East Fortune

  For Marilyn

  Love depends

  On habit quite as much as the wild ways

  Of passion. Gently does it, as the rain

  In time wears through the very hardest stone.

  Lucretius: Book IV, De Rerum Natura

  Contents

  Friday 6 May 2005

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Acknowledgements

  A Note On The Author

  By the Same Author

  Friday 6 May 2005

  One

  Jack Henderson was trying to live as calmly as possible. He seldom left home, drew little attention to himself, and took few risks in what he considered to be a hazardous world. His was a life of disciplined withdrawal; without pain or disturbance.

  It was two in the morning on the night of the General Election. Jack was driving home from Edinburgh. He could see the last of the city lights recede against a spray of summer rain. Traffic moved away from junctions and roundabouts with entitled confidence. This was how driving should be, he thought, with fewer vehicles and everyone knowing where they were going.

  He noticed a figure ahead and in the distance. It was a man standing as if his car had broken down. Perhaps he was waiting to hitch a lift.

  Jack quickened the speed of the windscreen wipers; brushing away the rain. He noticed that the figure was younger than he had first thought, a student perhaps, staring into the windows of each passing car.

  Jack kept his speed steady.

  The figure stepped out into the road. He stretched his arms out and his legs apart, making an X, palms facing the windscreen, the hands with a slight tremor that Jack only remembered later. His face had a questioning look that asked: Why are you doing this to me?

  Jack noticed that the sleeves on the man’s shirt were too short and that his hair was longer than he had first thought. The figure did not seem to be part of the world.

  Now the face was up against the windscreen, the flesh ruddy and sudden in the darkness.

  Jack felt the weight of the collision.

  The face contracted and fell away.

  Initially Jack hoped that he had made a mistake. Perhaps he had been dreaming. Perhaps the moment of impact had been a bump in the road, a speed restriction, a dog or a fox.

  But other cars were coming towards him in the opposite direction and they were already slowing. Hazard lights flashed behind him.

  Jack could see a shape on the ground in the rear-view mirror, a shadow in the darkness, clothing in the middle of the road.

  He pulled over and turned off the ignition.

  He knew, even then, that this was a last moment of normality before everything would have to change. If he could just arrest this moment, stop time, then everything might yet be all right.

  But it was not all right.

  He opened the door. There was a surge of noise, braking, people shouting.

  Jack could see the silhouette of another man jumping out and slowing cars down.

  Now there were lights all around him, people gesticulating, running, stopping and staring.

  Jack walked over to the body in the road. Already there was too much blood. The head was pulped on the right side. The legs were splayed away. Nobody lies twisted like that, Jack thought; nobody bleeds like that and survives.

  He looked at the head and at the blood; even in the darkness it gleamed a dark crimson: clotted.

  He tried to work out the man’s age. He could see that he was too old to be a student, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. He wondered how soon his parents would know and if he had a girlfriend.

  Jack knew that he would never forget this. It would be a hinge in his life, like the birth of his daughters or the time the woman who became his wife said that yes, she loved him, she would always love him and she would marry him; or the time when that same woman said that although she still loved him the fact was she couldn’t live with him any more, she just couldn’t. He had never understood what she had wanted out of life. He had never nurtured her.

  Nurtured. Even then Jack had thought it a strange word to use.

  Now this.

  He knew he should concentrate on nothing but the body in the road; a young man who could almost have been a son, a boy, lying in a ripped corduroy jacket, blood draining through his T-shirt: a moment out of the night, the light rain falling, the wood beyond.

  Before this Jack had been an ordinary man driving home. He had withdrawn from the world to avoid just such disasters, and yet here it was in front of him, lying in the road: abrupt catastrophe.

  He tried to think when he had first seen the figure in the distance. If only he had decided to accelerate before the boy stepped out.

  What was he doing walking so far out of town? You never saw people walking around near the A1, you just didn’t. You only saw them in the daytime, families who had gone for walks or picnics or men and women whose cars had broken down; never at night.

  And why had the boy chosen Jack’s car? Why not the previous Mitsubishi or the next Nissan Micra? Why this moment of conjunction when there was no one else on the road?

  Jack tried to think of the length of time everything had taken before this moment: how he had been watching the election results come in with his daughter; how they had shared supper together and he had left far later than he intended before realising that he had to find an all-night petrol station. Even the fact that he had allowed a car out at a crossing, or that he had let someone clean his windscreen for a pound at a red light must have made a difference. Any later and the boy might have thrown himself under another car. Any earlier and he might not have been there at all.

  There had been little traffic when he had started out on his journey but now there was nothing but cars, vans and lorries. Jack could see a police vehicle approaching.

  A man stopped his car alongside, putting on the hazard lights. He had thrown a packet of biscuits on to the back seat. He must have been trying to open them when the accident happened.

  Accident.

  Another man in a brown linen suit and open-toed sandals was standing in front of the dying boy, for he was dying, Jack knew that, waving traffic away. The man was hopping from one foot to the other. Perhaps he was trying not to get the blood on his socks.

