The Chessmen l-3 Page 11

  Roddy’s dad had bought him a second-hand, single-engined aeroplane. A red-and-white Piper Comanche. And the band had started earning enough for Roddy to pay for flying lessons out of Glasgow airport. But Roddy was flying high in more ways than one. He was destined for stardom and recognition of his very special talents. That’s how he saw it, anyway. And it was that overweening ambition that brought him, finally, into conflict with Donald.

  By the time I went into second year at university, Roddy and the rest of Amran had dropped out to concentrate on their careers in the band. Joey Cuthbertson had been reduced by a heart attack to little more than an invalid, and Donald had stepped into his shoes as No. 1 at the agency. It seems he had indeed sucked the old man dry.

  But although Donald’s dramatic rise to prominence in the Scottish music business had led to a resurgence of interest in mainly Glasgow-based bands like Amran, it also coincided with his spiralling descent into drink and drugs. He had always been, I suppose, a classic contender for that uniquely island condition known as the curam, when childhood indoctrination in unrelenting Presbyterian beliefs resurfaces like a virus after years of dissolute living to reshape its victims in the image of their fathers. In this case, the Reverend Coinneach Murray. But it would be a few years before Donald would find himself following in his own father’s footsteps. For the moment he was having too much fun in denial.

  What he had done was taken his eye off the ball, and Amran’s career was starting to stall, even before they had recorded their second album. Success can come in the blink of an eye, but vanish just as quickly, like an evaporating tear. The gigs were routine and repetitive and not serving in any way to advance the band’s career. Donald was never there, never at the end of a telephone, never around to discuss the things that Roddy and Strings and the rest thought important to their future. He had already embarked on that long and treacherous slide into addiction.

  For my own part, I didn’t much care. I drove the van, and the money I made meant I didn’t have to think too much about my own future. In truth, I didn’t really want to think about it. I had no interest in my degree course, no ambition, no idea what to do with my life. The news which had greeted me on my return to the island for my aunt’s funeral had robbed me of any interest in it. Artair and Marsaili were married. I had lost my oldest friend, and the only girl I had ever really loved.

  The friction between Roddy and Donald finally came to a head one weekend in early November.

  It was a Friday night, and Amran were giving a concert in one of those end-of-pier pavilions, a survivor from the days of seaside music hall, rescued from demolition and lovingly restored. It was somewhere on the west coast of England. I don’t remember where, exactly. One of those Victorian coastal resorts that had somehow survived the town hall vandals of the fifties and sixties and retained a kind of faded charm. The original promenade which ran a mile or so along the seafront was still there, and the pier was an elaborate structure of iron struts and girders nearly five hundred feet long. The pavilion itself was a shambles of curved roofs on the T at the end of it, and housed an auditorium with a seating capacity of between four and five hundred. In the summer it hosted those seaside variety shows that still somehow attracted large audiences. But events in November were few and far between.

  It was typical of the gigs that Donald had been booking for the band, and Roddy was in a mood even before we set off, determined to have it out with Donald, who had agreed to meet us there.

  It was a filthy night, wet and blustery, light fading as we drove into a little town en route, tucked away among the unfamiliar folds of rolling green English countryside. I was peering through my rain-smeared windscreen searching for signposts when Rambo, who always travelled in the van with me, suddenly shouted at me to stop. I jammed on the brakes.

  ‘What the hell-?’

  The car carrying the rest of band nearly ploughed into the back of us.

  ‘There’s a guy on the bridge.’ Rambo pointed across my line of vision towards the parapet of a bridge that spanned the brown waters of a river in spate. It was an old stone bridge, with lamp posts at intervals across its arch. A man stood up on the parapet wall, one hand clutching a lamp post. He was looking down at the water rushing past below. There was no mistaking his intent. A man steeling himself to jump.

  Roddy, Mairead and the others leapt out of the following car and ran round to my door.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Roddy shouted.

  I pointed over the bridge. ‘Looks like that guy’s about to do away with himself.’

  Everyone looked and there was a momentary hiatus. ‘Jesus,’ Roddy whispered. ‘What are we going to do?’

