Coffin Road

by Peter May

  She had removed her tie, opening the top of her blouse to reveal a little of her tattoo, lipsticked her mouth deep purple and reinstated her lip rings. She was determined to be as defiantly ugly as possible, staring down anyone who had the temerity to look at her.

  But today she wasn’t catching anyone’s eye. And, contrary to all outward appearance, she was bleeding inside, where Daddy’s little girl hid from the world, succumbing to guilt and grief.

  It was still a mystery to her why she had given him such a hard time. Driven by some internal devil that made her say and do things that she really didn’t mean. Just to be difficult, or obstinate, to hurt with malice aforethought. She had felt almost possessed, driven to truculence, and always filled, in the aftermath, with regret that she could never admit to.

  Her mother had doted on her when she was wee, an only child, an only daughter. But it was always her father’s approval she had sought, him she had wanted to spend time with. And in those early years he’d had endless patience, and limitless time, or so it seemed. He’d played games with her for hours on end – hide the sweetie, snakes and ladders, chequers – and read to her every night. Silly, childish stories, but they had given her an appetite for reading. Only now did she realise how desperately boring it must all have been for him. But he had never stinted on his time. He had taught her to swim on holiday in France, to ride a bike in the back garden, running along beside her, holding the saddle. ‘Don’t let go, Daddy, don’t let go,’ she had shouted, unaware that he had let go long ago.

  She glanced from the window of the tram, out across the roofs of Waverley Station, and, jumping focus, saw her reflection in the window. An involuntary smile on her face with the memory of it. And tears sprang suddenly to her eyes.

  From the age of twelve or thirteen she had become unaccountably angry with him. Not entirely her fault, because his work had taken up more and more of his time, leaving less and less of it for her. And she had punished him for it, mercilessly, with her moods, and sullen sulks, and sudden outbursts of anger. Even when he had gone out of his way to make time for her, to take her out sailing, or walking in the Pentland Hills, she had found excuses not to go. Hurting herself just to hurt him.

  And then the very last time she’d seen him. He had been going to come and watch her in the school debate. The proposition was that GMOs were the future of food and the only way to feed the world. She knew that it was one of her dad’s hobby horses. He had always been implacably opposed to the idea of genetically modified crops, and so she had boned up on the subject and was the principal speaker against the proposition. He had called off at the last moment. A problem at work and he had to deal with it. He said that he would drive her to the school but couldn’t stay.

  That he hadn’t even been going to hear her speak, after all the work she had put into it just to please him, had seemed like the last, unforgivable straw. She blew up at him, accusing him of being hopelessly selfish, of not caring about anyone or anything in the world but himself. And least of all her. As usual, he had stayed calm and patient and tried to explain. But that only infuriated her further, and she had screamed in his face, ‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!’ And fled from the room in tears.

  She never saw him again. They found his boat that weekend, out in the Firth of Forth. Empty. All the life jackets still on board. And then the note her mother had discovered that night, left on the pillow, beneath the duvet, so that she hadn’t seen it until going to bed.

  For the longest time, Karen had been utterly overcome by guilt. It was her fault. Somehow he’d been driven to take his own life because of her. The way she behaved, the things she’d said. And she had wished with all her heart that she could just go back and undo it all. Tell him that she’d never meant any of the things she had said, that she loved him really. But there was no way to do that, no way to unsay the things she’d said. And in the end her only means of dealing with it was by growing a hard outer shell that would never let anything in to hurt her ever again.

  She became aware of a middle-aged woman sitting opposite, staring at her, and caught a reflection of herself again in the window, her face streaked now with black mascara, and shiny with tears.

  *

  It was mid-afternoon when she got back to the house. Her mother would not be home for nearly three hours yet, returning no doubt with Derek, since it seemed he had already moved in.

