The cat stood on Fergus’s chest, its four white feet planted close together at its centre. A rumbling rose from it, greater than its size would suggest, and the front paws began to paddle at him, kneading his flesh. He could feel its claws drop and press into his skin, cutting through the thin blanket under which he had slept.
‘I see you’ve met Boots?’
Ruby was holding out a cup of tea for him. She was smiling, happy to be among her own things, in her right place. The cat leapt from Fergus and trotted back to his arm chair, glaring at Fergus with a contemptuous superiority.
Ruby had moved across the room and was kneeling in front of the cat’s armchair, clutching his furry cheeks, one in each hand and stroking him under the jaw. Her forehead was almost touching the animal’s head as she cooed nonsense at him. Fergus could hear the purring from across the room, and felt faintly uncomfortable. He looked anywhere else around the room and tried to think of something to say, to distract him from the purring. Thinking of nothing, he scrambled instead for his things, uncovering a large picture book on Cambodian religious art, and rummaged through his bag until he found his notebook. Ruby looked up from her cat, intrigued by the scuffed yellow cover, the way the pages broke almost unaided, the supple paper stretch out ready for Fergus’s pen. He felt her gaze.
‘I write down my dreams. Every morning. Have done since I was thirteen. It’s a bit of a ritual, I suppose. Keeps things in the right place, one side or the other.’
He was glad that she asked no questions, even more so when she excused herself, leaving him to his writing. He heard the shower stutter into life, and listened for other noises above the scratching of his pen.
By the time Ruby returned, he had completed his notes and, dressed in yesterday’s clothes, stood at the window, looking out on the grey ghosts of Stepney Green. The blue skies had gone, leaving a thin mist hanging in the chill air of morning. Ruby’s house looked out onto a green, fringed with mature trees; between their still-bare branches, he could make out a small grey church; the grave stones that surrounded it, like the church itself, were licked by sheets of mist drifting on the rising air, such that they appeared more or less solid with every glance. Beyond the church, Fergus could see nothing: none of the city or the tower blocks and slabs of buildings that had crowded his walk from the bus stop the previous afternoon.
‘It’s really foggy out.’
Fergus grunted in response. It was just a morning mist but he was too content to contradict her, enjoying the comfort of the soft solidity of the sky taking the city away, leaving only ambiguity, and the possibility of being elsewhere. The greyness stirred memories of the weight of the fogs that wrapped around Hinba in the late autumn.
‘Did Bridget disturb you last night, by the way? She always winds down in the kitchen for a bit when she’s finished working. Gets herself something to eat, a cup of camomile, that sort of thing. I left a note for her. Hope she didn’t clatter about too much.’
‘No, it’s fine. I slept straight through. What does she do ‘til that time, anyway?’
Fergus had left the mist behind and returned to the sofa. His bedding was rolled into a neat bundle at one end, and he moved this to the floor, under the arm, so that Ruby could sit with him. The cat still occupied the arm chair.
‘She’s a DJ. Well, that’s what she does at the weekends. Rest of the time she works in HR at a law firm in the City. Commercial property, I think. You’ll meet her soon – she’ll be up in a bit. Needs very little sleep, fortunately.’
Fergus had met the other two housemates the previous evening, but Bridget had already been gone. Jacob had been there when they had arrived, tapping numbers into a laptop computer at the kitchen table, projecting his expected earnings for the next three months, a hopeful, disappointed look on his face; he had gladly curtailed the task to join Ruby in cooking, and they had been eating when Matt appeared, cloaked in the gentle glow of mild inebriation and lycra. Both had asked endless questions about the island and his reasons for coming to the city, and Fergus had held court, happily answering them all, while Ruby shone with satisfaction. But Bridget had not appeared, not even when the wine was done and the four of them slunk off to their beds around midnight.
‘But doesn’t she have a child?’
He had also asked about each of the housemates and this one fact in particular stood out in his memory. It had seemed odd then, that a child should be raised in this household, but it was odder now that he understood the implications of being a DJ.