  I glanced at my watch. ‘We’re running late already.’

  Mairead threw me a look. ‘A man’s life is a little more important, don’t you think, than a gig on a pier?’

  We all looked at her in surprise.

  ‘She’s right,’ Strings said. ‘Come on, let’s try and talk him down.’

  But Mairead grabbed his arm. ‘No, you’ll scare him off. I’ll talk to him.’

  We watched as Mairead made her way cautiously towards him, and heard her call out. ‘Hello, I wonder if you could help me? I think we’re lost.’

  The man’s head snapped around, frightened rabbit’s eyes drinking her in. He was a man in his fifties I would say, losing his hair. Unshaven, and wearing a shabby raincoat over charcoal-grey trousers and a thread-worn cardigan. ‘Don’t come near me!’ He raised his voice above the roar of the water and glanced beyond her in our direction.

  ‘What are you doing up there?’ Mairead asked him.

  ‘What do you think?’

  Mairead looked down at the river and shook her head. ‘Not a good idea. You’ll ruin your shoes.’

  He looked at her with something like disbelief, and then she smiled, and there was something about Mairead’s smile that no man I ever knew could resist. He smiled back. A timid, uncertain smile. ‘They’re not new,’ he said. ‘So it won’t really matter.’

  She looked at his feet. ‘You’re wearing odd socks.’

  He seemed surprised, and took a look for himself. ‘Who cares?’

  ‘There must be someone who does.’

  His lips tightened into a grim line and he shook his head. ‘No one.’

  ‘No one at all?’

  ‘The only one who ever did is gone.’

  I saw her eyes fall upon the man’s left hand holding the lamp post and the band of gold on his third finger. ‘Your wife?’

  He nodded.

  ‘She left you?’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘Recently?’

  Again he shook his head. ‘A year ago today. Cancer. It was a long time coming.’ He turned to look at the water flashing below, then back at Mairead. ‘I tried so very hard. But I just can’t do it any more.’

  Mairead moved carefully, then, turning around to pull herself up into a sitting position on the parapet at his feet, hands flat on the wall on either side of her. ‘No children?’

  Another shake of the head. Then, ‘Well, yes. But he’s in Australia. I told you, nobody cares.’

  She tilted her head to look up at him. ‘I care.’

  He almost laughed. ‘You don’t even know me.’

  ‘Yes, I do. I know you very well.’

  ‘No, you don’t!’ His tone was hostile now.

  ‘Yes I do.’ And I saw a shadow cross her face, a cloud of real emotion. ‘You’re every man who’s ever lost the woman he loves. You’re my dad. I wish I’d been there for him. But I never knew, you see. He never said. And I never found out till he was gone. The young are too busy with their own lives. And it’s easy to forget that your folks still have lives, too. Feelings. You never lose those, even when you get older.’ She turned moist eyes towards him. ‘Have you told him? Your son. Have you told him how you feel?’

  ‘I’m not going to bother him with stuff like that.’

  ‘And you don’t think he’ll be bothere
d when the police come knocking on his door to tell him his father killed himself? You don’t think he’ll wonder why you never spoke to him? Or the guilt he’ll probably live with for the rest of his life, thinking there’s something he could or should have done?’

  The man’s face crumpled, then, and tears rolled down his cheeks with the rain. ‘I didn’t want to be a nuisance.’

  Mairead eased herself off the wall and held out a hand towards him. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You’re not a nuisance. Let’s go and call him. Right now.’

  ‘It’s the middle of the night there,’ he said.

  Mairead smiled. ‘He won’t mind. Trust me.’

  He looked at her for a long moment, and she held his eye, hand still outstretched, until finally he grasped it and jumped down on to the pavement beside her. Mairead put her arms around him and hugged him. The rain intensified then, as if crying with them, soaking them both as they stood in the middle of the bridge, darkness falling around them, the lights of cars raking past, drivers oblivious to the little life-and-death drama playing itself out by the parapet.

  Then, still holding his hand, she walked him towards us.

  ‘Come on, mate,’ Roddy said, ushering him into the car. ‘Let’s get you home.’

