The Ossians Read online

  ‘I don’t think you have much choice,’ said Nick.

  Connor looked at Nick and the knife for a few moments in silence. ‘I don’t suppose I do,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Good,’ said Nick, smiling and putting the knife away. ‘So here, take this.’

  Shug took a small army surplus kitbag off his shoulder and slung it at Connor.

  ‘Inside are four packages,’ said Nick. ‘Each one has got written on it who it’s for, and where you’ll meet them. There’s also a mobile in there. Keep it on you and switched on at all times. The folk you’re dealing with will get in touch before each deal. And I’ll be keeping tabs on you as well. At each drop they’ll exchange packages with you. Just bring me back what they give you. Think you can manage that?’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Connor.

  ‘Is that Jesus yes, no worries, Nick. Or Jesus, no fucking way, I’m a fucking moron and I can’t even tie my own shoelaces?’

  Connor looked from Nick to Shug then back again.

  ‘Jesus yes, no worries, Nick.’

  ‘Good. Now just to show that I’m not totally heartless, here’s a little something for your trouble.’ Nick pulled a plastic bag of white powder out a pocket and threw it at Connor. ‘Speed. You’re not worth coke, and I know you prefer the cheap shit anyway. Consider it an extra wee bonus to keep you going on the road. One last thing, don’t be tempted to open any of the packages. I find out that anything’s missing, or any of these deals have gone tits up, and you’d better never show your sorry fucking face in Edinburgh again. Understand?’

  Connor nodded as he pocketed the speed and shouldered the kitbag. The blood was still dribbling slightly from his nose, but he felt a little better.

  ‘Right,’ said Nick, ‘I think that concludes our business. Remember, keep the phone on, I’ll be checking in from time to time, OK?’

  Nick opened the toilet door and headed out. Shug went to follow, then turned back at the doorway.

  ‘Nice gig, by the way,’ he said. ‘Great band.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Connor as Shug left. He waited in the toilets a few minutes, touching his nose tentatively, and wondering what the fuck he’d just got himself into, then made his way out into the sweaty darkness of the venue. When he reached the table he could tell by the looks he was getting that his nose hadn’t stopped bleeding.

  ‘What the fuck happened to you?’ said Danny.

  ‘Just a wee altercation in the bogs,’ he said, nonchalantly sliding the kitbag under the table. No one seemed to notice, their attention drawn to his bloody face. He waved his hands around and tried to smile. A little blood dripped into his mouth.

  ‘Christ’s sake,’ said Hannah. ‘What kind of altercation?’

  ‘Just some punter had a problem with something I said onstage.’

  Hannah passed him a tissue which he held to his nose.

  ‘You think we should get this looked at?’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be daft, it’s just a bloody nose,’ said Connor. ‘Anyway, we’ve got partying to do.’

  Paul came over to the table, clearing a way through the crowd for a lanky, spindly young man in an expensive leather jacket, the pair talking as they came.

  ‘Jesus, been chasing parked cars again?’ said Paul, looking at Connor’s face.

  The beginning of a black eye was already visible, and a trickle of blood lay just under Connor’s swollen nose. He discovered that his upper lip was bleeding, and he sucked the ferric taste into his mouth.

  ‘Danny gets upset when I muck about with arrangements onstage,’ he said smiling at Paul, then Danny, who just shook his head.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Paul, ‘this is Jerry Gould, he’s the A&R for K2 records, flown up specially to see you.’

  The man offered a thin, cautious hand to Connor, who shook it aggressively, then he nodded acknowledgements to the rest of them. He seemed nervous and excited.

  ‘I thought you guys rocked!’ he said. ‘I mean, totally fucking rocked. I’ve got the three EPs and they’re great and everything, but The Ossians are just amazing live, really.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Hannah. ‘Glad you liked it.

  ’Paul butted in. ‘Jerry says K2 are very interested in working with The Ossians. He’s bringing the label boss up for the Glasgow gig.’

