by Clare Carson
‘There, have it,’ he said. ‘It was sticking out of an empty Jameson’s bottle under his bed.’
She quickly inspected the scrap: an 01 London telephone number was scrawled across the paper in Jim’s spidery handwriting. Message in a bottle. She stuffed it into her pocket.
‘You’re a dickhead,’ she said. ‘A fucking gongfermor.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘You fuck off.’
‘Okay. I will.’
He skulked away to his room. Fuck him, she thought. She stalked off in the other direction, through the kitchen and out into the fresh air of the courtyard, breathed deeply, leaned against the wall, on the verge of tears but no water in her eyes. The sky was brighter now, the thick bank of horizon clouds coloured salmon pink. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning. Too late, she thought. Too late for bloody warnings now. She sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. Fuck him, she thought again. She meant it this time. She pulled Tom’s notebook out of her back pocket and flicked through it. Jim Coyle, Jim Coyle, Jim Coyle, his name was written on nearly every page. What a tosser; him and his poxy journalism, his shitty writing skills, his fucking ambition. She stuck her hand in her front pocket and her fingers rasped the rough strike of her Swan Vestas. She marched across the front lawn, stood above her stone circle, ripped the pages out of the notebook, built a satisfying paper pyramid in the centre of the stones, placed a fat twig on top to pin them down, crouched with her back to the wind, used her hand to shield the matchbox. The flames flared, fizzled and died. She persisted, reigniting, puffing on the embers, striking and blowing until she had reduced the notebook to a pile of scorched paper and ash. She sat back on her heels and sighed. Wiped her forehead with her forearm, looked up to see Tom leaning against the kitchen door, watching her.
‘Is that my notebook?’ he asked. Quite calmly, given the circumstances.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s just a bloody journal. A diary. That’s all. I wasn’t going to do anything with it.’
He shook his head, retreated to the kitchen door.
‘You’d better get ready to go,’ she shouted after him angrily. ‘Jim will be home soon and then we’ll have to leave to catch the ferry.’ No reply.
She sat on the grass with her arms around her knees and gazed over the bay as an early morning curlew keened.
Her trance was broken by the low hum of a car. She stood. Hurriedly dismantled her stone circle, lobbed the sandstone rocks back into the rose bed, kicked and trampled the ashes, ruffled the grass with her plimsoll in an attempt to wipe away the scorch marks. The last remains of the notebook – a few yellow-edged papers – fluttered away in the wind. The rooftop crow cawed as the Renault steered into the courtyard. Jim bounded from the car, followed by the Renault’s driver. He was stocky with the same, dark-haired, pale-skinned colouring as Jim. But his warm smile and relaxed manner made him look completely different from her father. An easy-going version of Jim. It had to be Bill. He greeted her with a friendly handshake, said he hoped she had enjoyed her stay at Nethergate.
‘Hang on a moment,’ Jim said to Bill. ‘I’ve left the tank nearly empty. I want to give you some money for the petrol. I’ll go and dig out some cash.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Bill.
‘It does. Wait. I shan’t be long.’
Jim dived into the kitchen. Sam smiled shyly at Bill, noticed again the warmth in his mouth and it dawned on her that she had an unexpected opportunity to find out about her dad. His past. His childhood. Her gut tightened. She wondered whether she should ask. It was a perfectly normal question; it wasn’t about state secrets. She struggled to break the taboo, the silence surrounding Jim.
‘You went to school with Jim, didn’t you?’ she blurted.
She managed to make the perfectly normal sound odd. Bill frowned slightly, with puzzlement more than anything. ‘Yes. I did.’
Go on. Don’t back out now. Don’t lose the chance. ‘He was chucked out, wasn’t he,’ she stated.
‘Yes, he was.’ Bill clasped his wrist awkwardly in front of his stomach.
‘Why?’
‘Hasn’t Jim told you?’
‘He doesn’t really talk much about his past,’ she said, trying hard to keep the conversation casual, her mouth dry. She sensed Bill’s shrewd stare, digging below the surface of her expression.
