The Man In The Seventh Row (16 page)

They went to the funeral parlour, where his father lay in his coffin. Roy wore black, as usual. They all wore black. Roy had never seen anyone in a coffin before, except Dracula. His father looked very peaceful. He still looked jolly even in death, like Santa having a sleep before his deliveries. A small family group gathered and waited. And waited. An attendant came in, looked round the room, and nodded. The cemetery was not far, a 15-minute drive. Fifteen minutes before the funeral service was due to start Roy's uncle decided he had better find out when the undertakers intended to set off. Soon. The hearse was just coming. Any minute now. They hoped. It was on its way.

'Where is it?' asked Roy's uncle.

'Ah,' said the undertaker, 'well ...'

The Battys went to the funeral parlour and sat with the body. The hearse went to the Battys' house to collect the body, four men in black, with an empty hearse and an empty limo, hammering on the door, wondering if the occupants were too distraught to answer.

Roy, his mother, his brother and his uncle climbed into one vehicle and the undertakers tossed the coffin into the other. The hearse made it through the lights on the last flicker of amber but the lights turned to red before the limousine passed through, and a van, appropriately enough a butcher's van, screeched to a halt to avoid a collision. By now the hearse was overtaking another car and the limousine followed, speeding over the cobbles of Comely Bank Avenue in hot pursuit. Roy could have sworn all four wheels left the ground, just for a moment, as they flew down the hill on the wrong side of the road. The dramatic car chase over the streets of San Francisco in
Bullitt
ran through Roy's mind. The drive to the cemetery was quicker.

'I've never been to a funeral where the hearse overtakes other cars,' said Roy's mother.

'It's not normal then?' asked Roy.

'No, it's not normal,' said his mother.

Roy smiled. 'I think Dad would have liked it. It's a bit far-fetched, but he would have liked it.' He chuckled to himself.

It was weeks later that he went by himself to the Playhouse in North Berwick, where they were showing
The Magnificent Seven
. Again. And he thought he saw his father on the screen. No, he was sure he saw his father on the screen, as one of the Mexican peasants, and he just wanted to be there with him. He missed him. He wanted to be up there, with his dad again. But Yul Brynner stayed Yul Brynner. McQueen was still McQueen, perversely refusing to hand over his role to Roy. And then his father was gone, vanished in the bustle of white pyjamas and sombreros. He thought he had seen him up there on the screen, but it was difficult to be sure because his eyes had filled with tears. They ran down his face and he wiped them away. In the cinema, in the confessional darkness, no one can see you cry.

17

First there is a mountain. It looks a lot like the mountain at the beginning of the Paramount films. Then a figure in a leather jerkin and fedora comes into view, followed by native bearers and a mule, making their way through tropical jungle beneath the mountain. One of them hacks through the vegetation to reveal a hideous face with big eyes, bared teeth and a tongue hanging out. He screams and retreats in horror, though the face is not alive. It is carved in stone. In the trunk of a tree is an arrow. A caption appears over the scene. 'South America 1936'.

First there is a hill. It looks a lot like the Law at North Berwick in East Lothian. Then a figure in a leather jerkin and fedora comes into view, followed by a single, black, female bearer, with a haversack on her back and carrying a spade. There is no mule. They make their way across the ploughed field beneath the hill and the dull grey sky. The bearer hacks at the nettles at the edge of the field with her spade to reveal a hideous face with big eyes, bared teeth and its tongue hanging out. She ignores it. It is printed on wet, disintegrating paper, bearing the title 'Beano'. If a caption were to appear over this scene it would say 'North Berwick 1986'.

