by Zoe Strachan
‘It’s been a tough day,’ he said to Stephie, as if to justify his intrusion. She accepted a glass of wine and didn’t say anything when he handed one to Loren as well. He’d seen that look on his sister’s face before, when she’d been biting her tongue rather than answering back to their father.
‘So, have you two been enjoying the bright lights then?’
Loren started pulling at a scrap of skin by one of her nails. Her mascara had run, Richard noticed, smearing down to her cheekbones. He tried again: ‘Maris Arms or the Royal Hotel?’
‘Well,’ Stephie said. ‘We started in the Maris because we reckoned the food would be cheaper and then we went to the Royal because we reckoned it’d be open later.’
‘Only for guests,’ Richard said.
Stephie rolled her eyes at his pedantry and said, ‘Not that it would have made any difference given that we got thrown out.’
‘I just wanted,’ Loren said, standing up and veering towards the door, ‘I just wanted to get fucked, that’s all. It’s not a fucking crime you know.’
Still cradling her glass, she stopped at the door and asked of neither of them in particular, ‘How come I always spoil things? I just need to touch something and it’s ruined.’
‘Go to bed, Loren,’ Stephie said, and Richard noticed that her knuckles were white where she was squeezing the stem of her glass. ‘Sleep it off.’
Loren swerved around the open door and they heard her clump across the hall and up a few stairs. There was a pause, then she clumped back into the room and said, ‘I’m sorry Stephie. If I could go back …’
‘Just go to bed. Please.’
Richard avoided looking at Loren as she left the room again, listened to her tread across the landing to the spare bedroom. Stephie got up and closed the door.
‘What was that all about?’ Richard said.
‘Who knows? She’s just being self-obsessed again.’ Stephie leaned against the back of her chair.
‘When she said ‘get fucked’?’
‘She didn’t mean drunk. She was managing that perfectly well already.’
‘So what happened?’
Stephie gave an exasperated groan. ‘I don’t know, maybe it was the wrong point in her menstrual cycle or something. She was really going for it with the drink, then she spotted some guy in the hotel that she liked the look of, only it turned out he was there with his fiancée, but she’d turned in early. Let’s just say, Loren doesn’t like to take no for an answer.’
‘Ah.’
‘So she chucked a pint over him, he called her a mad bitch, she decked him, his friend had to intervene … oh god, it was unbelievable. I did apologise, honestly, but we were out on our ear and it’s taken me a fucking hour to haul her up the road.’
‘You should have called me.’
‘Och, I felt I’d pushed my luck already. Besides, she might’ve been sick in the back of the Lotus Esprit out there.’ She gestured towards the window, then paused, listening for any more noise from upstairs.
‘Maybe she’s passed out,’ Richard said. ‘Should you help her into bed?’
‘The way she was earlier, she’s lucky I didn’t help her into the fucking sea. You’d have thought fresh air would have a sobering effect.’ She sighed and spread her hands out on the table in front of her, pressing her palms down against the varnished wood. ‘She can’t really help it, I suppose. She’s had a lot going on, I guess it just comes out like that sometimes.’
What a convenient notion, Richard thought, that your behaviour could be completely outwith your control. ‘At least she apologised,’ he said.
Stephie started to speak, then got up and opened the fridge door. ‘Got anything to eat?’
‘That white bowl’s got some leftover pasta in it.’
Stephie took it out and lifted the plate which covered it, peering underneath as though mistrustful of what she might find. ‘Is that pesto or mould?’ she said, prodding it with a fork.
‘Pesto.’
‘Hmmph.’ She annointed the contents of the bowl with salt and pepper and returned to the table, where she speared each farfalle in turn and put it in her mouth. Richard was reminded of old school space invaders games, where a stationary shooter eliminated the opposition one spacecraft at a time. Chasing the last butterfly round the bowl Stephie said, ‘She wasn’t apologising for tonight.’
‘No?’ Richard got up and went to the fridge to top up his wine.
