Where the Dead Men Go

by Liam McIlvanney

  I nodded. That I needed to hear this didn’t mean that I believed it.

  When we broke apart Mari clapped her hands, chafed them together. ‘Anyway!’ She was all brisk and business now: ‘Looks to me like someone could do with cheering up.’

  ‘Well it’s not you.’ She was struggling to stifle a grin. ‘So I guess that leaves me. I’m open to offers. What did you have in mind?’

  ‘Ah, I don’t know.’ She forced two fingers into her back jeans pocket and extracted a hinged strip of card. Two tickets. The Black Keys gig at the Barrowland.

  ‘And dinner,’ she said. ‘Beforehand. At Ferrante’s. That’s the place you like, isn’t it?’

  ‘Jesus. Aye. What’s the occasion?’

  ‘We got it.’ She shrugged. ‘We got the contract.’

  ‘The athletes’ village?’

  ‘The velodrome, Gerry.’

  ‘Aah, brilliant.’ I hugged her. ‘Brilliant. Well done.’ I paused. ‘What about his Lordship?’

  She looked at her watch. ‘Sitter’s due in forty minutes. Get your arse in that shower.’

  *

  Ferrante’s was busy with the pre-theatre crowd but we landed a nice two-seater by the aquarium. We ordered Glendronach Parliaments to celebrate Mari’s news, and a bottle of Central Otago pinot to make her feel at home.

  Though we always spoke about making time for ourselves we rarely did it. I’d forgotten how good it could be just to talk and drink and eat, enjoy the music of a conversation, be Mari and Gerry, not Mum and Dad. Mari was stoked about the bid, kept coming back to it. It wouldn’t be officially announced till the New Year but they’d been tipped the wink that their bid was the winner. I was enjoying her elation, the wine, the nearness of her bare arms across the table, until halfway through the entrees I noticed Mari staring at something over my shoulder. She did it three or four times over the next two minutes. When she did it again I knocked my napkin to the floor and bent to fetch it. Three tables away. Big, good-looking guy in a pink polo shirt, the Kappa logo on his chest, the two naked women sitting back to back.

  I tried to focus on Mari’s words but the guy’s big square grinning face kept swimming up before me. When she looked at him again I stopped eating, set my knife and fork down on the plate.

  ‘Jesus.’ I finished chewing. ‘What the fuck, Mari – do you know this guy?’ I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. ‘Do you want me to get you an introduction?’

  She was still watching him, though her head responded to the tether of my voice and then her eyes followed, focused on me, puzzled at my angry tone: ‘What? Yeah, I do know him. I was trying to work out where I’d seen him. It was with Bryan, he came to see Bryan last week.’ Bryan Hamill was Mari’s boss at the firm. She was smiling. ‘Oh, that’s sweet, Gerry. Were you jealous? A pink polo shirt? Really? The Magnum moustache? You’re worse than my old man.’

  Mari’s father had once walked out of an amateur production of Death of a Salesman when he thought Mari’s mother was flirting with Willy Loman.

  ‘Listen, remind me to phone home when I get back,’ she said. ‘I need to talk to them. Mum and Dad.’ She looked up quickly. ‘It’s six years since Josh. Since – you know.’

  Mari had an older brother, deceased. He got killed in Oz, some shitty outback town, murdered, a mugging gone wrong.

  ‘I never told you about him,’ she said. ‘Not properly.’

  I knew Josh from the blurry snap of a blond, sardonic beach-bum in a wife-beater and yellow board shorts that occupied our living-room bookcase, and from the pious annual tribute that Mari’s mum paid him in the photocopied round-up of Somerville family news that accompanied our Christmas card.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You didn’t.’

  She drained the dregs of her whisky, took a slug of pinot, leaned forward and started to talk about him. There were five years between them. Josh had been more like a cooler, younger father than a brother. He bought her little presents, taught her how to surf, throw a rugby ball. Taught her how to fight. Josh had been her best friend right through her childhood, walking her to school, vetting boyfriends – terrorising them, it sounded like – and generally looking out for Mari, in so far as a GP’s daughter in a high-decile harbourside Auckland suburb needs looking out for. Then he left home. Bright but lazy, he finished school at sixteen, worked in a Huntly coalmine, played league on the weekends. He liked the life but the wages were shit and pretty soon he followed his mates across the Tasman, the big Kalgoorlie gold mine out in Western Oz. Big money. Coming home at Christmas with presents for everyone, laptops, digital cameras.

