Coffin Road (10 page)

‘It’s my daughter, for Christ’s sake.’

‘I only have your word for that.’ He pauses. ‘And anyway, they’d see us. A big black fucking cab crawling along behind them.’ I don’t know what to say, and he looks at me appraisingly. ‘Tell you what. I’ll take you to the school ahead of them. Got to be Firrhill High, in this catchment area. And you can watch her go in.’

We get there a full ten minutes ahead of them, and I assume they must have waited to take a bus up Oxgangs Road. Pupils straggle through the gates in groups of two and three and four. The rain has got heavier, and no one is lingering in the street or the playground. When I see them, they are instantly recognisable. Three lassies huddled under two umbrellas, hurrying down from the main road, and I am disappointed again not to see her face.

*

We sit along from the house in Hainburn Park all afternoon with the rain drumming on the roof of the cab. I can feel the driver becoming increasingly restive. And the only reason I can contain my own impatience is because I have decided to wait until my daughter returns from school, when I will step down from the cab to greet her in the street. It is more passive than walking up the drive and knocking on the front door to confront my wife. And I wonder if I am, by nature, a coward, or a prevaricator, or simply someone who shies away instinctively from the possibility of confrontation. Does she even know where I have been for the last year and a half, or why? What was the state of our relationship when I left? Are we still married? As the clock ticks away, I am becoming increasingly nervous.

By the time I see the three girls hurrying down the street towards us, what had begun the day as light drizzle has become a torrential downpour. Raining like stair rods, my mother used to say. And I catch my breath. Another memory. But it arrives like a lone horseman from the clouded depths of my mind, and slips away into insignificance.

I refocus. The gutters are in spate and I can see almost nothing out of the windows. I am wearing a waterproof jacket, but have no hat or umbrella. As soon as I step from the cab I will be drenched. They are almost upon us, and I swing the door open and step out on to the pavement, almost bumping into them. One of the girls releases a tiny, startled yelp, and all three faces turn up towards me from under the umbrellas. Fleetingly, I catch Karen’s eye, and see a face full of indifference, without a trace of recognition.

The girls hurry on, leaving me standing in the rain, my hair streaked in wet ropes down my forehead, and I am filled by the awful, hollow pain that comes with the realisation that the girl I had thought to be my daughter didn’t know me. Looked me straight in the eye and away again. Dismissive. Some stupid guy that bumped into them on the pavement. Certainly not her father.

I watch them carry on up the road, one of them detaching from the others and running up to the door of the house I have been watching all day, before vanishing inside. I open the door of the taxi, cast adrift again on a sea of utter confusion, and see the driver leaning towards me.

‘That lassie didnae know you fae Adam. You’re taking the piss, pal. You can find your own way back to the hotel. Shut the fucking door!’

In a state of semi-shock, I do as he says and hear him start the motor and rev fiercely. I watch as he pulls away up the street, leaving me standing at the side of the road. Perhaps it is only my imagination, but it seems to me as if the rain has intensified. I feel it beating a tattoo on my head, soaking into my jeans, washing around my shoes. I run a hand back across my scalp, sweeping my hair out of my eyes. With the rain running down my face, it would be hard to tell if I was crying. And if I were to cry, they would be tears of pure frustration. Along with the return, perhaps, of fear. For the rock of certainty on which I have built my hopes turns out to have been the sand of self-deception. If I had been Neal Maclean, resident of this Edinburgh suburb, father of Karen, then surely that girl would have known me? But if not her father, who else could I be? I feel as confused and disorientated now as I did those first moments on the beach at Luskentyre when I opened my eyes and realised I had no earthly idea who I was.

A strange, unaccountable anger takes hold of me. Why would I have all those newspaper cuttings about Neal Maclean? His birth certificate, with this address written on the back. It is incomprehensible. At the very least, somehow, I have to make some kind of sense of it.

I turn and walk briskly through the rain and turn into the drive of the house where the white Nissan is parked. Neal Maclean’s house. Where Neal Maclean’s wife and daughter live. At the front door, I knock three times in rapid succession, and such is my impatience that I barely wait a handful of seconds before knocking again. Then I spot the doorbell and ring it.

When the door opens, the woman with the blond-streaked hair looks startled, and it is immediately clear to me from her eyes that she doesn’t know me. Her daughter is hovering in the gloom of the hall beyond her, a towel in her hands. She, too, looks blankly towards me.

