If I Touched the Earth

by Cynthia Rogerson

  Also by Cynthia Rogerson

  I LOVE YOU, GOODBYE

  STEPPING OUT

  Contents

  Also by Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  Part Six

  Copyright

  Dedicated to the fictional memory of

  Calum Ross (1971–1996)

  and all A9 casualties

  and all the casualties of casualties.

  Acknowledgements

  For insight into grief, I would like to thank my aunt Florence Nelson, who likes happy endings. I am also grateful to Janne Moller and Kristen Susienka for nagging me to keep tweaking. And to Peter Whiteley for proofreading, for being patient and encouraging. I again take my hat off to Creative Scotland, whose generous bursary gave me the time to finish this novel.

  Finally, I am grateful to all the publishers who rejected a much earlier version of this novel – thank you! You were right, it was a terrible novel.

  Clown in the Moon

  My tears are like the quiet drift

  Of petals from some magic rose;

  And all my grief flows from the rift

  Of unremembered skies and snows.

  I think, that if I touched the earth,

  It would crumble;

  It is so sad and beautiful,

  So tremulously like a dream.

  Dylan Thomas

  In 1963, when Prime Minister Harold Wilson talked about the upcoming ‘white heat of technical revolution altering the UK beyond recognition’, he was accurately describing the fate of small Highland villages like Alness. In the early Seventies the North Sea oil industry at Nigg and the Invergordon Aluminium Smelter created thousands of well-paid jobs, and by 1973 eight times the original population swallowed sleepy little Alness. It disappeared! Completely smothered and gasping for air, so quickly no one even heard it gasp for air. There was a time folk complained about mysterious farting noises, which may have been dying gasps, but that was conjecture.

  The facts are these: One day Alness was quiet and clean, the next day Alness was a mess.

  Excerpt from History of a Small Place

  that Got Big by Janet MacInnes

  Part One

  1:32pm 5th January to

  4:12am 12th January 1996

  After

  Something strange happens seconds after Calum’s car crashes. A sudden change in the atmosphere of the material world. In nearby Evanton the light flattens so anything unbeautiful becomes almost sinister, and the things that are pretty seem slightly surreal. A breeze arises, a chillier breeze than even this winter day warrants. It eddies in the cul de sacs of Camden Street and Livera Street and creates small whirlpools of icy dust that sting the eyes of cats and runny-nosed toddlers in their pushchairs.

  A middle-aged woman shopping in the Spar, who has never met Calum and now never will, suddenly sighs and slumps inside. She drops a bottle of salad cream into her basket, though it is over-priced and not her favourite brand. She simply lacks the heart to do anything else.

  Outside the paper shop, a recently retired man, likewise unknown to Calum, shivers and zips up his jacket and suddenly thinks of people who are dead. His old workmate, Jam Jimmy, who always ate ham and jam pieces. His niece with bifocals, who used to sing ‘Hey Nannie Noo Noo’.

  Across the road at Marty Dunn’s garage, a small sticky-faced girl bursts into tears and is inconsolable for ten minutes, though her mother holds and strokes her, and in the end slaps her bottom impatiently. The child hiccups and can’t say why she’s crying, only sobs as if her heart is broken.

  Eighteen miles away, Calum’s mother Alison Ross sits and laughs with her call centre colleagues in the Market Bar in Inverness, riding the tail wind of a late lunch. She has just marginally missed her own mouth and is laughing and wiping lager off her face and shirt with a cloth the barmaid sweetly offers.

  ‘Hey, don’t worry,’ says the barmaid. ‘A mouth’s a small thing to aim for, I’m always missing mine, and look at the size of my gob – it’s huge, compared to yours.’

  ‘Ach, you’re always bragging about the size of body parts, you,’ says Alison, and returns the cloth. ‘Anyway, I was aiming for my chin and shirt.’ She has a fake tan face and slightly more orange neck.

  ‘So, is it time to head back to work, ladies?’ asks a young woman, who also sports an orange neck.

  ‘Aye, ’spose it’s time,’ says a plump woman, flushed-face, slightly hectic.

