Louise Welsh - Naming the Bones

Murray took a bite of toast and jam. It was good and he said so. The cat blinked at him from its spot in front of the fire, as if letting him know it was onto his game.

‘What’s the cat called?’

‘Archie.’ Murray almost choked at the sound of the familiar name, but the landlady didn’t notice. She bent over and rubbed behind the beast’s ears. It narrowed its eyes and took the salute as its due. ‘He’s an old soldier, aren’t you, love?’ She straightened up. ‘Do you like cats?’

He had never had much to do with them.

‘Very intelligent creatures.’

‘They are that.’

The topic of their conversation stretched his hind legs and started to clean his tummy, working meticulously down towards his tail.

Murray stifled the urge to laugh.

‘So do you see her around the island much?’

‘Mrs Graves?’

He wondered if the title was a courtesy or a slight — a married woman ‘promoting’ another, all the better to underline her spinsterhood — but Mrs Dunn’s features had regained their impassiveness.

‘I couldn’t tell you the last time I saw Christie Graves.’

‘But she still lives here?’

Their moment of communion was gone. Mrs Dunn lifted his empty plate, not bothering to ask if he’d enjoyed his meal.

‘I expect so.’

She went back through to the kitchen, leaving him to his book and his coffee. He drank it quickly, aware of the old woman through the wall, waiting on him to leave. She must have heard his chair scrape against the lino as he got up to go to his room, because she returned, tray in hand, ready to clear the table.

‘Just one thing, Mr Watson.’

‘Yes?’

He gave her the smile he normally bestowed on the departmental secretaries when he had made some administrative screw-up.

‘If you’re going out walking, would you mind taking off your boots at the front door, please? You trailed mud all through the house when you got back last night.’

He apologised, remembering too late that his smile had never had much effect on the women who ran the English department either.

Murray had intended to spend the morning in his room writing up the previous night’s telephone conversation with Professor James, but he had just got started when Mrs Dunn knocked on his door and asked if she could get in to clean. He glanced guiltily at the mud stains on the carpet and told her he would go and explore the island.

This time he took the car and drove to the village shop. Half a dozen vehicles were parked outside, a few men in overalls stationed next to them passing the time of day. They glanced at Murray with enough lack of interest to suggest tourists weren’t unusual, or perhaps that they had heard of his presence and already got his measure.

Inside the shop smelt pleasantly of soap flakes. Murray was cheered to see ranks of wine bottles marshalled together on the shelves, next to whisky, vodka and a surprising variety of rum. Three young girls clustered around a computer set in a corner niche, adding something to a Facebook page. Their stares were more assessing, though no less dismissive, than the loitering men’s.

Murray browsed the postcard rack looking for one of the broch where he had sheltered the night before, but it was missing from the display. Instead he selected a couple of sea views, unsure who he could send them to. He put the cards on the counter and placed an Ordnance Survey map beside them.

‘Can anyone use the Internet?’

The shopkeeper had the kind of doughy look that men with indoor jobs who are confronted by manual workers every day seem to take on. He gave Murray a tense smile wrought from shyness.

‘A pound an hour, longest session thirty minutes if there’s a queue.’ He nodded at the huddle of teenagers. ‘They’ve been on at least an hour and a half. I can ask them to take a break if you’d like to use it now?’

‘No, thanks, just checking for future reference.’

The shop man slid Murray’s map and cards into a paper bag.

‘Over for the walking?’

‘Yes.’ He wasn’t sure why he was lying, except perhaps to make life easier. ‘I’m staying with Mrs Dunn.’

‘Ah, well, you’ll be comfortable enough there.’

The man’s smile faltered and Murray sensed another shopper behind him.

‘Aye, she’s taking good care of me.’

He shoved his purchases into his rucksack and made way for a man dressed in blue overalls with an Oban Times in his hand. It seemed that Murray had chosen the time of day when the island folk congregated. He had to press sideways to negotiate his way to the door. It swung wide just as he reached it and Christie Graves lurched awkwardly over the step. Murray stepped back to let her pass, saw her eyes glance over him, and realised he had been half-expecting her all morning.

Murray sat outside in the car with the Ordnance Survey map draped across the steering wheel. Christie nodded to a few of the people outside as she left the shop, a canvas bag in one hand, her stick in the other, but didn’t stop to pass the time of day. He raised his eyes from the scant roads and many tracks of Lismore, watching as she got into her red Cherokee, and pulled away. Then he counted to ten, and steered his dad’s car out from its space.

Christie drove faster than he dared, but Murray caught flashes of her on the turns and hilly rises of the road ahead. He hit the CD player and Johnny Cash gravelled into life, singing about lonesome prisons and trains that whistled as they went by. It was a song from their childhood. Murray wondered if Jack listened to the CD sometimes, or if it had nested in its tray since before their dad had stopped being able to drive.

The world beyond the car window had a bright, dewy aspect, as if the previous night’s storm had refreshed the countryside. The fields had lost their shit-stained look and taken on the cheerful air of a children’s storybook. Behind the drystane dykes and high wire fences sheep and cows cropped at grass green and even enough to be plastic. The few cottages he passed seemed shrewdly placed, their stone fronts and sloping roofs the perfect complement to neat gardens cordoned off from nature’s wilder reaches by the same artfully built walls that kept the livestock within their bounds. Some small birds swooped in front of his windscreen, their long, black tails wagging. Murray almost hit the brakes, but sped on wondering if the red car had slipped away from him down one of the unmarked lanes that branched off from the road.

The island was small. There would be other opportunities, other ways of discovering where Christie lived, but now that he had begun the pursuit it seemed imperative to press on.

He pushed down on the accelerator, feeling the countryside around him blur and flash, the tarmac whizz into grey, dropping through the gears and speeding into the turn as he rounded yet another rising bend in the road, hoping for the glimpse of red that would tell him Christie was still ahead.

Then suddenly it was all red, the red 4x4 motionless in a passing place, the oncoming post office van in the middle of the road. He cursed and hit the brakes, turning the steering wheel towards the skid that threatened to overwhelm his own small vehicle. There was speed and slowness and an instant when he thought the car would win and pitch him from it, then the wheels obeyed and he drew to a halt a credit-card width from Christie’s bumper.

Fuck, fuck, shit, fuck, shit.

Christie’s eyes met his in her rear-view mirror.

He held up a hand in apology, then pulled down the sun visor, though the morning’s hopeful rays had already been overtaken by cloud.

He had no idea of what he was doing.

Cash sung on about moving the railway station somewhere ‘further down the line’ and the postie drove by, raising a finger from the wheel in laconic salute.