by Louise Welsh
The ivy seemed in bad taste to Murray, a graveyard escape reaching out its tendrils to the living, who had only come to bid goodbye.
A few mourners had gathered a short distance from the front door, waiting on the next event. The dark suits, black ties and cupped cigarettes made the men look like members of a pale-faced Mafia family. The women’s mourning clothes were less assured, combinations of grey, navy and black, outfits pieced together with emphasis on colour rather than style, as if the occasion was unexpected and they had been forced to rifle their wardrobes for something suitable at the last moment, which Murray supposed they probably had.
The name Robb was on a little sign outside the chapel. He shouldered his rucksack, took a deep breath and climbed the entrance steps, feeling the waiting mourners’ disinterested eyes on his back.
Inside it was strangely bright after the grey of the cemetery. He slipped quietly into the back row, his trainers silent against the polished oak floor. The minister was reciting a prayer, but the two pints he had sunk with Wee Johnny seemed suddenly to be working on him and Murray couldn’t make out the words. He bowed his head, clasped his hands and focused on his interlocked fingers.
Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, look inside and there’s all the people.
No one else had come to see Bobby Robb off. Murray glanced down the chapel, past the empty regiment of seats, to where the coffin still waited. Bobby was inside it, his scar grinning on into death, his secrets destined to be consigned to the fire with him.
It was too warm and there was a bad taste in his mouth. Murray was almost sure he could feel the grit of burnt cinders beneath the savour of stale malts. He wondered if the crematorium powered their heating from the bodies. It would make good sense, though he guessed it was an ecological triumph they might not want to advertise. The minister’s words were familiar now.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow
of death,
I will fear no evil: for thou art with me;
Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Murray’s head began to nod. He dug his knuckles into his forehead and blinked his eyes open.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of
mine enemies;
Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
How much credence did he give to George Meikle’s theory? The bookfinder was sincere, but that didn’t make him right. His story was based on a bad feeling he’d had under the influence forty years ago and a few unsubstantiated rumours. Odds were Bobby Robb was just another waster who’d grown into a lonely old man. There were enough of those in the city.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the
days of my life:
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
The minister was asking him to rise now. Murray unclasped his hands as the organ croaked into a suitably sombre tune. Murray felt a weight of self-pity in his chest. Was this his ‘Ghost of Christmas yet to come’, a foretaste of his own funeral, the empty chairs and uninterested minister?
He stood up as the tasselled velvet curtain drew magically across the coffin, veiling it from view. A decision forced itself on him.
It was stupid to waste time on quarrels. He would phone Jack.
Down in the front row a short figure he hadn’t noticed also got to her feet. Murray slipped from his place and silently left the chapel as the boxed remains of Bobby Robb slid into the furnace.
The waiting mourners’ number had expanded while he’d been inside. Murray crossed the pathway and stood a little away from the main body of the group, distant enough not to be accused of gate-crashing, but close enough to be mistaken for one of their number.
He’d only caught a glimpse of the back of the woman’s head as she rose from her chair. If Bobby Robb was as bad as Meikle painted him, then odds were the lone mourner was some unfortunate soul Bobby had leeched onto, to look after him in his final years. But a scintilla of excitement had slid into his chest at the sight of her.
An elderly man in the waiting crowd gave Murray a quizzical look, as if trying to place him. Murray straightened his jacket, wishing he didn’t look so scruffily conspicuous, then pulled his phone from his pocket and put it to his ear, the ideal alibi.
He called Jack on speed dial, but a robotic female voice primly told him the number was unavailable and cut the call without giving him the opportunity to leave a message. The woman emerged from the chapel and limped painfully down the stairs, resting her weight on a walking stick. She was shorter than he’d imagined. He supposed her height, combined with the chapel’s high-backed chairs, had conspired to hide her from him. It certainly wasn’t the sobriety of her outfit.
Bobby Robb’s only mourner was dressed in a pale lilac trouser suit, with a pink scarf tied loosely at her neck. The colours should have clashed with her hair, but the ice-cream pallet cleverly set off its russet tones. It would only take a posy of flowers to make her look like a tastefully dressed, mature bride. Murray overheard an elderly female mourner whisper, in tones that seemed to hold an equal share of admiration and disapproval, ‘The merry widow.’
He would have been inclined to agree, were it not for her tilting gait and grim expression; the kind of look a mother might adopt as she determined to switch off a suffering child’s life-support.
Murray took his phone, lined it up as best he could without being obvious, and snapped a picture, hoping the result would fare better than his earlier attempts. His quarry laboured towards the car park, her right shoulder dipping a little with the strain of her limp. He followed her at a distance, hoping for another shot, wary of being spotted, but unsure why. After all, if his instinct about the mourner’s identity was right, this might be the perfect opportunity to present himself. He could invite her for coffee somewhere smart – high tea at the George Hotel – and explain his project in full.
The woman stopped, adjusted her scarf and then turned to look back at the chapel, as if searching the sky for evidence that the deed was done. Now was his chance. Murray stepped purposefully forward, his feet crunching on the gravel.
