Читать книгу Naming the Bones - Louise Welsh - Страница 8

Chapter Three

MURRAY LOOKED AT the neat piles of papers he’d assembled, then surveyed the list that he had made.

Jotters – 3

Address Book – 1

Loose Papers – 325

Newspaper Cuttings – 9

Bus Tickets – 13

Train Tickets – 8

Drawings/Doodles – 11

Tarot Cards – 3

Letters – 6

Photograph – 1

The jotters and address book were his biggest prizes, but the photograph pleased him more. Archie and Christie sitting on a rock laughing together, their hair caught in a bluster of wind, eyes screwed tight against the weather. Archie was wearing an old Harris tweed jacket that looked too broad for his thin frame. His hair was long and stringy, his laugh topped by an unkempt moustache. Christie’s blonde hair was long too, parted carelessly in the centre. Her wide-lapelled coat looked Edwardian, but it had been a period of retro and revivals, and maybe it had been the latest fashion. She’d stuffed her hands into her pockets, pushing them together through the fabric so it looked like she was hugging herself. Archie had one hand on his knee. His other hand was hidden. Clasped around Christie’s waist or lost in the closeness of the pose? It was difficult to tell. Archie’s face was half-obscured by his hair and moustache, but he looked alive in a way that none of the other photographs had shown him. Murray wondered when it had been taken. That last summer up on Lismore? The look was right, the seventies hair and careless clothes, the treeless scrub of heather in the background. He would take a copy with him when he went to meet Christie Graves. Perhaps she would remember the moment it was taken, and maybe that memory would prompt others.

He pulled the jotters towards him. They were similar to those he recalled using in primary school, with boxed-in lines on the front cover for the owner’s name, subject and class, which Archie had left blank. He lifted one in the air and shook it gently. A couple of dried leaves slid from between the pages. Murray laid them carefully to one side and added them to his list.

Leaves – 2

The words looked stupid. He scored them out then took one of the leaves between his thumb and index finger and held it up to the light, seeing the veins still branching beneath the crisp surface. There was no secret message scratched on its desiccated flesh. He placed it gently back on the desk and opened the notebook. A list of words ran close to the margin on the left-hand side of the page, vocabulary or notes for a poem cramped in Archie’s now-familiar script.

Dune

Dawn

Dream

Dome

Diadem

He could see no connection between the words and any of the poems in Moontide. Murray leaned back in his chair and started to read, making notes in his own Moleskine notebook as he went along. He was a third of a way through the jotter when he came across the entry made in another hand.

I love you and she will love you too.

Beneath, Archie had added:

She loves me! But how can she be so sure that my new love will be a she?

Murray made a note of the exchange, wondering if it offered some kind of insight or was simply a joke. He’d assumed Archie’s sexuality was confirmedly heterosexual, but then the seventies had been a time of challenged boundaries, even in Scotland, and Archie’s love affair with the drink had frequently placed him between berths. Maybe he’d occasionally flopped into men’s beds in the way that he had so frequently flopped (Murray imagined that the word was often appropriate) into women’s. It was worth considering. At this stage almost anything was worth considering.

Murray had propped the photo against the desk lamp. He looked at it again, the grinning face and flying hair. How long after it had been taken had Archie drowned?

He worked until two, then decided to take some requests for reference books to the front desk. He supposed he should eat something. He’d woken with a sore head and mild nausea, remnants of the wine he’d drunk at the opening and of the semi-sleepless night that had followed. He should phone Jack, tell him . . . tell him what?

Murray filled in his request form neatly and went out into the corridor, closing the door gently behind him. He heard Mr Moffat’s jovial tones just before the man himself hove into view. The senior librarian was wearing his customary politician’s suit and tie. His sparse, white hair was cropped short in a style that might have looked thuggish on a less amiable countenance, but which lent Mr Moffat a jolly, monkish cast. He was walking fast, talking animatedly to an older, thinner man dressed in khaki trousers, a checked shirt and saggy cardigan.

Murray would have been content to let the pair pass with a friendly nod of the head, but the librarian hailed him warmly, his round face a testament to the pleasures of books and extended lunch breaks.

‘Good afternoon, Dr Watson.’ He shook Murray’s hand. ‘Everything working out okay?’

Murray’s voice felt rusty. He’d been in conversation with the remnants of Archie Lunan all morning, but this was the first time today that he’d opened his mouth to speak to the living.

‘Good, yes. I’m not sure what I’ve got yet, but it looks promising.’

