by Andrew Greig
Pass through the heavy door into the oldest part of the house. Up the dark stone steps worn in the middle, up two flights to the room where Sim Elliot hides out. The door is closed and no matter how you concentrate it doesn’t open up. But this evening it will, and then you’ll see him face to face.
As I was walking all alane,
I met twa corbies making mane …
More than ever you wonder about that mysterious I. What exactly is I doing there on the moor, why is I alone? Why indeed. Is it just by chance that I turns up on the lonely moor where the young man lies dead? Is I in fact the real killer, or is I here for another purpose?
These speculations rise into invisibility like the lark outside. The shadows shorten across the flagged kitchen floor, the privy’s rusting roof tips a groaning wing as you go in and make another coffee then lean over the plate again. The fisherman’s rod dips and rises where the water slaps on Cauldstane’s shores, the husk of the shaven man works on, and you like the rest of them must pass the day until the sun levels down over the long riggs and the evening’s revels begin.
*
And when we die, Jinny used to tell him, it’s only as a wee white dog enters the dark forest, all wary and excited and alert. The trees arch over, the dog trots on and is gone from view. It’s simple as that. No one knows what his adventures are in there.
Sim Elliot sits in his bedroom, at the dressing table that was his mother’s. He looks into the dark smudges of his eyes in the mirror as he inhales. For a moment he hears her voice Come here, my wee darlin. He puts the joint aside, lowers his shaggy head to the wood and sniffs. For a moment, the whiff of mother, something of lilac and bathsalts. She crumbles cubes into the bath and turns it blue. He is sitting in her lap in steaming water, her hands linked round his tummy. They are singing, her hot soft shakes against his back. Where have you been, my blue-eyed boy? He is held, embraced, at one. As with Jinny. Where have you been, my darling young one?
Just a moment then it’s gone. He sniffs again but she won’t come back. She has gone into the dark wood, the wood his mother and Jinny, Patrick and Fiona, his father and even the family’s Jack Russell terrier have entered. That he will enter soon.
He pushes himself upright. He does not feel well. He really does not feel well. There’s no particular pain at the moment, just a feeling in his core that he’s about to fall down.
He does up the top button of his white shirt, feeling it pinch around his neck. He pulls a face, hearing Jinny’s laughter as he tries to brush his hair into shape. She’d been looking forward to dressing up and going out on the town that last weekend. She’d started to become impatient with the enclosed world of the dale. Lately she complained Patrick seemed content with casual labour and living day by day without ambition or direction. But she talked of the Open University and a chance to use her brain, to get out and do something in the world. The baby, home-brewing, gardening and endless jam-making, pickling and preserving, were no longer enough for her energies.
Her electric-blue, velvety dress, stockings and lace-up boots – she was changing under his eyes. Her figure had returned but some of the lightness, the insistence that life was an easy adventure, that had gone. She seemed to him preoccupied, even when they were together, even when she looked into his eyes there seemed to be some question being asked. Or maybe he was asking it: Have we deluded ourselves? Has all this shame and wickedness been for nothing but a few fantasies and spasms of pleasure?
They were walking below the castle in the old town in silvery drizzle. Her face lit up then was swept with shadow as they passed another lamp and she was starting to talk about Patrick. Sim sees himself in top hat and tails but that’s nonsense. He would have worn the near-black linen jacket. White shirt, dark tie of his Border riding. Clean-shaven in those days but his hair getting long enough to raise eyebrows in the dale. You should have a ponytail, she said. You already smoke enough dope for a longhair.
She’d stopped with the gleaming wet cobble street at her back and said like it had occurred to her for the first time that she’d married Patrick for the same reasons she dropped out of college – because she wanted to, and to piss off her parents. Now she found it impossible to care much about any of them. She was going through the motions, she and Patrick had grown far apart. Marnie was the only thing they had in common and even that …
She’d sooked in her breath and was silent, very far away from him. Marriage as rebellion, he’d smiled ruefully at that. He keeked sideways at her, wondering if he was included in her plans or if he was still ready to be. She was no longer glowing when he looked at her, the light on her was only the streetlight. Then she looked back at him quite objectively, hesitated and he guessed he saw the same doubt, the same unspoken question in her eyes before she smiled and put her head to his chest, her arms around his back and palms flattened against him.
I know it’s not the same as before, she said. He looked down, relieved and terrifed to hear her say it. But if this can’t stay special, we’ve thrown away all decency and peace of mind for nothing.
She’d finally voiced what he’d scarcely let himself think.
He’d clasped his hands to the back of her head, remembers yet the coarse dampness in his palms and the tearing feeling in his chest and the wetness on his face, and pulled her head against his heart. Her voice was muffled when she spoke again.
If this isn’t special then love is a delusion and we’ve hurt good people for nothing and I’d rather be dead.
They’d stood in the mild dreich night, pressed to each other and the collar of her coat wet in his eyes and her hands now pressed to his arse, and it seemed like neither of them knew where to go from here. Then a group of lads passed, one of them laughed and made a remark about the wee drookit hoor, and Sim broke from her, seized him by the throat and put the fella’s head a few times against a convenient wall, ignoring the blows starting to thump in on him.
