The Chessmen (26 page)

And so I took it badly when she ended us one night, suddenly and without warning.

We were supposed to be going to a party and had agreed to meet in the bar of the Cul de Sac in Ashton Lane, in Glasgow’s west end. Mairead had said she would meet me at seven. By 8.30 I was still waiting and was on my third
pint. The place was crowded, and I could see people milling about in the lane below. There were several restaurants, bars and a cinema in the old cobbled street, and one of the restaurants on the far side had put out tables so that its patrons could enjoy the fine midsummer weather and take advantage of the light nights.

At first I wasn’t worried. Mairead was prone to bouts of lateness, when she decided five minutes before going out that she really had to have a shower. At least she didn’t have to spend hours on her hair, but the make-up could take half an hour. She was very conscious of her appearance or, as she liked to say, her image. Mairead had a mobile phone, and I would have called her. But I couldn’t afford one myself, so that wasn’t an option. I was about to leave and drive over to the Angel Building when I saw her pushing her way through the drinkers towards me. As usual she was turning heads.

‘Hey,’ I said, ‘what happened?’ I went to kiss her cheek but she averted her head in a strangely abrupt movement. I knew at once what was coming.

She moved closer, lowering her voice, and her eyes. ‘Fin, I’m sorry. It’s over.’

I waited until she looked up to meet my eye. ‘Why?’

There was something like exasperation in her voice. ‘You knew it wasn’t for ever, Fin. We both knew that.’

I nodded. ‘We did. But I’d still like to know why.’

She shook her head. ‘There’s no point. Explanations aren’t going to make either of us feel any better about it.’ She suddenly took my face in both of her hands, an intensity
in her eyes that I couldn’t remember ever seeing there before, and she kissed me so softly, and with such tenderness, that I might almost have believed she really did feel something for me. ‘I’m so sorry, Fin.’

And she was gone. In those few moments everything I had been and known these last months came to an end. The dream was over. There was no hiding any more. I turned back to the bar and finished my pint.

Outside the air was cool, but soft on the skin. I walked in a daze through the west end, heading instinctively for the party that Mairead and I had been going to. It was in a block of red sandstone flats in Hyndland. I knew I didn’t want to go home. It was far easier to be lonely in a crowd. I would never have believed that breaking up with Mairead could be this painful. The thought that I would never kiss her again, or touch her breasts, or feel her legs wrapped around my back was almost more than I could bear. All I wanted to do was get drunk.

The party was already jumping by the time I got there. I said hi to a few familiar faces, and heard someone ask where Mairead was. I didn’t answer. I found myself a soft seat in a dark corner with a six-pack at my side and sprung open the first can.

The music was deafening, and people were dancing. The girl nearest me stepped back over someone’s handbag and promptly sat down in my lap. A pretty girl with short black hair.

She’d been drinking. She giggled. ‘Ooops. Sorry.’

Maybe there was something about her that reminded me of Mairead. I’m not sure now what it was, but I smiled. ‘Be my guest,’ I said.

She tipped her head and gave me a curious look. ‘Are you at uni?’

‘I am.’

‘I thought I’d seen you somewhere. What year?’

‘Second.’

‘I’m in first.’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘We intellectuals ought to stick together. My name’s Fin.’

She giggled again. ‘So we should. I’m Mona.’

And that is how I met the girl who would wake me up in the morning to tell me that Roddy was dead. The girl I would marry, and who would bear my son. The girl I would divorce sixteen years later when the one good thing we had made together was no more.

Mairead was still wearing her coat as if, perhaps, Marsaili had hoped she wouldn’t stay and hadn’t offered to take it. It was long and black, and concertinaed on the floor around her chair. Her style had not changed in all these years. Years that had treated her kindly. They had pared away some of the flesh from around her face, leaving her almost hawk-like but still beautiful, with clear white skin and only the hint of crow’s feet appearing around the corners of her eyes. Her lips were full and strikingly dark in contrast with the rest of her face. There was a knowing quality in their smile, and an odd fondness in her eyes.

‘Hello, Fin,’ she said, and it was as if that final exchange in the Cul de Sac had happened just the night before.

Fin’s eyes flickered towards Marsaili and back again. ‘Hello, Mairead. I see you’re still going to the same hairdresser.’