  Someone else had stopped: a fat man with a comb-over getting out of a car and sweating, leaving a black Labrador in the back seat and his wife too scared to get out. She was holding a little boy in a yellow fireman’s hat.

  ‘He fair threw himself at you,’ the man was saying. ‘There was nothing you could do … I saw it happen … I’ll say so … you’ll need a witness.’

  He took his shirt off to staunch the blood.

  A woman got out of a yellow Nova and put a mohair rug over the boy in the road.

  ‘Poor wee lamb,’ she said.

  Jack looked at the rug because he didn’t want to look at the boy’s face. What kind of tartan was it? he thought. It was one of the less familiar clans.

  What could he do to undo it all, this moment?

  ‘I’m a nurse,’ the woman was saying. ‘We have to stop the bleeding.’ She started stroking the boy’s head, pressing at the blood with her husband’s shirt, watching the life die away. ‘Have you called an ambulance?’

  Jack felt for his mobile phone but couldn’t remember the number. It was different on a mobile phon
e, wasn’t it? He could see other people doing it for him. The boy began to cough in the road.

  Jack couldn’t look at the face or the rug any more. He began to concentrate on the boy’s shoes. They were polished brown brogues. They seemed almost too clean for the rest of his clothes.

  People were always speeding on this road, the woman was saying, there’ve been complaints, local campaigns; drivers speed up as they leave the city, hope you weren’t speeding.

  Her husband was stopping all the other cars, gesturing to the ambulance to come through.

  Jack heard the paramedics talking about a triage category one.

  A policeman started asking him questions. Was Jack the driver of the car and would he like to step aside? He had spots on his neck and silver numbers on the shoulder of his uniform that made Jack think of Sudoku. Perhaps all the policeman’s numbers added up to forty-five.

  He appeared to be talking about a digital breathalyser. Now the metal grates were between Jack’s teeth and he was asked to blow through a plastic tube into the small hand-held device. The policeman was telling Jack that it used an electrochemical fuel cell as a sensor. If the reading was under the legal limit of 0.05, the driver was normally free to leave, although obviously this wouldn’t apply under these circumstances.

  As Jack waited for the result he could see a policewoman taking statements from the witnesses, writing by hand in the light of the cars. It was taking her for ever. He thought how much better it would be if the policewoman knew shorthand. He could almost hear his mother’s voice: Don’t they teach them anything these days?

  He did not know how he could avoid telling her what had happened. His mother would try to console him, he knew, but there would also be a silent judgement, a feeling of disappointment; the sense that Jack could probably have avoided the whole thing if only he had been more aware.

  He wanted to speak, to explain himself, apologise even now to the boy who was being lifted into the ambulance; but the policeman said, ‘Better no say anything at this stage, sir.’

  Jack was driven away from the scene, back past the hospital and into Edinburgh.

  There were fewer people in the streets of the city. A girl in a white T-shirt was taking off her shoes to run barefoot and catch up with her friends; a homeless man in a sheepskin coat was holding out a beaten paper cup from McDonald’s.

  A sheepskin coat? Jack thought. In the summer?

  At the police station the chairs in the fluorescent room reminded Jack of school. He was offered a mug of tea. He never normally took sugar but now he asked for three spoons. He could do with a blanket too and then he remembered the rug covering the boy. Would the woman have taken it back, or would she have abandoned it? Perhaps it would be evidence?

  The clock read twenty-seven minutes past three. For a brief moment Jack felt he was in an airport. There was the same consistent light.

  He worried how much he would have to explain. Perhaps he would spend the night in the cells, await trial, and never leave?

  The policewoman who prepared to take his statement had short blonde hair and pale-blue eyes. They were the colour of speedwell, Jack decided. She had a soft voice with a hint of Fife in it. When had she decided to be a policewoman? He looked at her fingers for rings. Not married. Or did she take her jewellery off when she was on duty?

  Yes, he was called Jack Henderson and it was his car. No, he hadn’t been drinking. Yes, he’d already been breathalysed. They should have known that. Why did they keep asking? Were they trying to catch him out? The boy had stepped out right in front of him. There was nothing he could have done. Surely they knew that?

  Jack had always been scared of accidents and chance collisions, of bicycles and drunks, people holding kebabs and takeaways and cans of Tennent’s Extra, staggering, being sick, a drunken Scotland shouting through the Saturday-night traffic.

  And he had always been anxious about driving. He preferred trains and buses but what could he do, living in the countryside where there were only three or four buses a day, and not earning enough for perpetual taxis?

  He told the policewoman that he’d always been frightened of accidents. He wanted to say, ‘In fact I’ve always been scared, full stop.’ That was why he had withdrawn from the world in the first place: fear of accidents, fear of life.

  ‘A cautious driver then?’ the policewoman asked.

  ‘A careful driver. There is a difference.’ He didn’t mean to sound pedantic.

