Tombstoning (22 page)

They tootled past another bay and headland with a handful of old cottages arranged on it. According to the captain these were formerly coastguard houses, but now in disrepair. A couple of steep paths led down the cliffs from the cottages to a secluded beach. Round the headland and they were confronted with the harbour of Auchmithie, little more than a ramshackle stone wall covered with seaweed and algae and crumbling into the sea, with a huddle of small boats lurking behind it. A couple of rusty old cars and vans were parked along the seafront, old timers working on upturned boats hauled out onto dry land. Behind them a thin road snaked up between cliffs to the village of Auchmithie, little more than a cottage-lined street running along the headland and petering out in an overgrown field. David had been to the village a few times before as a kid, but could remember next to nothing about the place, except there was a tearoom, a pub and that was it. They had been press-ganged into doing a sponsored walk once at school, and had walked the few miles out to Auchmithie and back, but they hadn’t used the cliff path – presumably because the kids couldn’t be trusted not to fall in the sea – instead tramping along the inland road from town. Pretty ironic, thought David, considering what had then happened to Colin.

‘And here we have the fishing village of Auchmithie,’ the captain was saying. ‘Although Arbroath is thought of as the home of the smokie, in fact the world-famous delicacy originated here in Auchmithie. Sometime in the early nineteenth century the fisherfolk migrated to the larger harbour of Arbroath, bringing their secret for smoking the haddock with them. Amongst the families who flitted were all the famous smokie names, the same ones that continue to produce smokies to this day, such as Swankie, Spink and Cargill.’

David spotted Nicola looking at her. She had been keeping Amy entertained for most of the trip, pointing out seabirds and weird shapes and colours in the rocks, but now, at the mention of both Spink and Cargill, she was looking at David with raised eyebrows. He didn’t know exactly what the expression meant. Arbroath was crawling with Swankies, Spinks and Cargills, there had been hundreds of them at school, so it was hardly surprising that these names would come up now, he supposed. He thought of Neil again, and how someone had said that perhaps he lived out in Auchmithie. It seemed too remote, too far from civilization, almost, for anyone to bother living here, yet there was clearly activity both at the harbour and up in the village. Maybe some people liked the seclusion, the peace and quiet that living in a dead-end village gave them. Maybe there were more hermits in the world than David had thought. Maybe Neil was one of those hermits, driven to live here by whatever it was that he was running away from. Destroying a fellow marine’s life, for example. Or maybe more than that.

He looked up at the village again, ridiculously hoping to get sight of a stocky figure with Neil’s rolling gait striding clearly along the clifftop. He knew it was stupid, but he felt that any minute Neil was going to come walking into view and clear up everything, every lingering doubt in his head.

‘Auchmithie also featured in Walter Scott’s tale
The Antiquary
as the fishing village of Musselcraig, where the Mucklebackits lived,’ said the captain. The fucking
Antiquary
again, thought David. I’ll need to get a hold of a copy, see what it’s all about. But then he’d started one of Scott’s books at school – was
Ivanhoe
by Scott? – and he’d got about five pages in and given up. He wondered idly if anyone had ever made a film of
The Antiquary
, maybe he could watch that instead.

Their boat was already turning to head back south-east down the coast. This was apparently as far as their captain was willing to take them for a fiver. On the return journey the captain’s voiceover concentrated on the wildlife of the area, mostly the different seabirds on offer, although he did tantalize everyone on board by claiming that seals, porpoises, dolphins and even very occasionally minke whales could be spotted up and down the coast. Needless to say, they spotted none of those, but David managed to borrow an old pair of binoculars from the captain and spent the rest of the journey picking out guillemots, shags and kittiwakes and pointing them out to Amy, who was surprisingly excited by it all, although he still kept one eye on the sea in case Moby Dick or his pals showed up. At one point Amy spotted two puffins scudding across the sea surface, their tiny wings a blur and their chubby bodies struggling to get any height. She squealed as they crash-landed further along the coast, and David and Nicola smiled at one another. The sun was still on their backs and David looked at Nicola, picturing her naked astride him in the park, and couldn’t help thinking he was the luckiest bastard in the world.

‘I’m hungry,’ said Amy, turning to her mother and spotting David’s stray hand which had come to rest on Nicola’s waist. He removed it, not quickly enough but Amy ignored it and asked: ‘David, do you want to come to Granny and Grandpa’s for tea?’