‘Wonderful.’ Mr Moffat turned to his companion. ‘George, this is Dr Watson, through from Glasgow for a look at some Archie Lunan ephemera we didn’t know we had.’

‘Oh, aye.’

The older man looked unimpressed, but he held his right hand out anyway. Mr Moffat stood over them while they shook. For a bizarre moment Murray thought he was about to clasp their two hands together like a minister at a marriage ceremony, but the librarian confined himself to his usual easy grin.

‘George Meikle is our head bookfinder.’

Murray wanted to tell the bookfinder to call him by his first name, but the action seemed too awkward. Instead he indicated the request forms in his hand.

‘I was just heading in your direction.’

Meikle’s face remained dour.

‘I’ll take you along to the desk then.’

George’s surliness was at odds with his offer and Murray wondered if he was grabbing the opportunity to escape the weight of Mr Moffat’s cheerfulness.

‘Excellent.’ The librarian couldn’t have looked happier had he introduced Lord Byron to Percy Shelley. ‘Still, it’s a pity we don’t have more for you, Dr Watson. I often wish some poets had been more assiduous with their legacy.’

Meikle made a harrumphing noise that might have been a laugh or impatience.

‘Some of them are over-assiduous.’

‘George has a point.’ Mr Moffat lowered his voice as if he were about to tell a risqué joke. ‘We’ve been gifted signed notes to the milkman, but your man . . . one slim volume and a cardboard box of papers. Tragic. It’s going to make your job pretty difficult.’

‘There’s more than you might think, references in other texts, letters and the like, and I’m hoping more will turn up once I start talking to people who knew him.’

‘I’m a great believer in optimism.’ Mr Moffat was already turning away. ‘And there’s always George. He’ll help you out where he can.’

Murray groped for some way of saying he didn’t need any help beyond the room already provided. But he was already looking at the broad back of Mr Moffat’s blue suit as he headed away from him, along the corridor to his office.

George snorted with the same mixture of amusement and impatience he’d shown earlier.

‘This way.’

He started down the hallway in the other direction and Murray followed him, too polite to let on that he already knew his way around. He couldn’t think of anything to say. It was like this sometimes when he had been deep in work, as if his mind stayed trapped in the wrong mode, the best part of him caught in the pages he was carrying.

Lunan had been trying to write a sci-fi novel. Murray smiled at the irony. He’d been hoping to uncover lost verses by a neglected poet and instead had chanced upon notes for a pot-boiler. Maybe Lunan had been bored, or perhaps he’d decided to fight penury with pulp fiction. The notes for the book had been sketchy, but the beginnings of the plot were unoriginal, a small colony of people trying to pick their way through a post-apocalyptic landscape. Murray supposed the setting might have been inspired by the isolation of Archie’s last home.

George broke the silence, jerking Murray back into the moment and the empty corridor that smelled of books and learning.

‘So have all the big boys been covered then?’

It was a question he’d been asked before, most notably by Fergus Baine, Murray’s head of department when he’d submitted his request for a sabbatical. He’d pulled out the stops then, explaining his perspective on the poet’s neglected place in the canon, how his story crossed boundaries not simply of literary style but of a country divided by geography, industry and class. He’d dampened his love of Lunan’s poetry from his voice and presented an argument based on scholarship and fact. Murray had been as passionate as a commission-only salesman about his product, believing every word of his own spiel, but the hours spent in the small room with Archie’s slim legacy had left him dispirited. As if the salesman had opened his sample case in the privacy of a hotel room and been confronted with the flaws in his merchandise. He felt a sudden stab of anger. Who was this guy, anyway? Stalwart of the stacks, a glorified janitor with his old man’s cardigan and wilted features.

‘I don’t get you.’

‘Archie Lunan. I’d have thought you’d have better folk than him to spend your time on.’

‘I still don’t get you.’

George turned his face towards Murray, his expression unreadable.

‘He wasn’t much of anything, was he? Not much of a poet and not much of a man, as far as I could tell.’

‘And you’d be the one to judge?’

‘I’m not a professor of English literature.’

Murray doubted his promotion had been an accident and didn’t bother to correct it. He remembered his joke of the night before.

‘But you know pishy poetry when you see it?’

‘I know a big poser when I see one.’

The words could have been directed towards Murray, Lunan or both. The corridor stretched ahead of them. He didn’t need the guidance of this misery. He knew where he wanted to go, could put on some speed, step quickly ahead and leave the old bastard to ferment in his ignorance. Instead he kept his voice cold and asked, ‘So did you see a lot of Lunan?’

‘You could see Archie Lunan propping up the wall of an Edinburgh pub any night of the week in the seventies.’

