‘Ask,’ the third man in the car said.
At the top of the hill a small obelisk with a railing round it was outlined against the sky. On a bench beside it two men sat and a third stood with his foot on the bench, nodding towards the others. In the hollow of the hill, where the car was, there were mainly closed shops. A building that claimed to have been a garage was empty and derelict. Asphalt patches in front of it might have been where the pumps were. The owner’s name was a conundrum of missing letters – Mac- something. The only indication of life between them and the men at the top of the hill was outside the Mayfair Café. The name was carried on a white electric sign, not yet lit, projecting from the wall. The letters declaring the name were slightly smaller than those beneath, which announced a brand of cigarettes, so that it was as if the identity of this place, obviously a focal point of the village, was dependent on a company that had no connections here.
Five teenagers were standing outside the café, two boys and three girls. One of the boys, the smaller one, was doing an intricate but very contained soft-shoe shuffle with his hands out, palms towards his friends. He was wearing jeans and a black tee-shirt, sleeves rolled up to show his biceps. The others were laughing. Eddie Foley put the car in gear, eased along the kerb towards them and stopped. He loosened his seat-belt, leaned across the empty passenger seat and pressed a button. The window hummed down slowly enough for the group on the pavement to become aware of it. The dancer gave his friends a theatrical display of amazement and leaned down towards the open window.
‘That was terrific, mister,’ he said. ‘Could ye do it again?’
‘Thornbank?’ Eddie Foley said.
‘Naw,’ the dancer said. ‘My name’s Wilson.’
‘I’m looking for Thornbank.’
‘If ye give us a lift, we’ll take ye.’
‘It’s either right or left or straight on,’ one of the girls said.
The wit of it crippled the others with laughter. They leaned helplessly on one another and the girl herself had to admit how good it was, her pink hair coming to rest on the shoulder of the taller boy. Eddie Foley pressed the button and the window went up as the car moved off.
‘The natives don’t seem very friendly,’ he said.
‘Maybe we shoulda brought some coloured beads,’ Billy Fleming said.
‘Children,’ the third man said, ‘grow up into shites quicker every year.’
He was a small man with thinning hair. He wore nice rings and he had grey eyes that were so cold the flecks in them could have been crushed ice. He was Matt Mason.
Eddie Foley took the car up the hill and stopped across the road from the three men at the bench. He got out of the car and went over to them. Two of them looked about forty. The one with his foot on the bench must have been over sixty. He was the one who spoke.
‘Yes, sir. Can we help ye?’
‘I’m looking for Thornbank.’
‘Ye’re well out yer way here,’ one of the men on the bench said. ‘Where ye comin’ from?’
‘Glasgow.’
‘Ye woulda been better holding the dual carriageway tae outside Ayr,’ the third man said.
‘Ye’re wrong, Rab,’ the older man said.
In the car Matt Mason and Billy Fleming watched but couldn’t hear what was being said. They saw the conspiratorial noddings of the three men before they formed into an advisory committee for Eddie. They saw the pointing gestures, one of the seated men standing up and doing an elaborate mime of directions. They saw Eddie nodding towards the obelisk. In the soft light of late evening the scene had a simple dignity, four men silhouetted against the vastness of the sky in a mime of small preoccupations.
‘What’s he doing?’ Matt Mason said. ‘Getting a history of the place?’
Eddie came back across and got in the car. He waved as he drove away and the three men waved back.
‘Ah know where we’re goin’ now,’ he said. ‘They were nice men.’
‘We’re not here to socialise,’ Matt Mason said.
‘That was a monument they were sittin’ beside. To the men from the village. Died in the First and Second World Wars. One of them was holdin’ somethin’. Some kinda tool. Ah hadny a clue what it was for. Imagine that. Ye would think ye would know what it was for. Ah mean, this isny Mars.’
‘Is it not?’ Billy Fleming said and glanced across at Matt Mason for confirmation of his sneer.
Matt Mason looked back at him and then looked down at Billy Fleming’s trainer shoe resting on the back of the driving seat. The foot came off the seat and rested on the floor. Billy Fleming checked that the fawn upholstery wasn’t marked.
The black and white trainer shoes were part of a strange ensemble. They were topped by jeans and then a black polo-neck cashmere sweater, over which he wore an expensive-looking grey mohair jacket. It gave him an appearance as dual as a centaur. Above, he was a kind of sophistication; below, he was all roughness and readiness to scuffle. The face linked the two: a bland superciliousness overlaid features that bore the traces of impromptu readjustment.
‘Ah was goin’ to ask what it was,’ Eddie said. That tool thing. But Ah felt such a mug, Ah didn’t bother.’
Neither of the other two responded, and Eddie pursued the subject in his mind. The strange object the man had held and the solemnity in the darkening air of those names carved on the obelisk – names he imagined would mean much to most people in the village – had combined to make him feel what strangers they were here, the carelessness of their coming, rough and sudden as a raiding-party. He had sensed in the talk with them a formed and complicated life about the place, a strong awareness among them of who they were, mysterious yet coherent with a coherence he couldn’t understand. It was an uncomfortable feeling, as if he were a hick from the city.
The atmosphere in the car intensified the feeling. They seemed to be travelling within where they had come from. The plush upholstery appeared foreign to the places they were passing through. With the exception of Billy’s jeans and trainers, their city clothes would have looked out of place outside, as if they had come dressed for the wrong event. The smoke from Matt Mason’s cigar surrounded them, cocooning them in themselves.
Negotiating the winding ways, Eddie felt himself subject to the unexpected nature of events, the way an outcrop of land suddenly threw the road to the left, the recalcitrance of a hill. These roads were less invention than discovery. They weren’t merely asphalt conveyor belts along which sealed capsules fired people from one identity to the next as if they had dematerialised in the one place and rematerialised in the other. These roads made you notice them, rushed trees towards you, flung them over your shoulder, laid out a valley, flicked a flight of birds into your vision. They made Eddie aware of a countryside his ignorance of which was beginning to oppress him with questions that baffled him. What kind of people would live in that isolated farm on the hill? What kind of trees were they?
‘Flowers,’ he said suddenly. ‘The names of flowers. Ah always wanted to know a bit about that. Ah canny tell one from another. That’s true. Ah’ve got bother tellin’ a daisy from a dandelion.’
‘Six,’ Billy Fleming said. ‘That was a cracker. Only thing that wasn’t mashed tae a pulp was its beak. Definitely the prize-winner.’
Eddie became aware of Matt Mason’s silence. He had learned to be wary of that silence. He decided to push his misgivings aside. He was here on a job for Matt Mason. It wouldn’t do to confuse his loyalties.
‘Fast Frankie’s not too hot on the directions,’ he said, reidentifying himself with the other two and their purposes. ‘Ah hope his information’s more reliable. Ye think the big man’s what he says he