East Fortune (2 page)

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 That was why he had withdrawn from the world in the first place: fear of accidents, fear of life.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.

He turned on the television. Jeremy Paxman was arguing with George Galloway. ‘Are you proud of having got rid of one of the very few black women in Parliament?' Although the debate was feisty it did not seem to have any relevance to anything in Jack's life at all. Nothing mattered except the boy in the road.

He made a pot of peppermint tea and took it outside. He sat on the garden swing in the dark, rocking himself backwards and forwards, like one of his two daughters, Annie and Kirsty, ten years previously. He thought of the alternative routes he could have taken on the road home: any other decision that would have spared him this.

He tried to think again if it might have been his fault, if there was anything he could have done to avoid the accident. He hoped the boy had given some kind of warning or left a note. He should have asked.

He finished his tea and returned to the house. He stopped outside the bathroom and read the framed poem on the wall outside.

I have a child; so fair
As golden flowers is she,
My Cleis, all my care.
I'd not give her away
For Lydia's wide sway
Nor lands men long to see.

Maggie had given it to him on Annie's first birthday. Now Jack walked into the family room, passing once loved objects that were no longer needed. There was his grandfather's wax stamp and his Morse code key, the frayed lampshade he had never replaced, the Greek amphora Kirsty had made at a pottery class when she was thirteen.

Through the window he could see the mist of summer rain, lit by the garden light, dripping in quick repetition from the slates of the roof into the gutters, bouncing off the down pipe and the satellite dish, falling through the blossom and the leaves, resting on the ferns and the climbing hydrangea: everything Maggie had planted to make the garden theirs.

Jack tried to recall good things in his life; the luck and the happiness he had known that might explain this balancing act of fate, this nemesis: Fortuna, a sudden reacquaintance with death.

That morning he had felt hopeful. He had sat in the garden and seen a blackbird gathering moss from the roof. He had watched a bumblebee bounce against the kitchen window and heard the cry of swifts newly returned.

Yes, he thought, he had been quite happy despite the withdrawal from his family. This was what the ancients had been after, an untroubled, solitary existence, away from all the fever and the fret.

Rain fell on his face as dawn began to break.

The next morning the police phoned to say that the boy had died. His parents lived in Edinburgh's New Town. They had one other son: Allan.

They would let him know about the funeral.

Jack tried to concentrate on his work.

He thought perhaps he should do something on the myth of Iphis, who hanged himself when Anaxerete did not return his affection. How many in the classical world had died or killed themselves for love?

Perhaps he would make his students study the description of the moment of death in Lucretius: the departure of the spirit as smoke floating in the air.

Quod genus est Bacchi cumflos evanuit.
Just as happens when the bouquet of wine has vanished…

Could his students think of a better word than ‘bouquet'?

Aut cum spiritus unguenti suavis diffugit in auras.
Or when the sweet breath of ointment has dispersed into the air…

Couldn't they do better than ‘ointment' or ‘unguent'? Why couldn't they be bold and use ‘perfume' or ‘fragrance', and make the fact of death nothing more than the fragrance of a passing woman?

Aut aliquo cum iam sucus de corpore cessit.
Or when the flavour has passed from a substance…

Wasn't there a better way of translating this to make death more sensual, more pleasing, evanescent?

Jack could not concentrate. He decided to write to the boy's parents. He had to say something and writing it down would clarify his thinking. Then he could begin to come to terms with what had happened.

He made himself another cup of tea, and tidied up the kitchen, thinking of what he might write. He looked out his best fountain pen and filled it with ink. Each time he started he could not quite think how to phrase the letter.

Dear Mr and Mrs Crawford,

I wanted to write to say how sorry I am that the accident happened.

Was ‘accident' the right word? How else could he describe it? ‘Incident'? That made him sound like a policeman. ‘Event'? It was
a bit more than an ‘event'. He remembered reading articles in the Sunday papers telling him never to apologise or admit responsibility at the scene. It meant that he couldn't say what he really felt. He crossed out what he had written, drew out a fresh piece of paper, and began again.

I am sorry about all that has happened. It must have been a terrible shock.

Was that good enough? It seemed so bald. ‘Shock'. Surely he could do better than this? And was it a ‘shock' in any case? Perhaps there had been signs, warnings, previous attempts? He could not assume anything at all.

It must be awful to lose a child in this way.

Would the parents still see their son as a child? Jack didn't regard his daughters as ‘children' any more. Perhaps he should say ‘son'? Or would that imply that to lose a son was worse than losing a daughter?

I wanted to let you know that, if there is anything I can do, or if you would like to talk about what happened, I would be happy to do so.

‘Happy'? Glad? Would he really be ‘happy'? Perhaps he should say ‘prepared'.
I would be prepared to do so.
But was that friendly enough? How could he strike a balance between concern and distance?

He had never had to write a letter of condolence to a stranger before. It was different with friends. He had learned to suggest that the deceased were still with them, even if not in any bodily form. We carry them with us into the rest of our lives, to the last extremity,
tempus in ultimum.
We hear their voices. We can recall them at any time. They live within us.

But he could hardly say all this to a couple he had never met.

Jack decided to write what he could, correcting as he went. Then he would write the whole letter out again, a fair copy.

It took him over an hour and he decided to post it straight away. Then there would be no time to change his mind or refine it further. The job would be done.

Writing the letter taught Jack to keep busy. When he lost concentration, and had forgotten what he was doing, he snapped back to realise that all he was thinking about was the figure in the road.

So he looked for distraction: organising the timetable for next term, marking essays and dissertations, setting up extra seminars for the students who had fallen behind, anything to avoid thinking about Sandy Crawford.

Jack tried to picture the long fetch of the boy's life: what kind of family he must have come from and how he had come to be separated from its security.

How bad did life have to become for a man to be so determined to throw it all away?

Without his car, Jack travelled by bus to the university. It was slower but simpler. He did not have to concentrate and it gave him more time to think about all that had happened. He did not know whether he would have to tell his colleagues or what they might say behind his back. Perhaps they would think he had not been concentrating or that he was drunk; not that he ever drank that much.

On the bus Jack sat behind a woman who was complaining that she shouldn't have to pay for a TV licence because she only had a small television, and besides, she only watched opera. The girl opposite looked like an art student. She was lettering a phrase into a new notebook:
I HARDLY EVEN KNOW YOU.
And then at the bottom of the page:
CAN'T YOU SEE?