Иэн Рэнкин - The Flood

He was embarrassed by it, but he would keep it in his secret drawer beside the others and the stories he had written and hope his mother did not find it. His friends would laugh at him if they found out. All they knew was that he was good at writing stories and poems when asked to in English by a teacher who was going out with his mother.

He had visited the mansion one day in every week for a while now. He was waiting for Rian to suggest some meeting in a secret place. She had not yet done so. He had to content himself with a stolen kiss when Robbie was not around, and then only if Rian were in the mood. If not, she would sit with her face as dark as a coal-box and her arms folded firmly across her chest. On those days he would talk more with Robbie, and be more friendly towards him, just to spite his cruel princess.

They were talking about videos now — about the ones they had seen lately and the ones they would see when their parents were out. Sandy thought that he would leave and go to the Soda Fountain. Mr Patterson had promised him a whole lot of chocolates when he had finished his exams. But Sandy did not eat many sweets these days. Their taste was debilitating. It slowed him down, making his insides all sugary and numb. He preferred fruit. He would visit the fruit shop. But then he was being asked a question.

‘What about you, Sandy? You never had a dad, did you? I mean, you never knew who your dad was?’ They were talking about someone whose father had died suddenly. Now they had directed the conversation towards him. He looked at the serious faces and the acne and the thin, pallid bodies.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I never knew.’

‘Did you ever try to find out? Didn’t you ever ask your mum?’

‘No.’

How could he have done that? It had taken time to discover that children ought to have a father. By the time he found out, he had become sad for his mother. How could he have asked her such a personal and unnecessary question? Often, though, he had thought of asking her. He knew some of the rumours which had been currency when he was a child. It was his Uncle Tom, who had then quickly scarpered. It was the Devil himself, and his mother was a witch after all. It was one of his Uncle Tom’s friends. It was a fairy king. Would she tell him if he asked? Perhaps she would, now that he had grown up, but what did it matter? It was a moment’s curiosity every few months. It was nothing.

‘What’s it like then, not having a dad?’

‘It’s not like anything really. It’s not very different.’

‘How can you know if you’ve never had one in the first place?’ Colin was good at arguing. Sandy was forced to shrug his shoulders.

‘Well, it doesn’t seem any different,’ he said. ‘Am I different from you?’

‘Well, you’re witchy for a start,’ said Clark, laughing.

‘I’d put a spell on you if I was,’ said Sandy. ‘I’d change you from a frog.’ They all laughed at that. Sandy felt safe again. He was tempted to visit the mansion, but he knew that it would probably be empty at this time of the day. It was tempting, too, to visit the gypsy encampment at Craigie Hill. It would only take ten minutes from the Soda Fountain. The wind was beginning to blow a bit anyway. They could not lie here for much longer. Sandy pressed a finger down on to some of his goosebumps. They flattened for a second, then swelled. The dark strands of hair on his arms stood on end when he shivered, like the sea rolling up to the esplanade in Kirkcaldy.

‘Why don’t we go to Kirkcaldy?’ he suggested.

‘No money,’ said Clark. Colin and Mark nodded.

‘Well, let’s arrange a trip for when we have money. To celebrate the end of the exams. We can go to the Harbour Tavern. Dicky Preston says they serve you in there even if you’re underage. He says it’s easy.’

‘Okay,’ said Colin. The others were nodding. ‘That sounds fine. We’ll need a good bit of cash, though, so start hunting through your mum’s purse and looking in your dad’s pockets. Okay?’

‘Magic’

The cemetery sat at the top of The Brae. It was quite large, sprawling with the headstones of mining accidents and many other less newsworthy deaths. Matty Duncan was buried here in an untended but often visited corner. Mary passed this corner, and glanced at the gravestone. If he hadn’t died, it would have been my father...

The cemetery contained most of Mary’s family. A lot of plots had gone untended for too long, and yellow-flowering weeds were beginning to make serious inroads, giving the place a rank, lush look and a constant pungency resembling that of urine.

Mary stooped over one or two graves on her way to her parents’ plot, and pulled up some of the silent, stubborn weeds. Seldom did they come up at the roots. Mary knew that hers was merely temporary surgery.

Her parents’ tombstone gleamed still. In a few years it would lose its shine, but not yet. The letters were dull gold and indented clearly. Mary squatted by the graveside and placed her posy of flowers on the grass. She lifted the two glass jars from either side of the tombstone. There were partly withered stalks in one. The other was empty, someone having taken the flowers she had placed in it so delicately last week. She said nothing and thought nothing, just walked with both jars over to a small hut beside which stood a bin and a cold-water standpipe. She emptied the stalks into the bin where they landed on top of other matted and decaying vegetation, and rinsed out both jars under the tap before filling them. The icy water lingered on her hands, freezing them, sending all feeling to some foreign region. She blew on her fingers, trying to warm them, as she carried the jars over to the graveside, her parents, and the small tribute of flowers.

Having placed the jars in their original positions, marked by the greener grass beneath each, Mary made herself comfortable on the slightly damp ground at the foot of the grave and smiled. She had not smiled for a long time. She seemed to be studying the plot, just as she would have studied a work of careful embroidery. When she was satisfied with the arrangement of the graveside, she began to speak in a soft, respectful voice.

Clouds moved overhead with a regal gait befitting the calm afternoon. Crows were arguing in the distance, probably in the trees of the kirkyard. She told this to her mother. Her mother was interested in details and in the kind of day it happened to be, in the sights and sounds from which she had been banished. Mary’s mother had been a nature-lover all her years, taking the children out for long rambles on Sunday afternoons, summer evenings, and school holidays. She would point out wild flowers and trees to her two children, telling them the names of each and making them repeat these names so that they would remember. Then, later in the walk she would suddenly ask, “What was that called again?”, pointing to something, and when they shouted out the answer she would chuckle and say that they seemed to have learned more that day than in a whole week’s schooling.

They would laugh together and rush down the steep hill hand in hand and shrieking, collapsing eventually into the sofa at home, the sweat on their brows linking them inexorably to the day’s events, making them grin and glance at the father who pretended not to mind being excluded from their group.