A Winter Grave

Chapter Four

Brodie’s top-floor flat looked out across the city, east and west, from this red sandstone tenement at the top end of Gardner Street.

If he looked out the back from his kitchen window, he could see down into the cricket ground at Hamilton Crescent, where the first Scotland — England international football match had taken place in 1872. A goalless draw played out in front of 4,000 spectators.

From the bay window at the front, he could look down the hill to Dumbarton Road, which flooded frequently when the sewers and drainage system backed up from the river. The smell that lingered along the famous old road was nauseating. He had no idea how people continued to live there, how the shops survived. He avoided it as far as it was possible. Fortunately the odour rarely made it this far up.

It was dark by the time he got home. He switched on a light above the kitchen sink, and saw dirty crockery soaking in scummy water. Pans with the burned-on remains of forgotten meals. Aluminium carry-out cartons were stacked untidily on the worktop next to piles of cardboard lids stained with the residue of Chinese and Indian takeaways. The stink of stale food was very nearly as odious as the smell that stalked Dumbarton Road.

He saw his face reflected in the glass of the window. A ghost of himself. Short hair bristling silver and black and receding from a high brow above blue eyes. Cheeks hollowed out in the shadows cast by the light, and by the words of death delivered by a doctor more concerned with an infestation of cockroaches.

Unable to look at himself, he turned off the light and went through to the front room. He had no appetite, either for eating or for clearing up the mess. Neither seemed to have any point any more. Light from the street lamp outside reflected on the ceiling, casting the shadows of furniture around the room. He dropped heavily on to the settee. A half-empty bottle of whisky nestled between the arm and the cushion on his right. Golden oblivion. He reached for it and unscrewed the cap, raising the neck of it to his lips and letting the amber liquid burn all the way down to his gut. Maybe if he drank enough of it, the alcohol would kill the fucking cancer. Or him. Either would do.

It took him no time at all to empty the bottle, but if he had hoped to find escape in it, he was disappointed. Oblivion evaded him. When he closed his eyes, the room spun, and when he opened them again, the world was still there. Unchanged. Dark and depressing. The only emotion he seemed able to conjure from the whisky was self-pity. He forced himself out of the settee and staggered across the room to a G-plan sideboard that his parents had inherited from his grandparents, and then by him from them. The drawers were full of detritus from his folks’ house that he had never bothered to clear out, and when opened, always released a flood of memories in the timeless smell that lingered still among their belongings. He lifted out an ancient, dark green photo album embossed with a crocodile-skin pattern. Its brittle pages were held in place by red string threaded through punched holes. Photographs, read the washed-out gold script in the bottom right of the front cover. Between each page of photographs, as he squinted at them in the semi-dark, lay a protective sheet of patterned greaseproof paper.

The album had belonged to his paternal grandparents and dated back to a generation before that, black and white prints lovingly pasted on to each page, annotated in faded black ink. Granny Black. Papa Brodie. People long dead, like everyone else pressed between these pages. Lives that had come and gone, genes passing from one generation to the next in a line that ended with him. And he wondered what the hell it was all about. What any of it meant. What any of it was for.

And then he realised, of course, that it didn’t all end with him. That was just self-pity, self-obsession. There was Addie. Who wouldn’t even speak to him. If procreation was your raison d’être, then surely the estrangement of your child was the ultimate failure.

He dropped the album back in the drawer and went in search of another bottle. There was a little gin left in one he found in the kitchen, and he brought it back with him to the settee. It tasted vile after the whisky and he spat it out in an aerosol spray that settled slowly in the still of the room, the finest droplets catching light from the window as they fell.

‘Fuck!’ His voice reverberated around the room. Then, ‘TV, show me my photos.’

The screen on the wall above the original Edwardian fireplace flashed and flickered before presenting a pale blue background to a succession of digital photographs. They arrived like postage stamps from one side, grew to fill the screen, then shrank to vanish from the other. An accumulation of pictures taken in happier times, increasing in quality with each new generation of iPhone, at almost the same rate as the people in them grew older. And sadder.

His heart ached as it did every time he set eyes on Mel again. So young and fresh at first. Beautiful in her plainness. A wisp of a girl with a smile that would break your heart. Big, doleful eyes hiding mischief in their darkness. Long, straight, mouse-brown hair tonged into curls for their wedding day. He was transfixed by her, unable even to look at the pictures of himself, afraid that he would see only what he had become, not what he had been. Thirty seconds of video scrolled by. Mel laughing, almost choking on a piece of wedding cake. ‘Try it, Cam,’ she was saying and holding out cake towards the camera. ‘Try it.’ So innocent, and so cursed. And long dead. Like his parents, and their parents before them.