Tombstoning

by Unknown

  He felt thrilled and a little apprehensive at the idea of the subterfuge involved in his meeting this weekend. He wanted to tell someone all about it. He thought of Nicola and picked up the phone.

  ‘You’re a daftie.’

  Nicola had a point. After David had left the office and headed home, the excitement of his little undercover mission had waned quickly. By the time he’d got home he wasn’t sure at all about why he’d set up the meeting with this Wilkins character, or what he was hoping to achieve with it. A couple of hours later, sitting in the Abbey with Nicola, he had lost sight of any real purpose to the whole thing.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ he said. ‘Maybe I won’t bother going. I gave his secretary false contact details anyway, so I can just not bother if I don’t fancy it.’

  ‘What are you hoping to find out?’ said Nicola.

  ‘Good question.’

  David looked around him. Most of the pubs in the Southside were predominantly full of either students or locals, with hardly any mixing of the two. That wasn’t the case with the Abbey, in which both sets of punters coexisted in an uneasy balance, the mutual dislike between the groups usually never boiling over into anything more than the odd muttered comment. The large mahogany circular bar and ornate plate-glass windows were reminiscent of days long gone, when pubs took a certain pride in their appearance, and didn’t get needless facelifts every two years to try and pull in a few more punters. Across the room, at one of the window seats, an elderly decorator, judging by his paint-spattered overalls, was slumped asleep in his chair. A handful of giggling student girls waving Aftershocks in the air were taking it in turns to drape themselves over him, while their friends took quick snaps with their camera phones. The old man woke up finally, to shrieks of laughter, looking utterly bemused like a little boy lost in a supermarket. He frowned at the girls and got up to get a fresh pint.

  David turned back to Nicola, and was immediately lifted by the look on her face, a wry, squint smile and an arched eyebrow. It was amazing what the look on a particular woman’s face could do to a man’s insides, he thought.

  ‘I suppose I want to find out about Neil, find out what the hell he’s been up to for the last decade and a half,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why, except that there used to be four of us in a gang – a stupid little gang, admittedly, but a gang nonetheless – and now the other two in that gang are dead. I can’t really explain it, but there seems to be a bond, something pulling me towards him. I need to find him, speak to him about all this.’

  ‘You think he’s involved?’ said Nicola.

  The suggestion shocked David, but secretly not as much as it might’ve. Deep down he had been thinking the same thing, although he hadn’t voiced it out loud. To hear Nicola say it now it sounded obscene, monstrous – to suggest that there was somehow a connection between Neil and the deaths of Colin and Gary – but if he was being honest with himself, David had had the same thought himself.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t really know what to think. It’s all a bit of a mystery.’

  ‘It’s a real Nancy Drew job, for sure.’

  Nancy Drew, thought David – wasn’t that the girly version of those Hardy Boys books he’d read as a kid? Kind of murder mystery adventure things? Pretty dumb, he vaguely recalled.

  ‘I preferred the Hardy Boys myself.’

  ‘You would, being a boy.’

  ‘And what’s wrong with being a boy? I suppose you think it would be better if I was into girly pink Nancy Drew shit, aye?’

  ‘Nah, I like my men to be all men. Like lumberjacks. Ever sung a song about chopping down trees, David?’

  He laughed at the reference. It was easy to talk to Nicola. They made the same references, laughed at the same stupid jokes and drank the same cheap lager. He really wanted to sleep with her. But he also didn’t want to blow it. And anyway, this whole Gary thing – or Colin thing or Neil thing, whatever you wanted to call it, an Arbroath cliffs thing? – was kind of putting a dampener on that kind of action. Having said that, as his eyes drifted involuntarily to the small, firm breasts under Nicola’s tight T-shirt, the thought of sleeping with her brought about a stiffening in his cock, so maybe it wasn’t putting a dampener on anything after all.

