Stonemouth

‘Here,’ he said, handing me a big, slightly comical-looking mobile as we drove off. ‘You can give them a call.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. It was one of those ultra-basic mobiles made just for old people: big buttons, clearly marked. ‘Mind if I look in your numbers?’

‘Ye no know the number?’

‘No,’ I said. I didn’t want to add the of course not. Joe tutted, looked amused.

In the end I used directory enquiries.

The bike was a write-off and I wasn’t allowed a new one, not if I wanted to live at home for the next couple of years, before I’d be going to university.

I still had my old mountain bike so I sometimes took that to the nearest forests and hills, though my horizons had definitely shrunk. Joe would ring up some days and offer me a lift to the hills whenever he was heading that way himself. Usually I accepted. He wasn’t always going walking himself, just passing that way, and even when he was taking the dogs for a walk he always encouraged me to head off by myself and just be back at the car by an arranged time.

One day there was only one collie to walk, then, a few months later, none at all. I told him he ought to get new ones, but he said he’d owned too many by now. I didn’t understand, and told him so. He just shrugged and said, ‘Aye, well.’ This was, in retrospect, a lot better than telling me I would understand one day.

Mum and Dad got me a car — a hopelessly underpowered and terribly safe VW Polo — the day I turned seventeen. I passed my test when I was a month older and suddenly I had my freedom again. By then I knew Joe was Joe Murston, father of Donald, and I’d visited the family house on the hill to see him, rather than Callum. It felt more of a duty, to be honest, and the fact that I always stood a chance of bumping into Ellie when I went to see him was a long way from being an irrelevant part of the equation, but I always knew I’d miss him when he went.

I stand in the funeral parlour, looking at him. It’s quiet and cool in here and it smells of lilies: a too-sweet, cloying smell. Old man Murston lies, dressed in a dark, old-fashioned suit, in a flamboyant-looking open casket I suspect he’d have hated. I don’t think I ever saw him wear a tie before. One of those neck things, sometimes; a cravat. His plump face looks like it’s made from shiny plastic and his mouth is wrong: too tight and thin. His body, though still big, looks shrunken somehow, as if the air’s been let out of it.

I’m trying hard to remember some pearls of wisdom Joe might have imparted during our walks together, some deeply meaningful I-think-we’ve-all-learned-something-here-today revelation that I owe to him, but I’m failing.

Mostly we talked about nothing much, or about how it was in the old days: steam trains, having to pay the doctor in the time before the NHS, being able to walk across the river on the decks of trawlers, the war — he was on the farm throughout, producing food for the home front; I got the impression some fun had been had with Land Girls — and nature stuff. Joe taught me a lot of names for trees and birds and animals, but they were the old names, names already slipping from common use, and not really that much help. If a girl said, ‘Is that a cuckoo?’ and you said, ‘Naw, quine, yon’s a gowk,’ you’d generally be looked at aghast, like you were talking a foreign language. Which you kind of were.

Fankle. He taught me a few useful, or at least good words, like fankle. Fankle is more or less a straight synonym of tangle, but it sounds better somehow. Particularly as applied to a fishing line that’s got itself into a terrible, un-sort-outable mess, the level of shambles so extreme all you can really do is take a knife to it and throw it away. That’s a fankle. Applies to lives too, obviously, though the knife approach usually only makes things worse.

It’s just me and Grier in the gently lit back room of the funeral parlour. On the walls are serene paintings of sylvan landscapes, most bathed in the light of golden-red sunsets.

‘How did he die?’ I ask quietly.

‘Heart,’ Grier says.

She goes up to him and runs her fingers through the sandy, wispy hairs on his mostly bald head, patting them into a slightly different arrangement. She uses one finger to press down lightly on the tip of his nose, deforming it slightly before she releases the pressure and it goes back to the way it was.

‘What are you—’

‘Never touched a dead person before,’ she says.

She bends at the waist and quickly kisses him on the forehead. Her dark jacket makes that slidey noise again, quite loud in the insulated silence of the room. I wasn’t sure outdoor jackets were quite the right dress code for such a solemn visit but Grier had pointed out Joe had spent most of his life in baggy country clothes; it used to take weddings and funerals to get him into a suit. He wouldn’t have minded while he was alive, and he couldn’t mind now.

‘You don’t think he’s looking down on us?’ I’d asked.