ść!’Jack Henderson was trying to live as calmly as possible. He seldom left home, drew little attention to himself, and took few risks in what he considered to be a hazardous world. His was a life of disciplined withdrawal; without pain or disturbance.
It was two in the morning on the night of the General Election. Jack was driving home from Edinburgh. He could see the last of the city lights recede against a spray of summer rain. Traffic moved away from junctions and roundabouts with entitled confidence. This was how driving should be, he thought, with fewer vehicles and everyone knowing where they were going.
He noticed a figure ahead and in the distance. It was a man standing as if his car had broken down. Perhaps he was waiting to hitch a lift.
Jack quickened the speed of the windscreen wipers; brushing away the rain. He noticed that the figure was younger than he had first thought, a student perhaps, staring into the windows of each passing car.
Jack kept his speed steady.
The figure stepped out into the road. He stretched his arms out and his legs apart, making an X, palms facing the windscreen, the hands with a slight tremor that Jack only remembered later. His face had a questioning look that asked: Why are you doing this to me?
Jack noticed that the sleeves on the man’s shirt were too short and that his hair was longer than he had first thought. The figure did not seem to be part of the world.
Now the face was up against the windscreen, the flesh ruddy and sudden in the darkness.
Jack felt the weight of the collision.
The face contracted and fell away.
Initially Jack hoped that he had made a mistake. Perhaps he had been dreaming. Perhaps the moment of impact had been a bump in the road, a speed restriction, a dog or a fox.
But other cars were coming towards him in the opposite direction and they were already slowing. Hazard lights flashed behind him.
Jack could see a shape on the ground in the rear-view mirror, a shadow in the darkness, clothing in the middle of the road.
He pulled over and turned off the ignition.
He knew, even then, that this was a last moment of normality before everything would have to change. If he could just arrest this moment, stop time, then everything might yet be all right.
But it was not all right.
He opened the door. There was a surge of noise, braking, people shouting.
Jack could see the silhouette of another man jumping out and slowing cars down.
Now there were lights all around him, people gesticulating, running, stopping and staring.
Jack walked over to the body in the road. Already there was too much blood. The head was pulped on the right side. The legs were splayed away. Nobody lies twisted like that, Jack thought; nobody bleeds like that and survives.
He looked at the head and at the blood; even in the darkness it gleamed a dark crimson: clotted.
He tried to work out the man’s age. He could see that he was too old to be a student, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. He wondered how soon his parents would know and if he had a girlfriend.
Jack knew that he would never forget this. It would be a hinge in his life, like the birth of his daughters or the time the woman who became his wife said that yes, she loved him, she would always love him and she would marry him; or the time when that same woman said that although she still loved him the fact was she couldn’t live with him any more, she just couldn’t. He had never understood what she had wanted out of life. He had never nurtured her.
Nurtured. Even then Jack had thought it a strange word to use.
Now this.
He knew he should concentrate on nothing but the body in the road; a young man who could almost have been a son, a boy, lying in a ripped corduroy jacket, blood draining through his T-shirt: a moment out of the night, the light rain falling, the wood beyond.
Before this Jack had been an ordinary man driving home. He had withdrawn from the world to avoid just such disasters, and yet here it was in front of him, lying in the road: abrupt catastrophe.
He tried to think when he had first seen the figure in the distance. If only he had decided to accelerate before the boy stepped out.
What was he doing walking so far out of town? You never saw people walking around near the A1, you just didn’t. You only saw them in the daytime, families who had gone for walks or picnics or men and women whose cars had broken down; never at night.
And why had the boy chosen Jack’s car? Why not the previous Mitsubishi or the next Nissan Micra? Why this moment of conjunction when there was no one else on the road?
Jack tried to think of the length of time everything had taken before this moment: how he had been watching the election results come in with his daughter; how they had shared supper together and he had left far later than he intended before realising that he had to find an all-night petrol station. Even the fact that he had allowed a car out at a crossing, or that he had let someone clean his windscreen for a pound at a red light must have made a difference. Any later and the boy might have thrown himself under another car. Any earlier and he might not have been there at all.
There had been little traffic when he had started out on his journey but now there was nothing but cars, vans and lorries. Jack could see a police vehicle approaching.
A man stopped his car alongside, putting on the hazard lights. He had thrown a packet of biscuits on to the back seat. He must have been trying to open them when the accident happened.
Accident.
Another man in a brown linen suit and open-toed sandals was standing in front of the dying boy, for he was dying, Jack knew that, waving traffic away. The man was hopping from one foot to the other. Perhaps he was trying not to get the blood on his socks.
Someone else had stopped: a fat man with a comb-over getting out of a car and sweating, leaving a black Labrador in the back seat and his wife too scared to get out. She was holding a little boy in a yellow fireman’s hat.
‘He fair threw himself at you,’ the man was saying. ‘There was nothing you could do … I saw it happen … I’ll say so … you’ll need a witness.’
He took his shirt off to staunch the blood.
A woman got out of a yellow Nova and put a mohair rug over the boy in the road.
‘Poor wee lamb,’ she said.
Jack looked at the rug because he didn’t want to look at the boy’s face. What kind of tartan was it? he thought. It was one of the less familiar clans.
What could he do to undo it all, this moment?
‘I’m a nurse,’ the woman was saying. ‘We have to stop the bleeding.’ She started stroking the boy’s head, pressing at the blood with her husband’s shirt, watching the life die away. ‘Have you called an ambulance?’
Jack felt for his mobile phone but couldn’t remember the number. It was different on a mobile phone, wasn’t it? He could see other people doing it for him. The boy began to cough in the road.