Green eyes flecked with amber flickered towards him. Murray meant to continue on, extend his hand and offer his condolences, but he stalled. The woman’s eyes glanced him up and down, then dismissed him. She turned, walked to a red Cherokee and got in, slamming the door.
Murray breathed out. He felt like a mouse that had frozen in the beam of a night owl’s reconnaissance flight, only to be inexplicably spared. He watched as the woman he was almost sure was Christie Graves drove down towards the gates of the crematorium and away.
Chapter Sixteen
SOMEWHERE ABOVE HIM Murray’s father was smiling as he told Jack all about his two wee boys. Murray quickly surveyed the Fruitmarket Gallery’s café and bookshop, and then asked a young attendant if Jack Watson was around.
‘Jack who?’
The boy was heroin-chic pale, dressed in shrink-tight black jeans and a too-big studded belt. He glanced Murray up and down, then looked away, as if he had seen enough.
‘Watson, he’s one of your exhibitors.’
The boy pulled a leaflet wearily from the plastic holder on the wall beside him and flicked it open.
‘Six o’clock.’
It had been a long day, punctuated by disappointment and cremation. Murray marshalled his patience.
‘What happens at six o’clock?’
All the weary weight of time was in the boy’s voice.
‘Jack Watson’s artist’s talk.’
Murray wondered if the date of the talk had been stored somewhere in his unconscious, the better part of him making moves towards reconciliation his sour consciousness couldn’t concede.
He glanced at his watch. There was an hour before Jack was due to speak. He wouldn’t stay to hear him talk about how their father’s illness had inspired his art – the very thought of it invoked a burr of impatience – but if he could catch him be
forehand perhaps they could grab a pint together and patch things up.
‘If you see him, will you tell him his brother’s here, please?’
The boy leaned against the wall, his eyes trained on something beyond Murray’s view.
‘Sure.’
He made the prospect sound as likely as world peace.
The same Manga cartoons he and Jack had made fun of the last time they’d met still dominated the first room of the ground-floor gallery. The colours were still bubblegum bright, the bug-eyed girl still surprised by the spotty dog’s attentions. But now their devastated backgrounds seemed to dominate the image. He felt a sudden kinship with the citizens of Nagasaki who had crawled from the matchstick remains of their homes to find their city gone. Did they wake believing themselves dead? And when they realised the truth, how many committed suicide and regained blessed oblivion?
He had been wrong to laugh. Murray wasn’t sure if the artist was suggesting the H-bomb had led to a coarsening of culture, or that cartoons and pornography were destructive forces on society, but he was sure they viewed the world as a lost cause.
‘A cesspool.’
The words came out in a whisper, but he glanced round guiltily as he made his way to Cressida Reeves’ exhibition space, relieved there had been no one there to overhear him.
Perhaps it was the dust of Seafield cemetery still clinging to his soles that made the dim-lit room seem like a tomb. Or maybe it was the hundreds of faces staring from the walls, like supplications for healing from a saint who needed to be reminded what the sufferer looked like before intervening.
Murray began at what he assumed was the beginning: a cluster of baby photographs, children with cleft palates smiling delightedly for the camera. Some had clearly been taken in hospital, clinical assessments prior to operations, he supposed. But most were the usual bare-bum-on-fluffy-rug style of baby portrait. The distorted grins shone cheerfully beneath bright, fun-filled eyes. Murray felt ashamed by his own quick stab of revulsion at the warped lips and wet gums.
The next grouping was composed of children’s birthday parties. There was no sign of the cleft palates now. Murray wondered if they were the same subjects post-surgery, but other visitors entered the gallery and he resisted the temptation to scrutinise the beaming faces too closely.
The sets of photos continued through children’s calendar days: the opening of Christmas presents, first day of school, teenage friends. The samples were becoming smaller, some of the faces beginning to repeat. Murray returned to the information board he’d snubbed on the way in.
Cressida Reeves’ work is concerned with anonymity, identity and rites of passage. In her installation, Now You See Me, commissioned by the Fruitmarket Gallery, Reeves begins by inserting a baby photograph of herself into an anonymous sample of one hundred children also born with a cleft palate or ‘hare lip’.
The condition is absent from succeeding groupings, reflecting the ease with which it is corrected. Each subsequent set relates a shared experience; birthday parties, Christmas mornings, first day at school, teenage discos, first love, college etc. Reeves includes increasing numbers of images of her friends and family in each set, until she is no longer an anonymous disfigured child surrounded by other equally anonymous infants, but an adult surrounded by people she has chosen to know.
He went back to the birthday photos, wondering if he could identify Cressida in amongst the excited children. The images were simple, snaps executed with no great skill, meaningless beyond their family group. But they might be amongst the first possessions people grabbed if their house were burning, the belongings they mourned most in a flood.
The sitting room wallpaper in his childhood home had been bold and brown, like the wallpaper on the photo he was looking at now. He remembered some of the toys the children were playing with too. A Christmas morning shot showed a little boy stripping the wrapping from a Transformer Jack had coveted. A toddler in kung-fu pyjamas posed military-style with a light sabre. Murray remembered him and Jack jumping around their shared bedroom, swinging the glowing, plastic sticks, battling for the right to be Han Solo. He would remind Jack of the light sabres later. And maybe sometime much later they would sort through some photos together. It was time.
