Furnace (10 page)

You’ve read all of these? she asked.

I nodded.

She picked up one of the paperbacks and stared hard at the cover. It makes me feel stupid, she announced.

What does?

That you’ve read so much more than me.

What time does your sister come in? I asked.

She’s away tonight; on a training course. Jessie leaned forward and poured herself another full glass, draining the last of our third or fourth bottle of wine. You’re going away
soon, aren’t you?

I nodded.

To be a lawyer.

That’s right. I remember the ambivalence in her tone, and still can’t judge if it was mocking or envious. It stung me, anyway, even through the drink, and I fell quiet.

She drank a little more then pushed herself off the couch and went through into the hall. I sat brooding for a time, then got up and made my way to the bathroom, weaving through the dark.

There was a step in front of the toilet, a white plastic moulding, and another at the foot of the washbasin. After using the toilet and rinsing my hands, I examined myself in the mirror. My face
felt clumsy and numb. When I tried out different winning expressions I seemed to keep repeating the same half comical, half sinister leer.

Back in the hall, Jessie called to me from one of the rooms opposite the kitchen. The door opened onto her bedroom and she was in bed, sitting up pale in the dark, the sheets pulled high to
cover her breasts.

Come in. If you want, she said.

I nodded.

She watched intently as I undressed, staring through the gloom with open curiosity. As soon as I sat next to her, naked, she slid down the bed and took hold of my erection with both cool hands,
bringing a yelp from me that made her giggle. Are you a virgin? she asked, once we’d both settled.

No, I laughed.

She pressed closer, opening her legs over the long muscle of my thigh. I don’t mind. It’s better if you know what you’re doing. She began moving her hands, slowly and still in
tandem.

When she said she was ready, I rolled on top and reached down to guide myself.

Hurting? I asked, seeing her wince.

Yes.

I hesitated.

No. Go on, she gasped.

Her eyes were tight shut now, and free from her stare I remember studying her face. It was unpleasantly white, and closed like a fist. I remember thinking of the early days of summer and
wondering at all the times I’d puzzled over her privacies. They were clear to me now; plain and simple after all. With a grunt I was through, Jessie shrieking as she broke, then moaning with
a strange, distant sound as I fell into my rhythm.

I left after midnight. At the edge of the scheme I crossed the High Street and made for the sea-front though it wasn’t the quickest way home. An early autumnal westerly
had picked up off the Atlantic and it buffeted me as I walked. Striding into it I let my arms fall loose at my sides, waiting for the feeling of lift as each gust urged them outwards. I felt
weirdly pure: weightless and cleansed of all confusions, all complications. I was leaving, leaving, leaving. I could have flown into the air, a scrap of paper in the wind. There was no depth to
life, I remember thinking suddenly, and it seemed like a moment of final clarity and truth to me, the great lesson of my long, trivial summer. There was a shifting, fascinating surface to people
and the things they felt and said, but underneath it all was just a stony simplicity. Life was like the burn behind the shop, I thought as I leaned into the wind, drunk and grimly happy; a little
stream no deeper than its skin; mirrors over a pebble bed.

I didn’t notice Angus until I heard my name called from the promenade bus shelter.

Where you heading, man? Angus was hunched in a dark, heavy trench coat. A wedge of greasy hair blew across his face and he scooped it back theatrically.

I gestured vaguely, stepping into the shelter.

He held out a small flask of spirits.

I shook my head and Angus shrugged before taking a nip from it.

So. When is it ye’re off now? He turned away to hawk and spit.

Sunday.

Angus nodded. Law, he said portentously.

I looked away across the street. The steel shutters were down over the windows of the shop and with each gust of wind they rattled faintly.

You’ll be one o’ the enemy, man. Enemy o’ the underworld, ken? The wind dislodged a clump of hair again and this time Angus let it hang there a while, shielding him, before
dragging it back.

I laughed, turning to face him.

There was something new in his voice, I remember, an air of superiority, or contempt now that he was out of his shop apron and had the night at his back.

It didn’t matter. I was leaving soon, for good, and the thought filled me again with a sudden surge of immense satisfaction. I stared past Angus and out over the sea wall. Black waves
streaked with foam were rolling in fast out of the night. One after another they boomed dully into the sea wall and shattered with a boiling hiss. I remember imagining the great chains of the
northern currents, deep and cold, stretching all the vast way to Greenland, Newfoundland, America. We stared out at the waves together a while and then without a word or sign to Angus I left him
and crossed the empty road, hurrying.

For a long time after, or at least for what seemed like a long time then, in my twenties, I kept the occasional letters that Jessie sent, though I never responded. In all
fairness, they never invited reply. Like her dark, cramped paintings they were only masks. Their meaning was in their effect and even at their most fevered – and some were startlingly erotic
– they were always impersonal, always opaque.

Eventually, on a bored whim, some fifteen years ago, maybe more, I carried them all in to work and fed them to the office shredder. I changed addresses often in those days and no new letters
ever found me to replace them.

It often seems to me that there’s something principled in the most hardened of my clients – those who can never confess, even to themselves. True criminals are the
best of Idealists: they remember only on their own terms, and know that the whole world changes with each gratification. And why shouldn’t they come to think that way? Criminals are the
courts’ apprentices.