  Then one Boxing Day morning Mari saw Josh coming out of the bathroom with a towel round his waist and a new tatt splashed across his back, a snarling bulldog in a studded collar and a scroll with MAD DOGS in flashy Gothic script. He laughed it off but the family learned later that he’d gotten involved with a bikie gang, he might have been patched, was probably dealing for them. And then he’d fallen out with the top boys. The cops’ intel was that Josh had tried to stiff them on a hash deal but he might just as readily have said the wrong thing or looked the wrong way at someone’s missus.

  The family told people that Josh had been mugged but really he was murdered by his buddies. His Mad Dog brothers. The Kalgoorlie cops found him round the back of a brick-veneer row-house in an Aborigine district. Beaten to death. His face stoved in. Choked by his own blood. Mari’s parents flew over to identify their boy, bring back the body.

  ‘Jesus. I had no idea. I’m sorry, Mari.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She poked at her salad. ‘So, anyway. It gives you an idea why they act like they do, why they’re keen for me to come back. They miss me, Gerry. They worry. Every time I phone they think something’s happened.’

  ‘Why would they worry when they know you’re with someone like me?’

  ‘Well, exactly.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘I can’t imagine.’

  She smiled and I was reaching out to grip her hand when a clatter at my elbow stopped me short. The waitress had dumped an ice-bucket down on a tripod. The dull gold shaft of a champagne bottle poked at a slant from the slushy ice. A waiter leaned across, twice, landing champagne flutes on the table, aligning them with little sweeps of his palm on the tablecloth, two fingers clamped round the stem.

  ‘Sorry, no, we didn’t order—’

  ‘It’s compliments of another diner, sir.’ The waitress had stripped the sheath of gold foil from the neck of the bottle and was twisting the wire coil with sharp little flicks of her wrist. She nodded at the bar. ‘Gentleman in the leather jacket.’

  The little gunshot of the loosened cork sounded as I turned to look. The guy in the pink Kappa polo shirt, the guy Mari recognised, was on his way out, but it wasn’t him. He was holding the door for a second man, the one who’d had his back to us at the table, a shorter, square-set fellow who pocketed his wallet, scooped a handful of mints from the bowl on the bar, tipped two fingers to his temple and aimed them at me on his way out the door.

  ‘Who was that?’

  Mari held her glass of brimming fizz. The waiter had withdrawn. The waitress lodged the bottle in the bucket, wrapped a napkin round its neck, left us with a little bow.

  It was Hamish Neil.

  ‘No one,’ I said. I lifted my own glass. ‘A guy from work. Owed me a favour. Cheers.’

  ‘No one?’ Mari frowned, held her glass as if she was proposing a toast. ‘No one? You look like you’ve just seen a dead man.’

  Chapter Seven

  The funerals fell on consecutive days, Swan’s on a Tuesday, Moir’s on Wednesday. The Calvinist in me – even the Catholics in Glasgow are Calvinist, and Calvinism never lapses, it bites too deep in the bone – relished the prospect. Black suit laid out on the bed two mornings running, black tie draped on the wardrobe door. Shave against the grain with a fresh blade; virtuous sting of aftershave. I stood before the mirror in my stocking soles, folding a tie I’d inherited from my father, a tie I first wore to his funeral.

 
; Mari came through from the bedroom, fiddling with an earring. She nudged me out of the way with her hip and stood frowning at the mirror.

  She drew her upper lip over her teeth, checking her lipstick. She smoothed the front of her dress, turned to check the back view over her shoulder. I felt an incongruous stab of desire as I settled my Windsor and turned down my collar, watching the light catch the folds of her dress, the sheer tights, the glossy heels with the tapering spikes, and my cock nudged the fly of my trousers, once, twice: It’s not me who’s died.

  ‘You okay?’ She pulled me round to face her, brushed the shoulders of my suit, fiddled with my tie.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘This is the real one today.’

  ‘I know.’

