by Zoe Strachan
A motorbike shrilled past, swerving past a car that was slowing to pull in to the lay-by. ‘Anyway,’ Richard said, standing up and stretching his arms above his head until he heard one of his shoulders pop, ‘Let’s get back on the road.’
He stuffed his cup into the bin, dislodging a crisp packet in the process which he didn’t pick up.
‘Richard?’
‘This guy Dan that Luke brought to the hearing, the one he used to stay with?’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, he was quite a bit older, wasn’t he, and you made it sound as if he was gay. And they met when Luke was seventeen, didn’t they?’
Richard nodded and walked towards the car. The convertible parked next to him beeped and flashed as someone released its central locking by remote control. The Ford looked like an old rust bucket in comparison, but he knew it was solid enough to last a while longer at least. He unlocked Stephie’s door first and then his own, adjusted his wing mirror for the final stretch.
An hour or two later, he found himself circling the same roundabout for the second time as he tried to negotiate the one way system that would take them into the centre of town. He told Stephie that it must be a new road layout but then remembered that he’d never driven there before. One of the exits would take him towards Herrick House, he was almost sure, though he wouldn’t have walked that way. If it still existed, of course. When they went through the stone archway that channelled the traffic onto Main Street, unfamiliar shop signs caught Richard’s eye. He saw that the Earl of Merchiston had been taken over by a brewery; the frontage was glossier than before, and he spotted a chalkboard offering ‘Good Food!’ as they passed. A packet of dry roasted peanuts and some plain crisps had been as good as it got in his day. He didn’t know whether he was amused or horrified to be there, thinking in terms of ‘his day’. The Italian restaurant was still there, although the name had changed, and as they drove past Stephie said, ‘That place looks nice, let’s go there tonight.’
‘Yes. I went there once before, I think.’
He turned into College Street and said, ‘Look at the numbers. Our place should be round about here.’
‘There’s a sign up ahead,’ she said. ‘That might be it on the left.’
He pulled in and checked the parking sign. He’d have to feed the meter until six o’clock, but that would be fine. His back was stiff from the drive and he couldn’t figure out how he felt. If he walked down this road he’d come to the university on the right, the quadrangles and the chapel, and behind that the glass faµade of the library. He could follow the lanes and vennels to the Union, the cemetery, the harbour. He wondered where Luke was: huddled over a book in the short loan study area; on a bar stool in the Mature Students’ Club; tumbled in the bedclothes with an undergraduate, his hand twisted in her hair; standing at the end of the pier, looking out over the water and waiting for the scream of a Tornado F3 overhead.
‘When was the last time you were here?’ Stephie asked.
‘The day Mum and Dad came to get me,’ he said. ‘The day I left.’
0
The slam of the front door wakened me. Then there was music from Luke’s room, loud and insistent. I wondered if Aimee was with him; he’d spent long enough getting ready for their date, obviously hoping there would be some kind of recompense for the rom coms and chaste goodnight kisses. She’d called round for him earlier, bearing homebaking and looking as if she should have been wearing a gingham apron. I still had no idea what he saw in her, assumed it must be a challenge.
I fucking hate brownies, Luke had whispered to me before they left, scowling at the neat Tupperware container as though it had soiled our messy coffee table. In spite of my nausea at the sentiment of the gift, I’d plundered the tub three times, ostensibly because my brain needed sugar in order to complete Chapter 7 of the maths workbook.
Since we’d lived in the flat I’d become tuned in to Luke’s sounds, the thump of each shoe on the floor if he came in later than me. Tonight it sounded as if he’d flung his shoes at the wall, despite the effort he’d made polishing them earlier. No voices; he seemed to be alone. Something fell and smashed, a glass perhaps. I edged out of bed, hovered undecided and then pulled on a pair of pants, expecting a rap on my door at any second, to see him flushed and penitent. I groped for the t-shirt I’d taken off before I went to bed, put that on as well, but when after five minutes or more he hadn’t come I got back under the covers and fell asleep again.
The next day he got poisonously drunk. I’d refrained from knocking on his door and gone to morning lectures as usual, expecting to run into him at lunchtime at the Union, gulping down black coffee before Classics. No show, and he wasn’t in class either. As I collected extra copies of the articles we’d been assigned I imagined him languishing on the couch watching daytime television. But after my maths group I bumped into Marc, who mentioned that he’d seen Luke staggering along the promenade by the West Beach, shouting at the gulls.
What was he shouting?
Sounded like poetry to me, but what do I know, I’m a social scientist.
I’ll look out for him, I said.
Pretending to myself that it was concern rather than nosiness or need that drove me, I checked out the Union then walked through the town, ducked into the Earl and then the Ram’s Head, where I recognised the barmaid and asked if she’d seen him.
Guy with dark hair? Scottish, about my height.
Dinnae ken, she said, bored and polishing glasses.
Wears a kind of greeny blue leather jacket sometimes.
Could be, she said. Nice looking?
I shrugged, as though I’d never given it any thought.
Shocking flirt?
Yeah, I smiled. That’ll be him.
Uhuh. Had to knock him back earlier. He was in some state.
D’you know where he went?
