XIII
I didn’t run on a Sunday. There are many things I’ve felt I had to apologise for on God’s behalf, but Sunday as a day of rest isn’t one of them. I wouldn’t wish on anyone the Sundays of my childhood, and I have no objection to ferries or newspapers or play-park swings or television on the Sabbath, but I understand where the impulse to ban such things comes from. Sundays for too many people have become noisy, unrestful days. I like quiet Sundays, Sundays of thought and reflection, churchgoing, family lunches for those who have families, long walks, long naps in front of old movies on the box; Sundays without supermarkets and traffic, loud neighbours and trouble in the streets. Sundays without sirens. Even the wicked have to rest, in spite of the proverb, and if they do it gives everybody else a break too.
The Session would certainly have objected to my running on the Sabbath, but I too felt that somehow it wasn’t acceptable, whereas walking was. So I couldn’t go running in Keldo Woods, and the thought of the Stone up there lay on my mind like a dead weight. I tried to shrug it off but couldn’t. Eventually I got in the car and drove down the coast road, parked where the forestry track comes out, and set off for a walk.
It was nearly four o’clock, the light was failing, and there was nobody else around. I found the woods different at walking pace: the paths seemed less well defined, less like passageways fashioned from the bend and surge of my running. Also, when I ran through the woods I usually came in the other direction, from the high road, and now I had to pause occasionally to check I was going the right way. Apart from the odd flaff of bird wings in the branches, everything was still and silent. The gloom crept in about me. I thought of all those ancient stories that had their dark souls located in woods, stories not just from Scotland but from across northern Europe. Once upon a time people had lived in settlements that were little more than clearings in the vast expanse of forest: now it was the forests that existed only in patches – scattered remnants of what they had been – and the old stories had declined too. But there in Keldo Woods on that January afternoon I could feel them stirring, shuffling over twigs and frosty leaves, whispering at me from the shadows.
I came to a fork, swithered for a moment, took the path to the right. After fifty yards it petered out. I retraced my steps, set off along the other path. It went down a slope quite steeply, and I remembered running up it coming the other way. I strode on. The trees thinned out. This was the clearing where I had seen the Stone. It would be over to the left, set back. I peered into the space and made out a dim shape rising from the ground. I moved towards it.
It was very real. I leaned against it, feeling its ponderous stability. The surface was dry and cold. I thought, there’s been some kind of repeated error of omission, somehow all the historians and archaeologists have missed this. I thought of my friend Catherine Craigie, the font of all information about Monimaskit’s past. She’d written a book about the standing stones of the district and I was pretty sure she didn’t mention this one. I had the book in my study, I’d check later. But I knew I didn’t need to check. I’d run on this path for years, and there was no stone beside it.
‘What are you doing here?’ I heard myself ask. ‘Somebody put you here. What is it you want?’
I reached my arms around, hugging it, as if that would prompt an answer. I was embarrassed by my own behaviour, but fortunately there was nobody else to see me. An artist had recently arrived in town, an Englishman called William Winnyford, who had a commission from the local council to devise ‘an audio-visual experience based on the area’s natural and social heritage’ and run it in the museum as an exhibition, to mark the 600th anniversary of the town’s royal burgh status. I’d met him just once, thought him a young, earnest, pleasant idiot with absolutely no sense of his own idiocy. Stone-hugging was the kind of thing I imagined he did for a living. I stepped back, admonishing myself for my foolishness.
The daylight had all but gone. Stars were coming out, and I was getting very cold. I retreated to the path and hurried back to the car.
The Moffats’ house was only half a mile back along the road. Their gate was open so I swung in and parked by the back door. Light filled the steamed-up kitchen window. I knocked at the door.
I had known John and Elsie for more than a quarter of a century. They looked after me with a kindness that I didn’t deserve, dropping in at the manse every few days – separately now, since their lives revolved around young children. John tended to catch me in on his way home, after staying late at the school to get paperwork done. We’d sit and chat over a beer before he went down the road. Elsie visited less often, because of the children, but before she’d had Katie she’d come by on her way to or from the library where she worked. I would sometimes go to theirs for a meal. We’d share a couple of bottles of wine and watch a video. Occasionally I ended up staying the night.