  Karen could not for the life of her see what it was that her mother found attractive about him. His head was completely bald on top, smooth and unnaturally shiny. But he had a ring of dark hair around the sides and back, greying a little at the ears. And he wore it far too long, as if that could make up for the lack of it elsewhere. It might not have been so bad had he just shaved off the lot. That’s what men did these days when they went bald. And it looked so much better.

  She supposed he was quite well built, but old fashioned in the dark suits he habitually wore – estate agents, it seemed, were always on call – or the neatly pressed jogpants and sweatshirt that he wore to go running at the weekends. He was invariably nice to Karen, smiling and obsequious, believing apparently that it might endear him to her. She detested him.

  She dumped her bag in her bedroom and changed into a T-shirt and black jeans, then wandered through to her mother’s bedroom. In the months after her father’s death, she had come in here often. Her father’s clothes had been left hanging in the wardrobe, and they smelled of him. His smell. She would bury her face in one of his jackets and simply breathe him in. And it choked her every time. Because somehow it was as if he was still there. How could he be gone when she could smell him? That comforting, familiar smell that she had grown up with. Whether it was aftershave, or some other scent, or just the natural oils that the body exudes, it was a smell that always took her back to childhood, conjured those happy days when she had loved him unconditionally.

  His clothes had long gone. Her mother had removed them all one day when she was at school, and taken them to the charity shop. Karen had been distraught when she returned home to find his half of the wardrobe empty. Those suits and jackets and trousers on their hangers, the folded piles of jumpers and T-shirts, the drawer full of socks were her last connection to him. Somehow deep down she might even have believed that one day he would come back to wear them all again. But even that had been taken from her with their removal.

  Now, when she opened the wardrobe, they were Derek’s clothes hanging there, like the intruder he was in their lives. And all she could smell was the powerful, pungent odour of the aftershave he applied far too liberally to his shiny, shaven face.

  She banged the door shut and went through to the dressing room off the bedroom. Her mother’s little den. Karen knew that her mother kept an old photo album in here in one of the dresser drawers. An anachronism, really, in this digital age. Colour prints from film negative. Her paternal grandfather had been a portrait and wedding photographer, and her father had inherited all his cameras, and continued to use them almost until his death, though it had become more and more difficult to get film processed. Only very late did he succumb to digital, seduced by the gift of a Sony Cybershot from Karen’s mother, who was fed up being asked to take photographs she couldn’t immediately see and post on Facebook like everyone else.

  Shooting on film had meant that there were fewer photographs taken, which had made them more precious, and it was nice to have an album to sit and flick through. Pictures you could touch, almost as if touching the people themselves, a direct connection with a happier past.

  Karen sat on the floor, her back against an old armchair, pulled her legs up and opened the album on her knees. She smiled at the tottering two-year-old, arms raised, hands held by her daddy as he encouraged her to walk on her own. A picture taken by someone of the three of them, with Karen in the middle. She would have been about five then, and already her mother and father seemed dated. His hair had been longer at that time, falling in dark curls over his forehead. And her mother was slim, bef
ore she put on the weight, hair drawn back in a ponytail from a small, pretty face.

  There was one taken of Karen and her dad when she was about eleven. She had been quite tall then, following a period of rapid growth that had left her awkward and leggy. She was grinning shyly at the camera. Her dad had his arm around her shoulder and was smiling down at her adoringly.

  She felt the tears welling up again and bit her lip to stop them from spilling. Blinking furiously, she closed the album and slipped it back in the drawer. The last photographs would all have been digital and kept, she knew, in files on her mother’s laptop.

  The laptop sat open on the little dresser, where her mother would spend time posting and commenting on the videos and pics posted by her boring friends on Facebook. An endless succession of pointless quizzes, of babies and gardens, smileys and saccharine aphorisms. Share if animals are worth fighting for.

