Strip the Willow (26 page)

The Links were blocked high on either side by the HyperMall and Jumbo Arcade, the UberEye and the RollerCoaster. There was a thinnish strip between, a token alley. It acted like a green arrow, pointing at the Prom, behind which low sands and a restless North Sea moved.

In the green, at the end of Arcadia, a white skeletal shape stuck up.

Somebody was before him. And he, like a second comer, needed to get his heart in gear.

Not a whole tree, by any means, though big enough.

No leaves.

No twigs.

No bark.

A single trunk, and two white boughs branching out.

It was rammed in the ground, in concrete.

He reached up, and touched the bough that wasn’t empty.

– Have you been here long? he said.

– No, said Lucy. I just arrived.

– Good, he said. I wouldn’t want to have kept you waiting.

He looked seaward, but couldn’t see the sea.

– Come on up, she said. I’ve something to tell you. You’ll need to be sitting down.

He climbed into the empty bough.

– I’ve something to tell you, said Lucy.

– Tell me, he said.

– Did you ever meet Alison? said Lucy.

It was quiet at the beach, for the merest moment. The rides weren’t working yet.

– Your colleague was it, said Peem, I think. No, I didn’t meet her.

– You did, said Lucy, but neither of you spoke. Do you know how old she is, she’s forty past.

– Tell me what you have to tell, said Peem. I’m too old for this. I know this tone. Is it, when Alison was first thought of—

– That’s just it, said Lucy, she wasn’t thought of at all.

I came back from Paris early. I had Alison for six hours. Theo arranged to have her adopted. As for the father, he’d fucked off—

– When he was told to.

– And never appeared again, or wrote, or phoned.

– You said you were on the Pill.

– I said I was
starting.
I hadn’t actually taken the first one.

– What an unholy, fucking mess.

– Puts Spectacle in the shade, said Lucy.

– Alison is revving about the place in a stretch Hummer, with bull bars, Lucy continued. God knows where she’s stolen it from. I only just got away, through the kindness of trees.

– I’ve just saved Rookie Marr from choking, he said. Last night.

– Unbelievable, said Lucy. That’s unbelievable. The Sixties were quiet compared to this.

– Yeah, I grant you.
Icarus ’68,
eh? What was that all about? Like I saw the sun for about ten minutes, and flew sideways as much as up.

– This is a stick I planted earlier, said Lucy. I put it here in honour of Theo. Remember his
Sisyphus,
out in the garden in the snow?

– No, Peem said. I just remember you.

– This stick is into something, said Lucy. Do you know what I found out?

– No, tell me.

– There was another Lucy. And she’s under here.

– Too much, he said.

– She’ll not be in good shape, said Lucy. It was 360 years ago she arrived. It’s not clear in the city record whether she was a Lucy or a Lucky. She worked in an inn, serving ale and oysters. That class of women was nicknamed Lucky. From
Luckenbooth
perhaps. Anyway there was a lot of shit about religion—

– There often is—

– And King Charles wanted one Prayer Book, and the
Presbyterians
another. Next minute Montrose was riding across the Bridge of Dee to quell somebody, whichever side he was on that day, and a musket got let off, something pre-emptive, or warning, or
accidental
, and John Forbes stopped the ball.

– You don’t have a clue what you do to me, said Peem. And I don’t think you ever did.

– Anyway, said Lucy, Lucy had followed him to the Bridge of Dee, and, being pregnant, of course she was demented. John died, with that ball in his head, and she went away and hid, she brought the baby up. She said in public she was fostering, else she’d have been stuck on the stool of repentance for a year, and shelling out a fine.

Five years later, Montrose was in town again, with a troop of Irish dragoons. Montrose was handsome, and a poet, and
somebody
who would die bravely on a gallows and be distributed on spikes. But he didn’t take a line on rape.

Lucy was forced up the narrowness of Adelphi by three or four of them.
Lucky
for her it was that time of the month. They slapped her about and jeered and left her.

Three years further on, and what came visiting? Something smaller than a dragoon, less vainglorious than a leader.

– It seems to be the small things get you, said Peem.

– Plague, said Lucy. Plague ripped the heart out of the people. The rich couldn’t get out to their country seats fast enough. They left their servants of course, to prevent looting.

The dear old Council almost stopped meeting. They met only once, in the fresh air of Gallowgate, to agree to issue relevant contracts.

My father’s funeral I have to arrange, Peem thought. Together with Ludwig and Amande. Will my tribe of Annie, Hughie, Tammie
come back out of the shadows? Not that Lucy ever met them: she read about them, is all.

– Lucy volunteered, said Lucy. Often the nurses would come from a previous haunt of the plague, like Edinburgh. Well if they’d survived, they rode their luck. A paradoxical life. They were shunned and wanted. They performed great mercies. People were glad to see the back of them.

– Did Lucy survive? he said.

– Lucy had no immunity. She welcomed in the blackened, swollen, screaming folk, the young, the old, the nursing mothers. She bathed them, held them, given the chance she changed their rags. Tended whom she could tend. She listened to them in the sweat of night, it was all night for them, these huts were built to a budget, they had no windows. I’m sure she tried to console them.

– What do you think she whispered to them? About heaven?

– About heaven for some that were furthest gone, maybe. About real things.
Will I really die
? is always on everybody’s lips. What can you do but describe a flower by a stream, in the nook of a burn, under a bank, a clump of primrose. Perhaps they remember it. Perhaps they never looked at it. They remember it now. And then one day, she placed her hand inside her petticoat and felt the lumps in her groin.

– But there is no gravestone for Lucy?

