It’s dark by the time they stop, though only five o’clock. A candle snuffed without ceremony. They end up in a hotel bar, and then a hotel bedroom where Neal takes off his clothes because if he doesn’t, Alison will tear them. Nothing about this day astounds him more than her appetite for his body. She has never so much as kissed him on the mouth before. This is sex, solid wet sex with no bits of tenderness attached to it, and he’s never had it without bits on. It’s hot, it hurts, it feels sad, lonely, heady, feverish, and it thoroughly dismantles his twenty-year-old crush. And what rushes in to replace it? Love, it seems. His heart is scalded with love, and alarmed at the work it now has to do. The business of love, after all, is a serious one and Neal is a serious individual. He frowns. His new protectiveness dilates his pupils as he thinks about all he must do now. Love is already making him pay closer attention.
Alison, on the other hand, is swooning gratefully in a temporary faint – the business of sex, at times like these, being obliteration. Besides, she has no heart for love. To keep breathing is her main challenge, and one that she meets only half-heartedly. They lie silent a while, stunned for different reasons. Then, as if to hasten the end of breathing, she says, ‘I’m going to start smoking again.’
‘Aye?’
‘Have you got any smokes?’
‘No. Sorry.’
‘Starting in the morning, then. Mind all those times in the cottage?’
Into Neal’s mind comes the first glimpse he had of Alison. He’s not thought of this in a long time, but up it pops, pristine and poignant. She’d answered the door, Calum clinging to her leg, glared at Neal a second, stood back and shouted for her father. ‘Da! It’s the Glasgie mannie come to look at the cottage! Da!’
She’d worn faded bell-bottoms and a white short-sleeved peasant blouse with a red rose embroidered between her robust breasts. Her breasts turned out to be the friendliest part of her. Like downy gorgeous pillows, they were. (Still are, actually, he notices now. Very white, on the tide line where the fake tan ends.) But the way she’d studied him, unimpressed. He’d been smitten by her because it seemed so very unlikely she was asking for smitten-ness.
‘Aye. I mind the crowd of boys waiting to snog you.’
‘Ach, there were never that many.’
‘There was a queue of at least six at any given time. Fergus? Johnny? Burt? Not to mention all the Ians.’
‘Six. Well, right enough, six maybe. But that’s never a crowd. And they weren’t in love with me, I can tell you that.’
‘They were all in love with you.’
‘Never. Not one of them ever said it, any road. None of them ever acted it either. Free love. Ha! Those were the days of free feels, not love.’
‘Shush. Lots were in love with you.’
‘Well I think you’re just saying that, you’re feeling sorry for me.’
‘Of course I’m sorry for you,’ he whispers.
‘Are you? I can’t feel anything.’ Even to herself, her voice doesn’t sound like her own. Too high-pitched, quick, tight.
‘No?’ He wraps his arms around her again, trying to absorb this pain lying in wait. This is some of the work his love must do. Alison accepts the embrace, but looks away. Face hard.
‘I had a crush on you, Ali,’ he mumbles.
‘No way. You never said anything.’
‘I did.’
‘When?’
‘That time, mind that time? In the hall, Guy Fawkes Night.’ He’s only just now remembering it, himself. Oh! Desperately humiliating moment, mercifully buried under the dross of years. She’d laughed. Laughed! And in a particularly cold way.
‘Oh aye, that time.’
Is there a shadow of a smirk on her face even now? No, that’s only the way gravity is pulling down the fold of one cheek to the pillow.
‘But you never meant it, Neal. Surely. It was just something to say. And then you went all posh. Married and moved to Strathpeffer.’
Neal says nothing. Posh, in her mouth, is a swear word. Should he apologise for marrying and living in a nice house? In fact, his love has humbled him to the extent he almost does apologise, but then she says, ‘I saw him. Twice. First in hospital, then in the mortuary. I wasn’t going to the second time, but then I did.’
‘Did you?’
‘You know, Calum always thought of you as his dad.’
‘But … why?’
‘I don’t know. I never contradicted him.’
