Tombstoning (6 page)

David laughed despite himself. ‘Really, I can’t let you go to the bother of…’

‘I told you, it’s decided. Next topic of conversation?’

Nicola came off the phone wondering why she had just railroaded him into going. Why did she care so much if David was there? She couldn’t really understand his reticence about going, to her it was just a weekend away from the usual humdrum stuff of life, a chance to see what the hell the people from her past had been up to, and an excuse to catch up with her family. But now, she supposed, it was something else as well. Since meeting David at the weekend she had been thinking about him a lot. He still seemed young and naive. He’d never had to grow up in the way that she had with Amy. Somehow this reunion was part of it all, she wanted him to see that the past wasn’t a scary place, it was just the past, and she wanted him to grow up a little, so that he could maybe, just maybe, fit a little better into her life. But she was also drawn to that naivety, that thing that she didn’t have any more, the idea of living only in the present. Because you couldn’t do that, not with a daughter and a future to think of. Was she jealous of him in a way? Probably, she thought. But a good kind of jealous, she told herself. Whatever the hell that meant.

David got an email the next day at lunchtime with B&B details. Fairport House, 66 Nolt Loan Road, owned by a Mrs Swankie, charging £20 a night. It was a few doors down from the house he’d grown up in. Nicola had obviously booked this place as a joke, or a reminder or something. It was a street of century-old semis opposite the Keptie Pond, a place where he’d had countless childhood adventures, falling through ice, chasing swans, upturning boats, discovering glue-sniffers, losing footballs, falling off his bike, fighting other kids and all the rest. If anywhere was going to open the floodgates of memories it was this street. Great, thought David, but part of him was also pleased that Nicola had gone to the trouble of sorting him out with somewhere, surely that meant something. Or was he totally getting ahead of himself? Yes, he thought, he absolutely was, but he couldn’t help himself and he found that as the days went on he was trying less and less to stop himself doing so.

She phoned him on Thursday night.

‘All set for tomorrow, then?’

‘What makes you think I’m going?’

‘Well you haven’t told me otherwise, and you’d bloody better be, because otherwise I’m due the money on that bloody B&B.’

‘Yeah, OK, I’m going. Thanks for sorting that out, by the way.’

‘Not a problem. Can’t vouch for the place, could be a doily-filled, lacy shitehole, but you’d be surprised how little tourist accommodation there is in Arbroath. Or maybe you wouldn’t, since you grew up there and you know what it’s like.’

‘Nolt Loan Road as well.’

‘Yes, I thought that was a nice touch. Trip down memory lane, etc. All very obvious, but there you go. If you will leave your arrangements in my hands, that’s what you get.’

‘Do you want a lift up the road?’

‘Me and Amy are getting the train after she finishes school. She’s still at the age where the train is exciting, although she won’t admit that any more, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘When are you heading up?’

‘Hadn’t really thought about it yet.’

‘Well, I’ll give you a phone at this B&B, say, early evening? We can meet up and go out for a proper drink this time, what with me having a houseful of babysitters. Get ourselves in the mood for the big do on Saturday. Fancy it?’

‘Sure. I’ll speak to you then.’

And that was it, done and dusted. He was going to Arbroath for a school reunion after fifteen years away, and he was doing it to be with her.

It was the kind of beautiful, clear summer evening that hardly ever happens in Scotland, but when it does it reminds you why you bother to hang around. A fat, orange sun cast long shadows down the Firth of Forth as David crossed the bridge, thankful to be out of the throb of Edinburgh traffic and heading into open spaces. He kept his window down after paying the toll, enjoying the sea breeze in his face. Radio One played their latest inane drivel but he didn’t mind, enjoying the numbness of not having to think while he listened.

The road through Fife was pleasantly monotonous. Rolling crop fields were interspersed with small bursts of trees, and occasionally a tractor or harvester could be spotted kicking up dust in the distance. When he hit Dundee, he took the riverside route, preferring to keep the Tay at his side. The tide was out and sandbanks glistened in the slanting sunlight.