‘And you were out in the street with your nose pressed to the Christian side of the window when you saw him, I suppose?’

George Meikle’s laugh was harsh.

‘No, I wasn’t. But it’s not me we’re talking about, is it?

Murray felt weary with the weight of defending Lunan, a man who he suspected was probably as big an arsehole as George was implying. But it wasn’t the man he needed to defend. He said, ‘Archie Lunan may not have been Scotland’s favourite son, but he produced one of the most remarkable and most neglected collections of poetry ever to come out of this country.’

They had reached the foyer now. George turned to face him.

‘And you’re going to right that?’

‘I’m going to try.’

The older man’s voice was sweet with sarcasm.

‘A big thick book about a wee, skinny poet and his one, even skinnier volume?’

‘If I can.’

George shook his head.

‘And the greater part of it about how he went.’

‘It’ll be a part of it, but not the main part. I’m writing for the Edinburgh University Press, not the News of the World.’

‘Aye, that’s what Mr Moffat said.’ George hesitated, as if making his mind up about something. ‘You asked where I was when I spied Lunan in the pub. Half the time I was sitting opposite him, the other half I was sitting on the bench beside him.’

‘You were friends?’

‘Drinking pals, for a while.’ Meikle took a deep breath. ‘Why do you think Tuffet was bringing me along to meet you? You could find your own way to the request desk fine. He thought I might be able to fill in some gaps.’

‘And can you?’

‘I doubt it. All we ever did was hang about pubs talking pishy poetry. The kind of thing you no doubt get paid good money for.’

Murray grinned against the unfairness of George Meikle’s first-hand contact with Lunan.

‘I’d like to hear your memories of Archie, they could be a big help. Maybe you’d let me buy you a drink?’

‘I don’t drink.’

He wondered if anyone had conducted a study into the link between being teetotal and being a depressing bastard. But then the old man gave his first genuine smile.

‘You can stand me a coffee in the Elephant House when I knock off.’

Murray bought a ham and tomato sandwich from the news­agents opposite the library and ate it standing in the street. The bread was soggy, the tomato slick against the silvered meat. He forced half down then consigned the remainder and its plastic box to a bin. He’d turned his mobile off when he’d entered the library that morning, now he switched it on and checked for messages. There were two. He pressed the menu button and brought up Calls Missed. Jack had rung once, Lyn twice. He killed the phone and went back into the library. He had a lot of work to do before he met George Meikle.

The Elephant House was jam-packed, but Meikle had managed to bag the same seat that an insecure Mafia don would have chosen, near the back corner of the second, larger room commanding a good view of the café and ready access to the fire escape. Murray eased his way through the tables to greet Meikle and check on his order, then retraced an apologetic route back, past the glass cabinets stuffed with elephant ornaments to the front counter and the long queue to get served. When his turn came he asked for an Americano, a café latte and two elephant-shaped shortbreads, then negotiated his way back to the corner table, holding the tray carefully, praying he wouldn’t upset it, and if he did that it wouldn’t be over an occupant of one of the three-wheeled buggies that were making his journey so perilous.

Meikle folded the Evening News he’d been reading into a baton and slid it into the pocket of the anorak hanging on the back of his chair. Murray lowered the tray onto the table then unloaded the cups, slopping a little of the black coffee onto its saucer.

‘Sorry that was so long, there’s a big queue.’

Meikle gave the shortbread a stern look. ‘If one of those is for me, you’ve wasted your money.’

‘Watching your figure?’

‘Diabetes. Diagnosed three years ago.’

A vision of his father flashed into Murray’s head. He wrapped the shortbread in a paper serviette and slid it into the pocket of his jacket.

‘That’s not much fun.’

‘Eat your bloody biscuit.’ Impatience made George’s voice loud. One of the yummy mummies turned a hard stare on them, but he ignored her. ‘Biscuits I can stand. It’s the booze I find hard to watch folk with, and I’ve been off that twenty years.’

‘Since Archie went.’

Meikle shook his head.

‘You’ve got the bit between your teeth, right enough.’ He leaned forward. ‘An unhealthy obsession with your subject may be an advantage in your line, but remember Lunan only touched a small portion of my life. I’m sixty-five now, due for retirement at the end of the year. I’ve not seen Archie since we were nigh-on twenty-six. My quitting the drink had nothing to do with him. It was necessary, that’s all.’

Murray held up his hands in surrender.

‘Like you say, it’s a bit of an obsession.’ He took his tape recorder from his rucksack and set it on the table. ‘Do you have any objection to me recording our chat?’

