The meeting between Max and the research director was brief and acrimonious. It could only have had one outcome. Max cleared his desk and was escorted from the building. He decided to walk back to his apartment; it was five miles but he had to clear his head and think about what he was going to do now. If only he had Janine to help him. At least life would have some meaning. He felt sure he could straighten himself out if only he had Janine. He would try once more to persuade her. First thing in the morning he would go to the travel agent and get himself on a plane back to Geneva. He would talk to her face to face and tell her that he felt sure they could work something out. He looked at his watch. There would actually be time to catch the travel agent this evening if he got a move on and if his car had been returned by the garage. It had.
He cursed as he was held up at the second set of traffic lights in a row. He over-revved the engine and squealed the tyres at take-off only to see the third set of lights start to change against him. His right foot hesitated then slammed down hard on the accelerator. He charged through the intersection then swung the car hard over to join the southbound traffic on Serrano, the broad avenue leading into the heart of Madrid. The outer lane cleared and Max moved out into it. He accelerated and was doing nearly fifty miles an hour downhill when he saw the lights at the foot of the hill change to red. He cursed and put his foot on the brake. Nothing happened.
‘Christ!’ he screamed, pumping the pedal but to no avail. Pulling the hand brake on was equally useless. The cable snapped at the first hard tug. He slammed his hand down hard on the horn but the traffic ahead seemed oblivious to it. Blowing car horns was a way of life in Madrid. His last scream harmonised with the horn as he slammed head-on into an oncoming bus.
TWO
Edinburgh, Scotland. February 1991.
MacLean paused at the railings, his back to the bitter wind. He looked at the dark grey Victorian building and felt his yesterdays return in a slow, numbing nostalgia. All these years ago — he did the calculation in his head. He was thirty-seven so it must have been thirty-two years ago when his mother had brought him here to school as a well-scrubbed, bright-eyed five year old. The fabric of the building did not appear to have changed much at all. Perhaps the stone was darker but maybe even that was because of the leaden sky above.
The minutes ticked by but MacLean was oblivious. He stood motionless with his hands on the cold metal as memories of a time gone by were uncertainly resurrected. They were of children of another age, reduced to faces without names after all these years but still with smiles and personalities.
MacLean’s life had been such a nightmare for so long now that the border between dreams and reality had become indistinct. The surrealist thought that a class of children of thirty-two years ago might still be inside the grey building, lingered longer in his head than it should have done. The saving grace was that he recognised this as sign of the mental stress he had been under. People under great strain often started to believe in something simply because they wanted it so much to be true. They sought subconscious escapism, escape from a reality that had become too much like hell to bear.
Despite his attempts at rationalisation, MacLean found himself walking through the gates and crossing the playground. He climbed the stone steps to the entrance marked ‘BOYS’ and pushed open the door. It was just as he remembered, tiled walls and green paint and a vague smell of disinfectant. The source was a bucket and mop propped up against the wall by the door.
He started to walk along the corridor, following the sounds of an echoing piano and young voices. He remained unchallenged and stopped only when he came to a pair of brass-handled swing doors. On the other side was the assembly hall. His fingers touched the brass uncertainly. The handles were the original ones. He had touched them before.
The piano sounded a long chord and the children in the hall began to sing. MacLean closed his eyes. They were singing it! They were singing the very one. ‘In the bleak mid-winter, frosty wind made moan
…’ Seven year old voices lagged behind an insistent piano. The sound was pathetically thin on the cold air, fragile like happiness. ‘Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.’
MacLean looked along the rows of scrubbed faces, then, realising what he was doing, he put his hand to his forehead and acknowledged the fact that he was looking for faces he knew. He swallowed hard and got a grip.
The hymn ended and the pianist, a beefy woman in her fifties, began to thump out a Sousa march. Her eyes were fixed on the music in front of her, head held back at an angle so that she could see through the bottom lens of her bifocals. Her ample breasts shivered in time to the insensitive thump of her hands on the keyboard. The music was the signal for the children to troop out the far end of the hall in twos.
As the hall emptied and the music stopped, MacLean entered through the swing doors and paused to look up at the high ceiling. It made him feel small again. At the other end of the hall the pianist returned for something she had forgotten; she caught sight of MacLean and asked, ‘Can I help you?’ The tone of her voice demanded to know what he was doing there. She came towards him, music clutched to her bosom and filled with the confidence of being on her own ground.
MacLean’s expression did not change. His social programming no longer functioned.
‘Did you hear what I said?’ demanded the woman. The fact that she was challenging an intruder, broad and well over six-foot tall did not seem to occur to her.
MacLean looked at her, the cold morning light etching the pain lines round his eyes. ‘I’m taking a last look,’ he said quietly.
‘A last look at what?’ snapped the woman.
MacLean looked at her distantly then he said quietly, ‘My life.’
The woman appeared bemused. MacLean turned on his heel and left without saying any more. He did not look back as he walked up the hill away from the school but he did pause to pull up the collar of his overcoat. He had to bend his head against the wind which seemed determined to deny him progress.
He came to the canal bridge at the top of the hill and stopped again. The Union canal, the canal that had played such an important part in his childhood. Its banks had once been the most exciting place on earth. Here summer days had been longer, hotter and happier than they had ever been since. Despite the sub-zero temperature he could almost feel the sun on his back and the rough grass on his knees as he knelt down long ago to stare down into the still, dark water.
He left the pavement and climbed down the steep muddy path leading from the bridge to the towpath. The mud had frozen to the hardness of concrete. The canal itself was solid and a light dusting of snow lay on its surface. He started walking but suddenly remembered the tree. There had been a tree on the other side of the bridge from which he and his friends had once dangled a rope swing. He retraced his steps and walked under the bridge to find it still there. In February it was stark and bare, a black skeleton against a grey sky, but come spring, it would be reborn and in the summer its full leafy canopy would shelter another generation of ten year old jungle adventurers.
MacLean started out on his walk again. A mile along the towpath and he reached the playing fields of his old high school, netless tennis courts and the shuttered and silent pavilion. The smell of wet earth was carried on the wind and brought back memories of rugby games of long ago. He saw steam rise from the backs of scrimmaging forwards as he stood anxiously in the back line waiting for the ball to emerge from the melee and arc towards him. He recalled the surge of adrenaline as the three-quarters moved forward together like a single delta wing The sense of relief at having moved the ball out towards the wing before the opposing flankers reached you, the pain of being hit if they were too fast or you were too slow. That was when you smelt the earth, when your face was close up against it, being pressed into it by anonymous hands and feet.