Coffin Road

by Peter May

  ‘Well, what would make it worth your while?’ It’s strange how having all that cash makes me reckless.

  He laughs. ‘Forget it, pal, you couldn’t afford me. I’ll take you and drop you wherever you want to go.’

  I take out my wallet and count out a sheaf of notes, which I push through the gap below the glass separator. ‘Five hundred quid. And it might not even be the whole day.’

  The driver looks at the notes, and I see him run his tongue thoughtfully between his lips. He takes the bundle without comment. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Hainburn Park. It’s just north of the—’

  He cuts me off. ‘I know where it is.’ And he pulls away from the front of the hotel into the early morning traffic.

  It is a dull morning that camouflages the beauty of this grey-stoned city. It seems flat and lifeless. The only colour is on the pavements, where multicoloured umbrellas are lifted in protection from fine rain that falls like mist. The green of Princes Street Gardens seems end-of-season weary, and a pall of gloom hangs over the capital, as if in anticipation of winter, just around the corner.

  I watch the city slide past rain-streaked windows as we head south over the Bridges into Nicolson Street, and I suppose that this is my town. The place where I live. It all seems familiar enough to me, but I have no idea whether I grew up here, or moved back here later. What is my work, my job, my profession? I told Sally and Jon that I was an academic. If that is true, what is my subject, my area of expertise? Am I a teacher, a lecturer, a researcher? I close my eyes and stop trying to remember. If any of it is going to come back to me, I need to let it happen naturally. Trying to force it is only giving me a headache.

  I start to get lost as we turn west at Newington. The streets have become unfamiliar. The leafy suburban streets of upmarket Morningside, where grand detached houses lurk discreetly in mature gardens behind screens of trees and hedges made impenetrable by leaves starting to turn towards autumn.

  It takes little under half an hour to get there, passing finally through the blue-collar suburb of Oxgangs before turning into the warren of detached villas and bungalows that is Hainburn Park, with its view out beyond the bypass to the green rise of the Pentland Hills. Today they are almost lost in mist.

  I have been watching the numbers, and spot the house on our right as we pass it. ‘What number, mate?’ the driver asks.

  ‘This is it,’ I tell him. ‘Go to the end of the road and turn, then pull in about three houses down.’ I see his eyes flicker towards me in the mirror, but he does as I ask.

  When we have pulled in at the side of the road and he cuts his motor, he says, ‘What now?’

  ‘We wait.’

  I sense the driver’s unease, but ignore him and sit gazing out of the window at my house. It is a modern, detached villa with its own drive and what looks like a double garage. Tall wooden gates lead through to the back garden beyond, and I can see trees behind that.

  A white Nissan X-Trail is parked in the drive next to a short flight of steps that leads up to a front porch. There are net curtains on the windows of the front room, so it is impossible to see inside. All I want to do is walk up and knock on the front door, but something makes me hesitate. A need, perhaps, for some hint of familiarity, some memory, no matter how distant, as confirmation that this really is where I live. That I really am Neal Maclean.

  The driver has opened his window and is smoking, and reading a copy of the Scottish Sun. The windows in the back are starting to steam up, and I lower the one on the pavement side to get a clearer view of the house. Still nothing comes back to me. It all feels like nowhere I have ever been. And yet, why else would I have an extract of birth for Neal David Maclean, with this address written on the back of it?

  Even as I am watching, the front door opens, and I tense as a woman steps out. I strain to look at her through the fine drizzle as she skips down the steps and climbs up into the Nissan. I am almost disappointed by her ordinariness. Brown hair streaked blond, not excessively tall. A woman in early middle age. Forty, perhaps, and inclining to plumpness. She wears jeans and a sweater beneath a light summer raincoat which flaps open, and block-heeled sandals. A black bag on a short strap hangs from her left shoulder. She throws it into the car ahead of her as she gets in, then starts to back out into the street.

  I rap on the driver’s window. ‘We need to follow her.’