David looked at Nicola who just smiled and shrugged.

‘I’d love to,’ he said, as Arbroath appeared from behind the headland at the start of the cliffs, looking from this distance at once beautiful and serene in the soft late afternoon sunlight.

12
The Search

‘There’s more of everything, so don’t be afraid to get stuck in.’

A massive, steaming plate of steak pie, roast potatoes and veg was plonked down in front of David and he smiled.

‘Thanks, Mrs Cruickshank.’

‘Oh, for goodness sake, call me Bel, everyone does.’

Isobel Cruickshank was a handsome, petite woman in her mid-fifties with an air of amused and friendly authority about her. Her long brown hair had flecks of grey through it and was tied up in an untidy knot at the back of her head with a pencil sticking through it. She looked considerably younger than she was, as if bringing up five kids had been the easiest thing in the world. She was at least six inches shorter than Nicola, but that aside there were striking similarities – the wide mouth, the slight frame, the animated nose all clearly linked Bel to her eldest daughter. David watched as she headed back towards the kitchen and considered the notion that looking at a girl’s mum tells you what she’ll be like when she’s older. He liked what he saw, and he smiled again.

Nicola’s dad appeared from the kitchen drying his hands on a towel. He was a stocky man with thick forearms and greying hair swept back from his forehead. He wasn’t much taller than Bel, so Nicola’s height was just one of those strange genetic quirks, David supposed, but he wasn’t lacking in authority either. A lifetime of engineering lent him a keen analytical mind, something he applied as much to people and conversations as to the aircraft parts he dealt with at work, or the motorbike he was currently trying to reassemble in the back garden.

‘Know anything about bikes?’ he asked David.

‘Afraid not,’ said David.

He had met Alex Cruickshank a few times as a kid, and always been slightly intimidated by him, but so far today he’d seemed a perfectly likeable character. Admittedly he had been stuck out the back tinkering with gaskets and spark plugs with oily hands since David arrived, but still, he didn’t seem nearly as ominous a man as David remembered. He wondered what Alex would make of the fact he had screwed his daughter less than twenty-four hours before, in a public park no less. But then Alex had five kids, three of them girls, and umpteen grandchildren, so he supposed you got over that sort of thing eventually.

Alex sat at the head of the table. Nicola was opposite David, with Amy next to her, and Bel bustled back through and sat at the opposite end from Alex. The table was one of the extendable types, and had clearly seen plenty of usage over the years – gouges here, scuffs there, scratches covering the faded varnished wood – but it was at its most compact these days, all of the kids having left home except the youngest, Andy, still sponging free board and rent from his parents at the age of twenty-three. Andy had already skipped out to meet mates and go out on the piss, something David was glad of because he knew Nicola and Andy didn’t get on. So it was just the five of them for a cosy family dinner. It made David think about his own parents, no doubt sitting sipping the local
vin de pays
in the garden of their converted barn. As an only child, he’d never had the noisy security of big family meals, familiar chaos ringing in his ears, it had just been him and his rather bohemian parents who, outnumbering him two adults to one child, had pretty much treated him as a grown-up through most of his childhood, boring adult conversations and all.

‘So you were back for the funeral,’ Alex was saying. ‘Terrible business, really.’

‘Alex, I’m sure David doesn’t want to talk about that,’ said Bel, although she was looking at Amy as she said it. It must be good, having grandparents looking out for you, thought David. He had never known any of his own grandparents, something which led to inevitable self-pity, although thinking about it now, for the first time he thought about how it must’ve been for his parents, having their own folks die at an early age. He felt slightly ashamed he had never considered it before, but then he rarely considered his parents at all these days, something they’d made easy by living in another country.

‘It’s all right, Mum, Amy knows about what happened to Gary,’ said Nicola.

‘He fell off the cliffs when he was drunk,’ said Amy, matter of fact.

‘Were you good friends with him?’ said Alex, looking at David.

‘Not really. We were mates at school, but I hadn’t seen him in years until last weekend.’

‘Awful business,’ said Bel, seemingly resigned to the topic. ‘His parents must be distraught. How were they at the funeral?’

‘As you might expect,’ said Nicola. ‘In shock, I think.’

Nicola’s dad seemed to be considering something as he chewed a lump of steak.

‘David, you were friends with the Anderson boy at school as well, weren’t you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Another shocking business,’ said Bel. ‘Such a waste. Such a terrible waste.’