  ‘I have to go soon,’ said Nicola, smiling as if reading his dirty thoughts. ‘Amy’s only staying over at a friend’s for a wee while. I’ve got to get her home and to bed, or she’ll be a right pain in the arse come morning. Speaking of which, are you still OK with giving us a lift up the road? We can get the train or bus, it’s not a problem.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ said David. ‘It’ll be my pleasure.’

  ‘Yeah, a talk at our old school, followed by a funeral, a trip to the police station and now an undercover interview with a man trained to kill with his bare hands. It’ll be a hoot, I’m sure.’

  David downed what was left of his lager.

  ‘Gets me out the house, doesn’t it?’

  9

  Tombstoners

  ‘Altiora petamus’ roughly translates as ‘Let us aim for higher things’. David read the school motto as he drove in through the front gate, an unassuming entrance nestled in a residential area which led to the sprawling complex of crouching, modern, dusty red buildings scattered across Lochlands Hill that was Keptie High School. He swung right into the staff car park and got out.

  It was a muggy kind of day, a high-level haze diffusing the heat of the sun and spreading a sticky closeness, a claustrophobic blanket over the land. The buildings in front of him were much as he remembered them, slightly garish and clumsily-built rough brick rectangles radiating out from a central hub which housed the hall and cafeteria.

  It was only eleven o’clock and already he’d dropped Nicola and Amy off at Nicola’s parents’ and checked into the Fairport. Gillian with a hard ‘G’ seemed unsurprised to see him, as if strange men naturally kept returning into her life unannounced.

  He stood for a moment at his car door and soaked up the sight of the school. He had only spent three years in this place because it was built halfway through his secondary education. The original high school had been down the road, round the back of the Keptie Pond, but when that gloomy Victorian hulk of buildings started shedding masonry on pupils’ heads and sprouting leaks from lead plumbing, it was time to move. David had once been playing with a large storage heater in the old school’s overspill huts, knocked up quickly post-war, when he discovered some asbestos fibres stinging his hands. Another time Gary had badly sprained an ankle when a set of stairs gave way under him. This was before anyone knew about lawsuits so neither of them had profited from the school’s crumbling haplessness.

  They moved to the current school at the beginning of fourth year, just in time for the serious business of exams. As a younger kid David had often mucked about in this part of town, running through the long grass playing Japs and Commandos with mates. He could remember when this was all fields, and the thought made him laugh, but also made him feel old for a moment.

  As he stood looking at the school a Fiesta skidded round the corner, a blast of hardcore hip-hop causing its suspension to bounce and windows to throb. Two teenage boys covered in Burberry and Nike swooshes sat posing with the windows down, the engine on high revs. After a couple of minutes two girls about thirteen years old in tiny pleated black microskirts and white blouses came hurrying out the school, giggling and egging each other on. They ducked past the staff-room window and into the back of the Fiesta, which screeched off in a show of burning rubber. The weekend starts here, thought David.

  He headed towards the official entrance to the school – a door which no pupils were ever allowed to use – at the front of the admin wing, which seemed a damn sight nicer than he remembered the rest of the school being. He thought again about the school motto – ‘Let us aim for higher things’ – and about how he was here to talk about people doing exactly the opposite, plummeting to deadly depths. It was a black thought but it made him c
huckle nonetheless.

  He checked in at reception and was quickly met by Mr Bowman, who ushered him along a corridor and up some stairs into the library. Every second of the walk was disorientating, memories of his schooldays rushing back. Over there at the bottom of the stairs was where he was once battered by one of the extended Clarkson clan, essentially for being brainy. Round the back of the cafeteria was where Elaine Mackenzie had agreed to go out with him – a date which ended in disaster when he didn’t have enough money to stand her a bag of chips. Further over in the corner was where he and Neil had raided the tuck shop, making off with pockets stuffed full of Wham bars and Rhubarb and Custards, while over at the other side of the hall was where he had whispered a joke about Davros behind the girl from the year below them in the motorized wheelchair. A few of the memories were good, a lot of them bad, most of them embarrassing beyond words, especially the ones which revealed in spotlight what little shits he and his mates had been for large swathes of the time they spent as teenagers. There was no doubt about it, being back here, haunted by the ghosts of a feral childhood, made him feel mostly ashamed.