Jack couldn’t look at the face or the rug any more. He began to concentrate on the boy’s shoes. They were polished brown brogues. They seemed almost too clean for the rest of his clothes.
People were always speeding on this road, the woman was saying, there’ve been complaints, local campaigns; drivers speed up as they leave the city, hope you weren’t speeding.
Her husband was stopping all the other cars, gesturing to the ambulance to come through.
Jack heard the paramedics talking about a triage category one.
A policeman started asking him questions. Was Jack the driver of the car and would he like to step aside? He had spots on his neck and silver numbers on the shoulder of his uniform that made Jack think of Sudoku. Perhaps all the policeman’s numbers added up to forty-five.
He appeared to be talking about a digital breathalyser. Now the metal grates were between Jack’s teeth and he was asked to blow through a plastic tube into the small hand-held device. The policeman was telling Jack that it used an electrochemical fuel cell as a sensor. If the reading was under the legal limit of 0.05, the driver was normally free to leave, although obviously this wouldn’t apply under these circumstances.
As Jack waited for the result he could see a policewoman taking statements from the witnesses, writing by hand in the light of the cars. It was taking her for ever. He thought how much better it would be if the policewoman knew shorthand. He could almost hear his mother’s voice: Don’t they teach them anything these days?
He did not know how he could avoid telling her what had happened. His mother would try to console him, he knew, but there would also be a silent judgement, a feeling of disappointment; the sense that Jack could probably have avoided the whole thing if only he had been more aware.
He wanted to speak, to explain himself, apologise even now to the boy who was being lifted into the ambulance; but the policeman said, ‘Better no say anything at this stage, sir.’
Jack was driven away from the scene, back past the hospital and into Edinburgh.
There were fewer people in the streets of the city. A girl in a white T-shirt was taking off her shoes to run barefoot and catch up with her friends; a homeless man in a sheepskin coat was holding out a beaten paper cup from McDonald’s.
A sheepskin coat? Jack thought. In the summer?
At the police station the chairs in the fluorescent room reminded Jack of school. He was offered a mug of tea. He never normally took sugar but now he asked for three spoons. He could do with a blanket too and then he remembered the rug covering the boy. Would the woman have taken it back, or would she have abandoned it? Perhaps it would be evidence?
The clock read twenty-seven minutes past three. For a brief moment Jack felt he was in an airport. There was the same consistent light.
He worried how much he would have to explain. Perhaps he would spend the night in the cells, await trial, and never leave?
The policewoman who prepared to take his statement had short blonde hair and pale-blue eyes. They were the colour of speedwell, Jack decided. She had a soft voice with a hint of Fife in it. When had she decided to be a policewoman? He looked at her fingers for rings. Not married. Or did she take her jewellery off when she was on duty?
Yes, he was called Jack Henderson and it was his car. No, he hadn’t been drinking. Yes, he’d already been breathalysed. They should have known that. Why did they keep asking? Were they trying to catch him out? The boy had stepped out right in front of him. There was nothing he could have done. Surely they knew that?
Jack had always been scared of accidents and chance collisions, of bicycles and drunks, people holding kebabs and takeaways and cans of Tennent’s Extra, staggering, being sick, a drunken Scotland shouting through the Saturday-night traffic.
And he had always been anxious about driving. He preferred trains and buses but what could he do, living in the countryside where there were only three or four buses a day, and not earning enough for perpetual taxis?
He told the policewoman that he’d always been frightened of accidents. He wanted to say, ‘In fact I’ve always been scared, full stop.’ That was why he had withdrawn from the world in the first place: fear of accidents, fear of life.
‘A cautious driver then?’ the policewoman asked.
‘A careful driver. There is a difference.’ He didn’t mean to sound pedantic.
She asked him whether he had ever had any convictions in the past and when his car had last been serviced. It was clear that Jack was yet to escape blame but he could not think how he could have done anything differently.
‘The boy stepped out in front of me,’ he said. ‘There was nothing I could do. I know he saw me.’
Jack waited for the transcription of his statement. He could hear typing on a keyboard from the next room, a man shouting, ‘What the fuck’s it got to do with youse, you bastards?’ A woman hushing, ‘Calm down, Jim.’
‘Don’t you start telling me to fucking calm down.’
Jack looked at the clock and then at a duty officer, who appeared to be doing a crossword. A mute television in the corner was showing the election results. LAB HOLD EDINBURGH NORTH AND LEITH. The policewoman drummed her fingers.
‘Don’t do that,’ Jack wanted to say, halfway between a parent and a husband.
She smiled briefly and turned away, embarrassed. She had probably gone over her shift and was into overtime. She needed the money, Jack thought. He guessed that she would rather be at home, anywhere other than here with some middle-aged bloke who’d just topped a stranger. Perhaps they had a name for the victims, like train drivers after their first ‘one under’. Jack remembered reading that the most popular time for train suicide was eleven in the morning; so two o’clock in the middle of a summer night was perhaps a bit out of the ordinary. The eleven o’clockers. They got up and decided. It was like going to work.
Had the boy chosen him deliberately? Had he checked for single male drivers, avoiding families, old people and young lovers? Perhaps he had thought that a single middle-aged man would be able to cope better; and in a reassuring Mondeo Estate too, not some nippy little hatchback or convertible: sprightly enough for speed yet still sufficiently heavy to do the job. How much had he planned it – the volume of traffic, the weight of cars, the best position to ensure maximum impact? Had he chosen this stretch of road on purpose, just after the speed cameras where people always tended to accelerate away – or had it been an impetuous, random decision, a piece of chance or accident that had brought them together?
