The Steep Approach to Garbadale (17 page)

Al waves and comes over. He looks just like he did when he left, a week ago. Maybe the beard’s a bit trimmer. He nods at Deedee and takes his glass. ‘What the fuck happened to the flat, Tango?’ he asks me.

‘Fucken D.S. is what happened to the fucken flat, that’s what,’ I tell him.

He rolls his eyes. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’

‘My feelings exactly, big man.’

‘Jesus,’ he says. ‘Right. First things first. Who wants what?’

In a round is got. Al says his formal hellos and sits beside me, putting his wee backpack on the floor.

‘And before you ask,’ I tell him, ‘yes, they did take your big pack. Heard one of the boys in blue saying what a smart-looking bit of kit it was, too, so I wouldn’t hold out great hopes of ever seeing that again.’

‘Did they nick anybody?’

‘Aye, me!’ I poke myself in the chest. ‘I had about ten ounces of blow in the place cos Special Kay and Deep Phil were back from Umshter-fucken-dum.’

‘Shit. You been charged yet?’

‘Aye, fucken possession with intent to supply. No date yet.’

‘Ah thought they wur meant tae be no botherin wi blow these days, but,’ Veepil says, waving her cig around. This is about the seventh time she’s said this over the last couple of hours. Drink has been taken.

‘Sorry to hear that, Tango,’ Al says. ‘You got a legal?’

‘Aye, getting aid, and that.’

‘Did they leave anything of mine?’

‘That’ll be right. Maybe some dirty washing.’

‘So, are you locked out?’

‘Aye. The council took serious fucken exception for some bizarre fucken reason and put me in a fucken B&B on Flowers Street. Fucken shite it is. Sorry, Al; canny put you up now. I had a word, and Sunny D says you can stay at his and Di’s if you don’t mind sharing a room with the twins.’ I hold my hands up, feeling mortified and dead inhospitable, even though this is definitely not my fault. ‘Best I can do, big man. I’m really sorry.’

Al pats my shoulder. ‘That’s okay. Don’t worry.’

‘Ye’ll no be wantin tae go tae Sunny an Di’s though, will ye?’ Deedee says, giving it serious face.

‘No,’ Al says. ‘I’ll pass. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.’

‘Where are you going to go, but?’ I ask him.

‘Where fate seems to be pushing me,’ he says, sighing and staring up at the ceiling. ‘Back into the welcoming fucking tentacles of my family.’

Deedee is poking a finger through a handful of small change, mostly copper’s. ‘Anybody got any dosh fur the fag machine? Ma duty-frees must be back hame.’

Al digs in his pocket.

 
It begins with a choice. She picks a large coat with the deep, inside pockets that people call poacher’s pockets from the variety of coats and jackets and capes in the cloakroom of the house. The coat she selects is an old, shabby one that has been in the family for decades; it has been worn by her father, some of her uncles, perhaps a few of her larger-made female relations over the years, and by most of the males in the present generation of the Wopuld family. She leaves the house by the side door and takes the indirect route towards the main road, heading not down the drive that loops up to the front of the house and through the avenue of tall cedars, but instead walking down to the shadowy path that follows the River Garbh on its way from the inland loch towards the sea.

She picks up the first stone while she’s walking through the garden, stooping to pull it from the side of the path. She looks at it, thinking of cleaning some of the damp brown soil from it, but then puts it straight into one of the external pockets of the coat. There’s a glove in the pocket. She looks at it as she walks and feels in the other outside pocket, finding the second glove. She puts them on. They’re too big, like the coat, but it doesn’t really matter.

She walks down the path by the river, listening to the waters roar and shush. Some of the people on the estate call the river a burn. She has always wondered why something full of cold water is associated with a verb denoting fire and heat. There seems to be no adequate explanation for this.

The trees down by the river are what-do-you-call-it; deciduous. They have broad leaves they shed in the autumn. Autumn comes early here, this far north; a month or so early compared to Somerset, compared to Lydcombe. In perhaps as little as a couple of weeks the broadleaf trees here will be starting to turn brown and red and gold and begin to lose their leaves.