After Dundee, David didn’t recognize the road at all. Diggers, trucks and all sorts of roadworks vehicles scuttled back and forth amid a maze of traffic cones. One large sign declared that they were converting the road to Arbroath into a dual carriageway, scheduled completion date 2007. They had been talking about that since he was a boy, and it looked like they were finally getting around to it. The going was slow and dusty as he sat behind a lorry kicking up dry dirt everywhere.

The trance of driving left his mind free to wander, and he started to think about Colin. He was a natural sportsman – one of those irritating kids who was good at every sport they tried. He probably could’ve become a professional at golf, tennis or even athletics, but had chosen football, something he had an innate gift for. When playing in the school team Colin had to dumb things down a bit so as not to make the sides too uneven, relegating himself to a peripheral role as left back or sometimes going in goal, but even then he was the best keeper the school had seen in Christ knows how long. His real position was centre of midfield, though, controlling the game, and he seemed to have an instinct for passing and movement well beyond his years. That talent seemed immense next to the duffers and hackers, David and his classmates, but whether Colin had enough to make it professionally only time would’ve told. Except he never got time.

A couple of professional clubs had tried to tempt him away from school at sixteen, then again in fifth year, but Colin was no idiot and he’d hung around until the end of sixth year, getting a pretty decent handful of qualifications, just in case the football didn’t work out. By the summer of ’88 he had signed to Arbroath FC as a starting point, and he was due to start pre-season training with the club that August. He never made it that far.

Back then, football violence was commonplace, and although it was a small club, Arbroath punched above its weight, literally, in terms of hooliganism, with running battles around the streets of the town every other Saturday a regular occurrence. The four of them in the ADS never got involved in any of that – what was the point? It was all about the drinking for them, massive amounts of drinking on a very regular basis, something David had never really shaken off over the years. It was a stupid macho game, seeing who could get the most drunk the quickest, and it inevitably ended in puking disaster, but that never seemed to stop them. It was as if some unseen force was driving them on to drink larger and larger amounts.

But pretty soon they learned to handle it. They got used to each other drunk as hell and they looked out for each other. This was at the age of sixteen, when the four of them seemed to have plenty in common. Two years later, in their final year at school, the drinking was the only thing that kept them together. They knew the ADS wouldn’t last, but it was one last summer blowout, and it was a riot.

That July of 1988 was one long party. David and Neil had a joint birthday party, David’s eighteenth but Neil’s nineteenth since he’d been held back a year earlier in school. Neil was a year and a day older than David. Neil had been born on the very day that Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and he had been named after Neil Armstrong (his middle name was Armstrong, much to everyone’s amusement except his). Their birthday party had followed the usual pattern – insane levels of drinking early on, unsuccessful attempts to get off with a few girls, drunken camaraderie around the streets in the early hours of the morning, then getting to bed long after dawn. It was just one of many piss-ups that summer, but a week later one of those piss-ups ended with Colin’s death, and they never went out together in Arbroath again.

It was the last Saturday of July and they’d done the usual, down the West Port to a few pubs, then Tropics to check out the talent. When Tropics shut they headed along the front to Bally’s (formerly Smokies, people were still getting used to the name change), which was the same schtick except open till three. At chucking-out time they headed to Victoria Park, then the cliffs, one of the few places they could hang out without hassle from patrolling police. Sometimes they would light a fire, more often they would have a carry-out and would continue drinking as wide boys sped up and down the promenade in Ford Escorts showing off to girls.

Throughout July they had started joking in a fake macho way about jumping off the cliffs. They weren’t the biggest cliffs in the world, between a hundred and two hundred feet depending where you were, but they were high enough to kill you if you fell from them. The red sandstone was crumbling all along the five-mile stretch of clifftop walk from Arbroath to the tiny fishing village of Auchmithie – not that the ADS ever went walkies, they usually hung about the Arbroath end, drinking from cans of lager and bottles of cider and throwing things over the edge into the sea. If the tide was in, spray would sometimes shoot up and soak them, and when the tide was out, small shingly beaches and ominously dark little caves were exposed at the bottom of the cliff face. That night the sky was already starting to lighten a little in the east, the black cloudless expanse invaded by outstretching lavender and lilac fingers. As they staggered around the cliffs, their teenage years and drunken bodies made them utterly oblivious to the danger of falling. They joked about cliff-jumping. They dared each other. The tide was in and the sea appeared in benign mood, gently sloshing against tufts of grass at the cliff base, pushing plastic oil drums and other bits of flotsam gently against the massive expanse of rock. But they were only joking. Not even if you were completely paralytic would you consider something as idiotic as that, and for all their puerile teenage humour and their often idiotic banter, none of them was that stupid.