Five years before – nearly six now – when it seemed that they wouldn’t have children, Elsie had fallen pregnant. After Katie was born, they’d asked me to be her godfather. It wasn’t that they thought she needed God on her side: they wanted me to be part of the family. Baptism wasn’t mentioned. This suited me fine. With the Moffats, I wanted to be myself, not the minister.
As I stood stamping my feet at the door, I thought of Katie, four and a half and bright as the stars overhead. Now, there was someone I could tell about the Stone! She’d enjoy it, a kind of fairy tale, but then again it would be like telling my mother, not much use to me.
The door opened. ‘Gideon,’ Elsie said. ‘Happy New Year.’
She kissed me on both cheeks, her skin brushing me twice as her mouth retreated. I stored up the sensation.
‘Happy New Year,’ I said back. I hadn’t seen them since I’d come for a meal on Boxing Day.
‘Come in quick, it’s freezing. John, it’s Gideon!’ she called, as I followed her through the back lobby into the kitchen.
That she could be so easy at my unexpected appearance was Elsie through and through. There was history between us, and it gnawed at me like a dog, but Elsie continued to be as she’d always been – affectionate, caring, relaxed. No one was ever so giving as Elsie: she gave herself unstintingly to her children, so that her good humour and kindness rubbed off on their own still-forming personalities; to John, who I thought didn’t appreciate her as he should; to the snail-slow pensioners and lonely borrowers of romance and crime whom she served in the library; she never seemed to tire of giving. Even as I shrugged off my coat, she was putting the kettle on to boil and asking me if I’d stay to eat. Something that smelt good was simmering away in a pan.
‘No, no,’ I said, ‘I’ll not stay long. I was walking in the woods and thought I’d stop by. How’s everybody?’
‘Ask them yourself,’ Elsie said, as the door from the hallway opened and John, carrying two-year-old Claire, came into the room. They were followed by Katie, wearing a purple cloak and waving a wand. ‘That’s the video over,’ John said. ‘Hello, Gideon. The Lion King,’ he explained. ‘Third time we’ve watched it since Christmas. Can’t say we’re not getting our money’s worth.’
We shook hands and exchanged good wishes, and I kissed Claire on the forehead and went down in a crouch to give Katie a hug. ‘Happy New Year, sweetheart. How are you doing?’
‘I’m fine. I’m going to turn you into a frog,’ Katie said. She muttered an incantation and I bounced around on my hunkers croaking until she turned me back into a minister. ‘That’s a good spell,’ I said. ‘Where did you learn that?’
‘Friend taught me it,’ Katie said. She trailed the wand across the back of a chair and looked slyly at me.
‘Oh, is Friend a magician then?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Could he make me disappear entirely?’
‘No!’ She frowned at me, giving a passable impression of a frog herself. ‘Don’t be silly!’
Elsie poured mugs of tea and set a plate loaded with sliced Christmas cake on the table, and told me to sit down. John put Clair
e on the floor, where she and her sister began to play together, and fetched some glasses and a bottle of Grouse. ‘Want one?’ he asked Elsie. ‘Aye, all right, just a wee one,’ she said, ‘seeing as it’s Gideon.’ John joined me at the table.
‘Tell Gideon what Friend did yesterday,’ John said as he poured out the drams.
Katie glanced up at her father. ‘I don’t remember,’ she said.
‘Aye you do,’ John said. ‘What did Friend do to Bear?’
Katie looked into the distance and shook her head. ‘Don’t know.’
‘Don’t be mean,’ Elsie said to John, but she was laughing.
‘What did Friend do?’ I asked Katie. ‘I’d really like to know. You can whisper it if you want.’
She came over and craned towards my ear. ‘He gave him a haircut,’ she said.
‘Really?’ I said, adopting a low, conspiratorial voice, but the others could hear too. ‘Was it a good haircut?’
‘Quite good,’ Katie said, forgetting to whisper.