She frowned, stretched up to hang a glass from the rack overhead. No idea, she said. Here, did you read about that other student that’s gone missing?
I shook my head and left before she could tell me.
Luke had probably gone round to Aimee’s, and I could hardly follow him there. I tried to walk off a little of the unsettled feeling, intending to tramp the streets until the exercise warmed my blood again and the dusk made going back to the flat alone seem reasonable rather than some kind of failure. He was like an anchor, mooring me in the town, marking my place. Whenever he went away I felt less connected, no matter how many LesBiGay discos I went to and how many boys I kissed (not nearly enough).
My feet led me to the grass that bordered the east beach and a sweeping view of the sea, choppy and grey. Although I’d grown up inland it hadn’t been too far from the west coast, with its bleak caravan parks and beaches of dark shingle. People were throwing balls for their dogs, and I wished Jojo was with me, slavers and all. He’d have been burling round in excitement, waggy-tailed at the prospect of chasing his rubber bone into the waves. I moved back towards the pavement, climbed the steep path that passed by the graveyard, taking the long road home.
Luke was sitting against the back wall of the church when I found him, looking out to sea, a can of lager in his hand. His eyes were bloodshot and his lips looked parched. I crouched down beside him. He indicated the remains of a six pack lying on the ground, and I prised a can from its plastic noose and cracked it open. The chill had left the beer and it tasted sour. After a while Luke said, I don’t think that Aimee and I have a future together.
He shook a cigarette out his pack and flicked his lighter at it, with no luck. I took it from him and held the flame until he got a light. His skin was pale, clammy looking. I wondered if he’d taken any pills.
I’m sorry, I said. What happened?
He slit a blade of grass with his nail and tore it into two halves, which he threw onto the ground beside him.
Ask Aimee, if you can get within spitting distance of her.
But the truth was that I didn’t care about Aimee. We walked back
towards Herrick, Luke putting one foot in front of the other as though it required as much coordination and strength as he possessed. The shops had closed and the streets were quiet and almost empty. The newsagent attached to the Courier office hadn’t taken in their boards and the new headlines for the week’s paper stopped me dead: STUDENT MISSING, DEPRESSED LUCY NOT SEEN SINCE THURS and LUCY PARENTS: HELP US FIND DAUGHTER.
Luke, I said.
Yeah, he said. I know.
They don’t mean … Lucy, do they?
Yeah, he said again. They do.
Hang on, what happened?
He shrugged, kept walking.
What do they mean, depressed? I said, hurrying to keep up with him.
She was on anti-depressants, Luke said. They found them in her room.
How do you know?
Aimee, he said, scowling out her name.
I wonder where she is, I said.
Run away, who knows.
I hope she’s okay.
She is or she isn’t. Banal platitudes aren’t going to make any fucking difference either way.
He started walking faster, and I jogged to keep up with him.
Do you think … I began but he turned and snarled at me, Fuck off Richard. I’m not in the mood, okay?
He shoved past me and marched off, back in the direction we’d come from. I stood and watched him go.
23
Richard walked past his old flat, the one he’d shared with Luke. The building looked the same, the stone still rough and older looking than it was, although it seemed he’d hardly seen it in daylight. In his memory he was always rounding the corner to see the doorway illuminated under the streetlamp that had also cast a deceptively warm light through the threadbare curtains of his bedroom window. The door itself was still ajar, and he caught a glimpse of water pooling on the concrete floor of the close, just as it had when he and Luke had lived there. He wondered if students still rented it, imagined how ridiculous he would seem if he pushed the door open and climbed the curving stairs to the first floor, asked to look around. Although the day was mild, he felt a slight shiver as he moved out of the sunlight and into the shade of the building. Now that he was alone, without Stephie beside him, the past was lagging round him, thick and airless.
4 o’clock on the pier?
Richard had liked the ‘o’clock’, the old fashioned lack of abbreviation. He was early, he realised. There were twenty minutes to kill. He thought about wandering around the abbey, checking out the new visitor centre, but realised that there was an admission charge and decided to save it for when Stephie was with him. If she was interested; the prospect of a run of gift shops followed by a latte and a glossy magazine had elicited a more enthusiastic response than his suggestion of the castle or the museum.
‘Take your time,’ she’d said when he left her to her shopping.
‘It might not take any time. He might not be there.’
‘But if he is, it’s fine. Look, I’ll tell you what, I’m going to buy something to eat and go back to the B&B. You can text me if you want me to come out, or come back and get me there.’
He’d grown used to the pleasant confines Stephie put on his activities; back by a particular time, meals at regular intervals. He wondered, not for the first time, if Luke had anyone in his life or if he was still as free as he’d always seemed. Instead of going into the abbey grounds Richard ducked right, through the gate and down the harbour road, looking for the door in the wall that would take him into the cemetery. Sudden noise split the air and he twirled round, looking up for the planes. Funny how such a terrifying sound could become almost familiar. They were returning to the base, he assumed, or he might have caught a glimpse of them firing out over the sea. Poppy wreaths were glowing scarlet against the granite of the war memorial on Main Street, he’d noticed, months after Remembrance Day. A few bunches of fresh flowers had been propped at lopsided angles between them, swathed in cellophane, but Richard hadn’t gone up to read the cards that were taped to them.