As the sky continued to lighten the four of them drifted away from the cliffs, heading back into town, to their beds, ready to spend the whole of Sunday recovering. They split at the bottom of the High Street, David and Gary heading west, Neil and Colin going north, waving sloppy goodbyes to each other, half arranging to meet up the next night for a quiet Sunday pint. The gulls were out in force, squawking and diving for carry-out food scattered up the High Street. It was the last time David ever saw Colin. When he got home he crawled into bed, fantasizing about a girl he’d been chatting up that night (was it Nicola? He couldn’t remember now) and already thinking about a fry-up for breakfast.

He was woken at eleven by a phone call. It was the police telling him that Colin had been found dead at the bottom of the cliffs. He was hungover and still drunk, and he didn’t really get it at first. Yes, they’d been to the cliffs, he told the officer, but they’d all left and gone home, and Colin was fine. No, he didn’t know what time that was, but it was getting light. Yes, they had joked about jumping off, but it was just a joke, and no, Colin hadn’t seemed depressed, what the hell was he implying? Suicide? No fucking way. David was probably his best friend, but he was friendly with everyone, charming, clever, fit, funny, happy – all the other positive things you could think of. It was not suicide. David couldn’t make sense of it. What the hell was Colin doing back there after they’d left? He just couldn’t get his head round it.

He phoned Neil, who sounded even more hungover and shocked than he did. Neil confirmed they’d just headed home, and he’d said goodbye to Colin five minutes after they’d left David and Gary. It didn’t make any sense. It just didn’t add up. He couldn’t work it out at all. He hung up, went back to bed and lay there for a very long time, his head pounding, his mind whirring in confusion and his body shaking from the hangover and the shock.

There was an inquiry into the incident which came back with death by misadventure, whatever that was supposed to mean. Colin had a high level of alcohol in his blood, but the same would’ve been true of any of the four of them, of anyone between the ages of fourteen and forty in the whole bloody town on any given Saturday night. David couldn’t understand it – he just wasn’t drunk enough to have fallen accidentally, but there was also no way he would’ve jumped, and nobody would’ve pushed him, the thought was fucking absurd. And what was he doing there? Maybe he’d left something there, or lost something, and he’d gone back to look for it, or he couldn’t sleep and had gone for a walk, a piece of the clifftop giving way under him. You were always hearing scare stories about bits of the cliffs crumbling away, sandstone was notorious for eroding at a fair rate in the onslaught of the sea’s force, so maybe that was it, maybe it was just a stupid accident that could’ve happened to anyone.

David was still puzzling over this and still somehow in shock by the end of the week, and Colin’s funeral. It was the first funeral David had ever been to and with almost unbearably poignant timing it was the day before what would’ve been Colin’s eighteenth birthday. You couldn’t make this shit up, thought David as he trudged the short distance past Keptie High to the Western Cemetery. It was a stupidly hot day, utterly incongruous with the atmosphere of the town, as if the heavens couldn’t believe that this sort of thing could happen and had refused to play ball by providing the appropriate rain and wind and cold. David was sweating as he walked up the hill, feeling like a different person in a borrowed suit, borrowed black tie and school shoes that hadn’t been out the cupboard in a month.

This was the eighties, before Britain had a culture of mass-media mourning, and with school out for the summer there was no public grieving, no counselling sessions for friends, no appearances sobbing on local television. There was a big turn-out at the funeral, though. Colin had been a bright hope in the town, a charismatic presence, an athlete, an academic and a charmer of each generation.