The Fanatic (3 page)

‘Don’t be sulky, Jackie. Get him over and we’ll toast your alma mater. Why ever not?’

‘Well, to be honest, he’s a bit weird. He was a postgraduate when I was doing final year Honours. He sat in on a course I was doing – First World War or something. The guy running the course was supervising his PhD. But he dropped out – never finished it as far as I know.’

‘Shame,’ said Hugh. ‘Get him over, won’t you?’

‘Wait, I said. He was weird. Gave me the creeps.’

‘As far as I’m concerned, you’re just writing him a great CV. He has got something, hasn’t he? To look at, I mean. That woman over there can’t stop checking him out. He’s
disturbing
her. Don’t you see?’

‘It doesn’t surprise me,’ said Jackie. ‘All the women in the class felt the same. You tried to avoid his eye. Not that he actually ever did anything, you understand.’

‘Some people have that, don’t they? That amazing ability to upset other people just by being themselves. They don’t have to
do
anything.’

The old men, who had glanced at the man when he came in, had not paid him any attention since. Hugh, who made his living by exploiting how different people reacted to what they saw, noticed this and liked it. The old men were never going to be his customers. Jackie and the tourist were the ones who mattered, and they had the right responses. The barman, who probably saw the guy regularly, wasn’t bothered by him. The student seemed to have fallen asleep.

‘What’s his name?’ Hugh asked.

Jackie shook her head.

‘It’s all right, I won’t shout it out or anything. I won’t embarrass you.’

‘Carlin,’ she said. ‘Alan, I think. No, Andrew. Andrew Carlin.’

‘Andrew!’ shouted Hugh. The others in the bar stared at him, and the student woke with a jerk. ‘Andrew Carlin! Over here!’

‘You bastard,’ said Jackie.

‘Sorry,’ said Hugh. ‘No gain without pain.’

Carlin sat with a quarter-pint in front of him, and said nothing. Hardie had jumped up to buy him a drink as soon as the one he had was less than half full. ‘Less than half full, rather than more than half empty, that’s the kind of guy I am,’ said Hardie jovially and without a trace of irony. ‘What is that, eighty shilling?’ Carlin looked at him without expression, and nodded once. When Hardie went to the bar, there was an awkward silence between the other two. Jackie had been badgered earlier by Hugh into reminiscing about the class she and Carlin had both attended. The responses from
Carlin had been monosyllabic. Now she tried a different tack.

‘So what have you been up to since I saw you last? It must be, what, six years? I mind you gave up on the PhD. Can’t say I blame you, I was scunnered of History after one degree. Well, maybe not scunnered, just tired.’

‘Aye,’ said Carlin. He gazed at her. She wasn’t sure if he was merely acknowledging what she’d said or agreeing with it. She was aware again of the piercing stare that had been so oppressive in the class, and lowered her eyes. Even as she did so she felt she’d conceded a small victory to him. She made herself look back up, and found him off guard, and saw something she hadn’t expected. A woundedness? Damage? Fear? She couldn’t tell.

‘Six years, I’d say,’ said Carlin. ‘Mair or less. Whit I’ve been up tae: this and that.’

Jackie thought, Christ, is he on something? She wished Hugh would hurry up.

‘Are you working?’ she asked.

‘In whit sense?’

‘You know, in a working sense. In a job sense.’ She felt herself growing angry at him. She wasn’t a wee undergraduate any more, she ought not to be intimidated by his weirdness.

‘Na,’ he said, ‘no in that sense.’

Hardie returned. ‘There you go, mate, get that down you,’ he said chummily. Jackie cringed. Carlin shifted the new pint behind the unfinished one but otherwise said nothing.

‘Have you got a job at the moment, Andrew?’ Hardie asked.

‘She jist asked me that.’

‘Oh, has she been filling you in then?’

‘Has she been filling me in? I don’t think so.’

‘I’ve got a job for someone who needs a bit of extra cash,’ said Hardie. ‘The pay’s not great but the work’s steady and there’s not much to it. I think it would really suit you.’

More than you might bargain for, Jackie thought, you’ll end up with corpses all over the Old Town.

‘I run these ghost tours, okay? Three a day, seven days a week. The last one of the day, that’s a bit special. I charge the punters more for it and it always sells out. Well, it does in the summer anyway. It’s a bit of fun, but a bit scary too, right?
Plus we do some special effects in the half-light. That’s where you come in. If you’re interested.’

Carlin inclined his head. He might have been encouraging Hugh Hardie to continue or he might have been falling asleep.