Without looking over at him she said, ‘No. She slept with my boyfriend. We’ve split up now.’ She balanced her fork across the top of the bowl. ‘I really liked him.’
Richard stood with the bottle in his hand, moved to top up her glass.
‘I’m okay, thanks,’ she said, putting her hand over it.
He wedged the cork back in and put the bottle away. ‘Are you okay with her being here, really?’ he said. ‘I mean, I can find some excuse, make up some other visitors, anything.’
Stephie nodded. ‘It’s fine. Really fine.’
‘That’s all right then. It was just in case …’ he trailed off, not sure what he was going to say.
‘Well, I would say that a friendship is more important than being in a relationship that’s going nowhere with someone who’s turned out to be a twat, wouldn’t you?’
‘I suppose so.’
They sat in silence for a moment, the house seeming very still, as if the darkness outside was pressing down on it, muffling the small night sounds of gurgling pipes and clicking appliances.
‘It’s either that or lose both of them,’ Stephie said, getting up and rinsing her dish then slotting it in to the dishwasher. ‘I’m going to turn in now as well.’
‘I can make up a bed on the couch, if you want. If you don’t want to sleep in the same room.’
‘Nah,’ she said, ‘You’re all right. And I’m sorry, about causing a scene in your local. Don’t want to get you barred as well.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I always preferred the Maris anyway.’
Stephie came up behind Richard and put her arms around him, resting her chin on his shoulder. He patted her elbows, then squeezed back, locking her to him in a tight hug.
0
After eighteen disconsolate years, the job in the cemetery had made me feel as if finally I’d forged some connection with my hometown. Laid some claim, or had some claim laid on me. There were my antecedents, after all, lying in neat rows which I strimmed and trimmed, scooping up the clippings and dumping them on the compost heap behind the Celtic cross which listed the fallen sons of the parish. 1916 and 1918 particularly fine vintages, it seemed, of that easy-flowing red. I imagined them in uniform, not fresh-faced but already darkened and coughing from a few years down the pit. Boys no older than the century, with the lungs of sixty-a-day men. I could see the bunting strung out as the town gathered to hasten them. No conscientious objectors here, when the decision was made it was made mob-handed. Your occupation protected, essential to the war effort? Nae bother, you knew where your duty lay. Forget your sweetheart, your children, your mother, you would not be called coward in this town, even if you had to grow gangrenous and rot in the muddy blood to prove it.
By the time I deadheaded those daffs and yanked out the horsetails, well, by then the poof and the Asian were there to be vilified, and it didn’t matter if your only acts of bravery took place in the Whitehill Colliery Social Club. Heart attacks, strokes and cancers had taken the place of the roof falls, explosions, and plummets down the shaft engraved on the memorial stones the Company sponsored. The ones the mothers didn’t get to see, identified by stoic fellow workers who sat silent with pint after pint that night, hating their relief that it was a boy, not them. Archibald ‘Erchie’ Carden (Elder of the Tent of Rechabites), sorely missed. He fell a month short of his retirement, after fifty long years. Could he not live without it?
My taste for melodrama knew no bounds. I searched for grimy glamour under every piece of gravel I combed, becoming fascinated by
the failed escapes. The boy from the Royal Drake. A stoker, no less, he used skills honed here, stayed camouflaged with coal dust, the whites of his eyes tired and gleaming in the red light of the fire he fed. Could he tell if the coal he shovelled was hewn and hauled by his father, his uncle, their father in turn? Did it have a distinctive patina, leave a familiar stain upon the skin? I liked his pristine white headstone with its anchor and a rope; once I made a posy from stray carnations to lay alongside it. A crush on a boy who’d died decades before I was born. Pretty desperate, I know.
By the time the summer was drawing in I could glimpse my new life in the changing light, in the first of the fallen leaves I raked up in preparation for the oldsters who ambled along after church on Sunday. The peace of the cemetery seemed to lull them, easing them into the tug of their mortality. Some relatives didn’t come at all, of course; the In Loving Memory vase empty save for a few desiccated stalks, no bulbs to pop up spring after spring. It was up to me to remove the crisp poke, the snagged condom.