‘Can I help you?’ the woman says.

I have no idea what to say, and I blurt, ‘Don’t you know me?’

‘No, I don’t. What do you want?’

Her daughter calls, ‘He was standing out on the street when I got back.’

The mother says to me, ‘I think you’d better go.’

I don’t know what possesses me to say it, because I know now it’s not true. And I feel like a drowning man grasping at flotsam that I will simply drag under with me. ‘You must know me. I’m Neal Maclean. We’re married.’

Her eyes open wide with fear, all colour draining from her face in an instant, and she slams the door shut on me. From the other side of it, I hear her shout, ‘If you don’t leave immediately, I’ll call the police!’

*

There is a bar in the hotel called The Boston Bean Company. I have no idea why, and it seems to me like an absurd name for a bar. But tonight it offers refuge and escape to a man with no name, no past, no future. I am reacquainting myself with my only friend, Caol Ila. A friend who offers warmth and escape. And ultimately oblivion. A friend who doesn’t care who I am, good or bad, lost or found. A friend who will stay with me to the end, and ultimately hasten my departure.

It was quiet here when I first arrived, my hair still damp, a chill in my bones. But the in-crowd have arrived. Young people. Noisy. Drinking, talking, laughing. And above all, confident in who they are. They make an island of me. A solitary, silent island of confusion in their sea of certainty. I sit on a stool at the counter, watching my glasses come and go. A pale amber procession of them, evaporating before my eyes. And there is one refrain that plays again and again in my head like an earworm. If I am not Neal Maclean, who in God’s name am I?

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I am tempted by the hair of the dog. Not only because I feel like death on this grey September Edinburgh morning, but because I would like to rediscover the level of oblivion I achieved last night. The real world, today, feels even harsher and less forgiving.

It is only a short walk from the hotel to the top of Leith Street, and the turn into Princes Street. The equestrian statue of Wellington stands mounted on a plinth at the foot of the steps to General Register House, looking out over North Bridge.

For some reason I am acquainted with the history of this building. Built in the eighteenth century with funds seized from defeated Jacobite estates, it lay empty for nearly a decade, becoming known as the most magnificent pigeon house in Europe. It also provided a refuge for thieves and pickpockets before work resumed on its interior, turning it into what it is today – one of the oldest custom-built archive buildings still in continuous use anywhere in the world. Only nowadays they call it the ScotlandsPeople Centre.

At the reception desk in the main lobby, I buy, for fifteen pounds, a day search pass, and am escorted through the magnificent circular, glass-crowned Adam Dome, where the ancient records of sasines are stored on shelves that follow the contours of the room and rise in majestic procession to the golden dome high above. Desks with computers are set at intervals around the walls, but this is not the place where I will conduct my search.

The assistant takes me through a hall, past the Reid stairs, which lead to the historical and legal search rooms on the first floor, and into the Reid room itself, where computers sit before blue chairs in serried rows, on tables set along either side of the room. A man and a woman sit at a table in the centre, and the woman looks up and smiles as I approach, and asks to see my pass.

‘Have you used a computer in the search centre before?’ she asks.

If I have, I have no recollection of it and shake my head. She leads me to a desk and I sit down in front of a computer, feeling like a child on his first day at school. She pulls up a chair beside me, to boot up the computer and log me in.

‘Now, what exactly are you looking for?’

‘Anything at all about a Neal David Maclean.’ I fumble in my shoulder bag and bring out the extract of birth.

‘Ah, you must have accessed ScotlandsPeople online to get that?’

‘No.’ I am thinking as quickly as my hangover will allow. ‘It was given to me by a friend. I promised to do a search for him while I was here in Edinburgh.’

She touches the extract. ‘And that’s your friend? Neal Maclean?’

‘No. It’s a relative of his. He just wanted me to find out as much about Neal as I could.’

‘Well, you have his birth certificate, so that’s a good start. Is he married?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘Let’s have a look then.’ She leans across me to tap at the keyboard. I suppose this is something I should be doing myself, but she seems happy to help, bored perhaps from sitting for endless hours at her desk in the library silence of this room. ‘Yes, here we are, this looks like him. Married to Louise Alice Munro, February fifth, 1998. Married young. Just twenty years old.’

I squint at the screen and see that Louise Alice Munro is two years older than Neal, which is unusual. And she must have fallen pregnant very quickly after their marriage. Or perhaps a premature pregnancy was their reason for marrying at such a young age in the first place. ‘Is there any way of establishing whether they have had any children?’

