'Perfect. I'd come along on Thursday, but I might not be here. I'm leaving; probably just a holiday, but I'm going tonight. Or tomorrow mornmg, anyway.
McCann didn't look surprised. 'Aw aye? Where aboots ye goin?'
I took a deep breath. 'Arisaig.'
There are times when you can't do the sensible thing, when you can't act like a responsible adult at all; you just have to do whatever insane thing comes into your head. When bad people do it they end up murderers, when good people do it they end up heroes, and when the rest of us do it we end up looking like total idiots. But when's that ever stopped us?
I'd got the train back to Glasgow Central, couldn't see the shuttle bus for Queen Street, judged it would take ten minutes for me to get to the front of the taxi queue, so walked the quarter mile. There were only two trains a day to Arisaig on a Tuesday, and I'd just missed the last one — the 1650 to Mallaig — by five minutes. I'd stared down at the empty tracks, fuming.
Then I calmed down and tried to think rationally — however inappropriate that might have been, given my current state of mind. I was crazy doing this anyway, but I was totally mad to think about going right now. I had to see McCann; I'd agreed to meet him, and I still didn't know what was happening about Wee Tommy. There were a couple of other things I had to do as well.
I went to see when the next train was and picked up a timetable. 0550 tomorrow; ten to six in the morning, for God's sake; a sleeper from London. I bought a ticket and booked a seat (first class; old habits die hard). Due in to Arisaig at 1118. I got myself a cheapo digital watch in the station and set the alarm for 5 a.m. It seemed like a long time to wait. I had a horrible feeling I'd talk myself out of it by then.
Oh heck, might as well go the whole hog...
I ran to Macrae, Fietch and Warren's again, had the receptionist ring the Griff to say I'd be there in half an hour, and caught Mr Douglas before he left the office.
'I beg your pardon, Mr Weir?' he said when I told him what I wanted to do. He'd gone a bit pale.
'It's perfectly simple,' I told him, still breathing hard from the run. 'Let's get my Will out and we can have it drawn up from that in five minutes.' It took twenty, and Mr Douglas frowned when we took out the bit about being of sound mind, but it was done.
'I cannot believe, Mr Weir,' old Douglas said, adding weight to his words by the slow removal of his half-moon glasses, 'that you are not going to regret this... hasty decision.'
'I'm sure I shall,' I agreed, feeling pompous. 'But it has to be done.'
Mr Douglas just sighed. He'd refused to do it at all (referring to my 'excited and agitated state') at first; we compromised by dating it for the following day, to give me time to change my mind. I signed it and caught a taxi to the Griff.
'Whit?' McCann said.
I jangled the keys under his nose. 'It's yours. Take them. I've kept the Holland Street key because I'm going to stay there the night. As of tomorrow; all yours.' (Technically a lie, but what the hell.)
'You fuckin crazy ?' McCann had never looked so puzzled, or so worried (not even in Monty's).
'McCann, I've been crazy for years; you know that. Will you take the goddamn keys?' McCann drank from his beer glass, looking sideways at the keys in my hand. He shook his head. 'Naw; Ah want tae know whit's goan on.'
'McCann,' I said, despairing, 'it's perfectly simple; I've had some very bad and... maybe, some very good news, over the last couple of days. I came close to killing myself... or I think I came close... But even then I was,' I waved my hands in the air, jangling the keys, 'I was of sound mind. I still am, and I'm going to go over the hills and far away, to see an old friend who mayor may well not be pleased to see me but I've got to see her... and, anyway, I need to make a break, I need to get away from myself. I've seen my lawyer and what's going to happen is it's going to be as if I had died; I've signed a document which more or less has the same effect as my will; all the money goes.
'You get the folly and everything in it. Do whatever you want with it. At the moment everything in the folly includes a pigeon, and you've got to make sure it gets out somehow, also there may be some tapes and stuff like that, and a few personal things, but otherwise it's all yours. Also, I want you to see a woman called Betty gets in touch with my lawyers too. She'll turn up at the folly; you'll know her.
'I'm getting the early train tomorrow and for all I know I might be on the next one back, in which case I'll see you in here tomorrow and we'll both go to court on Thursday; or I might be away longer. It depends. All I'm asking you to do is keep in touch with my lawyers to check out what happens with Wee Tommy, and take the keys of the folly.'
I held the keys out again. McCann glared suspiciously at me. 'Please, McCann,' I said. 'Don't do this to me. I know I don't deserve it; I lied to you and I'm sorry... but please, please take the keys. It's important to me.'
McCann put his glass down. He looked at the keys in my hand, then into my eyes. He took the keys from me, eyes narrowing.
'If this is a joke, Ah'll break your fuckin neck, pal.'
I sat back laughing, but with a niggling worry in the pit of my belly, thinking about Glen Webb, and wondering at what might be my own absurd gullibility. 'If this is a joke,' I told McCann, thinking of the wild coasts beyond Arisaig, 'you probably won't need to.'
And so I sat in the Griffin bar with my friend McCann, and after a few drinks it was almost as it always had been, and we talked and laughed and I told him a little about my previous life, and I don't think he believed me when I told him how much money there was, or where it was going (but he approved, in theory), and I reassured him I wasn't going to be broke, even though the future royalties from all the old stuff would be distributed as well. A gentleman called Mr Richard Tumber was going to get a phonecall in a day or two which would delight and amaze him. I'd make a new record, but I was starting from nothing again; I needed an advance.
We left, and McCann went home and I went back to St Jute's and tried to sleep but couldn't, so sat up, in my high tower, on a vigil in which I looked out over part of the city and part of my life, remembering and regretting and re-living and sometimes smiling to myself, and realised that there were an awful lot of things in my life I hadn't got round to, and killing myself was just another one of them, and knew that I was doing a foolish thing, but that sometimes only foolish things worked.
In fact I was doing two foolish things, which is exactly one more than you're ever allowed to get away with at the same time ... but that couldn't be helped, because both giving it all away, and going off on an absurd, naive, immaturely romantic and probably doomed quest for an old love were required; they were the only possible things I could think of which might get me out of the rut, the inwardly spiralling groove I seemed to have been in for the past few years. So I had burned my bridges and I was leaping before I'd looked and I was already anticipating repenting at leisure. What am I doing? I asked myself.
Espedair Street. I worked on the song through the night, verse and chorus, not using a guitar or the keyboards but just singing it to myself in my head and gradually working it out. I wrote the words down on the back of Glen Webb's card, in tiny, tiny writing.
It wasn't really Espedair Street or Ferguslie Park or anywhere you could point to on a map; it was somewhere of a different sort, an amalgam of places and feelings and times, and a place only I knew about. The song was finished before it was time for me to go.
I left a saucer of milk and some crumbled bread and biscuits out for the pigeon, then went down to the crypt and gathered up the back-up master tape of all the songs and music I'd been working on over the past year or so. I should really have told McCann I might want to come back and use the studio for a wee while, but I'd forgotten. Maybe I could rent the place from him for a few weeks. Whatever. Not to worry.