‘Yeah, but his dad has him on alternate Fridays and Saturdays. Which is great, mind you. There aren’t many men of Steve’s age who would give up their weekends like that. Even if he was a twat to Bridge. Want some toast?’
The kitchen was as they had left it, save for a saucepan on the stove and, on the table, a plate streaked with orange, the dried remains of baked bean sauce. A spoon pointed to the sink. While the toast cooked and the kettle boiled, Ruby swept the remnants of Bridget from the room and pulled the blind, revealing a small garden, dense with rich greens under heavy dew. The sound of the chair scraping on the tiles made her turn with a start. With her hair down, it looked like any other hair. Except for the colour.
‘So what do you want to do? Until Tuesday? I’ve got stuff I need to do, I’m afraid, so I can’t babysit you the whole time.’
She was leaning on the counter by the toaster, the tea cups and the plate. A knife see-sawed on her finger but her eyes were fixed on him, waiting for reassurance that he was not going to be a burden, would prove to be as curious and independent as his adventure had promised.
‘Don’t know. Since I’m here I might as well see the sights. Plus, I’ve got to work out a better way of approaching Tuesday. As you say, I can’t just turn up and say ‘Give me back that wee stone’.’
Ruby had put down the knife and, retrieving a wrap of tobacco from the window sill, was rolling a cigarette. It was the thing that most troubled him about her, but he liked to watch her nimble fingers working the paper, the tip of her pink tongue slide along the edge to close it. If she only did that, not actually light the thing, he would be content with the habit. She moved to the back door, unlatched it and stood half in, half out of the kitchen while she lit the cigarette from a book of matches. The first exhalation was pushed out into the mist with something that sounded like a purr.
‘Well, you could say that you’re a journalist, doing a piece on the theft of antiquities… god, no, that’s stupid, it’ll put his guard right up. You’ll be escorted from the premises before you can say ‘Stupid suggestion.’ Sorry.’
The toast popped and, with a shrug, Ruby turned to attend to its buttering. He was not a good liar, but even if he were there did not appear to be a good lie to tell. It would, in fact, have been both simpler and more effective to simply call the police in Mallaig, despite Mr MacLeod’s protestations, and let them deal with the theft, if theft was what it was. The longer he had been away from home, the more the disappearance of the stone appeared to be a simple business transaction: there was little legitimate claim he could make to Maltravers, unless he was overlooking something glaringly obvious or spectacularly clever.
‘Can you put a slice in for me, love? Christ, what time is it? Feels late and I’m not even dressed.’
Fergus wondered if he should turn to greet the new arrival. He had not heard her enter the kitchen, but assumed that Bridget was standing behind him.
‘You must be Ruby’s mysterious new man. Hi, I’m Bridget. Sorry I missed you last night. Hope I didn’t wake you when I got back. I tried. Honest, Rube, I tried.’
Grateful for the invitation, Fergus twisted in his seat to acknowledge the greeting. He was surprised to find that his eyes were practically level with hers, even though she was standing. Dark eyebrows arched beneath a ruffle of cropped bleached hair. He had to resist the urge to stare too long at the tattoo that peeked above the low, stretched neck of her faded t-shirt; more tattoos, three small stars, were visible at her l
eft wrist when she reached for the mug offered her by Ruby. But most striking of all was a thin red scar that ran horizontally across her throat, about five centimetres in length. Her voice was infused with tobacco smoke and late nights; it had the timbre of a fine rasp on pinewood. Fergus was captivated by her wantonness.
‘Does he speak? Or just stare?’
Bridget had given up on Fergus and crossed the room to join Ruby and the toaster. Her loose, blue-striped pyjama bottoms, much like his own at home, disappeared into knitted boots, slippers patterned with Nordic figures and designs. Only Ruby’s raised eyebrows and disapproving stare brought him back to himself, reminded him of his manners.
‘Sorry. You just startled me. Sorry. Didn’t mean to… Sorry. Anyhow, I’m Fergus. Pleased to meet you.’