‘I need someone to play the part of a ghost. As soon as you came through that door, before Jackie even said she knew you, isn’t that right Jackie, I said you were perfect. You see, you look like someone. A guy called Major Weir, the Wizard of the West Bow. Have you heard of him?’

Carlin shook his head. When he spoke his voice was slow and toneless. ‘Is he like, real? A real person?’

‘Oh, definitely.
Was
real, yeah, for sure. Basically he and his sister Grizel, well, they were kind of Puritans, you know, the tall black hat brigade, Bible-thumping Calvinists.’

‘I ken whit Puritans are,’ said Carlin.

‘Good. Great. Well, anyway, one day they got found out. They were complete hypocrites. Satanists, I guess. They used to meet up with the Devil and stuff. And they were shagging each other. Grizel – isn’t that a brilliant name? – was kind of out of it, she was just a crazy old woman, but Major Weir, he was a
baad
guy. Not only did he shag his sister, he shagged cows and anything else that moved.’ Hardie broke off. ‘Of course, I’m paraphrasing. We don’t put it quite like this on the tour.’

‘I should think not,’ said Jackie. ‘Is this the man you want Andrew to impersonate? I take it he doesn’t have to be too realistic’ She didn’t understand herself: one minute she was disturbed by Carlin, the next she felt he needed protecting. She noticed how he sat: hunched, or coiled. When Hugh’s expansive gestures got too close, he seemed to shrink back. And yet this was less like a timid reaction than like, say, the natural movement of a reed in the wind.

‘No,’ Hugh said, ‘for the purposes of the tour, our ghost just does a bit of straightforward spookery. Appears suddenly at the ends of closes, that kind of thing. The Major got burnt for witchcraft and for years after that people were supposed to see him in the Old Town, round where Victoria Street now is and down the Cowgate, so that’s what we’ve got him doing – revisiting his old haunts, ha ha! I supply all the props – cloak, staff and wig. Oh, and a rat, but I’ll tell you about that
later. If you’re interested I’ll walk you through the part. On location, as it were. So, waddya think?’

‘Every night?’ said Carlin.

‘Yeah, but if you can’t manage the occasional night that’s okay, as long as I know in advance. It’s only an hour and a half. How about it?’

‘Whit’s the pay?’

‘Fiver a night. I know it’s not much, but for an hour or so, hey, that’s not a bad rate these days. Well above the minimum wage, if there was one. Oh, and nothing to come off it either. Cash in hand, thirty-five quid every week, no questions asked. Are you on benefit? Forget I said that. Waddya think?’

Carlin finally drained his first pint and started on the second. ‘It’s a commitment,’ he said after a while. ‘Every night, like.’

‘Well, as I said, if you can’t make it sometimes, we can negotiate. Get a stand-in. But I need someone to start straight away, and believe me, you’d be great for the part. Look, I’ll tell you what. Here’s an incentive: if you do it seven nights a week without missing one, I’ll round the cash up to forty quid. If you miss a night, you only get paid for the nights you work. That’s pretty fair, isn’t it?’

Jackie snorted and Hugh Hardie gave her what she assumed was supposed to be a withering glance. Some long and complicated process seemed to be going on in Carlin’s brain. Eventually he said, ‘I’m no sure.’

‘What aren’t you sure about? Talk to me, Andrew.’

‘The haill idea. It’s no the money. It’s the idea.’

Hardie made a shrugging gesture. ‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’

‘Well, that’s whit I’m no sure aboot. This guy Major Weir. You jist packaged him up in ten seconds and haund it him ower. Life’s no like that. I mean, d’ye ken whit ye’re daein wi him?’

‘He’s just a character, that’s all.’

‘You said he was real.’

‘Well, yeah, but he’s been dead three hundred years. Now he’s just a character. A “real character”, you might say.’ Hardie laughed a little nervously. ‘Anyway, we take the people round the places he lived in, tell them about the past. Not just him,
Burke and Hare, Deacon Brodie, all that stuff. I’ll take you on the route and you can see for yourself what we
do
with him, as you put it.’

‘That’d be guid,’ said Carlin. ‘I would need tae know, ken.’

‘Look,’ said Hugh, ‘I haven’t got time to show you the ropes if you’re not going to take the job. I need you to start this week. Tonight if possible. Tomorrow definitely. So, come on, how about it? Meet at the Heart of Midlothian at, say, eleven tomorrow morning and take it from there, eh?’