‘You shouldn’t be too judgemental about your father,’ he said. ‘It’s difficult for men of our generation to talk about personal things. It’s not that Jim has anything to be ashamed of, he didn’t do anything wrong. He just stuck his neck out, that’s all.’
‘What did he do?’
‘Oh, it was a Jesuit school. The usual stuff went on. You know.’
She shook her head. He reddened slightly.
‘Please tell me,’ she said.
He must have felt sorry for her, having to ask a stranger for information about her own father. He heaved a sigh. Hesitated. Eyed the far corner of the courtyard.
‘There’s really not a lot to tell,’ he said at last. ‘There was a lot of abuse of one kind or another. We just assumed it was normal. Open secret. Unspoken. It was what we expected. We were generally relieved if it amounted to nothing more than a beating. There wasn’t anything we could have done about it anyway; nobody would have taken any notice of us complaining. Just a bunch of schoolboys. So we put up with it mostly. But there was one priest who was a total sadist. He had it in for Jim. Took pleasure in humiliating him one way or another. He pushed Jim too far, made him realize he had nothing to lose, and so he went out one night and painted a message on the school wall. He wrote the name of the priest, said he was a boy-beater. That was all.’
She blinked, absorbing the details of the story: the abuse, the priest, the protest. ‘Jim was expelled because he was a whistleblower?’
Bill nodded.
‘What happened to the priest?’
‘Nothing. That’s the way it is with the church. Same old story. The victim gets the blame. Damned for affronting the church. That’s how it goes.’
A plip-plop-plip made Sam look up. A pebble bounced down the tiles, hit the edge of the guttering, arced and landed at her feet in the courtyard. The rooftop culprit cawed and hopped behind the chimneypot.
‘How did they find out it was Jim who wrote the message?’ she asked.
‘One of the other boys grassed on him.’
She gasped indignantly. ‘Why would another boy do that?’
Bill shrugged. ‘Because he wanted to curry favour with the priests,’ he said. He inhaled. ‘Probably because he didn’t like us, and none of us really liked him. He was a bit different, an outsider. Lone wolf. Jarek Crawley. Creepy Crawley we used to call him.’
Jarek. Odd name. Polish mother perhaps. The wires in her brain touched, sparked, gave her an electric shock. Playground bully.
‘What did Crawley do when he left school?’
Bill’s eyes flickered away and back. She was unnerving him with her questions, digging too deep, cutting too close to the bone. His voice definitely sounded warier. ‘Crawley went to university and managed to land himself a stint as a trainee reporter on a national paper.’
She closed her eyes briefly, saw the repeat pattern dancing across her eyelids. Journalist. The report about Ian Coyle in The Sun. Jim’s Bedford on the front page of the Southern Advertiser. The Watcher’s threat to sell her story to the press.
‘Could have done really well for himself,’ Bill continued. ‘But somewhere along the way he wandered into another line of business.’
‘Security fact-checker for Intelligence,’ she said.
Bill jumped, startled, caught unawares by her assertion. She assumed from his reaction she had scored a direct hit. His face darkened and she realized that he might appear amiable, but you wouldn’t want to find yourself on the wrong side of him.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realize you knew… I hope you’re not getting yourself… You have to steer well clea
r.’
He caught her eye. ‘You are like Jim in some ways. You don’t back off even when you would be better off well out of it.’ He rubbed his wedding ring with his thumb, searched her face intently again. ‘I don’t know how you found out about Crawley and I don’t want to know, but I’m warning you, if Jim hasn’t already done so,’ he said. ‘Keep out of his way.’
She nodded.
He wrinkled his nose. ‘He has a reputation for being fairly dogged when it comes to unearthing the dirt. Tenacious.’
She didn’t need Bill to tell her that.
‘Some would say it’s a bit of a compulsion of his. Can’t help himself. He has his own peculiar peccadilloes. Voyeur. Bit of a sadist.’
Give me the child, she thought, and I will mould the man.
