by Unknown
‘Do you want a lift up the road?’
‘Me and Amy are getting the train after she finishes school. She’s still at the age where the train is exciting, although she won’t admit that any more, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘When are you heading up?’
‘Hadn’t really thought about it yet.’
‘Well, I’ll give you a phone at this B&B, say, early evening? We can meet up and go out for a proper drink this time, what with me having a houseful of babysitters. Get ourselves in the mood for the big do on Saturday. Fancy it?’
‘Sure. I’ll speak to you then.’
And that was it, done and dusted. He was going to Arbroath for a school reunion after fifteen years away, and he was doing it to be with her.
It was the kind of beautiful, clear summer evening that hardly ever happens in Scotland, but when it does it reminds you why you bother to hang around. A fat, orange sun cast long shadows down the Firth of Forth as David crossed the bridge, thankful to be out of the throb of Edinburgh traffic and heading into open spaces. He kept his window down after paying the toll, enjoying the sea breeze in his face. Radio One played their latest inane drivel but he didn’t mind, enjoying the numbness of not having to think while he listened.
The road through Fife was pleasantly monotonous. Rolling crop fields were interspersed with small bursts of trees, and occasionally a tractor or harvester could be spotted kicking up dust in the distance. When he hit Dundee, he took the riverside route, preferring to keep the Tay at his side. The tide was out and sandbanks glistened in the slanting sunlight.
After Dundee, David didn’t recognize the road at all. Diggers, trucks and all sorts of roadworks vehicles scuttled back and forth amid a maze of traffic cones. One large sign declared that they were converting the road to Arbroath into a dual carriageway, scheduled completion date 2007. They had been talking about that since he was a boy, and it looked like they were finally getting around to it. The going was slow and dusty as he sat behind a lorry kicking up dry dirt everywhere.
The trance of driving left his mind free to wander, and he started to think about Colin. He was a natural sportsman – one of those irritating kids who was good at every sport they tried. He probably could’ve become a professional at golf, tennis or even athletics, but had chosen football, something he had an innate gift for. When playing in the school team Colin had to dumb things down a bit so as not to make the sides too uneven, relegating himself to a peripheral role as left back or sometimes going in goal, but even then he was the best keeper the school had seen in Christ knows how long. His real position was centre of midfield, though, controlling the game, and he seemed to have an instinct for passing and movement well beyond his years. That talent seemed immense next to the duffers and hackers, David and his classmates, but whether Colin had enough to make it professionally only time would’ve told. Except he never got time.
A couple of professional clubs had tried to tempt him away from school at sixteen, then again in fifth year, but Colin was no idiot and he’d hung around until the end of sixth year, getting a pretty decent handful of qualifications, just in case the football didn’t work out. By the summer of ’88 he had signed to Arbroath FC as a starting point, and he was due to start pre-season training with the club that August. He never made it that far.
Back then, football violence was commonplace, and although it was a small club, Arbroath punched above its weight, literally, in terms of hooliganism, with running battles around the streets of the town every other Saturday a regular occurrence. The four of them in the ADS never got involved in any of that – what was the point? It was all about the drinking for them, massive amounts of drinking on a very regular basis, something David had never really shaken off over the years. It was a stupid macho game, seeing who could get the most drunk the quickest, and it inevitably ended in puking disaster, but that never seemed to stop them. It was as if some unseen force was driving them on to drink larger and larger amounts.
But pretty soon they learned to handle it. They got used to each other drunk as hell and they looked out for each other. This was at the age of sixteen, when the four of them seemed to have plenty in common. Two years later, in their final year at school, the drinking was the only thing that kept them together. They knew the ADS wouldn’t last, but it was one last summer blowout, and it was a riot.
