Naming the Bones

by Louise Welsh

  Life was to change a lot in Scotland over the next decade, but many crofters still lived very much as their ancestors had. They heated their cottages with peat which they cut from the ground. Lighting came from oil lamps. They grew crops, baked their own bread, and salvaged what they could in the way of driftwood. Some, like Archie’s mother, collected their cooking and washing water from streams and wells.

  The island, rich in plant and bird life, was a paradise for a young boy, but for Siona, fresh from the camaraderie of blitz-torn Glasgow, it may have seemed like a prison. Who can blame her for returning to the city when her father died ten years later?

  Siona’s mind may always have been unsettled, or it might have been the years of drudgery on her father’s croft that disturbed it. Maybe it was even her move back to the city and the loneliness that she encountered there that were the catalysts. Whatever the origins of her deteriorating mental health, there’s no record of it until after she and her son returned to Glasgow.

  Murray looked up from the single page. Christie smiled at him. ‘Interesting?’

  ‘Yes.’ He wondered if his face looked wolfish. ‘How much more is there?’

  ‘A lot.’

  ‘And this is as much as you’re prepared to show me?’

  ‘Of his childhood, for the moment.’ Christie slid her hand into the folder, pulled forth a second page and held it out. ‘Here.’

  He took it from her and read on.

  Edinburgh was still a small city in 1969, but Archie and I could have passed each other daily without knowing. I used to look for him on the street; desperate to meet this ‘son of an abomination’ my mother had warned me about so many times. Eventually I asked around, discovered his local and persuaded a girlfriend to go there with me. Later I got used to places like that, but this was the first time I’d ever been in a working men’s pub.

  The barroom was lit by a naked one hundred-watt bulb, the floor strewn with sawdust. Even though we’d never met, I knew Archie straight away. He was slouched at the bar, so drunk he seemed to sweat alcohol. Archie was a good-looking young man, but when he drank his features grew slack and lost their air of intelligence. He behaved stupidly too. I watched Archie embrace a man, and then insult him with his arm still clasped around his shoulders. I heard him flirt like a fool with the barmaid and saw him lavish drinks on strangers who laughed in his face. I told my friend I’d made a mistake and left without speaking to him.

  A week later he took the seat opposite mine in the university library and started to read Baudelaire’s ‘Fleurs du Mal’. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. Eventually I plucked up the courage to introduce myself. Later I’d discover Archie was always shy when he was sober. He offered to take me for a drink, but I persuaded him back to my digs instead. We talked all through the night and when the sun came up we went to bed together.

  Murray looked up from the page and saw Christie’s small mouth widened in a smile.

  ‘You look shocked. We were cousins, not brother and sister.’

  ‘I’m not shocked. But I’d like to know what happened next.’

  ‘After we went to bed?’

  ‘No.’ He forced a smile. ‘After that.’

  ‘After that, we spent most of our free time together. I soon realised there was no way I was going to be able to keep him sober, so I learned how to drink.’

  ‘If you can’t beat them, join them?’

  ‘Drink was his wife, I was just his girlfriend.’

  ‘Was Archie writing a lot when you knew him?’

  Christie took on a look he had seen in other interviewees, a faraway stare as if gazing back into the past.

  ‘Apart from drinking, it was all he seemed to do. When we first met, Archie was matriculated at the university, but the only classes I ever knew him attend were poetry lectures. He used the library, of course, but that was for his own reading. He would lie around in the morning in his dressing gown, sipping beer and reading detective fiction or sci-fi. At midday he’d go down to the pub for a pint and a bite to eat. Then he’d either browse the local secondhand bookshops or go back to his room and write. He’d step out again at about nine in the evening.’

  ‘How could he afford it?’

  ‘Archie had been lucky. His mother had died and left him some money.’

  ‘An odd definition of luck.’

  ‘Do you think so? I used to envy him terribly.’

  He ignored the playful note of provocation in her voice and asked, ‘Were you writing too?’