  The day before I’d stood outside the church with the other hacks, the crew from Reporting Scotland, the rubbernecking locals, and watched six gangsters shoulder Billy Swan down the steps to the hearse. I followed the convoy of cars to the cemetery and stood well back when the interment began, me and the snapper and the rest of the pack. They stood six-deep round the grave, it was a Neil show of strength. Plain-clothes men haunted the edge of the crowd and a pair of uniforms stood beside their squad car at the cemetery gates. But that was just work. Today was for real.

  On the way down to Ayrshire we stopped for petrol. The cashier smiled, then she noticed my tie, passed me the receipt with a sympathetic grimace.

  We parked at the railway station and walked down the hill to the church. Mari took my arm as we crossed the cobbles.

  The Old High Kirk in Mureton is a squat grey box in the shadow of the viaduct. It looks like someone has fashioned a barn out of stone and then plumped a little clock-tower on top. I took an order of service from a teenage boy and we filed inside with the others.

  The church was packed. The service wouldn’t start for another twenty minutes but already the pews were thronged. We squeezed down a side-aisle and into our seats. I thought of Moir as a lone wolf, Johnny-no-pals, so it surprised me, the tight rows of mourners, the old kirk groaning like an emigrant ship. I felt sorry for my dead self, for the Gerry Conway whose boxed carcass would one day rest on trestles in front of a crowd far sparser than this. It feels a little hollow to be jealous of a dead man.

  Mari read the order of service and I looked round for people I knew. The daily and Sunday were out in force – we’d left a skeleton staff at Pacific Quay – and my colleagues, unfamiliar in black, with their unknown partners and spouses, were dotted round the church. Maguire and Niven were up the front, conferring like plotters. Further back I spotted the fire-truck lipstick and red-rimmed eyes of Neve McDonald and a haggard-looking Jimmy Driscoll. Russell Spence, the QC, was shuffling along to make space for Lachlan MacCrimmon, the court reporter. A couple of TV presenters whose names escaped me were tossing their heads in the gallery. Peter Hewlett the Rangers striker was there, and Mark Halliday, who won the Open Championship at Carnoustie in a three-way play-off with Woods and Westwood and never won anything again, and a red-haired character actor from River City, tugging at the sleeper in his ear. Towards the back of the church was a restless clutch of thugs with squaddie buzzcuts: I took these to be villains, the career crims who found their chronicler in Moir. I clocked the meaty profile of Gavin Haining, his big square shoulders in the pinstripe suit, and the imperative cherry bob of Annabel Glaister, the Deputy First Minister. Lewicki was there – he tipped me a nod across the aisle – and Bobby Ireland, the DI from Baird Street. I looked for Gunn and Lumsden, the blonde ponytail, the hulking leather jacket, but Moir was no longer a case and I should have known better. Another batch of crop-haired men, some with moustaches, sat with their slight wives in the second and third rows and the consoling hands they planted on the shoulders of a man in the front pew – Martin’s father, the retired RUC man, his grey hair looking freshly trimmed – marked them out as the relatives from Ireland.

  The reading was Ecclesiastes. Martin’s father rose from his place and stepped to the lectern. Before starting to read he rolled his shoulders and you sensed, in that readying gesture, all the funerals he’d attended down the years, all the send-offs for fallen colleagues, the knottings of the black tie. ‘To every thing there is a season,’ he told us, in a booming, theatrical bass. ‘And a time to every purpose under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal . . .’ There was no comfort in the words, no consolation. Just the tit for tat of his pendulum rhythm. A time for this and a time for that. His implacable Ulster vowels: ‘. . . a time to embrace and a time to refrain, a time to search and a time to give up . . .’

  I could see Clare in the front pew, her curls bouncing lightly as her shoulders shook. I was glad the girls weren’t there. Their blonde oblivious heads might have set me off. Mari felt for my hand and squeezed it and I squeezed back.

  The minister was a wiry, competent-looking woman with rimless glasses and a guilty smile. She looked like a distance runner. Her eulogy was nicely pitched. I’d been ready to resent it, to wince with scorn at her whitewashing of my friend’s memory but she seemed to know Moir better than I did. She didn’t hide from the fact – if fact it was – that Moir had killed himself. She spoke about his sometimes overbearing intensity and his ‘irritating frankness’ as well as his love for Clare and the girls and how stress can make us do unusual things. We sang a final hymn: ‘Will your anchor hold in the storms of life?’ Moir had been a sergeant in the Boys’ Brigade, the minister explained, and this was the BB anthem. It was a proper hymn, very Protestant, with a thumping tune and a strong, uplifting chorus, and I felt the better for having sung it.

