The Fanatic (36 page)

A couple of miles to the east, several hours later, Carlin stepped onto the sand at Portobello and went down towards the water. He’d gone into the city centre in the morning, and in the sunshine the walking had seemed so easy, and his mind so empty, that he had just kept going, down the Mile, past Holyrood, through the Park and out by Jock’s Lodge to the sea. The lamp-posts were covered with election posters. The billboards proclaimed a new era. He went by them all, scarcely noticing. And then at some point he was walking down one of the narrow streets in Portobello that led to the promenade, and there was the firth with the light glinting on it, and the beach with a few figures walking their dogs between the breakwaters, a handful of children running, a woman pushing a buggy along the hard sand.

The coast stretched away before him. Musselburgh, Cockenzie power station, the Berwick Law; and there, away on the horizon, was a speck just detached from the land. Was that the Bass? No, surely not. He didn’t recall seeing it from here before: on a map it looked like it would be off round the next corner. But the lines on a map were clear and distinct, whereas the sea and sky met in a blur, and the speck seemed too faded and far off to be real. After a while he could not focus his eyes on it properly.

Puerto Bello.
Some old sea-dog had built a house here and named it after a Caribbean town he’d helped capture from the Spanish in the War of Jenkins’ Ear. For fuck’s sake. That had to be the stupidest fucking excuse for a war ever. A lug in a jeelie-jaur. What did anybody get out of it? Well, Edinburgh had got a seaside suburb with a name that – today anyway, in the warm sunshine – suited it.

Carlin felt a kind of dull elation. It was nothing to do with the election result. Yesterday he’d been telling Jackie Halkit about the Mitchel trial, about Lauderdale and Sharp and the
others being like Forsyth and Rifkind. Today the Tories were all gone: if he told the trial again he’d have to substitute a bunch of new names. One gang for another. It wouldn’t change the story one bit; wouldn’t change the outcome. And yet people had voted for a change. Whatever they got, change was what they had voted for. In a way the mood, the expectation, was the most important thing about it.

But the wee surge of feeling he felt in his chest was something else: something about coming to the edge of the land. He always pictured the beach here as grey, but in fact the soft sand above the highwater mark was reddish, and the flat, streaky expanse below it shone in the sun. His steps left only slight indentations beyond the tideline. He stopped a few feet from the sea and watched it slap the beach with thin, lazy waves. It had always been doing that, would go on doing that, whether or not there was anybody there to watch. The sea did not care: it was indifferent to anything that might happen on the land which it defined. When Carlin went away, the sea would come up, thoughtless, and wipe out every trace of him.

His father was gone, his mother was gone. All that was left of them was in his head. And that would never be complete. However much he wanted to, he would never know, never understand their secret lives. However much he thought that the knowledge would help, would tie up loose ends, it never would. Jackie was right: life was all loose ends. The past was never over, the future had always begun. That was the terrifying thing: there was no end to life. Like the sea, it was utterly oblivious of you.

The only thing was to be recognised by someone else, however much of yourself you kept hidden. To touch somebody, and not be forgotten by them. And to remember them also. It might be a feeble, helpless, tiny gesture, but it was something. An acknowledgement, a sign that you had once existed.

He turned around. The sun was in his face and the figures further up the beach flickered in the light. Above them beyond the promenade the houses looked bleached and ancient. He wondered who was seeing him there against the sea. If there was anyone looking at all.

These things could make you depressed. And yet he felt good. He thought of Jackie. He would see her again, or he would not. There was nothing more to it. But he would always have her in his head, along with all the others. That was the best, the most human thing, that you could do for another person: not forget them.

There was a kind of comfort in the way he was. He saw the worlds shifting and sliding over one another. You could slip between them. You could feel them moving through you. It was an amazing, miraculous feeling, if you only had the time for it. That was what you had to have: time.

He made his way back off the sand. It was a couple of years since he’d been here, but he knew where he was going. The amusement arcade was still standing, but a bit battered looking, as though it might not last for ever. He wanted to go inside before it wasn’t there any more.

It was full of machines, old and new, and a cacophony of electronic bleeps, explosions, jingles and background music. Carlin had no interest in the sparkling, jazzed up fruit-machines, the racing simulators and war games. He was drawn to the older installations, operated by coins that had almost no value any more: one-armed bandits with three reels spinning in their metallic chests, clunking up Xs, Os and bars; penny falls with great heaps of copper that seemed as though they must tumble with every forward sweep that the machines made. He went up to the cashier’s booth and changed a couple of pounds for two plastic cupfuls of tuppences. They were weighty in his hands as he turned away. It seemed unlikely that he could ever get rid of them all.

He could spend hours in there, losing himself in the ebb and flow motion of the falls, in the clanking repetition of the bandits, scooping up his winnings and feeding them back in, giving himself over to the endless, broken rhythms of the place. There would be other people standing first at one machine, then at another; moving among them; passing each other as if in dreams. Carlin knew he would lose all his money but it didn’t matter: that wasn’t why he was there.

When he put the last coin down the last chute he would find he’d hardly spent a thing. For a while, it would be as
though time had slowed to the pace it had had when he was a child. When he stepped back out into the afternoon, he would have to be grateful for that and then let it go. And outside, the people, the houses, the cars, the city and the long walk back into it, for a while at least they would be what was real.