by Wilson, Mark
Chapter 2
Jock
I’d been in the city for half a day, mostly complaining about the cold wind. You know what an Edinburgh winter is like, Joseph, so bitterly cutting your bones take six months to defrost, just in time for another season to pass and the cold to return.
I’d grown up in a little town in Lanarkshire named Bellshill. It had been a mining town and a steelworkers’ town amongst a heavy industry district at one time. Families prospered. The people hard, but genuinely warm and, good God, so funny.
Now, the town, its thriving people, main street, businesses and families were gone or struggling, but slowly emerging from decades-long recession, caused by the brutal devastation of the area’s industry at the hands of a seemingly sadistic prime minister named Thatcher.
I hadn’t lived in Lanarkshire for years by 2015 when the plague broke out onto Edinburgh’s streets, but my body, long-acclimatised to the marginally warmer west of Scotland, still struggled with that east coast Edinburgh chill funnelled along the narrow cobbled streets and wide thoroughfares of the tourist districts. I loved Edinburgh. It is… was a beautiful city, but my trip was purely business. I’d been asked by the Ministry of Defence to represent Her Majesty’s Royal Marines’ Pastoral Division at a ceremony for the reopening of Mary King’s Close, which had been closed for centuries.
My family had come on the trip. A last minute decision. Things had been… tense between my wife, Isabelle, and I for maybe a year, maybe more. The kids were pissed at us, but not half as pissed as we were with each other. The life I lived – travelling, re-homing the family, months abroad on tour in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria – it takes a toll on a marriage, Joseph. Sometimes the lifestyle takes a toll on the whole family.
We married young, Isabelle and I. She had fallen pregnant with our daughter Patricia when we were both sixteen years old. I joined the Marines three months before she was due. With the lack of opportunities in Lanarkshire and our age, lack of education or work skills, the services seemed a smart move. Our families were furious, then devastated and then very supportive when we told them that Isabelle was expecting
My dad, Paddy, was a minister in a small church in Uddingston and didn’t speak to me for a week. Finally he came to me, face twitching with barely contained anger and a smidgeon of contempt, and asked me what I planned to do about the poor girl. I tried really hard not to laugh at him in his patronising judgement of us. I didn’t do a good job. As soon as the smile formed on my lips, he struck me with a heavy back-handed clout. I was simply stunned. My father had never hit me before; he’d never even threatened to. He was a warm, tactile man with his children.
I held my cheek and watched his face drop. As it registered what he’d done, tears filled his red-rimmed eyes. We stared at each other for a long moment then rushed towards the other for a tight embrace full of apologies, salty tears and promises. I told him of my plans to enter Marine training in the pastoral division, to marry Isabelle and work my arse off providing for the new family. His eyes filled again and he told me he should have known better. He knew that his son was a good young man and had been more worried about his flock’s reaction than how I was coping with the situation.
Dad was a godsend. So was my mum. In the months of basic training, the deployments that followed and the unexpected but eventually welcome news that they’d be grandparents, my parents filed their hearts and days with love for my new wife and child. In the years that followed, they lived for Patricia – wee Paddy, my dad called her – for Isabelle and for little Martin, who came along two years later. Everything I missed, they were present for. My kids wore the mark of their grandparents’ love all over them. It was a good thing, considering how poor a father I proved to be.
So we found ourselves in Edinburgh on Hogmanay, attending a series of boring lunches and speeches given by representatives of the Scottish Government and Edinburgh Council leaders. Lots of apologies, lots of commitments to atone for what had taken place in the city centuries before. A lot of faux-guilt and champagne and political posturing took place with the contrition for victimising the poor of seventeenth-century Edinburgh the excuse for parties and political alliances. Mary King’s Close would be reopened that night, at the stroke of midnight, three hundred and seventy years after men, women and children had been sealed underground to spare a city from the Black Death. It was a sad story, the history of Mary King’s Close.
