The Red Road (20 page)

Morrow and McCarthy sat in the car, stopped at a red light. She glanced at him. He looked quite frightened.

‘You all right, McCarthy?’

He nodded but he clearly wasn’t.

‘What’s on your mind?’

He kept his eyes on the lights. ‘What the hell’s going on, boss? Who is David Monkton?’

Morrow didn’t know what to tell him. She had never heard of him either.

17

Robert was in the pink drawing room. There were no traces of last night, no empty glasses, no full or empty bottles. The hippy must have moved them. Was the rental of the castle serviced? Robert couldn’t remember.

He had pulled an armchair up to the window and sat looking out at the sea, keeping a watch on the driveway. He tutted at his naivety: they wouldn’t come up the driveway. That wasn’t how death came. Death seeped through cracks, burst down doors, stormed beds and punctured walls. Death didn’t take a minicab from the station. Still, he couldn’t stop himself watching for it.

The painkillers had kicked in, the headache and sickness had retreated, mustering forces in his core as they waited for the medication to leave his system. He wasn’t actively in pain but he was smelly and trembling. He felt sticky. His balls were itchy. He was too sad to wash. Sometimes, he was too sad to even scratch his balls. He just sat there and suffered it.

He blinked and the sharp precognition of death receded like the sea on the beach. He saw himself getting lost in details of what was outside the window, how smelly he was, how soon he could take more pills. He was getting caught up in the petty details of day to day.

Abruptly, he imagined someone standing behind him with a gun to his head and he thought suddenly that ‘my balls are itchy’ wasn’t the last thought he wanted to have.

That brought him back to himself.

I am going to die, he thought. I am going to die today, probably. He resolved to get ready for it but had to acknowledge how slippery it was, how hard it was to stay focused.

The task then was to manage to stay focused, somehow, to remain aware of what was happening. And then another thought came to him: what good was it remaining focused on the fact that he was about to die? It wouldn’t get him ready for it, wouldn’t make it hurt less or stop him sobbing at the end and begging.

The questions baffled him. He tried to backtrack to yesterday, when he wasn’t hung-over and felt sure that he knew what he was doing. He thought they would have followed him here but it was nearly lunchtime and he was still sitting at a window.

He thought he’d be dead by now. Where were they?

He imagined them then, two men in a car, driving off the ferry. He saw them following the liquorice strip of road over the hills, around the inland lochs, down through the boggy land by the sea and through forests. He saw them slowing on the winding single track road, pulling over in passing places, letting locals know they were strangers by raising a full hand in thank you instead of the thankful finger-raise used by accustomed locals.

Or maybe the person sent to kill him was on this island, creeping inexorably across a hill towards him right now.

But maybe they weren’t coming because they didn’t know where he was. In which case he could sit at the window for a year, waiting.

Annoyed at the thought, Robert scratched his balls and then, buoyed by the achievement, he stood up. They might not know where he was. It hadn’t even occurred to him. He’d paid for everything with cash, not credit cards, he’d told no one. He even found the castle in a printed catalogue lying around the house and called from a payphone.

No one knew where he was. The SOCA report would be with the police, it would be leaked by now, the police were as leaky as a sieve, and whoever his father was in business with would be after him.

They’d check Robert’s old firm, his colleagues at the firm, see who he was close to. Robert wished he was back there, fighting with the other junior partners, falling out with the secretaries, being overlooked for promotion. It seemed a golden time now. He’d left with great ceremony, leaving to take over his father’s firm. He remembered thinking as he left that
now
he’d be happy.

The pictures of Rose came into his head and winded him. He sat back down. She looked the same in the photos. Her face was recognisably her. She even had her hair pulled back in a high ponytail. She was crying in one of them. Her face impassive but tears dropping off her nose as she leaned forward. He could tell she was young. She hardly had any pubic hair.