  The library was packed with PCs taking up every available desk space, while a few perfunctory peeling bookshelves hid in one corner of the room. A gang of about twenty boys lounged about on cheap plastic chairs in that overcooked nonchalance that teenage boys have. Their postures were attempting to say that they couldn’t give a fuck about anything, but it was an unconvincing message – the boys who really couldn’t give a fuck were already long gone from school. These boys were sixth-years – their lanky height and almost adult faces making David feel suddenly old as hell – so they had chosen to be here, for whatever reason. They weren’t exactly welcoming when David and Mr Bowman came into the room. David wondered why there were no girls in the group, and if the boys had been forewarned about this little impromptu meeting Mr Bowman had laid on. He didn’t have long to wonder, because Mr Bowman fired straight into introducing him. Before he realized it he was standing up in front of them. It was only then – with the sticky sunlight treacling in through the large bank of fusty windows and his armpits getting itchy from the heat – that he thought maybe he should’ve prepared something for this. All week his head had been swimming with thoughts of Gary’s death, thoughts of Nicola and her goddamn smile as she lay in bed across from him, thoughts of Neil and Colin walking away from him up the High Street and out of his life seemingly forever. He hadn’t thought about this at all. He hadn’t considered what this morning might actually entail; in truth he had assumed he was maybe just going to be here to answer the odd question or something.

  But now here he was, expected to say something meaningful, something about tombstoning, and about two people he’d known who died at the cliffs but who had nothing to do with tombstoning, if that even really existed anyway. Was Mr Bowman perhaps over-exaggerating the extent of what was going on amongst Arbroath’s kids? How did he know that these particular kids had anything to do with it? Was it only a one-off thing that had been reported in the paper? He’d said there was graffiti all around the town, glorifying Colin’s death, apparently at his memorial stone as well, but David had been there last weekend and there had been no sign of anything like that.

  He felt his scalp get hot, and the backs of his knees were moist with sweat. His mouth was dry, the dusty air in the library catching at the back of his throat. He felt like he’d been standing in front of the kids for an age, so he decided just to talk and see what happened.

  ‘Thanks. Erm, I’m not exactly sure why Mr Bowman asked me here today. What I mean is, I know why he asked me, but I’m not sure that I’m the right person to be doing this. He seems to be worried that, well… OK, let me start with the basics. I was friends with Colin Anderson.’ Was it his imagination, or did some of the boys sit up a little straighter in their seats? Their half-arsed masks of disinterest fell slightly, and David realized that they hadn’t been told what this was about after all. He was somehow encouraged by that idea and fired on. ‘I was with Colin the night he died. Not at the cliffs, well, I was there earlier with him, but I wasn’t there when he fell. Anyway, Mr Bowman tells me that some kids in town have this weird idea that Colin was involved in something that the papers are now calling tombstoning. They seem to have this idea that he’s some kind of underground legend, or an extreme sports hero or something equally stupid. I’m sure you all know what I mean.’ He could see that they did, and he noticed that every one of them was paying attention now. ‘Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. Colin did not jump from the cliffs that night. He would never have done anything that stupid. He fell. Why the hell would someone like Colin Anderson jump off a cliff, even if it was for a thrill? He was about to start pre-season training as a professional footballer; he had everything going for him. This tombstoning, or whatever you want to call it, is just a ridiculous idea based on absolutely nothing at all. Anyone who does it isn’t hard or clever or whatever, they’re just stupid. There’s thrill-seeking and then there’s just plain stupidity, and that’s what tombstoning is.’

  He stopped for a moment, wondering what else to say. One of the kids piped up quietly from near the front.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  The kid had the collar of his shirt up and a spiky, streaked haircut that David remembered being in fashion about 1985. Christ, was that shit back in again?