  He looks up, taking in the X-Trail, then glances back at me. ‘I hope this is kosher, mate, and you’re not some bloody perv. Cos I don’t want any part of stalking a woman that you’ve got a fancy for.’

  ‘She’s my wife,’ I tell him emphatically, and an unpleasant smile spreads itself across his face.

  ‘Oh, I get it. Been a bad girl, has she?’

  ‘Just follow the car, please.’

  His lip curls in annoyance, and for a moment I think he is going to tell me to get out of his cab. But if he was, he reconsiders, and turns to start the motor and accelerate away in pursuit of the white Nissan. It is clear that he does not like me, or this hire, but he’s taken the money, and I am happy that at least he does not try to engage me in meaningless small talk.

  She drives to a large shopping centre at Cameron Toll and takes a shopping trolley into Sainsbury’s. We park two rows behind her in the car park and wait.

  It is hot and stuffy in the back of the cab and I roll down the window part of the way and lean my head back against the rest, closing my eyes. I am not sure if it is a memory or a dream, or perhaps a mix of both, but I see a woman in blue who looks very familiar to me. If I breathe deeply I can smell her scent, and it takes me tumbling back through time to childhood. Patchouli. I know, without being told, that she is my mother. She has many rings on her fingers, long dark hair held in place by braided lengths from the front of it tied back. Her jeans flare over brown leather boots, and she wears a loose, tie-dyed top. A child of her age, caught in a time-warp from the era of her youth, when the world was still full of hope. She is leaning over me, kissing my forehead, smiling. And just beyond her a man is speaking her name. But somehow I can’t quite catch it.

  ‘What do you want me to do now?’

  I am startled by the driver’s voice, annoyed that the interruption has prevented me from hearing my mother’s name. It had been so close, so tantalisingly just out of reach. I blink and see the woman we have been following, loading bags of shopping into the back of her Nissan. ‘Just keep on her tail.’

  We follow her through a maze of streets before finally she pulls up in a parking space outside a row of single-storey suburban shops. My driver draws in on the opposite side of the street and the taxi’s diesel engine sits idling noisily as the woman goes into a hairdressing salon called Coif’n’Cut. Through the window we can see her being greeted by what looks like the owner. There is a kiss on each cheek, laughter, and then the coat and bag are dispensed with before she is led away, beyond our field of vision.

  ‘Knowing women, she could be in there for a while,’ the driver says. ‘And I canny sit parked here.’

  We end up parked in a fifteen-minute meter bay a hundred yards up the road, and I am in and out of the cab feeding it for the next hour and a half. My frustration is growing by the minute, and I can feel my driver’s impatience keeping pace with it.

  When eventually she emerges from the hairdresser’s, I can see no difference at all in her hair.

  ‘Hah,’ the driver grunts, looking in the mirror. ‘Either she snuck out the back to keep some secret rendezvous, or she’s paid a bloody fortune for fuck all.’

  Her next stop is at a Costa Coffee, but mercifully she emerges again after a few minutes, sipping a large takeaway cup and slipping back into her Nissan. We follow her to the house, then, and park further down the street to watch her carry her shopping into the house and shut the door.

  By now I have had enough. It’s time to confront her. I am about to step out of the cab, when I see a group of schoolgirls approaching from the direction of Oxgangs Road. Thr
ee of them. And some instinct makes me stop to watch. They are in school uniform. Teenagers from fifth or sixth year, swinging bags and taking their time as they make their way towards us in animated conversation beneath two umbrellas. At the drive to my house they stop briefly, then one of them detaches herself from the others and runs up the path to open the front door with her own key. She is too far away to see clearly in the rain, and is obscured by her umbrella. Sixteen or seventeen years old, I would have said. Quite a tall girl, but it’s impossible to make out her features.

  ‘Your kid?’ the driver says.

  I nod. ‘Yes.’ And it gives me the strangest feeling to realise that I have a daughter. I check the time and see that it is nearly one o’clock. She must have come home from school for lunch, and will probably leave again in half an hour or so. I decide to wait, to get a better look at her.

