Bright Stars

by Sophie Duffy

  I wasn’t driving.

  Tommo was driving.

  ‘You know your father is struggling for money,’ he said. ‘One of your brothers – Edward is it? – he has run up some very large debts, and they need to be paid off very soon, or some very dangerous men will do him some very bad harm.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Edward wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘We all do things out of character. Except maybe for my son who always acts as one would expect. With supreme recklessness and no thought as to the consequences.

  So you might wonder how will he learn from this? If you take his place? My answer to that is I will make sure of it. I will cut off his allowance. He will have to work for his keep.’

  Tommo was driving.

  But Tommo was over the limit.

  And I, Cameron Spark, was fine, the man said. It was in my power to save Ptolemy’s skin, he said. I could save my brother from some very bad men, he said. My brain filled my head. My lungs filled my chest. My gullet filled with sick.

  And your father, he said. You can help him, he said.

  But Edward…?

  ‘Not Edward,’ I said.

  ‘My mistake.’ He waved his hand like he was flicking away some dirt. ‘Your brother, Andrew.’ As though it didn’t matter which of my brothers was going to get their head kicked in.

  It felt like somebody had already kicked my head in, never mind my brothers. A piston pumping. The Edinburgh tattoo going full throttle.

  ‘I want to puke.’

  The man passed me one of those cardboard bowls that are never up to the job. I gagged and a spew of vomit spattered into the bowl and down my chin. The man gave me a tissue and I wiped myself clean. Laid back against the bed. Shut my eyes. Prayed he’d go away, leave me alone. I wanted sleep.

  Go away.

  When I opened my eyes, the man was still there, sitting on a chair, head in his hands, his expensive-looking coat nothing like my dad’s tatty anorak. This was Tommo’s dad. He had money.

  And my family had a lack of it. And if these debts weren’t paid, Andy could have a lack of working kneecaps.

  ‘Tommo has told me about the three of you. This Bex, who has been taking drugs. This Canadian girl, who has no licence, no insurance, to be driving over here. And you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘He told me you are solid.’

  ‘He did?’

  ‘He said you are trustworthy and reliable.’ Tommo’s father waited for these words to sink in.

  Solid.

  Trustworthy.

  Reliable.

  Words. They floated on my muddled, sick brain. But not muddled and sick enough that I couldn’t ask the question: ‘How did you get here so fast?’

  He smiled this dazzling smile. ‘Ptolemy called me. Car phones are a wonderful invention.’

  A meeting in Manchester.

  ‘How do you know about my family?’

  ‘I make it my business to find out who my son spends time with.’

  I remembered that feeling of being watched. If I was paranoid, then I had every right to be.

  ‘I know about the hunt. I know about Fylde bar. I even know about heavy metal fans from Hull. I don’t know what Ptolemy has said about me. I assume nothing too glowing. But I care very much for his future. He is a loose cannon and he needs some restraint.’ And then his closing gambit: ‘Bex will be forever in your debt,’ he said.

  I took a deep breath and let it back out.

  This man knew his son all right, but Tommo was wrong about his father. His father loved him. But Tommo wouldn’t know love if Aphrodite herself gave him a snog while chubby cherubs flitted all around. But Bex loved him. And I loved Bex. I could do this act of love for her.

  ‘Here’s what’s going to happen,’ the man began. And he spoke in a way that both calmed me and turned my heart to a fistful of ice.

  Later, the man was gone and Bex was sitting in his place. She smiled at me and even with her blood-pocked face and the swelling on her cheek, she had never looked so beautiful. Right now she could be dead in a silk-lined coffin with her hands arranged Ophelia-like around her tangle of pond-weed hair. But she was here, with me, living and breathing and needing my help.

  ‘You don’t have to do it,’ she said. ‘It’s perjury. We could go to prison.’

  ‘Not if we stick together,’ I said. ‘We’ll be okay. We can do this. I know what Tommo means to you. If I can help sort out this mess, then I will. And Christie’s strong. She’ll be right as rain. All this will be a bad memory.’