Carlin drank more of his pint. ‘And I’m like him, am I?’ he said.

‘The spitting image,’ said Hugh Hardie.

‘Show me the ropes then,’ Carlin said. ‘When I’m sure, I might no dae it. But I’ll dae it while I’m no sure aboot it.’

Although this was delivered in the same flat monotone, Hardie interpreted it as a joke of some sort and laughed loudly. Maybe it was relief. ‘Brilliant!’ he said, raising his glass. ‘
Slàinte.
’

Carlin didn’t respond. Jackie Halkit, raising her own drink instinctively, noticed that his glass, which only a couple of minutes ago had been almost full, was now down to the dregs. She hadn’t been aware of him drinking in the interim.

‘So what about the book, Jackie?’ Hardie turned and asked. ‘Is it a project?’

‘If you make it one,’ she said. She was aware of Carlin swivelling on his stool, standing up. Maybe he’s going to buy a round, she thought, and laughed into herself. She dragged her mind back to answering Hugh’s question. ‘As far as I’m concerned, at this point in space and time, no, it isn’t,’ she said.

‘Great,’ said Hardie. ‘It’s inspiring to work with you too.’ For a moment she thought he was angry at her, but then he gave her that winning smile. She had a sudden image of herself, seated in a pub late one afternoon, her consciousness being worked over by two men, both of whom intrigued her though she found them, for different reasons, slightly repellent. She felt she needed to get out in the sunlight.

‘Hey,’ Hugh said, ‘maybe I could get
him
to write it. Being a historian and everything.’

She brought herself back. ‘Where is he?’ she asked Hugh. Carlin had disappeared.

‘Gone for a slash, I assume,’ said Hugh. But at the end of five minutes, and after Hugh had been on a scouting expedition to the toilet, it became clear that Carlin had left the pub.

‘Fucking marvellous!’ said Hugh. ‘I mean, what’s that all about? Is he going to do it? Did we make arrangements? I don’t even know where the guy lives. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea, Jackie.’

‘Perfect for the part, I think you said. Don’t expect any sympathy from me, you rat. I did try to warn you.’

‘But he
is
perfect. I really want him scaring the shit out of my tourists. Do you not know where he lives?’

‘No. And I don’t want to either. But you did make arrangements, even if they didn’t seem very definite to you. That’s one of the things I mind about him, you only needed to say something once and it lodged, it stuck there in his head and he never forgot it.

‘One time when I was a student, someone sort of half-suggested we all go for a drink after the last class before we went home for Christmas, in Sandy Bell’s it was supposed to be, but it never came to anything, people just sloped off in different directions muttering cheerios. But then a couple of the girls caught up with me and said, Come on, let’s get pissed, so we did, just the three of us, we hit the Royal Mile and had a right laugh.

‘We all stayed in different flats over in Marchmont, so we were heading that way at the end of the evening and one of them says, Right, in here quick, one for the road before we get raped across the Meadows, and it was Sandy Bell’s, and would you believe it, the bastard was in there, cool as you like, propping up the bar listening to the folkies, and he turns to us and says. Well, I thought yous were never going to show. And we had a round but the fun had gone out of us like balloons, we just all stood around in a circle watching each other drink, him with his eyes on us all the time, and then he walked with us home across the Meadows cause he stayed up in Bruntsfield somewhere. I tell you, we were all that freaked we had to lie we all stayed in the same street cause none of us wanted to be the last one alone with him.’

‘Now that’s scary,’ said Hugh Hardie. ‘Creeps that hang
around all night on the basis of a throwaway suggestion. I hate that kind of no-hoper stuff. But you can’t get away from it, he’s an ideal match for Major Weir. They might have been made for each other. So, Heart of Midlothian at eleven, was that what we agreed? Do you think he’ll show?’

‘Unless he’s changed in six years,’ said Jackie. ‘Which I don’t think. Seems to me he just got weirder than he was already. You turn up there on time, I’ll bet he’s waiting on you.’

Their glasses were empty. ‘I’d better go,’ she said. ‘I’ve got stuff to do tonight.’

‘What stuff?’

‘Lassies’ stuff. You know, cleaning the bath, reducing the ironing pile, that kind of everyday homely stuff.’

‘God. Glad I’m not a lassie. Sure you don’t want another?’

‘No thanks, Hugh. But – and I know this is going to sound pathetically girlie too – what I would appreciate is if you’d just get me down the street a wee bit. I’ve got this feeling about Andrew Carlin. I don’t want him following me home or anything.’