Fergus was standing, hand extended in greeting. Bridget looked from him to Ruby and back again at the hand, before exploding, doubling, in laughter.
‘Fucking hell, Rube. Really?’
He let his hand fall to his side, ashamed, confused, angry. Bridget watched, waited, but soon became bored, turning to the toaster, prodding the slice of bread cooking there with her extended finger, as if she could accelerate the process. Fergus ran through all the things he could say, tested how far they would reassert himself as someone that did not deserve to be laughed at by strangers. Nothing came to mind, each phrase, explanation, challenge or apology only serving to deepen his ridiculousness, so he remained silent, aware that that too made him ridiculous. For the sake of doing something, he sat down once more.
Ruby, smiling, brought him a plate of buttered toast and sat beside him.
‘Don’t be such a dick, Bridget. I know you’re not used to blokes with manners, but no need to make a show of yourself. Anyhow, it’s not like that. Fergus is a friend. Needs a place to stay. I’m just helping him out.’
With a wink, Bridget disappeared back into the hallway, toast between her teeth.
28
The dragon stared down from its perch, implacable. Its tongue snaked like blood between silvered teeth; a talon raised in warning, guarding the gateway to the City. Fergus lingered a while on the Aldgate traffic island to watch it, to fix its iron-cold eyes with his. The lights changed and he resumed his walk, the buildings rising and closing about him.
The hour since leaving Ruby’s house had slipped seamlessly from pastoral quietude to grinding anxiety. The trees and grass and cobbles of Stepney Green had vanished with the leaving of Hayfield Passage, the funnel mouth disgorging him onto the Mile End Road. Traffic roared alongside him as he’d walked westwards, the pavements filling with people bundling in and out of shops and cafes. Soon even the trees that lined the streaming road thinned, replaced by the stalls of a street market. The air was thick with rare smells; unrecognisable products cluttered table tops and paving stones, some under canopies of colourful plastic sheeting.
It seemed to him that no-one in this vast city came from here. More than just those who looked different or who spoke in foreign languages, everyone he had met came from somewhere else. Jamie of course, but even Ruby talked about going home to a place in which she did not live. It was as if this vast, teeming city was a hollowness, an absence filled with the misplaced peoples of the world. If one night everyone was called to return to their grandfather’s hearth, as he was destined to do, he wondered how many would remain, what those few would do in all the emptiness.
Ruby had suggested that he start his sightseeing in the City, that he spend the morning roaming its streets and alleys so that she could do some work, catch up with things that needed to be caught; they would meet later for lunch and complete his tour in the afternoon. She had told him which bus to catch but he had decided to walk, to feel the sticky pavement passing beneath him. He knew already that it was only the masking of the horizon behind concrete and stone that made distance here an obstacle.
At Whitechapel, the engorged towers of the City had shaken off the thickest of the morning’s mist, and sunlight pierced the greyness, its point almost grazing the pavement. By the time he had passed the iron dragon marking the division between the grimy east and the citadel, shafts of grey brightness were breaking between the tall buildings as the morning sun burnt off the last of the mist; shreds of grey clung to the shoulders of the towers, ghost flags slowly flapping in the convections of air-vents and warming concrete.
Fergus had no idea where he should head; where the sights were to be seen. He knew only that he was to be at the cathedral for one. At St. Botolph’s church, he left the swirling traffic behind and journeyed into the lanes and passes, where there were few people to be found; the buildings instead crowded in and over him from all directions. Everywhere was height, constraint.
On every corner, it seemed, gaping holes appeared in the earth, concrete stumps and twisted steels clinging to the jagged edges of muddy gashes, as if the buildings they had previously anchored had been torn from their roots and carried off by giants. Behind painted boards, new leviathans rose, concrete piles pulled up by cranes. Fergus paused at one to read a sign posted on the hoarding of the site: ‘We have achieved 27 working days without a reportable incident’. The ‘27’ was in movable type, and Fergus presumed that it was someone’s job to update the tally each morning. He looked at the building rising above him. The site had plainly been here for longer than a month and Fergus found himself wondering what had happened 28 days before.