Outside my window the late afternoon sky is blank, not promising brightness or rain. When I stand I can see the commuters, a dark quiet river, flowing homewards along the street below. Behind
them, more travellers, an endless stream, spill out of Earl’s Court underground, almost all of them as they emerge glancing up at the colourless, unreadable sky, frowning an instant as if
confused, or wary. How many thousands of times have I done the same thing myself? All trespassers. All following one another until they vanish, one by one, into cars and buses and buildings on the
way to being alone again.

Hamilton picked her out easily despite the August festival crowds swirling about the station concourse. Something about her – maybe her stillness in so much swarming
movement, or her awkward, gangly tallness, striking in a girl so young – seemed to deflect like a magic circle the bustle and press all around her.

He was already late but paused anyway on the narrow iron walkway overlooking the crowds. She was staring towards the Waverley café and bar. Now that she was here, finally, he was
hesitant. At the thought of greeting her, of having to find the right words, a heavy reluctance, like drowsiness, seemed to soak through his brain and limbs. If he could slip away now, without
consequences, he would turn back, he confessed to himself. She was so tall and awkward and alone, there with her mother’s bulging white suitcase at her feet.

But he had fought her mother for exactly this: a longer time with his own daughter, and there was no backing out now. Whatever you think of me, I’ve got a natural right, he’d
insisted the last time they quarrelled, a father’s
right
to get to know his kid. Look at her, he’d hissed, gesturing towards his car where she was sitting, out of earshot but
watching them through the glass;
look
at her, for Christ’s sakes. She won’t
be
a kid much longer the way she’s going.

It was only a month since he’d made that last trip south to Leatherhead, but now, watching her unseen from above, he suddenly felt as if years had passed and he realised he was gripping
hard on the walkway rail, his hands slippery with sweat. She was still facing the café, her long, bare arms hanging limp at her sides. He freed his fingers and made his way down to her. As
his feet clanked on the walkway’s iron steps he looked up at the high, dirty glass panes roofing the platforms, and through them to the tops of buildings at street level where the hot, dusty
city thundered and roared. Marian, let’s get out of here, he almost shouted when he reached her from behind, and she jumped a little, startled.

In the taxi she handed him a letter out of the front pocket of her suitcase.

From your mother? he asked, and she nodded, reticent as always. He opened the unmarked envelope. The list inside seemed to have been scrawled in a hurry. One instruction was blotted out very
thoroughly, and only his daughter’s gaze stopped him holding the paper up to the light from the cab window.

He folded the sheet into an inside jacket pocket. The taxi had been crawling through traffic and now it stopped dead behind a line of open-topped buses. So, he said, meeting her
stare, how about this weather?

As if in answer, she turned to gaze out at the sweltering tourists and shoppers jostling alongside the cab. I expected Scotland might be a bit cooler, she admitted, and plucked the cotton of her
fitted vest away from her flat, damp chest.

It will be in the highlands, he said, and she nodded, frowning faintly at someone or something in the crowd. We’ll be high up, he added, then cleared his throat and waited for the cab to
lurch forward again.

That evening he ordered pizza to the flat and presented Marian with a heavy, oatmeal coloured, cavalry twill riding jacket as a thirteenth birthday present. That’s why
you only got a card last week, he said. I wanted to give you your real present myself.

Oh, she said, thank you. She held it up in front of her for a moment, then worked her arms into the stiff sleeves.

Surprise, he said, and she smiled.

The jacket was short in the arms but fitted well enough on the body, he thought. She lifted her arms out from her sides then lowered them again.

It’s really good material. Very expensive. The best. That’s why it’s a wee bit stiff to get into. But that’s good if you ever take a fall.

She nodded agreement.

The sleeves can be let out. I checked that, he added. I told them it might need that. It’s bespoke, he said.

She nodded again, seeming pleased with it, Hamilton judged, in her own undemonstrative way. She thanked him a second time, hugged him woodenly, then removed and set the jacket back on its
varnished hanger before sitting down to eat.

Hamilton waited a while, then glanced up at her. You want to take it with us to the hotel? I’ve booked some pony-trekking for you.

She blinked and stopped chewing, then shook her head.

No? Why not?

Colouring, she stared hard at the slice of pizza in her fingers. It’s not the kind of thing they’d wear, she said at last. The pony-trekking crowd.

Oh, he said, and laughed as she gave a pained smile back. Okay. I didn’t think of that.

She shifted in her seat.

You’ll wear it once you’re back home, though? For your serious riding?

Of course.

That’s fine then, he said, and watched her finish her food.

* * *

They left mid-morning for the drive north. Without telling Hamilton why, Marian took a brief but intense interest in Fettes School as they passed by. Then she settled back, eyes
closed, sealed off from him by the ear buds of her iPod.

The weather held fine through Perthshire but by noon a grey, level bank of clouds seemed to wait on the northern horizon for them, barely moving but shielding more and more of the blue sky as
the road climbed from bright birch woods to the snow gates before Drumochter. Just after two, Hamilton found the small hotel, tucked at the back of its village. A light rain was drifting in the
air, speckling the windscreen. The clouds he had been driving towards plated the sky completely now. Marian was sleeping, and he was hungry and stiff and irrationally vexed that she wasn’t
awake to share his discomfort. He stopped the engine, got out onto the pebbled parking space at the end of the drive and left the car door ajar while he went in to the Reception.

The proprietor, a small, neat, energetic-seeming woman, was busy with paperwork behind the desk. Her hair was completely grey but her face was smooth and almost youthful. She took a moment to
sign something, then smiled up at him. Mr Hamilton, she said decisively.