by Louise Welsh
Murray didn’t, but he forced a smile.
‘I take it that’s the outside lav.’
‘Got it in one. There’s a rain butt by the door that you can use for washing, and it’s okay for drinking if you boil first. Sheila says to come down to the house if you feel like a bath or a hot shower.’ He paused. ‘Are you sure you’re all right with this? I feel a bit guilty charging good money for something so basic.’
Murray wished the small man would go, but he knew that he needed to endure the rigmarole before he would be left in peace. He forced a smile onto his face.
‘Don’t worry, it’s ideal.’
‘Good.’ The crofter’s grin looked relieved. ‘I’m hoping the place is still watertight. I put the roof on myself before I moved the family in.’ He shone the beam of his torch up into the eaves. ‘I had a look this afternoon when I brought the camp bed down, there doesn’t seem to be any ingress of water.’ Pete clicked the torch off. ‘Time will tell.’ He reached into one of the boxes he’d brought and pulled out a half-bottle of Famous Grouse. ‘A dram to welcome you.’ He opened it and poured a little of the whisky onto the floor. ‘The old bloke that helped us move made me promise to always do this in a new house. The faeries like a drink too, apparently.’ Pete shook his head at his own foolishness. ‘It’s probably a joke he plays on all the English wankers.’ He took two glasses from the top of a box, poured a large measure into each and handed one to Murray. ‘Cheers.’
‘Good health.’
Murray thought his own toast sounded more like a curse. But Pete smiled and raised the glass to his lips.
‘So is your poet well-known in Scotland?’
‘No, he’s pretty obscure.’
‘This glen’s going to be proper cultured, what with you beavering away down here on your biography, and Mrs Graves up on the topside working on her novels.’
Before the blows the photographs had dealt, Murray might have quizzed Pete on the exact location of Christie’s cottage. Now he merely asked, ‘Do you see much of her?’
‘Not really, no. We phone to check on each other in the bad weather, and if the lines go down we drop round – you have to when you’re as remote as we are, and her mobility isn’t so good these days – but apart from that, we leave each other in peace.’
‘Have you read any of her books?’
‘Sheila’s the reader in our family. She used to be an English teacher before we settled here. She read the first one.’
‘Sacrifice?’
‘I think that was it.’ The crofter smiled apologetically.
‘It wasn’t a great hit, I’m afraid. Sheila usually likes books set on islands.’ He took another sip of his drink. ‘They remind her of here, I suppose, but she said this one was full of dead folk digging themselves from their graves.’
Murray felt a prickling on the back of his neck and resisted the urge to look towards the cottage’s small windows and the night beyond.
‘It’s about a group of hippies who move to the countryside and start dabbling in things they shouldn’t.’
‘Raising the dead?’
‘Amongst other things. It’s a bit silly.’
The wind had got up again. Somewhere a gate was banging, but the crofter didn’t seem to notice. He said, ‘Maybe I should give it a read.’
Pete met Murray’s eyes and his grin was wide enough for madness. Outside the banging became louder, then ceased. Murray wondered who or what had stopped it. He filled the silence with a question.
‘What did you do before you moved here?’
‘I taught too. Science. I decided to get out before I became the first teacher to do a Columbine and go on the rampage with a shotgun.’
The small man laughed. The lamplight caught the creases in his weathered face and twisted his smile into a grimace. Murray wondered if he had a gun up at the white cottage, and if he drank whisky there at night, alone in the middle of nowhere, with his wife and children asleep in the rooms above.
He rubbed his eyes and said, ‘Aye, I sometimes feel that about my students,’ though the thought had never occurred. ‘I still feel bad about almost bumping into Miss Graves’s car, even if she isn’t Booker Prize material. Maybe I should call round with a bunch of flowers or something.’
Pete shrugged.