She grinned, and ran a hand back through her stubble. There was just a little silver appearing in it now, but it hadn’t concerned her enough to dye it. ‘It’s my trademark.
They’ll put me in my coffin with my hair like this. Only, I hope it’ll be pure white by then.’

‘You want a cup of tea, Fin?’ Marsaili’s voice cut in on the exchange like a child with her nose out of joint seeking attention.

‘I’ll have a beer,’ he said, and turned to get a bottle from the fridge.

‘Same old Fin.’ Mairead took a sip at her mug. ‘Always with a beer in his hand.’

Fin twisted the cap off the bottle. ‘What are you doing here, Mairead?’

‘She came looking for you,’ Marsaili said.

‘They told me in town that you were restoring your parents’ crofthouse. I was amazed to hear that you’d come back. Last I heard you were being a cop in Edinburgh.’ And she chuckled. ‘I laughed out loud when I heard that. Fin Macleod. Policeman! Remember chasing the cops through the streets of that resort town in England?’

Fin grinned. ‘I guess we were lucky not to end up in a police cell.’

‘Who’s this
we
you talk about, Kemo Sabe?’

Marsaili glanced, perplexed, from one to the other as they shared their laughter. ‘Someone want to let me in on the joke?’

Fin waved his hand dismissively. ‘It’s a long story, Marsaili.’ Then paused, as a thought occurred to him. ‘I guess you two know one another from school?’

‘We shared some of the same classes,’ Mairead said. ‘But had different friends.’ She smiled at Marsaili. ‘I would never
have recognized you. Except I’d been told that you two were an item these days.’

‘Of course, I knew you straight away.’ Marsaili was smiling, but there was an edge to her voice. ‘Who wouldn’t?’ She turned towards Fin. ‘I saw her from the window. She was standing up there on the shoulder of the hill looking a bit like a lost soul.’

Fin quickly refocused the conversation. ‘I suppose you’re here for the funeral?’

Mairead’s face clouded. ‘Not just for it, Fin. To organize it. There are no relatives that we know of. So it’s up to Roddy’s friends to give him a proper send-off. You’ll both be coming?’

‘I won’t.’ Marsaili pushed herself away from the worktop to empty the last of her tea down the sink and rinse the mug. ‘I never really knew Roddy. And I’ve got the baby to look after.’

Mairead raised an eyebrow in surprise. ‘Baby?’

‘Our granddaughter,’ Fin said. And then felt compelled to explain. ‘We had a son I never knew about till recently.’

Mairead took Marsaili’s cue with the mug and stood up. ‘Never could keep it in the breeks, Fin, could you?’ Fin blushed and she smiled. ‘And still blushing, I see. Always wore your heart on your sleeve, you did.’ She held his gaze for a long moment. ‘They were interesting times we lived in.’

Fin nodded. ‘They were.’ And he took a pull on the neck of his bottle to disguise his discomfort. ‘You’ll let me know when the funeral’s to be?’

‘I will, now that I know where you are. I’m at the Cabarfeidh, in town.’ She paused, which made it sound almost like an invitation. And then she added, ‘Strings and Skins and Rambo are there, too.’

It seemed odd to Fin to hear those teenage nicknames again, as if somehow they should have grown out of them. And yet he still called Whistler, Whistler.

Mairead turned an ersatz smile towards Marsaili. ‘It was lovely to meet you again. Thanks for the tea.’ Fin opened the kitchen door for her and she paused momentarily as she passed him, a strange searching look in her eyes. But all she said was, ‘See you at the funeral,’ and was gone.

There was a long silence in the kitchen after she had left. It was almost as if Marsaili was waiting to hear the sound of her car starting, to be certain that she was away, before she spoke. ‘You two had a relationship, then?’

There was no point in denying it. ‘That obvious?’

‘Oh, yes.’ A long pause. ‘How come you never told me?’

Fin shrugged. ‘Nothing to tell. It was another me, in another place and time.’

‘Seems to me there are a lot of Fin Macleods I don’t know anything about.’ She lifted Mairead’s mug from the table to rinse it in the sink, and caught her reflection in the kitchen window. Fin saw her raise a hand, almost involuntarily, to sweep the hair back from her face. ‘She’s still very beautiful,’ she said, as if the contrast with her own reflection had prompted the thought.

