Coffin Road (9 page)

From the age of twelve or thirteen she had become unaccountably angry with him. Not entirely her fault, because his work had taken up more and more of his time, leaving less and less of it for her. And she had punished him for it, mercilessly, with her moods, and sullen sulks, and sudden outbursts of anger. Even when he had gone out of his way to make time for her, to take her out sailing, or walking in the Pentland Hills, she had found excuses not to go. Hurting herself just to hurt him.

And then the very last time she’d seen him. He had been going to come and watch her in the school debate. The proposition was that GMOs were the future of food and the only way to feed the world. She knew that it was one of her dad’s hobby horses. He had always been implacably opposed to the idea of genetically modified crops, and so she had boned up on the subject and was the principal speaker against the proposition. He had called off at the last moment. A problem at work and he had to deal with it. He said that he would drive her to the school but couldn’t stay.

That he hadn’t even been going to hear her speak, after all the work she had put into it just to please him, had seemed like the last, unforgivable straw. She blew up at him, accusing him of being hopelessly selfish, of not caring about anyone or anything in the world but himself. And least of all her. As usual, he had stayed calm and patient and tried to explain. But that only infuriated her further, and she had screamed in his face, ‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!’ And fled from the room in tears.

She never saw him again. They found his boat that weekend, out in the Firth of Forth. Empty. All the life jackets still on board. And then the note her mother had discovered that night, left on the pillow, beneath the duvet, so that she hadn’t seen it until going to bed.

For the longest time, Karen had been utterly overcome by guilt. It was her fault. Somehow he’d been driven to take his own life because of her. The way she behaved, the things she’d said. And she had wished with all her heart that she could just go back and undo it all. Tell him that she’d never meant any of the things she had said, that she loved him really. But there was no way to do that, no way to unsay the things she’d said. And in the end her only means of dealing with it was by growing a hard outer shell that would never let anything in to hurt her ever again.

She became aware of a middle-aged woman sitting opposite, staring at her, and caught a reflection of herself again in the window, her face streaked now with black mascara, and shiny with tears.

*

It was mid-afternoon when she got back to the house. Her mother would not be home for nearly three hours yet, returning no doubt with Derek, since it seemed he had already moved in.

Karen could not for the life of her see what it was that her mother found attractive about him. His head was completely bald on top, smooth and unnaturally shiny. But he had a ring of dark hair around the sides and back, greying a little at the ears. And he wore it far too long, as if that could make up for the lack of it elsewhere. It might not have been so bad had he just shaved off the lot. That’s what men did these days when they went bald. And it looked so much better.

She supposed he was quite well built, but old fashioned in the dark suits he habitually wore – estate agents, it seemed, were always on call – or the neatly pressed jogpants and sweatshirt that he wore to go running at the weekends. He was invariably nice to Karen, smiling and obsequious, believing apparently that it might endear him to her. She detested him.

She dumped her bag in her bedroom and changed into a T-shirt and black jeans, then wandered through to her mother’s bedroom. In the months after her father’s death, she had come in here often. Her father’s clothes had been left hanging in the wardrobe, and they smelled of him. His smell. She would bury her face in one of his jackets and simply breathe him in. And it choked her every time. Because somehow it was as if he was still there. How could he be gone when she could smell him? That comforting, familiar smell that she had grown up with. Whether it was aftershave, or some other scent, or just the natural oils that the body exudes, it was a smell that always took her back to childhood, conjured those happy days when she had loved him unconditionally.

His clothes had long gone. Her mother had removed them all one day when she was at school, and taken them to the charity shop. Karen had been distraught when she returned home to find his half of the wardrobe empty. Those suits and jackets and trousers on their hangers, the folded piles of jumpers and T-shirts, the drawer full of socks were her last connection to him. Somehow deep down she might even have believed that one day he would come back to wear them all again. But even that had been taken from her with their removal.

Now, when she opened the wardrobe, they were Derek’s clothes hanging there, like the intruder he was in their lives. And all she could smell was the powerful, pungent odour of the aftershave he applied far too liberally to his shiny, shaven face.

She banged the door shut and went through to the dressing room off the bedroom. Her mother’s little den. Karen knew that her mother kept an old photo album in here in one of the dresser drawers. An anachronism, really, in this digital age. Colour prints from film negative. Her paternal grandfather had been a portrait and wedding photographer, and her father had inherited all his cameras, and continued to use them almost until his death, though it had become more and more difficult to get film processed. Only very late did he succumb to digital, seduced by the gift of a Sony Cybershot from Karen’s mother, who was fed up being asked to take photographs she couldn’t immediately see and post on Facebook like everyone else.

