Lonie50

Audrey drove back the way she came, keeping the Caledonian Canal on her right hand side. She passed block after block of brown stone tenements, all of which looked the same. The car had gone about a mile, before she made a left turn, just past the ferry terminal. Behind the tenements were bungalows with large gardens which she followed up and over a hill until her car was facing back onto the road she’d just come off and had to admit she was completely lost. She’d passed shops and a post-office earlier and decided to ask for directions from one of them.

The post office was near the bus stop and next door to a newsagent, both of which were on the ground floor of a tenement block. A bell pinged as Audrey entered the post office. It was a musty smelling L-shaped corridor of a room with a serving counter behind a Perspex screen. A heavy set woman wearing a long coat stood leaning against the counter on the customer’s side talking through the glass to a balding man. He was dressed quite formally with a black suit jacket, shirt and blue tie, wearing wire-framed round glasses. Audrey took this to be the owner of the post office. He looked anxiously at her as she approached the counter. The heavy set woman’s mouth snapped shut at Audrey’s intrusion, but her feet shuffled her along the counter.

‘I’m looking for the manse?’ Audrey addressed the postmaster through a four-inch gap at the bottom of the Perspex screen.

He stood in front of her with his thin white hands on the counter as if he was going to start counting or typing. He’d leaned forward to hear her, but stepped back to consider the matter better.

‘A Reverend MacDougal?’ Audrey added this extra information because the postmaster seemed reluctant to give any information that was not officially authorised.

The heavy set woman snorted. ‘You’ll be lucky.’

Audrey turned to face her. ‘What do you mean?’

She leaned over, her pancake face growing animated. ‘The manse burnt down about hundred years ago.’ Her lips smacked together with delight at adding a little extra morsel. ‘With him in it.’

‘With who?’ Audrey asked.

‘Reverend MacDougal. Isn’t that right Charlie?’ The heavy set woman turned to the postmaster for confirmation. There was a small mouse like twitching of his face, which might have been yes or no, but she took it as confirmation to continue. ‘He was an evil bugger. Wasn’t he?’ She nodded in grim faced answer to her own accusation. ‘Got his house keeper pregnant. Didn’t he?’ Her black eyebrows beetled up to hide in her loose knit perm at the shock of it all.

The bell of the post office rung and a young denim clad lad waltzed in. He smiled at the two old biddys at the counter. Audrey and the heavy set woman moved aside to let him in. He pulled a Giro out of the inside pocket of his Levi jacket for the postmaster to cash. Charlie’s hand flew to notes and change as they continued their conversation.

‘What happened to the housekeeper and the baby?’ Audrey spoke with a strange urgency and she didn’t know why.

‘Oh, she was saved. Her and the boy.’ Her lips chewed that fact over. ‘A bastard. That’s how we knew.’ She snorted through her nose that such things could happen. ‘And now he’s a church elder and all holy-holy and you wouldn’t think that butter ever melted in his mouth.’

Audrey swallowed before she spoke. ‘What’s his name?’

The shop bell rang as the young boy left. Audrey’s question seemed to fill the heavy set woman with renewed indignation.

‘Donald Campbell,’ she trumpeted. ‘Lives down there by the coup. Best place for them if you ask me.’ Her small sharp eyes reassessed Audrey. ‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I’m a journalist.’ Audrey sounded apologetic, but it immediately set the woman at ease and she knew it was the right answer.

The heavy set woman clutched at her handbag. ‘I just came out for a first-class stamp and now…Do you want to take my picture?’ She pushed her bulk forward for future posterity.

‘No.’ Audrey smiled at her. ‘I was just looking for the Campbell’s house.’

‘Oh, it’s down there, first on your left and you’ll come to a square plot of green and a tenement block.’ She nodded her head sadly. ‘We keep to ourselves up this end, but the Campbell's are all very cliquey. Did you know that one of them had the audacity to become a Catholic priest?’ She looked at Audrey to see how this remark had affected her and then to the postmaster for confirmation. ‘Didn’t he Charlie?’

Audrey didn’t wait for his answer. Images of her own son clung to her and it was getting late, past his bed time. She should have been home from work, but it would mean doubling –back in her car and coming to the same place tomorrow. But there was a strong feeling, almost a need to find out what happened to the young boy after the fire. The coup was on her right, a bit of derelict ground growing nothing but fifty-foot electricity pylons. She swung her car into the left and took another left. The tenements here formed their own little square.

A boy with both hands on the handlebars of a metal framed scooter, wearing a bobble-hat that gave his head a peculiar egg shape, watched her parking with a glowering intensity. Audrey got out of the car, shutting the door quietly, as if any sudden noise would scare him away. ‘Do you know where Donald Campbell lives?’ She spoke softly looking with curious detachment at the bubble of snot that was sucked up and down on the boy’s nose as he breathed in and out.

‘Aye.’ The boy put his heel on the scooter, his interest in the car and the pretty lady now assuaged.

‘Can you tell me where it is?’

He sensed a stranger’s trick in her question and it showed on his face. His fingers gripped what was left of the dirty black rubber on the bent handlebars with renew vigour, ready to dart away. ‘Can you give me threepence?’ He checked her face. When she smiled, he added, ‘for sweets’.

Audrey had left her purse and bag in the car. She heard the scooter clatter onto the pavement. There was only sixpence in her purse which she handed to him with great solemnity. He was equal to the task, wiping the snotters from his nose on the sleeve of his wool jersey before taking the money and stuffing it into the pocket of the grey shorts he was wearing.