In South America, the man in the fedora tentatively makes his way into some sort of ancient dwelling. Enormous hairy spiders drop on him. Spikes hurl out of a wall, bearing the corpse of a previous explorer. He swings across a pit, using his whip as a rope. At the end of the trail he finds a fat gold idol sitting on its altar. In an instant he whips it from its perch and replaces it with a bag of sand. He smiles. But suddenly there is a rumbling noise, the stand on which the idol had been sitting begins to sink, and the whole building starts to crumble. Before swinging back over the pit, he throws the idol to his principal assistant, who tries to run off with it and leave the man in the fedora behind. The man in the fedora finds his erstwhile lieutenant impaled on spikes and retrieves the idol, at which point an enormous stone bowling ball, much bigger than a man, rolls down the corridor, gathering speed as it approaches, and the man realises he is the pin. He evades the giant bowling ball and emerges from the building to discover he is surrounded by Indians. He makes a dash for it and escapes in his plane.

Outside North Berwick, the man from the seventh row tentatively makes his way into some sort of quarry by the edge of the field. Small hairless spiders run away from him. Worms are squelched beneath his black welly boots. Spikes hurl out of the fencing bearing the wool from an itchy sheep. He jumps across a muddy puddle, without any artificial aid. At the end of the trail he rakes the ground for an hour or more, as rain turns the earth to mud. He finds a grubby stone. He wipes away the dirt, firstly with his hand and then with a brush he produces from the pocket of his sodden combat jacket. He smiles. Beneath the mud is a clean stone, about three inches long, grey, with little to distinguish it from any other in the field, except its cleanliness.

'What is it?' asks his native bearer.

'A stone,' says the man from the seventh row, pushing his fedora back on his head, all the better to admire his find. Rain drips from the brim of his hat onto his face. 'But not just any stone. It's a Stone Age stone. Look, it's been chipped away to make a sharp edge. It's beautiful.'

Suddenly there is a rumbling noise. It is the sound of a big man in a Barbour jacket standing at the top of the bank. He is clearing his throat to announce that this is his field and he will take the Stone Age stone. The man from the seventh row throws the Stone Age stone to his assistant and tells her to run off with it. An enormous Alsatian dog, which seems, from the explorer's perspective to be much bigger than a man, is bounding down the bank, gathering speed, and the explorer is cast in the role of bone. In her haste his assistant has fallen over and cut her hand on barbed wire. She bursts into tears, like a child. At the sight of his partner's injury, the man from the seventh row grits his teeth and stands his ground. The dog stops, suddenly uncertain. 'Fuck you, dog,' the man screams. The dog whimpers and runs back to its master. The man from the seventh row scrambles up the other side of the quarry, where he finds himself surrounded by sheep. He makes a dash for it and escapes in his ancient little green Mini, which is called Alfie, on account of ALF being the first three letters of its registration. 'And fuck you too, farmer,' his native bearer shouts at the ruddy-faced farmer who only now is reaching the gate.

Indiana Jones gatecrashes a Nazi archaeological excavation in the lost city of Tanis, near Cairo. With the help of the crystal of the sun god Ra he locates the Well of Souls and lowers himself into a buried chamber. The chamber is home to hundreds of poisonous snakes, but it also houses a magnificent golden box, the Ark of the Covenant, the container for the tablets on which God wrote the Ten Commandments. The Nazis get hold of it and open it. They want the power of God. They get it. They unleash terrible swirling ghostly mists and fire that melts the flesh from their bones. Indiana Jones and his sidekick Marion close their eyes. They alone survive the wrath of God.

Roy Batty walks through the imposing entrance hall. Eyes watch him from internal balconies overhead as he makes his way to one of the chambers that branch off the main room. His eyes scan the chamber as he walks. It is the wrong one. He turns. A black mamba flicks out its tongue and rises upwards ready to strike. Roy backs off watching it as he does so. Behind him is a rock python and an anaconda, the largest snake in the world, its name a combination of Tamil words for elephant and killer. Its green body, with black and yellow spots, is as thick as a child's, but four or five times as long. It is coiled around a branch that looks as if it should break under its weight. Its beady eyes follow Roy out of the room.