He selected a bench near the highest part of the cemetery and sat down, his back to the wall. Luke might walk that way to the pier, depending on where he lived now. Although there was tension somewhere in Richard’s chest – foreboding, excitement, he didn’t know which – he realised that he couldn’t wholly believe that he was going to see Luke again after so long. The text had come the previous evening, as he and Stephie had been eating carpaccio and wondering how the students at the opposite table could afford to go to the restaurant. She hadn’t understood what it was like, Richard thought, and then she’d identified the girls’ handbags on her way back from the bathroom and commented that the clientele was somewhat removed from that of the appropriately named Good Luck Cantonese, Leckie’s only sit-in restaurant. He’d read Luke’s message as soon as she’d left the table, checked and double checked that he’d got the sender right, ordered a jug of tap water out of a need for activity more than anything else. Something about the waiter’s demeanour made Richard realise that he’d mistaken them for a couple on a date, but he swished away before there was time to correct him.
And now here Richard was, sitting overlooking the cemetery. He’d read his course books on this same bench, or so he thought, when even on warm days the flat had seemed cold. It was strange to think how much time had passed since he’d left. His parents weren’t the kind of people who drove long distances and the journey back to Ayrshire had loomed over them. They’d waited in the car while he ran round the flat, stuffing his clothes in binbags and throwing CDs into his shabby leather suitcase, anxiety threatening to burst from his chest in some sprawling, irrevocable mess. He was afraid, he’d acknowledged then, of his father. Bedclothes were left in a tangle, dishes in the kitchen sink, but Richard had found himself edging open the door to Luke’s bedroom, spending a moment standing there, looking at its unaccustomed neatness and imagining that if the front door were to spring open and Luke arrive, there might be an alternative.
Then a horn had sounded outside, although Richard wasn’t sure if it was from his parents’ car or not, and there wasn’t enough time or reason for farewells. He remembered sitting in the back seat on the way home, nausea interrupted by the idea – it had been more than an idea, it had felt so urgent – that he should have taken something to remember Luke by. Though as it turned out, he hadn’t needed it. Almost ten years later and the memories had come pouring back, when he pulled the covers around him and closed his eyes at night, when his feet beat their rhythm on the rough single track road, when Stephie asked him questions about what had happened back then. Those memories had never really left him. They’d been there in his lonely Dundee bedsit, and the first time he’d listened to the night noises of the house in Argyll, but they’d been at their sharpest, their most cutting, in those hellish few months he’d spent back at home. If Luke turned up Richard would punch him, square in the jaw, rather than admit how he’d felt.
Up at eight every day although sleeping was his only solace, so as not to invite comments about laziness. Nothing to do apart from packing away childish things – the Warhammer figurines, the fantasy novels that no longer diverted him – and signing on once a fortnight. When he went back to the cemetery he saw that the grass needed mowed, just as the paths needed raked and the beds weeded. No cheery annuals now, just wizened stumps of standard rose with occasional surprised blooms. When it was dry enough Richard spent hours sitting on the bench near the far wall of the cemetery, reading, thinking, trying not to think. He wasn’t sure if the bench had been painted since he’d done it, only two years before. Angular letters scored in the thick, flaking colour announced: LYT, FUCK THE POPE, DARREN F IS GAY.
At times Richard looked up and half-expected to see Mr Walls ambling by, refuelling the mower or stooping to pick up a piece of litter. Once he recognised a wiry man with greyhounds who’d sometimes called by to pass the time of day. Two dead rabbits were dangling from his hand and Richard suddenly remembered that the man always used to address M
r Walls as ‘Faither’. Although Mr Walls had called Richard ‘son’ while they were working together he’d never been able to return the compliment. Even after such a short time away – even before he’d gone, if he was honest – such things sat uneasily on his lips as they never had on his father’s.
The second time he went to the Job Centre Richard saw Sammy McGuire from his year at school, and then he decided he couldn’t hack it. It was either get away or climb the pithead and take the quick way down. Not that he’d manage even to get up there in the first place, or so he thought when he walked past and considered the possibility. He remembered something Luke had said – ‘there’s this thing called clearing’ – and went to the library and scanned the papers, waiting for his slot on the one computer with dial up connection. His parents hadn’t been keen, but he’d made some phone calls while they were out at work, emphasising the personal reasons that had made him drop out of his first degree course and his high marks in maths and logic. He had something to prove, though he wasn’t sure what.
When Richard got to the pier he walked along to the end, sat on the big concrete step beside the harbour light. Rust stains ran down from a rivet embedded in the stone beside him. He looked at his phone, half-expecting a text from Luke cancelling their meeting, though that had never really been his style. They hadn’t had mobile phones then, they’d seemed a businessman’s affectation, something that only the norms needed. Luke arrived in his own time or not at all, and there was never any warning of which; Richard had sat alone in bars lingering over a pint and pretending to read the paper plenty of times. He felt the memory of a movement in his fingers, an answering call in his lungs. Although it had been years since he’d smoked the urge for a cigarette was almost overwhelming. He checked the time. It was five to four.