Perhaps the boy had thought nothing at all and just walked out, on substances, drugs or drink? Or perhaps he was calmly rational, fearing neither pain nor consequence?
Jack asked the policewoman when he could go home.
‘We’re just about done.’ She was not prepared to treat him as she might have done before the accident. ‘All you have to do is sign the statement and you’re free to go.’
‘We’ll call a taxi,’ the policewoman said. ‘You do have money? It’s quite a way to North Berwick.’
‘What about the boy?’
A bit of softness appeared in her face.
‘You can phone in the morning.’
The taxi smelled of cigarettes and Magic Tree. Jack sat in the back and looked at the tightly gelled grey curls of the driver as he talked about the problems at Hearts football club.
‘We might as well move the whole shebang to Lithuania,’ he said.
The sky was lighter now. It didn’t really matter what happened to him any more, Jack thought. He was no longer in control of his life.
The driver began to talk about the election and the Prime Minister having sex five times a night.
‘What’s wrong with doing it once properly? That’s what I always say.’
Jack tried to think of the last time he had slept with Maggie. It must have been three years ago. He had hoped that they could reach some kind of mutual understanding, beyond passion, but he had been wrong.
‘It’s because he’s going to lose the war. That’s what I think,’ the taxi driver was saying. ‘He has to make up for it with sex.’
He drove with one hand and kept turning round to see if Jack was all right. Jack guessed that the policewoman had tipped him off. ‘You watch him,’ she must have said.
He asked the driver to take a different route so they didn’t have to pass the scene of the accident.
‘Are you sure? This is the way. The A198.’
‘There was an incident earlier.’
Incident.
‘Cleared up now. They radioed. It’ll take ages to go crosscountry.’
‘Please.’
‘You’re throwing your money away.’
‘I don’t care about the money.’
‘You want me to go by all the windy back roads?’
The taxi driver began to talk about Edinburgh’s new traffic measures, which took everyone round the houses, and picking up the stag parties and hen nights (women were the worst, you wouldnae think it but they were). The streets were like the bottom of a baby’s pram, he said, all piss and puke.
Jack arrived home. The house was too big for him now that the family had left. He looked out at the long-redundant swing, and at the photographs of the children in silver frames: his two daughters against a celestial-blue studio backdrop.
He lived in a villa of red sandstone with flagstone floors and a large family kitchen. He had bought it when it was falling apart and he had been restoring it over twenty years. He had not worried then about coastal erosion or global warming; all he had wanted was a house on a cliff and a view out into infinite possibility. It would never be as grand as his parents’ house but he had wanted to provide the kind of childhood environment he had known himself, a constant sense of home, a place of refuge.
He opened the door to the larder and looked at foodstuffs past their sell-by date, left over from a time when his wife had prepared all the food. There were items he didn’t have a clue what to do with: baking parchment, liquid glucose syrup, dissolving gelatine, organic hemp oil. At the back he could see a Highland Spring bottle with a Post-it note Sellotaped over the label. HOLY WATER. DO NOT THROW AWAY. Maggie was a Catholic. There had been tension within his family about her from the start.
He turned on the television. Jeremy Paxman was arguing with George Galloway. ‘Are you proud of having got rid of one of the very few black women in Parliament?’ Although the debate was feisty it did not seem to have any relevance to anything in Jack’s life at all. Nothing mattered except the boy in the road.
He made a pot of peppermint tea and took it outside. He sat on the garden swing in the dark, rocking himself backwards and forwards, like one of his two daughters, Annie and Kirsty, ten years previously. He thought of the alternative routes he could have taken on the road home: any other decision that would have spared him this.
He tried to think again if it might have been his fault, if there was anything he could have done to avoid the accident. He hoped the boy had given some kind of warning or left a note. He should have asked.
He finished his tea and returned to the house. He stopped outside the bathroom and read the framed poem on the wall outside.
I have a child; so fair
As golden flowers is she,
My Cleis, all my care.
I’d not give her away
For Lydia’s wide sway
Nor lands men long to see.
Maggie had given it to him on Annie’s first birthday. Now Jack walked into the family room, passing once loved objects that were no longer needed. There was his grandfather’s wax stamp and his Morse code key, the frayed lampshade he had never replaced, the Greek amphora Kirsty had made at a pottery class when she was thirteen.
Through the window he could see the mist of summer rain, lit by the garden light, dripping in quick repetition from the slates of the roof into the gutters, bouncing off the down pipe and the satellite dish, falling through the blossom and the leaves, resting on the ferns and the climbing hydrangea: everything Maggie had planted to make the garden theirs.
Jack tried to recall good things in his life; the luck and the happiness he had known that might explain this balancing act of fate, this nemesis: Fortuna, a sudden reacquaintance with death.
That morning he had felt hopeful. He had sat in the garden and seen a blackbird gathering moss from the roof. He had watched a bumblebee bounce against the kitchen window and heard the cry of swifts newly returned.
Yes, he thought, he had been quite happy despite the withdrawal from his family. This was what the ancients had been after, an untroubled, solitary existence, away from all the fever and the fret.
Rain fell on his face as dawn began to break.
The next morning the police phoned to say that the boy had died. His parents lived in Edinburgh’s New Town. They had one other son: Allan.
They would let him know about the funeral.
Jack tried to concentrate on his work.
He thought perhaps he should do something on the myth of Iphis, who hanged himself when Anaxerete did not return his affection. How many in the classical world had died or killed themselves for love?
