On the Precipice

She should probably feel cold, Margaret thinks.
The biting wind has whipped her hair into a riotous tangle of dark curls and stirred the firth into a frenzy below.
Spring, it seems, is a relative term in Scotland. Not so much the presence of warmth and sunshine as the absence of the chill, impenetrable wall of darkness that envelops Edinburgh for six months of the year.
But the unforgiving assault of air at least numbs pain.
Margaret feels oddly exhilarated by the salt tang of the air. She takes it into her lungs in huge gulps as she tries to slow her heart, still racing from the climb up Arthur’s Seat.
Standing on the edge of the precipice, looking over the city, she has the giddy, dizzying feeling of childhood rides on the ferris wheel. But there are no safety bars here. And no strong hands to catch her if she starts to slip.
One step, thinks Margaret, and she’ll be tomorrow’s headlines.
Canadian backpacker falls to death.
One step to instant fame.
And nothingness.

*

Maggie was seven when it started.
Her obsession with Scotland began on her First Communion day. She was walking with her classmates across the church lawn, eyes cast primly down at folded hands as she pretended not to notice the satisfying swish of white satin against her tights and the slight prickling of the flowers in her hair. God might not like it if she was vain. Especially today.
Today Maggie could even ignore Stuart, who taunted everyone but seemed to have a special chapter in his book of insults for Maggie MacKenzie.
“Stuart Ian Fraser, walk nicely and keep your hands folded like a good lad.”
It was a woman’s voice – Stuart’s mom, Maggie guessed – and Maggie liked it. The lady didn’t sound like other old people. She sounded fun, with a song in her voice, and Maggie wondered why other grownups didn’t sound like that.
Mass was interminable for Maggie, who hated sitting still at the best of times. Even the curious cardboard taste of the host dissolving on her tongue didn’t hold her attention for long.
She was too eager to ask her father about Stuart’s mom. Dad knew everything, and Maggie was sure he’d know why she sounded so pretty.
He laughed, as he always did when Maggie came with one of her questions. Usually Maggie didn’t like being laughged at. but from Dad is was okay. She knew he meant it nicely. And he never told her stop asking questions, like Sister Mary did all the time at school.
“Why does she sound like that? Because she’s from Scotland, Sprout, and that’s how they talk in Scotland.”
Maggie made up her mind then and there that, when she was big, she’d go to Scotland. Imagine someplace where everyone had such pretty voices. As if they really wanted to sing but sometimes had to just talk instead.
Even when Stuart tugged the flowers from her hair and ran away with them, Maggie held onto her hopes for Scotland. Probably there were no awful people like Stuart there. Probably they made those people move to Canada.
But she was mad about the flowers. They looked so pretty against her curls, and she wanted them for the class picture.
Should she chase Stuart to get them back?

*

Maggie looked over and saw her parents talking to Pauline’s boring father.
They wouldn’t see her anyway. So she ran after Stuart, growing angry as the taller, faster boy managed to keep them just out of her reach. Then, to her horror, Maggie tripped, falling on her hands and knees onto the church lawn.
Winded and embarrassed, Maggie knew she was going to cry. Now she’d messed up her clothes and wouldn’t look pretty in the picture.
Then, surprisingly, Maggie felt a hand helping her up.
It was Stuart, holding out her flowers.
“I’msorryMaggieIdidn’tmeanit,” he said in a rush, helping her brush off her tights.
Then he ran off.
But not before he smiled at her.
And she smiled back.

*

Maggie looked over and saw her parents talking to Pauline’s boring father.
No, Mom wouldn’t want her to run. Not in her white tights and new, slightly pinchy shoes. (Maggie never mentioned that they were pinchy. If she had, Mom might not have bought them. And Maggie loved the look of them, with their white strap and shiny buckle.)
So Maggie made do without the flowers.
But she felt a pang for years when she looked at the picture.

*

They were fast friends after that. No one knew how it happened, but suddenly there they were. Maggie-and-Stuart. Stuart-and-Maggie. Their names were rarely said separately.
Their parents watched with pleased smiles as the two ran and biked and dared each other to climb higher and higher in the maple tree in Maggie’s front yard.
Maggie had girlfriends, too: Pauline and Tammy. But they were kind of silly. They weren’t friends like Stuart.