  ‘I didn’t pick up my pen until after Archie’s death. Then it was as if a new well had been sunk in me, it all came bubbling out.’ She reached into the folder again. ‘The final extract.’

  He took it from her, noting the page number, 349. Earlier in his quest the completeness of Christie’s memoir might have frustrated Murray, but it no longer mattered if his own book was rendered redundant. There were new poems. The thought thrilled him.

  Archie might never have returned to the island if I hadn’t suggested it, but when I did he leapt at the plan. By that time we were a trio plus one. That extra man was vital to our group; Bobby was Renfield to our Dracula. We thought he was harmless.

  Ours was an era of new societies, ideal communities and communes. Property was theft, jealousy bourgeois, and anyone over thirty, suspect. We set out with bags full of acid and hearts full of idealism. But it was soon clear the cottage was too small to house four adults and the sickness which had eventually left me in Glasgow returned with a vengeance.

  Archie’s sickness followed him too. There was no pub on the island, but he found a ceilidh house where he was very quickly unwelcome. That didn’t bother Archie. He’d already made enough contacts to be able to draw on a seemingly endless source of homebrewed spirits. Some mornings he was as sick as I was and the two of us lay groaning together in the bed recess we’d requisitioned as our own.

  As if overcrowding, bad trips, drunkenness and sickness weren’t enough, the weather descended into a long period of dark skies and relentless rain. Bobby would probably have stayed with us for ever, lost in his muddled world of drugs and spells, but very quickly I realised that Fergus was planning to leave. I couldn’t blame him. I had sold the island as an adventure, an opportunity to create, but there was no privacy to be had in the damp cottage, and my hopes of keeping the three of us together until what had to pass had passed were beginning to fade.

  Murray read the page twice, and then he set it aside on the table and looked at Christie.

  ‘You were pregnant when Mrs Dunn visited the cottage, weren’t you? That’s how you knew she was too.’

  Christie rolled her eyes. Her voice was impatient.

  ‘She was the kind of woman Fergus always seems to attract – buttoned-up, but desperate for some kind of adventure, some kind of debauch. The trouble is they never realise how far Fergus is willing to go.’ Was there a gleam of pride in her eyes? ‘He always pushes them beyond their limits.’

  Murray thought of Rachel. He asked, ‘Like he did with Helen James?’

  Christie snorted in amusement.

  ‘I very much doubt little Nelly was raped, but what could she say when her mummy and daddy found out she was unmarried and with child? It was the wrong time of year for an immaculate conception.’

  ‘She had an abortion.’

  ‘You didn’t strike me as a man who would be against a woman’s right to choose what she does with her body.’

  ‘I’m not. In fact, I’d go further and say everyone has a right to know what they take into their body. Mrs Dunn lost her baby.’

  ‘That was nothing to do with me.’

  ‘Was the baby Archie’s?’

  ‘I think it was Mr Dunn’s.’

  It took all his effort to keep his voice low and his words polite.

  ‘Was your baby Archie’s child?’

  ‘I like to think so.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I delivered her here, in the bed recess.’ She nodded toward
s the far corner. ‘Where my desk is now. The first major piece of work I produced there. A perfect little girl.’

  It was the same bed where Mrs Dunn had lain drugged. Murray saw it for an instant, the curtain drawn to one side, the soiled bedclothes slung onto the floor. Mrs Dunn had lost her baby. He wiped a hand across his face and asked, ‘Where is your daughter now?’

  ‘With Archie’s poems, buried down by the limekilns.’

  Murray wasn’t sure how long he sat staring in silence at Christie after she had spoken, but eventually he said, ‘I think you’ve miscalculated how much I want to get my hands on Archie’s poems, Miss Graves.’

  ‘Nature can be cruel.’ Her face tightened. ‘It had its way.’

  ‘So you took the child and buried it? Simple as that?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘Did Bobby Robb have anything to do with the baby’s death?’

  Christie’s laugh was hard and brittle. She said, ‘Bobby Robb was a fool and a fantasist. We’d tolerated him because he could supply us with drugs, but Fergus had grown sick of him and his stupidity. If the weather hadn’t been so bad, he would have been gone on the ferry to the mainland and a lot of tragedy would have been avoided.’

