by Louise Welsh
There were some kind of man-made caves up ahead, small triangular openings in a wall of mortared stone set tight into a high ridge. They looked dark and deep and somehow inviting. Perhaps he could crawl into one of them and die. Murray wondered about braving the boggy ground, but a couple of steps from the path his right boot sunk calfdeep into wetness and sludge, and it took more effort than he would have expected to prise himself free.
‘Fuck.’
He was breathing hard. It would be a horrible way to go, sucked into the mud, a living corpse in a soft, enveloping grave. Stupid to die like that, when there were pills and rope, razors and gin-soaked baths for the taking.
Murray stamped his boot, trying to shake some of the mud from him, though he was already wet through. Christ, at this rate he would die of trench foot.
Maybe he should turn around. He had promised to visit Mrs Dunn that afternoon and if he was going to cancel in good time he would have to get back to elevated ground and find a phone signal. He noticed an unpainted wooden fence up ahead, cordoning off a small square of ground. He would walk to that first, though he couldn’t think what would need protecting out here, where even the sheep didn’t venture.
It appeared to be a depression in the earth, half grown-over with grass. Murray tested the ground beyond the path with his feet. This time it felt firm enough, and he ventured tentatively forth to get a closer look.
‘I’d stand back from that, if I were you.’ The voice was female, high and cultured. It came from the ridge above him. He looked up and saw a figure dressed in a waterproof of the same dark olive-green as the one he was wearing. She too had drawn her hood up against the weather. What little light there was was behind her, her face lost in the shadows. ‘It’s a sinkhole. No one knows how deep it is.’
Murray imagined himself aging as he fell through the fathomless depths, his flesh rotting away, his skeleton still dropping, scream descending.
‘Shouldn’t it be better marked?’
The person on the ridge may have shrugged, but it was hard to tell through the mist of drizzle and the bulk of rainwear. ‘Everyone knows it’s there.’ It seemed futile to point out that he hadn’t.
‘Well, thanks for warning me.’
The figure nodded and turned away. Murray saw the stick, the awkward plunge of the shoulders as it limped from view, and realised that he’d been talking with Christie.
He shrugged his own shoulders. It was all pointless. He had been stupid to think he could write a biography of a man who had died thirty years ago, leaving one slim volume and not much else. The conversation with the Geordie’s landlord had been typical of his researches. Tantalising and half-remembered, a dramatic postscript to a drink-addled man careless of his own sanity. It added nothing to Murray’s understanding of Lunan. The long, lonely walk had decided him. He would go back to the city, write a tract that stuck entirely to an analysis of Lunan’s poetry, and try to think of what to do next.
Fergus had been right. The poetry was the thing, the life an unfortunate distraction from the art. They should delete authors’ names from all books and let the works stand or fall on their own merit. Fuck the egotistical, drunken shaggers who by some quirk of the genes were able to forge the stuff he used to think revealed the world to him. As far as he was concerned, they could sharpen their pencils and stick them up their own arseholes.
If Fergus knew about Rachel’s ‘hobby’, then he was a saint. Murray remembered meeting the couple in the department corridor the day he returned to collect the books he needed. Fergus’s hand gently touching his wife’s arm. In the professor’s place, he would have been tempted to tumble her down the stairs.
It occurred to Murray that his affair with Rachel had coloured his attitude towards the professor. Fergus was gruff and opinionated, there was no denying that, but his actions were consistently on the side of right. He had been outspoken in his opinion that Murray confine his study to Lunan’s poetry, going further than he needed in an attempt to stop him wasting his time. And whatever Bobby Robb’s faults, it reflected well on the professor that he’d provided an old friend with a home.
It didn’t matter any more. Soon they would cease to be colleagues, just as he had ceased to have any relationship with Rachel at all.
There was a shout from the ridge behind him. Murray turned and looked up at the small figure standing precariously at its edge. Christie lifted her hand and waved, though she must have known he had heard her.
‘Yes?’ Murray walked back to where he could hear her more clearly.
‘Can you help me? I seem to have managed to get my car stuck.’
The ridge was too high and slippy to climb. He followed Christie’s shouted directions and took the long way round to where the precipice descended, and then walked along the ascent until he found the track and the red 4x4 slumped half-on, half-off the shingled road, one wheel deep in the mud. The walk had taken him thirty minutes and he was sweating beneath his waterproof by the time he got there, despite the chill rain which had blown in his face since he left the shelter of the valley.
Christie must have been keeping watch for him, because she got out of the car as he approached and stood silently waiting as he walked the last few yards.
‘I tried putting some cardboard down for purchase, but I just seem to be digging myself in further.’
He might have been a paid mechanic summoned to give roadside assistance, rather than a stranger who had walked a mile or so in a deluge to help her.
Murray squatted down and looked at the back wheel. He could see where it had churned the soft mud. Christie was right; she’d been ploughing deeper into the earth. He got to his feet. It was windier up here, the wetness blowing in all directions. The rain could almost be classed as playful, if it wasn’t so fucking unpleasant, the persistence of it. The way it managed to slide beneath his outer layers and onto his flesh.
