by Lucy Lawrie
Then I remembered the poor woman whose family was suing her GP, and my reaction on hearing about her hypochondriac tendencies. I had rushed in with my laughter, falling over myself to place some distance between her and me.
‘Do you ever feel like Paul? You know, the way he talked yesterday?’
He considered this for a moment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘My job is to look after you and Sophie. Falling apart simply isn’t on the list of options.’
A wave of tenderness swept over me. Poor Jonathan. Working so hard. Denying himself even the right to his own feelings.
‘We’ll get there,’ I whispered, my voice suddenly thick with tears. I untucked his shirt, and slipped my hands underneath, to feel the warmth of his skin against my cold fingers.
12
I was finding it hard to concentrate. The faint whine of bagpipes had been drifting in through the office window all afternoon, but that was an occupational hazard in this part of town. Sometimes I even appreciated the holiday feel of it, and the implicit message that I should really be somewhere else enjoying myself – buying shortbread in Jenners or visiting Edinburgh Castle – and certainly not reviewing share purchase agreements or worrying about brain tumours.
What was more distracting, though, was the coach-load of tourists that had been milling around on the pavement outside for the past forty-five minutes. They kept peering down at us through the railings in a curious but vaguely disappointed way, as though we might be the first point of interest in a not very interesting guided tour.
As usual, I jumped when the phone rang.
‘Elliot McCabe here. More paranormal problems, I’m afraid.’ He gave a gusty sigh.
‘Really?’ I reached for a pen.
‘I’ve got an employee who’s been signed off on long-term sick leave, giving work-related stress as the reason. I eventually got round to requesting a doctor’s report. It arrived this morning and it says . . . let’s see, yes . . . “Re David McLaren . . . The patient came to see me in May this year complaining of severe headaches and insomnia. Reassurance was given, and advice on dealing with symptoms. However, the symptoms did not settle over time, and on the fifth visit the patient broke down. He complained that he had experienced unusual events at work, which had led him to believe that his place of work was haunted by a poltergeist. In particular, he was distressed by an incident when a coffin fell off a workbench, seemingly propelled by an invisible force. His work involves night shifts and he has become so anxious that he feels unable to attend work. A mild antidepressant was prescribed, and David has been referred for cognitive behavioural therapy in the hope that this may alleviate his symptoms.” ’
‘I see. Not very helpful, is it? What you really need to do is make the doctor say when this David character is likely to . . .’ – get his arse back into work – ‘. . . um, be fit enough to return to the workplace.’
‘It’s not just that. I’m concerned he might sue the company for causing some kind of mental illness.’
‘Hmm. Unlikely. He would need to prove that the company took no action over whatever was causing the stress. Our argument would be that action was impossible, because the problem was all in the employee’s mind.’
‘What if he says we should have got rid of the ghost?’
‘We would need to stick to the line that the . . . er, manifestations were a subjective phenomenon.’
‘But should we not do something . . . even by way of a gesture . . .’
‘I suppose you could make some very mild attempt . . . like putting garlic cloves in each of the affected rooms or something.’
‘No. Garlic is for vampires—’
‘Well then celery sticks or something. Just make it up, Elliot – play him at his own game.’
He sighed heavily. ‘My other concern is a claim under Health and Safety legislation.’
‘Health and Safety legislation?’ I envisaged Elliot rushing up to the poltergeist as it was about to chuck the coffin across the room, telling it to bend from the knees and not from the back.
‘Yes. There’s a health and safety angle to everything in the funeral business. Believe me, I’ve had my fingers burnt before—’
‘Elliot—’ I cut in. ‘Have you heard from Bobby Spencer at all?’
‘Not since he phoned me threatening to raise a tribunal claim. Why?’
I had a sudden image of Bobby, looming over the funeral home like it was a dolls’ house, orchestrating this whole debacle like a manically grinning, ginger-haired puppeteer.
‘Could you let me know if he surfaces again? And tell him to deal with McKeith’s in future rather than talking to you direct.’