‘You’ll meet her sooner or later.’ He closed one eye and held the half-bottle to his other, regarding the room through a golden whisky filter. ‘Mrs Graves is unpredictable. Some days she stops and chats, others it’s as if she doesn’t see you. Sheila says that a hundred years ago she would have been fuel for a bonfire.’ He laughed. ‘The way she says it, you’d think it wasn’t such a bad idea.’
‘Your wife doesn’t like her?’
‘She doesn’t like being snubbed. Me, I don’t care. After all, no one moves out here for the company. And it must be hard for Christie. She’s got MS. She had a bad episode a while back which more or less paralysed her. We thought that might be it, but she seems to have bounced back. Still, I’m not sure how much longer she’ll be able to be independent, let alone live in the back of beyond.’ Pete unscrewed the bottle’s cap and poured the remains into their glasses. ‘We may as well finish this, then I’ll leave you to get settled. I promised Sheila we wouldn’t go beyond the half-bottle. She doesn’t like me driving after I’ve had a couple, even when there’s only sheep to bump into.’
Murray nodded at the unmet Sheila’s wisdom, relieved he’d soon be rid of his new landlord. He thought of Alan Garrett and remembered Audrey saying that he wasn’t over the limit.
‘I heard there was a bad crash on the island a couple of years back.’
Pete’s expression grew serious.
‘Not long after we arrived. Sheila was really upset by it. Kept saying what if one of the kids had been walking by when it happened? What if he’d hit them instead of the tree? We’d met him too. Seemed like a nice guy, a family man. I heard he left a wife and kiddie.’
‘Was he under the influence?’
‘Apparently not.’ Pete gave him a half-suspicious look. ‘You didn’t know him, did you? I heard he was a university lecturer.’
‘No.’ Murray remembered the photograph of Alan Garrett that sat at his son’s bedside. ‘I heard about it, though. Bad news travels.’
‘That’s the truth.’ Pete clicked his torch on and off, pointing its beam at the edge of the room, as if the sudden shafts of light helped him think. ‘I shouldn’t do that, I’ll waste the battery.’ He set it back on the table and looked at Murray. ‘If I tell you something, will you promise it’ll go no further?’
‘Of course.’
The crofter looked Murray in the eye, as if assessing his sincerity. Either he decided to trust him, or the pull of what he wanted to say was strong enough to make Pete disregard any doubts, because he continued, ‘I never mentioned it to Sheila – she was upset enough as it was – but I’ve often wondered if he did it deliberately.’
Murray remembered the piles of journals devoted to suicides, the carefully logged statistics detailing artists’ age, gender, sexuality and the means they’d used to end their life. But the notion that Alan Garrett had committed suicide sat badly beside what he knew of his wife and child. He couldn’t imagine how the smiling man on the mountainside could have wanted to abandoned them.
‘Why?’
Pete shrugged his shoulders. There was something in the gesture that made Murray wonder if there had ever been a time when he’d contemplated smashing his tractor into a tree or convenient wall. He remembered the sickening feeling when his dad’s car had slewed towards Christie’s, the relief when he’d managed to bring it to a halt, and said, ‘I guess you’re sincere if you hit something as solid as that at full speed.’
‘That’s the thing.’ The small man’s voice was pensive.
‘You’ll have driven that road a few times yourself now. If you think on it, you’ll remember there’s not much along there that you could crash into that would have much of an impact. S
ure, there are plenty dykes, but they’re low. I’ve dwelt on it more than’s healthy. That tree was about the only thing guaranteed to do the job. If he didn’t mean it, it was very bad luck.’
‘Bad luck anyway.’
Pete nodded and tipped back the last of the whisky in his glass.
‘Not a very cheerful subject for your first night.’
‘No.’ Murray forced a smile. ‘So tell me about the sheep.’
The crofter grinned.
‘Why? Is there one you’ve got your eye on?’
They talked farming, then university and education, until the whisky was gone. Murray offered a dram from his own bottle. Pete hesitated, and then turned him down.