In 1645 the bubonic plague, or Black Death as it was known, raged through the populace. Millions had died worldwide and the city’s residents were beginning to feel the effects of the disease. In a barbarically desperate attempt to isolate the infected and to save the remaining residents, the council leaders forced the sick and dying into the underground streets of Mary King’s Close and sealed them in. Beneath the cobbles of old Edinburgh the infected suffered and were ignored. Eventually forgotten, they were abandoned and left roaming the underground streets of the crypts below.
Above, on the surface, the children danced on Edinburgh’s cobbles, joyful that the plague had been contained. According to legend they sang,
Ring-a-ring-a-roses,
A pocket full of posies;
Atishoo! Atishoo!
We all fall down.
A rosy rash, they alleged, was a symptom of the plague, and posies of herbs were carried as protection and to ward off the smell of the disease. Sneezing or coughing was a final fatal symptom and all fall down was exactly what happened. The people of Mary King’s Close were abandoned mercilessly.
At midnight, New Year’s Day 2015, the city leaders reopened The Close with the intention of erecting a memorial to the ancient plague victims and using the newly-opened Close for tourism. Instead, its residents poured out from their tomb and spread a new plague through the city. One that killed and hijacked what remained of its host and was characterised by the rash – that and the fact that the host was dead but somehow walking around with a hunger for human flesh.
As all bacteria do, the plague bacteria evolved and the disease mutated.
Underground for hundreds of years, some survivors had had children. They’d become something other than human: undead, shuffling through the dark crypts racked by a four-hundred-year hunger, a ring-a-roses rash emblazoned on their left cheeks marking them as infected.
The kids, Isabelle and I were in the assembled crowd, shivering in front of the heavy wooden doors to the crypts below. The outer barricades had been removed earlier in the day, giving the assembled dignitaries a purely ceremonial task of removing the final security bars and locks. In hindsight, the arrogance of those assembled was atrocious. Hundreds of the poor and sick had been forced into the dungeons below and all that represented to these people was a photo opportunity and access to a tourist attraction.
The former First Minister of Scotland gave a short speech, checking his watch as he mouthed half-hearted prayers for the souls abandoned. I pulled the kids in close, one in each arm, and sighed in acknowledgment of how much they’d both grown and how resentful they were of their father’s embrace.
As the politicians had their moment, my mind drifted to a time when Isabelle and I truly believed that could make it work. That we knew something our parents and teachers didn’t reckon on: love.
We had loved each other, no doubt, but the hardship and monotony and emotional rollercoaster of being a new parent had taken its toll on her. I was never there, she had to do everything alone. The late-night feeds, the school runs, the trips to hospital and fevers of childhood illnesses and the tears.
I thought that working hard, providing for them, was enough. I was a fool. The kids resented me as an infrequent interloper in their daily routine during my visits. Isabelle didn’t care anymore where I was. She’d found a new love in alcohol. Each one of them blamed me for the gaps in our lives and the pain the kids felt at carrying their mother upstairs, slurring and crying of how lonely she was. The blame was fairly and firmly placed on me.
So I stood shivering with the rest o
f those deemed necessary to the event, nodding at apologies and platitudes for the ancient dead that no-one gathered cared for, with a drunken wife, an eighteen-year-old firecracker of a daughter who detested me and a sixteen-year-old son, permanently angry, who thought that I was the reason for everything that caused him and his mother pain.
The doors eventually creaked open and the world ended for us that night. Not straight away, but it was over, bar for the passing of the web-thin tendril of love that held us together as a family. For a while, at least.
Chapter 3
Tricia
“How’s Uni going, sweetheart? I’ve no idea how you fathom all that computer programming stuff.”
Tricia Stevenson wore a padded parka, hood pulled up over head, red hair straying from beneath refusing to be restrained. She tore a lump from her over-sized burger that she didn’t really feel like eating, chewing on an insult as much as the meat. She swallowed the food and the spiteful remark.
“Fine,” she said flatly.