That July of 1988 was one long party. David and Neil had a joint birthday party, David’s eighteenth but Neil’s nineteenth since he’d been held back a year earlier in school. Neil was a year and a day older than David. Neil had been born on the very day that Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and he had been named after Neil Armstrong (his middle name was Armstrong, much to everyone’s amusement except his). Their birthday party had followed the usual pattern – insane levels of drinking early on, unsuccessful attempts to get off with a few girls, drunken camaraderie around the streets in the early hours of the morning, then getting to bed long after dawn. It was just one of many piss-ups that summer, but a week later one of those piss-ups ended with Colin’s death, and they never went out together in Arbroath again.
It was the last Saturday of July and they’d done the usual, down the West Port to a few pubs, then Tropics to check out the talent. When Tropics shut they headed along the front to Bally’s (formerly Smokies, people were still getting used to the name change), which was the same schtick except open till three. At chucking-out time they headed to Victoria Park, then the cliffs, one of the few places they could hang out without hassle from patrolling police. Sometimes they would light a fire, more often they would have a carry-out and would continue drinking as wide boys sped up and down the promenade in Ford Escorts showing off to girls.
Throughout July they had started joking in a fake macho way about jumping off the cliffs. They weren’t the biggest cliffs in the world, between a hundred and two hundred feet depending where you were, but they were high enough to kill you if you fell from them. The red sandstone was crumbling all along the five-mile stretch of clifftop walk from Arbroath to the tiny fishing village of Auchmithie – not that the ADS ever went walkies, they usually hung about the Arbroath end, drinking from cans of lager and bottles of cider and throwing things over the edge into the sea. If the tide was in, spray would sometimes shoot up and soak them, and when the tide was out, small shingly beaches and ominously dark little caves were exposed at the bottom of the cliff face. That night the sky was already starting to lighten a little in the east, the black cloudless expanse invaded by outstretching lavender and lilac fingers. As they staggered around the cliffs, their teenage years and drunken bodies made them utterly oblivious to the danger of falling. They joked about cliff-jumping. They dared each other. The tide was in and the sea appeared in benign mood, gently sloshing against tufts of grass at the cliff base, pushing plastic oil drums and other bits of flotsam gently against the massive expanse of rock. But they were only joking. Not even if you were completely paralytic would you consider something as idiotic as that, and for all their puerile teenage humour and their often idiotic banter, none of them was that stupid.
As the sky continued to lighten the four of them drifted away from the cliffs, heading back into town, to their beds, ready to spend the whole of Sunday recovering. They split at the bottom of the High Street, David and Gary heading west, Neil and Colin going north, waving sloppy goodbyes to each other, half arranging to meet up the next night for a quiet Sunday pint. The gulls were out in force, squawking and diving for carry-out food scattered up the High Street. It was the last time David ever saw Colin. When he got home he crawled into bed, fantasizing about a girl he’d been chatting up that night (was it Nicola? He couldn’t remember now) and already thinking about a fry-up for breakfast.
He was woken at eleven by a phone call. It was the police telling him that Colin had been found dead at the bottom of the cliffs. He was hungover and still drunk, and he didn’t really get it at first. Yes, they’d been to the cliffs, he told the offi
cer, but they’d all left and gone home, and Colin was fine. No, he didn’t know what time that was, but it was getting light. Yes, they had joked about jumping off, but it was just a joke, and no, Colin hadn’t seemed depressed, what the hell was he implying? Suicide? No fucking way. David was probably his best friend, but he was friendly with everyone, charming, clever, fit, funny, happy – all the other positive things you could think of. It was not suicide. David couldn’t make sense of it. What the hell was Colin doing back there after they’d left? He just couldn’t get his head round it.
He phoned Neil, who sounded even more hungover and shocked than he did. Neil confirmed they’d just headed home, and he’d said goodbye to Colin five minutes after they’d left David and Gary. It didn’t make any sense. It just didn’t add up. He couldn’t work it out at all. He hung up, went back to bed and lay there for a very long time, his head pounding, his mind whirring in confusion and his body shaking from the hangover and the shock.