  I tried to believe those words. I really tried. If you loved someone, then you put them first. Whatever the cost.

  And after all, this was my chance to be a superhero. To shine like a bright star.

  ‘They’re clamping down on drunk drivers. Attitudes are changing. Dad thinks you should be banged up for life if you kill someone.’

  ‘Tommo hasn’t killed anyone.’

  ‘Christie could be dead for all we know. She could be lying in the morgue, waiting for her parents to come and identify her.’

  ‘She’ll be okay,’ I said but she wasn’t listening.

  She was more concerned with her boyfriend. ‘They’ll kill Tommo in prison,’ she said. ‘I can’t live without him.’

  I drifted off.

  People came. People went.

  I think Tommo was there at one point, but I don’t really remember. But I do remember I had this terrible picture in my head: Christie, being carried up the field, oxygen mask covering her face, her neck in a brace thing, surrounded by uniforms, a cluster of them around her, like a funeral procession, undertakers and pallbearers and mourners.

  A nurse fiddled with my arm. Bathed my eye. Stitched my forehead.

  Another nurse took my temperature, my blood pressure.

  A doctor peered deep into my eyes with some metal instrument.

  I slept.

  When I woke later there was a different man by my bed. He looked familiar and my head throbbed trying to remember who he was and how I knew him. Then it came to me. The log fire, the collie dog with the soft ears. The man in the corner with his newspaper and pipe. Someone Christie knew. Her tutor.

  ‘Don’t move, stay there.’ His voice was nice, smooth and reassuring. ‘You’re Christie’s friend, aren’t you?’

  ‘Is she dead?’

  ‘Dead?’ He said the word like it was an ordinary, everyday word, which it was. Somewhere, at some time everyday, someone died. He was simply considering whether it was Christie’s turn today. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘She’s in theatre. They wouldn’t tell me much until I explained the situation, that she’s an overseas student. I just wanted to let you know that I’ve called Christie’s parents and they’re on their way to the airport. Toronto, I think they said. It was all a bit rushed and hasty.’

  He gave me a weak smile and his words corkscrewed until they lay curled up tight in my skull. ‘Is there someone I can call for you?’

  I thought of my dad at home, listening to Barbara Dickson, doing his union work, his day job at the brewery, surrounded by the smell of malt and hops. I thought of Bex and her letter. I didn’t know where the letter was. It could have fluttered away on the smoky night breeze. It could be trampled in the bloody mud of the field.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s no one to call. I’m fine.’

  But by then I had another visitor. A burly policeman.

  For the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.

  William Ross Wallace*

  _________________________

  *Not the William Wallace of ‘Braveheart’ fame, but a poet.

  Edinburgh, December 2013

  Baby

  The sky is clear and pale blue and casts shape-shifting shadows across the sodden grass. I’d forgotten how beautiful Rosslyn Chapel is, its stonework a testament to skill and hard labour and death-defying bravery.

  I know all about death-defying bravery. I’ve had to endure the journey her
e, quaking in the passenger seat with Dad taking on the A720 and A701. Now he’s wedged the Peugeot so close to the neighbouring Honda in the car park that I have to squeeze out, shape-shifting myself to ease through the gap without scratching the paintwork.

  ‘Why are we here exactly, Dad?’

  ‘Mum used to bring you.’

  ‘I know. She loved it.’

  ‘She did, aye.’

  ‘You haven’t been reading Dan Brown again, have you?’

  ‘I’ve never read that Da Vinci Code. But I’ve seen the DVD. Sheena gave it me. She likes all that mystery stuff.’

  ‘It’s nonsense.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Mum could’ve told Dan Brown a thing or two.’

  Dad laughs and I guide him into the gift shop to pay for our tickets. There’s building work been going on. Restoration. Nearing its completion. I think about my gift shop with its skeleton key rings and ghost books. I think about my job. I stop thinking about my job because if I lose it, then what will this all have been for?