  ‘So we wait again?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The driver sighs extravagantly, then reaches down to his left to retrieve a bag from which he takes a flask and a bag of sandwiches. And I realise how hungry I am myself. I ate very little yesterday, and had no breakfast this morning. So I lay my head back once more against the rest and close my eyes.

  Almost immediately, I see myself running alongside a child’s bicycle. A little girl is clutching the grips on the handlebars with whitened knuckles, wobbling as her short legs stretch fully to turn the pedals. ‘Don’t let go, Daddy, don’t let go,’ she shouts, and I realise that I am not holding the bike at all. I open my eyes again, blinking furiously. Karen. I don’t know where it comes from, but that is the name on my lips. I say it out loud. ‘Karen.’ And see the driver looking at me again in his mirror.

  ‘That your kid’s name?’

  I nod.

  ‘Quick eater, then. That’s her finished already.’

  And I realise that the driver, too, has finished his packed lunch, and that I must have dropped off to sleep. I am awake in an instant and, peering through a windscreen made almost opaque by fine droplets of rain, I see my daughter running down the drive to meet her friends, the three of them again sharing two umbrellas and huddled together beneath them.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘Follow them.’

  The driver turns to glare at me through the glass. ‘No fucking way am I following a bunch of teenage girls in my cab.’

  ‘It’s my daughter, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘I only have your word for that.’ He pauses. ‘And anyway, they’d see us. A big black fucking cab crawling along behind them.’ I don’t know what to say, and he looks at me appraisingly. ‘Tell you what. I’ll take you to the school ahead of them. Got to be Firrhill High, in this catchment area. And you can watch her go in.’

  We get there a full ten minutes ahead of them, and I assume they must have waited to take a bus up Oxgangs Road. Pupils straggle through the gates in groups of two and three and four. The rain has got heavier, and no one is lingering in the street or the playground. When I see them, they are instantly recognisable. Three lassies huddled under two umbrellas, hurrying down from the main road, and I am disappointed again not to see her face.

  *

  We sit along from the house in Hainburn Park all afternoon with the rain drumming on the roof of the cab. I can feel the driver becoming increasingly restive. And the only reason I can contain my own impatience is because I have decided to wait until my daughter returns from school, when I will step down from the cab to greet her in the street. It is more passive than walking up the drive and knocking on the front door to confront my wife. And I wonder if I am, by nature, a coward, or a prevaricator, or simply someone who shies away instinctively from the possibility of confrontation. Does she even know where I have been for the last year and a half, or why? What was the state of our relationship when I left? Are we still married? As the clock ticks away, I am becoming increasingly nervous.

  By the time I see the three girls hurrying down the street towards us, what had begun the day as light drizzle has become a torrential downpour. Raining like stair rods, my mother used to say. And I catch my breath. Another memory. But it arrives like a lone horseman from the clouded depths of my mind, and slips away into insignificance.

  I refocus. The gutters are in spate and I can see almost nothing out of the windows. I am wearing a waterproof jacket, but have no hat or umbrella. As soon as I step from the cab I will be drenched. They are almost upon us, and I swing the door open and step out on to the pavement, almost bumping into them. One of the girls releases a tiny, startled yelp, and all three faces turn up towards me from under the umbrellas. Fleetingly, I catch Karen’s eye, and see a face full of indifference, without a trace of recognition.

  The girls hurry on, leaving me standing in the rain, my hair streaked in wet ropes down my forehead, and I am filled by the awful, hollow pain that comes with the realisation that the girl I had thought to be my daughter didn’t know me. Looked me straight in the eye and away again. Dismissive. Some stupid guy that bumped into them on the pavement. Certainly not her father.

  I watch them carry on up the road, one of them detaching from the others and running up to the door of the house I have been watching all day, before vanishing inside. I open the door of the taxi, cast adrift again on a sea of utter confusion, and see the driver leaning towards me.

  ‘That lassie didnae know you fae Adam. You’re taking the piss, pal. You can find your own way back to the hotel. Shut the fucking door!’