‘I’ll try pushing. If you bring the clutch up very slowly, we might be able to get it out. If not, I guess I’ll walk back and find someone to give you a tow.’
Christie nodded. She got back into the driver’s seat, leaving the car door open. Murray positioned himself behind the Cherokee, waited until she had started the engine and then pushed with what remained of his strength. The 4x4 was huge. He felt his hands slip down its wet surface and knew that it wasn’t going to budge. He smelt the petrol fumes and realised what he was doing was dangerous. He might slither beneath the broad wheels and be maimed or even killed. Murray felt a sharp stab of anger at Christie for calling him up here when he should have gone for help in the first place. But he went on forcing himself hard against the tank’s boot, walking on the spot as his feet lost their grip and started to slide in the mud, just as he feared they would. He shouted, ‘Pull the clutch up gently!’ and resolved that when she stalled, he would go for help. But then he felt a small threat of movement, his hands slid again and he pressed them hard against the boot instinctively, knowing that if he let up the game would be over, the vehicle stuck tight. Then it bucked and pulled up onto the track with an audible slurp. Churned mud sprayed the air, a depressed Jackson Pollock abstract splashing his whole length. Murray staggered and would have fallen had he not managed to put a hand out and steady himself against the car’s boot, even as it moved onto the shingled pathway.
For a moment he thought she was going to go off without a word. But then Christie stopped the car and leaned out.
‘Thanks.’
‘No bother.’
He searched his pocket for a hanky, failed to find one and rubbed his glasses against his jeans.
‘Where are you headed?’
‘Pete Preston’s bothy.’
‘Jump in and I’ll take you to the crossroads, it’s only a short way across the field from there.’
Murray looked down at his mudspattered self.
Christie’s voice was impatient. ‘Don’t worry. This car’s seen worse. Besides, I seem to have miscalculated today. I might get stuck again.’
The landscape looked different from the vehicle’s high front seat. Now that he could lift his head and regard it without being battered by the elements, he could see that they were on a wind-blasted moor. The treeless expanse gave a long view of the depthless heavens. Murray felt like it might rain for ever.
‘Are you part of the dig?’
He had expected their drive to be conducted in silence, and her question surprised him.
‘No, just walking.’
Christie nodded, as if it was perfectly normal to tramp out to this abandoned portion of the island in a storm. She said, ‘I don’t usually meet anyone out here.’ It was unclear whether she was explaining her question or the reason why she’d chosen the lonely spot.
Christie leaned forward and wiped at the condensation misting the windscreen. She’d turned up the hot air and the car felt stifling after the damp chill of outside. Murray had drawn back his hood when he got in; now he unzipped his jacket, pulled his woolly hat from his head and mopped his wet, mud-spotted face with it. He rubbed a hand through his hair. He hadn’t had it cut since the summer break and it felt almost long enough to tie back in a ponytail. Perhaps this was how it started. The slow slide, until you became one of those blokes you used to marvel at, marking the time between giros by beating a track between the bookie’s and the pub.
He straightened his spine.
‘I walked through an abandoned village I don’t remember seeing on the map.’
‘It used to house the limeworkers.’
For a mad moment he thought of lime trees and imagined an orchard of them tended by cottagers who collected their fruit. Maybe his bewilderment showed because Christie continued, ‘You were by the limekilns when I saw you. They employed about fifty men at one time, back in the eighteenth century. It was the extraction of lime that caused the sinkholes. You have to watch out for them, they’re unpredictable and not all of them have been mapped.’
A stanza from The Ballad of Reading Gaol came into his head.
And all the while the burning lime
Eats flesh and bone away,
It eats the brittle bone by night,
And the soft flesh by day
He wiped a hand over his face, feeling the roughness of his bristles and said, ‘Lime’s what they used to use to dispose of dead bodies, wasn’t it?’
Her laugh was like a sudden bark.
‘You’ve a morbid turn of mind. It was an essential element in building-mortar. A lot of those fine townhouses and tenements in Edinburgh and Glasgow wouldn’t be standing if it weren’t for lime made on this little island.
What are you doing here?’
The question was abrupt and commanding.
Murray looked at her.
‘I came to see you.’
Christie Graves smiled, and for the first time he caught a glimpse of the beauty she’d been.
‘You sent me a letter, didn’t you?’
He nodded. None of it mattered any more, but he asked, ‘How did you know it was me?’
‘It didn’t really take a master detective. I looked you up when you first sent your request – your photograph’s on the university website. I thought you were familiar when I saw you in the shop yesterday, but I couldn’t place you. The beard makes quite a difference. But in any case, I would have realised when you said that you’d come here to see me. I’m not exactly inundated with visitors.’
She stopped the car and kept the engine running. Murray started to undo his seatbelt, but she said, ‘We’re not there yet, I just wanted to show you where I live.’
The heart of Christie’s house was a two-roomed cottage of the style Murray now knew was typical of the old island, but it had been extended to form a long bungalow with a picture window at its western end, where it would be pleasant to sit with a drink in your hand, on clear evenings, and watch the sun set. The road away from the cottage was still composed of rough stone, but it was wider and more even than the track they had just travelled, and the sleek black Saab parked outside Christie’s fenced garden would have had little trouble driving down it.