Neal wants to ask who the father really was. That old question. Takes a quick gulp of air, holds it, lets it go. He looks at the ceiling, at the pink lightshade, which looks grey. He’s lying on his back while she curls on her side, facing away from him.
She’s mentally reviewing the possible fathers of Calum. It had been a busy, blurry, party month, full of handsome Nigg workers buying her screwdrivers and rolling her joints. What a year to be sixteen and finally growing proper breasts! It’s an old habit, this reviewing, and is over within seconds, with the usual no-conclusion drawn.
Alison and Neal are both naked and covered to their chests with a heavy duvet. It smells unpleasantly floral. Sweetness over something less sweet. The only light is from the bathroom. The room is small, full of oddly assorted furniture, including a huge wardrobe from the fifties. Like a spare room minutes from being a storage room. They haven’t noticed any of this. Each, separately, notices the ugliness now and minds. It seems an unnecessary extra blow.
‘I let him think you were his dad because I wished you were,’ she whispers hoarsely. ‘You were the nicest man I knew.’
‘Oh god! Wow. Thanks. Thank you.’ Suddenly he remembers Calum at age … nine? Scabby knees and a Cookie Monster t-shirt, asking would he come play footie with him. It was drizzling outside, he remembers that. And Alison was sitting at the kitchen table smoking, drinking coffee, laughing at the fact he never used the last drops of milk in the pint. Always threw it down the sink. Did he play footie that time? Did he brave the drizzle, sacrifice time with Alison, go outside with Calum?
‘I’m going to sleep. I’m going to sleep, and when I get up I’m buying a pack of cigarettes.’
‘Okay, goodnight, I’m going to sleep too.’ Then after a minute, he adds, ‘You were a good mum, Alison.’
She says nothing, which is what he feels he deserves for such a glib statement. He kisses her in a brotherly way, lust a distant memory, but he does not sleep. He lays there and in his over-wrought state, suffers a moment of lucidity. A sudden sickening sense of wasted time. As if he is one hundred years old and his own mortality is just sinking in. It seems quite clear. All the important events of his life happened by age twenty-six, then he’d gone into a high-speed forgettable loop till being deposited, on this bed with Alison snoring beside him. He blames every unpleasantness of his past on the absence of Alison. Right now, he can hardly recall his wife’s face. Who was she anyway, and why did he marry her? Was it simply because she’d asked him, and getting girls to just sleep with him had been so excruciatingly confusing? Were his life’s major choices as random as that? If only he and Alison had done this all those years ago.
He creeps out of bed to phone his wife from the pay phone in the hall. He tells her a lie. When he returns, he spoons into Alison’s back. Close but gently, to not wake her. He is only slightly taller, curls easily around her. And he thinks, in his quirky way, about gloves, because he imagines that no glove in the entire history of glove-making has ever fitted so perfectly as their two bodies. And after a minute, their chests rise and fall in unison. But Neal is not asleep, and neither is Alison. Words, softened, half dreaming, ‘You’re beautiful.’ To the back of her neck.
‘Stop. I know what I am. I am not beautiful,’ she says.
He stops himself agreeing. The words travelling from his brain to his tongue are going just slow enough to do a brake skid. Finally, she falls asleep, and he does too, around dawn. His last thought is that his life has finally begun. They will always be together now, and he has been waiting tw
enty years for this.
An hour later, Alison is riding south in the back seat of a taxi, with sticky thighs and something quite jagged stuck in her chest. Another instrument, more like a serrated paring knife, has gone to work on her abdomen. Her insides are slowly tearing. And her eyelids are swelling, her tear ducts are hot, her throat is closing up. It’s hard to breathe, to swallow, to see, to hear. Good, she thinks. I’ve heard something like this is supposed to happen. Let it begin.
‘Look at that sun,’ says the driver. ‘Going to be a cracking day.’
‘Aye,’ she says, sucking the word back in through her teeth like an old woman.
Meanwhile the pallbearers have all fallen asleep, except William and Finn. They sit bleary-eyed and still drunk in a room littered with beer tins and ashtrays, as well as the snoring bodies of their friends. No one wanted to go home last night, so here they all are.