  ‘You look awfy hot there, Shirley. Getting the hot flushes?’

  ‘No! Me? No! Not old enough.’

  ‘Ah, come on, look at you. Like a radiator, you.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ she whispers. ‘It’s my socks. Compression socks. My veins, you see.’

  Alison and the others laugh cruelly in a burst that involves at least one of them spraying more lager onto the table. It’s been a one-and-a-half-pint lunch, and no food except crisps, to save on calories. They do this once a week, their girly lunch, a lunch which will leave no memory. Shirley’s face is not smiling.

  ‘You’re young, but you’ll see. You’ll get the veins. And you’ll get the hot flushes and all, too, you all will.’

  ‘Hot flashbacks, more like,’ says Alison defiantly. Raising her glass, swallowing the last of the lager, she feels nothing of the atmospheric shift that chilled Evanton. Perhaps it dissipated somewhere over the Cromarty Firth, leaving a trail of sighs and sobs and snappiness behind. Perhaps it never existed at all.

  Alison is told by a policeman and policewoman early that evening. Both of them are young and have unconvincing facial expressions.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘About three miles away. Between the two Evanton slip roads on the A9.’

  They tell her there were no other vehicles, no witnesses. Possibly black ice? Nothing certain. No obvious cause. They are very sorry.

  ‘Aye, alright, please just go now, please,’ she says, and after an awkward moment, they do.

  She sucks in air fast, fast, and makes strange whimpering noises. Races out to her car, then races back to the house for her car keys, which she then drops twice. One of her shoes slips off as she hurtles into her seat, and she has to lean out to retrieve it, but does not bother replacing it on her foot. She flings it to the back seat and drives out of Alness, down the A9 to Raigmore Hospital. Wants to look for evidence of her son’s car crash, but finds she cannot. Cannot look. In her head, a quiet but shrill whistling noise begins. She shakes her head slightly and the noise sloshes around. She closes her car window, and it grows louder. Just before she reaches the hospital, a huge drowsiness engulfs her, and she widens her eyes against it.

  Later she finds herself back home, though she cannot recall the journey. Alison walks around her house. She checks her reflection in the bathroom mirror every so often, as if she expects something from it. Calum left his bedroom light on again, and she switches it off and closes the door hard. Then opens it and closes it softly. She picks up the phone three times to call her sister Chrissie, but she does not dial. Occasionally, she makes little mewing sounds and sighs asthmatically, but is otherwise silent. She opens the refrigerator, retrieves all the ingredients for an omelette, cooks the omelette and does not eat it. Opens a bottle of whisky, drinks a mugful and vomits into the kitchen sink.

  At ten o’clock she turns on the news, stares at the wall, and at ten thirty-five she brushes her teeth and gets into bed with her clothes on but her shoes off. She lays under her quilt, cold and clammy, unable to get warm, and she keeps breathing and listening t
o her own breathing with disbelief. She falls asleep but is woken by her own shuddering jagged breath ten minutes later, as if she’s stopped breathing and has woken seconds before dying. Or as if she has dreamt of weeping. Her throat aches and her chest and stomach ache. She pictures her son lying in the hospital morgue, alone and cold. This is, of course, unbearable, but she cannot stop herself. All his life, she has worried about him being lonely.

  Neal is Alone

  The next day is bright. Luminous low winter light that excites everyone, but the day ends anti-climactically without sunset, in drizzle. Like the over-long Christmas afternoon two weeks ago, when Neal and Sally’s tree suddenly looked tawdry and the air bereft of anticipation, only a sense of flatness. Dingwall can be beautiful, with its church steeples and the hills swaddling it right down to the firth, but there is nothing beautiful now. Not a thing, and nobody either. Just a few unhealthy-looking thirteen-year-olds loitering around the war memorial, and a woman, drunk and singing as she makes her way to the train station.

  Neal, who like Alison had felt nothing at the moment of Calum’s death, can’t hear the woman. But he can hear the boys hooting and hawking, as boys do around war memorials at dusk. He guesses they’ll be smoking and discussing sex as if they know what they’re talking about, and maybe they do. Neal sighs and goes back to work.

