‘That your kid’s name?’
I nod.
‘Quick eater, then. That’s her finished already.’
And I realise that the driver, too, has finished his packed lunch, and that I must have dropped off to sleep. I am awake in an instant and, peering through a windscreen made almost opaque by fine droplets of rain, I see my daughter running down the drive to meet her friends, the three of them again sharing two umbrellas and huddled together beneath them.
‘What now?’
‘Follow them.’
The driver turns to glare at me through the glass. ‘No fucking way am I following a bunch of teenage girls in my cab.’
‘It’s my daughter, for Christ’s sake.’
‘I only have your word for that.’ He pauses. ‘And anyway, they’d see us. A big black fucking cab crawling along behind them.’ I don’t know what to say, and he looks at me appraisingly. ‘Tell you what. I’ll take you to the school ahead of them. Got to be Firrhill High, in this catchment area. And you can watch her go in.’
We get there a full ten minutes ahead of them, and I assume they must have waited to take a bus up Oxgangs Road. Pupils straggle through the gates in groups of two and three and four. The rain has got heavier, and no one is lingering in the street or the playground. When I see them, they are instantly recognisable. Three lassies huddled under two umbrellas, hurrying down from the main road, and I am disappointed again not to see her face.
We sit along from the house in Hainburn Park all afternoon with the rain drumming on the roof of the cab. I can feel the driver becoming increasingly restive. And the only reason I can contain my own impatience is because I have decided to wait until my daughter returns from school, when I will step down from the cab to greet her in the street. It is more passive than walking up the drive and knocking on the front door to confront my wife. And I wonder if I am, by nature, a coward, or a prevaricator, or simply someone who shies away instinctively from the possibility of confrontation. Does she even know where I have been for the last year and a half, or why? What was the state of our relationship when I left? Are we still married? As the clock ticks away, I am becoming increasingly nervous.
By the time I see the three girls hurrying down the street towards us, what had begun the day as light drizzle has become a torrential downpour. Raining like stair rods, my mother used to say. And I catch my breath. Another memory. But it arrives like a lone horseman from the clouded depths of my mind, and slips away into insignificance.
I refocus. The gutters are in spate and I can see almost nothing out of the windows. I am wearing a waterproof jacket, but have no hat or umbrella. As soon as I step from the cab I will be drenched. They are almost upon us, and I swing the door open and step out on to the pavement, almost bumping into them. One of the girls releases a tiny, startled yelp, and all three faces turn up towards me from under the umbrellas. Fleetingly, I catch Karen’s eye, and see a face full of indifference, without a trace of recognition.
The girls hurry on, leaving me standing in the rain, my hair streaked in wet ropes down my forehead, and I am filled by the awful, hollow pain that comes with the realisation that the girl I had thought to be my daughter didn’t know me. Looked me straight in the eye and away again. Dismissive. Some stupid guy that bumped into them on the pavement. Certainly not her father.
I watch them carry on up the road, one of them detaching from the others and running up to the door of the house I have been watching all day, before vanishing inside. I open the door of the taxi, cast adrift again on a sea of utter confusion, and see the driver leaning towards me.
‘That lassie didnae know you fae Adam. You’re taking the piss, pal. You can find your own way back to the hotel. Shut the fucking door!’
In a state of semi-shock, I do as he says and hear him start the motor and rev fiercely. I watch as he pulls away up the street, leaving me standing at the side of the road. Perhaps it is only my imagination, but it seems to me as if the rain has intensified. I feel it beating a tattoo on my head, soaking into my jeans, washing around my shoes. I run a hand back across my scalp, sweeping my hair out of my eyes. With the rain running down my face, it would be hard to tell if I was crying. And if I were to cry, they would be tears of pure frustration. Along with the return, perhaps, of fear. For the rock of certainty on which I have built my hopes turns out to have been the sand of self-deception. If I had been Neal Maclean, resident of this Edinburgh suburb, father of Karen, then surely that girl would have known me? But if not her father, who else could I be? I feel as confused and disorientated now as I did those first moments on the beach at Luskentyre when I opened my eyes and realised I had no earthly idea who I was.
A strange, unaccountable anger takes hold of me. Why would I have all those newspaper cuttings about Neal Maclean? His birth certificate, with this address written on the back. It is incomprehensible. At the very least, somehow, I have to make some kind of sense of it.
I turn and walk briskly through the rain and turn into the drive of the house where the white Nissan is parked. Neal Maclean’s house. Where Neal Maclean’s wife and daughter live. At the front door, I knock three times in rapid succession, and such is my impatience that I barely wait a handful of seconds before knocking again. Then I spot the doorbell and ring it.
When the door opens, the woman with the blond-streaked hair looks startled, and it is immediately clear to me from her eyes that she doesn’t know me. Her daughter is hovering in the gloom of the hall beyond her, a towel in her hands. She, too, looks blankly towards me.
‘Can I help you?’ the woman says.
I have no idea what to say, and I blurt, ‘Don’t you know me?’
‘No, I don’t. What do you want?’
Her daughter calls, ‘He was standing out on the street when I got back.’
The mother says to me, ‘I think you’d better go.’ I don’t know what possesses me to say it, because I know now it’s not true. And I feel like a drowning man grasping at flotsam that I will simply drag under with me. ‘You must know me. I’m Neal Maclean. We’re married.’
Her eyes open wide with fear, all colour draining from her face in an instant, and she slams the door shut on me. From the other side of it, I hear her shout, ‘If you don’t leave immediately, I’ll call the police!’
There is a bar in the hotel called The Boston Bean Company. I have no idea why, and it seems to me like an absurd name for a bar. But tonight it offers refuge and escape to a man with no name, no past, no future. I am reacquainting myself with my only friend, Caol Ila. A friend who offers warmth and escape. And ultimately oblivion. A friend who doesn’t care who I am, good or bad, lost or found. A friend who will stay with me to the end, and ultimately hasten my departure.
It was quiet here when I first arrived, my hair still damp, a chill in my bones. But the in-crowd have arrived. Young people. Noisy. Drinking, talking, laughing. And above all, confident in who they are. They make an island of me. A solitary, silent island of confusion in their sea of certainty. I sit on a stool at the counter, watching my glasses come and go. A pale amber procession of them, evaporating before my eyes. And there is one refrain that plays again and again in my head like an earworm. If I am not Neal Maclean, who in God’s name am I?
Chapter eleven
I am tempted by the hair of the dog. Not only because I feel like death on this grey September Edinburgh morning, but because I would like to rediscover the level of oblivion I achieved last night. The real world, today, feels even harsher and less forgiving.