Tombstoning (18 page)

The library was packed with PCs taking up every available desk space, while a few perfunctory peeling bookshelves hid in one corner of the room. A gang of about twenty boys lounged about on cheap plastic chairs in that overcooked nonchalance that teenage boys have. Their postures were attempting to say that they couldn’t give a fuck about anything, but it was an unconvincing message – the boys who really couldn’t give a fuck were already long gone from school. These boys were sixth-years – their lanky height and almost adult faces making David feel suddenly old as hell – so they had chosen to be here, for whatever reason. They weren’t exactly welcoming when David and Mr Bowman came into the room. David wondered why there were no girls in the group, and if the boys had been forewarned about this little impromptu meeting Mr Bowman had laid on. He didn’t have long to wonder, because Mr Bowman fired straight into introducing him. Before he realized it he was standing up in front of them. It was only then – with the sticky sunlight treacling in through the large bank of fusty windows and his armpits getting itchy from the heat – that he thought maybe he should’ve prepared something for this. All week his head had been swimming with thoughts of Gary’s death, thoughts of Nicola and her goddamn smile as she lay in bed across from him, thoughts of Neil and Colin walking away from him up the High Street and out of his life seemingly forever. He hadn’t thought about this at all. He hadn’t considered what this morning might actually entail; in truth he had assumed he was maybe just going to be here to answer the odd question or something.

But now here he was, expected to say something meaningful, something about tombstoning, and about two people he’d known who died at the cliffs but who had nothing to do with tombstoning, if that even really existed anyway. Was Mr Bowman perhaps over-exaggerating the extent of what was going on amongst Arbroath’s kids? How did he know that these particular kids had anything to do with it? Was it only a one-off thing that had been reported in the paper? He’d said there was graffiti all around the town, glorifying Colin’s death, apparently at his memorial stone as well, but David had been there last weekend and there had been no sign of anything like that.

He felt his scalp get hot, and the backs of his knees were moist with sweat. His mouth was dry, the dusty air in the library catching at the back of his throat. He felt like he’d been standing in front of the kids for an age, so he decided just to talk and see what happened.

‘Thanks. Erm, I’m not exactly sure why Mr Bowman asked me here today. What I mean is, I know why he asked me, but I’m not sure that I’m the right person to be doing this. He seems to be worried that, well… OK, let me start with the basics. I was friends with Colin Anderson.’ Was it his imagination, or did some of the boys sit up a little straighter in their seats? Their half-arsed masks of disinterest fell slightly, and David realized that they hadn’t been told what this was about after all. He was somehow encouraged by that idea and fired on. ‘I was with Colin the night he died. Not at the cliffs, well, I was there earlier with him, but I wasn’t there when he fell. Anyway, Mr Bowman tells me that some kids in town have this weird idea that Colin was involved in something that the papers are now calling tombstoning. They seem to have this idea that he’s some kind of underground legend, or an extreme sports hero or something equally stupid. I’m sure you all know what I mean.’ He could see that they did, and he noticed that every one of them was paying attention now. ‘Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. Colin did not jump from the cliffs that night. He would never have done anything that stupid. He fell. Why the hell would someone like Colin Anderson jump off a cliff, even if it was for a thrill? He was about to start pre-season training as a professional footballer; he had everything going for him. This tombstoning, or whatever you want to call it, is just a ridiculous idea based on absolutely nothing at all. Anyone who does it isn’t hard or clever or whatever, they’re just stupid. There’s thrill-seeking and then there’s just plain stupidity, and that’s what tombstoning is.’

He stopped for a moment, wondering what else to say. One of the kids piped up quietly from near the front.

‘How do you know?’

‘I’m sorry?’

The kid had the collar of his shirt up and a spiky, streaked haircut that David remembered being in fashion about 1985. Christ, was that shit back in again?

‘I said,’ the boy said, leaning forward and growing in confidence, ‘how do you know?’

‘How do I know what?’

‘That Colin didn’t jump? If you weren’t there, how do you know he didn’t jump off the cliffs for kicks?’

