered by her interest in my tales about the awkward men I’d slept with, and my disenchantment with low-grade passion.

‘You’re wise, Briddy,’ she said. ‘I left school and hooked up with a boy of twenty. I went to the registry office because that’s what you did to get away from home and have sex whenever you wanted. What a silly girl. When all I had to do was come to here, and play.’ 

She gestured round the room, and I giggled. The men at the bar raised their glasses, and she lifted her chin and waved. I didn’t dare.  She never said any more about her marriage, so I imagined a man cast off so she could start again.  

I wasn’t glamorous like Eva in her sheepskin jacket and knee-high boots. I was the dowdy friend dressed in charity shop finds, but it didn’t feel like that. We chose each other, even though I was starting out, and she exuded experience. During the day we went our separate ways. I hung out in the library. She said a place packed with students tapping on keyboards was not for her.  Late afternoon I would catch sight of her through the window, chatting to men who bent towards her as if they wanted to swallow her up, while she laughed and shook her head. A few minutes later she would appear next to me, her eyes glittering, and her sheepskin jacket flung over a shoulder. 

‘Come on, Briddy. Cocktail time.’

We would stroll down the steps into the dusk air where blackbirds were making their last calls of the day. Those few months melded together in a clutch of memories.  I talked more than I’d ever done. Once I told her about being the only child of parents who watched too carefully and still rang every day. 

‘It was claustrophobic. I couldn’t breathe.’

‘It sounds wonderful, Briddy. To be hemmed in by love.’

Her face tightened when she talked about home, a small farm perched on a Welsh hillside. The photo showed moss-green slopes and crumbling stone walls, but she shook her head when I said that it looked idyllic.

‘I left at seventeen to get away from parents who were disinterested from the day I was born. They were kinder to calves than children,’ she said, blinking quickly before ordering another bottle of wine.

We spent our time going to pubs and sauntering by the sea. When I wasn’t with Eva, I hung out with my flatmate, Saskia, and her gang of misfits. I assumed Eva was doing the same with unseen, more sophisticated friends. 

One night, Eva and I decided to go to the beach after an evening in the bar. We had drunk a bucketload of gin, Eva paying when I ran out of money. She always seemed to have cash, hauling twenty-pound notes out of her bag when I was down to my last fiver.

‘I need saltiness. Let’s go to the sea,’ she said, and I handed her the sheepskin, glad to leave the bar which was heaving with a crowd watching football on the big screen.

A man grabbed her arm as we left the pub and whispered to her. I expected Eva to call him out. Instead, she pushed his hand away with a tight smile and he said, ‘Another time.’  

I was used to men approaching Eva when we were together, but this time she looked unsettled. She walked fast and I jogged to keep up. When we got to the path that weaved through the dunes, Eva pulled a pair of glasses that I’d never seen before out of her bag.

‘Don’t say anything, Briddy,’ she said. ‘Better to see sometimes than never at all.’

I could have said that she didn’t need to pretend, but it didn’t feel like vanity. More as if she was dissembling on this cold, spring evening. During the day, the beach was a stretch of white sand populated by walkers and swimmers. At night, the darkness revealed only the crests of waves.

‘This life doesn’t feel real,’ said Eva. ‘It’s too perfect for someone like me.’

 ‘That’s not true. None of us are angels. Look at me and my hangups. Look at Saskia. She gets through the day with a handful of pills,’ I said.

‘That’s playing with unhappiness,’ said Eva. ‘That girl knows nothing. And you’ve still to find out.’

She pulled off her sheepskin jacket and dropped it on the sand.  I went to pick it up, but she called out, ‘Leave it, Briddy. I haven’t cast it off. It’s my second skin.’

I followed her as she strode towards the sea. The tide left silvery trails as it retreated.  I bent down and poked my fingers into the damp, gritty sand. When I looked up, Eva was paddling through the waves. I waited for her to stop but she kept going, each step higher, so she had to swing her body to keep upright.

‘Eva, your boots.’

The water was up to her thighs. She lifted her arms above her head and for a moment, I thought she was going to tip forwards. I ran into the water to pull her out. Before I reached her, she turned and shook her head.

‘Don’t fuss, Briddy. The water cools me down.’

The image is still with me. Eva swaying in time with the waves, jeans wet to her waist and a tight smile. The older Bridget would have asked if she was OK. Twenty-year old me thought that the words were a careless aside. 

We stood, me in the shallows and Eva further out, while the tide fell back into the dark. After a few minutes, she waded to the shore, raising each sodden boot to tread through the water. When we reached the firm sand, I tried to give her my scarf to dry herself, but she pushed it away even though she was shivering.

‘It’s alright. I’m not cold.’

She walked up the beach past the sheepskin. I picked up the jacket and threw it over her shoulders. She shrugged it off, so I carried it through the empty late-night streets until we reached her flat. When I handed her the sheepskin, she held it away from her body.

‘Goodnight, sweet Briddy, thank you,’ she said, and kissed me on the cheek.

She was gone before I could ask whether she would be alright.