‘That’s it behind you.’ The boy’s eyes narrowed as he pointed to a close. The bobble on his hat whipped furiously back and forth as he kicked the running board on the scooter and wheeled himself away from any possible repercussions.

The smell of bleach or disinfectant in the close mouth told Audrey that this was a good neighbourhood. She checked the nameplates on the three doors on the ground floor. There were no Campbells. On the first door to her right she found what she was looking for. A silver metal nameplate, highly polished as the chappers on the door with the name CAMPBELL on it. Her feet stood on the bristle of the doormat, her fingers on the letterbox, but she was unsure how to proceed. A banging noise came from upstairs and she chapped the door quickly, her uncertainty dissipated. She could almost hear the disgust and dismay in her mother’s voice that she’d been caught out, at her age, hanging about people’s doors.

A bent over old man answered. She knew it was Father Campbell’s grandfather because of the washed out blue eyes. In a way she was disappointed. In her head she hadn’t expected him to have a beard. It wasn’t untidy and he wore a clean white shirt and flannels, which did make him look younger than the image she had of him. He stood with the door open, looking up at her.

Audrey cleared her throat. ‘I’m a reporter.’ The door began to close slowly. ‘I’ve met your son Mr Campbell.’

‘Whit would you be meeting with my son for?’ Donald wasn’t sure what the strange young woman was doing at his door. She said she was a reporter, but he had his doubts.

Audrey shut her eyes for a second and shook her head in embarrassment. ‘Sorry. I’ve met your grandson.’ The door wasn’t shut in her face which she was thankful for.

‘Come in.’ Donald held the door open for her.

Audrey followed him from the white woodchip wallpaper of the hall into the white woodchip of his living room. All his furniture was brown and heavy-legged. Mr McDonald’s left leg also had a wooden aspect, scraping along behind the other and following the changing patterns and textures of the fitted carpets. He lowered himself into a wing-backed chair, which offered a muted light from the window overlooking the canal and a dark stain of cloud sitting on the Clyde beyond. Audrey took the chair across from him and she breathed a little easier. He scraped at the pot of his pipe and knocked the burnt pipe tobacco out onto the grate. The ritual of filling and sucking on his pipe as he lit it was a space away from time. The pleasant smell of pipe smoke filled the room and made sitting in silence a little more comfortable.

A black and white print on the wall, near the glass cabinet full of history’s knick-knacks caught Audrey’s eyes. His half-closed eyes sprung open as she drifted from her chair and stood behind him. She was studying it so intensely that she did not hear him rise from the chair, or feel his presence behind her. The sucking on the stem of the pipe and the smell of pipe tobacco made her turn towards its source.

‘The hanging tree.’ Mr Campbell spoke plainly, a glitter of light in his hooded eyes. The malignant growth on the wall needed no other explanation.

Audrey’s hand rose to trace its shape, but Mr Campbell gently pulled at her elbow, stopping her.

‘You’re not meant to touch it, or its bad luck will rub off on you.’ He seemed exhausted by his verbosity and stumbled back to his chair to sit down.

‘I’ve seen it before.’ Audrey felt the strange urge to touch it again to trace its fingers to the dark sky of the frame. ‘Who painted it she asked?’

The old man sucked on his pipe. ‘No one knows.’ His neck turned to look at the girl, but it was too much trouble. He rested his head on the hard leather of the chair. ‘The devil perhaps.’

‘I’ve seen it before.’ Audrey spoke again, reiterating what she had already said, as if the old man had failed to hear her. ‘Ringed by thirteen stones.’

Her words made him choke, but he said no more for a few moments. ‘The thirteen stones of Ardnacraish.’ He recited some doggerel. ‘From ship to shore we’ll see no more.’

There was a buzzing in Audrey’s ears. Her hand found the back of the old man’s seat and her feet were also unsteady. She moved around and past his chair to the seat opposite him. ‘What is that? Some poem?’

‘Yes. The Thirteen Stones of Ardnacraish. Haven’t you read it?’ He sounded surprised.

‘No.’ Audrey leaned forward in her chair, her hands clenched.

‘You really should.’ He puffed on his pipe and watched her though the blue haze. ‘How did you know about them then?’

‘I saw them in the picture.’

‘Ah.’ He tapped the pipe on the arm of his chair to clear some obstruction. The stem of the pipe found itself once more in his lips. He bit down and a healthy plume of smoke once more grew between them. ‘There’s no standing stones in the picture.’

Audrey felt the sudden urge to flee, but his stillness held her.

He pointed his pipe at her in accusation. ‘You’re not really a reporter are you?’ His voice had a surprising vigour.

Audrey struggled with the question, but something of the old man’s calm nature helped her relax. ‘I am, but this is my first proper job.’ He smiled at that, which encouraged her. ‘And it’ll probably be my last.’

He made no comment. The clock on the mantelpiece, some Victorian timepiece, ticked slow time and the old man’s hooded eyes began to close.

Audrey gripped both arms of the chair and eased herself up. The old man’s pipe dropped to the floor as he slumbered. She picked it up and put it on the grate, close to the family sized box of matches and close to hand, so he would see it when he awoke. ‘I’ll see myself out,’ she whispered. There were no lights on in the house and it was dark in the hall, but the front door only had an uncomplicated Yale lock. The door clicked behind her as she left.