Louise Welsh - Naming the Bones

Murray filled his mind with thoughts of Moontide , the perfect ordering of the poems which made the book not simply a collection, but a composition. He pushed away images of Rachel’s face, Rachel’s body, and started to recite the poems inside his head in the sequence Archie had arranged them.

He woke in the middle of the night from visions of a pink tangle of naked bodies, aware of his own irritating hardness, unable to remember whether his nightmare had been of a holocaust or an orgy. Murray lay muffled under the blankets, waiting for the dawn. He saw the first, grey light creep across the room and watched his breath cloud the cold air. He decided to get up and wash anyway, and then drifted back into a dark and dreamless sleep.

THE COTTAGE GREW too small for Murray at around eleven the next morning. He pushed aside the notes he couldn’t concentrate on and pulled on his rain jacket and woollen hat. It was pelting down outside, but he stepped from the cottage and set out with no thought of a destination.

It seemed that he had lived half his life in the rain. Murray pulled up his hood and kept walking, his face lowered against the wind, the raindrops beating a tattoo on his waterproof. Surely the showers should be softer, more refreshing, in the clear air of the countryside, but it seemed to him that this was the same harsh rain that fell on Glasgow. Without the shelter of tenements and pubs the city offered it was free to sweep across the island and seek him out.

Usually such egotism would have made him smile, but now he just kept his eyes down, concentrating on the grass one plod ahead, trying to put Rachel from his mind. It was impossible. She was in the sickness he felt low down in his stomach. He wondered how many more encounters she’d had with other men, wondered if Fergus knew.

Fergus.

For all of his suaveness and learning, he was a cuckold many times over. Murray tried to take satisfaction from the thought and failed. He didn’t give a fuck about Rachel’s husband. It was his own hurt that moved him.

He’d liked her poshness, liked her teases that he was her bit of rough; Murray, the dux of the school. Now he realised she’d considered him gauche, not sophisticated enough to be initiated into her games. She was right, of course. He would have been shocked — was shocked — at the idea of an orgy. His cleverness was of another brand.

It was the sense of specialness he mourned as much as Rachel herself, the belief that she had chosen him above others. His faith had been dented by her marriage to Fergus and her infidelity with Rab, sure. But he had nursed his trust, willing himself to forgive these faults in the knowledge that she had decided to make him her lover. Now he knew she gave her body the way another women might give you a smile, or a touch of her hand; something to be enjoyed, but no assurance of anything. She had made a fool of him.

Had the other men in the photographs treasured her the way he had or had they already known they were one of many? Murray picked up a stick and swiped it through the long grass edging the pathway, letting loose a spray of rainwater.

He wondered how he would ever face her again, and realised that he couldn’t. He would have to look for a new job, though he was working in the one place he had wanted to work since he was a boy. Everything was spoiled. The thought was childish in its intensity. There was nothing for him now, no lover, no family and no job. He would pack up and go home, except there was no home, only a carelessly furnished flat where he laid his head. The only home he had known had been handed back to the council when his father went into residential care. At the time he’d taken comfort in the thought that he and Jack were acting in accordance with their father’s principles, and some new family would be able to bring up their children in its shelter. Now he wanted nothing more than to turn the key he still had in the lock, climb the stairs to the room he’d shared with Jack and lie face-down on the bed.

Ahead of him was an abandoned cottage, a derelict shell of the same design as the bothy he was renting from Pete. This one was missing its roof and front door. Its windows, free of glass, stared. Who had lived there, alone in the middle of nowhere, and why they had gone? Murray shivered. His waterproof was holding up well, but his trousers were soaked through and splashed with mud. It was stupid, letting himself get drenched like this, an invitation to a cold or worse, but he walked on, unsure of where he was going, seeing other derelict cottages and realising that the place hadn’t been the preserve of some lonely crofter or a hermit seeking solitude, but a village.

He looked through one of the vacant doors and saw the grass growing on the floor, the ivy clinging to the walls. How long would it be before the elements toppled these small structures as they had already toppled the broch and the castle? Would future archaeologists dig here, or had records grown so precise every aspect of the recent past would be charted and ready for those who wanted to know? Maybe, soon enough, there would be no one left, no world to chronicle and argue over. All things must end, why not this too? The thought almost had the power to cheer him.

He was still close to the coast, but the track was veering inland now and the sea was out of sight. Murray noticed clumps of plump, dark green shoots in the grass around him. He guessed the ground was boggy and resolved to stick to the path. The sheep who had dotted his route till now were absent here. No birds sang and the sound of the sea, which had beaten a soft accompaniment to the wind when he was on the cliffside, was silenced. He must have descended into the shelter of some glen without noticing, because the gusts of air that had blasted the rest of his walk were gone. All he could hear was the rain drumming against his cagoule and the vegetation around him.

Murray looked at this watch. It was only lunchtime, at least four hours before the dark would come in, but already he thought he could sense the descent of the day. He had a sudden urge to turn back but pressed on, as a not-quite-sober man in a bar might press on into drunkenness.

There were some kind of man-made caves up ahead, small triangular openings in a wall of mortared stone set tight into a high ridge. They looked dark and deep and somehow inviting. Perhaps he could crawl into one of them and die. Murray wondered about braving the boggy ground, but a couple of steps from the path his right boot sunk calf-deep into wetness and sludge, and it took more effort than he would have expected to prise himself free.

‘Fuck.’

He was breathing hard. It would be a horrible way to go, sucked into the mud, a living corpse in a soft, enveloping grave. Stupid to die like that, when there were pills and rope, razors and gin-soaked baths for the taking.

Murray stamped his boot, trying to shake some of the mud from him, though he was already wet through. Christ, at this rate he would die of trench foot.

Maybe he should turn around. He had promised to visit Mrs Dunn that afternoon and if he was going to cancel in good time he would have to get back to elevated ground and find a phone signal. He noticed an unpainted wooden fence up ahead, cordoning off a small square of ground. He would walk to that first, though he couldn’t think what would need protecting out here, where even the sheep didn’t venture.

It appeared to be a depression in the earth, half grown-over with grass. Murray tested the ground beyond the path with his feet. This time it felt firm enough, and he ventured tentatively forth to get a closer look.

‘I’d stand back from that, if I were you.’ The voice was female, high and cultured. It came from the ridge above him. He looked up and saw a figure dressed in a waterproof of the same dark olive-green as the one he was wearing. She too had drawn her hood up against the weather. What little light there was was behind her, her face lost in the shadows. ‘It’s a sinkhole. No one knows how deep it is.’