The Chessmen (14 page)

‘Good for them. What’s any of this got to do with me, Donald?’

‘We need a roadie, Fin. Big Kenny’s gone to Inverness, and your name came up. The guys are comfortable with you.’

‘Some of us are still trying to get a degree, Donald.’

‘Nights and weekends, Fin. Good money in it. And, hey, you’ll sail through your degree, bro, without even breaking sweat.’

Donald was wrong about a lot of things. But he was right about Amran. I roadied for them for the rest of that academic year, and we gigged all over Scotland and the north of England. The record deal that Donald predicted came in June. The band spent the summer in the studio recording their first album, which they called
Caoran
, as a sop to Strings. They were mostly songs on which Roddy and Strings had collaborated, but they were given a real professional gloss by a producer who came up from London. They never did replace Whistler. When their first single was released in September it went straight into the charts at No. 5.

Mairead was turning into a minor celebrity, her face appearing regularly in the Scottish red-tops and on the covers of several nationally distributed magazines. She had her own fashion guru now, at least that’s what Mairead called her. A kind of dusty-looking lesbian art school dropout who advised her on clothes and make-up. I had to pinch myself at times to remember that Mairead was just a wee lass that I’d known and fancied at school.

Roddy’s dad had bought him a second-hand, single-engined aeroplane. A red-and-white Piper Comanche. And the band had started earning enough for Roddy to pay for flying lessons out of Glasgow airport. But Roddy was flying high in more ways than one. He was destined for stardom and recognition of his very special talents. That’s how he saw it, anyway. And it was that overweening ambition that brought him, finally, into conflict with Donald.

By the time I went into second year at university, Roddy and the rest of Amran had dropped out to concentrate on their careers in the band. Joey Cuthbertson had been reduced by a heart attack to little more than an invalid, and Donald had stepped into his shoes as No. 1 at the agency. It seems he had indeed sucked the old man dry.

But although Donald’s dramatic rise to prominence in the Scottish music business had led to a resurgence of interest in mainly Glasgow-based bands like Amran, it also coincided with his spiralling descent into drink and drugs. He had always been, I suppose, a classic contender for that uniquely island condition known as the
cùram
, when childhood indoctrination in unrelenting Presbyterian beliefs resurfaces like a virus after years of dissolute living to reshape its victims in the image of their fathers. In this case, the Reverend Coinneach Murray. But it would be a few years before Donald would find himself following in his own father’s footsteps. For the moment he was having too much fun in denial.

What he had done was taken his eye off the ball, and Amran’s career was starting to stall, even before they had
recorded their second album. Success can come in the blink of an eye, but vanish just as quickly, like an evaporating tear. The gigs were routine and repetitive and not serving in any way to advance the band’s career. Donald was never there, never at the end of a telephone, never around to discuss the things that Roddy and Strings and the rest thought important to their future. He had already embarked on that long and treacherous slide into addiction.

For my own part, I didn’t much care. I drove the van, and the money I made meant I didn’t have to think too much about my own future. In truth, I didn’t really want to think about it. I had no interest in my degree course, no ambition, no idea what to do with my life. The news which had greeted me on my return to the island for my aunt’s funeral had robbed me of any interest in it. Artair and Marsaili were married. I had lost my oldest friend, and the only girl I had ever really loved.

The friction between Roddy and Donald finally came to a head one weekend in early November.

It was a Friday night, and Amran were giving a concert in one of those end-of-pier pavilions, a survivor from the days of seaside music hall, rescued from demolition and lovingly restored. It was somewhere on the west coast of England. I don’t remember where, exactly. One of those Victorian coastal resorts that had somehow survived the town hall vandals of the fifties and sixties and retained a kind of faded charm. The original promenade which ran a mile or so along the seafront was still there, and the pier
was an elaborate structure of iron struts and girders nearly five hundred feet long. The pavilion itself was a shambles of curved roofs on the T at the end of it, and housed an auditorium with a seating capacity of between four and five hundred. In the summer it hosted those seaside variety shows that still somehow attracted large audiences. But events in November were few and far between.

It was typical of the gigs that Donald had been booking for the band, and Roddy was in a mood even before we set off, determined to have it out with Donald, who had agreed to meet us there.