‘Very nice.’
‘Are you afraid of the dark?’
It was sudden and unexpected, like all of Christie’s questions so far, and it set off a strange remembrance in Murray. He used to have a recurring dream, of waking to see his mother standing at the door to his and Jack’s bedroom, her silhouette shadowy and indistinct, but recognisably her. It was always marvellous at first, this vision of her and the waves of love that wrapped him warm beneath the blankets, but then gradually he would begin to feel her steady jealousy, because he and Jack were alive and cosy in their beds while she lay cold and dead in her grave. The conviction that she had come to take them with her would sweep over him. Sometimes when he woke the bed was wet. For years he had slept with the bedside light on. Jack hadn’t seemed to mind. Perhaps he had his own nightmares.
‘No, I don’t mind the dark.’
‘I’ll be home tonight. Why don’t you walk over after dinner and you can tell me what it’s all about?’
Murray felt like the marrow had been sucked from his bones.
‘It was about Archie Lunan.’
‘I know.’
It was what he had come for, but too late.
‘I’ve reassessed my project. It’ll focus on Archie’s work rather than his life.’
They had reached the crossroads now. Christie stopped the car and pulled the handbrake on, but kept the engine running. The wipers continued to sweep the rain from the windscreen. She turned awkwardly towards Murray. Now he could see that some of the lines on her face were from pain, and the tiredness it had brought, but her voice belied any suffering. It was mild and unsurprised, the kind of tone he used when trying to guide a slow student into realising an obvious point.
‘Why do you men always give in so easily?’ Christie switched off the engine. The wipers stalled mid-swipe and the rain began to melt into sheets, warping the view of grey sky and green scrub. ‘You went to the trouble of contacting me and then came over here to hunt me down, even though I said I wouldn’t speak to you. Now that I’m willing, you’ve changed your mind. What happened?’
Murray shrugged.
‘I decided it was pointless.’
Christie snorted.
‘Everything is, but we have to find some way of passing the time.’ She sighed. ‘How much do you know about MS?’
He had been ready to open the door and leave. But now that Christie had mentioned her illness, he couldn’t muster the strength to be callous.
‘It’s a slow wasting disease that works on the nerves.’
‘That’s pretty much it. Except that it works on the sheaths that protect the nerves, and it’s not always so slow. If you’re lucky, you can get away with years of remission where nothing much happens. If you’re not, you can find yourself deteriorating rapidly to the point where you need a wheelchair. Or worse.’
Murray didn’t want to know what worse consisted of.
He gripped the door handle and said, ‘I’m very sorry to hear that. I hope yours stays in remission.’
‘It isn’t in remission.’ Murray looked at Christie and she gave a small nod. ‘So if you decide you don’t want to talk to me, make sure you’re certain. I don’t have time to grant second chances.’
He opened the car door and got out.
‘Thanks for the lift.’
‘I’ll leave a light on. Tonight or not at all.’
Murray shut the door. He pulled his hood up and began the walk down towards the bothy. Halfway along the road he looked back, making sure Christie had managed to turn the car without getting bogged down in the mud again. She was gone. All that remained was the rain, beating down on the crossroads.
Chapter Twenty-Six
MURRAY PUSHED OPEN the door to the bothy. The last leg of his journey had worn him out, and hi
s teeth had begun to chatter in a way he’d thought only happened in cartoons. He peeled his jacket from him, registering that something was wrong.
The Calor gas heater glowed warmly from the centre of the room, though he had been careful to turn it off before he left. Murray picked up the heavy torch Pete had gifted him and tiptoed towards the cottage’s second room just as the door started to creak open.
The intruder took a quick step backwards into the shadows. He raised his left hand to protect his face and his right came forward, knocking the torch away. It tumbled from Murray’s grip and skidded across the floor.
‘Good God, Murray.’ Professor Fergus Baine looked like he had dressed for his very first country house shoot. His Barbour jacket gleamed newly and his tweed cap was set at a rakish angle. He dusted some invisible spot from his lapel, staring at Murray as if unsure of what he was seeing. ‘Are you okay?’
Murray pulled a chair out from the table and sat down. He was too tired to do anything except rest his elbows on the table and set his head in his hands.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I was in the neighbourhood and thought I’d drop by.’
‘There isn’t a neighbourhood.’
Murray started to laugh, but the chill had him in its grip now. A shiver that could have doubled as a spasm clutched at him and the laugh turned to a cough. Murray pulled off his hat, dragged his jumper over his head and started to rub his chest dry with his T-shirt. University of North Alabama. God, that had been a while ago, back when everything seemed possible.
‘So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war, there never was a knight like the young Lochinvar.’ Fergus’s voice was slick with sarcasm. He lifted the kettle from the Primus stove, felt the weight of water in it and lit the gas. ‘You need to wash yourself in warm water.’ He went through to the bedroom and returned with a blanket. ‘Here, wrap yourself in this while we wait for it to boil.’