‘Do what you have to.’

Murray hit Record and beyond the window of the small machine cogs began to roll, scrolling their voices onto the miniature tape.

‘So what was he like?’

George’s face froze in a frown, like an Edwardian gentleman waiting on the flash of a camera.

‘When I knew him he was a great guy.’

Murray rewound the tape and pressed Play. George’s voice repeated against the backdrop of café noise, When I knew him he was a great guy.

‘Jesus, I hope you’re not going to do that every time I say something.’

The young mother gave George another look. This time he held her gaze until she glanced away. He muttered, ‘You’d think no one ever had a fucking bairn before.’

Murray bit the head off one of the elephants and pressed Record again.

‘So what made him a great guy?’

Meikle answered with a question of his own.

‘What do you know about Archie?’

‘The work. Basic stuff, where he was born, his death of course, and a few things in-between. I’ve been interested in him since I was sixteen, but I’m only starting serious research into his life now.’

‘Have you talked to Christie?’

‘I’ve corresponded with her. She’s promised to meet me.’

‘And do you think she will?’

‘I hope so.’

George nodded his head.

‘Fair enough.’ He hesitated. ‘I’m not sure what it is you want to know.’

‘Whatever you want to tell me. First impressions. You said he was a great guy, what was so great about him? Did he consider himself a poet when you knew him?’

George raised the mug slowly to his mouth, as if it wasn’t the drink he wanted so much as the thinking time. He cradled the cup in his hands for a moment, then set it down, running a finger thoughtfully along the rim, rubbing away a thin brown stain of coffee.

‘When I first met Archie he didn’t know what he was. I mean I think he knew that he wanted to be a poet when he was in his pram. He was always straight about that, but he still wasn’t sure about who he was. He was a west-coaster like yourself, but he was living here in Edinburgh and he’d spent his early years on one of the islands, so his accent would scoot about north, east and west.’

‘Everywhere except the south.’

Meikle laughed.

‘That’s one thing that hasn’t changed. You don’t find many Scotsmen aspiring to come from the south, not the ones who stay, anyway. But what I meant was his voice reflected the way he was, unsettled, always trying out new personas. ’

‘So would you say his personality was split?’

‘Jekyll and Hyde? That would be convenient for your book, wouldn’t it? No, nothing as dramatic as that, not when I knew him anyway.’ He paused and took another sip of coffee, more thinking time. ‘But you could say that Archie had two sides to him, the Glaswegian who wasn’t going to take any shit and the mystical islander. Neither of them was a perfect fit.’

Murray scribbled in his notebook.

2 personas, hard v mystical, but not J & H

‘I’m not sure what else to say. We were just two young blokes who liked a drink and a craic.’

‘At a risk of sounding like Julie Andrews, start at the very beginning. How did you and Archie meet?’

Meikle shook his head. His expression was still stern, but Murray thought he could detect the hint of a smile behind the straight-set lips.

‘That was typical Archie. I had a room up in Newington at the time, not so far from where we are now, student digs, a bed, a Baby Belling, an excuse of a sink and a shared lavvy in the stair. I was coming home along Nicholson Street one night. It was late, but not quite pub chucking-out time. That road’s not so different now than it was then, unlike the rest of Edinburgh, that’s turned into a bloody theme park.’ Meikle took another sip of coffee and gave Murray a half-apologetic glance, as if he hated these tangents as much as his listener. ‘Aye, well, as I was saying, it was typical Archie, but I wasn’t to know that then.’

George grinned, getting into his stride, and Murray realised that this was a story he had told before. He wrote in his notebook, Well-established anecdote.