William and Finn stopped talking a while ago. Finn turns the lamps off and opens the curtains. They both flinch. Not another sunny day! It’s too cruel. Where is the rain when you need it? As if complying, the room dims and hail suddenly pelts the windows like pebbles.
They catch each other’s eyes, glance away, then back. Up till yesterday, they’d hardly seen each other since school. Right this minute, the world has shrunk to this room and each other. The hail turns to rain, and they turn to look out the window, standing at opposite sides of the small room. Finn with a yawn and a stretch, William with a tired half-smile, head tilted. Smoke curling from the cigarette in his mouth. They glance at each other again.
‘Another thing,’ William’s croaky voice says into the silence as his eyes slide away back to the window. ‘He never returned my Green Day tape.’
‘Bastard,’ slurs Finn.
‘Still. By fuck, I’d buy him a pint right now.’
‘Two pints.’
‘Hey, are you okay?’
‘Fuck off,’ says Finn.
‘Hey, hey. Nothing wrong with crying. I was only asking, like.’
Finn can’t speak for a minute. His eyes are streaming, his mouth clamped shut angrily. Then he says:
‘It’s sad, man. I mean, it just fucking is.’
William crosses the room, stepping over bodies, and it seems he is about to hug Finn, to comfort him, but then they start play-punching each other. First the shoulders and jaws, and they even giggle a little because they are so tired and this is so bad. To be playing like this, when Calum is dead. Then without warning, William delivers a sharp punch to Finn’s stomach. He doubles over, moaning.
‘Sorry, Finn. Got carried away, like. You okay?’ He whispers, because the other friends are still asleep.
‘What’d you do that for?’ Also whispering.
‘Don’t know.’
‘Fuck. You’re off your head.’
‘I said I’m sorry.’
Finn stands up suddenly, swings for William’s face. Not easy. William is about six inches taller. Lands one hard on his nose, which instantly spouts blood.
‘Screw you to hell,’ says William nasally, holding his nose.
Finn looks at the blood, makes a strange sound. A girlish wail, followed immediately by a short uncontrolled roar. If helplessness had to just be a noise, this would be it. The friends have roused now, and Finn rushes out of the house. Walks down the dawn road in the pouring rain, fast, breathing hard. Needing to pee, needing to vomit, needing to … oh he doesn’t know all the things he needs to do. He is exploding with them.
William follows with deliberate strides. Catches up with him, holding a tea towel to his nose. And without saying a word, they enter Finn’s empty house together. After a minute, Finn draws the curtains and bolts the door. Moves with jerky motions, pulls off his wet clothes. Everything but his underpants. Face like a five-year-old, energised by his own tantrum. William just watches him, like he’d watch a slug without its shell. Some compassion, but also cold curiosity. And then he stops thinking altogether, both of them do. Desire, dark and heated and heedless, is curling into the room like smoke.
The old minister is drinking tea in bed. He doesn’t normally drink tea in bed, but he couldn’t sleep last night, and his wife is slightly alarmed by his pale exhaustion. But he’s alright.
‘I’m alright, you know,’ he tells her in his tired, kind voice. ‘People die.’
‘But a young person, Henry. Calum was so young.’
‘Sometimes young people.’
Then she passes him a hankie, but she doesn’t tell him not to cry. He’s told her often enough: People should cry. People need to cry.
In the Golspie hotel, Neal finally wakes up. She’s left no message, no souvenir, not even a sock, a tissue. She is gone and he is glad and drives home as quickly as possible. As if his house is in great danger, on fire, or about to crumble in some unpredicted landslide.
A9
If the A9 was a person, it would be named Morag and be about sixty-two. A modest, well-maintained, post-menopausal woman, with occasional flashes of real beauty. Wholesome, trustworthy. A road to be proud to call your own. She snakes over the Kessock Bridge from Inverness, winding over the Black Isle, shrinking into two lanes at Tore; over the Cromarty Firth causeway, scooting by Evanton, Alness, Invergordon, Barbaraville, Saltburn, Tain and further. Up the east coast she goes, past oil rigs, up and down long braes, in and out of wind-warped woods, past fairy tale castles and sandy beaches with singing seals. Sensible, graceful, calm Morag, all the way to Scrabster, that scoured-out place at the very top. Though in certain places, like the ten-mile straight stretch leading to the Nigg turn-off, the A9 is more like a maddening seventeen-year-old called Josh, daring you to open it up; overtake that Volvo estate, that combine harvester, that rental car driven by elderly Japanese. Go on, shift down and floor it!