‘Because he wouldn’t have, that’s why.’ David realized the inadequacy of the answer, and thought that he sounded like a teacher as he said it. ‘It’s just not the kind of thing Colin would’ve done. What would be the point?’

‘Maybe it
was
for a thrill,’ said the kid, his long limbs arranged around his seat like a pile of snakes. ‘Maybe he just thought it would be a buzz.’

‘There’s no buzz in jumping off a cliff and killing yourself.’

‘How do you know?’

The rest of the boys were shuffling around in their seats, trying to hide smiles from their faces.

‘How do you know if you’ve never tried?’

‘Have you tried?’ David tried to stare the boy down, but got nowhere.

‘That’s not the point,’ said the boy, remaining cool. ‘The point is that you don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know what it’s like to jump off a cliff into the sea, and you don’t know what happened to Colin Anderson. Or Gary Spink.’

News had obviously spread fast around town. There was no reason why it wouldn’t, David supposed, no reason why Gary’s death wouldn’t be the talk of every pub, club, office, shop and home, as it must’ve been for the last five days. But he wasn’t about to let this little shit tell him off in front of his mates, especially when the wee bastard knew nothing.

‘Gary didn’t jump either.’

The boy smiled at David.

‘Again, how do you know?’

‘I just know. I was with Gary on Saturday night, we sat and got fucking pissed together all afternoon, then all night, and when I left him he was on the High Common, heading in the opposite direction from the cliffs.’ He could hear his voice rising in pitch and volume, and he felt a trickle of sweat start to run down his forehead. ‘So you tell me why the fuck he would turn round, walk all the way across town and then throw himself off the cliffs. For kicks? Suicide? You don’t know anything about Gary, or Colin, you jumped-up little prick.’ He could see Mr Bowman getting out his seat from the corner of his eye but kept on regardless. ‘You don’t know a fucking thing about me or my life, or about either of them. So don’t go claiming they’re martyrs or heroes, because they’re not. All the pair of them are is wasted potential, guys who could’ve amounted to much more. You don’t know how the hell they came to be found at the bottom of the cliffs, so don’t fucking tell me you do.’

The boy with the streaked hair was nonplussed. He held David’s gaze and gradually got out of his seat.

‘The problem is,’ he said, hissing through his teeth, ‘you don’t know how they came to be at the bottom of the fucking cliffs either, do you? What kind of mate were you to the pair of them? You don’t know anything about them. You haven’t even lived in this town for the last fifteen years. You can’t come here and tell us what happened to Colin back then, or Gary at the weekend, because the simple fact is you don’t know, and you never will.’

David knew he was right. The little shit was right, that was the worst thing. This visit had been a huge mistake. Birdshit hair was absolutely right, who the fuck was he to come and tell them that Colin and now Gary weren’t tombstoners, or whatever? Really he knew nothing about it. Maybe they both committed suicide. Maybe they were both murdered. Maybe he had misjudged their banter that night all those years ago and Colin really had gone back and jumped off as a dare to himself, or just to get a buzz. Maybe David had secretly feared that was the truth all along and felt guilty about it. Maybe the two deaths weren’t connected at all. Who was to say that one wasn’t an accident and the other a suicide? Gary had seemed fine when they met at the weekend, but after fifteen years, was one day enough to form any kind of valid judgement?

The truth was, David didn’t know. He didn’t know what the hell had happened to either of them, all he had to go on was his gut instinct, but what the fuck use was that? It was nothing, it was superstition, it was a feeling, it was nothing concrete, nothing as certain as two dead bodies lying in a heap at the bottom of a cliff face, fifteen years apart.

He slumped back into his seat with the realization and put his head in his hands. He felt exhausted and no longer even had the energy to lift his head up. The boy with his collar up sat down with a satisfied grunt and folded his arms, and a heavy silence rushed in and drowned the room. Mr Bowman started ushering the boys out of the door, then came back to sit opposite him. After a while David looked up.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Mr Bowman. ‘I suppose I should’ve known it was a stupid idea. But I really thought it might be worth a try. It’s not easy talking to these little shits, they’re so sure about the world all the time, they never listen to common sense. Especially young Derek Clarkson back there, your little pal.’