Two construction workers walked past, dressed in grubby white hard hats and still grubbier yellow jerkins, jersey jogging bottoms and oversized boots. Fergus could not decipher their conversation, but the unfamiliar language blurred in any case into the hum and clank of the day. One drank coffee from a cardboard carton, the other a can of ready-mixed gin and tonic. Fergus looked at his watch – it was ten past nine – and back again at the sign, at the ‘27’, then at the two men who were finishing their cigarettes beside the site entrance. While they smoked, others brought tall and slender gas cylinders out from the hoarding and loaded them onto a waiting truck, bearing the name BOC. One of the carriers looked up and caught Fergus by the eye. They were entwined momentarily, as if held in a suspended city, suddenly silent and still, before Fergus fell back, embarrassed, into the noise and movement of the street.
If the threat of death, however small, hung in the closed air of the city, so too did the pulsing heat of life. It was a mortal city, a visceral city. The winds on Hinba could make it seem as though the islanders were clinging to the rock for dear life; and in the spring when light and greenery burst onto the island, in was a place of fecundity. But death and life came from elsewhere, and the island was simply a refuge from one and the site of the other. Here, the city itself was death and it was life. The buildings throbbed with hissing whines, warm air escaping from their gills onto the street.
Past Bank and along Cheapside, the hard stones of the pavement almost fizzed, and indeed sometimes shook. Women in tailored skirts bustled by, clutching mobile phones to their ears, their incongruous trainers flashing garish in the morning light. The walls of the street were lined with inscrutable stone facades, ridged with the harsh rhythm of windows, or immense glassy behemoths that sat hunched, seemingly dropped into the city from another world entirely. Some of these were vast constructions: almost cities in themselves, almost big enough in which to lose the whole of his island.
In the shadow of St Paul’s dome, Fergus sat among the grave stones. He had some time yet, and the quiet of the churchyard, nestled under trees, was more welcoming than the steps of the cathedral, where it seemed that hundreds of others had also arranged to meet. Although relatively secluded, he was not entirely alone: on a neighbouring bench, a very fat man sat staring straight ahead, lost. He wore a black suit and black shirt, which did nothing to mask the ball of his stomach; his only movement was to bring a fat cigar to his mouth and back to his knee like waves on a beach. More active, a round-faced Japanese woman, in her early 20s, wearing optimistic hot-pants and big sunglasses, strolled in circles
beneath a statue’s plinth; she was dictating something unintelligible into her phone and held the pink-cased apparatus in front of her, like a saucer, recording her observations in a low voice, calm but enthusiastic; with her free hand she conducted her thoughts with swirls and rolls of her fingers and palm and wrist.
Noticing his interest, she paused, looked over her sunglasses at Fergus, and raised her eyebrows in reprimand. Fergus dropped his eyes and studied his shoes. The black leather was dull and scuffed. He wondered if Ruby had shoe polish, before conceding that it was unlikely. Dissatisfied and resigned, he looked up. The Japanese woman still circled the statue, but the fat man had gone. In his place, a young woman with red hair was smoking a cigarette and talking on her mobile phone. Her face was turned away, but it was unmistakably Ruby: the same shade of red, the same leather jacket and boots, the same shape to her shoulders, her back.
Her voice did not carry on the fuzzy, motor-soaked air, but the circles drawn with her free hand suggested a weary explanation, one often rehearsed, no longer of interest. When she hung up, she sat for a few moments, her head bowed over her lap, the hand still cupping the phone. Then the red of her hair wriggled with her shaking head before falling lower down her back, and he imagined the point of her chin, the extent of her throat. Fergus waited until the irritation had had time to pass, then moved with all the poise he could muster across the tarmac to her bench.
The Cursing Stone: a gripping mystery and family saga Page 16