‘That might take a while.’

And I think there is no point. I know they have a daughter. ‘Let’s skip that, then.’

‘Do you want to go back the way? Parents, grandparents.’

I shake my head. ‘No.’

And she frowns. ‘I don’t really understand –’ she glances at my pass – ‘Mr Smith. What exactly is it you think you can find here?’

I am at a complete loss. I really have no idea.

‘I take it he’s still alive?’

‘Who?’

‘Neal David Maclean.’

‘I believe so, yes.’

‘Well, if you only believe so, maybe we should check that first.’

And as she leans across me again, I smell her perfume – something floral sweet – and I feel the warmth of her body. She initiates another search and hits the return key to bring up the result. She straightens in her seat, pulling down her jacket where it has ridden up over her breasts.

‘Well,’ she says, and gives me the strangest look. ‘Your friend might have briefed you a little better, Mr Smith. Neal David Maclean has been dead for over two years.’

And I gaze at the winking cursor on the screen. A fit man, a sailor, used to the outdoor life, Neal Maclean had died in his late thirties from a heart attack. Was it any wonder his wife had looked at me as though she had seen a ghost?

CHAPTER TWELVE

Karen’s trip out towards the airport was not on a tram this time, but in a taxi. Which took a much more direct route, heading west on the A8, past Corstorphine and the old art deco Maybury Roadhouse at the roundabout, freshly painted and home now to the Maybury Casino. But the airport was not her destination.

She was unaccountably nervous. Not because she had skipped school, or stolen money from her mother to pay for the taxi, but because she was embarking on a voyage of discovery, to confront the demons she had tried so hard to keep in check these past two years.

Guilt had been the most prominent of them. A creeping, destructive sense of guilt that had eaten away, like so many termites, at the very foundations of her self. So much so that she had felt compelled to invent a new self, to gloss over the old, to pretend that she was someone else altogether, raising two fingers to the world as if she didn’t give a damn.

Her father’s final words had stripped away all that self-delusion.

Tell Karen I love her, even if I never could be the dad she wanted me to be
.

Who had she wanted him to be? She had no idea, and looking back she realised that she was the one who had changed, not him. He had been
everything
she had wanted him to be when she was younger. She had adored him, would have done anything for him. Just, she knew, as he would have done anything for her.

How hurt and frustrated must he have been when the daughter who adored him turned into the sullen, resentful teenager she had become?

Of course, she’d had no idea, then, of the estrangement that existed between her parents. She had been far too self-absorbed for that. But again, in retrospect, she could see all the signs. Remembering the whispered arguments in the bedroom, the silences at the dinner table. How increasingly he was detained at work and came home late. And although her mother had claimed the other night that he had used his work as a means of escaping
her
, Karen now wondered. Perhaps it was disappointment in his daughter that had kept him away from home, and that was what had driven the wedge between him and Karen’s mum.

Yet more guilt.

Tell Karen I love her.

The written words had gone through her like a knife. Cold, hard, sharp-edged. And they had met with little resistance. Her mother’s spoken words had echoed in her mind for hours afterwards.
It was only ever about you
. What had she meant? Had she been jealous of the relationship between Karen and her dad? Or was she blaming Karen for her father killing himself? Karen might have asked, had she not been afraid of the answer. Though, she hadn’t spoken to her mother since. And, the way she felt now, never would again.

The hours after she read the note had been spent crying in her room until she physically ached. Then had followed a stripping away of all the layers of pretence she had built around herself since her father’s death. In the bathroom, she had hacked away the longer, green hair on the top of her head, and then dyed it black like the rest. One by one, the piercings and lip rings were removed, leaving tiny holes in pale, naked skin. She scrubbed her face until it was devoid of the least trace of make-up, then stood staring at herself in the mirror, searching blue eyes for truth. Wondering not who it was she had become, but who she had been. And what she had done.

As she sat in the taxi now, she could see that same reflection staring back at her from the glass screen. She barely recognised herself. A pale, plain face beneath a head of close-cropped black hair with a few stray curls gelled back on top. There were penumbral shadows beneath her eyes from lack of sleep, and a puffiness still from all the crying. She was dressed, for her, very conservatively. Jeans, white tennis shoes, a plain white T-shirt beneath a long-sleeved dark jacket. There was not a tattoo in sight. Purple nail varnish had been removed from short nails that she had always had a tendency to bite, and she looked down at her hands and thought how small and ugly they were. Then remembered the tattoo artist laughing as he told her that men liked women with small hands, because it made their manhood seem bigger. She burned with shame at the recollection of things she had done in the name of rebellion.

