Louise Welsh - Naming the Bones

Murray imagined himself aging as he fell through the fathomless depths, his flesh rotting away, his skeleton still dropping, scream descending.

‘Shouldn’t it be better marked?’

The person on the ridge may have shrugged, but it was hard to tell through the mist of drizzle and the bulk of rainwear.

‘Everyone knows it’s there.’

It seemed futile to point out that he hadn’t.

‘Well, thanks for warning me.’

The figure nodded and turned away. Murray saw the stick, the awkward plunge of the shoulders as it limped from view, and realised that he’d been talking with Christie.

He shrugged his own shoulders. It was all pointless. He had been stupid to think he could write a biography of a man who had died thirty years ago, leaving one slim volume and not much else. The conversation with the Geordie’s landlord had been typical of his researches. Tantalising and half-remembered, a dramatic postscript to a drink-addled man careless of his own sanity. It added nothing to Murray’s understanding of Lunan. The long, lonely walk had decided him. He would go back to the city, write a tract that stuck entirely to an analysis of Lunan’s poetry, and try to think of what to do next.

Fergus had been right. The poetry was the thing, the life an unfortunate distraction from the art. They should delete authors’ names from all books and let the works stand or fall on their own merit. Fuck the egotistical, drunken shaggers who by some quirk of the genes were able to forge the stuff he used to think revealed the world to him. As far as he was concerned, they could sharpen their pencils and stick them up their own arseholes.

If Fergus knew about Rachel’s ‘hobby’, then he was a saint. Murray remembered meeting the couple in the department corridor the day he returned to collect the books he needed. Fergus’s hand gently touching his wife’s arm. In the professor’s place, he would have been tempted to tumble her down the stairs.

It occurred to Murray that his affair with Rachel had coloured his attitude towards the professor. Fergus was gruff and opinionated, there was no denying that, but his actions were consistently on the side of right. He had been outspoken in his opinion that Murray confine his study to Lunan’s poetry, going further than he needed in an attempt to stop him wasting his time. And whatever Bobby Robb’s faults, it reflected well on the professor that he’d provided an old friend with a home.

It didn’t matter any more. Soon they would cease to be colleagues, just as he had ceased to have any relationship with Rachel at all.

There was a shout from the ridge behind him. Murray turned and looked up at the small figure standing precariously at its edge. Christie lifted her hand and waved, though she must have known he had heard her.

‘Yes?’ Murray walked back to where he could hear her more clearly.

‘Can you help me? I seem to have managed to get my car stuck.’

The ridge was too high and slippy to climb. He followed Christie’s shouted directions and took the long way round to where the precipice descended, and then walked along the ascent until he found the track and the red 4x4 slumped half-on, half-off the shingled road, one wheel deep in the mud. The walk had taken him thirty minutes and he was sweating beneath his waterproof by the time he got there, despite the chill rain which had blown in his face since he left the shelter of the valley.

Christie must have been keeping watch for him, because she got out of the car as he approached and stood silently waiting as he walked the last few yards.

‘I tried putting some cardboard down for purchase, but I just seem to be digging myself in further.’

He might have been a paid mechanic summoned to give roadside assistance, rather than a stranger who had walked a mile or so in a deluge to help her.

Murray squatted down and looked at the back wheel. He could see where it had churned the soft mud. Christie was right; she’d been ploughing deeper into the earth. He got to his feet. It was windier up here, the wetness blowing in all directions. The rain could almost be classed as playful, if it wasn’t so fucking unpleasant, the persistence of it. The way it managed to slide beneath his outer layers and onto his flesh.

‘I’ll try pushing. If you bring the clutch up very slowly, we might be able to get it out. If not, I guess I’ll walk back and find someone to give you a tow.’

Christie nodded. She got back into the driver’s seat, leaving the car door open. Murray positioned himself behind the Cherokee, waited until she had started the engine and then pushed with what remained of his strength. The 4x4 was huge. He felt his hands slip down its wet surface and knew that it wasn’t going to budge. He smelt the petrol fumes and realised what he was doing was dangerous. He might slither beneath the broad wheels and be maimed or even killed. Murray felt a sharp stab of anger at Christie for calling him up here when he should have gone for help in the first place. But he went on forcing himself hard against the tank’s boot, walking on the spot as his feet lost their grip and started to slide in the mud, just as he feared they would. He shouted, ‘Pull the clutch up gently!’ and resolved that when she stalled, he would go for help. But then he felt a small threat of movement, his hands slid again and he pressed them hard against the boot instinctively, knowing that if he let up the game would be over, the vehicle stuck tight. Then it bucked and pulled up onto the track with an audible slurp. Churned mud sprayed the air, a depressed Jackson Pollock abstract splashing his whole length. Murray staggered and would have fallen had he not managed to put a hand out and steady himself against the car’s boot, even as it moved onto the shingled pathway.

For a moment he thought she was going to go off without a word. But then Christie stopped the car and leaned out.

‘Thanks.’

‘No bother.’

He searched his pocket for a hanky, failed to find one and rubbed his glasses against his jeans.

‘Where are you headed?’

‘Pete Preston’s bothy.’

‘Jump in and I’ll take you to the crossroads, it’s only a short way across the field from there.’

Murray looked down at his mud-spattered self.

Christie’s voice was impatient. ‘Don’t worry. This car’s seen worse. Besides, I seem to have miscalculated today. I might get stuck again.’

Murray glanced at her as he got into the passenger seat, and thought he could almost detect the hint of a smile.

The landscape looked different from the vehicle’s high front seat. Now that he could lift his head and regard it without being battered by the elements, he could see that they were on a wind-blasted moor. The treeless expanse gave a long view of the depthless heavens. Murray felt like it might rain for ever.

‘Are you part of the dig?’

He had expected their drive to be conducted in silence, and her question surprised him.

‘No, just walking.’

Christie nodded, as if it was perfectly normal to tramp out to this abandoned portion of the island in a storm. She said, ‘I don’t usually meet anyone out here.’ It was unclear whether she was explaining her question or the reason why she’d chosen the lonely spot.

Christie leaned forward and wiped at the condensation misting the windscreen. She’d turned up the hot air and the car felt stifling after the damp chill of outside. Murray had drawn back his hood when he got in; now he unzipped his jacket, pulled his woolly hat from his head and mopped his wet, mud-spotted face with it. He rubbed a hand through his hair. He hadn’t had it cut since the summer break and it felt almost long enough to tie back in a ponytail. Perhaps this was how it started. The slow slide, until you became one of those blokes you used to marvel at, marking the time between giros by beating a track between the bookie’s and the pub.