  It’s calm inside the chapel, despite the tangled knots of visitors. The candles are lit and some sort of Christmas thing is going on for the kids. Storytelling (I know all about that). It takes me back to school nativity plays. Tea towels on your head if you were a shepherd. Tinsel if you were an angel. I was always an angel on account of my curls but I hankered after the innkeeper’s role. He was a problem solver. A thinker-outside-the-box. A superhero. ‘You can have the stable out the back. There’s a manger will do for a cradle. And the ox and ass will keep you warm. And the straw will soak up the blood. Amen.’

  Dad and I wander around, together, on our own. I’m waiting for him to say something ‘significant’ to me. Why else would he bring me here?

  Eventually, he sits me down on a pew in the south aisle.

  ‘Look around you, son. The carvings tell a story. A knight on horseback. An angel playing bagpipes. The nativity. The fallen Lucifer. The dance of death. The star of Jerusalem. And all those green men. I know where they all are because your mum, she used to bring me here too. She was an historian. But she was also a romantic. She mixed things up, like her beloved Scott and Burns used to make stuff up.’

  ‘They sound like they should have a TV cop show.’

  ‘Quite the comedian in your middle-age.’

  ‘I’m not middle-aged.’

  ‘Forty-six is middle-aged.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘At least you’re not as old as me.’

  ‘That’s something.’

  ‘You’re the age your mum was when she died.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Don’t be downhearted. Whatever’s going on with you and Amanda, you can sort it. And if you can’t, well you just have to carry on. I had to carry on.’

  ‘You had us boys. You had no choice.’

  ‘There’s always a choice. I could’ve laid down in the middle of George Street and let the traffic roll over me. I could’ve flung myself off the Forth Bridge or Arthur’s Seat. I could’ve stuck my head in the oven.’

  ‘It was an electric oven.’

  ‘Well, you get my drift.’

  ‘Aye, Dad.’

  ‘But I carried on. I made your tea, I made you have baths. I made sure you were up for your paper rounds and that you had clean uniform for school. I nagged and fussed and fended off the wolves and somehow got you through to adulthood. Through that difficult time back in 1986. But you being forty-seven doesn’t mean I stop worrying.’

  ‘I’m forty-six.’

  ‘Whatever.’ He takes out a handkerchief and gives his nose a blow so loud it reverberates off the rafters. He inspects the contents briefly before stuffing it back in his pocket. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on with work?’

  ‘It’s fine. Something and nothing. I have to go in for a meeting tomorrow.’

  ‘A meeting?’

  ‘Just to talk through health and safety procedures. You know what a minefield that can be.’

  ‘A good reason if ever there was for Independence.’

  ‘Dad, if you had your way, you’d be back in the People’s Republic of Orkney.’

  ‘Sounds fine to me.’

  A young mother walks past us, babe in arms. For a moment her hair is lit up by the candlelight so it looks like her golden hair is a halo, like a Madonna. But she is wearing Ugg boots and a parka and the baby smells of sick. I suppose even the baby Jesus smelled of sick. And poo. How did they clean the nappies back then? It must have been one long hard slog having a baby. If you survived the birth. If you survived the Romans and the stoning and the Jewish Law.

  ‘You can talk to me anytime you like, you know that.’ He rests his hand on my leg. I feel this pressure and I realise Dad is trying to stop my leg from jigging so much.

  ‘I’m seeing a counsellor.’

  ‘A councillor or a counsellor?’

  ‘A counsellor.’

  ‘What type is that? The political one or the shrink one?’

  ‘The shrink one.’

  ‘So you’re saying you have someone to talk to.’

  ‘I have someone to talk to.’

  ‘Okay. Well, can I just ask you one thing?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Are you gay?’

  ‘Where did that come from?’

  ‘I thought I’d ask. You might want to unburden yourself.’

  ‘No, Dad. I’m not gay.’

  ‘Because it’s fine if you are.’

  ‘I’m actually not.’

  ‘Okay, well, if you’re sure, let’s get on our way. It’s cold in here and my bones are aching. Time for a whisky.’

  ‘I’ve got a bottle of Macallan at home.’

  ‘Have you now? Well, we’d better be heading back then.’