It was a filthy night, wet and blustery, light fading as we drove into a little town en route, tucked away among the unfamiliar folds of rolling green English countryside. I was peering through my rain-smeared windscreen searching for signposts when Rambo, who always travelled in the van with me, suddenly shouted at me to stop. I jammed on the brakes.

‘What the hell—?’

The car carrying the rest of band nearly ploughed into the back of us.

‘There’s a guy on the bridge.’ Rambo pointed across my line of vision towards the parapet of a bridge that spanned the brown waters of a river in spate. It was an old stone bridge, with lamp posts at intervals across its arch. A man stood up on the parapet wall, one hand clutching a lamp post. He was looking down at the water rushing past below. There was no mistaking his intent. A man steeling himself to jump.

Roddy, Mairead and the others leapt out of the following car and ran round to my door.

‘What’s wrong?’ Roddy shouted.

I pointed over the bridge. ‘Looks like that guy’s about to do away with himself.’

Everyone looked and there was a momentary hiatus. ‘Jesus,’ Roddy whispered. ‘What are we going to do?’

I glanced at my watch. ‘We’re running late already.’

Mairead threw me a look. ‘A man’s life is a little more important, don’t you think, than a gig on a pier?’

We all looked at her in surprise.

‘She’s right,’ Strings said. ‘Come on, let’s try and talk him down.’

But Mairead grabbed his arm. ‘No, you’ll scare him off. I’ll talk to him.’

We watched as Mairead made her way cautiously towards him, and heard her call out. ‘Hello, I wonder if you could help me? I think we’re lost.’

The man’s head snapped around, frightened rabbit’s eyes drinking her in. He was a man in his fifties I would say, losing his hair. Unshaven, and wearing a shabby raincoat over charcoal-grey trousers and a thread-worn cardigan. ‘Don’t come near me!’ He raised his voice above the roar of the water and glanced beyond her in our direction.

‘What are you doing up there?’ Mairead asked him.

‘What do you think?’

Mairead looked down at the river and shook her head. ‘Not a good idea. You’ll ruin your shoes.’

He looked at her with something like disbelief, and then
she smiled, and there was something about Mairead’s smile that no man I ever knew could resist. He smiled back. A timid, uncertain smile. ‘They’re not new,’ he said. ‘So it won’t really matter.’

She looked at his feet. ‘You’re wearing odd socks.’

He seemed surprised, and took a look for himself. ‘Who cares?’

‘There must be someone who does.’

His lips tightened into a grim line and he shook his head. ‘No one.’

‘No one at all?’

‘The only one who ever did is gone.’

I saw her eyes fall upon the man’s left hand holding the lamp post and the band of gold on his third finger. ‘Your wife?’

He nodded.

‘She left you?’

‘She’s dead.’

‘Recently?’

Again he shook his head. ‘A year ago today. Cancer. It was a long time coming.’ He turned to look at the water flashing below, then back at Mairead. ‘I tried so very hard. But I just can’t do it any more.’

Mairead moved carefully, then, turning around to pull herself up into a sitting position on the parapet at his feet, hands flat on the wall on either side of her. ‘No children?’

Another shake of the head. Then, ‘Well, yes. But he’s in Australia. I told you, nobody cares.’

She tilted her head to look up at him. ‘I care.’

He almost laughed. ‘You don’t even know me.’

‘Yes, I do. I know you very well.’

‘No, you don’t!’ His tone was hostile now.

‘Yes I do.’ And I saw a shadow cross her face, a cloud of real emotion. ‘You’re every man who’s ever lost the woman he loves. You’re my dad. I wish I’d been there for him. But I never knew, you see. He never said. And I never found out till he was gone. The young are too busy with their own lives. And it’s easy to forget that your folks still have lives, too. Feelings. You never lose those, even when you get older.’ She turned moist eyes towards him. ‘Have you told him? Your son. Have you told him how you feel?’

‘I’m not going to bother him with stuff like that.’

‘And you don’t think he’ll be bothered when the police come knocking on his door to tell him his father killed himself? You don’t think he’ll wonder why you never spoke to him? Or the guilt he’ll probably live with for the rest of his life, thinking there’s something he could or should have done?’

The man’s face crumpled, then, and tears rolled down his cheeks with the rain. ‘I didn’t want to be a nuisance.’

