She spoke with a practiced weariness and reached again for Fergus’s hand, but he remained immobile, transfixed by the beggar’s sharp eyes. To emphasise her calm disinterest, she shrugged her shoulders. The beggar’s gaze turned to her, and he allowed himself a small mocking smile.
‘Well that’s no bother; I’ll take notes just as well.’
As he spoke, Fergus noticed spots of rain water spring from deep within his coarse beard. Through the bristle, there was the twist of a mouth, the creases of a grin, of a small triumph. His eyes glinted with fresh confidence, flashing like a knife in dirty sunlight.
Mary was at a loss. Short of grabbing her brother and dragging him away, there seemed little that she could do. As if releasing a jet of irritation, she hissed his name. This seemed to rouse him, but not to movement.
‘I think we do have a little cash, yes – let’s see what’s in here.’
Fergus pulled his fist from his jeans pocket, and the beggar flinched fractionally before he saw that the boy was clutching a handful of change. A small pink tongue tip traced over an oily, bristled lip, the eyes fixed now on the glimpses of copper and nickel between Fergus’s fingers. The palm opened revealing a mound of coins. As the boy sorted through them with the index finger of his left hand, there were flashes of gold. The total amounted to maybe eight pounds. Mary, looking on in disbelief, wondered why her brother carried so much loose change.
‘Aye, I think I can help. Two pounds, was it? Do you mind much if I give to you it in fifties and twenties? What’s your name, by the way? If I’m going to be lending you money, seems appropriate that we should be acquainted? I’m Fergus, Fergus Buchanan.’
Fergus poured the coins into his left hand and extended his right courteously. The beggar, looked at the hand and back at the face, and then wrinkled his nose with a sniff.
‘Look pal, I only want a little cash for something to eat. I’m not looking for friends. You’re fucking weird, going around introducing yourself to strangers. I don’t want to be acquainted. If you’re not going to give me a couple of quid, you can get out of my way and stop wasting my time.’
Mary spotted her opportunity, and grabbed her brother by his extended hand and pulled him around the beggar. Once free, she continued to drag him across the square.
‘Yeah, you fuck off, you bastard stuck-up skinflints! Too fucking grand to give a man a chance at something to eat? Un-fucking-believable!’
By the time they reached the other side of the square, Fergus had slipped his hand from Mary and was walking alongside her, stride for stride. While they waited for the lights to change at the crossing, Mary smiled up at her brother, grateful for the glimpse of the humanity that seemed sometimes to be the price of living in the world.
‘You alright?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be? No harm done.’
Behind her, a JCB was tearing apart a building from the inside out; the shrieks of twisted, shearing steel and concrete rose above the roar of traffic. For reasons Mary only barely understood, she embraced her brother and kissed him gently on the cheek. Fergus pretended to be embarrassed by her tenderness, but allowed himself to be held a moment longer.
‘No. Suppose not. Anyhow, welcome to Glasgow. Shall we go find a drink now?’
With a drag of her head and a sly smile, Mary led Fergus off into the city.
14
The city wheezed its way into wakefulness, and with it Fergus. Thin light streaked the living room in an indefinite shaft. From the sofa, Fergus watched it crawl, incipient, towards him across the carpet. He was not where he had expected to be. This was not the hall of residence from which Mary had sent those letters and Christmas cards. The return address, neatly printed in her compact handwriting across the back of the envelopes, had signified another place. Fergus was disturbed not only by his displacement, but also by the implications contained within it.
He stretched his feet out over the end of the too short sofa and felt his spine unrolling, his legs straightening with a glorious creaking. His bare toes he pulled up towards him, stretching muscle across shin bone in an ecstasy of pain. The house was quiet yet, even though the noise of traffic outside was an insistent rasping hum. More present and aware, he pulled the sleeping bag over himself, as much to cover his nakedness as to ward against the chill that hung in the air. The sleeping bag was made of blue nylon, pale on the inside, navy on the out. It had been unzipped so that it made a passable impression of a blanket, except that the nylon felt unpleasant against his skin, slick and scratchy at the same time. The coarse fabric of the sofa was another irritant – there was no sheet beneath him. Fergus wondered how he had slept at all, and only his dreams proclaimed the certainty of his slumber. His right hand, a clumsy spider, explored the carpet by the sofa until it found his notebook and his pen. Forgetting his discomfort, he dissolved the waking world in the narrow rhythms of his writing, recounting the adventures of his sleeping self.