Her taxi cruised through the underpass at the Gogar roundabout and, half a mile further on, took a left leading down to a smaller junction, before swinging left again and heading south. This was green, open country, transected by the Gogar Burn and punctuated by stands of dark trees. The road swooped over a rise in the land, and she saw the Gogarburn Golf Course off to their right, before the curve of the tarmac took them down in a wide sweep to a sprawling complex of steel and black glass that filled the hollow. It was built on two levels, and lay surrounded by mature trees that almost hid it from casual view. An enormous car park, very nearly filled to capacity, stood in grounds of manicured lawns. Her taxi swung into the turning circle at a concourse which led to revolving glass doors at the entrance to the main building, and Karen saw a long marble plinth set into the grass. It was engraved with the words
The Geddes Institute for Scientific Research
. This was where her father had worked for the two years before his death, and she had never once set foot in it.

A large, uniformed security guard standing at the door refused to let her in. ‘You need a pass, love.’ But he didn’t look at her as if she were his ‘love’.

‘I’m here to see my godfather.’

He cocked a sceptical eyebrow. ‘And who would that be?’

‘Professor Chris Connor.’

He hesitated.

‘My dad used to work here, too.’

‘Used to? Where is he now?’

‘He’s dead.’

Which tilted him slightly off balance, and she saw the first crack in his implacable veneer. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Karen Fleming.’

‘And your dad?’

‘Tom.’

He stabbed a finger at her. ‘You wait there.’ And he slipped inside and crossed the lobby to a reception desk. Beyond him, Karen could see through the glass, a long atrium rose up to a pitched glass roof that spilled light down on to what looked like the kind of shopping street you might find in a mall. There were coffee shops, restaurants, a bakery, a clothes store, a supermarket, even a bookshop. And the concourse was criss-crossed by people drifting from shop to shop, or riding the escalators up and down to a gallery running along either side of the first floor. Others stood in groups talking, and sipping skinny lattes from Starbucks cups.

The security guard returned to wave her through the revolving door and lead her across to the desk. A young woman wearing a headset with a microphone smiled at her. ‘Professor Connor will be down in a moment. I’ll need to make out a pass for you.’ She slipped a form across the counter for Karen to fill in with her name, address, telephone number, date, time and reason for visit. When it was done, she peeled away a second copy sheet for filing, and folded the top sheet to slip into a plastic visitor holder that she gave to Karen to clip on to her jacket. ‘Just sit over there.’

Karen crossed to sit uncomfortably in one of several leather armchairs grouped around a handful of coffee tables whose tops were marked by stains and rings.

Voices raised in idle chatter and laughter echoed all around the atrium and Karen wondered where it was that people worked here. And what it was they did. She had only ever had the vaguest notion of what it was her father worked at for a living. A research scientist employed by the university was all she had ever known. His field had been neuroscience, though she had no real idea exactly what that was.

In the centre of the lobby, the black bust of an impressive-looking young man with a thick head of hair and a full beard was raised to head height on a marble plinth. She saw the name
Sir Patrick Geddes
, and beneath it his birth and death dates.
1854–1932
.

‘Hello, K-Karen.’ His voice broke into her reverie. She looked up and was as shocked by her godfather’s appearance as he seemed to be by hers. He was, perhaps, a little older than her father and had always been inclined to plumpness. But since she last saw him he had shed more weight than was good for him and looked gaunt and wan, his once luxuriant thatch of sandy hair now thin and scraped back to disguise advancing baldness.

She stood up and kissed him awkwardly on each cheek. His brown eyes, watery and bloodshot, darted here and there and seemed reluctant to meet hers directly. He nodded towards the bust of Patrick Geddes, a way of distracting them both from their unease.

‘Amazing chap,’ he said. ‘Botanist, sociologist. And probably one of the world’s first environmentalists. Taught zoology right here in Edinburgh for a while. Then founded the university of Bombay.’ He forced a smile. ‘Or Mumbai, as they call it now. Planned the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, too, and founded the Collège des Écossais at Montpellier in France. As if that wasn’t enough, he was pretty much known the world over as the father of urban planning. Not bad for a laddie from Aberdeenshire. And all of it achieved in seventy-eight short years.’