‘It always is,’ said Alex, taking a swig of Guinness from a can. ‘Remember when that Cargill boy killed himself in his car, Bel? It was the same for his parents.’

David realized straight away that this was Neil’s older brother, Craig, who had died when he and Neil had been about ten. The name Cargill just kept cropping up.

‘Did you know the Cargills, then?’ asked David.

‘We did a little, back then,’ said Bel. ‘Of course they’re both dead now.’

‘Are we talking about the same people, here?’ asked Nicola, a little wide-eyed. She’d clearly never heard this chat from her parents before. ‘The parents of Neil who was in our year at school?’

‘And his older brother Craig, who crashed his car – yes, that’s them,’ said Alex, looking to Bel for agreement.

‘Connie and Jim,’ she said. ‘Jim died years ago, now, maybe ten years ago? Lung cancer I think it was that got him. Connie died a few months later, from a massive stroke.’

‘Jesus,’ said David under his breath.

‘Bit of a cursed family,’ said Alex, wiping his plate with a slice of bread. ‘I feel sorry for Neil, being the only one left.’

‘I never knew you knew the Cargills,’ said Nicola.

‘Everyone knows everyone around here, dear,’ said Bel. ‘Anyway, we didn’t really know them too well by the time Craig died. We knew them from when we were all at school together. Jim was quite a hard man, with a temper. I felt sorry for Connie sometimes. I don’t really think she knew what it was going to be like, with him and the two boys in the house. I met her occasionally in the street, but she never really said much.’

‘Well, people change, Bel,’ said Alex, ‘and circumstances change. None of us really know what it’s like in anyone else’s home.’

‘It must’ve been terrible when Craig died, though,’ said Bel. ‘Just like it must’ve been awful for the Spinks, and for the Andersons back when Colin had his accident.’

There was so much death around, thought David. He had never really considered how the deaths of the young affected everyone in a community like this, in the spider’s web of lives intertwined genetically and geographically and spread across the generations. He hadn’t ever given much thought to how Colin’s parents, or his two younger sisters, must’ve felt when Colin was found dead. He had been so young and selfish at the time, and his tunnel vision shamed him now. He wondered what Colin’s sisters were doing. He struggled even to remember their names – one was called Jude, was it? Or Judith? And the other was Emma or Emily – definitely Emma. He had carried Colin’s death around for years, but for them it must’ve been – must still be, presumably – a thousand times worse. They would only just have been in their teens, if that, when he died. How did the uncertainty of his death affect them? How did the death affect them, full stop? He hoped they’d found a way to work through it all.

Was
he
over it? What did that even mean? The event had irrevocably changed his life, but then every other event in his life had also affected him in some minute way. He felt dizzy as he imagined the infinite twists and turns his life took every microsecond of every minute of every day, how all other possibilities vanished, all other alternate universes collapsed into the one existing one, all potential futures simply fizzled out of being once every infinitesimal decision was made, moment by excruciating moment. It terrified him, both the myriad of possibilities his life could take at any moment, and the way those possibilities were only that, just possibilities, and then they were gone, phut, quicker than the blink of an eye.

He thought about what Nicola had said about the past making us what we are. He had disagreed with her back then, insisting in his obstinate naivety that you made yourself up every morning brand new, you could reinvent yourself with every second of every day. And in a sense maybe that was right, you could be an entirely different person from moment to moment, with each event that occurred changing the concept and reality of the you that existed from then on, but it
was
all built on the bedrock of past experience, it was all down to what had gone before, it was all based on the person you were the moment before that, and the moment before that, right back to when you were conceived, and beyond, into the past of your parents, their parents and your ancestors further back beyond that, right back to the creatures crawling out the primeval swamp and breathing the air around them. The past
did
make you who you were, and not just your own past, but the history of the world, the way people had struggled to survive for centuries, all so that he could be sitting here right now, sticking a forkful of steak pie into his mouth and thinking about the endless terrifying possibilities of life. He felt idiotic for ever suggesting to Nicola – this wonderful girl sitting across the table from him – that human beings were clean slates, that reinvention was easy, that the past didn’t matter to the present. It was a revelation, and he felt the weight of the generations suddenly pressing down on his shoulders. All those millions of eyes from the past watching him from the ether, waiting to see what he was going to do next. He didn’t know what he was going to do next. But whatever it was it would change him, it would change the world, it would change the future. He felt sick at the thought.