Shooting on film had meant that there were fewer photographs taken, which had made them more precious, and it was nice to have an album to sit and flick through. Pictures you could touch, almost as if touching the people themselves, a direct connection with a happier past.

Karen sat on the floor, her back against an old armchair, pulled her legs up and opened the album on her knees. She smiled at the tottering two-year-old, arms raised, hands held by her daddy as he encouraged her to walk on her own. A picture taken by someone of the three of them, with Karen in the middle. She would have been about five then, and already her mother and father seemed dated. His hair had been longer at that time, falling in dark curls over his forehead. And her mother was slim, before she put on the weight, hair drawn back in a ponytail from a small, pretty face.

There was one taken of Karen and her dad when she was about eleven. She had been quite tall then, following a period of rapid growth that had left her awkward and leggy. She was grinning shyly at the camera. Her dad had his arm around her shoulder and was smiling down at her adoringly.

She felt the tears welling up again and bit her lip to stop them from spilling. Blinking furiously, she closed the album and slipped it back in the drawer. The last photographs would all have been digital and kept, she knew, in files on her mother’s laptop.

The laptop sat open on the little dresser, where her mother would spend time posting and commenting on the videos and pics posted by her boring friends on Facebook. An endless succession of pointless quizzes, of babies and gardens, smileys and saccharine aphorisms.
Share if animals are worth fighting for
.

Karen sat in front of it and tapped the trackpad to waken it from sleep. The desktop was a shambles of icons and folders, files and photographs, jpegs and PDFs. She clicked the
Photos
icon on the dock and the software that stored all her mother’s photographs opened up to fill the screen. The sidebar listed photo events going back several years. Karen went through them at random, but couldn’t find any of her father, and wondered if her mother had trashed them. The most recent were of her and Derek. A barbecue in the back garden, a picnic in the Pentlands. Drunken faces at a party leering for a selfie taken on her mother’s smartphone.

Karen breathed her exasperation and shut down the software. She was about to put the computer back to sleep when a folder among all the items on the desktop caught her eye. It was labelled simply,
Derek
. She hesitated to open it. It would be like spying, and she knew how pissed off she would be if she thought her mother was trawling through files on
her
laptop. But curiosity overcame reticence, and she double-clicked. The folder opened up in a separate window to reveal a long list of files, tracing email communications between Derek and her mother, going back nearly five years.

Karen wasn’t quite sure why she was disappointed. Dozens of what would inevitably be boring work emails. Houses for sale. Schedules. Adverts. Appointments with clients. Photo attachments. She pushed the cursor arrow towards the red
Close
dot, then on a sudden impulse double-clicked to open a file at random. It was dated a little less than three years ago, and, as Karen read it with growing disbelief, her blood turned cold.

*

She felt as if she were fevered. Her face was hot and red and her throat burned. She could hear Derek retreating from conflict out in the hall and tiptoeing downstairs. Her mother was flushed and defensive.

‘You had no right to go poking through my private correspondence!’

‘No, I didn’t. But I did. And that’s not even the point. You and that baldy bastard were cheating on my dad long before he died.’

‘We weren’t
cheating
!’

‘Okay, fucking behind his back, then.’

‘Stop it!’

‘No.’ Karen was fired up by hurt and righteous indignation. ‘What did you do, bump him off so you could be together?’

Exasperation exploded through her mother’s teeth. But she held her voice in check. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘What’s ridiculous about it? I never believed he committed suicide anyway. Why would he?’

‘Look . . .’ Her mother was fighting to stay calm. ‘Yes, Derek and I were having an affair.’

‘Fucking, you mean. Over the desk in that back office at the estate agency, probably.’

For a moment, her mother didn’t know what to say, and blushed to the roots of her hair. And Karen realised that’s exactly what they’d been doing. But her mother recovered quickly, speaking in calm, measured tones. ‘My marriage to your father had been over in everything but name for a long time. Work had always been his mistress, the one he ran to when he needed to escape from me.’ She looked pointedly at Karen. ‘From us. And then it became more than a mistress, more than an escape. Like he was married to the damn job. It took over his life. He was never here. Well, you know that.’ She paused, breathing rapidly, and Karen couldn’t think of a single thing to say to fill the silence. ‘So, yes, Derek and I became lovers. But there was no cheating involved. I told your father. I’m no saint, but I’m no sinner either. I asked him for a divorce. One day, when you stop being a child and grow up, maybe you’ll understand what it feels like to be neglected by a partner.’

Stinging from the
child
jibe, Karen fired back. ‘What, you mean like the way I feel right now?’ Which didn’t miss its mark, and she pressed home on it. ‘What if it was your affair, asking him for a divorce, that made him kill himself?’