‘We had complaints about him years ago. When I was still working for the police. When I was stationed in Glasgow. Nasty complaints. But we couldn’t ever make anything stick. Everybody knows he still keep his contacts with the press, uses them when it suits him. Sells his surplus information when he’s short of cash. Everybody knows, but nobody can do anything about it.’ He folded his arms. ‘Stay away from Crawley. He’s dangerous. Men who have nothing to lose are always dangerous. Leave Crawley for Jim to sort out.’
The scrape of the kitchen door on the hard floor tiles made them both turn towards the croft. She could see Bill taking a mental note; the hinge must have dropped, repair needed.
Jim emerged, waving a bunch of green notes in his hand. ‘Sorry I took so long. Just looking for a piece of paper I left somewhere. Had a phone number on it. Seems to have disappeared.’
Sam scuffed the courtyard gravel with her plimsoll.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Jim continued. ‘I’m sure it will turn up somewhere.’
She could sense him scrutinizing her. She kept her eyes down.
‘Been having a good old chin-wag have you?’ he asked Bill.
‘Yes. It’s nice to catch up with your brood.’
‘What were you talking about then?’ Jim demanded as he handed over the wodge of cash.
Bill didn’t miss a beat. ‘Oh, the usual. Families. I was just trying to work out whether Sam had inherited any of the Coyles’ fine features. It’s odd, isn’t it, the way family resemblances work. Strange how the genes play out. I can’t see any real likeness between you and Sam. Sometimes the physical traits seem to skip a generation, jump a few squares on the chessboard.’
‘Oh, she’s a Coyle all right,’ said Jim. ‘Can’t judge a book by its cover.’
Bill laughed. ‘You’re an odd clan. You Coyles.’
Jim grimaced, flicked his wrist. ‘Time to leave if we’re going to catch this ferry.’
The crow on the roof cawed.
‘I’m going to have to do something about that bird,’ Bill said. ‘It’s buggering up the rendering on the chimney.’
‘It’s a bit of a smart-arse,’ Sam said as she walked towards the kitchen door to collect her bag. It made sense now though – Jim’s views on journalists. She should have paid more heed to his allergic reaction, worked out sooner that it was connected to the Watcher.
16
The return journey across the Flow country had been painful. She had avoided speaking to Tom. Jim had avoided speaking to anyone. Tom had made some joke or other about silencers as they passed the point where Jim had stormed off over the moorlands on the way up. Nobody had laughed. Now here they were, back at Inverness station, Cortina on trailer, killing time before they had to board the train heading south. She had said in the vague direction of Tom that she needed to phone Liz. She was walking away when Jim called after her.
‘Do you have a spare stamp on you?’
Sam shook her head.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I’ve left it too late to look for a post office.’
‘What do you need it for anyway?’
‘Harry’s postcard. I’ll just have to hope it gets there on the stamp I’ve got.’
She gave him an exasperated look; not Harry’s bloody postcard again.
Jim grinned. ‘Harry’s always been my second man,’ he said.
‘I’m sure he won’t cry if he doesn’t get a postcard.’ She couldn’t quite contain the seeping resentment.
‘I have to go and find a guard,’ he continued. ‘Need to see if I can arrange my sleeping quarters for the night. Twist a few arms.’
They went their separate ways.
Inside the phone box outside Inverness station, she fumbled around for loose change in the bottom of her coat pocket. Liz’s voice crackled down the line.
‘Hello. Hello.’
The phone beeped like a juvenile herring gull demanding food from its mother. She rammed the coins she had finally located down its gullet.
‘Hello. Is that you?’ said Liz.
‘Yes, it’s me.’
‘Are you on your way home?’
‘Yes, we’re at Inverness Station.’
‘You don’t have to get a lift back with Jim from the station tomorrow, do you? You’re not in any hurry.’
‘I don’t know. I hadn’t really thought about it. Why?’
‘I want you to go to Foyles and pick up a book on the way home.’
‘Mum, Foyles isn’t on the way home.’
‘The book is for you anyway. It’s from Ruth. She phoned this morning. She said she’d ordered a book for your birthday. She has an account there. All you have to do is go and pick it up.’
‘Oh, okay. I’ll see how I feel in the morning.’