Perhaps he would make his students study the description of the moment of death in Lucretius: the departure of the spirit as smoke floating in the air.
Quod genus est Bacchi cumflos evanuit. Just as happens when the bouquet of wine has vanished…
Could his students think of a better word than ‘bouquet’?
Aut cum spiritus unguenti suavis diffugit in auras. Or when the sweet breath of ointment has dispersed into the air…
Couldn’t they do better than ‘ointment’ or ‘unguent’? Why couldn’t they be bold and use ‘perfume’ or ‘fragrance’, and make the fact of death nothing more than the fragrance of a passing woman?
Aut aliquo cum iam sucus de corpore cessit. Or when the flavour has passed from a substance…
Wasn’t there a better way of translating this to make death more sensual, more pleasing, evanescent?
Jack could not concentrate. He decided to write to the boy’s parents. He had to say something and writing it down would clarify his thinking. Then he could begin to come to terms with what had happened.
He made himself another cup of tea, and tidied up the kitchen, thinking of what he might write. He looked out his best fountain pen and filled it with ink. Each time he started he could not quite think how to phrase the letter.
Dear Mr and Mrs Crawford,
I wanted to write to say how sorry I am that the accident happened.
Was ‘accident’ the right word? How else could he describe it? ‘Incident’? That made him sound like a policeman. ‘Event’? It was a bit more than an ‘event’. He remembered reading articles in the Sunday papers telling him never to apologise or admit responsibility at the scene. It meant that he couldn’t say what he really felt. He crossed out what he had written, drew out a fresh piece of paper, and began again.
I am sorry about all that has happened. It must have been a terrible shock.
Was that good enough? It seemed so bald. ‘Shock’. Surely he could do better than this? And was it a ‘shock’ in any case? Perhaps there had been signs, warnings, previous attempts? He could not assume anything at all.
It must be awful to lose a child in this way.
Would the parents still see their son as a child? Jack didn’t regard his daughters as ‘children’ any more. Perhaps he should say ‘son’? Or would that imply that to lose a son was worse than losing a daughter?
I wanted to let you know that, if there is anything I can do, or if you would like to talk about what happened, I would be happy to do so.
‘Happy’? Glad? Would he really be ‘happy’? Perhaps he should say ‘prepared’. I would be prepared to do so. But was that friendly enough? How could he strike a balance between concern and distance?
He had never had to write a letter of condolence to a stranger before. It was different with friends. He had learned to suggest that the deceased were still with them, even if not in any bodily form. We carry them with us into the rest of our lives, to the last extremity, tempus in ultimum. We hear their voices. We can recall them at any time. They live within us.
But he could hardly say all this to a couple he had never met.
Jack decided to write what he could, correcting as he went. Then he would write the whole letter out again, a fair copy.
It took him over an hour and he decided to post it straight away. Then there would be no time to change his mind or refine it further. The job would be done.
Writing the letter taught Jack to keep busy. When he lost concentration, and had forgotten what he was doing, he snapped back to realise that all he was thinking about was the figure in the road.
So he looked for distraction: organising the timetable for next term, marking essays and dissertations, setting up extra seminars for the students who had fallen behind, anything to avoid thinking about Sandy Crawford.
Jack tried to picture the long fetch of the boy’s life: what kind of family he must have come from and how he had come to be separated from its security.
How bad did life have to become for a man to be so determined to throw it all away?
Without his car, Jack travelled by bus to the university. It was slower but simpler. He did not have to concentrate and it gave him more time to think about all that had happened. He did not know whether he would have to tell his colleagues or what they might say behind his back. Perhaps they would think he had not been concentrating or that he was drunk; not that he ever drank that much.
On the bus Jack sat behind a woman who was complaining that she shouldn’t have to pay for a TV licence because she only had a small television, and besides, she only watched opera. The girl opposite looked like an art student. She was lettering a phrase into a new notebook: I HARDLY EVEN KNOW YOU. And then at the bottom of the page: CAN’T YOU SEE?
Out in the streets the wind hit him for the first time; the early-summer air of a city that never stayed warm for long. He stopped at a florist in Nicholson Street. The floor was crowded with wedding sprays and funeral wreaths. White chrysanthemums spelled out the word ‘Elaine’.
He chose four bunches of white freesias and asked for them to be sent to the boy’s home.
A film crew was shooting a period drama near by. Two men with cans of lager started a football chant every time the first assistant called ‘Action!’ demanding £20 to go away.
Twenty quid, twenty quid, twenty quid!
Twenty quid, twenty quid, twenty qui-id,
Twenty quid, twenty quid, twenty quid,
Twenty QUI-ID, twenty quid.
He took the lift to his office in George Square and tried to keep to his routine: Roman authors in translation on Tuesdays, Latin every Wednesday, philosophy and set texts on Thursdays. He had organised his timetable so that even in term time he had a four-day weekend.
Jack knew that he had to try to stay calm, not letting the death affect him, but it returned with every passing police car, each ambulance siren, and with the sight of every solitary male figure waiting to cross the road in the distance. These were his daily reminders, ne obliviscaris: do not forget.
A few days later, amidst the bills and the junk mail on the doormat, he found a handwritten letter.
Dear Mr Henderson,
Thank you for your letter and the flowers. The funeral will be held next Thursday 19 May at Greyfriars Kirk at midday. If you would like to come you would be welcome. We appreciate your letter at this difficult time.
Yours sincerely,
Peter and Iona Crawford
He wondered if people would know who he was at the funeral and how many people he might have to tell. He could already imagine them pointing him out.