There was an inquiry into the incident which came back with death by misadventure, whatever that was supposed to mean. Colin had a high level of alcohol in his blood, but the same would’ve been true of any of the four of them, of anyone between the ages of fourteen and forty in the whole bloody town on any given Saturday night. David couldn’t understand it – he just wasn’t drunk enough to have fallen accidentally, but there was also no way he would’ve jumped, and nobody would’ve pushed him, the thought was fucking absurd. And what was he doing there? Maybe he’d left something there, or lost something, and he’d gone back to look for it, or he couldn’t sleep and had gone for a walk, a piece of the clifftop giving way under him. You were always hearing scare stories about bits of the cliffs crumbling away, sandstone was notorious for eroding at a fair rate in the onslaught of the sea’s force, so maybe that was it, maybe it was just a stupid accident that could’ve happened to anyone.
David was still puzzling over this and still somehow in shock by the end of the week, and Colin’s funeral. It was the first funeral David had ever been to and with almost unbearably poignant timing it was the day before what would’ve been Colin’s eighteenth birthday. You couldn’t make this shit up, thought David as he trudged the short distance past Keptie High to the Western Cemetery. It was a stupidly hot day, utterly incongruous with the atmosphere of the town, as if the heavens couldn’t believe that this sort of thing could happen and had refused to play ball by providing the appropriate rain and wind and cold. David was sweating as he walked up the hill, feeling like a different person in a borrowed suit, borrowed black tie and school shoes that hadn’t been out the cupboard in a month.
This was the eighties, before Britain had a culture of mass-media mourning, and with school out for the summer there was no public grieving, no counselling sessions for friends, no appearances sobbing on local television. There was a big turn-out at the funeral, though. Colin had been a bright hope in the town, a charismatic presence, an athlete, an academic and a charmer of each generation.
The Western was a well-groomed cemetery with evenly spaced graves, wide walkways and huge monkey puzzle trees. It sat on the edge of town, overlooking tattie fields through a thin wire fence. Colin’s grave was at the back, amongst the more modest modern plots, and David walked up alone, noticing a line of neat Marines’ graves, all young men, not much older than David, who had died in the Falklands War. The idea of all those once youthful bodies lying decomposed under the turf shocked him. Poor bastards. Enjoy life while you can, he thought, because you’re a long time dead. The thought didn’t cheer him up any.
At the graveside he met up with Gary and a few other classmates, most looking like little kids playing a dressing-up game, trying to look upset, trying to wear a seriousness that they simply didn’t have the life experience to actually feel yet. It felt so unreal, the sun beating down between the tree shadows, cars zipping past beyond the fields, the sombre religious intoning from someone who didn’t even know Colin – ‘a life cut down in its prime’, for God’s sake. David noticed Neil wasn’t here. He had considered not coming himself, so he understood.
He looked at Gary, who seemed in worse shape than he was. He wanted to say something, something meaningful that might help both of them make sense of what was a nonsensical situation. A few days ago they’d all been blind drunk together, and now one of them was in a box, having earth shovelled over him. He suddenly couldn’t stand to look at Gary anymore. He wanted to be alone and very, very drunk; he wanted to crawl into his own little hole and hide.
He went to the wake to show face, but only stayed briefly. There was such a colossal distance between his generation and his parents’ that he couldn’t think of anything to say to Colin’s lost-looking mum and dad. His own parents were there, offering bland, formulaic condolences, and all the older mourners seemed like automatons, offering the appropriate programmed responses to stimuli. David just wanted to get out of there and start drinking properly.
He spent the rest of the day drifting from pub to pub, going to places that were not his usual haunts, just so he could be alone and unknown. But there was no such thing in Arbroath, and too many vaguely recognized well-wishers kept making comments about Colin that were simply strings of platitudes and clichés hung out to dry. He was thrown out of two pubs for being loud and abusive, then picked a fight with a large stranger outside Fatty’s chippy, just so that he could be hit and feel the reality of pain in his body. He staggered home, blood dripping from his nose on to his white shirt, and vowed never to go out in this stupid fucking town ever again.