  In a state of semi-shock, I do as he says and hear him start the motor and rev fiercely. I watch as he pulls away up the street, leaving me standing at the side of the road. Perhaps it is only my imagination, but it seems to me as if the rain has intensified. I feel it beating a tattoo on my head, soaking into my jeans, washing around my shoes. I run a hand back across my scalp, sweeping my hair out of my eyes. With the rain running down my face, it would be hard to tell if I was crying. And if I were to cry, they would be tears of pure frustration. Along with the return, perhaps, of fear. For the rock of certainty on which I have built my hopes turns out to have been the sand of self-deception. If I had been Neal Maclean, resident of this Edinburgh suburb, father of Karen, then surely that girl would have known me? But if not her father, who else could I be? I feel as confused and disorientated now as I did those first moments on the beach at Luskentyre when I opened my eyes and realised I had no earthly idea who I was.

  A strange, unaccountable anger takes hold of me. Why would I have all those newspaper cuttings about Neal Maclean? His birth certificate, with this address written on the back. It is incomprehensible. At the very least, somehow, I have to make some kind of sense of it.

  I turn and walk briskly through the rain and turn into the drive of the house where the white Nissan is parked. Neal Maclean’s house. Where Neal Maclean’s wife and daughter live. At the front door, I knock three times in rapid succession, and such is my impatience that I barely wait a handful of seconds before knocking again. Then I spot the doorbell and ring it.

  When the door opens, the woman with the blond-streaked hair looks startled, and it is immediately clear to me from her eyes that she doesn’t know me. Her daughter is hovering in the gloom of the hall beyond her, a towel in her hands. She, too, looks blankly towards me.

  ‘Can I help you?’ the woman says.

  I have no idea what to say, and I blurt, ‘Don’t you know me?’

  ‘No, I don’t. What do you want?’

  Her daughter calls, ‘He was standing out on the street when I got back.’

  The mother says to me, ‘I think you’d better go.’

  I don’t know what possesses me to say it, because I know now it’s not true. And I feel like a drowning man grasping at flotsam that I will simply drag under with me. ‘You must know me. I’m Neal Maclean. We’re married.’

  Her eyes open wide with fear, all colour draining from her face in an instant, and she slams the door shut on me. From the other side of it, I hear her shout, ‘If you don’t leave immediately, I�
��ll call the police!’

  *

  There is a bar in the hotel called The Boston Bean Company. I have no idea why, and it seems to me like an absurd name for a bar. But tonight it offers refuge and escape to a man with no name, no past, no future. I am reacquainting myself with my only friend, Caol Ila. A friend who offers warmth and escape. And ultimately oblivion. A friend who doesn’t care who I am, good or bad, lost or found. A friend who will stay with me to the end, and ultimately hasten my departure.

  It was quiet here when I first arrived, my hair still damp, a chill in my bones. But the in-crowd have arrived. Young people. Noisy. Drinking, talking, laughing. And above all, confident in who they are. They make an island of me. A solitary, silent island of confusion in their sea of certainty. I sit on a stool at the counter, watching my glasses come and go. A pale amber procession of them, evaporating before my eyes. And there is one refrain that plays again and again in my head like an earworm. If I am not Neal Maclean, who in God’s name am I?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I am tempted by the hair of the dog. Not only because I feel like death on this grey September Edinburgh morning, but because I would like to rediscover the level of oblivion I achieved last night. The real world, today, feels even harsher and less forgiving.

  It is only a short walk from the hotel to the top of Leith Street, and the turn into Princes Street. The equestrian statue of Wellington stands mounted on a plinth at the foot of the steps to General Register House, looking out over North Bridge.

  For some reason I am acquainted with the history of this building. Built in the eighteenth century with funds seized from defeated Jacobite estates, it lay empty for nearly a decade, becoming known as the most magnificent pigeon house in Europe. It also provided a refuge for thieves and pickpockets before work resumed on its interior, turning it into what it is today – one of the oldest custom-built archive buildings still in continuous use anywhere in the world. Only nowadays they call it the ScotlandsPeople Centre.