That’s him.
Perhaps he could stand at the back without anyone noticing. But he would have to meet the parents; he would have to say something.
He wished Maggie was still with him or that he could persuade her to come. He could hardly ask one of the girls; Annie was travelling, Kirsty had her exams, and besides, then he would have to explain everything.
He did not want to worry them. He did not want to be blamed or face any kind of confrontation. That was why he had withdrawn in the first place, he reminded himself. Now, it seemed, he had failed even at that.
Jack had forgotten that he had promised to go with his parents to a concert in the Queen’s Hall. His mother called to remind him.
‘I noticed that you didn’t write it down when I mentioned it.’
‘I’ve had a lot on.’
‘More than usual?’
‘No, it’s not that.’ He wasn’t going to tell her on the telephone.
It was a concert of motets and madrigals. Jack had to pretend to like the music more than he did. He saw himself as more of a blood-and-thunder man: Beethoven. Mahler. Wagner.
‘They are a very good group of Americans,’ his father was saying as they entered the Hall.
The audience was mostly retired. The spaces around the seats were cluttered with walking sticks, shopping and handbags. Jack caught himself wondering how often the people left their homes and how many more concerts they would be able to attend before they died.
The music consisted of love songs and laments; for lost love, lost youth, and lost opportunity. Perhaps, Jack thought, Sandy Crawford had been driven to distraction, and then death, by love. He began to imagine talking to a girl, or perhaps a boy, at the funeral: the survivor, the punished, the left behind.
As he listened to the music Jack thought of his friends who had never reached old age, struck down by breast cancer, AIDS and accident: Katy, Peter, Jan; now this boy. It was another marker in his life. A stop.
A woman with long dark hair stepped forward and began to sing how cruel and inexorable fate had coloured her sweet life. Jack knew that it was unhealthy to think that she was speaking directly to him when the words were random acts of coincidence. They could hardly have been meant but the music was saying what he could not.
He knew he should tell his parents what had happened and how he felt; that this recent disruption meant that he could not think of anything else. But how would he begin and how could they hope to understand?
Perhaps, Jack thought, it would be better to protect them from the news. They were old. They had seen enough disappointments. And Jack had surely lived long enough not to be a child to his parents any more; not to need mothering or fathering or for anyone to tell him that everything was going to be all right. In any case everything was not going to be all right. No one was going to kiss this better.
He tried to concentrate on the music. The singer was coming to the end of another lament. She was begging her lover to deign to remember all that they had shared. She could never forget him.
Si vous pri, que de moi vous voelle remenbrer,
Car je vous porroie oublier.
He returned home to discover that Maggie had telephoned. Jack worried that she was phoning about one of the girls, or money, or an unspecified anxiety he could do nothing to allay, but when he returned the call it appeared that she just wanted a chat.
‘What are you doing next Thursday? I’m going to be in Edinburgh. I’ve got a meeting at the Botanics.’ Her tone was surprisingly cheerful. ‘I don’t suppose you’re free?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing. A long-standing engagement. A seminar.’ He could hardly tell her it was a funeral.
‘Can’t you change it?’
‘No. Why? Is it urgent?’
‘You normally can.’
‘Well, I can’t change this.’
‘What is it? Are you all right? Has something happened?’
She had always been able to tell what he was thinking in the past but Jack would not confess.
‘No. Nothing has happened.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure. And I have to be away in the afternoon.’
‘Oh well, another time. I’m glad you’re going out. That’s something.’
‘I don’t stay in all day, you know. I still have a job.’
‘I know. But I don’t want you spending too much time on your own. You know how you get…’
Jack was sure his wife had noticed the anxiety but he was prepared to say anything, however inadequate, rather than tell her what had happened.
He had been to enough funerals and was more familiar than he wanted to be with readings about people stepping out into the next room, or footsteps that had been with us all along. But death had never been his direct responsibility before.
The Minister spoke about the inevitability of human pain. He argued that suffering could make people strong, and that Sandy’s death had been a kind of sacrifice. He had been a bright young man who had been unable to cope in the real world. The Minister talked about the delight of Sandy’s jokes and his curiosity about the world before the loss of self-worth, the gradual closing; his silencing from all those around him.
They sang a hymn: ‘Jerusalem the Golden’. A man stood up and told the congregation that he had not only been Sandy’s brother but also his best friend. He read the lyrics of a song Sandy had written:
All the things we’ve said
All the life we’ve led
Everything we’ve shared
Everything we’ve known
All the times we’ve loved
All the times we’ve fought
Everything we’ve shared
Everything we’ve known
Forgive me, forgive me,
I hadn’t thought, I hadn’t known
A life by myself, a whole life alone
Allan Crawford talked about Sandy as thoughtful and kind but also troubled by the carelessness of everyday life. He had seen poverty and injustice and he wanted to fight and change it and he had tried to do too much of it on his own. He couldn’t understand why people didn’t think as he thought.
As he spoke Jack looked at a woman in the front row. It was either a relation or Sandy’s girlfriend. Her hair was dark and swept back, severe more than sober, and she was wearing a black summer dress. It was as if she was no longer part of the world. Her eyes were dulled but not red. Jack wondered if she was on medication.
He thought of the suicides he knew from history; the urging on to silence when death became a need, a desire beyond all other: behaviour that could not be redirected, a silencing.
After the blessing the congregation left to the sound of ‘American Pie’.
This will be the day that I die.
There was a wake at the house in Drummond Place. Jack had said that he didn’t want to trouble them but Sandy’s father had insisted that he come. It was like a summer party with white wine and elderflower cordial; cucumber and smoked salmon sandwiches; strawberries and chocolate cake.