*

Maggie couldn’t forgive Stuart for the flowers. Even though she knew it was a sin not to forgive.
Even when they showed up in her desk on Monday with a SweetTart candy that said “Be mine,” Maggie turned away.
Stuart Fraser was a bad boy. Besides, everyone knew boys were stupid. She and Pauline and Tammy said it all the time.

*

Maggie never knew when it changed. When the innocent intimacy of childhood just vanished.
But one day, not long after they’d all moved on to the big high school, she saw Stuart in the hallway and smiled at him. He pretended he hadn’t seen her.
Maggie went home and cried.
Not that she told him that. She went back to school and giggled louder than everybody as she and Pauline and Tammy strutted the halls with the careless confidence of fourteen-year-olds just beginning to realize that the boys were watching.
Stuart watched for a long time.
Maggie knew that. She watched him, too, but she never told anybody.
Then, at one school dance in Grade 10, he asked her – with a great show of indifference – to dance.
Maggie, equally and just as carefully indifferent, agreed.
Then they were Maggie-and-Stuart, Stuart-and-Maggie again. The same. Only different.

*

Stuart went to the big high school, too. Maggie saw him sometimes in the hallway. Sometimes she even smiled at him – seven years was a long time to hold a grudge about some silly flowers.
Sometimes he smiled back.
Once, when Maggie was waiting for Pauline outside the science lab, he left his friends and headed her way.
Then Pauline came out and grabbed her arm with a giggle. “I think Stuart likes you,” she whispered as the two flounced off.
Stuart never tried to talk to Maggie after that.

*

No one was surprised when Maggie and Stuart went off to university together. Not together, precisely – Maggie was studying engineering, Stuart was in arts – but their rooms were in the same dorm, on neighbouring floors.
Maggie never felt the need to tell her parents that she spent most nights in Stuart’s room. And she never told anybody, not even Pauline, how she felt when she watched him lying there wearing nothing but a rumpled sheet. Or about the funny, delightful mornings when he’d smuggle food – muffins or bananas or, on one messy but memorable occasion, chocolate pudding – out of the cafeteria and feed it to her in bed.
And lie there, naked, quoting poetry at her. Usually Robbie Burns, with an exaggerated Scottish accent and an impish grin.
“As fair art thou, my bonnie lass.
So deep in love am I.
And I will love thee still, my dear
Till a’the seas gang dry.”
“It was written for you, Margaret Dhu,” he’d say in that velvety voice that often made her miss her eight-thirty math lecture.
Maggie knew ‘dhu’ only meant dark. But when the word rolled off his tongue like a caress, it meant everything she couldn’t bring herself to say.
Love. Forever.
And she hugged to herself the knowledge that she had found what so many girls wanted.
The perfect man.

*

Maggie figured she’d never see Stuart at university. But, as it turned out, she met him around campus sometimes. He even lived in the same dorm, a floor above her.
Sometimes he’d be with a girl – usually a pretty, laughing blonde. Those times, he’d always say hi to Maggie. With a see-what-you-missed air that got under her skin.
Like she’d missed anything at all.

*

Maggie didn’t know when the shadow fell. When she first saw the darkness in her laughing poet.
It was the little things at first.
The questions. Where were you, Mag. Who was that on the phone. Why weren’t you in last night.
The eyes. The hurt when she made plans with the girls. The dark anger when she stayed out late drinking with Mark and Damian after a gruelling exam.
The voice. The caressing, velvety tones that often turned cold. Condescending. Are you really wearing that. Do you really want to order that steak well-done. Do you really like that kind of wine.
When she got upset, he did too.
“I’m so sorry, Margaret Dhu,” he’d say earnestly.
Looking into his hazel eyes, she’d melt. He didn’t mean to be a jerk. It was just stress, that’s all.
There would always be an act of atonement. Flowers in her room. A teddy bear on her pillow. A KitKat in her bag.
She’d smile then and return to his room. To his bed.
And watch him sleeping in a tangle of sheets and know it would somehow be all right.
Because he loved her.

*

Maggie saw Stuart more and more. Not planned encounters, just around – in the cafeteria, in the stairwell, at the odd keg party.
She could never quite figure him out. He often looked over like he was going to speak.
He never did.
And the parade of laughing blondes seemed to take up more and more of his time.
So why did he keep watching her?
Weird.
Maggie shrugged it off. Stuart Fraser was no concern of hers.