  ‘He’s not really like a big boss,’ said Jerry. ‘He’s just a guy, you know? I’m definitely going to recommend that we sign you, but he always likes to see what’s going on for himself. When he sees you in Glasgow, he’ll be fucking blown away. It’s just his kind of thing – music with bollocks, but also with brains. I can’t wait to hear what else you’ve got coming up.’

  ‘The next EP’s already half-written,’ said Connor, fidgeting with the bag strap under the table. ‘It’s called Argentina ’78 and it’s about Scottish national identity.’

  ‘First we’ve heard about it,’ said Kate.

  ‘It’s a work in progress.’

  ‘I think we need to talk about shit like that,’ said Kate, ‘before you go shooting your mouth off.’

  ‘Easy,’ said Paul. ‘Jerry’s just saying that K2 are totally into the band.’

  ‘Look, I’ll leave you guys to it,’ said Jerry, as Paul placed an arm on his shoulder and gently angled him away from the table. ‘But we’ll talk more at the Glasgow gig, yeah? And you can meet the boss. It’s been good talking to you.’

  ‘Yeah, good meeting you, Jerry,’ said Connor sarcastically, but Jerry and Paul were already out of earshot. He turned to the table.

  ‘What about him, eh? What a corporate fucking dicksplash.’

  ‘What’s your problem?’ said Kate, glaring. ‘He was just saying he liked us. You seem to be happy enough taking praise off fifteen-year-old girls, but not grown men who work for record labels.’

  ‘I just didn’t trust him.’

  ‘You only spoke to him for two bloody seconds, what are you on about? You’ve got some serious problems dealing with people, you know that?’

  ‘I deal with you lot OK, don’t I?’

  ‘I wouldn’t ask that if I were you,’ said Kate. ‘And anyway, we know what you’re like. We’re used to it. I’m not sure the wider world is ready for your little quirks.’

  Connor was desperate to look inside the bag. He assumed he was carrying drugs or money, or maybe both, but who knew with Nick Simpson? That guy was fucking trouble, and now Connor was up to his arse in the shit along with him. Jesus. He needed a drink.

  ‘Whose round is it?’

  ‘Mine,’ said Danny, raising his bulk out the booth. ‘Same again?’

  Connor took Hannah by the hand. He had to try and calm down.

  ‘Right, about that dance we were going to have,’ he said.

  ‘Are you asking?’

  ‘I’m asking.’

  ‘Then I suppose I’m dancing.’

  Even at four o’clock on a winter morning, the sky above Edinburgh wasn’t dark. Bulging orange clouds raced overhead, bouncing streetlight back down to earth as the leafless trees in the Meadows swayed hesitantly.

  A stream of drunk people headed through the park down Jawbone Walk, away from the city centre. A trio of girls in short skirts were clinging to each other and singing Kylie. Two teenage boys stood by a large cherry tree, one resting his hand on the other’s back as his friend puked up the night’s intake. Over to the west a Gothic church spire split the purple edge of sky, as eerie white steam from the breweries drifted upwards behind it.

  The five of them made their way home like twigs in the stream of people around them. Danny and Kate walked arm in arm sharing a bag of chips, while Hannah toked a joint alongside. Behind them Connor and Paul were propping each other up and moving as much sideways as forwards.

  Connor felt peaceful. His headache was gone and his face had stopped hurting. He felt his lip with his tongue, it was swollen and raw but there was no pain for now. He saw his sister, best friend and girlfriend up ahead and felt a skelf of love jab his heart. He knew exactly how to
wind them all up and could never resist doing so. They’d come to expect this, which made him subconsciously conjure up new ways of pissing them off.

  He knew he drank too much, but he didn’t have a drink problem. It became a problem when you couldn’t handle it, right? When it was affecting your life and your relationships for the worse? All his mates got drunk all the time, just like him. Kate had told him recently that he didn’t drink for fun. He was having fun now, wasn’t he? She’d also accused him of thinking too much. How the hell do you think too much? That’s like saying you breathe too much. But then you can hyperventilate. So could you hyperthink? Better to think too much than too little. He realised he was thinking about it too much.

