Naming the Bones (3 page)

He pulled the jotters towards him. They were similar to those he recalled using in primary school, with boxed-in lines on the front cover for the owner’s name, subject and class, which Archie had left blank. He lifted one in the air and shook it gently. A couple of dried leaves slid from between the pages. Murray laid them carefully to one side and added them to his list.

Leaves – 2

The words looked stupid. He scored them out then took one of the leaves between his thumb and index finger and held it up to the light, seeing the veins still branching beneath the crisp surface. There was no secret message scratched on its desiccated flesh. He placed it gently back on the desk and opened the notebook. A list of words ran close to the margin on the left-hand side of the page, vocabulary or notes for a poem cramped in Archie’s now-familiar script.

Dune
Dawn
Dream
Dome
Diadem

He could see no connection between the words and any of the poems in
Moontide.
Murray leaned back in his chair and started to read, making notes in his own Moleskine notebook as he went along. He was a third of a way through the jotter when he came across the entry made in another hand.

I love you and she will love you too.

Beneath, Archie had added:

She loves me! But how can she be so sure that my new love will be a she?

Murray made a note of the exchange, wondering if it offered some kind of insight or was simply a joke. He’d assumed Archie’s sexuality was confirmedly heterosexual, but then the seventies had been a time of challenged boundaries, even in Scotland, and Archie’s love affair with the drink had frequently placed him between berths. Maybe he’d occasionally flopped into men’s beds in the way that he had so frequently flopped (Murray imagined that the word was often appropriate) into women’s. It was worth considering. At this stage almost anything was worth considering.

Murray had propped the photo against the desk lamp. He looked at it again, the grinning face and flying hair. How long after it had been taken had Archie drowned?

He worked until two, then decided to take some requests for reference books to the front desk. He supposed he should eat something. He’d woken with a sore head and mild nausea, remnants of the wine he’d drunk at the opening and of the semi-sleepless night that had followed. He should phone Jack, tell him . . . tell him what?

Murray filled in his request form neatly and went out into the corridor, closing the door gently behind him. He heard Mr Moffat’s jovial tones just before the man himself hove into view. The senior librarian was wearing his customary politician’s suit and tie. His sparse, white hair was cropped short in a style that might have looked thuggish on a less amiable countenance, but which lent Mr Moffat a jolly, monkish cast. He was walking fast, talking animatedly to an older, thinner man dressed in khaki trousers, a checked shirt and saggy cardigan.

Murray would have been content to let the pair pass with a friendly nod of the head, but the librarian hailed him warmly, his round face a testament to the pleasures of books and extended lunch breaks.

‘Good afternoon, Dr Watson.’ He shook Murray’s hand. ‘Everything working out okay?’

Murray’s voice felt rusty. He’d been in conversation with the remnants of Archie Lunan all morning, but this was the first time today that he’d opened his mouth to speak to the living.

‘Good, yes. I’m not sure what I’ve got yet, but it looks promising.’

‘Wonderful.’ Mr Moffat turned to his companion. ‘George, this is Dr Watson, through from Glasgow for a look at some Archie Lunan ephemera we didn’t know we had.’

‘Oh, aye.’

The older man looked unimpressed, but he held his right hand out anyway. Mr Moffat stood over them while they shook. For a bizarre moment Murray thought he was about to clasp their two hands together like a minister at a marriage ceremony, but the librarian confined himself to his usual easy grin.

‘George Meikle is our head bookfinder.’

Murray wanted to tell the bookfinder to call him by his first name, but the action seemed too awkward. Instead he indicated the request forms in his hand.

‘I was just heading in your direction.’

Meikle’s face remained dour.

‘I’ll take you along to the desk then.’

George’s surliness was at odds with his offer and Murray wondered if he was grabbing the opportunity to escape the weight of Mr Moffat’s cheerfulness.

‘Excellent.’ The librarian couldn’t have looked happier had he introduced Lord Byron to Percy Shelley. ‘Still, it’s a pity we don’t have more for you, Dr Watson. I often wish some poets had been more assiduous with their legacy.’