  Karen sat in front of it and tapped the trackpad to waken it from sleep. The desktop was a shambles of icons and folders, files and photographs, jpegs and PDFs. She clicked the Photos icon on the dock and the software that stored all her mother’s photographs opened up to fill the screen. The sidebar listed photo events going back several years. Karen went through them at random, but couldn’t find any of her father, and wondered if her mother had trashed them. The most recent were of her and Derek. A barbecue in the back garden, a picnic in the Pentlands. Drunken faces at a party leering for a selfie taken on her mother’s smartphone.

  Karen breathed her exasperation and shut down the software. She was about to put the computer back to sleep when a folder among all the items on the desktop caught her eye. It was labelled simply, Derek. She hesitated to open it. It would be like spying, and she knew how pissed off she would be if she thought her mother was trawling through files on her laptop. But curiosity overcame reticence, and she double-clicked. The folder opened up in a separate window to reveal a long list of files, tracing email communications between Derek and her mother, going back nearly five years.

  Karen wasn’t quite sure why she was disappointed. Dozens of what would inevitably be boring work emails. Houses for sale. Schedules. Adverts. Appointments with clients. Photo attachments. She pushed the cursor arrow towards the red Close dot, then on a sudden impulse double-clicked to open a file at random. It was dated a little less than three years ago, and, as Karen read it with growing disbelief, her blood turned cold.

  *

  She felt as if she were fevered. Her face was hot and red and her throat burned. She could hear Derek retreating from conflict out in the hall and tiptoeing downstairs. Her mother was flushed and defensive.

  ‘You had no right to go poking through my private correspondence!’

  ‘No, I didn’t. But I did. And that’s not even the point. You and that baldy bastard were cheating on my dad long before he died.’

  ‘We weren’t cheating!’

  ‘Okay, fucking behind his back, then.’

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘No.’ Karen was fired up by hurt and righteous indignation. ‘What did you do, bump him off so you could be together?’

  Exasperation exploded through her mother’s teeth. But she held her voice in check. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘What’s ridiculous about it? I never believed he committed suicide anyway. Why would he?’

  ‘Look . . .’ Her mother was fighting to stay calm. ‘Yes, Derek and I were having an affair.’

  ‘Fucking, you mean. Over the desk in that back office at the estate agency, probably.’

  For a moment, her mother didn’t know what to say, and blushed to the roots of her hair. And Karen realised that’s exactly what they’d been doing. But her mother recovered quickly, speaking in calm, measured tones. ‘My marriage to your father had been over in everything but name for a long time. Work had always been his mistress, the one he ran to when he needed to escape from me.’ She looked pointedly at Karen. ‘From us. And then it became more than a mistress, more than an escape. Like he was married to the damn job. It took over his life. He was never here. Well, you know that.’ She paused, breathing rapidly, and Karen couldn’t think of a single thing to say to fill the silence. ‘So, yes, Derek and I became lovers. But there was no cheating involved. I told your father. I’m no saint, but I’m no sinner either. I asked him for a divorce. One day, when you stop being a child and grow up, maybe you’ll understand what it feels like to be neglected by a partner.’

  Stinging from the child jibe, Karen fired back. ‘What, you mean like the way I feel right now?’ Which didn’t miss its mark, and she pressed home on it. ‘What if it was your affair, asking him for a divorce, that made him kill himself?’

  Her mother stood with her hands on her hips, eyes upturned towards the heavens. ‘A moment ago you were accusing us of murdering him.’

  ‘Well, maybe you did.’ Her eyes were burning now, too. ‘Dad would never have fallen overboard. And even if he had, he’d have been wearing his life jacket. So how come it was still in the boat?’

  ‘Because he took his own life, you stupid girl! Have you forgotten that he left a note?’

  ‘Oh, yes. The famous note. The one you’ve always refused to let me see. How do I even know it exists?’

  Karen’s mother stabbed an angry finger at her. ‘Don’t you fucking move.’ And Karen was shocked to hear her swear. She stormed away down the hall, and Karen could hear her banging about in her den, slamming drawers and doors. When she returned, she was very nearly hyperventilating, and she thrust a folded sheet of paper at her daughter. ‘It’s not the original. The police still have that. But this is the copy they made for me.’

