‘Okay, Mam. Be well.’
I cried off, feeling nothing but deep misgivings about the call. I needed to pay my mother a visit soon. Whether she wanted me to or not.
I was rattled, checked about the boat for a stowaway bottle of scoosh to top up my coffee. I found some empties, but nothing I could put to use.
I had a habit to feed; my nerves were jangling. I tanned the coffee and hit the street.
The scaffies were out, hosing down the pavement. I liked the aura of early morning — it felt like the end of the world, which suited my mood. Orange streetlights still fizzed away overhead; occasionally a whole street of lights would go out and jolt my senses. Though the roads were empty, every now and again white van man came rattling over the cobbles as he went to drop off the morning papers. In days gone by you might have seen a postman… how things have changed.
I knew a pub off Constitution Street that opened at six in the a.m. It was a tradition for the dockers to come off the night shift, get a pint on the way home. Now it was full to bursting with jakeys and addicts. Boys just off the boat looking for a bit of Dutch courage before assessing their first move in a new city.
I put in an order: ‘Pint, chaser — double it.’
The pint was poured in quick time, no standing period, slung before me by a heavyset barman who had all the sympathy of a contestant on Runaround.
I put the double to bed smartish, let the pint go down slower. When it hit the halfway mark I downed it and left the bar. I could have stayed till closing but I had a different mission today — to find Tupac.
If there were buses going down this end of town at this time, I didn’t see any. Blame the trams. Edinburgh had signed up for a?700 million new tram system, the installation of which entailed the ripping-up of Leith Walk. Traders were going out of business every day of the week. But they were sole traders. As if the powers that be gave a fuck about anyone that wasn’t one of their players.
I schlepped through the town. I needed the air anyway, but could have done without the exercise. Sure, I needed that too. However, whether I could handle it was another question. I got as far as the west end of Princes Street when I decided enough was enough, flagged a Joe Baxi and took the road out past the zoo to Corstorphine Hill. I had Fitz’s description of Tupac to go on, that and the fact that he ‘lived on the hill’ would make him easy to find. Surely.
I schlepped all over, through dub and mire. It felt unsettling to be back near the scene of Moosey’s murder. The place I once knew as a beauty spot had changed; more and more this city was revealing its true nature to me. In the most brutal ways imaginable. Try as they might to paint the place as a capital of culture, as ‘genteel’ Edinburgh, I knew the real deal. They could stick their tartan troosers, their tea towels with the castle on, and the Scott Monument shortbread tins, I knew what this joint was made of, and it was rotten through.
I thought of the absurdity of my situation. Corrupt police were putting me in the frame for a man’s murder — a man who was widely believed to have been responsible for a toddler’s brutal killing that the courts couldn’t make stick. And now, here I was, in city parkland, chasing down a septuagenarian witness who was living rough in one of the richest countries in Europe. If we’d had a Scottish Enlightenment in Edinburgh I missed that meeting. The state of the city made me want to spit bullets.
I marched on but by midday I was ready to jack it, then I found what in my boyhood would have been called a den. A rough shelter under a tree, an old bit of carpet laid down and a few sheets of chipboard to keep out the elements. I pulled a pile of newspapers down and made myself an approximation of a chair. I settled into a David Goodis novel that I was carrying, The Moon in the Gutter, and waited for Tupac to return.
I was rereading the last page of the book, skipping back and looking for the bit where the story gets wrapped up in a neat little bow and delighted to find it wasn’t there, when a figure loomed out of the distance. It was an old man, bent over with a heavy rucksack on his back and a smaller, though equally well stuffed, one on his front.
I stood up, crossed the ground to meet him and gave a wave. ‘You’d be Tupac, then.’
Chapter 25
He was an old soak with a nose you could open bottles with and he must have been seventy-five if he was a day. His face was girded with burst veins, red patches and the kind of battered features you associate with a life on the road. Tupac ran a gnarled hand over his forehead, fingers yellow with nicotine, nails yellower yet, said, ‘Christ, I’ve never been so popular.’
I offered him my hand to shake. ‘I’m Gus… Gus Dury.’
He smiled, so wide his one tooth in the side of his gob got an airing. It looked like a tombstone dangling over his jaw. ‘The fella from the papers!’
I felt a warmth suffuse my cheeks. ‘Aye, that’s me.’
‘I saw your story, the murder thing.’ He waved his hand over the hill, like he was signifying his own estate, then removed his heavy packs and hid them behind the den, covering them with the chipboard and some branches. ‘I’ve followed a few of your stories over the years, but it’s been a while since I mind seeing you.’
Why I felt surprised to hear a tramp had been reading the papers, when his shelter was stacked with them, I’d no idea, said, ‘Yeah, well, sometimes it’s a long time between drinks.’
Tupac smacked his lips; I’d caught his attention. He spoke: ‘Sometimes it is that.’
I played up to him. ‘I was wondering if I could get you a pint.. It’s a chat I’m after really, but if you’ve got the time for a quick jar…’
He yelled, excited as a five-year-old, ‘I’ll take ye up on the offer, Gus Dury!’
The barmaid looked about eighteen, an age group I’d been paying a lot of attention to these days. Not perving, far from it. On top of the dog-abusing little bastards I had my eye out for, and the anniversary that Debs had reminded me was on the way — as if I needed reminding — there was also the lingering feeling of my own mortality creeping up on me.
In the last few years I had aged terribly. I’d managed to skip the whole bloated, pot-bellied, middle-age- spread deal and go straight to gaga decrepitude. I woke in agonies of aches running the length of my body. My back alone took an hour or so each morning to become usable. In the last few weeks I’d also started to suffer terrible blackouts. I’d had those before on the drink but my memory had always remained patchy throughout them. Now each blackout brought… nothingness.
Still, I liked to fool myself it was all a matter of signing off the sauce for a few weeks. A bit of healthy eating, taking up my five portions, maybe, dare I say it, exercise. If I could grab some rays while I was at it, surely that would be all I needed to fire myself back to the level of health I’d previously enjoyed.
Surely it would.
Like fuck it would.
I knew I’d played Russian roulette with my body and my mental well-being for so long that I was beyond saving. I was a washed-up wreck and no amount of denial was going to paper over those cracks.
I played a line from Blake: ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’ Nice try, son.
I knew the real facts of the matter — the road of excess leads to the road of excess.
‘That’ll be six-fifty,’ said the barmaid.
I stared at my new buddy. He didn’t look like he’d eaten. I said, ‘You could do with some meat on those bones.’
‘No, no. I’m fine on the pint.’
I sensed he was being polite. I pushed the issue, ‘A bowl of soup?’
The barmaid backed me up, ‘It’s Scotch broth… and it comes with soda bread.’
Tupac put his face close to my own. His breath could turn milk, ‘Maybe a bowl of broth would be just the trick.’
I could tell this was all very embarrassing for him, but he had such an air of humanity that the barmaid didn’t even acknowledge his battered appearance, the rank smell coming from him. Truth told, she probably thought we were just another pair of jakes making the most of giro day.
She left us with a smile. Flash of bright blue eyes. She was a heartbreaker; I wanted to look out for her. God, you’re getting on when you look at eighteen-year-old girls and feel protective of them. I wondered about myself