‘Not very,’ John said. ‘Bear’s gone into hiding till it grows in again.’
‘He looks like a prize-fighter,’ Elsie said, sitting down. Katie went back to her sister on the floor, and they began taking turns at covering one another up with the purple cloak. ‘It’s a nightmare, this Friend business,’ Elsie went on. ‘It’s like having another child in the house, but you can’t speak to it. Him. I needed to give him a piece of my mind about the haircut, but I had to relay it through Katie. She absolutely insists it was Friend, not her.’
‘She’ll have taken the message on board too, though,’ I said. ‘It won’t happen again. Will it?’
‘No chance,’ Elsie said. ‘You’d have to take clippers to Bear to get his hair any shorter, at least on one side. I’ll need to try and even him up at some point. Well, slainte. Here’s to a good year.’
The three of us raised our glasses. ‘Slainte,’ John and I responded, and we all drank. Elsie put a hand over my hand. ‘All right?’ For a moment it was as if she and I were alone in the room.
‘I’m fine,’ I said. She still thought it hurt me: this time of year, the absence of Jenny. Well, it did and it didn’t. Sometimes I was amazed at how little it hurt. I looked at her hand on mine. She smiled, but it was a smile of kindness, nothing more. She took her hand away.
‘So what else is new?’ I asked. When she smiled it was sexy without her meaning it to be. If she had deliberately smiled sexily I’d have felt as gauche and hopeless and tongue-tied as a fourteen-year-old. I hated the way other men watched her in the street or at dinner parties, I hated the way John didn’t watch her – as if he’d become bored, blind to her beauty. The way her hair lay in rings against her neck and clustered behind her ear thrilled me. I could have studied the jut of her collarbone under her cable-knit jumper for hours. But when we touched, only I was sick with desire. She cuddled and kissed me, as if trying to make up for Jenny after all that time, but that was all she was doing, making up for Jenny. She was a friend and my best friend’s wife, and I was the minister, and these things made her unattainable.
‘Not a lot,’ John said. ‘We had Elsie’s mum here at New Year. Apart from that we’ve just been lazing about, entertaining the masses.’ He nodded at the girls. ‘And I’ve been doing a bit of work in between.’
‘Not school work?’
‘God, no. Writing.’
John wrote stories. He got them published too, in wee magazines and even in the odd anthology. He was trying to write a novel. It had been going on for years. I’d read the stories – they were competent, if a bit dull – but I’d never been invited to read any of the novel. He was pretty phlegmatic about how long it was taking, which made me think it might not be very good. If it was good, would he not feel more urgency to get it published? ‘Ach, well,’ John would say. ‘It’ll make someone rich when I’m dead.’
‘The novel or a new story?’ I asked.
‘Novel,’ John said.
‘Are you making progress?’
‘A bit.’
‘I don’t suppose you ever get to see this opus, do you?’ I asked Elsie.
‘What, me? No way. Not till it’s finished, anyway. I will, one day,’ she added, quickly, as if to banish the idea that it never would be.
‘I know you authors don’t like talking about work in progress,’ I said, ‘but can you not even tell us what it’s about?’
He shook his head. ‘Wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘In one sentence.’
He smiled. ‘I can’t.’
Elsie made a gesture of hopelessness with her hands. ‘You see?’ she said.
‘How about you?’ John asked. ‘What have you been up to?’
‘Oh, the usual,’ I said. ‘You know they used to call these holidays the Daft Days, but I think that was a reference to drink and debauchery, not running around daft. I don’t have time for debauchery – too much social work to do. But I appreciate the drink,’ I said, raising my glass again.
The holidays were a busy time for me. There was the watchnight service on Christmas Eve, then the morning service on Christmas Day itself. After that I always went to the care home and had a drink with the staff and dinner with the residents. Then there were visits to the elderly and poorer kirk members, the organisation of deliveries of extra food and presents to parishioners in need, and various other pastoral duties. Monimaskit is a douce, prosperous-looking place on the surface, but it contains a surprising number of people trying to cope with financial or personal disaster. And then, it being winter, there were usually deaths between Christmas and New Year. I had two funerals to conduct the following Tuesday.
