Chapter One

 

Our lives are often built on lies. They come in all shapes and sizes. Big lies and small lies. Lies told out of compassion to protect someone we care for. Lies told out of malice to hurt someone we despise. Lies which cover up dark secrets. Lies are the mechanisms by which we compensate for our faults and our regrets. The bad things we wish we’d never done. Sometimes lies are simply the things that are never spoken out loud.

I’ve had it with lies.

I’m going to come clean about what happened in Maggie’s house.

It started with the three of us walking along an old railway track one sun scorched morning. The story I’m about to tell had furrowed its foul, creeping roots deep into the soil of the past long before that. But that day in the summer of 1973 is as good a place as any for me start.

Back then the track was a dark scar that slashed its way across a long swathe of countryside. A scar that reeked of its past industrial history, surface so black that you could smell the decades of soot and dust that had been ground into the dirt. Ragged shards of coal fallen from long ago steam trains that crunched under foot like fine gravel, releasing a sulphurous stench when they cracked.

It was sometime in late July that we walked the track, side by side, like brothers from some dysfunctional family, dressed almost identically. Ben Sherman shirts, faded Levi’s, held up by wide braces. Danno’s blue, HC’s red, mine yellow. Tattered black baseball boots on our feet. Each one of us with shoulder length, feather cut hair, spiky on top, attempting to emulate the style favoured by Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood from The Faces.

The track sat on the crest of an artificially raised embankment. Nettles and curling fern grew in abundance on the steep slopes to either side, interspersed with yellow flowering gorse and clusters of wild lilac. Here and there small trees and shrubs clung awkwardly to the sandy soil. The upper fringes were lined with dandelions, bramble briars and the occasional outcropping of wild strawberries.

When it had been operational it had been a branch line, an offshoot of the main Edinburgh to Carlisle route. Trains hushed and hissed and rattled along its iron tracks, carrying goods and passengers. But its heyday had already faded and died before our parents were born. In 1973 it had been a good two decades since the iron tracks were lifted.

Now it was just a place to wander and squander away a summer day. The three of us had traversed it hundreds of times. It was one of half a dozen places in a compressed map of our little town that we seemed to frequently find ourselves aimlessly and predictably drawn to. That day, however, we were walking the track with a definite purpose in mind.

“So, are you going to make the run, or what?” asked Danno.

The three of us stopped as HC contemplated his answer.

He hesitated a moment, and then nodded his head sheepishly.

That settled, we set off again.

Just ahead of us I could see a week-old copy of the Daily Record, lying face up on the ground. With not so much as a hint of breeze to blow it away it just sat there in perfect stillness, pages slowly baking yellow from the attentions of the sun. As the three of us sauntered past it I glanced down.

‘Scorcher!’ blared the headline, in huge block capitals.

The picture beneath showed a kid in swimming trunks on the packed beach at Portobello near Edinburgh. He was squinting up at the camera, frozen in a moment of time. He had an ice cream cone in his left hand and a plastic bucket in his right. The ice cream was melting like streams of white lava over his fingers.

I’d seen that front cover umpteen times the previous week as I pushed the morning newspapers through people’s letter boxes. The mini heat wave we were enjoying had lasted for almost over a fortnight now and the Record had carried several other front covers of a similar ilk. Most memorable was the picture of two teenagers frying an egg on the pavement in a Glasgow suburb.

HC claimed he knew one of the kids. Danno said that was balls, the picture had obviously been set up by the photographer who’d given the kids an egg and asked them to do it. I pointed out that it didn’t matter if it was a set up, because anyone could see that the picture was real. It was so bloody hot that you could fry an egg on the pavement.

Nine days in and the heat wave showed no signs of breaking.

It was only just gone half past eleven in the morning but already I could feel the sweat soaking through my Ben Sherman. The red chequered material was sticking to my back. I wondered if it would leave a stain. I loved that shirt. I thought it made me look hard and edgy, like one of the guys on the front cover of the cheap skinhead novels that seemed to be endlessly passed around between the pupils at our secondary school.

Farther along the track we could see the heat rising in a shimmering haze. The weed-lined embankments hummed to the sound of bees and bluebottles. A multicoloured host of butterflies flitted back and forth across the track. Swarms of hungry midges hung in teeming clouds in the air.

An old man we knew from one of the bungalows near our housing scheme came along the track from the other direction. He was dressed in a polo shirt, khaki slacks, and a pair of brown sandals with accompanying brown socks. His Alsatian dog was padding along the track in front of him, tongue lolling to one side. As it approached HC crouched down and mussed it ears. “Good boy, Captain,” he told it. “Who’s a good boy them.” The Alsatian wagged its tail and slobbered over HC hands.

“Hope you boys are not up to mischief,” said the old man.

“You know us, Mr Renton,” said HC. “Good as gold.”

“And I’m a monkey’s uncle,” scoffed Renton.