When he took them out of the safe and looked at them Robert threw them across the room. He scurried to the opposite wall and clung to it. Did his father take those photographs? Did his father masturbate to them? No one would masturbate to them, they were terrifying. But then you never knew what people wanted to see. When he saw them Robert was so mesmerised by her face that he didn’t see the context. It was a small girl, naked in a group of looming men, dark men, some laughing, some leering. But Robert being Robert only saw Rose in the pictures. Rose crying. Rose looking up at a face, frightened. Rose smiling in one of them as a man fingered her. The rooms were anonymous. There was drink.

These were the things people did when the lights were out, when no one was watching.

I cannot fix this, he thought, in the low womb of the safe room, as he held the warm wall. I cannot fix this on my own. He had seen the books. Why did his father have those pictures of Rose?

Rose was almost a sister to Robert. She was in prison, he was at school. She had accidentally killed a man who tried to abuse her, his father told him. They went to visit her. And Julius and Robert stayed loyal to her, differentiating themselves from those sorts of men.

Robert visited her in prison with his father. On the way there, for the first visit, Robert half hoped he’d fancy her but he didn’t. Later he thought that they were too much alike but that wasn’t true, really. They just didn’t fancy each other. He accepted her the way family do: without too much appraisal, without assessing her. She was theirs and when she became their nanny Robert felt that it was right and proper and was delighted she and Francine got on so well, with Francine being always a little bit delicate even before she got ill. Like his mother: Margery was always a little bit ill.

But to see her in the photos, that made him ferocious about her. He wanted to wrap himself around her, small Rose, and protect her from these terrible men. He was prepared to ruin himself, his family, his father’s reputation, if it meant bringing these men down too. He would do that for Rose. So he called the police and did what they told him: fill out the form.

He sat at the window of the castle and felt slightly better again, remembering how honourable he was being, how different from the men in the picture. He was going to let them kill him for Rose. He stood up, thinking he might go for a shit, trying to remember where the toilets were, and then he saw him: the hippy was in the field below the castle, trundling across it on his quad bike. He stopped, took a small bag of grain from under his cape and emptied it onto the ground. Then he drove a few yards away and watched the geese gather around and eat it.

The geese were chalk white, bigger than a city dweller like himself would have supposed. The hippy folded his arms under his cape and watched them. Even from here Robert could see that he was smiling. And then two men at the distant end of the field, beyond the fence, waving him over. The hippy looking at them, seeing them, staying on his bike and trundling over to them and Robert was gripped by horror as he saw him approach them in their dark clothes, faces obscured by woolly hats pulled low. He couldn’t see the hippy’s face but felt he was still smiling and the men were smiling, Robert could see flashes of teeth, they were smiling as he approached them and one of them had his hand in his pocket.

They chatted. The hippy tucked his hands into his cape, a woman’s cape for fuck’s sake. And then one of the men took his hands out of his pocket as Robert watched, holding his breath, and he offered the hippy a chewing gum. The hippy shook his head, took his hands out and drove back across the field. The men turned and walked on.

They were out for a walk.

Robert fell back from the window. He couldn’t let them kill the hippy. He just couldn’t let them. Robert was going to have to leave the castle.

Feeling much, much better, Robert walked up over the crest of the hill and found the sea laid out before him like a silver picnic blanket. To the left a steep drop led to the white sanded beach and the castle overlooking it. To the right soft green hills showed the decaying foundations of an abandoned village, one of those decaying crossword puzzles left by the clearances. The sharp wet wind whipped at his hair. Seagulls hovered over the sea. In front of him the land dropped away into the water.

Robert was wearing his office suit, city shoes and a one pound plastic cagoule he’d found in the boot of his car. Unfortunately, he’d stepped in a puddle as he came out of the house and his feet were wet, his toes numb with the cold now and the material on his shins was damp, sticking to him, making his skin numb on his bony shins. He felt wonderful. The rough terrain, the wind and noise and the screams of the seagulls, the intermittent rain and brutal blasts of sunshine all tore him from his father’s burden of guilt, from Rose’s tortured childhood and those circles of men, took him from faceless men talking to the hippy and thoughts of his children and left him in the moment. He had climbed up here on his hands and knees, scrabbled over scree, got his loafer stuck in a hollow full of mud. And he stood tall now on the ancient landscape, looking out at a sea that didn’t know or care that he existed.

