The Anvil (3 page)

‘Christ!’ he screamed, pumping the pedal but to no avail. Pulling the hand brake on was equally useless. The cable snapped at the first hard tug. He slammed his hand down hard on the horn but the traffic ahead seemed oblivious to it. Blowing car horns was a way of life in Madrid. His last scream harmonised with the horn as he slammed head-on into an oncoming bus.

Edinburgh, Scotland. February 1991.

MacLean paused at the railings, his back to the bitter wind. He looked at the dark grey Victorian building and felt his yesterdays return in a slow, numbing nostalgia. All these years ago - he did the calculation in his head. He was thirty-seven so it must have been thirty-two years ago when his mother had brought him here to school as a well-scrubbed, bright-eyed five year old. The fabric of the building did not appear to have changed much at all. Perhaps the stone was darker but maybe even that was because of the leaden sky above.

The minutes ticked by but MacLean was oblivious. He stood motionless with his hands on the cold metal as memories of a time gone by were uncertainly resurrected. They were of children of another age, reduced to faces without names after all these years but still with smiles and personalities.

MacLean’s life had been such a nightmare for so long now that the border between dreams and reality had become indistinct. The surrealist thought that a class of children of thirty-two years ago might still be inside the grey building, lingered longer in his head than it should have done. The saving grace was that he recognised this as sign of the mental stress he had been under. People under great strain often started to believe in something simply because they wanted it so much to be true. They sought subconscious escapism, escape from a reality that had become too much like hell to bear.

Despite his attempts at rationalisation, MacLean found himself walking through the gates and crossing the playground. He climbed the stone steps to the entrance marked ‘BOYS’ and pushed open the door. It was just as he remembered, tiled walls and green paint and a vague smell of disinfectant. The source was a bucket and mop propped up against the wall by the door.

He started to walk along the corridor, following the sounds of an echoing piano and young voices. He remained unchallenged and stopped only when he came to a pair of brass-handled swing doors. On the other side was the assembly hall. His fingers touched the brass uncertainly. The handles were the original ones. He had touched them before.

The piano sounded a long chord and the children in the hall began to sing. MacLean closed his eyes. They were singing it! They were singing the very one. ‘In the bleak mid-winter, frosty wind made moan …’ Seven year old voices lagged behind an insistent piano. The sound was pathetically thin on the cold air, fragile like happiness. ‘Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.’

MacLean looked along the rows of scrubbed faces, then, realising what he was doing, he put his hand to his forehead and acknowledged the fact that he was looking for faces he knew. He swallowed hard and got a grip.

The hymn ended and the pianist, a beefy woman in her fifties, began to thump out a Sousa march. Her eyes were fixed on the music in front of her, head held back at an angle so that she could see through the bottom lens of her bifocals. Her ample breasts shivered in time to the insensitive thump of her hands on the keyboard. The music was the signal for the children to troop out the far end of the hall in twos.

As the hall emptied and the music stopped, MacLean entered through the swing doors and paused to look up at the high ceiling. It made him feel small again. At the other end of the hall the pianist returned for something she had forgotten; she caught sight of MacLean and asked, ‘Can I help you?’ The tone of her voice demanded to know what he was doing there. She came towards him, music clutched to her bosom and filled with the confidence of being on her own ground.

MacLean’s expression did not change. His social programming no longer functioned.

‘Did you hear what I said?’ demanded the woman. The fact that she was challenging an intruder, broad and well over six-foot tall did not seem to occur to her.

MacLean looked at her, the cold morning light etching the pain lines round his eyes. ‘I’m taking a last look,’ he said quietly.

‘A last look at what?’ snapped the woman.

MacLean looked at her distantly then he said quietly, ‘My life.’

The woman appeared bemused. MacLean turned on his heel and left without saying any more. He did not look back as he walked up the hill away from the school but he did pause to pull up the collar of his overcoat. He had to bend his head against the wind which seemed determined to deny him progress.

He came to the canal bridge at the top of the hill and stopped again. The Union canal, the canal that had played such an important part in his childhood. Its banks had once been the most exciting place on earth. Here summer days had been longer, hotter and happier than they had ever been since. Despite the sub-zero temperature he could almost feel the sun on his back and the rough grass on his knees as he knelt down long ago to stare down into the still, dark water.

He left the pavement and climbed down the steep muddy path leading from the bridge to the towpath. The mud had frozen to the hardness of concrete. The canal itself was solid and a light dusting of snow lay on its surface. He started walking but suddenly remembered the tree. There had been a tree on the other side of the bridge from which he and his friends had once dangled a rope swing. He retraced his steps and walked under the bridge to find it still there. In February it was stark and bare, a black skeleton against a grey sky, but come spring, it would be reborn and in the summer its full leafy canopy would shelter another generation of ten year old jungle adventurers.

MacLean started out on his walk again. A mile along the towpath and he reached the playing fields of his old high school, netless tennis courts and the shuttered and silent pavilion. The smell of wet earth was carried on the wind and brought back memories of rugby games of long ago. He saw steam rise from the backs of scrimmaging forwards as he stood anxiously in the back line waiting for the ball to emerge from the melee and arc towards him. He recalled the surge of adrenaline as the three-quarters moved forward together like a single delta wing The sense of relief at having moved the ball out towards the wing before the opposing flankers reached you, the pain of being hit if they were too fast or you were too slow. That was when you smelt the earth, when your face was close up against it, being pressed into it by anonymous hands and feet.