‘I’d best get back. That’s one thing about this life, early to bed, early to rise. It doesn’t make you wealthy and wise, but it sure as hell makes you want to avoid hangovers.’ He leant into one of the boxes and pulled out an unset mouse trap. ‘You’ll maybe need one of these. The little buggers like to come in out of the cold at this time of year. Can’t blame them, I suppose. I’ll lend you one of the cats for a few days if they become a problem.’
‘Cheers.’
He must have looked dismayed because Pete laughed.
‘Don’t worry, they’re tiny. Nothing like those big restaurant rats you get in Glasgow, just a bit cheeky. They don’t seem to realise we’re the superior species.’
He rose and pulled on his jacket. Jinx followed her master to the door, tail wagging. Murray got to his feet too.
Standing, the two men seemed to fill the room.
‘I almost forgot.’ Pete fished the tractor keys from his pocket. ‘When I collected your bags, Mrs Dunn said she’d like you to drop by tomorrow afternoon, if you can spare the time. You’ve not reneged on the rent, have you?’
‘No, you can trust me on that score. It might be about her bedroom carpet. I got mud on it.’
The crofter laughed.
‘The whole island’s mud, and worse. Landladies can’t afford to get upset about that kind of thing. Likely she wants to feed you up, doesn’t know about all these gourmet tins of sardines and baked beans you hunter-gathered at the shop this afternoon.’
‘Aye.’ Murray leant down and scratched Jinx between the ears. This time the dog tolerated him. He could feel the warmth of the gas heater still stored in her rough fur. ‘That’ll be it.’
Murray stood at the door staring into the cold night, long after the rumble of Pete’s tractor had faded. There must have been a host of clouds hidden behind the night’s blackness, because the world beyond his door was a trembling mass of dark.
‘Starless and bible black.’
He wondered if he would start talking to himself more, now that he was to be so much on his own; found himself envying Pete Jinx’s company. He and Jack had campaigned hard for a dog when they were boys, but their dad had been adamant in his refusal. Murray had secretly suspected they would have had their way if their mother had lived. When he was very young there had been a point where the desire for his mother and for a dog had seemed equally strong. The two impossible wishes had merged and he’d imagined her up in heaven, a remote and smiling Isis guarded by a noble canine companion, the lost dog they never had.
Murray closed the door, turned off the heater and took a last glass of malt to bed with him, then lay in the utter dark, unsure of whether the noises he could hear came from the next room or from beyond the cottage’s stone walls. Mice or the faerie folk tidying up in return for the dram Pete had gifted them. Either option seemed horrid. He pictured Bobby Robb’s bed, shipwrecked in Fergus Baine’s grubby tenement flat, and ringed by spells. He wondered if Archie had believed in the occult too – interested in the beyond – or if the intelligence which had helped him fashion poems from the rough stuff of words had saved him from that particular delusion.
Murray filled his mind with thoughts of Moontide, the perfect ordering of the poems which made the book not simply a collection, but a composition. He pushed away images of Rachel’s face, Rachel’s body, and started to recite the poems inside his head in the sequence Archie had arranged them.
He woke in the middle of the night from visions of a pink tangle of naked bodies, aware of his own irritating hardness, unable to remember whether his nightmare had been of a holocaust or an orgy. Murray lay muffled under the blankets, waiting for the dawn. He saw the first, grey light creep across the room and watched his breath cloud the cold air. He decided to get up and wash anyway, and then drifted back into a dark and dreamless sleep.
Chapter Twenty-Five
THE COTTAGE GREW too small for Murray at around eleven the next morning. He pushed aside the notes he couldn’t concentrate on and pulled on his rain jacket and woollen hat. It was pelting down outside, but he stepped from the cottage and set out with no thought of a destination.
It seemed that he had lived half his life in the rain. Murray pulled up his hood and kept walking, his face lowered against the wind, the raindrops beating a tattoo on his waterproof. Surely the showers should be softer, more refreshing, in the clear air of the countryside, but it seemed to him that this was the same harsh rain that fell on Glasgow. Without the shelter of tenements and pubs the city offered it was free to sweep across the island and seek him out.