“We’ll give you regard to Cheetah, then,” said Danno, referencing Tarzan’s pet chimp in the TV series.

Renton narrowed his eyes. “Less of your damned cheek.”

Danno tried to stare him down. When I saw his fists clenching, I intervened with my impression of Shaggy from Scooby Doo. “You think your dog would like a Scooby snack?”

Renton chuckled. “You’re that kid who does all the voices. I’ve no idea who that was supposed to be though.”

HC ruffled the dog’s head again and stood up. “I swear we’re not up to mischief,” he said.

“That’ll be the day,” laughed Renton and threw a chewed up old tennis ball for his dog to chase. Captain didn’t seem too keen. But when the old man urged him on, he trotted ahead and grudgingly retrieved the ball.

Once they’d gone HC wiped his hands on the front of his jeans. “Why do you always have to try and make trouble?” he said to Danno.

Danno gave a shrug of his shoulders and kicked at the path, scuffing the rubber soles of his baseball boots along the surface, and sending up a little billowing cloud of dry dirt and old coal dust. “It’s turning like the desert,” he said, changing the subject.

I chopped at some wilting nettles with the stick I was carrying. “More like the jungle.” A pollen heavy bee, striped in orange and black, flew blindly at my head, buzzing noisily. I ducked to dodge it.

“It’s like that film, Bridge over the River Kwai,” said HC. “We’re like prisoners of war, getting force marched to build that bridge in the jungle.”

“Nobody’s forcing you to do anything,” said Danno.

HC ignored him and turned to me instead “Do your Alec Guinness, Ranks. Do Alec Guinness, in Bridge Over the River Kwai.”

I turned to face him, narrowing my eyes a bit against the glare from the sun. HC bit his lip. I could tell he was trying not to laugh too soon. I wedged my stick under my armpit and put on my best upper crust accent.

“One day the war will be over,” I said, jutting my chin forward. “And I hope the people that use this bridge in years to come will remember how it was built and who built it. Not a gang of slaves, but soldiers, British soldiers – even in captivity.”

“Brilliant,” said HC. His face was so full of freckles he looked as if he’d come down with a bad dose of the measles. He grinned at me. “You’re like Mike fucking Yarwood.”

Danno punched me playfully on the arm. “Deserves an Oscar, so he does. One of these days he’ll be on telly.”

Mentally I gave myself a pat on the back. I’d found that the thing with impressions was that if you got the words down more or less perfectly it didn’t really matter too much if you didn’t sound exactly like the person you were attempting to impersonate. When people heard the words come out, they kind of filled the gaps and automatically imagined the voice, like it was the missing piece in an audible jigsaw.

“My granddad was a Japanese prisoner during the war,” said HC.

Danno stopped to urinate into the nettles. A white butterfly landed on the back of his hand. “No, he wasn’t.”

“Was too,” insisted HC. “He showed me the scars where they whipped him.”

“More like the scars where he fell off the pavement when he was pissed,” said Danno, shooing away the butterfly and pulling up his zip.

“Fuck you, Dalgetty,” said HC.

Danno deliberately scuffed the soles of his baseball boots against the path again. This time HC walked right into the cloud of dirt and cold dust that drifted upward in the lazy heat. He coughed and spat, then turned and pushed Danno hard against the shoulders.

Danno balled his fists.

I got in between the two of them. We scuffled chaotically for a bit, in that stupid, almost comedic, Three Stooges manner we’d been endlessly descending into since we were six. Then, after a few punches and curses, the whole thing just fizzled out and we carried on as if nothing had happened.

“Look,” I said, pointing down the track with my stick. “We’re nearly there.”

At the bottom of the steep embankment to the left of the track sat the dilapidated ruin of Maggie’s house. The garden fence had been toppled and strangled by a rampant invasion of thorny brambles. Battalions of thistles and goldenrods stood like an unruly army in the garden itself.

Every window to the back of the house was smashed. All that remained were jagged fragments of glass that clung precariously to dry slithers of putty. A huddle of filthy looking pigeons roosted lazily on the exposed attic beams, where part of the slate roof had collapsed. There were blades of grass growing out of what remained of the guttering. Raggedy bits of a dirty old net curtain hung in a limp tangle around a rusted drainpipe that yawed partially loose from the wall. Rust had bled into the curtain, making look suitably bloody and gruesome.

With its moss infested brickwork and its crumbling sills, the place looked like something out of a horror film. Locally it had a creepy reputation that fitted its image perfectly. Just looking down on it made my heart pound. Even the heat of the day couldn’t defeat the cold shiver that suddenly ran through me.

“Are you actually going to do it this time?” asked Danno. “Or are you going to chicken out again?”

HC looked a little more sheepish. “The thing is,” he said, “I’ve got something I need to tell you both. Something I’m not supposed to tell anyone. If I tell you now, you’ve got to swear straight on the holy bible, not to breathe a word.”

