Louise Welsh - Naming the Bones

MURRAY WATSON SLIT the seal on the cardboard box in front of him and started to sort through the remnants of a life. He lifted a handful of papers and carefully splayed them across the desk. Pages of foolscap, blue-tinted writing paper, leaves torn from school jotters, stationery printed with the address of a London hotel. Some of it was covered in close-packed handwriting, like a convict’s letters home. Others were bare save for a few words or phrases.

James Laing stepped out into an ordinary day.

Nothing could have prepared James for the. .

James Laing was an ordinary man who inhabited a. .

The creature stared down on James with its one ghastly fish eye. It winked.

Murray laughed, a sudden bark in the empty room. Christ, it had better get more interesting than this or he was in trouble. He reached into the pile and slid out a page at random. It was a picture, a naïve drawing done in green felt-tip of a woman with a triangular dress for a body. Her stick arms were long and snaking. They waved up into a sky strewn with sharp-angled stars; the left corner presided over by a pipe-smoking crescent moon, the right by a broadly smiling sun. No signature. It was crap, the kind of doodle that deserved to be crumpled into a ball and fired into the bin. But if it had been deliberately kept, it was a moment, a clue to a life.

He reached back into the box and pulled out another bundle of papers, looking for notebooks, something substantial, not wanting to save the best till last, though he had time to be patient.

Pages of figures and subtractions, money owed, rent due, monies promised. A trio of Tarot cards; the Fool poised jauntily on the edge of a precipice, Death triumphant on horseback, skull face grinning behind his visor, the Moon a pale beauty dressed in white leading a two-headed hound on a silver leash. A napkin from a café, printed pink on white Aida’s , a faint stain slopped across its edge — frothy coffee served in a glass cup. A newspaper cutting of a smiling yet serious man running a comb through his side parting; the same man, billiard-ball smooth and miserable on his hirsute double’s left side. Are you worried about hair loss? The solution to baldness carelessly cut through and on the other side a listing for a happening in the Grassmarket. No photograph, just the names, date and time. Archie Lunan, Bobby Robb and Christie Graves, 7.30pm on Sunday 25th September at The Last Drop.

Then Murray struck gold, an old red corduroy address book held together by a withered elastic band and cramped with script. A diary would have been better, but Archie wasn’t the diary-keeping kind. Murray opened the book and flicked through its pages. Initials, nicknames, first names or surnames, no one was awarded both.

Danny

Denny

Bobby Boy

Ruby!

I thought I saw you walking by the shore

Lists of names with the odd phrase scribbled underneath. There was no attempt at alphabetisation. He was getting glimpses already, a shambles of a life, but it had produced more than most of the men that went sober to their desks at nine every morning.

Ramie

Moon

Jessa* * *

Diana the huntress, Persephone hidden, names can bless or curse unbidden.

Murray would have liked photographs. He’d seen some already, of course. The orange-tinted close-up of Archie that showed him thin and bestraggled, something like an unhinged Jesus, his hands knuckled threateningly around his features, as if preparing to tear the face from his head. It was all art and shadows. The other snaps came from a Glasgow Herald feature on Professor James’s group that Murray had managed to pull from the newspaper’s archive. Archie always in the background caught in a laugh, squinting against the sky; Archie cupping a cigarette to his mouth, the wind blowing his fringe across his eyes. It would be good to have one of him as a boy, when his features were still fine.

Murray pulled himself up. He was in danger of falling into an amateur’s trap, looking for what he wished for rather than what was there. He hadn’t slept much the night before. His mind had got into one of those loops that occasionally infected him, information bouncing around in his brain, like the crazy lines on his computer screensaver. He’d made a cup of tea in the early hours of the morning and drunk it at the fold-down shelf that served as a table in the galley kitchen of his small flat, trying to empty his brain and think of nothing but the plain white cup cradled in his hand.

He would divide the contents of the box into three piles — interesting, possible and dross — cataloguing as he went. Once he’d done that he could get caught up in details, pick at the minutiae that might unravel the tangled knot of Archie’s life.

Murray had handled originals many times. Valuable documents that you had to sign for then glove up to protect them from the oils and acids that lived in the whorls of your fingertips, but he’d never been the first on the scene before, the explorer cracking open the wall to the tomb. He lifted an unsent letter from the box, black ballpoint on white paper.

Bobby

For God’s sake, find me some of the old!

We’ll wait for you at Achnacroish pier on Saturday.

Yours, closer than an eye,

Archie

No date, no location, but gold. Murray put it in the important pile, then took out his laptop, fired it up and started listing exactly what he had. He picked up a discarded bus ticket to Oban, for some reason remembering a hymn they’d sung at Sunday school.

God sees the little sparrow fall,

it meets His tender view;

Even this simple ticket might have the power to reveal something, but he put it in the dross pile all the same.

Murray’s interest in Archie Lunan had started at the age of sixteen with a slim paperback. He could still remember the moment he saw it jutting out from a box of unsorted stock on the floor of a second-hand bookshop. It was the cover that drew him, a tangerine-tinted studio shot of a thin man with shadows for eyes. Murray had known nothing about Lunan’s poetry or his ill-starred life, but he had to have the book.

‘Looks like a baby-killer, doesn’t he?’ The man behind the counter had said when Murray handed over his fifty pence. ‘Still, that was the seventies for you, a lot of it about.’

Once he owned the book Murray had been strangely indifferent to its contents, almost as if he were afraid they might be a let-down. He’d propped it on the chest of drawers in the bedroom he shared with his brother until eleven-year-old Jack had complained to their dad that the man’s non-existent eyes were staring at him and Murray had been ordered to put it somewhere where it wouldn’t give people nightmares.

He’d rediscovered the book the following year, when he was packing to go to university, and thrown it in his rucksack, almost on a whim. The paperback had languished on the under-stocked bookshelf in his bed-sit through freshers’ week and into most of the following year. It was exam time, a long night into studying, when he’d found himself reaching for the poems. Murray supposed, when he bothered to think about it, that he was looking for a distraction. If so, he’d found one. He’d sat at his desk reading and re-reading Archie Lunan’s first and only poetry collection until morning. It was an enchantment which had quietly shadowed Dr Murray Watson in his toil through academe, and now at last he was free to steep himself in it.