time he moved first, gliding around Hardie’s static figure like a winger of the old school of Scottish football, a wee ugly knot of accidental perfection. He hauled off into the gathering evening, swearing profusely.
Jackie was still smiling when they reached Nicolson Street. ‘It’s okay,’ she told Hugh, ‘I don’t know what got into me. I’ll be fine from here. But thanks anyway’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Well, see you around. Come on the tour some time.’
I’ll do that,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you.’ Then she was away, across at the lights, still wondering if he’d expect her to pay for a ticket.
Andrew Carlin was the kind of man that might slip between worlds, if such a thing were possible. He inhabited his days like a man in a dream, or like a man in other people’s dreams.
There were three mirrors in Carlin’s place: one in the bathroom, one on the door of an old wardrobe that stood against the wall of the lobby, and one over the fireplace in the front room, which doubled as his bedroom. This was an old, ornately gilt-framed mirror, mottled at the edges, and with a buckle in it that produced a slightly distorting wave in the glass. It was like a mirror that hadn’t had the courage to go the whole bit and join a travelling show, where it could turn those who looked in it into fully-fledged grotesques.
This was the mirror Carlin talked with, mostly. It had once been his mother’s. It was flanked by two heavy brass candlesticks, which he had also inherited from her. In his parents’ house the mirror and the candlesticks had been crammed onto a shelf among the bric-a-brac and debris that his mother couldn’t stop snapping up in charity shops. She would come home laden with bargains and they’d have to eat beans for the rest of the week. When his father died it got worse. From the age of fourteen Carlin missed the dogged, watchful presence that had balanced the magpie frenzy of his mother. The only time he benefited from her obsession was when he first got the flat in Edinburgh, a tiny conversion on the top floor of a tenement in a street that was too near the canal to be really Bruntsfield. It was cheap enough to rent on his own, but came with a minimum of furnishings. She sorted out a few items for him – dishes and jugs and ornamental vases, most of which he sold on to junk shops or returned to charity. His mother never came to see him, so would never miss what he got rid of.
The mirror was one of the things he liked and held onto. When she died some years later and he cleared the house, he put most of what remained to the cowp. The candlesticks, however, he brought back with him and set on either side of the mirror. The three objects seemed to feed off each other, acquiring a new dignity of their own. Now Carlin felt that where they were was where they had always belonged.
He lit the gas fire, warmed his legs against it for a few minutes, then turned the fire down and faced the mirror. He thought of Hardie saying he was like this Major Weir. How the fuck did he know that? He looked and looked to see Weir in the mirror, but he didn’t know what he expected to see. And he thought of Jackie Halkit.
Edinburgh was a village, if you walked around it you saw the same faces all the time. He’d seen her once or twice in the last year, and each time it had been by chance. He’d recognised her, but he’d never made an attempt to speak to her. You didn’t do that. You didn’t go up to folk. If something was going to happen, they would come to you. That was how it worked.
That was how it had worked till now. He’d broken in on her. He tried to imagine her with himself live in her head again. What would she be thinking? But he couldn’t touch how she might be, just couldn’t feel it.
He saw himself standing outside Dawson’s in the late afternoon. It had been light outside and lighter still in there, because the place was full of bright electric bulbs at the bar and over the tables. Carlin preferred the gloom. He liked candlelight and shadows. Between the street and the inside of the pub there hadn’t been much to choose.
Then suddenly, as he stood there, he had been invaded by a sensation so strong that he had had to put out his hand and steady himself with the tips of his fingers on the varnished wooden beading of the pub door. Just a touch to get his balance back. It was as if he had been right on the edge of something. It was like the other feeling he sometimes got, an overwhelming sense of being elsewhere, or that he could reach out and touch things that were long gone.
The past. He could stretch his fingers and feel it, the shape of it. It was like having second sight in reverse. It was like holding an invisible object, both fascinating and disturbing. Or like feeling your way in the dark.
He’d read that seers didn’t like their gift of seeing the future because there was nothing they could do about it. They had visions of horrible accidents, injuries, deaths, and they couldn’t stop them. There was a guy up north, the Black Isle or somewhere, who took the money from people who came to see him and then was rude and abrupt with them. He had no wish to see their future trials and losses, their rotten endings and stupid tragedies. But he could not turn them away. People came to his door every day, desperate to be warned of things that could not be avoided.
The past was like that for Carlin: a hole at the back of his mind through which anything might come.
‘I’ve a bit o work if I want it,’ he said to the mirror.
‘Guid. Aboot fuckin time. Get ye aff yer fuckin erse.’
‘Dinna start.’
‘Dinna talk tae me then. Think I care aboot yer fuckin work?’
‘It’s no a job but. It’s jist play-actin. Part-time.’
‘Aw ye’re bluidy fit for. Gaun tae tell us aboot it?’
Carlin stared until the mirror had the gen. Sometimes that was enough.
‘Thing is,’ he said, ‘I want tae check this guy oot.’
‘Who, Hardie? Forget it. A right wanker.’
‘No, Weir. Somethin aboot him. Mebbe he had a bad press.’
‘Aye. On ye go, son. Bleed yer sapsy liberal hert dry, why don’t ye. Listen, if ye find oot he was a nice Christian buddy eftir aw, keep yer geggie shut or ye’ll be oot o work again.’
‘I’m no sayin he wasna an evil bastart. But it seems everybody has him marked doon as a hypocrite. Jist because ye lead a double life disna make ye a hypocrite.’
‘Well, you would ken, wouldn’t ye? Sounds tae me like ye might be buildin yer argument on shiftin sand though, friend. I mean, pillar o society by day, shagger o sheep by night – how much mair hypofuckincritical can ye get?’
‘Aye, aye. I jist don’t like pigeon-holin folk. Ken, an early version o Jekyll and Hyde, earlier than Deacon Brodie even – it’s too pat.’
‘Well, jist brush him under the carpet then. Lea him alane. The last thing we need’s anither split fuckin personality. We’ve got mair than enough o them. Fuckin Scottish history and Scottish fuckin literature, that’s all there fuckin is, split fuckin personalities. We don’t need mair doubles, oor haill fuckin culture’s littered wi them. If it’s no guid versus evil it’s kirk elders versus longhairs, heid versus hert, Hieland and Lowland, Glasgow and Edinburgh, drunk men and auld wifies, Protestants and Catholics, engineers and cavaliers, hard men and panto dames, Holy Willies and holy terrors, you name it Scotland’s fuckin had it. I mean how long is this gaun tae go on, for God’s sake? Are we never gaun tae fuckin sort oorsels oot? I am talkin tae you, by the