Roy climbs upwards through the ancient building to a small chamber at one end. At the entrance to the chamber is the black granite statue of a goddess, with bare breasts and the head of a lion. He is alone in the room. He moves along a passageway, aware of the sound of his footfall and his quickened breathing. This is the place. On one side is a row of coffins decorated with intricate coloured paintings of cobras, vultures and fantastic hybrid creatures. The body of a falcon is topped with the head of a ram. Some of the coffins are coloured gold. Cold white eyes stare at him from inhuman faces. On the other side of the passage is what he came for. Another coffin. On it is painted the figure of a woman, with black hair and a white pleated gown. But it is not the coffin of a woman. For the coffin is only about two feet long.

Roy slips a small notebook from his pocket and writes down a description. He hears nothing, but the sound of his breath and the scribble of his pen. Suddenly he is aware of a figure by his side. It is a young woman.

Her hair is short and her skin black as coal, highlighting the whites of her eyes. 'There's a cafe downstairs,' she says, sounding as if she has a bad cold and may be losing her voice. 'You can buy me a coffee.'

'That was how I became an archaeologist,' Roy tells Anna, 'and how I met Jo, in the Ancient Egypt room at Chambers Street Museum.'

'Your wife?'

'Very soon she was my wife,' says Roy. 'She had arrived in Edinburgh that morning, with the address of some friend of a friend who was supposed to put her up. But it turned out to be an empty flat. Her parents were Nigerian, but she had spent her whole life in London. She just decided it was time to be somewhere different. She was twenty and she was impulsive.

'She asked me to put her up and she usually got what she wanted. She was going to stay with me a couple of nights until she could contact the friend of a friend or find a place of her own. She stayed eight years on and off.

'Jo had a golden tongue. She could talk her way into anything. She sang for a living. Imagine a female Lee Marvin singing old songs from the movies like
'Over the Rainbow', 'Ol' Man River' and 'As Time Goes By'. Well, that was Jo. Smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish. I often wondered what she would sound like if she didn't drink or smoke. Maybe there's a whole tribe of Nigerians who sound like Lee Marvin. I loved her singing and she loved the idea of me being Indiana Jones. The next morning she went out and bought me the hat, and she called me 'Indy' the whole time. At least she did at the beginning.

'We got married two weeks after we met. I was a student and she was singing in hotels, nightclubs and bars. I think she imagined that when I graduated life would be one big foreign holiday. Egypt, India, Crete, Mexico. But the closest we got to Ancient Egypt was the Egyptology room in Chambers Street and watching
Raiders of the Lost Ark
together.

'Indiana Jones got to investigate the Temple of Doom and uncovered a cult of human sacrifice. I was lucky to get a job. I was digging up a lost civilisation, but it was in Whithorn. No, you'll never have heard of it. It's stuck out on a peninsula off the road from Glasgow to Ireland. It was the cradle of Christianity in Scotland and in the Middle Ages it was supposedly a city to rival Paris. But it didn't when we were there. To me it was a lost civilisation but to Jo it was just a village in the middle of nowhere. Old people retired there and young people left as soon as they could. It was four hours' drive from Edinburgh. And it always rained.

'Nobody sang in Whithorn. Not for a living. Not for fun. Jo kept the flat on in Edinburgh, working there, and I would go back to see her at weekends. Or she would come down when she wasn't singing. Sometimes we would work on the dig together.' He paused momentarily before adding the word 'occasionally'.

More often she would sit in the cottage watching videos, though she did not share Roy's passion for films. Films were at best a source of songs for her act, at worst a way of passing the time that involved less effort than reading a book. Roy had always had a video player. Back in the Seventies, when he was earning little, he hired one, a big heavy metal box with big knobs you pushed down for 'Play', 'Record' and 'Stop'. Six months advance rental entitled him to a free video film to keep and he chose
MASH
, one of the very first pre-recorded videos available to the public to buy.
When Roy left his first job, his colleagues clubbed together and bought him a single blank video tape which he used to record
The Magnificent Seven
.

Jo considered films more enjoyable if taken with alcohol, cannabis, coke or amphetamines. Sometimes she took amphetamines when she was helping him at the excavation site and would burrow through the earth like someone in a silent movie. Roy was not sure whether it was better that she come across something of interest or not, for it was not at all certain that a fragment of pottery would survive her excavation.