*

It was the night of the engineering grad party at Damian’s – a typically loud, hot, crazy Damian kind of party.
Stuart begged off with a philosophy assignment – defining solipsism, he explained with a rueful shake of his head. Maggie teased him that it was solipsism of the worst sort to think that his philosophy assignment was more important than her grad party.
And they parted, laughing.
It was late – early morning, really – by the time Maggie got back. And she was far from sober when she let herself into Stuart’s room, planning to crawl into bed and tease him awake.
She wasn’t expecting him to be up pacing the floor.
She wasn’t expecting the anger. The ice-cold, quiet rage that was so much worse than noise and fury.
She wasn’t expecting him to grab her roughly.
“You little slut.”
Maggie never knew a voice so soft could sound so vicious.
He grabbed at the black bra strap peeking out from underneath her tank top.
“Does Damian like this one particularly?”
The sneer in his voice hit Maggie like a slap in the face.
“Stu, don’t be silly.”
She shook off his hands and backed towards the door, wanting to put distance between herself and the stranger who wasn’t Stuart.
“Shtu, don’t be shilly,” he mocked her. “Drunk, too, like a slut would be.”
Maggie’s head reeled. This wasn’t Stu, her Stu. He didn’t mean it. It was a bad day, that’s all. Maybe his assignment wasn’t going well.
She reached out a tentative hand towards him.
“Stu –”
She heard the blow before she felt it.
She wondered. If the strange, crunching, cracking sound was connected to the darkness that seemed to be closing in around her. If the searing pain that followed was in her nose or her eye.
And if the hard, agonizing knot in her chest was what a heart felt like when it began to break.

*
Maggie, stumbling home drunk from the grad party at Damian’s, couldn’t believe she’d finished university and somehow failed to find a man after four bloody years.
Oh, there’d been a few. Greg. Todd. Jamie. Sean. And that one awkward, drunken night with Damian. But no sign of Mr. Right.
Aw, screw it. Who needed men, anyway?
Maggie was giddy enough to beam happily at Stuart Fraser when she passed him in the stairwell.
He didn’t look happy, she thought. In fact, he looked miserable.
But what did it matter?
Stuart Fraser was nothing to her.

*

She knew they didn’t believe her.
Not the nice nurses or the silent, bearded doctor. Not Pauline or Tammy. And not her parents, who worried when she arrived home announcing she was heading to Scotland. As soon as possible.
She could see from their faces that no one bought the eye story. But they accepted it when she explained, lightly but firmly, that the engineering grad party had gotten out of hand and she’d ended up in the middle of a fight.
No one asked about Stuart. Why he hadn’t been around. Why he wasn’t going on this long-spoken-of journey to Scotland. Why she never returned his tearful calls.
But she didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.
She just packed her backpack and caught a plane.

*

Maggie studied the clothes on her bed with dismay, wondering how so much wardrobe was meant to fit in so little backpack and whether that small bottle of cover-up would be enough to take the worst edges off the shiner she’d earned at the engineers’ softball tournament.
What would Scottish men think of a Canadian girl with a black eye?
Then Maggie grinned. Heck, it was Scotland. She’d just tell them the other guy looked worse. Probably they’d laugh and buy her a pint.
Anyway, this time tomorrow she’d be in Edinburgh.
The phone rang but Maggie ignored it. The machine could get it.
“Maggie, it’s Stuart Fraser.”
She glanced at the machine in surprise.
“I heard you were off to Scotland soon and wondered if you wanted some tips or anything. Anyway, I’m at 592-1756 if you want to gimme a shout.”
Maggie sat on the bed, shaking her head.
Weird. Maybe Pauline hadn’t been wrong years ago when she said Stuart Fraser had a thing for Maggie.
Maggie giggled and returned to packing.
She wouldn’t call him back, of course. Not tonight. Or ever.
But it was nice to think he’d noticed her once.

*

Maggie feels the wind whip against her face, the cold lulling her still-sore eye into numbness. She peers over the edge of the cliff and contemplates what it’s like to be twenty-three years old. In a strange country. And absolutely alone.
She raises her arms as if to control the rush of wind or fly away on its fearsome power.
And she feels a grin spread across her aching face as she turns and walks away from the precipice.
Margaret Anne MacKenzie is finally in Scotland.