So he was a Clarkson as well, thought David; they bred like fucking rabbits in this town. He wondered if the lad was related to Mike Clarkson, if he’d heard about the fight last weekend.

‘The trouble is, he was right, wasn’t he? I don’t know what the fuck happened. To either of them.’

Mr Bowman looked at him for a long time with something resembling pity. Eventually he glanced up at the clock on the wall.

‘Sun’s just past the yardarm,’ he said getting up. ‘I could use a stiff drink. Want to join me?’

Right at that moment, David couldn’t think of anything he’d like more.

The Lochlands was surprisingly busy for midday, but it was a Friday, thought David, so some folk were clearly getting a head start on the weekend. The handful of punters at the bar looked as if they’d never left the place since David saw them parked on the same barstools a week ago. They grabbed the last free table next to the gents and Mr Bowman got the round in, ordering up a couple of token pies at the same time.

David couldn’t help feeling bad about what had just happened at the school, not least because that Clarkson kid had highlighted exactly what had been gnawing away at him. The past seemed to be intertwining with the present the more he came back to this fucking place, and he felt like he was getting dragged down by an undercurrent of memory, a rip tide of lives half-formed, people half-forgotten and places that he hadn’t thought of in a long, long time.

He’d let Mr Bowman down. He didn’t really owe the old bastard a thing, but he had turned up with the genuine intention of trying to help out and he had hardly gotten started when he’d given up, let himself be talked down by a fucking teenager with a haircut that wouldn’t’ve looked out of place on
Top of the Pops
twenty years ago. Little wank, thought David, although it was hardly Derek Clarkson’s fault that Bowman’s half-arsed idea had been misguided in the first place.

He thought again about what Clarkson had said. He really didn’t know what had happened to Colin and Gary but he
did
have a glimmer in the fog, a lead that might shed some light on the matter – Neil. He hadn’t thought of him while he was losing it in front of the school kids, but now, sitting with Jack Bowman in the pub, it came back to him.

‘I wanted to ask you about Neil,’ he said, taking a deep swig of lager.

‘It’s funny you should mention him, because after I spoke to you on Monday I did a little asking around, in the staff room and such like. I thought it was curious that I’d seen him, and yet he never turned up at your reunion. I was just being nosy, I suppose, but after what you said in Tutties, I got to thinking that it is rather strange for someone to have lived in this area for so long, and yet for no one to really know anything about him.’

David had drunk half his pint already. He really needed to slow down, but it was nervy drinking, nervy with what had just happened, and what Jack was telling him now.

‘And?’

‘Well, you know that he served in the Royal Marines, don’t you?’

‘Sure, he was in the first Gulf War, then he was dismissed on medical grounds.’

‘Ah, well, that was the official line, I gather.’

‘And you know differently?’

‘Remember that this all comes from the staff room, so it has to be taken with a whole mountain of salt, but one of the other teachers had heard that there was a lot more to it than that.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘A number of the lads came back unwell, suffering from both physical and mental problems. I believe they refer to it as Gulf War Syndrome.’

‘I thought that was never proven.’

‘It’s still open to debate in the courts.’

‘And you’re telling me that Neil had Gulf War Syndrome?’

‘One of the teachers’ cousins was a nurse at Ninewells, and a number of squaddies came in with complaints.’

‘Wait a minute, wouldn’t they have gone to a military doctor with this?’

‘I understand they didn’t trust someone on the military payroll to look into it properly.’

‘OK, so he had Gulf War Syndrome,’ said David. ‘That’s still medical grounds, so that’s presumably why he was given his discharge, yeah?’

‘I’m sorry, I seem to have misled you,’ said Jack, finishing his pint and looking at David. David got the hint and quickly got the pints in, irritated at Jack for stringing this out.

‘As I was saying,’ continued Jack as David sat back down, ‘he claimed to be suffering from Gulf War Syndrome, but that wasn’t why he was discharged.’

‘Well why the hell was he discharged?’

‘It seems there was a fight, at the Condor base, between two commandos. One of them ended up in a coma. The other was Neil.’