  ‘The child would have lived?’

  ‘No, the child was never going to live. It was small and weak and had been born to fools who didn’t know or care enough to look after it. Idiots who filled the room with smoke and fed it with water when the stupid girl that was supposed to be its mother let her milk dry up and still drank and got high, and the stupid man that might have been its father drank and smoked, took drugs and talked poetry.’ She sighed. ‘We’d thought we could manage it ourselves, but the birth was horrendous. Bobby shot me full of something to help with the pain. It knocked me out so hard it’s a miracle the child was born at all. She must have clawed her way out.’

  ‘Didn’t Archie do anything?’

  ‘Archie had been big on having the child. He was full of fantasies about what it would be like to belong to a real family, but when she arrived, sickly and underweight, Archie did what he always did. He drank. When we discovered she was dead, he was sure it was Bobby’s doing. Bobby was always setting his stupid spells, rambling on about purity and sacrifice. Archie jumped to conclusions, even though there wasn’t a mark on her body. Maybe he wanted someone to blame. He beat Bobby badly. He might have killed him, if Fergus hadn’t managed to force him out of the cottage and bolt the door. I was a little mad too, I suppose. I didn’t know what had happened, but I knew that my baby was gone. I held her by the fire and rubbed her body, but it stayed as limp and as cold as she’d been when I found her dead in the bed beside me. Bobby and Fergus finished our supply and I joined them. We didn’t think about Archie until the next day. We had no idea he would take the boat out in the storm. It was stupid.’

  Murray whispered, ‘It was suicide.’

  But it was as if Christie didn’t hear him.

  ‘She was tiny. I wrapped her in my silk scarf and we put her in a tin box we’d found in the cottage. Fergus placed the poems Archie had been working on beside her and then we buried her and marked the spot with a stone.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What else could we do? Archie was missing, presumed drowned, and we were drug-taking hippies in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t like we believed in God. I had neglected her and lost her. Do you know how the judicial system treats neglectful mothers? How the press crucifies them? How they get dealt with in prison? A funeral wasn’t going to make any difference and jail wouldn’t have made us better people. Archie had paid the ultimate price, people would have thought that I should too. We did what we thought we had to.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Tomorrow they’re going to start digging where we buried her. It’s only a matter of time before they uncover her corpse and Archie’s poems. It’s the last chance I have to be reunited with her before I die.’

  Murray got to his feet. He felt weary in his bones.

  ‘Where’s your phone?’

  Her voice was wary.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because one of us has to call the police. I think it would be better if it was you, but if you won’t then I’ll do it myself.’

  ‘There are no police on the island.’

  ‘I think they might consider this worth the journey.’

  Christie leaned back in her chair, looking old and ill.

  ‘You haven’t asked me where Fergus is.’

  ‘I know where he is, up to his neck in shit.’

  ‘He had to go back to Glasgow. Apparently his wife tried to commit suicide. Like I said, he has a penchant for attracting women who want to explore their limits, then pushing them too far.’

  The horror of it was hot in Murray’s throat.

  ‘Will she be okay?’

  The woman made a gesture of impatience.

  ‘I expect so. There’s a difference between seeking attention and doing it for real.’ She looked him in the eye.

  ‘It takes real courage to kill yourself.’

  Christie held Murray’s stare, and he remembered a piece of advice his father had given him: ‘Always approach a trapped animal with caution. It’ll bite you, whether you’ve come to kill it or set it free.’

  He wanted to go now, back to Glasgow to see Rachel and find out how she was, but a suspicion that the woman still had more to reveal held him there.

  ‘Dr Watson, do you think I spent forty years on an island where I’m hated because I’m in love with the landscape? I stayed to be close to my child. She’s been on her own for too long. I want us to be buried together. If you help me, I’ll give you the original manuscript of my memoir, all the photographs and documents I have relating to Archie, and the poems buried beside our daughter. It’s more than you could have hoped for.’