‘Will do. Look, I have to go now – I have a meeting. But could you please prepare a note for me with a clear recommendation as to how we should proceed. If you could get it to me by the end of the day, please.’ And he rang off.
Time to get creative, then. I stared up at the Japanese tourists again, hoping for inspiration, until I looked at the clock and realised I had to leave for the nursery in less than an hour.
Bullet points were the way to go. I recommended that Elliot should arrange for an up-to-date risk assessment, preferably to be undertaken by an independent risk assessment consultancy. I suggested that David McClaren should prepare a statement for the assessor so that he could check for any non-subjective explanations, e.g. electrical faults, infestation by rats or mice, evidence of the presence of drugs or other hallucinatory substances. I asked Elliot to get back in touch after the risk assessment had been completed, so I could provide further advice as to how to proceed at that time.
For one mad moment, as I shut my laptop, I dared to hope that I’d never hear from Elliot McCabe again.
13
From time to time I receive student newsletters from Oakenwell College, Massachusetts. My former landlady still forwards them assiduously from the Morningside flat. I keep thinking I should tell them to take me off their mailing list but part of me likes receiving these missives. They’re like communications from a parallel world, snapshots from a life I chose not to live.
I was in the living room one morning in late September when one of them popped through the letterbox. Sophie was planted on the floor, playing with a toy giraffe, bashing it on the carpet in the V-shaped space between her short chubby legs. The outline of her head, dipped in concentration, and the delicate little stem of her neck, formed the shape of a perfect question mark. It seemed to emphasise her newness – the infinite possibilities of her.
In between extended moments contemplating my daughter, I was checking the contents of her changing bag: sterilised empty bottle in an insulated holder, carton of baby milk, flask of hot water to heat bottle, Infacol wind drops, antibacterial hand gel, nappies, wipes, changing mat, nappy sacks, spare change of clothes, two bibs, two muslin cloths. I was planning to take her for a walk in the Botanic Gardens.
‘Scissors, scissors, scissors,’ I muttered as I went to retrieve the mail. I was determined not to forget this final item – necessary to open the milk carton quickly at the crucial moment.
The newsletter, when I saw it, struck a chord. I’d been thinking about Malkie – and that era of my life – all morning. Not that this was exactly unusual, since our little heart-to-heart in the car outside the doctor’s. But when I took it into the living room and flicked through it, I found another little piece of my past waiting for me on the last page. It was a photograph of a painting by one of the students – a seascape under moonlight. Underneath, I recognised the lines of an Emily Dickinson poem I had once written about whilst at University. I remembered an autumn afternoon spent curled up in a sunny window seat at the library, inhaling the smell of warm wood and old books.
Each that we lose takes part of us;
A crescent still abides,
Which like the moon, some turbid night,
Is summoned by the tides.
I sank back on the sofa, suddenly caught up in a fierce, inexplicable longing. But Sophie started wa
iling – her giraffe had toppled out of her reach – so I dismissed the feeling, gathered myself up and got us both ready to go.
It was a cold, dull day, and it wasn’t until around half past two, when we were walking back through Inverleith Park, that the sun broke out from behind a pearly bank of cloud to the south.
‘Ah look, Sophie! Sunshine.’
She gurgled in her buggy. I stopped and bent down to kiss her nose, hoping for one of her ravishing smiles, but she wasn’t looking at me. She had tipped her head back and was surveying the canopy of one particular tree with a thoughtful, wide-eyed stare. A few trees in the park had already turned a satisfying Halloween orange, but the leaves of Sophie’s tree were caught at a point of luminous, washed-through green, about to tip into yellow. I wheeled her across the grass to a bench that overlooked Inverleith Pond, eased her out of the buggy and held her against my chest so she could look over my shoulder at her tree. Her breath was damp against my neck, and I could hear the little catches as she swallowed. Within a minute or two, though, she laid her cheek on my shoulder with a big sigh, and fell asleep.