So my thoughts spiralled as I sat in the fug of the Drumrigg bus, heading home for the promised mid-term visit. I looked out over the fields, where furrows of dark earth were highlighted with frost and mist drifted around the trees and hedgerows. In the distance I saw a dark shape, the old pithead rising behind a small copse. Preserved as a monument, though I wasn’t sure who visited it. Old men maybe, walking their wee dugs and prodding chips of pelt and fractured Buckfast bottles with their sticks; and teenagers of course, like Kenny Dodd, who’d been cremated rather than laid to rest. I missed Luke already, I realised, was jealous of his trip to Edinburgh, his plans for sweaty clubs and new drugs.
It was mid-afternoon when I got off the bus. My parents would be at work and I guessed Stephanie was still at school, or sitting on the wall of the petrol station watching the cars whip by on their way somewhere else. As I walked from the pissy bus depot along to the war memorial I felt that it wasn’t my town, not any more. Apart from a handful of summer afternoons spent behind the high walls of the cemetery it never had been. These places don’t adapt. Their neat, straight, stone rows, built for a purpose, seem aimless when the purpose is taken away. The net curtains yellow in the windows, withered gardens and ramshackle sheds mourn the proud hobbies of grown men; cultivating roses and canaries, building intricate ships from matchsticks and glue. This town fell asleep, the headstone would say, Jesus said come. Mr Sim’s terraced cottage lay empty, I noticed, and I wondered if he’d finally messed with the wrong boy, resolved to check the cemetery, just in case.
I followed Victoria Street, taking the route of the men in collarettes and gloves whose parades were framed on the walls of the local library. Named for the empire, for success and prosperity, it climbed the hill towards the edge of the town, beyond Louisa Row, built to celebrate a pit boss’s firstborn. The houses stopped but I kept going, past the Catholic church and its primary school, past the last local bus stop, until I reached the cemetery. The gate was closed but unlocked, an officious council sign announcing the opening hours. Metal grilles covered the windows of Mr Walls’ redbrick cottage. He’d been moved to the sheltered housing in Drumrigg, I’d heard. Staying on after retirement wasn’t done anymore, no keepers lived within the bounds of parks or cemeteries these days; besides, he’d told my dad that he’d seen enough funerals to last him a lifetime.
Well, sure enough, a late addition to the (ssh, don’t tell anyone) reused plots by the back wall. J. Sim. 47 years. And at the bottom, bluntly: Erected by his brother. I was surprised he hadn’t been burnt, but some small traditions lived on amongst the Baptist community out there, like the lingering suspicion that you’d need your corporal remains on the day of judgement. Even if, by their standards, your damnation was pretty much a done deal. Just visible despite vigorous scrubbing by the council graffiti task force, I discovered his epitaph: Sucks cocks.
Is it any wonder that after spending so many of my young days surrounded by death, I developed an appetite for living? There wasn’t much living to be done there, in that stultifying place, so I was poised and eager to make up for lost time later on. I just needed someone to help show me the way.
14
When they reached the shop Stephie said, ‘Let’s walk further. To the garage.’
‘Don’t you have to get started?’ Richard looked at his watch.
‘Yeah, but I need the exercise. So do you.’
Richard stared at her. ‘But I’m always out running …’
‘I was joking,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ he said, looking up to where the tips of the mountains slipped through pale drifts of cloud. It wouldn’t rain yet, though the sky was darker further inland. ‘What about Loren?’
Stephie shrugged. ‘Still asleep.’
He nodded, and they kept walking. He thought about saying something about the field system, about the ribbons of land flanked by crumbling dry stane dykes that stretched from the road down towards the sea, but he didn’t know if Stephie would be interested. They passed a tough little vegetable patch, half a dozen rows of potatoes and cabbages, a hardy clutch of raspberry canes propped together against the wind and netted for the birds. Alan Campbell had two pigs in a pen, the ground chewed up under their feet, and next to that John McKinnon’s boat rested under a navy tarpaulin.
