Louise Welsh - Naming the Bones

‘They must be cracking offers. Should you go with him?’

‘He’s a grown man.’

‘Difficult customer?’

‘Easy customers needn’t apply.’

‘Aye, I suppose.’ He nodded back at the pub. ‘I really didn’t notice it was a go-go bar before I went in.’

‘Go-go bar.’ Lyn laughed. ‘You’ve some turn of phrase.’ She looked beyond him, following Frankie’s progress with her eyes, before turning her attention back to Murray. ‘It wouldn’t be any of my business if you did.’

‘But I didn’t.’

‘Must have been a shock to the system.’

‘A wee bit. I was looking for somewhere to get a bowl of soup.’ They laughed together and for the first time he was glad they’d met. Lyn glanced back in the direction Frankie had taken. He was a block ahead now, talking to a Big Issue vendor. Frankie reached into his pocket for a pack of cigarettes and the vendor sparked them both up.

‘I’d better go after him, our bus is about due. Have you got time to walk to the stop with me?’

It was the opposite direction from the one he’d intended taking, but Murray nodded and they started to follow slowly in Frankie’s wake, like parents who had let their child run ahead on a weekend walk.

‘So is Frankie your main man at the moment?’

‘There’s a horrible thought, but now you mention it, I do seem to spend more time with him than I do with anyone else, including Jack.’

‘How is Jack?’

‘Why don’t you ask him yourself?’

‘I will, when I have a moment.’

Lyn sighed.

‘I’ll tell him you were asking after him.’

‘Thanks.’ Murray hesitated. ‘Could you tell him that I might. .’

‘Oh, shit.’

‘What?’

Lyn started to run.

‘That’s our bus.’

Ahead of them Frankie stuck out his arm and a maroon double-decker slowed to a halt. Lyn was fast, but she was too short to be a sprinter. Murray shouldered his cursed bag and broke into a dash. The bus’s suspension sank until its platform was level with the pavement, and its doors concertinaed open. Frankie raised his arm in farewell to his friend and started to steer himself aboard. Murray shouted, ‘ Hoi! ’

The vendor saw Murray and put a foot on the bus’s platform, holding it there.

‘Cheers.’ Murray’s words were a whisper. He reached into his pocket and his hand closed on the same two-pound coin he’d tried to spend on a Coke. It was too much, but he pressed it into the vendor’s palm anyway.

‘Nae bother.’ The man stepped free of the bus. ‘They’re not going anywhere.’

He offered him a paper, but Murray shook his head and climbed aboard.

The driver had unlatched the door of his cab and managed to open it a crack, but Frankie had parked his chair against it, blocking his exit. Murray smelt smoke, saw the lit cigarette in Frankie’s hand and understood. The driver sank back into his seat, casting an envious glance at Frankie’s Mayfair.

‘Listen, mate, I’m off shift at five whether I get to the depot or not, but there’s folks here got things to do and you’re stopping them getting to where they’re going and doing them. Why not let them get on their way?’

‘You heard the driver.’ An elderly woman leaned out from her place halfway down the aisle. ‘Get rid of the cigarette or sling your hook.’

Frankie turned his chair to face his audience.

‘Do you know the first person to ban tobacco? Adolf Hitler.’ Frankie drew forth his pack of Mayfairs and slid another cigarette free. ‘Sometimes folks can be too obedient.’

An old man got to his feet. ‘I’m betting it was that kind of lip landed you in that chair.’ He shifted his shopping bags and seemed about to go down the aisle. But the old women around him broke into choruses of ‘Well said, Mr Prentice’ and ‘You tell him, Jim’, and he stayed where he was, chest puffed up beneath his anorak, an elderly pasha surrounded by his well-wrapped-up harem.

‘What’s going on?’

The run had freed Lyn’s hair from its clasp. It burst around her face in a riot of tangles. Her cheeks were flushed, though whether from the exertion or annoyance it was hard to tell.

Murray turned towards her, but it was Frankie who spoke.

‘I was holding the bus for you.’

He took the cigarette from his mouth, expertly nipped its lit end and placed it back in the pack.

The driver shut the doors and restarted the engine.

‘Fuck’s sake, I would have waited if you’d asked.’

‘Aye, right.’ Frankie backed his chair into the space by the door, slotting himself next to a toddler in a buggy. The child gave him a baleful look and Frankie nodded back. ‘How you doing?’

‘Sorry.’ Lyn scrabbled in her purse and put the fares in the slot.

‘Don’t apologise, dear.’ The driver issued the tickets, smiling sadly like a man who’d seen it all now. ‘You’ve got my sympathy if you’re shackled to that article.’

Murray said, ‘She’s not. .’

But the driver’s eyes were on the road, the bus gliding from the stop, just as Murray remembered he hadn’t intended on travelling anywhere except the library.

In the end he went round the supermarket with them too, listening to Lyn and Frankie discussing the relative merits of the produce on offer. Lyn asked him if he didn’t want to get a few things for himself, but he shook his head. He wouldn’t know where to start. Frankie, on the other hand, seemed to know exactly what he was doing.

Frankie rolled to a halt by the wine shelves, scanning them with an expert eye. ‘I think we’ll have a couple of bottles of that cheeky burgundy on special, please, Lyn.’

Murray noticed Frankie checking out Lyn’s rear as she reached up to the top shelf to retrieve the wine.

‘You enjoy cooking?’

‘Beats starving.’

Lyn put the bottles amongst their other groceries and they continued their slow patrol of the shelves.

‘Frankie’s a bit of a gourmet.’

‘Food’s one of the few pleasures left to me.’

Lyn snorted. ‘Plus the booze, fags and all the rest.’

‘All the rest? Are you offering?’

Lyn gave the wheelchair a small push Murray was sure contravened professional guidelines. She looked at Murray.

‘So tell me more about how the research is going.’

It occurred to him that she was humouring him the way she’d just humoured Frankie, the way she probably humoured Jack.

‘It’s dull. You know what I’m like when I get onto that, a train-spotting stamp-collector.’

Murray picked a bottle of oil from a shelf. It had red and black peppercorns suspended in it. He turned the bottle on its side and watched them slide slowly through the yellow viscous, like migrating stars in a steady firmament.

‘Come on, you know I like hearing about your mad poet.’

The oil was the same pale yellow as lager. He remembered a night in the pub years ago, Lyn pouring the remains of her pint over Jack in response to something she’d deemed sexist. He remembered the surprise of it, Jack’s expression and his own astonished shock of admiration. He remembered laughing then taking a deep draught of his own drink before drenching his brother with the dregs. Their drunken dash to outrun the bartender’s curse — Yous’re all barred!

He put the oil back on the shelf.

‘I don’t think Archie was mad, not at the start anyway. Sure, he behaved crazily sometimes, but from what I’m hearing he tanked it. I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t drugs somewhere in the mix too.’

‘You sound almost hopeful.’

‘It’s in the past. I can’t fix it. All I can do is make sure I get the facts right.’

Lyn’s voice was soft.

‘Can’t you cut your brother’s exhibition the same slack?’