Her mother stood with her hands on her hips, eyes upturned towards the heavens. ‘A moment ago you were accusing us of murdering him.’

‘Well, maybe you did.’ Her eyes were burning now, too. ‘Dad would never have
fallen
overboard. And even if he had, he’d have been wearing his life jacket. So how come it was still in the boat?’

‘Because he took his own life, you stupid girl! Have you forgotten that he left a note?’

‘Oh, yes. The famous note. The one you’ve always refused to let me see. How do I even know it exists?’

Karen’s mother stabbed an angry finger at her. ‘Don’t you fucking move.’ And Karen was shocked to hear her swear. She stormed away down the hall, and Karen could hear her banging about in her den, slamming drawers and doors. When she returned, she was very nearly hyperventilating, and she thrust a folded sheet of paper at her daughter. ‘It’s not the original. The police still have that. But this is the copy they made for me.’

Karen stood looking at it, her heart in her throat, and she didn’t even want to touch it.

‘Go on, take it. You’re a big girl now. Or so you keep telling me. Time to face the truth. After sixteen years of marriage, this is all he could think to leave. Nothing about me. Not a word of apology. Or regret. Nothing.’ She pushed it at Karen again. ‘Go on, take it. It was only ever about you.’

Karen was shaking as she took the folded sheet from her mother’s outstretched hand. She opened it up very slowly, and saw her father’s familiar scrawl. Somehow she had expected there would be more. But all it said was,
Tell Karen I love her, even if I never could be the dad she wanted me to be
.

CHAPTER TEN

Broken clouds are painted roughly across the sky, like a sketch in preparation for a painting. They reflect crudely in the still autumn waters of the Firth of Forth, off to the west. To the east, beyond the suspension cables of the road bridge, the triple humps of the rail bridge are painted rust-red. A paint that lasts much longer now, doing men out of work.

I can see the sails of occasional yachts tacking out towards the North Sea, and somewhere beyond the low-lying smudge of the south shore, the city of Edinburgh nestled tightly beneath Arthur’s Seat.

I am tired. It has been a long drive down from the Isle of Skye after an early ferry crossing from Tarbert. With stops, I have been nearly eight hours on the road.

Traffic is gathering already for rush hour, and I am glad to be heading into Edinburgh rather than out of it. Until I hit the town itself, and it all grinds to a halt. At Haymarket I smell the malt bins of the breweries. The all-pervasive stench of them, like stale beer in a pub at midnight, hangs in the air and suffuses the senses with strangely elusive memories that remain infuriatingly just beyond reach. Oddly, the streets of the city are familiar to me. I need no maps or GPS to guide me to the King James Hotel at the top of Leith Walk, where Sally booked me a room for two nights using her credit card. But I will pay with cash.

I am glad now that I thought to reserve a parking place in the tiny car park below the hotel. Driving in the city, I would be at much greater risk of being stopped by the police than I have been on the open road. Although that did not reduce my paranoia to any significant degree on the drive down.

The girl at the reception desk is tall and willowy. And difficult. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she says, ‘I need your credit card.’

‘I don’t have one.’

‘The room was booked using a card.’

‘A friend’s card. I am not authorised to use it. I’ll pay cash.’

She glances at her computer screen. ‘Well, the lady has authorised its use to pay for the room. We’ll add any other charges to that.’

‘No.’ I shake my head in frustration. ‘I want to pay cash.’

‘I’m sorry, we need a credit card to cover payment of any additional costs you might run up. Meals, room service, bar . . .’

‘I’ll give you a deposit. In cash.’

She sighs, as if I am the one who is being difficult. And I wonder how it can possibly be this hard to pay for something with real money. ‘I’ll get the manager.’ My turn to sigh.

The manager, who looks no older than fifteen, insists on deducting the room and parking charges from the credit card, since those amounts had been pre-authorised by the card holder, and in the end accepts a cash deposit of £1,000 to cover additional room charges, although he refuses to allow me to charge meals or drinks to the room. I am going to have to reimburse Sally when I get back.

When I dump my bag in my room, I am tempted to jump into a taxi and go straight to the address on the back of the birth certificate. But it is too late in the day, and I am tired, and even if I do not sleep well, I know it would be better to start fresh in the morning.

So I drink a couple of whiskies at the cocktail bar, trying not to think about why I am here, and have a salad in the restaurant, before retiring to my room to lie on the bed watching television until finally, sometime in the small hours, I drift off to sleep.