  ‘What’re you thinking, Boy Wonder?’ Paul whispered loudly.

  ‘Just thinking about thinking too much.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Something Kate said.’

  ‘She’s dead right, you do think too much.’ Paul squinted at Connor. ‘Hey, have you always had that bag?’

  Connor clutched the kitbag closer to his shoulder. When they’d got chucked out the Liquid Room at closing he’d almost forgotten about it hidden under the table, which would’ve been a fantastic way of fucking up this whole ridiculous thing before it even got started. He was desperate to look inside. He felt nervous carrying it, keen to get home and stash it safely. Up until now, the rest of them had been too drunk to notice him carrying it.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Got my guitar shit in it – leads, pedals and stuff. Plus my lyric notebooks. Didn’t want to risk leaving them in the van overnight.’

  Paul shrugged. Connor looked across the park at the steeple needling the sky. Patches of low cloud sped overhead but beyond that he couldn’t see the moon or stars.

  ‘That’s the problem with this fucking city,’ he said, pointing upwards. Paul followed his finger.

  ‘What, the sky?’

  ‘See the stars?’

  Paul stumbled forwards.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Exactly. Sometimes you just want to look at the stars, don’t you? But you can’t cos of all this fucking streetlighting everywhere. If you go to the countryside the sky’s jam-packed with fucking stars, but here you can’t see shit. All those alien civilisations millions of light years away, and what do we do? Block it all out. What if they’re trying to contact us right now, and we can’t detect it because of some stupid fucking street lamp? How shit would that be?’

  ‘You think that’s happening?’

  ‘Probably. How the fuck would we know? That’s the real reason I want to get out of here – to see the stars. To see millions of years into the past. To see all those other fucked-up worlds and find out if they’re as useless as we are. Fucking streetlights.’

  He lashed out a foot and booted the bottom of the light they were passing. It rattled a little. Something caught Connor’s eye – a black, shadowy shape on the unlit grass moving parallel to them.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Just a dog,’ said Paul, following Connor’s gaze.

  ‘Looks more like a big cat to me,’ said Connor. ‘There are loads of big-cat sightings in Scotland, you know.’

  ‘Yeah, but not in the Meadows,’ said Paul. ‘That’s up in the mountains and shit.’

  The dark figure turned and paced alongside the path twenty feet away. It came forwards, its quick feet and flat, downward tail flickering at the edge of the shadows as it was exposed. A fox. It stood and looked at them for a second before trotting off towards some nearby bins.

  ‘Maybe we’ll see some wild animals up north,’ said Connor. ‘Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!’

  ‘I don’t know what you think this tour is going to be like,’ said Paul. ‘Scotland’s not exactly a fucking jungle. What are you expecting, a bloody safari?’

  They were walking under the arch at the bottom of the path, heading towards the Marchmont Road flat that Connor, Hannah and Danny rented between them. The arch was twelve feet high and made of a whale’s jawbone. It had stood there for a hundred and fifty years and it looked worn and tired.

  ‘Reckon this is the real Moby Dick?’ said Connor, slapping the bone. ‘Old Father Abraham, or whatever his name was, searching all those years for the white whale and here it is, sitting at the arse end of a park in Edinburgh, rotting away and no one gives a flying fuck.’

  ‘Father Abraham was with the Smurfs,’ said Paul. ‘You mean Captain Ahab.’

  ‘That’s what this tour is, our search for Moby Dick,’ said Connor as they closed on the other three. ‘You think I’ll make a good Captain Ahab?’

  ‘Didn’t Captain Ahab die?’ said Paul. ‘You’d be better off as Father Abraham.’

  ‘Come on, there’s more bevvying to be done,’ said Danny as they left the Meadows. He looked at Connor and cocked his head sideways. ‘Hey, you always had that bag?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Connor. Fuck’s sake, he thought.

  ‘What have you two been talking about?’ said Hannah, falling back in line with Connor and Paul.

  ‘The stars, big cats and Moby Dick,’ said Connor.