Meikle made a harrumphing noise that might have been a laugh or impatience.

‘Some of them are over-assiduous.’

‘George has a point.’ Mr Moffat lowered his voice as if he were about to tell a risqué joke. ‘We’ve been gifted signed notes to the milkman, but your man . . . one slim volume and a cardboard box of papers. Tragic. It’s going to make your job pretty difficult.’

‘There’s more than you might think, references in other texts, letters and the like, and I’m hoping more will turn up once I start talking to people who knew him.’

‘I’m a great believer in optimism.’ Mr Moffat was already turning away. ‘And there’s always George. He’ll help you out where he can.’

Murray groped for some way of saying he didn’t need any help beyond the room already provided. But he was already looking at the broad back of Mr Moffat’s blue suit as he headed away from him, along the corridor to his office.

George snorted with the same mixture of amusement and impatience he’d shown earlier.

‘This way.’

He started down the hallway in the other direction and Murray followed him, too polite to let on that he already knew his way around. He couldn’t think of anything to say. It was like this sometimes when he had been deep in work, as if his mind stayed trapped in the wrong mode, the best part of him caught in the pages he was carrying.

Lunan had been trying to write a sci-fi novel. Murray smiled at the irony. He’d been hoping to uncover lost verses by a neglected poet and instead had chanced upon notes for a pot-boiler. Maybe Lunan had been bored, or perhaps he’d decided to fight penury with pulp fiction. The notes for the book had been sketchy, but the beginnings of the plot were unoriginal, a small colony of people trying to pick their way through a post-apocalyptic landscape. Murray supposed the setting might have been inspired by the isolation of Archie’s last home.

George broke the silence, jerking Murray back into the moment and the empty corridor that smelled of books and learning.

‘So have all the big boys been covered then?’

It was a question he’d been asked before, most notably by Fergus Baine, Murray’s head of department when he’d submitted his request for a sabbatical. He’d pulled out the stops then, explaining his perspective on the poet’s neglected place in the canon, how his story crossed boundaries not simply of literary style but of a country divided by geography, industry and class. He’d dampened his love of Lunan’s poetry from his voice and presented an argument based on scholarship and fact. Murray had been as passionate as a commission-only salesman about his product, believing every word of his own spiel, but the hours spent in the small room with Archie’s slim legacy had left him dispirited. As if the salesman had opened his sample case in the privacy of a hotel room and been confronted with the flaws in his merchandise. He felt a sudden stab of anger. Who was this guy, anyway? Stalwart of the stacks, a glorified janitor with his old man’s cardigan and wilted features.

‘I don’t get you.’

‘Archie Lunan. I’d have thought you’d have better folk than him to spend your time on.’

‘I still don’t get you.’

George turned his face towards Murray, his expression unreadable.

‘He wasn’t much of anything, was he? Not much of a poet and not much of a man, as far as I could tell.’

‘And you’d be the one to judge?’

‘I’m not a professor of English literature.’

Murray doubted his promotion had been an accident and didn’t bother to correct it. He remembered his joke of the night before.

‘But you know pishy poetry when you see it?’

‘I know a big poser when I see one.’

The words could have been directed towards Murray, Lunan or both. The corridor stretched ahead of them. He didn’t need the guidance of this misery. He knew where he wanted to go, could put on some speed, step quickly ahead and leave the old bastard to ferment in his ignorance. Instead he kept his voice cold and asked, ‘So did you see a lot of Lunan?’

‘You could see Archie Lunan propping up the wall of an Edinburgh pub any night of the week in the seventies.’

‘And you were out in the street with your nose pressed to the Christian side of the window when you saw him, I suppose?’

George Meikle’s laugh was harsh.

‘No, I wasn’t. But it’s not me we’re talking about, is it?

Murray felt weary with the weight of defending Lunan, a man who he suspected was probably as big an arsehole as George was implying. But it wasn’t the man he needed to defend. He said, ‘Archie Lunan may not have been Scotland’s favourite son, but he produced one of the most remarkable and most neglected collections of poetry ever to come out of this country.’