The rain has almost ceased now and the sky is going from a dull to a brighter grey. She squats by a stone in the centre of the rough path and tries to prise it out, but it will not come. She takes the gloves off, thinking this may help, but it doesn’t. She puts the gloves back on again. She walks down a narrower path to the side of the stream and pulls a rock from the bank, putting that rock into the external pocket on the other side of the coat from the first stone.

She continues down the riverside track, stopping now and again to add stones and rocks to her pockets, beginning to use the deep, inside poacher’s pockets. The coat is starting to become heavy, pulling her shoulders down.

Where the road into the estate crosses the river, via an old curved bridge of grey stone, she stays with the path, passing under the road. A car hisses overhead on the still damp tarmac. She hears that, and listens to the tumbling waters echo off the curved surface of arching stone, then she’s out from beneath the bridge and walking down the path towards the rocky shore and the dull grey gleaming that is Loch Glencoul, the sea loch. The line of rocks arranged like giant pearls around the shore of the loch are different shades of grey; a rainbow of monochrome. Their colour changes to brown near the water, covered in seaweed. The mountains tower around the loch, their high tops hidden by the uniform blanket of grey cloud.

The coat feels very heavy on her now, weighing her down with the mass of stones she’s accumulated, making her shoulders ache. The rocks in the poacher’s pockets click and clack as she walks and force her to move with a swaying, halting, slightly unnatural step. The river shallows and broadens out between banks of rain-bright grass that give way to the rocks and seaweed at ragged, undercut margins of dark, peaty ground where the grey remains of barkless tree trunks and giant branches - element-stripped, time-polished - lie trapped and caught, twisted limbs spread and out-flung in frozen poses of what look to her like agony and despair; a Pompeiian tableau representing the fossilisation of a meaningless end.

There is no discernible path any more. She stumbles down the side of the stream, nearly falling, then stoops to pick up another couple of rocks, adding them to the collections in the poacher’s pockets. She thinks she feels something give as she adds the stones to the right pocket, and worries that the material will rip, letting the stones fall out. She recalls a fable about something like that. Aesop, probably. The fable of the woman who tried to carry too many rocks; that would be her. Not that it would ever be written, not that anybody would ever read it. Not that it mattered in the least. Not that anything did.

The rocks on this part of the shore are round and hard to walk over, especially with all the extra weight she is carrying. She had carried less when she had been pregnant with the child, though sometimes it had felt like all the weight in the world. She splashes into the stream as it spreads out still further, leaving behind the grassy banks and forming a rough delta across the rocks, straggled with seaweed and the flayed flotsam branches. Her boots fill with cold water. She stops, takes off the gloves and carefully does up the buttons on the coat, right up to her chin. Then she stoops, plunging her hands through the water rushing around her boots, and picks up a last couple of stones from the bed of the stream. Cradling them in the crook of one arm, she pulls the gloves back on over her wet hands, then holds the stones, one in each hand, rather than risk putting them into the already overloaded pockets of the coat.

She keeps on walking down the stream until the stream becomes the sea, becomes the waters of the loch. By sticking to the stream bed she’s walked past the seaweed, avoiding slipping and falling on it. She wonders where the water stops tasting fresh and starts being salty.

The waters of the loch rise around her ankles, calves, knees. The coat’s tails float up on the surface of the loch, moving with the small waves, then start to disappear under the surface, weighed down by the stones she has gathered in her pockets. The water is stunningly, sharply, cruelly cold. Already, as the waves chop and surge around her knees, she can hardly feel her feet, and what sensation remains is painful; a bone-chilling ache she remembers from childhood. The coat sinks around her. The water rises to her thighs.

A seagull - wings stretched across the breeze - banks around her, some distance off. Its white head and black bead-eyes swivel once in her direction, then the bird pulls up and flaps slowly away, heading for the shore.

The rain has started again, dampening her hair. She wades further on, each step deeper and draggier than the last, forcing her way out towards the dark centre of the loch as though through a nightmare. The waters reach her groin, then her belly and waist, chilling her utterly, sucking the warmth from her body. Bubbles rise from her clothes. Each step she takes is a little easier now; she feels more sure-footed on the hidden surface of the bed under the brown waters as her body tries to float. She’s holding her gloved hands and the two last stones out of the water, hugging them up near her shoulders. Water trickles over her wrists and down her forearms.