‘You’re awake already. Good. Can I get you a cup of tea?’
Fergus was still writing, propped against the sofa’s arm, his knees tucked up, the sleeping bag slid down to his waist. His pale torso, hairless and lean, embarrassed him and he covered his chest with his opened notebook like a startled starlet in a sex comedy. But Craig seemed unconcerned and turned towards the kitchen, padding away in just his boxer shorts and t-shirt, shouting over his shoulder a question about milk and sugar.
All Fergus could do was to shout in confirmation, before returning to his task, to attempt to complete his notes before Craig returned with the tea to end, not simply interrupt, the solitude. His agitation however sat awkwardly, blocking his recollections in a way unfamiliar to him. In the end, he curtailed his notes unsatisfactorily and snapped shut the book to scowl at the empty door frame through which Craig had vanished on his way to the kitchen. He could not be angry only at Craig, of course, or even at all, if he were being honest. His fault was unwitting. It was Mary who had lied, who had hidden from her family the conduct of her life in Glasgow.
The extent of her lie was not clear, of course. That she had moved out of halls and into this flat was a certainty. That she had failed to let her family know this was also a fact. But the reasons were not yet known; the full nature of the Mary’s friendship with Craig had not yet been established.
Craig was whistling merrily in the kitchen, accompanied by the kettle’s hiss. Fergus wrestled with his resentment. Mary’s move, albeit unannounced, was not its cause; rather the idea that she might be sleeping with this cheerful stranger filled him with an inexplicable indignation. True, this was the product simply of an assumption. He had not seen into which room Mary had stepped when they had said their goodnights. He did not know whether it was the same room into which Craig had previously disappeared, leaving sister to arrange a temporary bed for her brother. He could not, despite his best efforts, recall an instance during the previous evening when the two had touched inappropriately. There was no objective reason to believe that they were sleeping together, simply his own fetid imaginings. To make matters worse, Fergus could not be sure that, rather than morality, his discomfort stemmed from the humiliation that his little sister had beaten him to sexual experience.
‘Here you go, mate.’
Craig returned carrying two mugs. One was plain white, almost entirely clean; the other bore the colours of an unknown football team. Fergus took the almost-white cup and the heat stung the pads of his fingers: as soon as the vessel was safely on the small table beside the sofa, he shook his hand in a futile attempt cool them. He remembered that Craig was not Scottish, and wondered how he had forgotten.
He thought back to the previous evening. From the station they had found their way through the tangle of streets and people to an indifferent, anonymous bar. Its blandness was a welcome relief after the sudden maelstrom of the city. They had lingered a while over a pint of 80/, and talked of their immediate plans. He had surprised himself in his enthusiasm to try Indian food, and they had left the
pub hopefully, turning through a narrow gateway and out onto a broad thoroughfare. With coy pride, Mary had introduced Fergus to Buchanan Street and watched while her brother absorbed his surroundings.
‘They call it the Style Mile. Everyone thought it was so funny. Because I was anything but stylish. All slacks and windcheaters.’
Fergus had kept close to his sister as she navigated the tides and narrows around Sauciehall Street, until they found the restaurant near a wide ribbon of road, criss-crossed by high concrete bridges. There Mary had talked a little about the significance of a bullaun stone, or butterlump, the word wrinkling her nose in pleasure. She’d talked about the time before Scotland, about the coming of the Christians, the traces they left before the Norsemen followed with their own gods and kings. Fergus for the first time could see the way that the writing of the past in the ground brought his sister to life; it was not simply a device to distance her from Hinba and the other Buchanans.
