The Interpretations

  Weet’s day was in danger of ending, as it had begun, badly.

  Bob Brodie, the new Miss Crystal, had filed only seven days’ worth of horoscopes before being knocked down by a car. Of course he’d known that something like this was going to happen. So he was delighted by the potency of his astrological powers but less taken by the pain he had to endure as a result of this success. His right arm had been broken in two places. He would be unable to write or use a typewriter for three weeks.

  Weet had heard the bad news when he arrived at the small, crowded, smoky offices of the Dalmore Herald at half past eleven that morning. Though the new Miss Crystal was not well known and few of the staff had actually met him, a get-well card was being passed round for everyone to sign. When it reached Weet’s desk he wanted to write on it, ‘Die you miserable fucker.’ But he decided against this. Instead he wrote, ‘Where will we two meet again? In Dalmore, Elgin or in Tain?’ He signed it, ‘Beth McCrystal (Miss).’

  Then he picked up a copy of that morning’s Herald and glanced at his own horoscope which informed him that he might well experience a temporary reversal of fortune. Once again Miss Crystal’s powers of prophecy proved to be entirely accurate. Less than two minutes later McManus called Weet into his office. ‘Good morning, Miss Crystal,’ he said, smiling.

  Weet’s method of dealing with this disaster was to devote the next two hours to writing three weeks’ worth of horoscopes. He had two guiding principles. First, he would avoid specific references to the movements of the heavenly bodies. Nothing would be in transit anywhere and nothing would be on the cusp of anything else. Obviously, a horoscope which did not mention the astrological charts might lack a certain credibility but this would be compensated for by the compelling nature of his predictions. Anyway, he didn’t really give a shite.

  The second principle was that his horoscopes would be based, unswervingly, on chance. He used two dice. The higher the score, the worse the news. This meant that the very best news was reserved for a score of one, which, Weet realised with pleasure, was impossible. At seven, things changed over and it was downhill all the way to twelve.

  The first roll of the dice produced a two and a one. Weet wrote, ‘A close friend may give you some information that will be to your advantage. Today three is definitely your lucky number.’

  Seven came next. Bad news but not too bad. ‘You may be disappointed in some long-pursued goal. Do not let this disturb you. The signs are that you should consider devoting your energies elsewhere.’

  Next came a pair of fives. Weet’s mood brightened. ‘The omens for today are not at all positive. Meetings with anyone unknown to you personally should be avoided.’ He smiled. With a bit of luck a few job interviews would be cancelled. After all, there were some people who really believed this stuff.

  For a while Weet actually enjoyed being Miss Crystal. It became even more fun when he realised that the odds were slightly in favour of doom and gloom.

  Of the thirty-six combinations available on two six-sided dice, fifteen offered a score of six or less but there were twenty-one combinations which gave seven or above. This was excellent news.

  Then, about twenty minutes into his horoscope manufacture, he hit the jackpot: double six.

  ‘There is absolutely no need to panic,’ he wrote, ‘as it is possible that the tragic consequences of today’s astral projection will come to nothing. However, it is essential that you review all travel arrangements, especially those that involve transportation by car or over water. Movement other than to the South is to be avoided at all costs.’

  By a quarter to two Weet had completed his task. He had eighteen pages of astrological predictions, one per day for the next three weeks of Dalmore Heraldry. He felt pleased with himself because he had tackled the problem head-on, dealt with it straight away. Last time he had let it get him down. Now he was free to concentrate on the piece he had to produce on Gilfedder. This was for tomorrow’s edition and his deadline was 8pm. He had six and a quarter hours to produce eight hundred words. He decided to use up forty-five minutes by going out for lunch. As usual he went to Miss Petty’s Tearooms.

  Weet liked Miss Petty’s because it was quiet and genteel and contrasted greatly with the noisy offices of the Herald and the increasingly irritating atmosphere of the Din where many of his colleagues made do with a sandwich and a pint. Weet liked to drink but he worked hard at limiting this to evenings. He never drank before 6pm. Well, rarely.

