Page 26 of Iron Debt
Timeline?
I put the phone down. I picked up my glasses. I went back to page one and started again, because the numbers were the only thing in my life that still did what I told them to.
CHAPTER 14
Chips And Salt
MORVEN
Ididn’t know why I ordered two. My hands made the decision and I stood at the counter genuinely surprised at myself.
The chip shop was on the corner of Dock Road and Marine Parade – the same chip shop that had been on that corner since I was twelve, run by the same woman, or possibly her daughter, or possibly a clone grown in the industrial fryer that had been bubbling away in the back since before devolution. The counter was Formica and the menu was handwritten on a whiteboard and the floor was sticky with decades of chip fat and salt and the condensation of a thousand conversations held while waiting for battered sausage.
I’d asked to walk alone. The phrasing of the request – “I’d like to walk into town alone” – had been directed at the kitchen in general, but the answering silence came from all three of them, which told me it wasn’t my request that was being considered but my safety. Ewan had looked at Lachlan. Lachlan had looked at his tablet.Neither of them had said no, which was itself a response – the non-refusal that meantwe trust the judgment of the man who will follow you anyway.
Al followed at twenty paces. Same distance. Same silence. Same steady tread on the pavement behind me, the footsteps I’d come to know so well that their absence would have been louder than their presence. We walked through Cairndhu’s centre – past the memorial park, past the library, past the building society and the newsagent and the barber who had cut Duncan’s hair for thirty years – and I thought about the fact that I was walking through my own hometown with a minder and the fact that the minder’s proximity had stopped feeling like surveillance and had started feeling like company, and I didn’t know when that had happened, and I suspected my body did.
The woman behind the counter didn’t blink at Al. She didn’t go quiet or tense or perform the subtle rearrangement that most people did when he walked into a space. She looked at him, looked at me, and said: “Same as usual, love?”
She was talking to him. He had a usual. At a chip shop on the corner of Dock Road.
“Two portions of chips,” I said. “Cheese and curry sauce.”
She didn’t ask who the second one was for. She looked past me at Al, standing six feet behind on the pavement, his hands in his jacket pockets, his collar up against the wind. She looked back at me. She assembled the two polystyrene trays with the speed and economy of someone who had been serving chips for so long it had become a kind of art.
I paid. I took both trays. I walked to the bench on the sea wall – the long wooden bench facing the Firth,five metres from the chip shop, positioned at the point where the pavement gave way to the rocky shore and the Clyde spread out in a wide, flat grey expanse under a sky that matched it almost exactly.
I sat down. I placed the second tray on the bench beside me. I ate a chip.
Fifteen seconds later, Al sat down.
The bench was too small for him. Everything was too small for him – the chip tray in his hands, the bench beneath him, the concept of two people sharing a view of the Firth without commentary. He sat with his elbows on his knees and the tray balanced on one enormous palm and ate chips with the other hand, one at a time, and said nothing.
I said nothing.
The silence was not the silence of strangers on a bus or the silence of two people who had run out of things to say. It was the dense, textured silence of two people who had been walking side by side every morning for a week and had discovered that words were the least efficient way of communicating what needed communicating. The chips were hot. The curry sauce was good. The wind off the Firth carried salt and diesel and the distant clanking of the dock cranes and the mineral smell of the river at low tide.
We ate. The seagulls circled. A ferry moved across the middle distance, flat and grey against the flat grey water.
“I was trained to hold a position,” I said. I didn’t plan it. The sentence arrived in the air the way hisfootsteps arrived on the cliff path – suddenly, without announcement, because the alternative was not saying it and the not-saying had become more effort than the saying. “In ballet. You hold a position for as long as the music requires. The body screams and you don’t move. You train the scream out of it.”
He ate a chip. He looked at the Firth.
“Aye.”
A pause. A gull screamed overhead.
“So was I.”
Four words. Said in the same bass register he used for everything – the voice that sat low in his chest and didn’t rise for emphasis and didn’t fall for effect and simply existed at the frequency it existed at, unalterable, like the tide. But the four words carried the weight of fifteen years of training rooms and fight rings and the brutal discipline of a body that had been taught to absorb damage and not show it, and I understood – with the recognition of one trained body meeting another – that we were saying the same thing. We had both been broken into shape. We had both survived the breaking. We were sitting on a bench eating chips and watching the water and we were, in the most fundamental way two people could be, the same.
He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket. Not the phone pocket – the other one. He took out an envelope. The same one I’d seen described in enough of Ewan’s sidelong glances to know it was important – worn, soft-edged, the flap resealed with tape.
He opened it. He took out a clipping. Newspaper. Yellowed, folded once, the crease line soft with handling. He held it out to me.
I took it. The paper was warm from his jacket. From his body. I unfolded it carefully.
A review.The Herald, dated two years ago. A photograph of a young woman on stage – thin, dark-haired, anonymous in the corps de ballet, third row from the left. The review covered the Scottish Ballet’s autumn season. The relevant paragraph was marked with a faint pencil line in the margin:
