The Fanatic (4 page)

‘Come
on
,’ said Hardie, looking at his watch. ‘Six o’ clock. It’s kind of early for stalking.’ Then he saw that she wasn’t joking. ‘Yeah, sure, no problem. Where do you stay again?’

‘New Town,’ she said. ‘Just chum me a block or two, if you don’t mind.’

‘I’d chum you all the way,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to have to do some haunting tonight, I guess, so I’d better go home too, get myself organised. The traffic’ll have died down a bit by now, though, I’ll flag you a taxi.’

‘I’ll walk,’ she said. ‘I’ll be fine. It’s just – seeing him again.’

Out on the street they had to negotiate past a drunk man coming towards them. He lurched at Hugh, who put a hand out defensively to prevent him falling into his arms. The raincoat slid greasily under his palm.

‘Dae I no ken ye fae somewhere?’ said the drunk man. He looked old; his jaw bristled with sharp white hairs and was shiny wet with slavers.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Hardie, easing him back. He sidestepped to the left but the drunk man miraculously matched his footwork with a neat shuffle and blocked his path again.

‘Let me pit it anither wey. Dae you no ken me fae somewhere?’

Jackie burst out laughing.

‘Whit’s she findin sae bluidy funny?’

‘Nothing,’ said Hugh. ‘Look, I definitely don’t know you.’ The man looked intently up into his face. ‘Why do you think I would know you?’

‘Christ, I don’t know,’ said the drunk man. ‘Thought I’d seen ye before. Thing is, I was kinna hopin ye’d ken me. Cause I don’t have a fuckin clue whae I am.’

This time he moved first, gliding around Hardie’s static figure like a winger of the old school of Scottish football, a wee ugly knot of accidental perfection. He hauled off into the gathering evening, swearing profusely.

Jackie was still smiling when they reached Nicolson Street. ‘It’s okay,’ she told Hugh, ‘I don’t know what got into me. I’ll be fine from here. But thanks anyway’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Well, see you around. Come on the tour some time.’

I’ll do that,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you.’ Then she was away, across at the lights, still wondering if he’d expect her to pay for a ticket.

Andrew Carlin was the kind of man that might slip between worlds, if such a thing were possible. He inhabited his days like a man in a dream, or like a man in other people’s dreams.

There were three mirrors in Carlin’s place: one in the bathroom, one on the door of an old wardrobe that stood against the wall of the lobby, and one over the fireplace in the front room, which doubled as his bedroom. This was an old, ornately gilt-framed mirror, mottled at the edges, and with a buckle in it that produced a slightly distorting wave in the glass. It was like a mirror that hadn’t had the courage to go the whole bit and join a travelling show, where it could turn those who looked in it into fully-fledged grotesques.

This was the mirror Carlin talked with, mostly. It had once been his mother’s. It was flanked by two heavy brass candlesticks, which he had also inherited from her. In his parents’ house the mirror and the candlesticks had been crammed onto a shelf among the bric-a-brac and debris that his mother
couldn’t stop snapping up in charity shops. She would come home laden with bargains and they’d have to eat beans for the rest of the week. When his father died it got worse. From the age of fourteen Carlin missed the dogged, watchful presence that had balanced the magpie frenzy of his mother. The only time he benefited from her obsession was when he first got the flat in Edinburgh, a tiny conversion on the top floor of a tenement in a street that was too near the canal to be really Bruntsfield. It was cheap enough to rent on his own, but came with a minimum of furnishings. She sorted out a few items for him – dishes and jugs and ornamental vases, most of which he sold on to junk shops or returned to charity. His mother never came to see him, so would never miss what he got rid of.

The mirror was one of the things he liked and held onto. When she died some years later and he cleared the house, he put most of what remained to the cowp. The candlesticks, however, he brought back with him and set on either side of the mirror. The three objects seemed to feed off each other, acquiring a new dignity of their own. Now Carlin felt that where they were was where they had always belonged.

He lit the gas fire, warmed his legs against it for a few minutes, then turned the fire down and faced the mirror. He thought of Hardie saying he was like this Major Weir. How the fuck did he know that? He looked and looked to see Weir in the mirror, but he didn’t know what he expected to see. And he thought of Jackie Halkit.

Edinburgh was a village, if you walked around it you saw the same faces all the time. He’d seen her once or twice in the last year, and each time it had been by chance. He’d recognised her, but he’d never made an attempt to speak to her. You didn’t do that. You didn’t go up to folk. If something was going to happen, they would come to you. That was how it worked.

That was how it had worked till now. He’d broken in on her. He tried to imagine her with himself live in her head again. What would she be thinking? But he couldn’t touch how she might be, just couldn’t feel it.

He saw himself standing outside Dawson’s in the late afternoon. It had been light outside and lighter still in there,
because the place was full of bright electric bulbs at the bar and over the tables. Carlin preferred the gloom. He liked candlelight and shadows. Between the street and the inside of the pub there hadn’t been much to choose.

Then suddenly, as he stood there, he had been invaded by a sensation so strong that he had had to put out his hand and steady himself with the tips of his fingers on the varnished wooden beading of the pub door. Just a touch to get his balance back. It was as if he had been right on the edge of something. It was like the other feeling he sometimes got, an overwhelming sense of being elsewhere, or that he could reach out and touch things that were long gone.

The past. He could stretch his fingers and feel it, the shape of it. It was like having second sight in reverse. It was like holding an invisible object, both fascinating and disturbing. Or like feeling your way in the dark.

He’d read that seers didn’t like their gift of seeing the future because there was nothing they could do about it. They had visions of horrible accidents, injuries, deaths, and they couldn’t stop them. There was a guy up north, the Black Isle or somewhere, who took the money from people who came to see him and then was rude and abrupt with them. He had no wish to see their future trials and losses, their rotten endings and stupid tragedies. But he could not turn them away. People came to his door every day, desperate to be warned of things that could not be avoided.

The past was like that for Carlin: a hole at the back of his mind through which anything might come.

‘I’ve a bit o work if I want it,’ he said to the mirror.

‘Guid. Aboot fuckin time. Get ye aff yer fuckin erse.’

‘Dinna start.’

‘Dinna talk tae me then. Think I care aboot yer fuckin work?’

‘It’s no a job but. It’s jist play-actin. Part-time.’

‘Aw ye’re bluidy fit for. Gaun tae tell us aboot it?’

Carlin stared until the mirror had the gen. Sometimes that was enough.

‘Thing is,’ he said, ‘I want tae check this guy oot.’

‘Who, Hardie? Forget it. A right wanker.’

‘No, Weir. Somethin aboot him. Mebbe he had a bad press.’

‘Aye. On ye go, son. Bleed yer sapsy liberal hert dry, why don’t ye. Listen, if ye find oot he was a nice Christian buddy eftir aw, keep yer geggie shut or ye’ll be oot o work again.’

‘I’m no sayin he wasna an evil bastart. But it seems everybody has him marked doon as a hypocrite. Jist because ye lead a double life disna make ye a hypocrite.’

‘Well, you would ken, wouldn’t ye? Sounds tae me like ye might be buildin yer argument on shiftin sand though, friend. I mean, pillar o society by day, shagger o sheep by night – how much mair hypofuckincritical can ye get?’

‘Aye, aye. I jist don’t like pigeon-holin folk. Ken, an early version o Jekyll and Hyde, earlier than Deacon Brodie even – it’s too pat.’

‘Well, jist brush him under the carpet then. Lea him alane. The last thing we need’s anither split fuckin personality. We’ve got mair than enough o them. Fuckin Scottish history and Scottish fuckin literature, that’s all there fuckin is, split fuckin personalities. We don’t need mair doubles, oor haill fuckin culture’s littered wi them. If it’s no guid versus evil it’s kirk elders versus longhairs, heid versus hert, Hieland and Lowland, Glasgow and Edinburgh, drunk men and auld wifies, Protestants and Catholics, engineers and cavaliers, hard men and panto dames, Holy Willies and holy terrors, you name it Scotland’s fuckin had it. I mean how long is this gaun tae go on, for God’s sake? Are we never gaun tae fuckin sort oorsels oot? I am talkin tae you, by the way.’

‘I ken. Hardie would say that’s fine. He would say it’s guid for business. Gies us somethin tae sell tae the tourists.’

‘Don’t come the bag wi that fuckin shite. Since when was that pricktugger a fuckin culture expert? And onywey, whit kinna basis is that for an economy? Whit gets sellt tae the tourists is an unreal picture o an unreal country that’s never gaun tae get tae fuckin grips wi itsel until it runs its ain affairs.’

‘Independence? The likes o Hardie would run a mile. We’d be like Switzerland. Dead borin, only withoot the money.’

‘Noo I
ken
ye’re playin the Devil’s advocate. Don’t fuckin mock the Swiss. You’ve been there. It’s a clean country, everybody’s got jobs, everybody uses the trains and they don’t
fuckin go tae war wi onybody. The Swiss fuckin ken where it’s at, if ye ask me.’

Carlin turned the backs of his legs to the fire again. ‘Your language,’ he said. ‘Away and wash yer mooth oot wi soap.’

Carlin twitched the nylon fishing-line to make sure that the rat was free to run. He knew it would be but he couldn’t stop himself. He felt the weight of the rat shift slightly at the far end of the line, just a fraction of an inch, and let his fingers go slack again. Then he waited for the people to come.

He was huckered against a wall halfway down a steep close between Victoria Street and the Cowgatehead. There was a dog-leg at this point, so that anyone descending could not see him until they turned the corner, and could not see the second half of the close until they turned again at the place where he was standing.

He was wearing a long black cloak, fastened at the neck, over his ordinary clothes. When he walked the cloak billowed and swirled around him, but now, as he stood still, it hung limp and heavy like a shroud. Leaning next to him against the wall was a black wooden staff, as tall as himself, and surmounted by a misshapen knucklebone head. A straggly wig of wispy auld man’s grey hair fell about his neck, framing the ghastly whiteness of his face. The previous ghost, Hugh Hardie had said on the run-through that morning, had used clown make-up, but he didn’t think Carlin needed it.

The close was little frequented by locals. It was not on an obvious route to a pub or other destination, and its length and dinginess gave it an unhealthy reputation. It was used by drunks and destitutes as a urinal more than as a throughway. Tourists were seen in it only if they had got lost. Or were on a ghost tour.

The nylon line ran from his hand along the ground to a hole in the wall a few yards up the close, just before the dog-leg was reached. When the tour party reached this spot, the guide would bring everybody to a halt, and describe the living conditions of this part of Edinburgh in the seventeenth century. Hardie had rehearsed this with Carlin earlier. The guide would talk about the lack of sanitation and ask his listeners to step carefully. ‘This close was once called the
Stinking Close,’ he’d say, ‘and it still in some respects is deserving of the name.’ ‘That,’ said Hardie, ‘is your cue, your amber light.’

Carlin’s first task was to pull the large rubber rat, which was secured to the fishing-line through a hole in its mouth, across the ground and round the corner, causing alarms and excursions among the tourists as it skited over their feet.

As soon as he’d reeled in the rat, he had to move on. The guide would usher the people on round the dog-leg. They were supposed to get a glimpse of swirling cloak and a shadowy figure carrying a long staff disappearing down the lower part of the close. ‘At the entrance onto the Cowgatehead,’ Hardie stressed, ‘stop and wait for a few seconds. You’ll be silhouetted in the archway. Turn and glare back up at them. It’ll look brilliant.’

Meanwhile the guide would tell them the tale of Major Weir, pointing out that he had lodged just off this very close with his sister Grizel. He would describe how he had confessed his terrible crimes before a shocked assemblage of fellow Puritans; how he had been tried and convicted of incest, bestiality and witchcraft, and burnt at the stake on the road to Leith; and how poor, mad Grizel had tried to take off all her clothes on the Grassmarket scaffold before she was hanged, just a few yards from where they were now standing. Ever after, the Major and she would be collected at night in a black coach drawn by six flame-eyed black horses, and driven out of the town to Dalkeith, there to meet with their master the Devil. At other times the Major’s stick, with the satyr-heads carved on it which seemed to change shape and expression, would float through the dark wynds and closes, going like a servant before him and rapping on the doors of the terrified inhabitants.

‘As you have seen,’ the guide would say, ‘Major Weir lives on. Perhaps, as we journey through these old dark corners of Edinburgh, you may catch another glimpse of him …’

And so they would. They’d turn into the Cowgate and see a tall, cloaked man moving silently along the wall ahead of them. They would follow him as the guide told more stories of ghosts and murders and other half-hidden horrors. They would be brought, by and by, back towards the High Street,
where their tour had started, by a series of narrow stairs and closes. And at the last turn, those at the front of the party would find themselves staring up at the looming, gash-faced Major Weir, glowering disdainfully down his nose at them – just for a second or two, and then he’d be gone, and the adventure would be over. Tell your friends,’ the guide would conclude, ‘but – don’t tell them everything. Leave them to be
un
pleasantly surprised.’