That night was a turning point. I spent more time with Saskia who asked, ‘What’s up with the earth goddess?’ and when I said, Eva and I were busy with assignments and planned to catch up at the weekend, she retorted, ‘Really? Are you sure?’ 

I went to Eva’s flat the next evening even though I hadn’t told her I was coming. There was a candle in the window but no other light. Climbing up the stairs I heard rock music instead of Eva’s favourite jazz. I rattled the letterbox and pushed the handle like I always did. The door was locked so I called out, ‘It’s me.’

When Eva opened the door, she was wearing a black slip that made her look thin, and smaller. But it was her wrists that made me stare. Each one was circled by a soft line of pale red. 

‘Briddy, how lovely. I would invite you in, but I’ve got a visitor.’ 

Her voice was slow as if she’d been asleep, and she rubbed her arm.

‘I wanted to see you,’ I said. 

She leaned towards me. Her breath was hot.

‘Let’s meet up tomorrow. After library.’ 

‘OK. Be careful,’ I said, my lips brushing her cheek. 

I was surprised by my audacity. I never gave advice to Eva.

Her fingers rubbed mine, and she whispered, ‘I’m fine. Now go.’

At the bottom of the stairs, I looked up. Eva was still at the open door. When a man’s voice called out, ‘Come on, Eva,’ she shrugged her shoulders and mouthed, ‘Tomorrow.’

I told myself it was nothing. One of the men hinted at in conversations in the pub. The games that women with more experience than me played. In rolling dreams that night, I imagined her standing in a candlelit room, the spume of waves falling on her dark hair and bare shoulders. Strands of seaweed wrapped around her feet.

I woke when Saskia pulled at my arm. ‘You’ve been mainlining bad thoughts again,’ she said. ‘You were shouting.’

‘I was out late. I went to Eva’s. She’d someone there.’ 

‘Not a surprise. You know what that’s about?’

‘One of her dates,’ I said.

Saskia sighed. ‘Oh, Bridget. Eva’s got danger written all over her wonderful body.’

‘That’s ridiculous. Anyway, you’re one to throw stones with the junk you use.’ 

I wasn’t usually this blunt, but Saskia wasn’t upset. ‘I’ve no shame about my dalliance. It’s safe, not like what Eva is up to.’

‘She knows what she’s doing.’  

‘She does and she doesn’t. You think she’s better than you, Bridget.’

‘Not better. More,’ I said. 

‘You sweet thing, Eva isn’t so different to the rest of us,’ said Saskia. ‘She wants to be like geeky you with your poor fashion taste, crow-coloured hair, and a flatmate like me.’

‘That isn’t how it is.’

‘It is, my innocent friend. She came looking for you last week and I wasn’t too friendly, and she said, “Don’t worry, Saskia,” in that strange drawl of hers. “I’m not a she-wolf trying to gobble Briddy up. I know she’s too good for me. I just want a little of her fairy dust.” Fair enough, I thought. We could all do with some of that.’

‘Rubbish,’ I said. 

‘I’m not so sure, Saint Bridget.’

She jerked open the curtains and I threw my pillow at her. I spent the day in the library and walked past Eva’s flat on the way home. There was a glow in the window. I didn’t knock on her door. 

‘You haven’t seen, Eva?’ I said to Saskia the next evening.

‘My advice. Leave it for a while.’ She picked up the half-empty bottle of wine and poured me a glass.  

When Eva didn’t show up at the library the following day, I went to her flat. I banged the letterbox until the landlady came out of the basement flat with her hair wrapped in a towel.

‘She’s not here. Went this morning, dear. Didn’t even serve her notice.’ 

‘She wouldn’t go without telling me,’ I said.

That wasn’t true. It wouldn’t be difficult for Eva to leave me behind. Like the moss-green fields, and the farmer’s son. The evening waves and the wet sand. I could be abandoned too.

The woman unlocked the door.

 ‘Go on, Have a look. You’re well rid of her. I told her I’d had enough. Doors banging. Those men late at night.’ 

Later, I said to Saskia that walking into the flat was the moment I realised I could be loved and deceived. Everything of hers had gone. The sofa was battered and ordinary without the ruby coloured throws and embroidered cushions. There was a trail of candle wax on the window ledge and half a dozen empty wine bottles on the table. 

‘This was on the back of the door,’ said the woman, and handed me Eva’s sheepskin. ‘I don’t know why she left it.’

I clutched the jacket to my chest and pressed my nose into its woolly lining. There was still the faintest tang of salt, and drying seaweed. 

‘It’s for me,’ I said.

oOo

Susan Elsley writes short and long fiction and lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work has been published in journals and anthologies including Crannóg, Northern Gravy, Paperboats, The Storms, Postbox and Fictive Dream. She won the Ennis Book Club Festival prize (2024) and was shortlisted for the Bath Short Story Prize (2024), the Alpine Fellowship Writing Award (2023) and Moniack Mhor’s Emerging Writer Award (2019). 

Find her at  Instagram @susanelsley.