‘She is.’ Fin drank some more of his beer. ‘We had a relationship, yes, Marsaili. But I never liked her very much.’

Marsaili was surprised. ‘No?’

Fin shook his head.

‘Why not?’

‘I knew her too well. She never cared much about anyone or anything, except herself. It was all me, me, me.’

Marsaili dried her hands on the dishtowel and there was a sadness in her smile. ‘A bit like someone else, I know.’ And she walked past him to the living room.

Mairead’s voice rang around the rafters of the church, clear and pure and unaccompanied. The doors were open so that those outside could hear her, and in the still of this sad grey morning, her voice drifted out across Loch Ròg, a plaintive lament for a lost friend and lover.

Somehow, in the Gaelic, both the words and the melody were more powerful, more tribal, of the land and the place and the people. And Fin found the hairs rising up on the back of his neck. He had missed the original funeral, but the others were all here to bury Roddy again, just as they
had done seventeen years before. Only then, the coffin they had carried was empty, save for some rocks and a few personal items from childhood. His parents had wanted it that way. To give a sense of closure. A chance to say goodbye.

Now the coffin with his body in it awaited them outside his old home overlooking Uig sands from the north shore. His parents had been returned to the earth now themselves, but the new owners of the house his father had built had given permission for the funeral procession to start from there.

As the mourners streamed out of the little church at Miabhaig, Fin reflected that it was more like a circus than a funeral. The Scottish media had descended en masse, along with stringers for most of the English press. Cameras flashed and pencils scribbled in notebooks, and digital video recorded all for posterity – and the six o’clock news. The discovery of Roddy’s body had been occupying pride of place on the news schedules for days. Archive footage from seventeen years earlier had been unearthed and hastily cut together with the latest video to feed the public’s voracious appetite for celebrity news. Celebrity death appealed even more to popular prurience. Throw in a little murder and mystery, and ratings were guaranteed. Sales of Amran’s CD backlist had soared.

Fin had expected Whistler to show up. He had disappeared again following their encounter outside the Sheriff Court, but there was no sign of him at the church. And it wasn’t until Fin stepped outside that he set eyes on Strings and Skins and Rambo for the first time.

He was shocked by how both Skins and Rambo had aged. Rambo was almost completely bald, and looked twenty years older than the others. Skins’ hair was streaked steel-grey, and swept back from a face devoid of its once boyish charm. Strings, too, had slipped quietly into middle age, perhaps hoping that shoulder-length dyed hair tied in a ponytail would create the illusion of a younger man. But he was thinner, meaner somehow, the fingers that spidered over his fretboard longer and bonier now than Fin remembered. Only Mairead seemed to have the Peter Pan touch. She looked as radiant and beautiful as she had as a teenager. She had never lost that certain something which had bewitched so many boys, and no doubt so many men in later life. She was the sole identifiable image of Amran. It was always her face that featured on the covers of their CDs, on their website, on their concert posters. No one but the most ardent of fans would have recognized Skins or Rambo, or even Strings. They were background. Wallpaper. Just musicians. Mairead
was
Amran.

Many of the mourners drove straight to the cemetery at Ardroil. Those who intended to make up the procession gathered outside the former Mackenzie home on the road above the beach, along with the media circus.

Fin was astonished to see Donald there, come out of his self-imposed exile in Ness to expose himself to public scrutiny for the first time since the shooting in Eriskay. And he was as much a source of interest and curiosity to the crowd as the presence of the celebrities of Amran. He was, it transpired, to be one of the primary coffin-bearers, at
Mairead’s request, along with Fin, Strings, Skins, Rambo and Big Kenny. All of them together again for the first time since fifth year at the Nicolson.

But since it was a two-mile walk to Ardroil, there were another six men standing by to provide periodic relief in relays. The coffin itself weighed much more than the remains of the man inside it, solid oak resting heavily on the broad shoulders that raised it from the chairbacks on which it had been resting in the road. A helicopter hired by one of the news networks flew overhead.

It took the procession of well over fifty people more than an hour to reach the turn-off to the cemetery. There was a hand-painted sign with a white arrow pointing past a tubular agricultural gate, and a rough track wound up over the machair to the walls of the cemetery itself beyond the rise. Shoulders were aching, hands numb, by the time they got there.