  It’s at times like this, squeezing into the Peugeot, juddering out of the car park and taking on the A701 and A720, that I wish I could still drive. Or that I had a dram of that Macallan in a hip flask.

  Maybe I am finally a bona fide Scot.

  And by came an angel who had a bright key,

  And he opened the coffins and set them all free;

  William Blake, Songs of Innocence

  Lancaster University, 1986

  Limit

  I hadn’t counted on the breathalyser.

  ‘Breathe into that, lad,’ the copper said. And I looked at his whiskery face, wondering why the burly man in uniform was holding out a breathalyser. ‘We ask everyone who’s been driving and got in an accident. Especially one as serious as this. Your friend’s injuries are life-threatening.’

  ‘I had two drinks. That’s all. Just two. That’s the limit, isn’t it?’

  ‘This’ll tell us if you’re over it, lad.’

  I breathed into the bag, watched with rising horror, panic; the policeman’s face grew more hostile, his over-sized body stiffening.

  ‘I’m arresting you…’

  But I heard no more. I looked around for Tommo’s dad but couldn’t see him. And then I was sick again. Sick until there was nothing left inside me except an overwhelming confusion that made me unable to see or hear or think.

  Scotching the Myths

  For years the hidden closes of Old Town Edinburgh have been shrouded in myths and mysteries, with blood-curdling tales of ghosts and murders, and of plague victims being walled up and left to die. Now new research and archaeological evidence have revealed a truer story, rooted in fact and – as if so often the case – more fascinating than any amount of fiction.

  The Real Mary King’s Close Official Souvenir Guide

  Edinburgh, December 2013

  Stag

  I put on a suit for the occasion. It’s a good suit, dark blue with a pin stripe. Dad irons me a shirt. Then Sheena irons it again so I can actually wear it without embarrassment. *

  ‘Do you want me to come with you, son?’

  ‘No, Dad. I’ll be okay. It’s just a meeting.’

  ‘Well, let me know how you get on.’ />
  ‘I will. Don’t worry.’

  I leave him with Sheena at the sink and Barbara belting out Tell Me it’s not True.

  An hour to kill before my meeting. I take a wander in the Old Town, up the Royal Mile, the High Street, Castle Hill, past the dark narrow closes, Advocate’s, Fleshmarket, Mary King’s. Mum used to bring me here too when I was a kid. Back then it was all joss sticks and hippy stuff. Now it’s kilts, T-shirts and tat. Tartan, tartan, tartan everywhere you look. The tourists love it, in and out the shops, trying on cashmere gloves and comedy hats, bathing in the history, treading the cobbles, criss-crossing the Heart of Midlothian. Paving stones worn with years of treading feet, towering tenements of darkened granite. Ghosts, underground horrors and hidden streets. St Giles’, the Mercat, the pubs, the jewellers, the tobacconists. And then up towards the castle, looming out of the volcanic rock of ages past, the seat of such history and turmoil. Blood, torture, imprisonment.

  There’s Braveheart with his blue face and the Wallace sword, entertaining the crowds for charity, a Japanese lassie wielding his weapon, posing for a photo. Where else can you go and be surrounded by such theatre? Here, in Edinburgh, you can step back in time and shake the hands of those who went before. The living and the dead have never been so close.

  Edinburgh, city of contrasts. Jekyll and Hyde. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Trainspotting. Old Town, New Town. Twenty-five year Speyside single malt fashioned from the crushed horns of unicorns. And Buckie tonic.

  Up above the ground, and beneath it. Heaven and hell. But let’s not forget everything in between.

  ‘Take a seat, Cameron.’ This is a woman I have never met. Human Resources Manager for Skeletours Inc. For we in Edinburgh are not the only keepers of ghosties and ghoulies. There are other tours, down in England: York, Bath, London, Winchester. Skeletours Inc. is big business. Ghosts are big business.

  She shakes my hand, Fiona McCabe. She is Edinburgh. Posh. And then there’s the other one, the Assistant Director, monkey to the organ grinder by any other name, (an organ grinder conspicuous by his lily-livered * absence).