‘Sam, just go to Foyles. For Ruth’s sake, show her you appreciate her efforts. It won’t take you very long. And Sam, there’s one other thing you could do for me. Could you just nip down to the theatre department and see if you can pick up a couple of copies of Marlowe’s…’
‘Beep, beep, beep. I’m out of coins, Mum. See you tomorrow.’
She pushed her way out of the phone box, ambled slowly back across the station concourse, noticed a man standing in a newsagent holding a copy of Private Eye, watching her over the top of the pages.
She managed thirty minutes in the sleeper with Tom, fending off any attempt at conversation with her pointedly monosyllabic replies before even she, the mistress of the prickly silence, could take it no longer and had to abandon him on the muttered pretext of needing to check up on Jim. She swayed along the corridor as the train wended through the green and purple cutting, its butt kissing Inverness goodbye, its face squinting up at Aviemore. Dusk, proper dusk; the darkness was rising behind the jagged peaks of the mountains. Somewhere in the distance she thought she saw a stag.
Jim was in the saloon carriage, stretching back in the seat he had claimed as his own for the night. He had leaned on the guard, but had failed to secure a berth. The haversack was slumped on the table in front of him. The bright overhead light bleached his features, smoothing over the boozer’s blemishes, tinting his face with a chalky pallor. His mottled hands clutched a tumbler of whisky. The translucent amber disc slithered and slipped around its glass casket with the movement of the train; or perhaps it was the tremor in his fingers. His puffy extremities alarmed her. Forty-six. He was only forty-six. In her mind he was going to age disgracefully, not waste and wither. He caught her scrutinizing him. She glanced away. She didn’t want him to see that she had noticed his failing strength, the parting of image and reality, shadow and substance.
He placed the tumbler carefully on the table and tilted back in his seat.
‘Where’s your journalist friend?’ he asked.
‘In the sleeper.’
‘He was very quiet on the drive back. Something up?’
‘No.’
‘Did you check his pockets before we left then, like I told you to?’
She nodded.
‘Find anything?’
She raised her shoulders into a semi-shrug, half expecting him to demand she hand over anything she had confiscated from Tom. He didn’t. He smiled and changed the subject.
‘A
nyway I’ve been thinking,’ he said.
‘About what?’
‘About what you asked me.’
‘What did I ask you?’
‘What I thought you should do with your life.’
‘Oh.’ That conversation. ‘And?’
‘I think you should be an archaeologist. Do your history degree, then go and train as an archaeologist.’
‘Archaeologist?’ She’d had her fill of ancient ruins. ‘God, I’m not sure I want a job sitting in a hole in the middle of nowhere digging up skeletons.’
‘You’ll have to deal with skeletons, whatever job you do.’ He laughed cynically. ‘One week in an office and I reckon you’d be pleading to be sent to a hole in the middle of nowhere with a couple of skeletons for company. If I had my life over again, I reckon that’s what I would do. Archaeology. Has to be more rewarding than my bloody job.’
‘I don’t really see the point of being an archaeologist. They don’t exactly do anybody any good.’
‘Good? What do you mean good?’
‘Tikkun olam,’ she said.
‘Ah. Tikkun Olam. Repairing the world. Leave the world a better place than you found it. Doing good. I’m not sure I’d worry about that too much. Doing good is a bit of a mug’s game. No one will thank you for doing good. You might think you’re doing good but everybody else will think you’re serving the enemy.’
He stared morosely into the bottom of his glass. Oh God, he was on the downward slope.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I will think about archaeology.’
She paused. ‘But you could still do it.’
‘What?’
‘Archaeology. You could finish the history degree and do an archaeology course.’
He studied the remains of his drink. ‘I’d like to think it’s possible,’ he said. ‘I suspect I’ve left it too late now though.’
A spit of rain splattered and rolled catawampus down the pane and then another and another, tearing across the glass. Maudlin. He was being maudlin. Or plain bloody stubborn. Selfish, buggering up everybody’s life with his sheer pig-headedness, unwillingness to let go of his lot, his other lives. He turned to face her, but his eyes were focused somewhere far away.