  ‘I said,’ the boy said, leaning forward and growing in confidence, ‘how do you know?’

  ‘How do I know what?’

  ‘That Colin didn’t jump? If you weren’t there, how do you know he didn’t jump off the cliffs for kicks?’

  ‘Because he wouldn’t have, that’s why.’ David realized the inadequacy of the answer, and thought that he sounded like a teacher as he said it. ‘It’s just not the kind of thing Colin would’ve done. What would be the point?’

  ‘Maybe it was for a thrill,’ said the kid, his long limbs arranged around his seat like a pile of snakes. ‘Maybe he just thought it would be a buzz.’

  ‘There’s no buzz in jumping off a cliff and killing yourself.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  The rest of the boys were shuffling around in their seats, trying to hide smiles from their faces.

  ‘How do you know if you’ve never tried?’

  ‘Have you tried?’ David tried to stare the boy down, but got nowhere.

  ‘That’s not the point,’ said the boy, remaining cool. ‘The point is that you don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know what it’s like to jump off a cliff into the sea, and you don’t know what happened to Colin Anderson. Or Gary Spink.’

  News had obviously spread fast around town. There was no reason why it wouldn’t, David supposed, no reason why Gary’s death wouldn’t be the talk of every pub, club, office, shop and home, as it must’ve been for the last five days. But he wasn’t about to let this little shit tell him off in front of his mates, especially when the wee bastard knew nothing.

  ‘Gary didn’t jump either.’

  The boy smiled at David.

  ‘Again, how do you know?’

  ‘I just know. I was with Gary on Saturday night, we sat and got fucking pissed together all afternoon, then all night, and when I left him he was on the High Common, heading in the opposite direction from the cliffs.’ He could hear his voice rising in pitch and volume, and he felt a trickle of sweat start to run down his forehead. ‘So you tell me why the fuck he would turn round, walk all the way across town and then throw himself off the cliffs. For kicks? Suicide? You don’t know anything about Gary, or Colin, you jumped-up little prick.’ He could see Mr Bowman getting out his seat from the corner of his eye but kept on regardless. ‘You don’t know a fucking thing about me or my life, or about either of them. So don’t go claiming they’re martyrs or heroes, because they’re not. All the pair of them are is wasted potential, guys who could’ve amounted to much more. You don’t
know how the hell they came to be found at the bottom of the cliffs, so don’t fucking tell me you do.’

  The boy with the streaked hair was nonplussed. He held David’s gaze and gradually got out of his seat.

  ‘The problem is,’ he said, hissing through his teeth, ‘you don’t know how they came to be at the bottom of the fucking cliffs either, do you? What kind of mate were you to the pair of them? You don’t know anything about them. You haven’t even lived in this town for the last fifteen years. You can’t come here and tell us what happened to Colin back then, or Gary at the weekend, because the simple fact is you don’t know, and you never will.’

  David knew he was right. The little shit was right, that was the worst thing. This visit had been a huge mistake. Birdshit hair was absolutely right, who the fuck was he to come and tell them that Colin and now Gary weren’t tombstoners, or whatever? Really he knew nothing about it. Maybe they both committed suicide. Maybe they were both murdered. Maybe he had misjudged their banter that night all those years ago and Colin really had gone back and jumped off as a dare to himself, or just to get a buzz. Maybe David had secretly feared that was the truth all along and felt guilty about it. Maybe the two deaths weren’t connected at all. Who was to say that one wasn’t an accident and the other a suicide? Gary had seemed fine when they met at the weekend, but after fifteen years, was one day enough to form any kind of valid judgement?

  The truth was, David didn’t know. He didn’t know what the hell had happened to either of them, all he had to go on was his gut instinct, but what the fuck use was that? It was nothing, it was superstition, it was a feeling, it was nothing concrete, nothing as certain as two dead bodies lying in a heap at the bottom of a cliff face, fifteen years apart.