The skyline was spectacular from here: Arthur’s Seat in the distance, Edinburgh castle on its bulk of rock, the panorama of domes and church spires, enticing green glimpses of parks and private gardens. I could trace with my eye the neat patterns of elegant New Town crescents and terraces, places where I had walked a hundred times but which were unfamiliar from this vantage point. I thought of all the lives being lived there, all the dramas being played out in my city and all the streets that fell under the sweep of my gaze.
And what about the lives I could have lived? All those paths seemed to spiral back to one central, incontrovertible point. Malkie – again – and me, teetering on the brink of adulthood all those years ago.
*
Because you see, I never went to Massachusetts.
Malkie and I had one summer together – a glorious, shimmering summer in my memory, although in fact we only saw each after dark. He was stacking supermarket shelves from ten a.m. until six p.m., and I was working in a bar near the Museum of Scotland, in long busy evening shifts that ended at midnight. Each night I crawled back to his flat, reeking of smoke and beer, showered, and joined him in bed, my bare skin sweet with the smell of Johnson’s Baby Soap. In the mornings, we’d sleep late – he’d set his alarm for 9.25 a.m. – just enough time for him to shower, shave and pitch up at Tesco.
One afternoon in August, I went to the University library and emailed Oakenwell College to tell them I wouldn’t be coming, and then dropped by the Law faculty to see about getting myself onto a law conversion course.
For a while, I tortured myself by gazing at the Oakenwell brochure: the chapel nestling between soft green lawns, vistas of maple and elm trees, leaves aflame with breathtaking fall colours. And I would scan through the various course reading lists, my heart beating fast as though I was in touching distance of Emily Dickinson herself, in her Amherst attic, or Willa Cather, on the wide-open Nebraska plains.
But I couldn’t leave Edinburgh – being with Malkie made me feel as if I’d just woken up after twenty years of sleepwalking through my life.
When term started again, there was a shift in our relationship, as subtle and inexorable as the inching of summer into autumn. It wasn’t a physical change – my body still responded, deep inside, every time I saw him. The sound of his voice, full of Glasgow grit, provoked the same reaction. And he seemed as caught up in me as he’d ever been. But some kind of new awareness, a question mark, seemed to hang over the relationship.
During the week we studied together at the law library after lectures, and then I’d spend Saturday at his flat. We would watch the football, if it was on, and then we’d make dinner; clumsy meals of pasta and supermarket garlic bread, or chicken kiev with oven chips. On special occasions it would be ‘Secret Recipe Bolognese’, the only meal Malkie knew how to make from scratch – knowledge passed down from mother to son when he’d left home to go to University.
If I was in a relaxed mood, chirpy and light, all would be well and the time would flow easily between us; but increasingly, I found myself trying to think of the right thing to say, and it would be a relief when he finally took me to bed, where we didn’t have to talk, but just let our bodies fit together. We would always have music on; for months we had the same CD on repeat, which started with an Aerosmith rock ballad, ‘I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing’. He would murmur the words, buzzily, into my skin as he kissed my throat. And then afterwards we would fall asleep face to face with the bedside light still on, the navy blue duvet thrown back off our too-warm bodies.
Somehow, though, that connection between us seemed unstable, like a rare element forged in an intensity of heat and light. I would leave his flat on a Sunday morning after staying over, and everything would feel perfect, light, sparkling, between us. But as soon as I had left I would start fretting about why he hadn’t asked me to spend the day with him too, and the next night. A knot would form in my stomach, tightening harder and harder until he phoned.
He finished with me the day after my birthday, saying he wasn’t ready to commit. Every time I asked ‘Why?’ or ‘What have I done wrong?’ his eyes grew a little more distant, as though it was the questions themselves that were breaking us apart. So I stopped asking them, and within the week he was knocking at my door, saying he’d made a mistake. Twice more, over the next eighteen months or so, he finished it, then changed his mind. And each time he came back to me, the moments became even more precious, knowing as I did by then that there was very little chance he would ever really be mine.