  Karen stood looking at it, her heart in her throat, and she didn’t even want to touch it.

  ‘Go on, take it. You’re a big girl now. Or so you keep telling me. Time to face the truth. After sixteen years of marriage, this is all he could think to leave. Nothing about me. Not a word of apology. Or regret. Nothing.’ She pushed it at Karen again. ‘Go on, take it. It was only ever about you.’

  Karen was shaking as she took the folded sheet from her mother’s outstretched hand. She opened it up very slowly, and saw her father’s familiar scrawl. Somehow she had expected there would be more. But all it said was, Tell Karen I love her, even if I never could be the dad she wanted me to be.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Broken clouds are painted roughly across the sky, like a sketch in preparation for a painting. They reflect crudely in the still autumn waters of the Firth of Forth, off to the west. To the east, beyond the suspension cables of the road bridge, the triple humps of the rail bridge are painted rust-red. A paint that lasts much longer now, doing men out of work.

  I can see the sails of occasional yachts tacking out towards the North Sea, and somewhere beyond the low-lying smudge of the south shore, the city of Edinburgh nestled tightly beneath Arthur’s Seat.

  I am tired. It has been a long drive down from the Isle of Skye after an early ferry crossing from Tarbert. With stops, I have been nearly eight hours on the road.

  Traffic is gathering already for rush hour, and I am glad to be heading into Edinburgh rather than out of it. Until I hit the town itself, and it all grinds to a halt. At Haymarket I smell the malt bins of the breweries. The all-pervasive stench of them, like stale beer in a pub at midnight, hangs in the air and suffuses the senses with strangely elusive memories that remain infuriatingly just beyond reach. Oddly, the streets of the city are familiar to me. I need no maps or GPS to guide me to the King James Hotel at the top of Leith Walk, where Sally booked me a room for two nights using her credit card. But I will pay with cash.

  I am glad now that I thought to reserve a parking place in the tiny car park below the hotel. Driving in the city, I would be at much greater risk of being stopped by the police than I have been on the open road. Although that did not reduce my paranoia to any significant degree on the drive down.

  The girl at the reception desk is tall and willowy. And difficult. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’
she says, ‘I need your credit card.’

  ‘I don’t have one.’

  ‘The room was booked using a card.’

  ‘A friend’s card. I am not authorised to use it. I’ll pay cash.’

  She glances at her computer screen. ‘Well, the lady has authorised its use to pay for the room. We’ll add any other charges to that.’

  ‘No.’ I shake my head in frustration. ‘I want to pay cash.’

  ‘I’m sorry, we need a credit card to cover payment of any additional costs you might run up. Meals, room service, bar . . .’

  ‘I’ll give you a deposit. In cash.’

  She sighs, as if I am the one who is being difficult. And I wonder how it can possibly be this hard to pay for something with real money. ‘I’ll get the manager.’ My turn to sigh.

  The manager, who looks no older than fifteen, insists on deducting the room and parking charges from the credit card, since those amounts had been pre-authorised by the card holder, and in the end accepts a cash deposit of £1,000 to cover additional room charges, although he refuses to allow me to charge meals or drinks to the room. I am going to have to reimburse Sally when I get back.

  When I dump my bag in my room, I am tempted to jump into a taxi and go straight to the address on the back of the birth certificate. But it is too late in the day, and I am tired, and even if I do not sleep well, I know it would be better to start fresh in the morning.

  So I drink a couple of whiskies at the cocktail bar, trying not to think about why I am here, and have a salad in the restaurant, before retiring to my room to lie on the bed watching television until finally, sometime in the small hours, I drift off to sleep.

  *

  The taxi driver looks at me as if I am mad. It is a black hackney cab, and I have already slipped into the back seat and fastened the seat belt when I tell him that I want to keep him for the day. He shakes his head. ‘I don’t do that. Wouldn’t be worth my while.’