By the time bill had arrived, accompanied by two gold-wrapped chocolate mints, both brother and sister were anxious, for their own reasons, for the morning to come. They had congratulated themselves on their good fortune in finding the catalogue, in identifying McAteer’s Auction House so easily. With the last of the lager they toasted the kindness of the old man from the mist.
They took the subway to Hillhead and walked back down the hill, pausing for Mary to point out the building where she took her classes. On Gibson Street, they slipped into a two room bar, with parquet floors and a zinc counter; a huge painting of a Highland cow stood over a glowing fireplace in the back corner and well-mannered music was rolling under the ceiling. He knew no-one, of course, yet Fergus found the anonymity less sterile than in the first bar: some people did know each other, but more than that, the strangers were content to share words and laughter. They had drunk two more pints together when Mary flung her arm in the air and waved it as if from the shore, her face eager, distracted. It was then that he had met Craig.
Thinking back, Fergus was not sure that he could remember the voice his sister’s friend had used, and now it was lost forever behind the beer and the noise of the bar. A friend of his sister, that was how Craig had introduced himself. He was another student at the university, a second year, who lived in a tenement around the corner. The pub was local to both Craig and Mary. It was just as near to one as to the other. These gobbets of information assembled themselves slowly in his mind, turning like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle until they snapped together, building up a picture. But Fergus did not have the full image to compare against, and it was possible that the picture was distorted, incorrect, as well as incomplete. Every so often, he would ask questions in the hope that their answer would provide the piece that would unlock the whole. He had asked these questions as they occurred to him, out of sequence with the conversation around him, and Mary and Craig would pause for a moment to make sense of them, before they answered and then returned to the flow of their own words and thoughts. At last, Fergus understood that Mary lived not in her Hall of Residence, but there was no opportunity to challenge her without creating a scene. In any case, the three of them were intent upon how best to handle the following morning’s adventure.
Craig, it seemed, knew of someone that worked at McAteer’s and had offered to join Mary and Fergus on their errand. But Fergus has been resolute, stubborn even, in his insistence that he would handle the matter himself. He made it clear that, while he meant no offence, he did not require assistance from Craig: the Buchanans were more than capable of their task. Mary had shrugged a smile at Craig, to confirm an earlier certainty.
‘Stevenage. You’re from Stevenage. SG1.’
The small fact had found its way up through the slow soupiness of Fergus’s memory. That he had announced it so abruptly, almost proudly, seemed increasingly embarrassing in the quiet, awkward seconds that followed in the empty air of the flat. But Craig’s immediate confusion eventually broke into a broad grin.
‘Yeah, that’s right. Well, it’s SG4, as it goes, but not bad. And well remembered, by the way, in the circumstances. How’s your head? It was quite a heavy night in the end.’
Fergus wanted to say that SG4 wasn’t, strictly speaking, Stevenage, but decided instead that it would be better to answer Craig’s question.
‘N’yah. I’ve had worse hangovers. I feel fine, I think. A wee bit tired, a little sluggish, but no actual pain anywhere. You?’
Craig laughed, then shrugged his own indifferent state. Fergus drank tea and wondered when Mary would appear. He was increasingly uncomfortable about Craig’s half-nakedness, particularly if his sister was in fact sleeping with him. He knew this made no sense at all, but he was nevertheless grateful when Craig, hearing the bathroom become vacant, made his excuses and went to take a shower. Fergus took the opportunity to pull on his t-shirt and marshal his belongings before his own turn with the bathroom came around.
By the time he returned from his shower, Mary was sitting, washed and dressed, in the living room, chatting with Craig and another young man. This other was a gangly youth whose Adam’s apple formed a dog’s leg in his throat; his neck and face presented an uncomfortably large canvass of pimply skin, through which burst untidy clumps of badly-shaved stubble. Craig looked handsome in comparison.
‘Hi there. Sleep well? I was just telling Johnny about our plans for the day. Are you all set? Had your breakfast?’