MacLean continued walking. He saw that the surface of the canal was strewn with stones where children had tested the strength of the ice. He had to find out for himself. Keeping one foot on the bank he lowered the other to the surface and began a slow transfer of weight. Ten of his thirteen stones were on the ice before it protested with a loud crack and a chorus of ancillary creaks. The question had been answered. He rejoined the towpath.

The canal ceased courting the line of the main road and started to meander off into rural isolation. MacLean continued until it began to forge a level path through steepening ground on either side. There was more shelter from the wind here. There was also a wooden bench seat in an alcove in the hedgerow where he rested for a moment. A robin came to investigate and sat on the ground in front of him as if it instinctively knew that he posed no threat. Its breast seemed spectacularly red against the frost on the grass. MacLean held out his hand invitingly but the robin was not that trusting.

He recalled the last time he had come this far up the canal. He must have been thirteen years old and it had been in the school summer holidays. He and a boy named … the name eluded him for the moment but floated tantalisingly near the tip of his tongue until he had it. Eddie! Eddie Ferguson. He and Eddie had paddled their way up through the reeds in a canoe owned by Eddie’s brother. His brother had not exactly given permission but as he had gone off to Scout camp this was seen as being just as good. At that age the journey had held all the excitement of a search for the source of the Nile. He remembered the sound the fibreglass canoe made when it brushed up against the reeds.

MacLean was startled out of his preoccupation by a woman’s voice.

‘Carol! No! Don’t! Come back!’

There was so much fear in the voice that MacLean could not ignore it. He got up off the seat and rounded the bend of the towpath. He was in time to see a small child of six or seven, dressed in wellingtons and a red, plastic raincoat dash out on to the ice, her face alive with mischief. Her mother who had been chasing after her came to a halt at the edge of the bank. MacLean could tell that she was fighting to control her voice. ‘Carol! Listen to me. I want you to walk towards me … now!’

The child turned and smiled. ‘Look Mummy,’ she said. ‘I’m standing on the water.’

MacLean was thirty yards away. He stood stock still lest he break the spell between mother and daughter.

‘Walk towards me Carol,’ said the woman. There was no mistaking the anxiety in her voice despite her measured calmness. MacLean could almost feel the fear.

The child herself suddenly appeared to sense that something was wrong too. Her smile faded and she showed signs of being afraid as she started towards her mother. She took two steps and the ice sent out singing cracks in all directions like spokes radiating from the hub of a wheel; she stopped moving.

‘Come on Carol,’ said her mother.

The child took one more step and the ice opened up beneath her. She disappeared through the hole in an instant and her mother screamed out loud. MacLean broke into a run. There was no sign of the child, just a black hole in the ice like the jagged mouth of a shark.

‘Do something!’ screamed the woman. ‘For God’s sake do something!’

She was hysterical. She gripped MacLean’s lapels as she implored him to help. MacLean took her hands away and looked around for wood. There was none. For a moment his eyes must have reflected the hopelessness of the situation. The woman saw it and screamed again, ‘Oh God no! Please God no!’

MacLean could not bear the agony of being unable to do anything. He broke free of the woman and jumped down heavily on to the ice at the edge. He went straight through and landed on the ledge that lay half a metre below the surface. The icy water numbed his legs as he threw off his over coat and started to lash out at the ice in front of him with his feet, first with his right and then with his left. There was nothing ungainly about it. He retained perfect balance and put all his weight behind each strike. To the woman, the only thing that mattered was that MacLean was making good progress. He had rekindled hope in her. ‘Go on!’ she urged.

MacLean reached the second shelf of the canal and sank to a metre in the icy water. He could no longer use his feet. Without considering the consequences he started to attack the ice with his fists. The ice continued to give but now it was being splattered with blood from cuts to his hands. MacLean’s concentration was total, his features remained set and he ignored the pain until he had created a big enough opening in the ice. With a brief look back at the woman on the bank he sank down into the dark water beneath the ice.

On the bank, the woman was left feeling more alone that she had ever thought possible. Both her daughter and the stranger had disappeared. It was as if they had never been there. Even the wind had dropped away to nothing. Broken ice and black water was all that there was to see. Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone …

MacLean’s body erupted from the opening in the ice. In his hands he clutched the body of the little girl in the red raincoat. He couldn’t speak; the agonising cold had all but paralysed him. He waded and stumbled his way to the bank and handed over the bundle before collapsing on to the frosty grass. He could feel the water on him turning to ice.

The woman was in a state of panic. She had the lifeless body of her child on the ground in front of her and was trying to coax the water out of her lungs.

‘No!’ croaked MacLean. ‘She needs air … Breathe into her …Water later … ‘

The woman’s eyes sought reassurance from MacLean.

‘Do it!’ he ordered. He tried to reach the child himself but exhaustion and the numbing cold had robbed him of all energy. The woman started to give the child mouth to mouth resuscitation.

‘Yes,’ said MacLean in a voice that was barely a whisper. ‘Keep on. Don’t stop.’

Icicles were forming on MacLean’s face, stabbing at his eyes and ears. He tried to clear his vision with the back of his hand but only succeeded in adding grit to the problem. He cursed and tried again before crawling towards the pair. At that moment the child spluttered and coughed. Her mother cried out in elation, ‘She’s alive! She’s alive!’

‘Now the water!’ croaked MacLean.

‘The water?’ repeated the woman.

‘Get the water out of her lungs now,’ insisted MacLean, angry at having to repeat himself when every syllable caused him such pain.

The woman rolled the little girl on to her front and put her head to the side, She started to pump the water out of her lungs. There was a lot more spluttering and coughing but it was the most beautiful sound in the world.