Most people here use the A9 every day. And like most daily routines, like getting dressed and brushing teeth, like breathing, A9 journeys are rarely recorded in people’s memories. They don’t notice the way it can gleam, shush, murk, slide, light up, depending on that day’s mood. If they are lucky, they will live an entire life without a single clear memory of it.
The place on the A9 where Calum crashed his car has not reverted to innocence yet. There are still tyre marks in the mud, deep grooves where his wheels spun, and in the long grass there are various items which flew from his car when the windscreen disappeared. An Oasis cassette case, a Golden Virginia tin lid, some Jelly Babies, half-melted now. There are also some tribute bouquets, a half dozen, mostly wrapped in Tesco plastic, and weighed down with stones. Roses, daisies, hyacinths, some daffodil buds which will never bud now. Rain-smeared messages: Keep on running, Cal. Miss ya, pal. Luv u 4eva.
There are some roadworks planned about half a mile north, and a Highland Council truck pulls onto the verge not far from where Calum crashed. Two men in yellow jackets hop out and debate whether they should place the plastic cones here or further down the road. Then they spot the tribute flowers.
‘Must be where that boy went off the road, few weeks back. Mind?’
‘Oh aye. Mable’s brother-in-law knows the auntie. Chrissie somebody. Alness.’
‘Terrible shame, that.’
‘Oh aye, a terrible waste.’
Then a short silence, because small talk now seems almost rude, but there’s not a lot else to say about a dead boy they never met. They sit in their cab, and to cheer themselves they have an early tea break. Open flasks and eat ham sandwiches and Mr Kipling cakes. Listen to the football scores on the radio. Fart and burp pleasurably. No hurry, is there?
A young woman with blond hair, wrapped up in a warm red coat, walks towards them on the verge. She’s carrying a bouquet of roses in a cellophane wrapper. Pedestrians are rare on the A9, and the men stare at her a minute. Zara avoids their eyes and, head down, walks quicker.
‘Must be one of them. One of them flower-leavers.’
‘Aye. Looks frozen, poor lass, so she does.’
Five minutes later, they decide to set
out the cones up the road, away from the flowers. Seems only right. They toss their crusts out the window and pull out on the road again. Less than a minute later, some crows discover the crusts, and squawk the good news to their friends.
Part Two
20th January to 23rd January 1996
Post-Coital Life with the Wife
Neal married Sally only three months after losing his virginity. To Sally, though he never told her that. And here he is: after seventeen years of fidelity, he’s lost a kind of virginity all over again, and it’s every bit as upsetting as the first time. As if he’s been in a car crash too. He wanders slowly through his house with a vacant look, is distracted, stunned. Horny. His thoughts are slow and his body is slow too. The hours seem too long somehow, the days interminable, and his body has a too-clear memory of hers.
He thinks about Calum now and then, and feels uneasy, deficient in some essential way because he feels numb. What is wrong with him? What could be more straightforward than grief for a young person’s death? But Neal feels like an amateur, emotionally. He knows the loss is terrible, but since his tears in the church, the actual feeling of sadness has faded. Besides, Calum’s absence makes no difference to his day to day life, so is easy to forget.
Instead, he thinks about Alison. When he thinks about her, he feels a curious hollow pulling down, and there is a darkness, a heaviness about this desire he’s never felt for his wife. He wonders a dozen times if he should’ve worn a condom. He might have grave cause to regret it one day, but looking back, he can’t remember a moment when he might have brought the subject up. Besides, he didn’t have any condoms, and probably would’ve made a cock-up of using one if he had because he’s never worn one.
If I Touched the Earth Page 3