The house was filled with floral displays from friends: white lilies, white orchids, white roses. There were bereavement cards on the mantelpiece and side tables: impressionist paintings, Constable skies; images of permanence and good taste.
In the hall were large collages of family photographs behind sheets of plastic: the mother with her boys on the beach, family groups in church cloisters, mountains they had climbed, sites where they had camped.
The inner doors of the house had been removed, ready to be stripped for another round of DIY. There were sample doorknobs and taps for the bathrooms amidst the flowers, the condolence cards and the golfing memorabilia.
‘Would you like a drink, Mr Henderson?’
‘Jack. Please call me Jack. That would be kind.’
Iona Crawford showed him school photos of her son in a navy windcheater on the top of a mountain, a Munro probably, smiling with his thumbs up. Perhaps she had moved it to make it more prominent. Jack wondered if Sandy had been the favourite.
‘He loved mountains. Until he thought he had better things to do. If he’d stuck with mountains … Still … We can’t change anything now…’
Jack studied the photographs for longer than was necessary. It was easier than speech.
‘We’d had a bit of trouble with him before, over Highers,’ Peter Crawford said. ‘He’d even seen the doctor and got the medication but none of us were ever expecting anything serious. Hypomania, they called it. I thought that sounded bad, but the doctor said it was only a mild form and that rest, a bit of exercise and mountain air would do him good.’
‘What did you do?’
‘We went to Skye, climbed the Cuillins. It was the best time we had together. But then, after a couple of years at uni, it all started to go wrong. Perhaps we expected too much of him. He said he was tired, he couldn’t write essays any more. Then he took to his bed. Nothing we could say would get him out of there. He was listless. He said that he had lost his sense of taste and found eating exhausting. His brother thought he was just “being a student” and that it was only a bit of attention-seeking. I wanted to tell him to pull himself together but Iona kept saying if a child is called attention-seeking it’s because they want attention.’
‘I’ve always thought that,’ his wife said.
‘So we made sure we looked after him, brought him food. We left it on trays outside the door, but it was no use. He didn’t want to recover. He believed that, if nothing moved, if he could just keep everything still, then he could survive in that state for ever. No one would notice. Every time we went in to see him he pretended he wasn’t there. For a time he only moved when we were out of the house.
‘Then Krystyna came. At first I didn’t think she could deal with it all. But she turned the whole thing round. And I was grateful to her. Sandy was always calmer when she was with him. But then he must have collapsed again; just when we thought he was getting better. It doesn’t seem fair.’
‘I miss him so much,’ said Iona. ‘I thought if I could only keep him at home he would be safe. But you can’t hold on to your children for ever, can you?’
‘I suppose not,’ said Jack.
Sandy’s mother was beginning to cry.
‘I’m sorry. Please excuse me. It was good of you to come.’
Jack walked out into the garden, and saw the girl from the front row at the funeral. Her skin seemed whiter than it had been in the kirk; her hair even darker. The only colour other than black was a touch of pale-grey eye shadow and a silver bangle on her arm. She was smoking.
‘I am sorry,’ she said, putting out her cigarette. ‘It is not allowed in the house.’ She spoke with an Eastern European accent and looked as if she would rather be anywhere other than standing in this garden; this city; this country.
‘I’m sure they wouldn’t mind.’
‘I think they do. Even today.’ She looked at Jack as if she could not understand why he was talking to her. Then she guessed. ‘You are the man?’
‘Yes.’
‘I am Krystyna.’
‘I’m Jack.’
She nodded.
‘I should say I am sorry. For you. For what happened.’
‘I don’t think…’
‘Because … you know … I am … I was … the girlfriend…’
‘I understand.’
‘You have been told about me?’
‘Only a little.’
Jack did not know how to continue.
‘Where are you from?’ he asked. They could have been at a drinks party.
‘Poland. Kraków.’
‘Your English is very good.’
‘I have been here for three years. And I learned before I came.’
‘Are you a student?’
‘No. I have a job. One day I’d like to study more. But now, of course, everything has stopped.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘I did not expect this.’
‘No. I don’t suppose we can ever prepare for something like this.’
The sun was in Krystyna’s eyes. She moved into partial shadow.
‘Did you see him walk out?’ she asked.
‘Yes…’
‘Was it clear? That he wanted to do this?’
Jack remembered the night again.
‘It seemed so. But I keep thinking I should have swerved.’
‘He would have done the same,’ said Krystyna. ‘Like in football. They go the same way. Sandy did it in the streets all the time. It was always an accident. But he kept doing it. If someone was walking towards him and stepped out of his way, Sandy would move in the same direction. It was so confusing.’
Jack wanted to ask how long Krystyna had known him and if she had seen the body. He could not picture what the undertakers might have done to such a battered head, or to the chest, to make the corpse look at rest. He remembered the policewoman telling him that Sandy had died, and that no one since then had used the word ‘dead’. He had ‘gone’, or ‘passed over’, he was ‘no longer with them’. But he didn’t seem to be dead.
‘You were brave,’ Jack said. ‘In the service.’
‘You saw me?’
‘I didn’t mean to stare. I thought you might have been his sister.’
‘No.’ Krystyna smiled. ‘He did not have a sister…’
‘Yes. The police told me. I remember now. I’m sorry.’
‘I could feel people were looking at me the whole time. I did not know what to do.’
‘I suppose you just have to get through it,’ said Jack. ‘You cannot do anything else.’