  ‘And the Smurfs,’ said Paul.

  ‘Just the usual, then?’ said Hannah. She leant in, kissed Connor softly on his swollen lip and passed him the remains of a joint.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Connor. ‘And we’re not even properly stoned. Yet.’

  2

  South Queensferry

  ‘Beacon, guide us through the winter dark

  Linger in our souls, cling around our hearts’

  The Ossians, ‘RLS’

  Connor woke with his hands folded across his chest like an Egyptian mummy in a tomb. Thin light filtered through the curtains giving the room a washed-out, fuzzy look. He’d thrown the duvet off in his sleep, and Hannah lay curled up next to him in black pants, her pale knee bent over his leg, her head nuzzling into his shoulder. He looked at the clock. 10:33 blinked at him. He’d slept for two hours.

  A siren sounded far away and quickly faded, leaving only the sound of Hannah’s breathing and the faint peal of church bells. He felt crushingly tired, yet couldn’t sleep. He hadn’t slept well for months now, and in the morning sometimes felt like he was encased in a coffin of cotton wool.

  He was still drunk, stoned and speeding. He reached for a half-smoked joint in the ashtray next to the bed, lit it and inhaled. He looked at Hannah. Her sedate face was more human than anything he’d seen in the mirror recently. She’d always had a sense of calm; that was one of the reasons he was drawn to her. They’d met five years ago, when he was nineteen and she’d just turned twenty-one. Inevitably, it was at a gig – The Twilight Singers at the Venue. Connor was standing at the bar when he noticed her. Her red hair was longer then and her face slightly sharper, but her eyes were just as bright and her body just as tightly packed.

  ‘Do you fancy him?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was just asking if you fancied him,’ he said, pointing at the stage. ‘Greg Dulli?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she laughed. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Of course. How could you not?’

  He bought her a drink, they got talking, she bought him a drink back. Later they danced and drank and discovered they were both in bands, and split an E between them. Later still, at a party in someone’s flat, they spent several hours on a sofa with their noses almost touching, discussing which parts of their own bodies they disliked most, comparing them and laughing. By the morning they were buying trainers on Princes Street, spaced through lack of sleep, their eccy comedown and the new rush of feelings. He still wore the trainers.

  Connor looked at her now in bed. Before he’d met Hannah he’d never gone for older women, but with her it was different straight away. OK, there were only two years in it, but at that age two years still seemed a big deal. Hannah had always been more mature, more honest and more purposeful than him. It made perfect sense that she was a teacher now, she’d always instinctively been drawn towards helping others, and good at comm
unicating with kids. Some of that was no doubt down to growing up with a much younger stepsister and stepbrother. That was another thing – her resilience. She was an only child stuck in the middle of a divorce when she was ten, yet she’d never taken sides, and always got along with both her parents and their new partners. Her mum had chucked her dad out of their Leith Walk flat after one too many disastrous drunken gambling sessions but, following a spell inside, her dad had cleaned up, got his shit together, found a new woman and even held down a steady job. Her mum, meanwhile, had hooked up with a lecturer at the further education college where she worked as secretary, moved to a colony flat in Leith Links, and had two more kids. Hannah took it all in her stride. She was the first from either side of the family to go to college or uni, and her parents were immensely proud of that fact. She was faintly embarrassed by their enthusiasm, but at the same time kind of proud of herself, too.

  One year of university had been enough to convince Connor that higher education wasn’t for him. He’d been a little obsessed with maths at school, all those cryptic sequences, symbols and equations. He thought there might be a key to understanding the world in all that abstract space. He thought that imposing the structure of geometry on the universe might help it make more sense. He could never have expressed any of this, it was just there in the gloomy recesses of his mind, never enough to grab hold of. But hours of dry lectures and blackboard scribbles killed his interest, and he dropped out. Since then his life had been a master class in avoiding responsibility. All his jobs had been no-brainers, easy to perform, impossible to care about. Just the way he liked it. The band was the purpose, at least that’s what he clung to for now.