– None for the 1,400 who died and were ditched here. Written out of history, or never written in, we can only piece one or two together. If I ever did Spectacle again, it would be the story, not of the garish, unjustly famous, but of the unknown.

– Worthy, Peem said. That is worthy.

– Folk want to know they are connected, said Lucy.

– Alison does.

– No, Alison feels betrayed. She brought up Gwen on her own. Alison barely knows Gwen’s dad; it was drunken groping at her stepfather’s funeral.

There was another silence.

– She had to work right after the baby. So she got a job, and
eventually
landed up working with her own absentee mother, or Gwen’s unavailable granny, take your pick. All unbeknownst. We went out from time to time, a gin from her mother odd Friday nights, that’s all a daughter needs. She didn’t even know I gave her away till the other day. If Alison wants to kill me, she kills me. If she wants to take us both out, that’s what she’ll do.

– So we sit up a dead white tree, planted in a charnel house, and wait for our much wronged daughter to come and kill us? said Peem.

– That or the rising sea.

– The fucking sea, he said. Who cares about the fucking sea? Let’s go and meet her.

– Wait, she said. Give me time.

– You were there for me, he said, all those years ago. Lucy?

– Your name is Peem, said Lucy. We made love once, a long time ago, and it was very wild, and very beautiful. I was cheeky to you, that was the fashion then. I told you to go away, not quite fuck off, learn to
exist
. I was afraid of commitment, I suppose. It was in my bones.

– It comes full circle, he said. 360 years.

– You slept, you were tired after making love. And you had been running half the night. And you had some problem I didn’t take in, about saving the city.

– I was always about to save the city.

– Lots of people are, said Lucy. Anyway, you slept, and I got fresh clothes for you.

He looked across and imagined her nakedness, white on white, against the desperate tree.

– What? she said.

– I was going to say something. But—

– It’s not too late, she said. It’s never too late. But you don’t have to.

– I think that’s what I want on my epitaph.

– What?

–
I was going to say something.

She was sinking into herself.

– Have to get up the road, before the tanks— said Peem.

– I’ll stay here. My people need me.

– Underneath? he said.

– Underneath everything. Kiss me before you go.

He headed back up the town, keeping to the wall, ready to dive into any alley.

So he’d held back the full story, at least for now, and perhaps that was best. The years after the fishing, long after he recovered from the bout with the Triplex, the years as a teacher in schools round the country, teaching the distinction between the colon and the
semicolon
, attempting to inculcate in the young selected glimpses from the history of doubleness in the Scottish novel. Taking them up hills to recite poems, out to islands to chart the whirlpools in their veins. And away to the theatre, the Citizens, the Traverse, until that fateful night when he allowed himself to get distracted, by an unwise whisky, by jollity behind, and him driving the yellow minibus.

When he came out of his second cracked skull coma, there was no welcome left for him in teaching, not with two kids dead on the Forth Brig slip road. He wasn’t breathalysed, he was admonished, he went on supply lists round the country, but whatever teacher shortage might be looming, work for him just shrivelled away. And as it did, so did his sense of purpose and connection. He went wandering then.

He hadn’t been home for many’s a year, after that second bust-up with his Dad, about
irresponsibility.
Tam was about his only pal, and Iris of course. They gave him a cubby-hole in their house to type in, when he passed through, and Tam looked after his drafts. Iris didn’t read them.

The NHS had filed Tam’s transcript years ago, and wouldn’t release it. Only occasionally did Tam offer comment on the success or otherwise of Peem’s reimaginings of the balder facts. Peem’s memory came, Peem’s memory went, in strange waves.
Horizontigo
,
yes. He feared his past. He wished it away. He sought to recover what was lost.

Writing was mainly therapy, Tam knew that.

As he walked back up the Boulevard, he was composing the core of two speeches. The one he would make at his father’s funeral, if he survived, and if Andy’s body hadn’t got lost in the struggle by then, or abstracted to cover things up by government forces. He wondered if he would meet Annie and them there, and what he could possibly say.

Also what on earth he could say to Alison when he met her, if he met her. It was all so raw, it was war-zone stuff.
Hello – you’ve never met me – I’m your father – your mother’s in deep shock – and your Grandad’s just been shot – how are you?

He wondered what she would look like, Alison, when she was pointed out to him. Decently-built like Lucy, or scrawnier like him? He wondered what she would speak like, too. What would she have inherited of her late Grandad’s accents: the emphases with which he had praised, loved, exploded; his subversive laugh?

How are you, love
?

Was this it, then? thought Lucy.

Would a wee lassie approach behind her, and leave a dead hen and a jug of milk at the base of the tree, then scurry wordless away?

Would a bigger one wander up, dressed in skins, and begin haggering the ground around the tree, with an ineffectual wooden spade?

Would no lass in her senses ever come near her?

Alison took her father’s arm, it was a brilliant feeling. Peem had asked around and eventually plucked his startled daughter from the massive dance, which had taken over the street. The initial shock, the standing-back, the drinking-in, the blind hug, then, facing each
other, running with tears, took longer than you could ever imagine. Then the questions started.

– Sae did ye miss me aa these years? she said.

– I didna ken you existed. But I missed you, sure I missed you. I’ve been pretty much on my own for a good while now.

– Ye didna need tae be.

– I can cope with aloneness, he said. Sometimes ye get to really like it. Other times no.

– Bein alane stinks, said Alison, sae dinna ging aff again, okay?

– I didna go off, said Peem. I was sort o kidnapped. Kidnapped by man and accidents, kidnapped by time. But I’m gettin a grip noo.