‘Yes, it is like that.’
‘I am very sorry.’
‘We should have known,’ said Krystyna. ‘All of us. We should have stopped it happening. We didn’t have enough patience. None of us did.’
‘You mustn’t be hard on yourself.’
‘No,’ said Krystyna. ‘That is where you are wrong, I must be hard on myself.’
‘I understand,’ said Jack.
‘Really?’ Krystyna’s tone was brittle, as if she was ungrateful for Jack’s sympathy. ‘I do not think you do,’ she said. ‘I do not think you can understand at all.’
Jack stepped away, preparing to leave.
‘I’m sorry.’
Krystyna leaned forward, swaying slightly. For a second Jack thought she was about to faint. He wondered if he was going to have to catch her, explain what had happened, be responsible once more.
Krystyna held up her hand, apologising with her body before she said any words.
‘I am sorry. That was not polite. I did not mean to be rude. I only mean that we cannot understand what it is like for each other. I cannot understand what it is like for you.’
‘You can imagine.’
‘I can try to imagine. It must have been horrible. To drive that car; for all of this to happen.’
‘I keep remembering it,’ Jack said, ‘and then I keep trying to forget it. Perhaps it is the same with you.’
‘Yes, sometimes…’
‘I cannot know,’ Jack said. ‘Neither of us can. I cannot know what it has been like for you at all.’
‘No. Perhaps we are the same.’
‘We try to understand…’
‘And then we understand that we cannot understand,’ said Krystyna. ‘I’m sorry, I must go. I must see other people.’
Krystyna walked away. Jack looked at her and beyond her; at the sawflies on the roses and at the haar drifting in from the sea.
He knew that it was ridiculous to want to see her again. He tried to tell himself that he should forget Krystyna altogether, but he wandered round the Polish areas of Edinburgh, hoping that it would seem accidental if they met.
He looked at buses pulling away, crowded with people starting or finishing their days, men and women who simply got on with the sheer business of living.
Jack wished he could feel part of it all but how was he supposed to stop thinking about the night, the boy in the road and the light rain falling?
He looked in Polish cafés, delis and restaurants. He tried to keep on the move, maintaining the illusion of knowing where he was going. He realised that it might take weeks to find Krystyna.
He finally saw her in a queue for a bus at the top of Easter Road. She was with a group of friends but stepped away as soon as she saw him.
‘It is you,’ she said.
Jack asked Krystyna if they could talk. They might both find it helpful, he said. He wasn’t sure. But he thought he should offer. He wanted to do something to acknowledge what had happened. He realised that, because of his nervousness, he was saying too much, speaking too fast. Perhaps they could go for a drink.
‘I am not sure this is a good plan. I am not sure it would be good for us to talk about it.’
‘I keep thinking about it,’ Jack said, avoiding the truth of I keep thinking about you.
She looked at him and he thought that he could detect pity.
‘All right,’ she said, ‘if it is polite…’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I could maybe see you Thursday. If you like.’
They met in a pub on Leith Walk. A group of students were discussing what they took to be some of the great mysteries of life: why twenty-four-hour shops had locks on their doors when they were open all the time, what was the best thing before sliced bread, and how did Danish pastries, English muffins, French fries and Scotch eggs come to be named?
Jack asked for a vodka and tonic and a pint of lager. He knew that he was too old for all this. Even when he was at his smartest, in slimming black, his older daughter told him that he looked like a minister who had seen better days.
Krystyna had found a table in the garden under a large green umbrella. A barbecue was starting up. Jack remembered when they had last had one at home. Annie’s friends had come round and used a vocabulary that he could only partly understand. They told stories about their racist grandparents counting the number of black television presenters and used incomprehensible phrases such as ‘buff’, ‘scran’, ‘bang-off’ and ‘allow that!’.
A group of Krystyna’s friends called over – ‘Czść!’
‘Would you like to join them?’ Jack asked.
‘I do not think so.’
‘I hope you’re not embarrassed to be seen with me.’
‘They probably think you are a friend of my father.’
Best get that out of the way, Jack thought.
‘Don’t look so worried,’ Krystyna said.
‘I’m sorry,’Jack said. ‘I don’t normally do this. I tend to avoid my students.’
‘I am not a student. It is fine.’
Jack could see that Krystyna was being brave, putting in her defences, lest he ask her too many direct questions.
‘Thank you for seeing me,’ he said.
Krystyna lit a cigarette.
‘I do not know what you want.’
‘To talk…’
‘What do you want to speak about?’
‘It’s hard.’
‘Of course it is hard.’
‘There is so much to say but I cannot sort out my thoughts,’Jack said.
‘You are worried about asking too much?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘It’s OK.’
‘I’m not sure that it is.’
Jack wanted to know how much Krystyna blamed him for what had happened. Perhaps another driver would have avoided Sandy, or only wounded him.
‘Do you think about it all the time?’ he asked.
‘Of course.’ Krystyna took a sip of her drink.
Jack wondered if she was hoping that the action alone would fill the silence.
All he wanted was to find out if she thought as he did; that they had been involved in an event that no one else could understand. They were responsible and yet they were also victims; forced to stop their lives without knowing how they could recover or continue.
‘Normally I know what to say,’ said Jack, ‘but I can’t find the right words at all.’
‘We have time,’ said Krystyna.
‘I hope so.’
Jack noticed the birthmark on the inside of her upper arm, just above her left elbow. It was like a splash of dark-brown paint or a smear of chocolate. On her engagement finger was an amber ring.
‘Do you have enough people to talk to?’ he asked. ‘About what happened?’