He smooths out the ridings tie, flips up the collar of his shirt and tries to remember how to do this. Left over right, under, back up through the loop. He remembers yet how good it felt, the relief of turning from Jinny to a fight, the blood rising in him and all his ancestors at his back. The relief of rage, of blows given and taken. The blow to his kidneys was nothing to the hurt of the question she’d begun to voice. He stotted the wee thug’s head one more time off the wall, dropped him and turned at a crouch to face the other three, ready for anything. No kick in the balls could compare to the sickener when she’d announced she was pregnant with Patrick’s bairn. He heard her scream a warning, put up his arm to catch the blade of the Stanley knife in his sleeve, smashed the hand into the wall of the close, kicked the legs away from the bastard, felt himself being bundled to the wall and knew he was in trouble.
He straightens the knot, smoothes down the tail of the tie, tightens up his gut as he prods another beta-blocker down his throat then settles the linen jacket over his shoulders. A bit tight now, but it will see him out. A city rammie broken up by the police, it had served its purpose. Once he’d washed his face, put ice on the swelling, they’d gone into the restaurant and somehow never finished that conversation, never resolved whatever it was that had been hanging in the balance between them. I’d rather die …
He will die soon, he knows it, he feels it. The thought calms his hands, for it would be a relief. But first he must face Jinny’s girl, the daughter they never had.
His son believes in resurrection of the body. Jinny had her daft notions of meeting again in many lives, over and over. But he has never seen Jinny since that last unfathomable look as she fell away from him on Creagan’s Knowe, and their unborn child died with her. Death is an end, thank God. Only for one brief time had his life been worth living. He had known joy, long syne. Perhaps it’s better not to have, but on the whole he doubted that.
He straightened the jacket, pulled the comb through his beard. The man in the mirror looked tall but stooping slightly like a bigger man deflated. But the man in the mir
ror looked almost amused, had perhaps some spunk in him yet. He could have been going out on the town with Jinny, for maybe their twenty-fifth anniversary and trying not to get into a fight this time, instead of going downstairs to meet her daughter.
His belly was quivering. He really felt he could shit himself. He had wanted and feared this moment for so many years. It was almost the only thing he wanted or feared. Almost the only thing left to do other than get the estate settled.
He squared his shoulders, took a quick drag and exhaled. He opened the door and stood at the top of the back stairs. He could hear the voices now. Davy, the high-pitched Canadian, then a deeper murmur. Her. Marnie. Jinny’s lassie.
He closed the door behind him and set off down the creaking stair.
And when we die, he thought dreamily, it’s like a woman pulling off her summer dress and walking to the edge of a river pool, feeling for the last time the earth beneath her toes before letting go and diving out, away, into the current.
He almost knocked before going into his own sitting room, hearing at some great distance a muffled barking. The door-knob was slippy in his palm. He turned it and went in to meet whatever.
The man and the woman stand looking into each other across a room gone faint. She’s all in black, a greenish shawl about her shoulders and something glinting at her breast. Both have cheekbones and eyes like flint arrowheads. They stand, frozen, mid-step towards each other. His hands are coming up empty as though he was offering her something invisible. Her left hand holds a glass, her right hand is bunched behind her back.
Stare till your eyes ache.
The man who killed Jinny is a handsome charred devil. I should have been prepared for that. We were all on our feet as he stood in the doorway. I said and did nothing, just waited, feeling the shake go through me like lightning ripping down a trunk.
Dad, David said. Dad, this is Marnie Lauder from Crawhill.
The power is in the waiting and I’ve waited long for this. He stood with his dark burnt-out eyes set on mine. His hand came up, palm open towards me. Powerful hand, broad palm, long fingers strong to love or kill. The mouth that once kissed Jinny opened and I felt myself falling away from everything known. His voice was deep and slightly slurred.
It’s been a long wait, lass, he said. I’m right glad you’ve come.
His hand shook slightly as I stepped towards him and looked up into that face. My hand came up of itself. Heat of his palm on mine, then our fingers wrapped tight. The shock went right down to my feet, earthed through my soles. He leaned, turning his head like trying to see past me to someone else. He looked so hard into me that for the first time I doubted myself.
You dinna look like your mother.
I thrust up a laugh. So who do I look like? My dad?
He kept his eyes on me, so close now I saw myself tiny in his pupils.
I never saw Patrick beardless, he said carefully, so it’s hard to say.
Still he clung on to my hand. I gripped back and felt the pulse of his thumb. Anyone else in the room had gone faint like in the plates. Burned out though he was, I felt the heat and the sex in him as I stared him back. For a moment it seemed we stood in a high place, just the two of us, with the green stir of trees on one side and the death-drop on the other.
He loosened my fingers and our palms slid apart.
You’re welcome in my house, he said.
And you in mine, I said, and let the shawl slide back to show the brooch pinned high on my black sweater, and had the pleasure of seeing him turn pale as moon on snow.