He looked over at the village. Ankle-high stumps of foundations that were once homes to generations. They had been run off their land, victims of an injustice, bigger than he had suffered, bigger than a room full of men and small, naked Rose. The buildings had been left and had decayed back into the soil and now it didn’t really matter any more. He smiled and walked towards them. His shoes were squelching horribly, there seemed to be more water in them than out of them and he thought about taking them off to empty them and promised himself that he would when he got over there. He hurried up the hill, anticipating a little shelter from the wind. The native Highland people knew where to build, it would be a sheltered place for a village.

It wasn’t sheltered at all. At the first square of foundation stones he found the wind harder than the hill top he had come from. He stepped over the little wall, into the house, and tried to imagine what it would have been like. Very small. Tiny room. He felt nothing, tried to evoke some awe in himself: he tried to imagine a whole family, six kids and grandparents too living in this tiny room. But he wasn’t sure if it was a house. It could have been a dunny, for all he knew. Or a storeroom. He didn’t know how they lived back then. He circled the space. Six children and two parents and two grandparents couldn’t fit in this room, actually. It must be a storeroom.

He moved onto the next square, stepped inside and tried to reimagine the whole thing there. Why were there two grandparents, he thought. There should be four grandparents, but even just the two were too many. But maybe some grandparents would have died, at sea or of colds or something. He was pondering this when he stepped out of the imagined room.

His foot, expecting but not finding the ground where it was supposed to be, dropped suddenly away from him into a hole, overbalancing him so that he twisted and fell and landed on his face, on a big stone lying on the ground.

Robert lay in the wet grass, groaning, his cheekbone still on the offending stone. His mind flailed as he tried to think of someone to blame, the tourist board, the Highlanders, gravity. And then, at the same time as he became aware of the futility of blaming anyone for what was essentially a mishap, he became aware of the dull pain in his ankle and the tingling in his numb toes. He sat up and looked at the foot that had gone down the hole. He peeled up his wet trouser leg. The ankle looked raw in the bright light, raw and a bit chubby. And then as he watched, moving his toes, knowing it wasn’t broken, the ankle got fatter and fatter.

A seagull landed near him, eyeing him as though he might be a felled lamb. It looked fucking enormous, tipping its big, ugly head at him, getting the measure of him. Robert picked up a stone and threw it, missing. The seagull was unperturbed.

‘Fuck off!’ shouted Robert, but it didn’t.

He felt wetness on his face and reached up, took his hand away and saw blood. Really quite a lot of blood. It was coming from his cheek. He needed a mirror and looked around as if there might be one lying somewhere in the wet grass pitted with sheep shit.

The seagull was watching him. Maybe it had smelled the blood before he saw it. No, wait, that was vultures. It was eyeing him still, tipping and untipping its head as if working out which part of him to eat first. Robert felt foolish, at a disadvantage. He had a massive gash on his face the seagull knew more about than he did.

Then he had an idea. Sitting on the muddy ground with only one fully functioning ankle and blood dripping onto the plastic cagoule that was sticking to him like cellophane now, he took out his mobile, turned it on, touched the icon for the camera and took a photograph of his face. There. He could see it now. It wasn’t even that bad. Just a bit of split skin on his cheek.

He smirked over at the seagull but it was pecking at the ground. It opened its wings and flew straight out to sea.

Holding on to the low wall for support, Robert carefully extracted his grotesque ankle out of the hole and pulled the trouser leg back down over it. He bent his good leg under him and stood up, keeping the bad ankle off the ground until he was upright. If he couldn’t get down the hippy might be killed in his place. Then he tried it. Not too bad. He could get back down on his own. It was a little bit painful when his weight was on it. He’d have to go slow but it wasn’t too bad at all.