  His head bows over an old newspaper, gleaning old facts to feed into the computer humming in front of him. This week it’s Thirty-Two Years Ago Today. Last week it was Sixty-Four Years Ago Today. The newspaper is one hundred and thirteen years old, so some weeks he does 113 Years Ago Today. Is it a boring task? Not for Neal. He likes dreamy occupations, like walking and reading history books. He notices patterns that mean nothing to anyone else, like the fact all the babies born to his neighbours last year were given one-syllable names, and yesterday the women in his queue at Tesco were all wearing their hair in ponytails. Patterns please him. Predictability pleases him. He’s had a few problems with his car lately, and his cat had to be put down at the vets, this is about as much commotion as his life can take.

  He’s become very like his granddad. Perhaps through childlessness he’s skipped the stage of becoming his father, who recently eloped with a waitress called Myrtle and lives in a caravan in Skegness. Life’s a beach, and also short. Lighten up, son, his father wrote on a postcard. The photo was of a naked bottom with a smoking cigarette sticking out from the crack. But Neal had not smiled, had not lightened up in the least. He is more like his ginger-haired granddad, a gentle pottering soul, given to beginning and not finishing sentences.

  Neal’s own ginger hair flops over his forehead right now, and he frowns a little as he types. In concentration, not irritation. He loves his job. The column is never boring, and besides it’s not only the column he does, he also organises adverts. Though he prefers the columns, of course. They have fewer numbers. He sets his research aside for a minute to sip his coffee and switch on the radio, the local station – Moray Firth. The news, and he almost switches it off again – current news never has the same appeal – when a name jumps out at him, punches him in the ear drums, also somewhere in his stomach. He flinches. Sits up, sets his coffee down too fast and it splashes on his old jeans. Neal often talks to himself when he’s alone in the office, and now he says, ‘Damn. Damn it.’

  First the car, then the cat, now Calum. It seems all the C things are in great danger.

  Funeral Prelude

  Calum has been dead four days. He’s in Chisholm’s Funeral Home on Huntly Street in Inverness. No one except his mother has been to see him. But then, not many folk came to see him alive, either. Calum led a solipsistic, contradictory existence as a long-distance runner and a smoker of fat joints, a watcher of violent videos and a fan of Blind Melon. He was also an active member of the local long-term unemployed.

  Neal sits alone at home, looks out the window at nothing. Poor Calum, he thinks. Another A9 fatality, it’s enough to make you want to close the road down. In the last twelve months, fourteen people have died on it, and dozens injured. In his mind, he constructs an A9 victim memorial alongside the war memorial. Instead of an armed soldier, a metallic sculpture of a scrunched car, some personal items in unlikely places. A toy on the bonnet, a shoe through the windscreen. Red gloss paint splashed on the dashboard. A plaque with names. A long plaque, with space to add names.

  He puts his head in his hands, and presses his fingers into his tear ducts. How has the span of his own seemingly short life overlapped the beginning and end of this other life? For a minute, to calm himself, he reminds himself that his body is sitting on a piece of furniture in his house, which is anchored to the earth’s surface, which is rotating around the sun at the very same time it is spinning on its axis through dark space. Right now. And every creature breathing on this illusory stable surface is transient. Himself and Sally and Alison included. A hundred years from now – same stage, different cast. Whooosh, all gone. Nothing matters. Imagining this, reminding himself of the big picture, is oddly like praying. And like praying, it delivers relief. Relief and gratitude.

  The front door opens and shuts with Sally’s quietly decisive click. Neal sits up straighter, clears his throat and grabs the newspaper off the coffee table, though why he should need props for the woman he’s been married to for seventeen years is a mystery.

  And Alison Ross, mother of the dead Calum? She’s being pulled away from him, the currents are too strong to resist, and by some fluke he’s been trapped and remains exactly the age he was when he crashed. Nothing is recognisable now. Time itself has splintered. When one day passes Alison tells herself this time yesterday Calum was alive, but already that seems unlikely. By the time she tells herself this time four days ago Calum was alive, it is almost not credible. Waking up and acknowledging another day without him in it feels a betrayal, and worse. A lie.