*
Annie Tat brought drinks then they went through to the dining room. Shifting yellow candlelight, meat on the table, pasta for the lady fair, wine red in the glasses. The grouping was as foreshown – the young man silent next to his intended, the father opposite, staring into his glass. The two women bent towards each other across the table.
No one will remember what was said that evening. Only Annie Tat heard the faint creak above as her man went soft-footing up the backstairs to the study, and she banged crockery and joked as she served until she heard the footsteps descending. No one talked about the past nor asked about the future. There was only the women laughing and the candlelight stirring deep pools around the eyes, and the pale glimmer of the ancient coin set in the brooch’s heart.
*
Shifting groupings at the back door as the young ones make to leave. Sim Elliot drapes the shawl round Marnie’s shoulders. She nods acknowledgement but her eyes are fixed on the stone disc and its bunch of keys that David dirls from his index finger. She crosses to the kennel and crouches down. Hawk growls low, rises to his feet.
Careful, David calls. He’s not usually violent, but …
Her hand comes out slowly, waits, then drops firmly onto the dog’s head. Hawk subsides, his head turns and he licks her palm. She squeezes his ears then gets up.
Nor am I, she says to David. As she walks to the Land-Rover, Tat drifts from the shadows and slips Jinny’s old note into her palm. She pockets it, and then there is waving and thank-yous.
Go canny, Sim says, you’re all half-pissed already.
He holds out his hand to Marnie but she raises her arms and clasps his shoulders, pulls him down to whisper something in his ear. He jerks back and bumps against Annie Tat who steadies him with her hand flat against his back. The engine grunts and catches, white lights stab into the trees. In the dazzle only Tat sees Marnie’s hand come out the window to drift pale as an owl, and how her palm angles as with her little finger and thumb she signs for him alone the gesture he thought had long vanished from the Border country.
And then they are gone. Tat shivers as he steps inside. Revenge hot trod. You may not hinder me.
Annie is clattering plates in the kitchen, Elliot has already vanished up the back stairs. Tat stands in the doorway and lights a cheroot as he watches the headlights swing down into the valley. None will get much sleep tonight, that’s for sure.
Plate 7
The second-last plate is the most vividly coloured and detailed of them all. Here is action, scene after scene, linked by drove roads, the flight of birds, brambly briars, drystane dykes laced against the sky.
Even at first glance this plate is one of fatal meetings, final partings, fights and ghosts and resolutions. At the centre are linked permutations of sexual meeting, skeletons white in river beds, bairns held defiantly. Around them salmon leap from rivers at the end of arcing rods, lovers turn into birds, fly into the sun or rise to meet the arrow’s flight.
In the cold hard angular metal of the Land-Rover cab, Marnie and Jo are squeezed in beside David. They’re giggling and carrying on, pushing him against the door as he struggles to steer between ruts. He tries to listen to them but his head is floating high alongside the white moon above the dale, pierced by slivers of blackness then clear again.
The dirt road twists downhill and the moon is lost. At the edge of the headlights’ onrush he sees bushes sway back like gasping crowds as they lurch by. He winds the window down and feels the cool and fragrant air wrap round his face.
It is too long since he’s been out in the country at night, his senses alive to the mystery and the danger. He wants that again, to feel young, alert, on the loose, his life hanging by the speed of his reactions, each moment sharp as a blade drawn across the skin.
Perhaps it’s the whisky and then the wine and the raised state of his companions – and how long is it since he’s seen Jo like this, so aroused and vital? – but he has a parallel vision of them moving through the darkness under the trees on their trusty hobbie horses. Moving near-silently towards the village, the crouched houses and darkened corrals, as they rehearse the fell business to be done there …
He feels the heavy leather jerkin stitched with metal, leather boots and breeches, the steel helmet pressing down on his forehead. The lance, the short sword, the coarse rope coiled on his pommel, the fire-making kit in his saddlebag along with bannocks and dried meat. They are moving
in single file with no need to speak, taking the secret ways through the woods and mosses. Flurries in the undergrowth where weasel and fox pursue their ends. A white owl moves through the gash in the clouds where the last light holds, banks and is gone into the ruined keep and its song of stone.
We could die tonight, he thinks. One mistake, wrong turn or hesitation and it’s over for ever. That’s what lights this fizz in his belly and lets him see in the dark. That is the cause of the love he feel for his companions who ride alongside. We are reiving, he thinks, reiving into the unknown, and for this hour we are alive.
The wheel jerks and nearly breaks his thumb. He smothers the blasphemy that rises in his throat and he slows as they pass by the shallow linns at the bottom of the woods, still shining grey in the night. The women have dropped some argument about feminism and art in favour of tickling each other. He has never seen either of them like this, so wild and lit up.
Even as his pulse beats in his neck, he shakes his head at his fantasies, the ones that warmed his frozen boyhood. He had forgotten so much. Above all, though he’d always known reiving was business in stolen cattle, kidnapping and protection rackets, at times the sole economy of these lawless parts – he’d forgotten it was exciting. Sin and sex make us glow like coals in the dark. That’s why we do it, to burn. Though the night is all around and in us, we are on fire and we like it. We like it. We choose it. That’s why it happens, over and over.