Funeral Note

Alexis Skinner

I must have raised my voice during my discussion with my dear stepmother. I may be a partner in the august firm that is Curle Anthony and Jarvis, but I’m still well down the pecking order and the office that I rate didn’t have too much spent on its sound-proofing. I had barely hung up before the door opened and my secretary’s frown came into view.

‘Is everything all right?’ she murmured. Clio Lomax and I are still new to each other: her predecessor Pippa finally pushed her flippancy far enough for it to earn her a rollicking from the chairman of the firm. When she came crying to me and I told her that it wasn’t before time, her lip became so petted that she called me a ‘fucking establishment lackey’ and walked out, never to return. Now she’s working in her father’s investment management business; God help the clients.

Clio was available as a result of one of our departments having been downsized during the recession, and she moved straight into the vacancy. Her inquiry wasn’t entirely solicitous. It was her way of suggesting that I turn down the volume.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘You weren’t meant to hear that. Just a small family disagreement. You don’t want to know about the serious ones. You know who my stepmother is?’

She nodded. ‘I take it you won’t be voting for her next year.’ I grinned, and she left.

I tore into the project I’d been assessing before Aileen’s call; her interruption had taken fifteen minutes out of my midday break, but since I hadn’t been scheduled to meet anyone, it wasn’t a big deal. The day was warm and sunny, so I cleared out of the office, walked down the steps that lead from Castle Terrace to Princes Street Gardens, and bought a sandwich lunch at the Fountain Cafe. I was eating it, on a bench, when my mobile sounded.

I looked at the screen, and felt instantly brighter. ‘Hiya,’ I said. ‘How’s the sex slave business?’

‘Getting worse by the day for the traffickers,’ Andy replied, cheerfully, ‘I’m glad to say. So is drug-dealing, and the Agency’s internet team just busted a rock singer for having some very bad stuff on his computer.’

‘Once upon a time, sex and drugs and rock and roll were reckoned to be very good indeed,’ I laughed, ‘until Director Martin became head of the serious crime-fighters. How’s the weather in Paisley? It’s lovely here in the Gardens.’

‘No idea,’ he replied. ‘I’m enjoying the sunshine on Leith. It’s an outside officer job that your father asked me to do; it’ll take up the rest of the day.’

‘Are you around this weekend?’

‘I am tomorrow, unless this goes pear-shaped. Sunday I’m going up to Perth to take the kids out. You?’

‘I’m clear. Fancy meeting up tonight, and taking it from there?’

‘Deal. I’ll call you when I’m done.’

That’s the way it is with Andy and me now. We have no ambitions for our relationship, but we enjoy it. I know what a lot of people think of me. . yes, they think it of me, rather than him. . but I did not set out to bring it about, and I’m sorry that his marriage didn’t work. I’ve had hate mail, the old-fashioned kind, addressed to me at the firm and always anonymous. There’s been shit posted about me on Facebook too. . Faecesbook, as I’ve come to call it. I assume it’s all come from people who are, or consider themselves, friends of Karen, Andy’s wife. He hasn’t had any of that stuff, but you’d have to be seriously mental to send poison pen messages to a cop. If anything was too heavy, I’d ask him to deal with it, but I would never, ever mention it to my father.

It’s strange, that people can come back into your life when you believe that you’ve consigned them entirely to your past. When Andy and I split and he married Karen, I didn’t see him for a few years, even though he’s my old man’s closest pal, and I never expected to have anything to do with him, ever again. Same with Sarah and Dad; when they divorced and she went back to the US, I assumed that it was for good. Her latest comeback was as unlikely as Rocky Seven but it’s happened. Sarah says it was a career move. Yes, and next year I will be the fairy on top of the Christmas tree on the Mound.

I shouldn’t have said what I did to Aileen about her, in the midst of the only major row we ever had. I knew that Sarah detested her, but I was just as sure that Aileen had no thoughts about her at all, that she saw her as being as distant a figure in my dad’s past as my mother is. And there she’s wrong on two counts.

Sarah is in the present and she’s alive; so is my mother, in my father’s heart. Sarah found that out and stopped trying to compete. Aileen? She didn’t even know she was in a contest. She lived in a world that she’d created in which her husband is settled and content, domestically, and in the job about which he was always ambivalent, but which she manoeuvred him into accepting.

Great, until she tried to push him that one step too far and it all went up in smoke. She came to me in the hope that I could put out the fire, and I threw petrol on it by telling her that her predecessor still loved her husband. I’d told her she’d screwed things up, but what had I done myself?

I was by the bin, recycling my sandwich wrapper, when my phone rang again. ‘Yes, Dad,’ I said.

‘You had a call from Aileen?’

‘Yeah,’ I admitted. ‘I’m sorry. I lost it.’

‘You and me both,’ he sighed, ‘last night. We should be ashamed of ourselves, shouldn’t we?’

‘That depends. Were we right on the principle?’

‘Of being against police unification? I believe so, absolutely. Trouble is, Aileen believes the opposite.’

‘And she wants you to subordinate your view to hers, and me too, by implication?’ I put the question to him as if I was leading him, in court. ‘That’s what she expects, yes?’

‘Yes, that’s how it seems. But it works both ways; I recognise that. It’s an impasse.’

‘Will it happen, Pops?’ I asked. ‘The unified force.’

‘It’s shaping up that way,’ he admitted. ‘You only need to look at the numbers. If the Nationalists and Aileen’s crew both back it, then it’ll walk through the parliament. She and Clive Graham probably think I’ll keep quiet if ACPOS support it, but I won’t. Any journo who asks me a straight question will get a straight answer, and I’ll bloody well make sure that I am asked. It won’t make any difference, though, for all the friends I have in the media, and in the parliament itself, because when it comes to it, there won’t be a free vote.’

‘Will you really quit over it?’

‘That’s my intention, although Aileen imagined that I could be bought off with the top job. No chance of that,’ he said emphatically. ‘What would make me reconsider? If you asked me not to, I might not.’

‘If I asked you to betray your principles?’ I exclaimed. ‘Why would I ever do that?’

‘Look, kid, if I go balls out over this I could make myself pretty unpopular with some people with a lot of power. There could be backwash, you know.’

The waves would have to be high, I reckoned, to reach a fifth-floor office in the biggest commercial law firm in Scotland. But they could be as high as the castle that I could see through my window and they wouldn’t make any difference to me.

‘Remember that song,’ I said, ‘the one you used to sing to me when I was wee, in the years after Mum died, whenever I got sad and started to cry because really she wasn’t coming back?’

I could see him smile, as if we were on Skype. ‘Yeah. The one by Paul Williams: wee guy, glasses, dodgy hair; “You and me against the world”. I’ve still got it, you know, that record. It was your mum’s favourite.’

‘Then dig it out and play it, because it was never more true.’

Nobody really understands about my dad and me; there’s a bond that ties us together, one that will never break, although she who formed it has been dead for twenty-five years.