Phantom Limb (eBook)

CHAPTER ONE

It was his eighth funeral of that week. Like a conductor clipping a ticket, the dead needed him to get them into the ground. Even a few months ago, it had been a job like any other, black shoes and jacket, iron your shirt, comb your hair. But it was beginning to weigh on him. The mourners kept calling him Father.

‘That’s the Catholics,’ one said.

‘What do you call the others then?’

‘Just by their name.’

The men talked amongst themselves, then turned to stare at him. His first name had drifted away in the last years of primary school. Overtaken by several similarly named boys who had promised to share. He had to admit that everyone called him Gillis.

‘What’s that, Irish?’

‘Thought you said you weren’t Catholic?’ The man jabbed his elbow into the minister as he passed over a glass of whisky.

‘I knew a Gillis at school. Funny guy. Kept to himself, thought he was an athlete. . . Is that you? No? Can’t be. . . you’re a minister?’

Given the opportunity to explain himself, he didn’t bother.

‘The running didn’t work out.’

His lungs had not been deep enough. His legs had not been long enough. His eyes watered in the cold. He went through a pair of trainers every couple of months.

‘That’s a shame. What happened?’

‘Knees.’ Gillis looked down at his suit trousers, and the men nodded.

‘I mind you running at school,’ the schoolmate pointed at him. ‘Away round the football pitches. All on his own. Rain. Snow. Frost. No bother.’

Gillis smiled. ‘I know.’

‘Still get out?’

‘Not with the knees. I can’t.’

‘A proper champion though, weren’t you? Like UK wide. Got medals and all that?’

Gillis nodded. ‘I ran in England.’

The men smiled. ‘Oh, England.’

Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester, once in London, second and third places, a few finals and qualifiers, some participation medals. Then, the disaster that brought on the knees. After all that, a job in a printer’s office, in a hotel, in a shop warehouse. The draught, and then the dregs. He had come back home a few years ago.

‘What have you done to yourself?’ his dad had asked. He had always been a happy boy. Now, too nervous to leave a room or start a conversation, let alone renounce a tradition, he had gone back to the old kirk, where his granny had taken him to Sunday school. He sat with her in the pews. Helped her make the teas and coffees. The minister, and the deacons, and all the old folk remembered him. They seemed to think his life was ahead of him. The minister was retiring – and dying, though he didn’t know it yet. And the Lord asked, ‘Whom shall I send?’ The silence was deafening. Out of politeness, Gillis answered, ‘Send me.’

‘Listen.’ The old minister had taken Gillis to one side. ‘It’s not a bad job. The wages aren’t much, but you get the manse guaranteed, and a motor, and you’ll have your mornings and evenings. Mostly it’s just hospital, funeral, home by five.’

He was thirty-one. In a photograph on his granny’s shelf, he held a degree in Divinity like a cudgel.

The mourners were bored. An old man had died. He loved the wife he’d left. And the children he’d disowned. He loved the hills he hadn’t climbed in thirty years. And the football team whose players he couldn’t name. They watched impatiently as tricky corners of cling film were picked from silver oblongs covered in sandwiches, and broad bowls of crisps were set down.

‘Help yourselves, folks.’

With a sandwich, a sausage and a whisky all balanced in one hand, Gillis accepted a pint, and then another. He smiled though his mouth was full. People liked to get the minister a drink, and thank him for his lovely words. They looked at him as though he was a boy, new to the world, blushing and blinking, asking silly questions, wanting impossible answers.

There was a toast, and Gillis poured his whisky into a half-downed pint. His back was slapped and his hand was shaken.

‘That’s what I like to see,’ they said.

The dead man’s cousin stood on a chair at the back of the pub, his baldy head wavering close to a flickering light bulb. He raised his glass, and the chattering stopped.

‘May we all go at life like Sandy did. He never asked what his duty was, to him it was simple. And as for his pleasures, they were simple too. He liked to have a drink, and he loved to smoke. So he smoked! And he didn’t care who he was around. Whether it was bairns and babies, he smoked from the age of seven to the age of seventy-eight. For Sandy.’