Tears fill her eyes and start to roll down her cheeks as she takes each sucking, gasping breath. The cold of the water, gradually transferring itself to her body, seems to be draining the ability to breathe from her chest muscles, putting them into spasm, forcing her to fight for every breath. She wonders if this terrible, wrenching, invasive cold will stop her heart even before she drowns.

She is terrified. She starts to sob, the sobs made sharp and ragged by the penetrating cold of the water and her spasming chest. She had hoped that right now, in these final moments, there might be some sort of peacefulness, that she might find a state of uncaring resignation imposing itself upon her, like a foretaste of the freedom from pain she is looking to oblivion to provide. Instead she is going to her death in a state of dread and cold-flayed agony, blundering across the rocks hidden by the dark brown water beneath her, horror stricken at the thought of what she is doing to those who will survive her, filled with fear at the idea that there might after all be a stupid, vengeful, punitive God, a God ultimately no better than Man, a God who punishes further those so lost to hope they take their own lives in the first place. What if all that nonsense is true? What if the ghastly Christian mumbo-jumbo is based on truth?

Well, let it be. She deserves any punishment, will accept it, embrace it. If this too-humanly formed God really existed, then the afterlife was as vindictive and spiteful as the world, indeed was just a continuation of it, and what she was here she would be there, and so no more deserving of any mercy or relief in that world than she was in this. She knows what she is doing is wrong. The knowing that what she is doing - what she has realised for some time she was committed to doing - will hurt others (one or two deserving, the rest not deserving at all) is itself one of the reasons that she hates herself and her life and what she has become, and so seeks this extinction.

Anyway, it still doesn’t matter. Just the chance of not being, not thinking, not suffering, is worth it all. Deep inside, she knows it really is all nonsense, and there is no continuation whatsoever.

Another few steps. She feels lighter still, gasping as the water surrounds her torso like an icily enveloping lover. Her heart is beating very quickly. The coat and the collection of stones keep her down, stopping her from floating. The water comes to her breasts - the obscene, cold lover squeezing like something hungry - and a wave splashes her stone-clutching hands, dribbling water down her wrists towards her elbows. The next wave splashes her face. One more step, then another, sinking deeper. The water is at her chin now. She takes a deep breath, instinctively, then thinks how stupid this is, and lets the air away again, forcing the last of it out as the water ascends to her mouth.

A note. She should have left a note. She thought of this weeks ago, days ago, even last night, but in the end she didn’t do it. Perhaps she ought to have left one. It was traditional. Traditional. This thought makes her smile, briefly, tremulously, as the sense-destroying coldness of the water splashes up to her nose. No, there was no point leaving a note. What would she have said?

The tears roll down her cheeks and into the slapping waves, taking their own tiny cargo of saltiness with them.

She feels sorry for the child, for Alban.

The gently sloping shelf of the loch bed ends here; she walks off the hidden underwater cliff with a tiny surprised cry, bitten-off, and vanishes immediately under the brown waves, her auburn hair sucked down at last like fine tendrils of seaweed, leaving only a few bubbles which float briefly and then burst and vanish.

Her last breath, taken reflexively the instant before she cried out, held instinctively despite her desire for death, finally surrendered to the crushing pressure of the black water fathoms down, surfaces in a small silvery cluster of larger bubbles about half a minute later.

The gull comes back through the soft veils of grey rain, wing-tipping down, feathers almost touching the surface of the waves over the place where she disappeared, then it curves away once more.

 
Back on track. He should think so, too.

Alban turns up at the London offices less than a week after Fielding had to leave him in Glasgow. They meet in Reception, Al standing dressed like a tramp in that same grubby-looking hiking jacket and toting his little stained backpack, his dirty jeans and scuffed hiking boots making him look like he’s just stepped out of the forests or a workman’s van. His beard is looking well trimmed, Fielding thinks, but still. They’re surrounded by the prizes, plaques, awards and certificates hanging on the walls, and by the framed newspaper cuttings and photographs of the famous, featuring either a game - usually
Empire!
- or Wopuld family members.