Page 32 of Beautiful Ugly
“Well, in that case, I’ll take some lamb chops please,” I say.
The smile returns, and she starts adding the meat to the scales.
“Life on a small island like this isn’t always easy,” she says.“Meat is best fresh but the ferry only sails once, sometimes twice a week, so we slaughter our own in the abattoir out back.” She turns to look over her shoulder at a door behind the counter. I look too, and think I see someone standing there behind the frosted glass, but maybe it was just a trick of the light. “Everything you see here,” she says, looking back down at the meat counter, “would have been alive and well only a day or so ago. Walking around, breathing the sea air, feeling the sun on its back. Now they’redead. Just like that, their life is over. Finished. Extinguished. Ended when it had barely begun. How is the writing coming along?” The unexpected question tacked on the end of her speech knocks the wind out of me a little. I didn’t realize she knew who I was too. “Small island. Everyone knows everything about everyone here,” she adds, as though reading my mind.
“I’m starting to realize that.”
“Nobody has any secrets on the Isle of Amberly. I hope you left yours behind.”
Her words somehow feel like a threat and a warning at the same time.
“Writers don’t have secrets, and if we do we hide them inside our books,” I tell her, but she just smiles. “You have a beautiful accent. Are you from Spain originally?”
“I always find that fascinating about the British. The way they don’t ask what they really want to ask but still expect to find out what it is they want to know,” she says.
“Sorry, you’ve lost me.”
“Again, no. You are lost because of you, not me. You asked if I was from Spain, but what you really wanted to know is why I am here, on Amberly.”
She’s clearly confused. I was actually just trying to make polite conversation.
“Whyareyou here?” I ask, indulging her.
“Why does anyone do anything? There are only ever tworeasons: for money or for love. In my case, love. I was living in Barcelona when the love of my life walked into the café where I worked. That was five years ago. We’ve been together ever since, and being married to a butcher has plenty of advantages,” she says, smiling again.
I stare at the bill’s butchers sign on the tiled wall behind her. “Well, Bill is a lucky man.”
“Bill is dead,” she replies, still smiling.
“Oh, I’m sorry—”
“Don’t be. I was talking about Alex. We took over Bill’s Butchers when Bill had a heart attack. We were here on holiday—just visiting the island—but ended up running the business. It was a case of right time, right place.”
Not for Bill, I can’t help thinking.
The door behind the counter swings open. I catch a brief glimpse of the room it hides, filled with lots of shiny metal surfaces. There is what looks like an operating table in the middle, with a carcass on top. And a saw. The bloody limbs almost look... human—
“Gosh, sorry, didn’t know we had a visitor,” a skinny young woman says, quickly closing the door.
They kiss and I feel a little old and out of touch for assuming that Alex was a man.
Alex—the woman—has short blond hair, round rubber earrings that stretch holes in her lobes, and when she wipes her bloody hands on her otherwise crisp white apron, I see that she has tattoos on each of her fingers. A skull, a star, a sun, a moon, and a heart. She catches me staring and smiles in a way I find deeply unsettling.
“How delightful. Avisitor. Out of season.” She speaks the way someone does when they have known nothing but wealth. It catches me off guard because her posh British accent doesn’t match her appearance; it’s out of sync, like when the sounddoesn’t match the image on your TV and your brain can’t immediately process what is wrong. “I hope you’re not writing about us in your book.”
“You and Mary?”
“Theisland. This is a quiet place. A peaceful place. Aprivateplace. We don’t need authors or journalists coming here, writing about Amberly, attracting even morevisitorsand turning our home into some sort of Scottish island Disneyland. We like things the way they are.” She says it all with a friendly smile but her words still sound menacing.
“Did a journalist come here?” I ask, wondering if she was referring to Abby.
“We get a lot of visitors during the tourist season—too many—it’s impossible to remember them all,” Mary interrupts.
“And they’re all the same,” Alex adds.
Mary smiles apologetically, then wraps the meat in paper before placing it inside a red-and-white stripy bag. “I’ve added some lamb sausages for the dog, my treat,” she says, smiling at Columbo, who is sitting outside staring in through the window.
I thank her, pay, and then turn to leave. The little bell tinkles when I open the door.