The man pressed his glass into the crook of his elbow to free his fingers, pushed a cigarette between his lips and passed the packet down to a woman who was grappling at his legs, trying to hold him steady. He leant on her shoulder as he sparked the cigarette and repeated, ‘For Sandy!’ The mourners laughed, and the old men took out their lighters and fag packets as the barman ran around shouting, ‘Not in here, not in here!’

‘Leave us alone, ya bastard,’ yelled the cousin, but as he tried to step down, his body ran the length of the woman holding him up and his belt buckle snagged at her necklace and collar. The old man unhooked himself, found his feet and griped about freedom. Can a grown man not smoke in peace? Can folk not mind their own business any more? What in hell was happening to this country? Then the cigarettes were blunted on tables or nipped and stored away, or taken out into the rain, and the dead man’s cousin disappeared and when he returned he had tears on his face, and the barman had his arm around him. ‘I know, I know,’ he said.

A baby gurned in the darkest corner of the pub, bound into a car seat, surrounded by dozens of wet jackets and scarves. Between toothless gums, the mother’s finger was being softly bitten. She was stretched over toward her friends, ignoring the baby, to laugh and sip from a glass of wine, until she glanced over and caught Gillis’s eye. He had drunk enough not to react, and they held one another’s gaze. The mother muttered and rolled her eyes, and her friends looked over. She lifted the car seat onto the table and dug her fingers into folds of white muslin to lift the baby out. Pushed her wine glass to the edge of the table and refused another.

‘I shouldn’t even be drinking, honestly.’ She cut a scowling glance back at Gillis. But his eyes were away, wandering over the pub decoration, framed photos of men with collared horses, kneeling next to trophies, standing beside fishing boats, huddled in ancient uniforms.

Underneath, seated in a long line, the dads and granddads, some silent, others immobile, in wheelchairs and oversized black jackets, a regimental pin glinting from a buttonhole. Standing by them, ignoring them, the uncles and cousins shouted over one another, and when their conversations abruptly ended, they scratched at their stubble and jangled the change in their pockets. Running between their legs, kids were carrying cups of tea and coffee to their aunts and auld grannies, getting a pound or a mint, or a toffee from strangers who held them by the neck, or ran hands through their hair, or told jokes and riddles that made no sense. As his gaze completed a full circle, returning to the woman in the corner whose baby was now burping and retching into a napkin, Gillis imagined himself as a lighthouse, big light beaming from the middle of his forehead, cemented in place by the sugared remainder of spilt drink, warning passers-by to keep away from hidden depths and sudden shallows, from rocks that will sink you.

‘You’re looking lost.’ By his elbow, a man’s head exceeded reasonable limits. For its sheer scale, its breadth, its height, once its present occupant was finished with it, this skull would have to be cleaned, polished and preserved. Startled, Gillis had to step back to take in all of the features. Crow’s feet, drinker’s rosacea, cheeks pockmarked with acne scars, along with two eyes, and a nose, and a grinning mouth. The teeth. The parts reassembled when the man spoke. ‘Can I shake your hand, Father? It’s not an easy job you do.’

The man was almost bald, but closely cropped grey hairs speckled his head and the heights of his cheeks where he had missed shaving that morning. The broad hand which gripped Gillis’s looked swollen, as though the gold watch which pinched the wrist was holding in an excess of blood.

‘How do you know the deceased?’ Gillis asked. The man was still holding him, and smiling. ‘Are you related?’

The man laughed. ‘No. Not related. I’m their boss. I’m Nichol.’ He said his name with a note of false humility, as though it was a title, or a prize that had been won.

‘Whose boss?’

‘What?’

‘I said whose boss are you?’

Nichol let go of his grip on the minister to point across the back wall, where the uncles and cousins, the dads and granddads looked up and raised their glasses, pursed their lips and lifted their eyebrows. ‘All of them.’

‘Fish.’

‘Fish.’

‘Aye, fish.’

Nichol had brought a few of the younger men over, and he pointed at each of them in passing...