Yet here he was, driving past the old golf clubhouse that was now a guesthouse perched on the hilltop edge of town. He negotiated a new roundabout on the road in, drove past a new statue which seemed to have two people in monks‘ outfits waving a parchment in the air, and headed up the hill towards his B&B.
As he turned into Nolt Loan Road and caught sight of the Keptie Pond his mind was deluged with lighter childhood memories. The water tower stood imperiously over the pond like a tinpot baron’s castle, while the island in the middle of the pond was still packed with trees and ducks and swans. There had been some new landscaping around the edges, he noticed, and new signposts warning about thin ice, and forbidding ball games, and reminding dog walkers about picking up dogshit as they went. The hut where you used to hire boats from was gone, as were the boats. But despite all the small changes, this was definitely still the same place, still the street that he grew up in, still the place he had spent the most time in his life. And now he was back.
4
The Cliffs
‘Please, call me Gillian.’
She pronounced it with a hard ‘G’, but that was about the only thing hard about Gillian Swankie, thought David. She was a short, voluptuous woman somewhere in her forties with an easy-going, bright red smile and a body made of flamboyant curves. She greeted David at the door with a strangely intimate handshake and a brace of air kisses, making him reel a little. She was certainly attractive, although she wore too much make-up. She was nothing like the lonely old widow he had imagined. The inside of the house didn’t match up to his expectations either – there were no toy dolls, lace curtains, frilly cushions, flowery patterned wallpaper or carpets. Instead the place was done out in neutral show-home colours, with exposed floorboards covered by simple rugs. There were no pictures of graduating children (she was probably too young for that, right enough) or tiny grandchildren – a staple of most B&Bs he’d stayed in around the country, the owners turning their now-empty family home into a pension-boosting money-spinner, the men taking a back seat, the women enjoying the company of strangers to fill the mothering void in their lives. But the Fairport felt different. Gillian with a hard ‘G’ seemed altogether younger, more vivacious and more dangerous than his image of a B&B owner, and although she was Mrs Swankie he couldn’t picture her as a doting wife. Was she alone or married or divorced? Did she have kids? What business was it of his what the hell she’d done with her life?
‘W
e don’t get many single visitors through Fairport, are you here on business?’
‘Not exactly,’ was all David could think of to say. She looked at him and a crafty smile came across her comfortable, worn-in, handsome face. She seemed to know something David didn’t. She turned to head up the stairs and David followed, his eyes trained on her impressively large arse which swung from side to side as she pulled on the banister. ‘I’ll show you to your room,’ she said, looking over her shoulder. David glanced up with a start, shifting his eyes from her arse to her face a moment too late. Rumbled.
The room was standard issue, no-nonsense B&B – small telly mounted on the wall in a corner, plain double bed, small en suite toilet and shower and a tray next to the bed with a kettle, sachets of instant coffee, biscuits and two cups. Genuine Scottish hospitality. He got the spiel about breakfast (served until a surprisingly late eleven o’clock) and the front door (stayed unlocked through the night) from Gillian, who locked eyes with him throughout, smiling in a knowing way. Were the two of them alone in the house?
Gillian left and he got settled in, but a couple of minutes later he heard a phone ring and she called up to him. It must be Nicola, he thought, why hadn’t she tried his mobile? He went downstairs and picked up the receiver.
‘Alright, droopy drawers, ready for some reunion action?’
‘David?’ It was a male voice and he recognized it.
‘Yeah?’
‘It’s Gary. Spink. From school.’
The first thing David thought was how the fuck does he know I’m here? Some sort of small-town telepathy thing going on? Jungle drums? An announcement in the Arbroath Herald?
‘Hey, Gary. How the hell are you? Long time no see, and all that.’
‘I’m fine.’ He didn’t sound fine, thought David. He sounded nervy, or timid, or something similar. But then he’d always been a little shy of life, thought David, always acting as if something was about to jump out from behind a tree and scare seven shades of shite out of him. Maybe sometime in the last fifteen years, something had done just that.