  At the close of the service I stepped forward with the others and shouldered my share of the burden. At first it seemed we might buckle under the weight and I staggered a bit as the edge of the coffin cut into my neck, but we set off gingerly up the aisle, the undertaker beside us, counting our steps, like the coach of the world’s slowest rowing crew. We carried Moir into thin yellow sunlight and laid him in the hearse. One of the undertakers slipped me a card with ‘Number 4’ printed on it. Later, at the graveside he called out the numbers and I stepped up: the end of a blue tasselled rope was placed in my palm.

  The grave was black against the snow, and I thought again of my old man’s coffin. ‘Brace yourselves,’ the undertaker whispered, and the six of us gripped our ropes as he slid the wooden staves from under the box. The cords snapped tight and our forearms trembled. The coffin pitched and wavered over the grave, but we steadied it and held it true, and wobbled it into the slot. Wet smell of earth. Same smell as Dad’s. Same ache in my shoulders. It was delicate work, and the ropes seemed too slight for the job. The undertaker talked us through it in his low, steady undertone, tapping our forearms in turn when he wanted us to pay out more rope. The coffin jerked down in its narrow slot, tilting and righting, the head and now the feet pitching forward. Finally it bumped down onto hard earth. The undertaker bowed and we walked backwards to our places, hands clasped over our groins.

  ‘You going to the hotel?’

  Lewicki at my shoulder. There was a reception in the Goldberry, Mureton’s only decent hotel. Halfway decent.

  ‘I’ll see you there.’

  He clapped my shoulder, nodded at Mari, set off across the gravestones clutching his overcoat tight at the neck. At the car park I collected the flowers from the back seat. Mari stayed in the car.

  *

  At the reception Mari went off to the ladies and I joined the other suits at the bar. There were sombre nods, handshakes close in to the body, claps on the shoulder. It’s always like this. We stand around sipping pints of lager tops, talking in low voices, the bar staff alert and respectful. Then the first round of whiskies appears. Someone tells a joke. We all lean in for the punchline and lean back laughing. The mood lifts and the reception has begun.

  It’s the camaraderie of the living. At the root of it lies the recognition that, try as we might to avoid
it, death will find us out. But Moir hadn’t tried to avoid death. Moir had rushed forward to meet it, and that rather spoiled the occasion. Standing at the bar, we had no way to deal with this, no joke that wouldn’t have seemed tasteless, out of place. We nodded at each other and drifted off to the tables, to the little side-plates of sausage rolls and triangular sandwiches.

  The Goldberry Hotel had changed. In the twenty years since I last crossed its doors the place had been tarted up. It was furnished in the tourist style, a tourist being someone who’s a little hazy about the trajectory of the Highland line. A targe and twin claymores were mounted on the wall above the fireplace and the waitresses – local girls whose tattooed lower backs and pierced navels were hidden under starched white shirts and sober tartan skirts – marched the dark acres of Black Watch carpet.

  The function suite was busy. Haining was there, the big beast, clapping backs, clutching elbows, working the room. He bicep-punched a man with silver hair and leaned to kiss a thickset woman. He scoped the room, head high, predatory, caught my eye over the shot glass, nodded. A silver tray bumped my ribs. Little orange breadcrumbed balls. I looked at the girl.

  ‘Blue cheese and walnut truffles,’ she said. Her hair was scraped back and tied in a bow. A man’s shirt and tie under the apron. Tiny nick in the skin, just under her left eye.

  ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

  When she moved off I spotted Lewicki, patting the pocket of his suit and heading for the fire-door.

  The car park was full of smokers, gathered in little conclaves, refugee huddles. Flapping their arms, stamping in their thin-soled shoes. Breath and smoke in the frozen air. Lewicki had his head in his armpit, shielding the flame with his jacket.

  ‘Thought you’d given up,’ I said.

  The head popped up. ‘Hey!’ He kept the ciggie in his mouth to shake my hand, clapped me on the back, our shoulders bumping.