  She asked him whether he had ever had any convictions in the past and when his car had last been serviced. It was clear that Jack was yet to escape blame but he could not think how he could have done anything differently.

  ‘The boy stepped out in front of me,’ he said. ‘There was nothing I could do. I know he saw me.’

  Jack waited for the transcription of his statement. He could hear typing on a keyboard from the next room, a man shouting, ‘What the fuck’s it got to do with youse, you bastards?’ A woman hushing, ‘Calm down, Jim.’

  ‘Don’t you start telling me to fucking calm down.’

  Jack looked at the clock and then at a duty officer, who appeared to be doing a crossword. A mute television in the corner was showing the election results. LAB HOLD EDINBURGH NORTH AND LEITH. The policewoman drummed her fingers.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Jack wanted to say, halfway between a parent and a husband.

  She smiled briefly and turned away, embarrassed. She had probably gone over her shift and was into overtime. She needed the money, Jack thought. He guessed that she would rather be at home, anywhere other than here with some middle-aged bloke who’d just topped a stranger. Perhaps they had a name for the victims, like train drivers after their first ‘one under’. Jack remembered reading that the most popular time for train suicide was eleven in the morning; so two o’clock in the middle of a summer night was perhaps a bit out of the ordinary. The eleven o’clockers. They got up and decided. It was like going to work.

  Had the boy chosen him deliberately? Had he checked for single male drivers, avoiding families, old people and young lovers? Perhaps he had thought that a single middle-aged man would be able to cope better; and in a reassuring Mondeo Estate too, not some nippy little hatchback or convertible: sprightly enough for speed yet still sufficiently heavy to do the job. How much had he planned it – the volume of traffic, the weight of cars, the best position to ensure maximum impact? Had he chosen this stretch of road on purpose, just after the speed cameras where people always tended to accelerate away – or had it been an impetuous, random decision, a piece of chance or accident that had brought them together?

  Perhaps the boy had thought nothing at all and just walked out, on substances, drugs or drink? Or perhaps he was calmly rational, fearing neither pain nor consequence?

  Jack asked the policewoman when he could go home.

  ‘We’re just about done.’ She was not prepared to treat him as she might have done before the accident. ‘All you have to do is sign the statement and you’re free to go.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘We’ll call a taxi,’ the policewoman said. ‘You do have money? It’s quite a way to North Berwick.’

  ‘What about the boy?’

  A bit of softness appeared in her face.

  ‘You can phone in the morning.’

  The taxi smelled of cigarettes and Magic Tree. Jack sat in the back and looked at the tightly gelled grey curls of the driver as he talked about the problems at Hearts football club.

  ‘We might as well move the whole shebang to Lithuania,’ he said.

  The sky was lighter now. It didn’t really matter what happened to him any more, Jack thought. He was no longer in control of his life.

  The driver began to talk about the election and the Prime Minister having sex five times a night.

  ‘What’s wrong with doing it once properly? That’s what I always say.’

  Jack tried to think of the last time he had slept with Maggie. It must have been three years ago. He had hoped that
they could reach some kind of mutual understanding, beyond passion, but he had been wrong.

  ‘It’s because he’s going to lose the war. That’s what I think,’ the taxi driver was saying. ‘He has to make up for it with sex.’

  He drove with one hand and kept turning round to see if Jack was all right. Jack guessed that the policewoman had tipped him off. ‘You watch him,’ she must have said.

  He asked the driver to take a different route so they didn’t have to pass the scene of the accident.

  ‘Are you sure? This is the way. The A198.’

  ‘There was an incident earlier.’

  Incident.

  ‘Cleared up now. They radioed. It’ll take ages to go crosscountry.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘You’re throwing your money away.’

  ‘I don’t care about the money.’

  ‘You want me to go by all the windy back roads?’

  ‘If you can.’

  The taxi driver began to talk about Edinburgh’s new traffic measures, which took everyone round the houses, and picking up the stag parties and hen nights (women were the worst, you wouldnae think it but they were). The streets were like the bottom of a baby’s pram, he said, all piss and puke.

  Jack arrived home. The house was too big for him now that the family had left. He looked out at the long-redundant swing, and at the photographs of the children in silver frames: his two daughters against a celestial-blue studio backdrop.

  He lived in a villa of red sandstone with flagstone floors and a large family kitchen. He had bought it when it was falling apart and he had been restoring it over twenty years. He had not worried then about coastal erosion or global warming; all he had wanted was a house on a cliff and a view out into infinite possibility. It would never be as grand as his parents’ house but he had wanted to provide the kind of childhood environment he had known himself, a constant sense of home, a place of refuge.

  He opened the door to the larder and looked at foodstuffs past their sell-by date, left over from a time when his wife had prepared all the food. There were items he didn’t have a clue what to do with: baking parchment, liquid glucose syrup, dissolving gelatine, organic hemp oil. At the back he could see a Highland Spring bottle with a Post-it note Sellotaped over the label. HOLY WATER. DO NOT THROW AWAY. Maggie was a Catholic. There had been tension within his family about her from the start.