Louise Welsh - Naming the Bones

Christie took on a look he had seen in other interviewees, a far-away stare as if gazing back into the past.

‘Apart from drinking, it was all he seemed to do. When we first met, Archie was matriculated at the university, but the only classes I ever knew him attend were poetry lectures. He used the library, of course, but that was for his own reading. He would lie around in the morning in his dressing gown, sipping beer and reading detective fiction or sci-fi. At midday he’d go down to the pub for a pint and a bite to eat. Then he’d either browse the local second-hand bookshops or go back to his room and write. He’d step out again at about nine in the evening.’

‘How could he afford it?’

‘Archie had been lucky. His mother had died and left him some money.’

‘An odd definition of luck.’

‘Do you think so? I used to envy him terribly.’

He ignored the playful note of provocation in her voice and asked, ‘Were you writing too?’

‘I didn’t pick up my pen until after Archie’s death. Then it was as if a new well had been sunk in me, it all came bubbling out.’ She reached into the folder again. ‘The final extract.’

He took it from her, noting the page number, 349. Earlier in his quest the completeness of Christie’s memoir might have frustrated Murray, but it no longer mattered if his own book was rendered redundant. There were new poems. The thought thrilled him.

Archie might never have returned to the island if I hadn’t suggested it, but when I did he leapt at the plan. By that time we were a trio plus one. That extra man was vital to our group; Bobby was Renfield to our Dracula. We thought he was harmless.

Ours was an era of new societies, ideal communities and communes. Property was theft, jealousy bourgeois, and anyone over thirty, suspect. We set out with bags full of acid and hearts full of idealism. But it was soon clear the cottage was too small to house four adults and the sickness which had eventually left me in Glasgow returned with a vengeance.

Archie’s sickness followed him too. There was no pub on the island, but he found a ceilidh house where he was very quickly unwelcome. That didn’t bother Archie. He’d already made enough contacts to be able to draw on a seemingly endless source of homebrewed spirits. Some mornings he was as sick as I was and the two of us lay groaning together in the bed recess we’d requisitioned as our own.

As if overcrowding, bad trips, drunkenness and sickness weren’t enough, the weather descended into a long period of dark skies and relentless rain. Bobby would probably have stayed with us for ever, lost in his muddled world of drugs and spells, but very quickly I realised that Fergus was planning to leave. I couldn’t blame him. I had sold the island as an adventure, an opportunity to create, but there was no privacy to be had in the damp cottage, and my hopes of keeping the three of us together until what had to pass had passed were beginning to fade.

Murray read the page twice, and then he set it aside on the table and looked at Christie.

‘You were pregnant when Mrs Dunn visited the cottage, weren’t you? That’s how you knew she was too.’

Christie rolled her eyes. Her voice was impatient.

‘She was the kind of woman Fergus always seems to attract — buttoned-up, but desperate for some kind of adventure, some kind of debauch. The trouble is they never realise how far Fergus is willing to go.’ Was there a gleam of pride in her eyes? ‘He always pushes them beyond their limits.’

Murray thought of Rachel. He asked, ‘Like he did with Helen James?’

Christie snorted in amusement.

‘I very much doubt little Nelly was raped, but what could she say when her mummy and daddy found out she was unmarried and with child? It was the wrong time of year for an immaculate conception.’

‘She had an abortion.’

‘You didn’t strike me as a man who would be against a woman’s right to choose what she does with her body.’

‘I’m not. In fact, I’d go further and say everyone has a right to know what they take into their body. Mrs Dunn lost her baby.’

‘That was nothing to do with me.’

‘Was the baby Archie’s?’

‘I think it was Mr Dunn’s.’

It took all his effort to keep his voice low and his words polite.

‘Was your baby Archie’s child?’

‘I like to think so.’

‘What happened?’

‘I delivered her here, in the bed recess.’ She nodded towards the far corner. ‘Where my desk is now. The first major piece of work I produced there. A perfect little girl.’

It was the same bed where Mrs Dunn had lain drugged. Murray saw it for an instant, the curtain drawn to one side, the soiled bedclothes slung onto the floor. Mrs Dunn had lost her baby. He wiped a hand across his face and asked, ‘Where is your daughter now?’

‘With Archie’s poems, buried down by the limekilns.’

Murray wasn’t sure how long he sat staring in silence at Christie after she had spoken, but eventually he said, ‘I think you’ve miscalculated how much I want to get my hands on Archie’s poems, Miss Graves.’

‘Nature can be cruel.’ Her face tightened. ‘It had its way.’

‘So you took the child and buried it? Simple as that?’

‘More or less.’

‘Did Bobby Robb have anything to do with the baby’s death?’

Christie’s laugh was hard and brittle. She said, ‘Bobby Robb was a fool and a fantasist. We’d tolerated him because he could supply us with drugs, but Fergus had grown sick of him and his stupidity. If the weather hadn’t been so bad, he would have been gone on the ferry to the mainland and a lot of tragedy would have been avoided.’

‘The child would have lived?’

‘No, the child was never going to live. It was small and weak and had been born to fools who didn’t know or care enough to look after it. Idiots who filled the room with smoke and fed it with water when the stupid girl that was supposed to be its mother let her milk dry up and still drank and got high, and the stupid man that might have been its father drank and smoked, took drugs and talked poetry.’ She sighed. ‘We’d thought we could manage it ourselves, but the birth was horrendous. Bobby shot me full of something to help with the pain. It knocked me out so hard it’s a miracle the child was born at all. She must have clawed her way out.’

‘Didn’t Archie do anything?’

‘Archie had been big on having the child. He was full of fantasies about what it would be like to belong to a real family, but when she arrived, sickly and underweight, Archie did what he always did. He drank. When we discovered she was dead, he was sure it was Bobby’s doing. Bobby was always setting his stupid spells, rambling on about purity and sacrifice. Archie jumped to conclusions, even though there wasn’t a mark on her body. Maybe he wanted someone to blame. He beat Bobby badly. He might have killed him, if Fergus hadn’t managed to force him out of the cottage and bolt the door. I was a little mad too, I suppose. I didn’t know what had happened, but I knew that my baby was gone. I held her by the fire and rubbed her body, but it stayed as limp and as cold as she’d been when I found her dead in the bed beside me. Bobby and Fergus finished our supply and I joined them. We didn’t think about Archie until the next day. We had no idea he would take the boat out in the storm. It was stupid.’

Murray whispered, ‘It was suicide.’

But it was as if Christie didn’t hear him.

‘She was tiny. I wrapped her in my silk scarf and we put her in a tin box we’d found in the cottage. Fergus placed the poems Archie had been working on beside her and then we buried her and marked the spot with a stone.’

‘Why?’