  The temptation of it stopped Murray’s breath for a moment. He took a gulp of air and plucked his jacket from the floor.

  ‘I reckon it’ll be around twenty minutes before I can get a signal. As soon as I do, I’m calling the police. I advise you to ring them first.’

  Christie gave a wry smile.

  ‘It won’t be the ferry or a police launch that takes me from the island, Dr Watson. I already have what I need to transport me. I think I’ve proved my staying power, but I’ve no intention of waiting for the final chapter.’

  He took a step towards her.

  ‘There’s no certainty you’ll go to jail.’

  ‘My mother would have said that my prison had already been appointed by a higher court – a wheelchair, incontinence, loss of speech, choking to death.’

  ‘You’re nowhere near that stage yet.’

  ‘Aren’t I? I didn’t realise you were a medical doctor as well as a doctor of literature.’ She sighed. ‘I’m tired of it all. If it’s time for me to leave my home, then it’s time for me to leave. You said you supported a woman’s right to choose. Well, this is my choice. Fergus understands that at least. He brought me the means.’ She forced herself to her feet and stood, her face raised, her eyes locked on his. ‘All I wanted was for you to help me make a good death, and to bring some peace to Archie and to our daughter.’

  It was the words ‘good death’ that did it. Murray sat back down in his chair and put his head in his hands.

  Chapter Thirty

  MURRAY DROVE SLOWLY, with the headlights off. It was the kind of night that men who wanted to be up to no good craved. The sky was free of moon and stars, the road ahead black, his vision marred by mist and rain. Murray kept his eyes on the darkness before him and asked, ‘How will I know where to dig?’

  Christie’s voice was hushed, as if she were still afraid Murray might change his mind.

  ‘We left a marker. I used to visit every day, but lately it’s been too difficult.’

  ‘Is that what you were doing when I met you?’

  ‘The weather was too poor to drive down, but I could see her grave from the ridge.’

  The rain
battered against the metal roof of the car, a hundred drumming soldiers marching forth to halt the outrage.

  Murray said, ‘It’s worse tonight.’

  ‘It helps. No one will be about and the ground will be soft.’

  ‘Isn’t there a chance it might have been dislodged? If it has, we may not be able to find it.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Christie was in the seat beside him, but her words seemed to come from far away. ‘Her face was the last thing I covered. I swaddled her in my scarf, as if I was about to take her out for some air, then I tied it around her head. The people of the islands used to believe children who died as infants had been stolen by the faeries and a faery replica left in their place. I can understand why. She looked like my baby, but I knew she wasn’t. My child had gone.’

  Murray glimpsed Christie’s ghost-white face as she turned towards him. Perhaps the fear showed in his expression, because she said, ‘It won’t be as bad as you’re anticipating. Imagine it’s simply the poems we’re excavating. We wrapped them in polythene. You don’t even have to go into the box, I’ll take them out for you.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘You drive me home, collect the papers and photographs I promised you, and leave.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Will wait some days, perhaps months. Who knows, maybe remission will return and I’ll be spared for years. But I’ll have my child’s body and the means to make a good death when the time comes. Do you know how important that is?’

  Murray stared at the road ahead and thought of the promise he and Jack had made to their father.

  ‘Yes, I know what a good death can mean.’

  She reached out and stroked a finger down his cheek. It was a lover’s touch and he flinched.

  Christie whispered, ‘I always half-thought he would come back. Some nights I still do. I sit by the window reading, something catches my eye and I think, There’s Archie, come for me. It used to frighten me. I’d wonder if he would still be angry, what he would look like after all that time. Do you remember “The Monkey’s Paw”?’ Murray nodded, but perhaps Christie didn’t see him in the darkness, because she continued, ‘A husband and wife wish for their dead son to be returned from the grave. No sooner is the wish from their mouths than they hear a hideous banging at the door. When they open it, in place of the hale and hearty boy they dreamt of stands a mangled wreck of a corpse half cut to shreds by the wounds that killed him. Wounds that now have the power of endless torment rather than the power of death.’