‘I turned off into Rankeillor Street. It was a rare night, cold but clear, with a full moon. I could see the outline of Salisbury Crags beyond the end of the street. I remember that distinctly because it was a Friday night and I’d been thinking about taking a climb up there in the morning. Maybe it was the full moon, they say that does funny things to you, but suddenly I felt like I had the energy for the climb right then. I was half-wondering if I should go ahead or if it was the drink that was doing my thinking for me and whether I might end up falling face-first off some cliff or catching my death from hypothermia. Maybe I was aware of the group of lads at the other end of the street, but I wasn’t really paying any attention, I was imagining what it would be like at the top of the hill in the dark with only the moon and the sheep for company. I’d more or less decided to go for it when I heard shouting. It was Archie, though I didn’t know that at the time. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but what I could see was that the other three lads were laying into him. I’ve never been much of a fighter, but it was three-to-one, and even from that distance and in the dark I could tell that Archie had a body more suited to wielding a pen than a pair of boxing gloves. So one minute I’m in quiet contemplation, the next I’m running towards the four of them, yelling my head off. They had your man on the ground by this time and they were beginning to put the boot in. I don’t know why my appearance on the scene should have made any difference. It still wouldn’t have been even odds, not with Archie on the ground the way he was. Maybe they’d finished with him, or maybe they didn’t have the stomach for more, because the lads kind of jogged off, not running, but moving at a faster-than-walking pace. They shouted some abuse, but I wasn’t going to let that bother me. Truth be told, once I stopped running and yelling, I started to get the shakes. Still, I think I was pretty pleased with myself, a bit smug, you know? Archie was still on the pavement. I leaned down to give him a hand up and that’s when it happened. He landed me a good one square in the face.’ George laughed and shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe it. ‘Before I knew it, the two of us were scrapping in the street. Then came the blue light. I guess someone in the tenements must have called the police when the first fight was kicking off. They charged the pair of us with drunk and disorderly and shoved us in separate cells for the night. My one and only arrest.’

Meikle laughed and shook his head again.

‘It doesn’t sound like a very promising basis for a friendship.’

‘No, it doesn’t, does it? But someone in the station must have slipped up because we were booked out at the same time the next morning. I wanted nothing to do with him, of course. I mean one minute there I am thinking about moonlit climbs and the next I’m in a cell in St Leonard’s police station.’

‘So how did you and Archie end up pals?’

‘Oh, Archie was a charmer. He made a gracious apology and before I knew it we were in a café swapping our life stories over bacon rolls and coffee. Then it was pub opening time. We went on from there.’

‘So thumping people one minute and charming them the next, but not a Jekyll and Hyde character?’

‘You’re keen on that one, aren’t you?’ Meikle’s belligerence had vanished in the story. ‘He was full of life and sometimes his energy spilled over into something else.’

Murray glanced at the recorder still spooling their words onto tape and wondered how far he should push the older man.

‘He sounds like a violent alcoholic.’

Meikle winced, but his voice remained low and calm.

‘The alcoholic bit I don’t know about. He liked a drink, true enough, but he was young, it could have gone either way. Personally I think a lot of that’s to do with whether you’ve got an addictive personality or not. I do, my father did too, but I don’t make assumptions about other folk, especially the dead. The violence part? Aye, well, he got into fights, like a lot of young lads, but I don’t think Archie was violent per se. I used to, but I’ve had a bit of time to consider. I reckon that when he drank all his insecurities were given a free rein. Archie would hit you, right enough, but then he’d drop his guard and let you give him a proper doing. I got a fair few blows in that night before the police pulled me off him. That was part of the reason I went for a drink with him the next day. I couldn’t believe the mess I’d made of his face.’

Meikle ran a hand over his thinning hair. Murray reached forward and turned off the tape recorder. Their cups were empty, the elephant reduced to crumbs. He asked, ‘Would you like another coffee?’

‘Make it a Diet Coke.’ The older man gave him a tired smile. ‘There’s only so much coffee you can drink.’

Meikle was on his mobile phone when Murray returned. He looked away, as if to guard his privacy, but his telephone voice was as loud as his cursing voice.

‘Aye, about half an hour or so. No, don’t worry. I can fix myself something when I get in. Yes, okay, love. You too.’ He cut the connection and looked at Murray. ‘I’ll need to be heading off soon.’

‘You’ve already been generous with your time. You said you and Archie talked a lot of poetry.’

‘I was bumming myself up a bit there. He talked and I listened. I was more into the politics. I tried to turn Archie onto it.’ Meikle snorted. ‘That was the way we talked then, you didn’t get someone interested in something, you “turned them onto it”.’

‘Quite a sexual turn of phrase.’

‘Aye, it was all sex then, except it wasn’t. Maybe down in London, but not up here sadly. Archie maintained that poetry had nothing to do with politics. We used to argue about that. They were happy times – you could even say the best of times – but when you ask me what we did, it’s all of a same. Keith Richards isn’t the only one that can’t remember the seventies. I mean, how well do you remember your student days?’

‘Pretty well.’

Meikle laughed.

‘That figures. No offence, but look at you. You were probably bent over your books half the time and in lectures the other half.’

‘More or less.’

‘Aye, well, we weren’t. What I remember is the odd rumpus, the occasional one-night stand, a lot of parties, a lot of laughs, a good time. For me, Archie was just a part of all that. What they call a wasted youth.’

‘Except it wasn’t.’

Meikle gave him a sad smile.

‘No, I don’t think it was. It was what came later that was the waste.’