Seventy-eight seemed very old to Karen. ‘That would be two of my dad’s lifetimes, then.’

Connor became self-conscious again, and he glanced around as if looking to see who might be watching them. Though, as far as Karen could tell, no one was paying them the slightest attention. ‘Wh-what are you doing here, Karen?’

‘I came to see my godfather.’

Connor looked instantly guilty, and Karen noticed that he was turning his wedding ring constantly around the third finger of his left hand, without any apparent awareness of it. ‘I’m sorry, Karen. I should have kept in touch. I . . . I know your dad would have wanted me to. It’s just . . .’ He searched around for some excuse. ‘Things have been, you know, not so great at home.’ But he didn’t elucidate. ‘Y-you shouldn’t really have come here. It would have been better if you’d called.’ He took her by the arm, gripping her too hard, and she was sure that his fingers would leave bruises. ‘You’d better come up to the office.’

As they glided up to the first-floor gallery on the escalator, Karen looked down on to the concourse. ‘What is this place? It looks like a shopping mall.’

Connor smiled. ‘We’re a research institute attached to the university.’

‘What do you research? The shopping habits of employees?’

He shook his head, and for the first time his smile came quite naturally. ‘You sound like your dad.’ And for some reason that thought made tears well in her eyes. She blinked and looked away to avoid embarrassment. ‘There are five thousand employees and students based here, Karen, and we’re a long way out of town. I think Ergo took a leaf out of The Royal Bank of Scotland’s book. Their headquarters is just over the hill there, and they have a very similar arrangement. The place is like a small town. People do everything but actually live here. Shop, eat, work, socialise. It narrows our focus and keeps it concentrated on work.’

Karen noticed that his stutter seemed to have disappeared. ‘What’s Ergo?’

They had reached the gallery now, and he led her along it, past offices and meeting rooms with glass walls and open doors. ‘It’s a Swiss agrochemical company. Probably bigger than Monsanto and Syngenta combined. They derived the name from the shortened form of the Greek word
ergostasio
, meaning
plant
. But, of course, Ergo itself also means
therefore
.’ He turned to smile at her. ‘I think, therefore I am. I think.’ When she didn’t return the smile, his faded. ‘Anyway, Ergo is the institute’s primary benefactor. They fund ninety per cent of our research.’

‘Which they then exploit commercially?’

Connor flicked her a look, surprised perhaps by her perception. ‘Well, yes. But it provides a wonderful resource for the university, professors and students alike.’ He glanced around the gallery that lined the atrium. ‘These are all just offices and conference rooms for staff and administration. Lab facilities and lecture theatres are located in the outlying buildings.’

At the end of the gallery, they turned right into a long corridor, then left into a small office with two desks pushed together beneath a window looking out across trees, towards the airport. Karen could see planes landing and taking off, but triple-glazing and engineered insulation cocooned them in silence. Connor closed the door carefully behind them, and closed blinds on the glass wall to shut them off from the corridor beyond. ‘Wh-what is it you want, Karen?’ The uncertainty crept back into his voice with the return of the conversation to personal matters.

‘I want to know about my dad.’

His agitation increased. ‘W-well, why? Your mum could tell you much more about him than me.’

‘I’m not talking to my mum right now. And, anyway, I’m not sure she really knew that much about him. You’ve known him since you were students together. You were his best man. And my godfather, for Christ’s sake.’

He looked at the floor, his arms hanging awkwardly at his sides. ‘I’m sorry. I . . . I’ve been pretty lousy at that.’

‘Well, maybe you can make up for it now.’ She saw him wince, as if she had stabbed him. ‘I want to know what he was like. Really like. What he was working on.’ She paused. ‘Why he killed himself.’

Her godfather turned away to shuffle papers on his desk. She saw him shaking his head. ‘I wish you’d called me at home.’

‘Why?’

‘B-because this isn’t the place to talk about stuff like that.’

She sighed her frustration. ‘I couldn’t find a number or an address for you anywhere. This is the only way I figured I could contact you. It’s like, you know, you haven’t made it very easy.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.’

She finally lost patience. ‘Stop apologising, Chris! Just talk to me.’ And she thought how strange it seemed to be calling him Chris. When she was a child, he’d encouraged her to call him ‘Toffee’, which had been her father’s nickname for him. Not remotely appropriate now.