The symbols just before the H and C had been obliterated by a heavy black felt-tip marker, but the original note had been written with a ball-point, and by holding the page up to the light at just the right angle, I could see that the first letter had been an F and the second an L.
F and L. Those abbrevations didn’t turn up anywhere else in Rory’s notes for either Crow Road or anything else that I knew of. Rory never crossed stuff right out; he only ever put a line through it. Why the big deal with the felt-tip? And who were F and L? And why that “whoops”? And what was too close to what?
I found myself cursing Uncle Rory’s inconsistency. F in the diaries sometimes meant Fergus (aka Fe), sometimes Fiona (also Fi), and sometimes Felicity, a girl Rory had known in London, also recorded as Fls, Fl or Fy (I guessed). The only L in the diaries seemed to be Lachlan Watt, though he - mentioned on the rare occasions when he came back to visit from Oz - was LW, more usually.
Some nights at Lochgair, after long evenings spent poring over those little, thin-paged diaries on the broad desk in dad’s study, trying to make sense of it all, and failing, I’d fall asleep in my bed with the symbols and acronyms, the letters and numbers and lines and boxes and doodles and smudges all swirling round in front of me even after I’d put the light out and closed my eyes, as though each scribbled sign had become a mote of dust and - by my reading - been disturbed; lifted from the page and blown around me in a vortex of microscopic info-debris, chaotic witnesses of a past that I could not comprehend.
I found one thing which - after a little puzzled thought — I could comprehend, but which I hadn’t been expecting, in Uncle Rory’s 1979 diary. Stuck to the inside back cover with a yellowing stamp hinge was an old, faded, slightly grubby paper Lifeboat flag, without its pin.
The sentimentalist in me was reduced almost to tears.
In Glasgow I had taken to sitting in churches. It was mostly just for the atmosphere. Catholic churches were best because they felt more like temples, more involved with the business of religious observance. There was always stuff going on; candles burning, people going to confession, the smell of incense in the air ... I’d just sit there for a while, listening but not listening, seeing but not seeing, there but not there, and finding solace in the hushed commerce of other people’s belief, absorbed in the comings and goings of the public and the priests, and their respective professions of faith. A father would approach me, now and again ... but I’d tell him I was just browsing.
I walked a lot, dressed in my Docs and jeans and a long tweed coat that had been my father’s. Uncle Hamish sent me thick letters full of original insights into the sacred scriptures, which I dipped into sometimes when I couldn’t sleep. I never got further than page two of any of them. I frequented the Glasgow Film Theatre, and installed a video and a TV in the lounge. I bought a ghetto-blaster which usually lived in the flat’s kitchen (and so became known as the gateaux-blaster) but which I would take walkabout with me sometimes, at least partly for the weight-training which transporting the brute from room to room provided. I’d stand and look at time-dark paintings, or run a finger over the line of some cold, marble animal, while the tall, glittering rooms resounded to the Pixies, REM, Goodbye Mr Mackenzie, The Fall and Faith No More.
‘He’s here,’ Ash said, coming back with the drinks. She sat down.
I looked around. I saw him after a while. A little shorter and a little younger-looking than I’d expected, from the tape I’d seen. He was talking to a couple of other guys; they were all dressed in grey trench coats, and one had put a hat down on the bar that at least looked like it ought to be called a fedora. I wondered if the other two were also journalists.
Rupert Paxton-Marr; a foreign correspondent, his meticulously-trained, razor-sharp mind ready in an instant to describe a place as ‘war-torn’ and bring home to us all events and disasters in far away places, to talk of people