*

The taxi driver looks at me as if I am mad. It is a black hackney cab, and I have already slipped into the back seat and fastened the seat belt when I tell him that I want to keep him for the day. He shakes his head. ‘I don’t do that. Wouldn’t be worth my while.’

‘Well, what would make it worth your while?’ It’s strange how having all that cash makes me reckless.

He laughs. ‘Forget it, pal, you couldn’t afford me. I’ll take you and drop you wherever you want to go.’

I take out my wallet and count out a sheaf of notes, which I push through the gap below the glass separator. ‘Five hundred quid. And it might not even be the whole day.’

The driver looks at the notes, and I see him run his tongue thoughtfully between his lips. He takes the bundle without comment. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Hainburn Park. It’s just north of the
—
’

He cuts me off. ‘I know where it is.’ And he pulls away from the front of the hotel into the early morning traffic.

It is a dull morning that camouflages the beauty of this grey-stoned city. It seems flat and lifeless. The only colour is on the pavements, where multicoloured umbrellas are lifted in protection from fine rain that falls like mist. The green of Princes Street Gardens seems end-of-season weary, and a pall of gloom hangs over the capital, as if in anticipation of winter, just around the corner.

I watch the city slide past rain-streaked windows as we head south over the Bridges into Nicolson Street, and I suppose that this is my town. The place where I live. It all seems familiar enough to me, but I have no idea whether I grew up here, or moved back here later. What is my work, my job, my profession? I told Sally and Jon that I was an academic. If that is true, what is my subject, my area of expertise? Am I a teacher, a lecturer, a researcher? I close my eyes and stop trying to remember. If any of it is going to come back to me, I need to let it happen naturally. Trying to force it is only giving me a headache.

I start to get lost as we turn west at Newington. The streets have become unfamiliar. The leafy suburban streets of upmarket Morningside, where grand detached houses lurk discreetly in mature gardens behind screens of trees and hedges made impenetrable by leaves starting to turn towards autumn.

It takes little under half an hour to get there, passing finally through the blue-collar suburb of Oxgangs before turning into the warren of detached villas and bungalows that is Hainburn Park, with its view out beyond the bypass to the green rise of the Pentland Hills. Today they are almost lost in mist.

I have been watching the numbers, and spot the house on our right as we pass it. ‘What number, mate?’ the driver asks.

‘This is it,’ I tell him. ‘Go to the end of the road and turn, then pull in about three houses down.’ I see his eyes flicker towards me in the mirror, but he does as I ask.

When we have pulled in at the side of the road and he cuts his motor, he says, ‘What now?’

‘We wait.’

I sense the driver’s unease, but ignore him and sit gazing out of the window at my house. It is a modern, detached villa with its own drive and what looks like a double garage. Tall wooden gates lead through to the back garden beyond, and I can see trees behind that.

A white Nissan X-Trail is parked in the drive next to a short flight of steps that leads up to a front porch. There are net curtains on the windows of the front room, so it is impossible to see inside. All I want to do is walk up and knock on the front door, but something makes me hesitate. A need, perhaps, for some hint of familiarity, some memory, no matter how distant, as confirmation that this really is where I live. That I really am Neal Maclean.

The driver has opened his window and is smoking, and reading a copy of the
Scottish Sun
. The windows in the back are starting to steam up, and I lower the one on the pavement side to get a clearer view of the house. Still nothing comes back to me. It all feels like nowhere I have ever been. And yet, why else would I have an extract of birth for Neal David Maclean, with this address written on the back of it?

Even as I am watching, the front door opens, and I tense as a woman steps out. I strain to look at her through the fine drizzle as she skips down the steps and climbs up into the Nissan. I am almost disappointed by her ordinariness. Brown hair streaked blond, not excessively tall. A woman in early middle age. Forty, perhaps, and inclining to plumpness. She wears jeans and a sweater beneath a light summer raincoat which flaps open, and block-heeled sandals. A black bag on a short strap hangs from her left shoulder. She throws it into the car ahead of her as she gets in, then starts to back out into the street.

I rap on the driver’s window. ‘We need to follow her.’

He looks up, taking in the X-Trail, then glances back at me. ‘I hope this is kosher, mate, and you’re not some bloody perv. Cos I don’t want any part of stalking a woman that you’ve got a fancy for.’

‘She’s my wife,’ I tell him emphatically, and an unpleasant smile spreads itself across his face.

‘Oh, I get it. Been a bad girl, has she?’

‘Just follow the car, please.’

His lip curls in annoyance, and for a moment I think he is going to tell me to get out of his cab. But if he was, he reconsiders, and turns to start the motor and accelerate away in pursuit of the white Nissan. It is clear that he does not like me, or this hire, but he’s taken the money, and I am happy that at least he does not try to engage me in meaningless small talk.