I looked at Danno.

Danno raised his eyebrows and rolled his eyes.

“The thing is, I was born with this heart defect,” explained HC. He looked so earnest and sincere that I might have started straight off to believe him. That is if I hadn’t known full well what a relentlessly prolific lair he was. “The slightest shock might bring on a heart attack. I swear it’s like a time bomb ticking in my chest. I could be gone like that.” He clicked his fingers to demonstrate.

“Book him Danno,” I said in my Steve McGarrett Hawaii Five O voice. It had become a thing now. Whenever HC told one of his whopping lies, I told Danno to book him. Danno started to laugh. And that set me off.

“That’s utter crap, Anderson,” said Danno. “You’re talking out your arse again. That’s what you do. You tell far-fetched stories all the time. That’s how come you ended up getting called HC.”

I was the one who’d given him the name in the first place. At the mention of it I danced a little jig and slipped seamlessly into my Danny Kaye. “I’m Hans Christian Andersen. Andersen that’s me.”

HC hawked up a gob of spit and expelled it noisily onto the path.

I could feel my cheek stinging from the heat of the sun.

“You two think you can take the piss out of me all the time?” he grunted. “Well, you’ve gone and shot yourselves in the feet this time. Because I had this little surprise that I was going to tell you about later. But now you can just go and fuck yourselves.”

Danno heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Come on then,” he said. “Tell us.”

“We’re doomed,” I added, doing my Corporal Frazer from Dad’s Army. “Doomed, I tell ye.”

Danno laughed and play punched me again.

HC folded his arms over his chest and put on his serious face. The one we’d both come to associate with him preparing to tell yet another enormous whopper. Sure enough, out it came. “I was going to tell you that my uncle got us tickets to see Slade when they play in Edinburgh,” he said. “But now, because you’re both such piss taking bastards, you can go and fuck yourselves. I’ll find someone else to take.”

Over the past few years HC’s uncle had taken on a mythical persona. He’d apparently been everywhere, done everything, and met everyone. Danno and I had only ever seen him once. He was in the army at the time, and he came to HC’s eleventh birthday dressed in the uniform of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. He hadn’t been seen since. There was a rumour that he was serving a prison sentence for armed robbery. HC claimed this was a cover for secret work he was engaged in for the government and got really uptight if either of us suggested that this was bull.

“Your uncle hasn’t got tickets to see Slade,” sneered Danno.

“Oh, yes he has,” HC shot back. “As part of his undercover work my uncle’s been working a roadie for Slade. It’s his job to set up Cozy Powell’s drum kit.”

I snorted loudly. “Cozy Powell isn’t in Slade, HC. It’s Don Powell. Don Powell is Slade’s drummer. Cozy Powell played drums with Jeff Beck’s band.”

HC seemed to be caught on the hop. He scowled back at me.  “Shows how much you know, Rankin. Cozy Powell and Don Powell are the same person. Cozy Powell is Don Powell’s nickname. He used it when Slade lent him to Jeff Beck.”

“Lent him to Jeff Beck?” I whooped at the notion. “You’re having a laugh.”

“I suppose your uncle told you that?” said Danno. “The same one who’s been trying to infiltrate the IRA?”

“The same one who smuggled himself onboard Francis Chichester’s yacht, so he could sail around the world?” I taunted.

“Come on, Ranks,” said Danno, turning on the worn heels of his baseball boots. “Let’s just leave him here. We’re wasting our time. He’s too chicken. He’s just making up shite to cover how chicken he is.”

“Guess that make it chicken shite then,” I said.

Laughing at the joke the two of us started walking back along the track. Somewhere away in the distance I heard a workman’s pneumatic drill, rattling relentlessly against concrete. A trickle of sweat ran down the side of my face. Another wasp buzzed at my head. I swiped it away.

“Wait,” HC called after us. “I’ll do it. I’m no chicken. But if something jumps out at me and I die of a heart attack you’ll have to answer to my mum.”

“If you die of a heart attack, I’ll be so astounded that I’ll have one myself,” said Danno. “Your mum’ll be the least of my worries.”

I fell to the dusty track, clutching my chest and doing my impression of Jimmy Cagney in White Heat. “Made it, Ma. Top of the world!”

“Don’t call my mum stupid,” said HC.

He ran headlong at Danno. Still lying down I made a grab for his leg. As he toppled, he knocked Danno from his feet. For about a minute the three of wrestled in the dirt. Then it all fizzled out again. I looked at Danno. Out of the three of us he had the quickest temper. He was always getting into fights at school. He might have been a whole head shorter than both HC and me, but he was packed with muscle and aggression. If one of our little squabbles ever really got out of hand, both of us would probably come out the worst.

“So, are you going to do the run, or what?” asked Danno.

“I’m going to do it,” said HC. “But if I die of fright, you’ll be sorry.