Mairead eased herself off the wall and held out a hand towards him. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You’re not a nuisance. Let’s go and call him. Right now.’

‘It’s the middle of the night there,’ he said.

Mairead smiled. ‘He won’t mind. Trust me.’

He looked at her for a long moment, and she held his eye, hand still outstretched, until finally he grasped it and
jumped down on to the pavement beside her. Mairead put her arms around him and hugged him. The rain intensified then, as if crying with them, soaking them both as they stood in the middle of the bridge, darkness falling around them, the lights of cars raking past, drivers oblivious to the little life-and-death drama playing itself out by the parapet.

Then, still holding his hand, she walked him towards us.

‘Come on, mate,’ Roddy said, ushering him into the car. ‘Let’s get you home.’

The man lived in a semi-detached house in a short suburban street on the outskirts of the town. A drab, miserable place. Mairead switched on the lights and put on a kettle. A train rattled past the foot of a long, narrow garden with a dilapidated potting shed and an overgrown lawn.

Roddy went next door and came back with the neighbour, an elderly woman who fussed and flapped in the tiny kitchen where the rest of us were gathered, and said she knew a friend who would come and sit with him. And Mairead sat him down by the electric fire with the phone, and dialled the number of his son in Australia.

We left him then, with the neighbour keeping an eye till the friend arrived, the man talking hesitantly to his son ten thousand miles away. I could not really imagine what kind of a conversation it might be. But he was alive, and he was speaking about how he felt instead of bottling it up and driving himself to suicide. And that was all down to Mairead.

On the path, as we walked back to the vehicles parked in the road, I said to her, ‘I didn’t know your parents were dead.’

She shrugged. ‘They’re not.’ And then she laughed at my frown. ‘Oh, Fin, Fin, you’re such an innocent. The situation called for a story, so I gave him one. When I sing about a broken heart, or everlasting love, folk need to believe that it’s true. That my tears are real. I’m good at that.’

I thought about the emotion which had clouded her face as she lied to the man on the bridge, and how easily both he and I had been convinced. And I realized then that I could never trust her to tell me the truth about anything.

The upshot of it all was that we arrived an hour late for the gig on the pier. The manager was a skinny, uptight, bald little man called Tuckfield. He wore a blue suit with brown shoes. A combination I had never trusted. He was red-faced and close to apoplexy. And, of course, there was no sign of the smooth-talking Donald to pour salve on troubled waters.

‘I have three hundred paying customers in there baying for my blood or their money back,’ he spluttered at Roddy.

Me and the guys left Roddy to try and explain as we unloaded the van. I don’t know how we did it, but the band was on stage and opening the show within half an hour. Myself, and a Glasgow boy called Archie, who drove the car, lay down in sleeping bags in the back of the van to try to get some sleep, and the band played for almost three hours to make up for their late arrival.

The first I knew that there was any trouble was when the back doors of the van were flung open and Roddy stood out on the pier, his face grey with anger. ‘That bastard won’t pay us!’

‘What?’ I sat bolt upright. If the band didn’t get paid, I wouldn’t get paid.

‘We played nearly an hour longer than agreed to make up for being late, but he still says we were in breach of contract and won’t pay.’

I jumped out the back. ‘Let’s go talk to him.’

We found him in his office at the end of a corridor behind the stage. He was wary and defensive when Roddy and I came in, and took an instinctive step back from the door. He raised a hand. ‘I don’t want any trouble.’

‘There’ll be no trouble,’ I said. ‘Just pay us and we’re gone.’

He waggled a finger. ‘No, no, no. You people left me hung out to dry tonight. That wasn’t professional. You broke your contract. Get me your manager on the phone, and when we’ve agreed compensation, you’ll get your money.’

‘You’ve had your compensation,’ Roddy almost bellowed at him. ‘We played an extra fucking hour!’

‘I still had people asking for their money back. People who left before you even showed up.’

I thought Roddy was going to go for him, and stepped in quickly, hand raised. ‘Okay, let’s get Donald on his mobile.’ Not everyone had mobile phones in those days. Donald had the latest model, but there was no guarantee that he would be in any fit state to answer it. He should have been at the
gig with us. But he wasn’t. God only knew what had become of him.