  At twenty-nine Weet was often the youngest of Miss Petty’s lunch customers by about forty years. The elderly, mostly female clientele brought their age in with them. Despite the summer warmth they wore long dark woollen coats which had gone out of fashion decades before. They wore thick brown stockings and stout sensible shoes in dark brown or black leather which was as highly polished as the EPNS cutlery that lay on Miss Petty’s white starched tablecloths.

  Weet’s favourite lunch companion was Miss Comlyn. A small, thin, very upright woman, Miss Comlyn had lived in the same house in North Dalmore for eighty-two years. She had been born in that house and she would happily admit that she hoped to die there, ‘when God calls me to His Own.’ Miss Comlyn had lunch at Miss Petty’s Tearooms every day and she frequently shared a table with Weet. As he wanted a quiet lunch, Weet welcomed her as she spoke very little. She was very deaf.

  Consequently Weet’s communication with Miss Comlyn was usually restricted to nods and smiles between mouthfuls of plaice and chips. And he felt this was a pity because there were questions he wanted to ask her. For example, had she ever been abroad? Had she ever even been as far as Aberdeen or Inverness? He knew that she had been a teacher in Dalmore Primary School for thirty-eight years. Had she ever left Dalmore? These were questions he could easily ask her; there were many more that he could not. He knew that she had never married. Had she ever been in love? Had she ever had sex?

  Some years before, shortly after the death of Mrs McFarren, the minister’s wife, an unusual rumour had circulated in Dalmore. This rumour suggested that what had finished Mrs McFarren off – she was already seriously ill – was her discovery that her husband had once had an affair with Miss Comlyn. Weet had often tried to imagine this unlikely union but could not do so. Miss Comlyn was at least ten years older than the Reverend McFarren. He had arrived in the parish of Caulder more than thirty years ago and would then have been about forty. Miss Comlyn would have been fifty or fifty-one.

  Weet knew that logic, planning and clear thinking were commodities always absent when it came to love or lust. But Mr McFarren and Miss Comlyn? He doubted it. Anyway, the rumour didn’t last long. He wondered if they had heard it themselves and, if so, what they had thought about it. He couldn’t possibly ask Miss Comlyn, this eighty-two year old woman whose hair was no longer grey but completely white, whose appetite was frequently reduced, as it was today, to the tiniest fillet of sole, two small boiled potatoes sprinkled with mint and a portion of peas so small that you could count them easily.

  Weet realised that he loved Miss Comlyn dearly, almost as much as his own grandmother whose death seven years before had upset him greatly. He only ever met Miss Comlyn here at the restaurant and he only exchanged a few words with her on tiny inconsequential subjects but there was something endearing about her manner. It wasn’t overdone or cloying; it was warm but always economical and appropriate. As her deafness increased it seemed that she had learned to be selective when listening. She had acquired the ability to recognise when listening was of value and when it was a waste of time. She understood completely when to say something and when to be still.

  ‘Peter,’ she would say to him, ‘I think I’ll go now.’ He had no idea why she called him Peter but he had never bothered to correct her. This was what she always said to him at the end of her meal and it indicated that he should ask the waitress to bring her bill. When she had paid he would help her from her chair, she would take hold of his forearm and say to him, ‘You’re such a nice young man.’ Then she would go. />
  Today, as she was completing the paying of her bill, counting out coins carefully onto the little silver dish provided by the waitress, her handbag slipped from her lap. It landed upside down on the floor, spilling out most of its contents. Weet helped the waitress to pick everything up. There was a pair of gloves, a small pack of face cream, a couple of pens, a tiny metal bound address book, a laundry ticket, a packet of boiled sweets, an embroidered handkerchief and a pocket-sized edition of the New Testament.

  There was also a small folder made of blue card. It had an elastic band round it and it enclosed a number of photographs. Several of these had slipped out onto the floor. Weet picked them up and placed them, in a neat pile, on the corner of the table. As he was doing this he looked at none of them except for the one that finished up on top. This was of a young elegant and attractive woman seated in profile by a window. Weet thought he recognised one of Miss Comlyn’s nieces or grand-nieces.