Usually such egotism would have made him smile, but now he just kept his eyes down, concentrating on the grass one plod ahead, trying to put Rachel from his mind. It was impossible. She was in the sickness he felt low down in his stomach. He wondered how many more encounters she’d had with other men, wondered if Fergus knew.
Fergus.
For all of his suaveness and learning, he was a cuckold many times over. Murray tried to take satisfaction from the thought and failed. He didn’t give a fuck about Rachel’s husband. It was his own hurt that moved him.
He’d liked her poshness, liked her teases that he was her bit of rough; Murray, the dux of the school. Now he realised she’d considered him gauche, not sophisticated enough to be initiated into her games. She was right, of course. He would have been shocked – was shocked – at the idea of an orgy. His cleverness was of another brand.
It was the sense of specialness he mourned as much as Rachel herself, the belief that she had chosen him above others. His faith had been dented by her marriage to Fergus and her infidelity with Rab, sure. But he had nursed his trust, willing himself to forgive these faults in the knowledge that she had decided to make him her lover. Now he knew she gave her body the way another women might give you a smile, or a touch of her hand; something to be enjoyed, but no assurance of anything. She had made a fool of him.
Had the other men in the photographs treasured her the way he had or had they already known they were one of many? Murray picked up a stick and swiped it through the long grass edging the pathway, letting loose a spray of rainwater.
He wondered how he would ever face her again, and realised that he couldn’t. He would have to look for a new job, though he was working in the one place he had wanted to work since he was a boy. Everything was spoiled. The thought was childish in its intensity. There was nothing for him now, no lover, no family and no job. He would pack up and go home, except there was no home, only a carelessly furnished flat where he laid his head. The only home he had known had been handed back to the council when his father went into residential care. At the time he’d taken comfort in the thought that he and Jack were acting in accordance with their father’s principles, and some new family would be able to bring up their children in its shelter. Now he wanted nothing more than to turn the key he still had in the lock, climb the stairs to the room he’d shared with Jack and lie face-down on the bed.
Ahead of him was an abandoned cottage, a derelict shell of the same design as the bothy he was renting from Pete. This one was missing its roof and front door. Its windows, free of glass, stared. Who had lived there, alone in the middle of nowhere, and why they had gone? Murray shivered. His waterproof was holding up well, but his trousers were soaked through
and splashed with mud. It was stupid, letting himself get drenched like this, an invitation to a cold or worse, but he walked on, unsure of where he was going, seeing other derelict cottages and realising that the place hadn’t been the preserve of some lonely crofter or a hermit seeking solitude, but a village.
He looked through one of the vacant doors and saw the grass growing on the floor, the ivy clinging to the walls. How long would it be before the elements toppled these small structures as they had already toppled the broch and the castle? Would future archaeologists dig here, or had records grown so precise every aspect of the recent past would be charted and ready for those who wanted to know Maybe, soon enough, there would be no one left, no world to chronicle and argue over. All things must end, why not this too? The thought almost had the power to cheer him.
He was still close to the coast, but the track was veering inland now and the sea was out of sight. Murray noticed clumps of plump, dark green shoots in the grass around him. He guessed the ground was boggy and resolved to stick to the path. The sheep who had dotted his route till now were absent here. No birds sang and the sound of the sea, which had beaten a soft accompaniment to the wind when he was on the cliffside, was silenced. He must have descended into the shelter of some glen without noticing, because the gusts of air that had blasted the rest of his walk were gone. All he could hear was the rain drumming against his cagoule and the vegetation around him.
Murray looked at this watch. It was only lunchtime, at least four hours before the dark would come in, but already he thought he could sense the descent of the day. He had a sudden urge to turn back but pressed on, as a not-quitesober man in a bar might press on into drunkenness.