Her father cricked his neck to the side a fraction, his discomfort provoking her.
“Fancy taking a walk along The Royal Mile,” he asked.
Glaring across the table at her dad, Tricia thought fuck it and forced acidic contempt into her tone.
“Sounds great, Dad. How about we get mum a Zimmer-frame, some extra-strong coffee and a can of Monster? Then we’ll be set.”
Marty, face down looking at his iPad, snorted in derision and appreciation of his sister’s put-down to their father.
Tricia watched her dad’s face flush for a second, enjoying his reaction. She raised her eyebrows, daring him to chide her. Jock closed his eyes firmly and took a moment to compose himself. Tricia enjoyed his discomfort and took a long pull on her double vodka, trying not to wince at the ethanol burn. An infrequent drinker, she’d only ordered it to piss him off.
Her dad opened his eyes, once again calm. He looked over at her mother, Isabelle. Forehead on her forearm, she’d been drinking, more or less, since they’d arrived in the city by train that morning. Tricia and her brother were used to negotiating and guiding their mother when she was inebriated, which was often. Jock… Dad, on the other hand, had little experience or patience with Isabelle, or with his children for that matter.
Jock looked back to her, a pleading look in his eyes. It was pathetic. He was supposed to be the parent.
“Look, Tricia, I need her sober and able to at least stand without falling over for this ceremony tonight,” he said.
Marty laughed again. Tricia held her stare, drilling her eyes into Jock’s.
“Aye, good for you, Jock,” she said, enjoying him trying to conceal his annoyance at her use of his given name. “How about I make a wee tabasco cocktail? You get a funnel and a length of tube and we’ll get in about her. She’ll be on her feet in two minutes.”
To his credit, Jock held his military composure though his right eye twitched a fraction, showing his stress.
He leaned in closer across the table and said quietly, “Let’s just get her up to our room in the hotel. She can sleep off the drink for the next few hours. Get her cleaned up and presentable by ten o’clock.”
Tricia shoved the glass of vodka across the table. It reached the table’s edge and disappeared over. Jock’s arm shot out. He caught the glass and slammed it hard onto the table top.
“You almost spilled your drink… love.”
Tricia clocked the look on her brother’s face, surprise and grudging admiration at the old man’s reflexes. Guessing that her own face wore the same expression, she forced a sneer.
“Nice catch, Jocky,” she laughed. “Aye, don’t you worry yourself. We’ll get her home and we’ll all be scrubbed up looking our best for your big ceremony. Okay?”
Her father stood. “Good,” he said. He left without another word.
Marty shifted his backside along the red leather bench of the booth they sat in.
“You gonnae eat that burger, Trish?” he asked.
Tricia watched her father leave. He didn’t look back once. How does a man get to thirty-four years of age and be such a blind arsehole? she thought.
“Na. Help yourself, blondie,” she said.
“Nice one, doll,” he grinned, scooping up the three-quarters of the burger she’d left uneaten. Stuffing her fries and onion rings inside the bun, Marty took a dino-sized bite and spat through a mouthful of food, “He’s a dick at times, eh?” He nodded at the door. “The old man.”
Tricia nodded, glancing over at their mum who hadn’t budged for an hour. “Aye. He is. C’mon, let’s see to her.”
The entire day had been ridiculous in its purpose and in its reality. Tricia, cloaked in her parka, held herself close, arms wrapped around her own midsection against the cutting wind slicing along The Royal Mile.
She sighed heavily, blowing a cloud of condensed breath out into the night. She looked to Marty, caught his eye and nodded over at their mother who stood at Jock’s side, as was her duty, and trying not to sway. She didn’t look like she felt the cold at all. A marvellous insulator, a half bottle of Smirnoff. Her father, seemingly oblivious to all but the need to at least appear unified and engaged, had placed an arm around Isabelle, who roughly shrugged it from her shoulders.