They had reached the foyer now. George turned to face him.

‘And you’re going to right that?’

‘I’m going to try.’

The older man’s voice was sweet with sarcasm.

‘A big thick book about a wee, skinny poet and his one, even skinnier volume?’

‘If I can.’

George shook his head.

‘And the greater part of it about how he went.’

‘It’ll be a part of it, but not the main part. I’m writing for the Edinburgh University Press, not the
News of the World
.’

‘Aye, that’s what Mr Moffat said.’ George hesitated, as if making his mind up about something. ‘You asked where I was when I spied Lunan in the pub. Half the time I was sitting opposite him, the other half I was sitting on the bench beside him.’

‘You were friends?’

‘Drinking pals, for a while.’ Meikle took a deep breath. ‘Why do you think Tuffet was bringing me along to meet you? You could find your own way to the request desk fine. He thought I might be able to fill in some gaps.’

‘And can you?’

‘I doubt it. All we ever did was hang about pubs talking pishy poetry. The kind of thing you no doubt get paid good money for.’

Murray grinned against the unfairness of George Meikle’s first-hand contact with Lunan.

‘I’d like to hear your memories of Archie, they could be a big help. Maybe you’d let me buy you a drink?’

‘I don’t drink.’

He wondered if anyone had conducted a study into the link between being teetotal and being a depressing bastard. But then the old man gave his first genuine smile.

‘You can stand me a coffee in the Elephant House when I knock off.’

Murray bought a ham and tomato sandwich from the news­agents opposite the library and ate it standing in the street. The bread was soggy, the tomato slick against the silvered meat. He forced half down then consigned the remainder and its plastic box to a bin. He’d turned his mobile off when he’d entered the library that morning, now he switched it on and checked for messages. There were two. He pressed the menu button and brought up Calls Missed. Jack had rung once, Lyn twice. He killed the phone and went back into the library. He had a lot of work to do before he met George Meikle.

The Elephant House was jam-packed, but Meikle had managed to bag the same seat that an insecure Mafia don would have chosen, near the back corner of the second, larger room commanding a good view of the café and ready access to the fire escape. Murray eased his way through the tables to greet Meikle and check on his order, then retraced an apologetic route back, past the glass cabinets stuffed with elephant ornaments to the front counter and the long queue to get served. When his turn came he asked for an Americano, a café latte and two elephant-shaped shortbreads, then negotiated his way back to the corner table, holding the tray carefully, praying he wouldn’t upset it, and if he did that it wouldn’t be over an occupant of one of the three-wheeled buggies that were making his journey so perilous.

Meikle folded the
Evening News
he’d been reading into a baton and slid it into the pocket of the anorak hanging on the back of his chair. Murray lowered the tray onto the table then unloaded the cups, slopping a little of the black coffee onto its saucer.

‘Sorry that was so long, there’s a big queue.’

Meikle gave the shortbread a stern look. ‘If one of those is for me, you’ve wasted your money.’

‘Watching your figure?’

‘Diabetes. Diagnosed three years ago.’

A vision of his father flashed into Murray’s head. He wrapped the shortbread in a paper serviette and slid it into the pocket of his jacket.

‘That’s not much fun.’

‘Eat your bloody biscuit.’ Impatience made George’s voice loud. One of the yummy mummies turned a hard stare on them, but he ignored her. ‘Biscuits I can stand. It’s the booze I find hard to watch folk with, and I’ve been off that twenty years.’

‘Since Archie went.’

Meikle shook his head.

‘You’ve got the bit between your teeth, right enough.’ He leaned forward. ‘An unhealthy obsession with your subject may be an advantage in your line, but remember Lunan only touched a small portion of my life. I’m sixty-five now, due for retirement at the end of the year. I’ve not seen Archie since we were nigh-on twenty-six. My quitting the drink had nothing to do with him. It was necessary, that’s all.’

Murray held up his hands in surrender.

‘Like you say, it’s a bit of an obsession.’ He took his tape recorder from his rucksack and set it on the table. ‘Do you have any objection to me recording our chat?’