  Miss Comlyn removed the elastic band from the small folder and began to replace the photos that had fallen from it. But she kept back the photo of the young woman. She regarded it for a long moment without any change of expression and then held it out towards Weet.

  ‘What do you think, Peter?’ she asked.

  Weet leaned forward and spoke to her, exaggerating the movement of his mouth to help her understand. ‘Beautiful,’ he said, smiling. ‘Very beautiful. Your niece?’

  But she didn’t hear these last two words. ‘March the twenty-fourth, nineteen twenty-four,’ she said. ‘My twenty-fourth birthday. Very easy to remember. All the twenty-fours, you see.’ She smiled. ‘Venice,’ she said, adding, ‘Have you ever been to Venice, Peter?’

  Weet shook his head.

  ‘Oh, it’s a wonderful city. Wonderful.’ She leaned towards him and explained in little more than a whisper, ‘I was a bit of a flirt then, you know.’ Then she winked at him.

  Miss Comlyn put the photos away and closed her handbag. ‘Now don’t get up, Peter,’ she said as she herself stood. ‘You’ve done enough for me today already.’ She put her hand on his shoulder and said, ‘You’re such a nice young man.’ And then she left.

  This encounter with Miss Comlyn unsettled Weet and as he walked back to the Herald this feeling intensified to the level of distress. He sat down in front of his typewriter but didn’t touch the keys for ten minutes.

  How had he managed to convince himself that he knew everything worth knowing about someone like Miss Comlyn? Or McFarren? Or, more importantly, given the task in hand, Gilfedder? Had he really been arrogant enough to believe, during these past nine years at the Herald, that he could write these people down, define them in a matter of three or four paragraphs? Did he seriously think he could say anything of value about Gilfedder – even Gilfedder – in 800 words?

  He was sufficiently self-aware to realise that he was facing some sort of crisis. Right now. This very minute. He knew both that he couldn’t possibly write about Gilfedder and that he had to do it anyway. He still had five hours in which to produce his 800 words.

  He fed a sheet of paper into the typewriter.

  ‘The death of Donald Gilfedder affects us all,’ he wrote. He stared at this sentence for some time. Only 792 words to go. He pulled the sheet of paper from the typewriter, crumpled it into a ball and dropped it into the bin beside his desk.

  On the next sheet of paper he typed, ‘Who will mourn Donald Gilfedder?’

  Again, he examined this sentence for a minute or two. It was even shorter than his first effort and left him 795 more words to write. He ripped it out and binned it.

  ‘Other than his immediate family, who will grieve for Donald Gilfedder when he is laid to rest this afternoon at the East Kirk in the parish of Caulder?’

  Twenty-eight words. Not bad. A good start. He con­tinued, ‘Donald Gilfedder will be remembered mostly for the events which took place within a few weeks of the end of his life – an attack, allegedly by Gilfedder, on a fellow employee of WattWays Freezing Plant, the firing of a shotgun at police and the siege in Proby Street, Dalmore, in which Gilfedder held his wife hostage for two hours. As we know, the siege ended tragically when Gilfedder was shot by an unnamed police marksman.

  ‘These bald facts suggest we are dealing, at best, with someone suffering an acute psychological breakdown or, at worst, with a dangerous criminal. This is a conclusion that greatly distresses Donald Gilfedder’s widow, Avril, who is a nurse in the Royal Infirmary in North Treshie.

  ‘ “What annoys me,” she says, “is that everyone will concentrate on those last few hours of Donald’s life and forget the years that went before. Donnie was a fine husband and I want the world to know that.”

  ‘It’s not the Herald’s usual policy to condone any kind of criminal . . .’

  blah

  blah

  blah

  No, and it wasn’t the Herald’s policy to print shite like this.

  Or maybe it was.

  Weet spent half a minute crumpling this sheet of paper, pressing it into as tiny a ball as he could manage. Probably a good idea, he reflected, as there wasn’t a great deal of room left in the bin and he was pretty sure that several more attempts would follow.

  And he was right. By half past four he was no nearer completing the piece than he had been at two o’clock.