‘I have friends. They are mostly Polish. I know I have to be strong.’
‘What about your family?’
‘My mother is dead. I have not told my father. He is too far away. He did not know about Sandy. Jednakze, he does not like failure.’
‘It’s not failure.’
She pushed away a strand of her hair.
‘I see Allan: his brother. Other people do their best but I think they are a little bit embarrassed. Why did you want me to come here?’
‘To see if there was anything I could do to help.’
‘To understand?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. Perhaps one can never understand these things. Was there any warning?’
‘So many. But I did not believe Sandy.’
‘You can’t blame yourself.’
‘I can. Trust me.’
‘Then I’m sorry,’ said Jack.
Krystyna began to tell her story.
‘Before, Sandy came to see me all the time. He did not stop. Even when I asked him. He said he wanted to check that I was real, that I had a place in the world, and that he was not making me up. If he could see me then he knew that I was real.
‘“Sometimes,” he told me, “I am not sure we are alive at all.”
‘He said it was like being in a coma or a dream, because he could not do anything about the world. Nothing he did made any difference. It did not matter what he said or did. The world ignored him.
‘I did not know what to do. Then the policewoman came with a note in her hands. I saw Sandy’s writing and a strange word I did not know, weary – even the weariest river finds somewhere safe to sea. I did not understand what he meant.’
‘I wanted to go to the inquest,’ said Jack. ‘But it didn’t seem right.’
‘The policewoman gave me the note. “We will need you at the hospital,” she said. “When you’ve had a moment.” I did not know what she meant when she said “moment”. What is a moment? How long is a “moment”? The last time I had been in a hospital was when my mother died. Then she said, “You might like to bring a friend.”
‘I did not know who to call or what to do. I do not know how you do things in this country. I had no idea. So I called his brother.’
Jack remembered Allan in the middle of the wake, drinking from a can of beer with a girlfriend in a silver dress. His suit had looked too small for him.
Krystyna was still speaking.
‘He had this blackness, Sandy kept telling me. It was always there, over his shoulder, behind him. He said he sometimes felt he was being followed by his own illness. The only way he could stop it was to lie down. I could not understand. “You can’t be followed if you’re lying down,” he said.
‘Then I was in hospital myself, lying down, next to his body. I kept my eyes open and on the light in the ceiling. I was thinking that I was going to be there for ever, everything had stopped, and there was no escape from anything. Just the end. And melancholy – is that the right word?’
‘Grief.’
‘Ah yes, grief.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jack said. ‘I didn’t mean to go into all this.’
‘I think you did.’
Krystyna looked down at her empty glass and lit another cigarette. Jack offered her a second drink and returned to the darkness of the bar. The students waiting in front of him were talking about great nights out, the end of exams, weekends away in Dublin.
‘You must not be upset with yourself,’ Krystyna said when he returned. ‘It was an accident. Nobody blames you, I promise.’
‘I know … well … no … I don’t know.’
‘You were in the wrong place. That is all. It cannot be your fault.’
‘I can’t help thinking about it. I worry you’ll blame me, that you are angry with me, that you think I could have avoided him.’
‘I don’t. I am angry with Sandy. I am angry with myself. I do not have any anger left for you.’
‘Can you think about anything else?’
‘We cannot help what we think.’
‘I’d like to see you again,’ Jack said.
Krystyna was surprised; almost amused.
‘Why?’
‘If you need help; or if you want to talk to someone.’
‘To jest los…’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘It is fate.’
‘What will you do now?’
‘Go on. What else can I do?’
‘I thought you might like to go home – have some time away?’
‘I don’t know what “home” is any more. If I have a home it is here.’ Krystyna stood up. ‘I am sorry. I have not been polite.’ Then she stopped, opened her bag and tore a page out of a notebook. ‘Here is my phone number. In case you want it. I must go now. I have to work.’
She held out her hand so that Jack could shake it: a formal farewell.
‘It was nice to meet you,’ she said, speaking as if it was a phrase she was remembering from her first English lesson. ‘I hope we meet again.’
‘I hope so too.’
Jack stayed on in the pub and went over everything they had said. He tried to think how he might have expressed himself better or encouraged Krystyna to stay longer. Perhaps she had left so abruptly because she was upset and she did not want to show him.
He walked back to his office, past the skateboarders in George Square and the chaplaincy centre that offered consolation to ‘all faiths and none’. It was a student world of kebab shops and cafés (Haggis samosas are back!), of second-hand bookshops, bookmakers and poundsavers. Jack could not imagine what Krystyna made of it all or how she could ever feel at ease in such a city.
He gathered up the exam papers he had to mark and took the bus home, out through the south of Edinburgh, following the road he had taken the night Sandy had died. The roadside hedges were thickening in the warm rain; spindle and blackthorn, blackberry and crab apple, woodland ghosts with yellow rapeseed behind. The bluebells were dying now.
He could see the noticeboards out of the window: Two miles, thirteen fatalities in three years. One mile, six fatalities. Jack wanted someone to stop, to recognise what had happened to him. It could be a stranger, anyone who would allow him to feel less solitary.
He walked back from the bus stop past the willow scrub by the river, the banks deteriorating, vegetation halting the flow. It looked clogged and stagnant.
That night he listened to the sea rise and fall in the distance. He thought how long it might take Krystyna to recover and how selfish love could be when removed abruptly and without warning; the punishment involved.
He could not stop thinking about her: the sound of loss in her voice, the distance between them as she spoke. He looked out into the garden to see the first of the wisteria coming into bloom, the promise of summer.