She drives to a large shopping centre at Cameron Toll and takes a shopping trolley into Sainsbury’s. We park two rows behind her in the car park and wait.

It is hot and stuffy in the back of the cab and I roll down the window part of the way and lean my head back against the rest, closing my eyes. I am not sure if it is a memory or a dream, or perhaps a mix of both, but I see a woman in blue who looks very familiar to me. If I breathe deeply I can smell her scent, and it takes me tumbling back through time to childhood. Patchouli. I know, without being told, that she is my mother. She has many rings on her fingers, long dark hair held in place by braided lengths from the front of it tied back. Her jeans flare over brown leather boots, and she wears a loose, tie-dyed top. A child of her age, caught in a time-warp from the era of her youth, when the world was still full of hope. She is leaning over me, kissing my forehead, smiling. And just beyond her a man is speaking her name. But somehow I can’t quite catch it.

‘What do you want me to do now?’

I am startled by the driver’s voice, annoyed that the interruption has prevented me from hearing my mother’s name. It had been so close, so tantalisingly just out of reach. I blink and see the woman we have been following, loading bags of shopping into the back of her Nissan. ‘Just keep on her tail.’

We follow her through a maze of streets before finally she pulls up in a parking space outside a row of single-storey suburban shops. My driver draws in on the opposite side of the street and the taxi’s diesel engine sits idling noisily as the woman goes into a hairdressing salon called
Coif’n’Cut
. Through the window we can see her being greeted by what looks like the owner. There is a kiss on each cheek, laughter, and then the coat and bag are dispensed with before she is led away, beyond our field of vision.

‘Knowing women, she could be in there for a while,’ the driver says. ‘And I canny sit parked here.’

We end up parked in a fifteen-minute meter bay a hundred yards up the road, and I am in and out of the cab feeding it for the next hour and a half. My frustration is growing by the minute, and I can feel my driver’s impatience keeping pace with it.

When eventually she emerges from the hairdresser’s, I can see no difference at all in her hair.

‘Hah,’ the driver grunts, looking in the mirror. ‘Either she snuck out the back to keep some secret rendezvous, or she’s paid a bloody fortune for fuck all.’

Her next stop is at a Costa Coffee, but mercifully she emerges again after a few minutes, sipping a large takeaway cup and slipping back into her Nissan. We follow her to the house, then, and park further down the street to watch her carry her shopping into the house and shut the door.

By now I have had enough. It’s time to confront her. I am about to step out of the cab, when I see a group of schoolgirls approaching from the direction of Oxgangs Road. Three of them. And some instinct makes me stop to watch. They are in school uniform. Teenagers from fifth or sixth year, swinging bags and taking their time as they make their way towards us in animated conversation beneath two umbrellas. At the drive to my house they stop briefly, then one of them detaches herself from the others and runs up the path to open the front door with her own key. She is too far away to see clearly in the rain, and is obscured by her umbrella. Sixteen or seventeen years old, I would have said. Quite a tall girl, but it’s impossible to make out her features.

‘Your kid?’ the driver says.

I nod. ‘Yes.’ And it gives me the strangest feeling to realise that I have a daughter. I check the time and see that it is nearly one o’clock. She must have come home from school for lunch, and will probably leave again in half an hour or so. I decide to wait, to get a better look at her.

‘So we wait again?’

‘Yes.’

The driver sighs extravagantly, then reaches down to his left to retrieve a bag from which he takes a flask and a bag of sandwiches. And I realise how hungry I am myself. I ate very little yesterday, and had no breakfast this morning. So I lay my head back once more against the rest and close my eyes.

Almost immediately, I see myself running alongside a child’s bicycle. A little girl is clutching the grips on the handlebars with whitened knuckles, wobbling as her short legs stretch fully to turn the pedals. ‘Don’t let go, Daddy, don’t let go,’ she shouts, and I realise that I am not holding the bike at all. I open my eyes again, blinking furiously. Karen. I don’t know where it comes from, but that is the name on my lips. I say it out loud. ‘Karen.’ And see the driver looking at me again in his mirror.

‘That your kid’s name?’

I nod.

‘Quick eater, then. That’s her finished already.’

And I realise that the driver, too, has finished his packed lunch, and that I must have dropped off to sleep. I am awake in an instant and, peering through a windscreen made almost opaque by fine droplets of rain, I see my daughter running down the drive to meet her friends, the three of them again sharing two umbrellas and huddled together beneath them.

‘What now?’

‘Follow them.’

The driver turns to glare at me through the glass. ‘No fucking way am I following a bunch of teenage girls in my cab.’