  She is alone but she is not. She is surrounded by her sister, her nieces, her friends from the old days, her friends from all the days since, her neighbours (some of whom she does not recognise), and is in sporadic contact with the strangers who deal with the formalities and consequences of death. The registrar. The bank officials. The police. The coroner. The funeral home. The minister. The benefits office. The DVLA. Calum’s exit seems to require a lot of signatures and phone calls. In a way, it is more exhausting than the labour leading to his birth. The contractions of grief are unimaginable, even to her, and so they ride way down deep. Subterranean grief she subconsciously alters her breathing to accommodate. Her coherent thoughts wouldn’t fill a thimble. She moves through these days on tip-toe. Steps gingerly around lethal black clouds, bottomless pools of howling.

  It takes immense energy, this tip-toeing around and talking politely, yet she is not tired. She does not sleep, and doesn’t take the pills her sister offered. She bathes daily, yet her body has a peculiar smell. Unpleasant. Sour. Her breath is sour too, and has a metallic taste as if she is pregnant. Despite this offensive odour, she can’t recall ever having been embraced so much, even at her parents’ funerals. She feels invaded, sore, bruised by this physical attention, but she senses a responsibility to accept all the wet kisses and tight squeezes. All the intimacy. She’s never been an especially polite person, or even an especially kind person, but now she can’t say please stop touching me. She shrinks further and further inside herself. She is the size of a dot. A hard, black dot. There’s not much room inside a hard black dot, which suits her fine.

  Yet there are interludes of silliness, of weird distractions. Such intensity is simply unsustainable. Once on the way to the post office, feeling so odd the town itself looks like a foreign city, she stops by a shoe shop window in the High Street. Stares, because there is the perfect pair of shoes – she’s been wishing someone would make a pair of shoes like this forever, and there they are. Red tartan patent leather, with three black suede buttons running down the side. Chunky, almost flat-soled, but flirty too. They are absolutely adorable, and she cannot stop herself entering
the shop to see if they have her size. They do and she buys them without looking at the price, then continues on her way to post letters ceasing Calum’s car insurance and his Run UK subscription. The whole shoe episode feels surreal, inappropriate, yet she cannot resist putting the new shoes on the minute she is home.

  One morning she notices light shining through a window. It slices through the air and falls on the chair Calum used to consider his. A great cold shaft of light. A visitation of light. It occurs to her she has never properly noticed light before. She sits, her shiny new tartan shoes on, and watches this light. Concentrates on it, as if it’s a compelling television programme. As if it’s personal and has something to say.

  Tears in a Cold Place

  The day cruelly decides to be summer, with diffused summer light. A confusing blue sky. A disturbingly pleasant crisp breeze, which also seems blue. Neal enters the church, takes one look at Alison and the whole place keels. He stares. Her eyes are still milky blue, with deep grey smudges under. Her hair has become blond and her face fake-tanned since he last noticed her, but she still has the same deep groove of worry between her eyebrows. He remembers her abundance of freckles, but can’t see them from this distance. Arms and back, especially. She is not beautiful or sexy or looking-good-for-her-age. He doesn’t know what she is, except she is herself in all her flawed glory, and no one else has ever made him feel exactly this way. And no, if you asked him, he would not have a word for this feeling. He might say it felt a little wheezy, though he is not asthmatic.

  Aside from his briefly manic expression, he looks like a billion other forty-three-year-old men – slightly paunchy, very slightly slope-shouldered, a wee bit crinkly about the eyes, a few white amongst the ginger hairs, and a receding hairline that reveals a rather tender-looking scalp. He looks conventional – nothing to say he’d once had a ponytail, worn a sheepskin coat, worn an earring. He’s marginally still in the handsome stage that finally arrived when he was twenty-six, but in a blurred temporary way. Handsomeness is on its way out, is saying goodbye to Neal.