By the time we entered the dying days of the relationship, we’d given up on those ordinary everyday things that we couldn’t quite seem to get right – watching television together, eating meals, going to the pub. We just used to lie in bed together, wrapped in each other’s arms, listening to music. There was an unspoken agreement that the Aerosmith was now out of bounds, but there were plenty of other mournful tracks to listen to, which all somehow expressed the paradox I was living through – that misery could be transformed into something beautiful. And I would try to get my head around the enormity of what was coming, would ache with the loss of him even as I was lying there beside him.
Late one evening, he turned up at my flat unexpectedly. I knew why he’d come, in the way I could always read his emotions. Wordlessly, he drew me into a hug, and stood, rocking me gently. Then, hand in hand, we walked to his car.
We drove up around the road that circles Arthur’s Seat, and then climbed up on foot as far as we could go. We sat on a concrete bench in the darkness, staring the end of our relationship in the face. Suddenly, he threw his head back and cried in a broken voice, ‘I can’t bear this. I can’t do this any more.’
I gathered all my courage and said what I knew to be true now. ‘You’re never going to love me, are you.’
He shook his head. ‘We have to stop.’
I sat quietly, feeling only compassion. I knew this was nobody’s fault, not any more. We’d both tried. I knew the feelings he had for me, understood their limitations. I knew that he’d tried to turn them into something that could bear the weight of a future together. And I had tried to step back from him, tried to be strong enough to function within the uncertainty. But every time, we found ourselves playing out the same pattern, and every time, we fell apart along the same fault line. There was nothing more to be done.
I looked out across the city below us, the lights twinkling from a thousand different streets. And I realised that, however hard and long I looked, even if I knocked on the door of every house in every street in the world, even if I walked through every crowd, tapped the shoulder of every stranger with dark hair and a shabby navy jacket, I would never find another Malkie. It hit me then, the loss of him. It resonated through me, like a perfect note in a heartbreaking song. And then it settled in my bones so that it ached to move, to take a single step.
*
I felt sha
ky, as I got up off the bench and tucked Sophie back into her pushchair to begin the walk home. That poem, finding its way to me, had been almost like a warning. For the part of me that loved Malkie was still there, under the surface. Always, since the day of Jo’s psychology experiment. It was true – of course it was – that just when you thought it had dissolved away, pain and longing could reappear, terrifying and undiminished. In certain seasons, when the tides are strong, when the wind is blowing in from a certain direction. And autumn had always been a bad time of year for missing Malkie.
Where did that leave me, I wondered, as I pushed the buggy along past Waitrose and meandered along Orchard Road towards home. God, the very air seemed to smell of Malkie that afternoon . . . the tail end of summer, a crispness in the breeze, the autumn flame catching at the leaves. With a searing twinge of sadness for Jonathan, I acknowledged my feelings. It seemed there would be no getting over this. No getting over it at all.
14
‘You know, I’ve been thinking about Braid Hills Funeral Home,’ I announced to Jonathan. He groaned and sagged in the driver’s seat – we were on our way home from B&Q, having spent a scintillating afternoon looking at mixer taps. We’d been planning a trip to the park but soft drizzle had been falling all afternoon, the October colours muted under a low grey sky. As we crawled through traffic the wipers swished back and forth in a reassuring sort of way, lulling me into a conversational mood.
‘I’m just wondering whether, somehow, Bobby Spencer could be behind all this trouble they’re having. What if he’s . . . I don’t know . . . faking the ghosts or something? Could he do that, do you think?’
‘Bobby Spencer, the five-foot-nothing ginger evil genius?’ Jonathan still found it amusing that I had suspected Bobby of planting the anonymous note.
‘It just seems strange,’ I persisted. ‘Or maybe he’s putting the other employees up to it, somehow. Maybe he’s still in contact with them. What do you think? Do you think I should look into it, or suggest that Elliot gets in touch with him?’