Fergus caught sight of the bowl of cereal cradled in Craig’s hands and he realised that he was extraordinarily hungry. But his urge to get out from the flat and the uncertainty about his sister’s relationship with Craig overwhelmed his hunger and he claimed that he didn’t really fancy anything. Mary nodded and rose briskly, retrieving her coat from the back of the high stool beside the kitchen counter. As they left, there was no kiss for Craig, just a wave and a non-committal vagueness about seeing her two flatmates later. Fergus pulled on his jacket slowly and nodded a silent farewell as he slipped through the door after his sister.
15
McAteer’s stood in a handsome stone building on the corner of two dignified streets in the heart of Merchant City. It was surrounded by placid boutiques, galleries and pavement cafes, none of which appeared to have any customers. It was a quiet refuge from the empty shop fronts and raggedy desperation of only a few streets away, yet never before had Fergus experienced calmness as disdain. With no great enthusiasm, he pushed open the door.
A small bell chinked behind them as Fergus and Mary stepped into the soft warmth of the show room. It was the only sound to be heard, save for their own breathing and the murmur of two other customers, a middle-aged couple inspecting porcelain figurines. The door swung shut with a sigh; sealed once more, the show room absorbed even these sounds into its plush embrace.
A young woman looked out from behind a glass cabinet. Her hesitant eyes lingered over the new arrivals for a few moments, until she was certain that they were not deserving of her most unctuous attention. She smiled and busied herself once more with the contents of the cabinet, content to let the young couple build up their courage before she approached.
Fergus paid her no great attention, so occupied was he by the treasures that surrounded him. Large statues of mahogany and bronze vied for space among glistening dining tables and silk-clad chaises-longues. By the wall was an escritoire, its patina so deep that he imagined he could see all the way back through its 300 years. Beyond it, stacks of heavy supple carpets filled the space as far as the corner; a crowd of oil paintings clung to the wall above. The centre of the room was made up of cabinets containing spotlit objects on glass shelves: glassware, silver and jewels. Fergus thought of the misery that had brought these treasures together in this place. He thought about the old man on the train, his precious books that would soon be swallowed by McAteer’s insatiable vaults.
Mary was suddenly alive to a cabinet of smaller, older statuary, some of which was made from the rough stone of ancient times. She set off towards it with determination and in
cipient rage. Fergus followed, curious as to why the dignity of the dead meant more to his sister than that of the living.
‘Is there something in particular that you’re looking for?’
The young woman had appeared behind them, unseen. She was plumper than she had appeared, standing behind the cabinet, her features less precise. Her dark brown hair fell onto her shoulders and, as she twisted slightly at her heel, the changing light caught the glints of soft chestnuts that shone with deep, dull reddishness. She spoke with closely trimmed precision, but her self-assurance was unconvincing. Despite her evident breeding, she had not yet lost the impediment of youthful uncertainty.
Her nervousness emboldened Fergus. He explained that he was looking for a particular piece, which had appeared in the previous autumn’s catalogue. On the walk across the city, Mary had persuaded him that he should not yet explain the theft: first they needed to locate the stone and too strong a display of righteousness might make the auctioneer uncomfortable. So instead he held out the flattened page of the catalogue and indicated the picture of the cursing stone.
At her request, Fergus let go of the page and the young woman took it. She turned towards a counter near the back of the show room, hidden behind a stuffed bear that stood on its hind legs, jaws wide, spoiling for a fight. Fergus was surprised that he had not noticed it before, but followed anyway. Mary lingered a while, looking for familiar shapes among the stones in the glass cabinet, as if identifying a corpse.
Fergus stood, uncertain, while the assistant took from beneath the counter a heavy book, its worn spine bound in insulating tape. She dropped it gently onto the desk with a dull thump, then opened it carefully and flipped through the pages, running her index finger down a column of numbers at the left-hand margin. In a few moments, she stopped, smiled and tapped her finger on the page with satisfaction.
The Cursing Stone: a gripping mystery and family saga Page 10