  The man lived in a semi-detached house in a short suburban street on the outskirts of the town. A drab, miserable place. Mairead switched on the lights and put on a kettle. A train rattled past the foot of a long, narrow garden with a dilapidated potting shed and an overgrown lawn.

  Roddy went next door and came back with the neighbour, an elderly woman who fussed and flapped in the tiny kitchen where the rest of us were gathered, and said she knew a friend who would come and sit with him. And Mairead sat him down by the electric fire with the phone, and dialled the number of his son in Australia.

  We left him then, with the neighbour keeping an eye till the friend arrived, the man talking hesitantly to his son ten thousand miles away. I could not really imagine what kind of a conversation it might be. But he was alive, and he was speaking about how he felt instead of bottling it up and driving himself to suicide. And that was all down to Mairead.

  On the path, as we walked back to the vehicles parked in the road, I said to her, ‘I didn’t know your parents were dead.’

  She shrugged. ‘They’re not.’ And then she laughed at my frown. ‘Oh, Fin, Fin, you’re such an innocent. The situation called for a story, so I gave him one. When I sing about a broken heart, or everlasting love, folk need to believe that it’s true. That my tears are real. I’m good at that.’

  I thought about the emotion which had clouded her face as she lied to the man on the bridge, and how easily both he and I had been convinced. And I realized then that I could never trust her to tell me the truth about anything.

  The upshot of it all was that we arrived an hour late for the gig on the pier. The manager was a skinny, uptight, bald little man called Tuckfield. He wore a blue suit with brown shoes. A combination I had never trusted. He was red-faced and close to apoplexy. And, of course, there was no sign of the smooth-talking Donald to pour salve on troubled waters.

  ‘I have three hundred paying customers in there baying for my blood or their money back,’ he spluttered at Roddy.

  Me and the guys left Roddy to try and explain as we unloaded the van. I don’t know how we did it, but the band was on stage and opening the show within half an hour. Myself, and a Glasgow boy called Archie, who drove the car, lay down in sleeping bags in the back of the van to try to get some sleep, and the band played for almost three hours to make up for their late arrival.

  The first I knew that there was any trouble was when the back doors of the van were flung open and Roddy stood out on the pier, his face grey with anger. ‘That bastard won’t pay us!’

  ‘What?’ I sat bolt upright. If the band didn’t get paid, I wouldn’t get paid.

  ‘We played nearly an hour longer than agreed to make up for being late, but he still says we were in breach of contract and won’t pay.’

  I jumped out the back. ‘Let’s go talk to him.’

  We found him in his office at the end of a corridor behind the stage. He was wary and defensive when Roddy and I came in, and took an instinctive step back from the door. He raised a hand. ‘I don’t want any trouble.’

  ‘There’ll be no trouble,’ I said. ‘Just pay us and we’re gone.’

  He waggled a finger. ‘No, no, no. You people left me hung out to dry tonight. That wasn’t professional. You broke your contract. Get me your manager on the phone, and when we’ve agreed compensation, you’ll get your money.’

  ‘You’ve had your compensation,’ Roddy almost bellowed at him. ‘We played an extra fucking hour!’

  ‘I still had people asking for their money back. People who left before you even showed up.’

  I thought Roddy was going to go for him, and stepped in quickly, hand raised. ‘Okay, let’s get Donald on his mobile.’ Not everyone had mobile phones in those days. Donald had the latest model, but there was no guarantee that he would be in any fit state to answer it. He should have been at the gig with us. But he wasn’t. God only knew what had become of him.

  I borrowed Tuckfield’s phone and listened as the number rang unanswered at the other end, until Donald’s messaging service kicked in. There didn’t seem any point in leaving a message. When I hung up I saw murder in Roddy’s eyes.