‘This reminds me of home, a bit,’ Stephie said.
‘Does it?’
‘Yeah. I mean, not the sea or anything, just the grey houses and the stuff people do. Like the house at the corner before you go into the estate’s got a boat outside, and some folk have greenhouses with tomatoes.’
‘All that seemed to be dying out, when I left,’ Richard said. ‘Anyway, at home that’s the older folk, isn’t it?’
‘The ones who read the Advertiser every week.’
‘And worry that things have got worse. Most of the town isn’t like that now, surely.’
The wind whirled around them and Stephie pushed her hair back from her face. ‘And do you think things have got worse?’
Richard shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s years since I lived there.’
‘They’re demolishing the school this summer.’
‘Really? Maybe I’ll go back to see that.’
‘Yeah, they found asbestos in it, or something. But they’re going to rebuild it bigger, apparently. Don’t know how exactly because they’ve starting building houses where the playing fields were.’
‘Executive homes?’ he asked. They were passing the terraced cottages by the primary school. Built to house the teachers and the coastguards, these were now inhabited by the elderly and infirm despite the steep concrete steps that led up to them from the road.
‘I guess so,’ Stephie said.
‘Who’d pay to live there though? It’s not as if there’s anything to do.’
Stephie shrugged. ‘Maybe you’ve just been spoilt by your experience of the big city. On the subject of which, how was Glasgow?’ She looked at him as if she expected him to start blushing.
‘Fine,’ he said.
‘Well, did you have a nice time? You didn’t really tell me about it, what with Loren and everything.’
‘Nothing to tell,’ he said. ‘It was a work do. Boring.’
‘Hmm.’
They reached the garage and got their messages, Richard introducing Stephie to Evelyn behind the counter as they paid. He felt vindicated, as if the presence of a family member proved something. Evelyn looked at Stephie intently, nodded.
‘I guess news travels fast,’ Stephie said when they’d returned to the road and started walking again.
‘They’re pretty tolerant,’ Richard said. ‘Can’t afford for all the white settlers to bugger off home.’
‘Will you stay here forever?’
‘I’m only just thirty Stephie. I’m not really making forever plans.’
‘Maybe you’ll hit the big time and move to London or New York or somewhere. Then I can come and visit again.’
An image flickered throu
gh Richard’s mind, an alternative kind of life, full of people and parties and tall buildings. A hazy figure beside him; tall, with dark hair. A lover perhaps, or boyfriend. ‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ he said. ‘It’s all changing to brain training for the over fifties and sports stuff for people who can’t be bothered going outside.’
‘Och, but surely war’s always in? I mean, it’s not like there aren’t any real ones any more.’
Richard sighed. ‘Yes, but First World War’s a niche market, something to fill the gaps between the Hitler documentaries on UKTV History. Focus groups are more interested in modern war. Iraq, Afghanistan, the Caucasus.’
‘But some of them wouldn’t be the same if it wasn’t for the First World War, would they?’
He smiled. ‘You’ll be telling me who led the opening attack at Passchendaele next.’
They walked back up the hill, past the tearoom which now had a sign on the gate saying OPEN, and another promising Home Baking, handwritten and slipped in a polypocket which was pinned underneath.
‘Cup of tea?’ Richard said. ‘Scone?’
‘Nah, it’s all right. We’ve just bought a bumper pack of Hobnobs.’ Stephie said. ‘And remember, a moment on the lips …’
‘Oh Jesus, remember Mum used to say that?’
‘Yeah, in between eating bowl after bowl of Special K. It’s a miracle I never ended up anorexic. Though it might not have done me that much harm,’ she said, slapping her hips.
‘You look fine,’ Richard said.
‘You’re just saying that.’
‘No, I’m not actually. I think you inherited the good-looking gene, if our family had one.’
Stephie kicked a pebble along the road. ‘Loren’s pretty though, isn’t she?’
Richard chased the stone Stephie had kicked and sent it flying into the ditch by mistake. ‘Not especially,’ he said. ‘Or at least, she’s perfectly fine.’