  At a quarter to five McManus tapped him on the shoulder. He was a small round man in a brown suit who seemed incapable of ever knotting his tie neatly. Weet thought of him as a bookie’s runner, a wide boy, always intent on hustling the next deal. In fact McManus had gone into journalism after being invalided out of the Army. He’d been parachuted into Egypt during the Suez crisis and broke both ankles. ‘Would’ve left anyway,’ he’d said to Weet once. ‘What the hell were we doing there in the first place?’

  ‘How’s the Gilfedder piece going?’ McManus asked.

  ‘I’m struggling,’ Weet admitted.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Forget Gilfedder. What do you know about Leckie?’

  ‘Leckie?’

  ‘Fred Leckie.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Weet. Don’t you read the papers?’

  ‘Only when someone’s standing over me with a shotgun.’

  ‘Used to manage Hamilton Accademicals.’

  ‘Football?’ Weet said in disgust. ‘Football?’

  ‘That’s right,’ McManus said. ‘You love it really.’

  ‘Look, on my list of favourite things, football’s fifty-seven places lower than horoscopes.’

  McManus dropped a small blue folder on Weet’s desk. ‘Just taken over at United.’

  ‘Dalmore United?’

  ‘Aha! You see, you even know the name of the local team. You’re an expert.’

  ‘Why would he leave Hamilton for Dalmore?’

  ‘God knows, but he has. In there . . .’ He prodded the folder with a thick forefinger. ‘. . . you’ll find a lot of stuff about him – playing career, management success, some of his personal ups and downs and so on. Wouldn’t mention the downs, by the way. Not yet, anyway. But do me a six hundred word profile, will you? Just a summary of this lot with a bit of welcoming ra-ra. The Herald’s readers behind him, etc, etc. The usual. We’re extending the sports coverage by a page to include it. A few pictures and so on.’

  ‘What’s wrong with Duncan?’ Weet asked.

  ‘Duncan’s sick,’ McManus said, making his distaste for this news very clear.

  ‘You know, I’m not feeling too well myself,’ Weet said.

  ‘You’re fine,’ McManus said. ‘You’re absolutely fine.’

  ‘So . . . so . . . I’m doing horoscopes and sport now, is that it? As well as my other obviously much less important work?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Do I hear the word “bonus”?’

  McManus was already on his way back to his office. ‘I’ll buy you a pint,’ he said.

  ‘And Gilfedder?’ Weet shoute
d after him.

  ‘Not for tomorrow. Link it in with your piece on the funeral.’ His door slammed shut.

  Weet looked at the folder. The single word LECKIE was printed in red across the pale blue cover. It looked as if it had been scrawled by a child of five.

  The folder was not thick. There were a dozen or so documents inside it, including short biographies taken from match brochures, a few clippings from football magazines and the sports pages of Scottish dailies. There were pictures of Leckie holding trophies that his teams had won.

  Weet actually enjoyed this type of work. He was good at it and McManus knew this. That’s why Weet was given it. Any kind of summarising was Weet’s work and, as long as there wasn’t too much material to start with, he could do it quickly and well.

  By five-thirty he had produced a piece on Alfred Leckie that had clearly been written by a football enthusiast who had followed Leckie’s career keenly over the past twenty years. Leckie would undoubtedly work his magic on Dalmore United who would not remain second from bottom of the Highland League for very much longer. Most importantly, he was determined to come up with an acceptable plan for a new stadium.

  Weet handed in his piece (598 words) and went home.

  Weet rented a two-bedroom flat above the Army Surplus Store on Dalmore High Street. Home was not the right word to describe this place. He didn’t really live there; he occasionally occupied the premises. He lived in the offices of the Dalmore Herald; he lived in Miss Petty’s Tearooms; he lived in the Din and one or two other pubs in Dalmore. His flat was the place he slept in. He spent very little time in there otherwise, although he sometimes used the second bedroom as an office. But, like the bedroom he only slept in, the sitting room he rarely sat in and the kitchen he never cooked in, this office was not an orderly place. It wasn’t dirty, just untidy.