‘I always thought it was pretty damned inconsiderate, Jesus being born in the middle of the holidays,’ John said. ‘Just when a man like you should be putting your feet up.’
‘Aye, well,’ I said. He always liked to mock my trade. He considered it his duty as an atheist to challenge the absurdity of what I represented.
‘Still,’ I said, ‘I did manage to get a run in on New Year’s Day. And again yesterday.’
‘Oh? Are you training for another marathon?’
‘No, no more marathons. Just keeping the engine ticking over. I was running in the woods. I saw something very odd yesterday.’
‘How do you mean, odd?’ Elsie said.
‘Well, what do you know about the standing stones around here? I mean, where they’re located and so on.’
‘I know there’s twelve of them,’ John said, ‘but I couldn’t tell you exactly where they all are. Miss Craigie’s the expert on that kind of thing.’
‘Aye, I know. But, for instance, do you know if there’s one in the woods up there?’
John shrugged. ‘Don’t think so, but I could be wrong.’
‘We’ve got her book somewhere, haven’t we?’ Elsie said. ‘That would tell us.’
‘I’ve a copy in the manse,’ I said. ‘I’m going to check it later. But I know for a fact there isn’t one. A stone in Keldo Woods, I mean. But now there is.’
‘Now there is what?’ John said.
‘A standing stone. It wasn’t there on the first, but yesterday it was. I saw it when I was running. I’ve just been back to double-check. It’s definitely there.’
‘What, where it wasn’t before?’ Elsie said.
‘Exactly.’
John shrugged again. ‘How could it be?’ he said. ‘You must have made a mistake. It must have been there all along.’
‘That’s what I told myself,’ I said. ‘But it wasn’t.’
‘It must have been. You just never spotted it before.’
‘That’s the obvious solution, I know. And I admit I don’t run that particular route all that often, but I’m absolutely positive about this stone. It looks like it’s been there for ever, but it hasn’t.’
John lifted the whisky bottle, tipped it significantly. ‘A wee bit too much of this lately?’ he asked with a grin.
‘I’m not kidding you,’
I said.
‘Okay,’ John said. ‘So how did it get there? Somebody must have put it there.’
‘Not possible. It’s eight feet tall. There must be several more feet of it in the ground. It’s stuck solid, and it must weigh at least a ton. You’d need a tractor or a forklift truck or something. There’d be tracks everywhere.’
‘What’s it like?’ Elsie asked.
‘He just told you,’ John said. He made a little gesture of impatience with one hand. ‘It’s a standing stone.’
‘No, I mean, what’s it like?’ Elsie repeated, and I felt a rush of gratitude towards her. She was trying to picture it. ‘It must be, well, weird.’
‘It is weird. It’s spooky, actually. It was just standing there in this clearing in the mist and it felt like it was giving off some kind of power.’
‘Bloody hell,’ John said. ‘You’re not going all Lord of the Rings on us, are you?’
‘No, I’m not,’ I said. ‘It was more like that big monolith thing at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey. If Neolithic apes had come out of the trees and started leaping about in a frenzy it wouldn’t have altogether surprised me.’
‘Hobbits more like,’ John said.
‘Bugger off,’ I said.
‘Language,’ Elsie warned, indicating the girls giggling on the floor.
‘Well,’ said John, ‘if nobody put it there, and it hasn’t always been there, then the only possible explanation lies somewhere else.’
‘Where?’ Elsie asked.
‘With him – Gideon.’
‘In his head, you mean?’
‘Aye. Clearly he’s delusional.’
‘But he says he’s not, that it’s real.’
‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he, if he’s deluded.’
‘Do you feel deluded, Gideon?’
‘Nice of you to ask,’ I said. ‘Actually, I feel great. There’s nothing wrong with me.’
‘They always say that,’ John said, shaking his head sadly. ‘The job has finally got to you, Gideon.’
The Testament of Gideon Mack Page 11