As a politician droned on about the importance of the night’s events, Tricia rolled her eyes, wondering how the hypocrites gathered had managed to marry their own political aspirations to the altruistic endeavour they’d attached their ambitions to. What had been done to the people of Mary King’s Close so many years ago had been the cruellest of abandonments. That these career politicians stood at this place delivering insincere apologies and regrets brought home to Tricia how different her father and she were, that he could be a part of it.
As the politician did his ceremonial opening, Tricia felt her father pull her close to his side. Marty suffered similar attention under Jock’s other arm. Stiffly, she accepted his embrace, listening to him whisper about new beginnings. Marty formed an open fist and made a rude gesture that made her laugh. Jock mistook it for acceptance of the moment.
Despite the years of neglect, her mother’s retreat and the general sense of abandonment and detachment the family felt because of and towards Jock, Tricia found herself melting into her father’s embrace. His strong arms, just for the moment, made the anger ebb. Just for the moment, she accepted her father’s love and fused herself to his side, guilelessly. She felt like a child again. She felt safe again… and loved… and wanted. Just for the moment.
And then the doors opened.
Chapter 4
Jenny
“Fiona, we’ve been over this. Nobody knows that we’re in Edinburgh. Even if they did, nobody cares.” Jenny lifted her bottle of Corona to her lips and pulled on a mouthful, watching her sister’s reaction over the end of the glass bottle.
“But what we did, Jenny–”
“Fuck what we did,” Jenny yelled, a little louder than she’d intended. A few older men in the World’s End bar looked around, but generally her voice had been lost amongst the din of the Hogmanay crowd. Jenny leaned in closer to her younger sister, speaking more quietly this time.
“Fuck him. You know what he tried to do. Never again, we agreed on that… after Dad.” Jenny shifted her eyes away from her sister’s at the mention of their father.
Fiona sagged a little in her seat. “Aye,” she said. “I know, Jenny. It’s just that I don’t want you to get into any trouble.”
Jennifer wafted a back-handed swipe at the air between them.
“Och, balls to that. It was just a broken nose, he’ll live.”
“So why come here?” Fiona asked, raising an eyebrow.
Jenny smiled sardonically. “He’ll be pissed. Best to give Bellshill a miss for a few days, at least until our Peter comes back from the rigs. That bastard McConnachie won’t come near either of us with Peter at home.”
Fiona laughed, despite her caginess. “I don’t think McConnachie will come ne
ar you or me again anyway, sis.”
Jenny smiled bitterly.
“Aye, well. Best to let things settle for a bit. Never again… remember that, Fiona.”
Fiona’s eyes misted as memories of their abuse at their father’s hands stabbed at her. They’d escaped his house and his desires when they were in their early teens and had vowed to never be powerless again.
Jenny watched her sister fight back the demons of their childhood and take a long drink from her Jack Daniels. Placing the glass onto the table in front of them, Fiona cocked her head to the side. “Aye, but all McConnachie did was grab my arse cheek.”
Jenny’s face became stoic. “Aye, well, it was the wrong arse to be grabbing.”
They clinked glasses.
“Fair enough, love,” Fiona said. “Let’s make this our last. I’m tired.”
Jenny’s face screwed up. “We’re two minutes from the bells, love. You’ll manage.”
Fiona glanced at her watch. “Christ, is it that time already? Might as well see the course. Want another?” she asked, nodding at the dregs in Jenny’s bottle.
A brief nod.
Jenny watched her sister approach the bar, which was three-deep with punters trying to get a drink in to toast the New Year. By the time Fiona reached the oak bar, the bells were ringing and people had begun kissing and shaking hands. An old man with a rank-smelling whisky in his hand planted a forty-proof kiss on Jenny’s cheek as she mouthed to her sister, “Happy new year, darlin’.”
Fiona stuck her tongue out and mimed a vigorous snogging action, laughing at her sister’s new admirer.
Jenny shook her head then kissed the man warmly on the cheek, avoiding his pursed, hopeful lips. Wishing him a happy new year, she guided him to a group of ladies his own age at the piano.