Murray skipped the first days at school, and the school-uniformed shots that followed, and went directly to the teenage years. Now he could spot Cressida amongst the crowding faces. The ribbons coiled in her long hair, and the black fedora that topped the arrangement, declared her a fan of Boy George. That made her younger than Murray, but only by a few years.
He could see the tiny scar, faintly visible beneath the thick make-up. It had very likely tormented her through her teens, but it was already adding character to features that might otherwise have been too sweet for substance. How would it feel to kiss her there, on the slight pucker above her top lip? He walked swiftly to the college shots that comprised the next section, feeling ashamed of the sudden spark of desire that had transferred itself from grown-up Cressida to her teenage counterpart.
The art school crowd that she’d hung around with later looked edgier and more fashion-conscious than he supposed he and his university friends had, but Murray could still relate to the camaraderie in the images. He was searching for his brother’s face too now, and found him, beer bottle tilted to his mouth, hair gelled into a DA, the collar of his leather jacket turned up.
Murray smiled, recalling his father’s outrage when Jack had borrowed his car and driven it over the squeaky new leather jacket to scuff it up. It had looked good when he’d finished, though, a montage of monkeys, skulls and roses painted in red and black over the grazed surface.
They hadn’t seen much of each other in those days, each forging their own way, occasionally meeting back at their dad’s, going for a beer when their paths crossed, but no more than that. The closeness had returned later.
Jack appeared again, looking very young, in a group shot with others from his class. A youth with a green Mohican who Murray vaguely remembered stood on Jack’s right side, Cressida on his other, her arm around his waist, hugging him close. She too looked much younger, her hair back-combed into a massive halo, her black leggings tucked into Doc Marten boots in a style that had always reminded him of Max Wall. She’d looked better on the night of the opening, older but more sophisticated, assured.
He scanned the rest of the set, realising that though the fashions in the photographs might vary, these records of college experience were as similar to each other as the childhood parties had been; as if the beer-drinking, lamppost-climbing, face-pulling and kissing had also been organised with tradition in mind.
He checked his watch. Five-thirty. Maybe he should step out and see if Jack had arrived. Murray turned to go, but something snagged on the edge of his vision and he returned to the display. It would have been easy to miss, and yet he wondered how he could ever have overlooked it: a black and white photo-booth strip. The one-after-the-other shots managed to both capture and animate the moment when his brother and Cressida turned towards each other laughing, touched lips, tongues, and then broke away, still laughing.
He paused for a moment in the next room, letting his eyes rest on Nagasaki. He wondered if Lyn had seen the photos, remembered her strained look on the exhibition’s opening night, her curtness in the Burger King when he asked if she knew Cressida. Exploiting a memory that should have been kept private was exactly what he had accused Jack of doing. He wondered if his brother minded, and realised that he hoped he did.
Murray was almost in the street before he become conscious that the young gallery attendant had said something as he passed. He retraced his steps and the boy repeated it.
‘Your brother’s in the café.’
‘Cheers.’
His voice was harsh with ill-use and the strains of the day, but it seemed he’d unintentionally hit on the right note because the young man’s belligerence was replaced by solicitude.
‘I tried to tell Jack you were here,
but he and his girlfriend went past before I could catch them.’
Murray had an urge to enquire if his arse was superglued to the seat, but he ignored it and hurried through to the café, relieved to have the opportunity to see Lyn as well before Jack’s show got on the road.
The café was busy. Murray scanned the room, unable to spot Jack and Lyn amongst the closepacked tables. Then suddenly it was as if the photo-booth pictures had come to life.
Jack and Cressida were at a corner table by the window, kissing.
‘Jesus.’
Murray stepped forward unsure of what he was going to say.
There was nothing he could say.
A waitress approached, menu in hand, and he turned to leave, desperate to escape before they saw him. He felt his rucksack hit the counter, heard the waitress’s gasp and the echoing shatter of glass against concrete, loud as sudden gunshot. Water flashed across the floor as a massive arrangement of Stargazer lilies hit the deck.
Cressida and Jack broke their clinch, principals in a brilliantly choreographed move that had every head turning in perfect unison towards the smash. Murray saw his brother get to his feet, heard the hum of conversation build from the silent instant that had followed. He turned and walked from the building, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind him, like a pathway to disaster.
‘Murray, wait.’
His brother’s boots sounded loud on the pavement. Who the fuck wore segs in their shoes? It was another affectation, part of the all-surface-no-substance shit that defined Jack these days.
‘Wait.’
‘Get to fuck.’
Murray caught the curious stares of the schoolchildren waiting to enter the Edinburgh Dungeons. The bored-looking ghost at the door said, ‘Mind your language or it’s the bloody stocks for you.’ And the queue giggled beneath their teacher’s disapproving gaze.
Murray felt a hand on his shoulder and turned, his fists balled.