  I tried to be the voice of reason. ‘Now look, Mr Tuckfield, you know why we were late. We saved a man’s life tonight. And we gave you an extra hour of our time to make up for it. Now, we’re not unreasonable people. And I’m sure you’re not an unreasonable man. So we’ll just go and pack up the van, and wait out front. And when you decide you’re going to pay us, we’ll shake hands, and say no more, and be on our way.’ I paused. ‘And if you don’t. .’ I could feel Roddy’s eyes on me, wondering what was coming next. ‘Well, you can stay in here and rot. I’ve driven two hundred and fifty fucking miles to get here, and I’ve another two hundred and fifty fucking miles to get home, and I’m not fucking leaving till I get my fucking money.’

  I wasn’t one to swear much, although Mr Tuckfield wasn’t to know that, but Roddy did. And as I strode back out to the van, with Roddy almost running to keep up, he said, ‘Maybe you should be our manager, Fin.’ I just gave him a look.

  We were packed up and ready to go shortly after midnight. Mairead and the other members of the band who travelled in the car wanted to go, leaving me and Roddy to deal with Tuckfield.

  But I was adamant. ‘No. We all stay, or we all go. And if I go without being paid, this is the last gig I drive for you people.’ And they knew I meant it.

  So we stood around outside at the end of the pier, smoking, wrapped up in coats and scarves, listening to the sea washing up against the stanchions below us. The streetlights of the town, rising up across the hill beyond the promenade, twinkled in the dark. But the good people of this once popular holiday resort had long since gone to bed, and the houses that lined the hillside stood in darkness. The rain had stopped, but everything was still wet, reflecting street lamps and stars.

  I didn’t know how long Tuckfield was prepared to stay in there, but I was ready to sit it out till the following morning, if necessary. By one o’clock the others were getting restless.

  ‘Come on,’ Strings said. ‘This is pointless. Let’s go.’

  Roddy was shaking his head slowly, almost like a man in a trance. He muttered, very nearly inaudibly, ‘This is the end for Donald fucking Murray. He’s finished. Finished!’

  All the lights around the pavilion went out, plunging the end of the pier into darkness. Everyone was suddenly alert. Almost at the same time, the distant wailing of a police siren drifted to us across the night, and I turned to see the blue light of a police patrol car heading down the hill towards the front. It was no surprise when it bumped across the promenade and headed straight up the pier towards us.

  ‘Jesus!’ Rambo said. ‘He’s called the co
ps.’

  I felt indignation welling in my chest. ‘So? We haven’t done anything wrong.’

  But as it turned out, the cops weren’t interested in us. The patrol car drove straight past, swerving into a sideways skid on a handbrake half-turn, and coming to a stop right outside the main door. A white-faced Tuckfield emerged, quickly locking the door behind him, and jumped into the back seat of the police car. The car revved and spun its back wheels, and sped off along the pier.

  For a moment we all stood watching in disbelief.

  Mairead sat in the front seat of the car, face pale and angry, like a full moon reflected on the windscreen. Roddy and Strings were in the back, Roddy sitting side-on, with his legs out of the open door. I don’t really know what possessed me, but anger rose in me like overheated milk and I jumped behind the wheel of the car and started the engine.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Roddy shouted.

  ‘Just shut the door!’

  He barely had time to get his legs in and pull the door closed before I had spun the car around to accelerate hard along the pier in pursuit of the police car. ‘For Christ’s sake, Fin, you can’t go chasing the cops!’

  I saw Strings’ frightened-rabbit face ballooning into my rearview mirror. ‘Jesus, Fin, you’ll get us all arrested.’

  I said nothing, and as I pressed my foot to the floor in an attempt to close the gap on the blue flashing light ahead of us, I was aware of Mairead turning to look at me. But she never said a word.

  The police car slewed across the promenade and turned south towards a collection of fairground attractions shuttered up for the night. The driver ran a red light, and turned up the hill. I could feel the tension in my own hands as I spun the wheel and followed. There were no other vehicles around this early in the morning.

  At the top of the hill the police car turned right then dog-legged to the left, and I felt my tyres sliding on the wet surface of the road as I followed, losing control for just a moment before finding grip again and picking up speed. I was almost hypnotized by the blue flashing light dead ahead, without a single thought of what on earth it was I might do if and when I caught up with it. But we were gaining on it, and the tension being generated by the others in the car was almost tangible.