Phantom Limb E-Book

Chris Kohler

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 540

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'Mesmerising... the work of a writer possessed of a rare power and vision' Daily Telegraph One evening, Gillis - a young Scottish minister who technically doesn't believe in god - falls into a hole left by a recently dug up elm tree and discovers an ancient disembodied hand in the soil. He's about to rebury it when the hand... beckons to him. He spirits it back to his manse and gives it pen and paper, whereupon it begins to doodle scratchy and anarchic visions. Somewhere, in the hand's deep history, there lies a story of the Scottish reformation, of art and violence, and of its owner long since dead. But for Gillis, there lies only opportunity: to reinvent himself as a prophet, proclaim the hand a miracle and use it for reasons both sacred and profane... to impress his ex-girlfriend, and to lead himself and his country out of inertia and into a dynamic, glorious future.

Leseprobe

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2024 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2025 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Chris Kohler, 2024

The moral right of Chris Kohler to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

EBook ISBN: 978 1 80546 082 4

Atlantic Books

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To be yersel’s – and to mak’ that worth bein’, Nae harder job to mortals has been gi’en.

Hugh MacDiarmid

For Kathryn

CHAPTER ONE

It was his eighth funeral of that week. Like a conductor clipping a ticket, the dead needed him to get them into the ground. Even a few months ago, it had been a job like any other, black shoes and jacket, iron your shirt, comb your hair. But it was beginning to weigh on him. The mourners kept calling him Father.

‘That’s the Catholics,’ one said.

‘What do you call the others then?’

‘Just by their name.’

The men talked amongst themselves, then turned to stare at him. His first name had drifted away in the last years of primary school. Overtaken by several similarly named boys who had promised to share. He had to admit that everyone called him Gillis.

‘What’s that, Irish?’

‘Thought you said you weren’t Catholic?’ The man jabbed his elbow into the minister as he passed over a glass of whisky.

‘I knew a Gillis at school. Funny guy. Kept to himself, thought he was an athlete. . . Is that you? No? Can’t be. . . you’re a minister?’

Given the opportunity to explain himself, he didn’t bother.

‘The running didn’t work out.’

His lungs had not been deep enough. His legs had not been long enough. His eyes watered in the cold. He went through a pair of trainers every couple of months.

‘That’s a shame. What happened?’

‘Knees.’ Gillis looked down at his suit trousers, and the men nodded.

‘I mind you running at school,’ the schoolmate pointed at him. ‘Away round the football pitches. All on his own. Rain. Snow. Frost. No bother.’

Gillis smiled. ‘I know.’

‘Still get out?’

‘Not with the knees. I can’t.’

‘A proper champion though, weren’t you? Like UK wide. Got medals and all that?’

Gillis nodded. ‘I ran in England.’

The men smiled. ‘Oh, England.’

Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester, once in London, second and third places, a few finals and qualifiers, some participation medals. Then, the disaster that brought on the knees. After all that, a job in a printer’s office, in a hotel, in a shop warehouse. The draught, and then the dregs. He had come back home a few years ago.

‘What have you done to yourself?’ his dad had asked. He had always been a happy boy. Now, too nervous to leave a room or start a conversation, let alone renounce a tradition, he had gone back to the old kirk, where his granny had taken him to Sunday school. He sat with her in the pews. Helped her make the teas and coffees. The minister, and the deacons, and all the old folk remembered him. They seemed to think his life was ahead of him. The minister was retiring – and dying, though he didn’t know it yet. And the Lord asked, ‘Whom shall I send?’ The silence was deafening. Out of politeness, Gillis answered, ‘Send me.’

‘Listen.’ The old minister had taken Gillis to one side. ‘It’s not a bad job. The wages aren’t much, but you get the manse guaranteed, and a motor, and you’ll have your mornings and evenings. Mostly it’s just hospital, funeral, home by five.’

He was thirty-one. In a photograph on his granny’s shelf, he held a degree in Divinity like a cudgel.

The mourners were bored. An old man had died. He loved the wife he’d left. And the children he’d disowned. He loved the hills he hadn’t climbed in thirty years. And the football team whose players he couldn’t name. They watched impatiently as tricky corners of cling film were picked from silver oblongs covered in sandwiches, and broad bowls of crisps were set down.

‘Help yourselves, folks.’

With a sandwich, a sausage and a whisky all balanced in one hand, Gillis accepted a pint, and then another. He smiled though his mouth was full. People liked to get the minister a drink, and thank him for his lovely words. They looked at him as though he was a boy, new to the world, blushing and blinking, asking silly questions, wanting impossible answers.

There was a toast, and Gillis poured his whisky into a half-downed pint. His back was slapped and his hand was shaken.

‘That’s what I like to see,’ they said.

The dead man’s cousin stood on a chair at the back of the pub, his baldy head wavering close to a flickering light bulb. He raised his glass, and the chattering stopped.

‘May we all go at life like Sandy did. He never asked what his duty was, to him it was simple. And as for his pleasures, they were simple too. He liked to have a drink, and he loved to smoke. So he smoked! And he didn’t care who he was around. Whether it was bairns and babies, he smoked from the age of seven to the age of seventy-eight. For Sandy.’

The man pressed his glass into the crook of his elbow to free his fingers, pushed a cigarette between his lips and passed the packet down to a woman who was grappling at his legs, trying to hold him steady. He leant on her shoulder as he sparked the cigarette and repeated, ‘For Sandy!’ The mourners laughed, and the old men took out their lighters and fag packets as the barman ran around shouting, ‘Not in here, not in here!’

‘Leave us alone, ya bastard,’ yelled the cousin, but as he tried to step down, his body ran the length of the woman holding him up and his belt buckle snagged at her necklace and collar. The old man unhooked himself, found his feet and griped about freedom. Can a grown man not smoke in peace? Can folk not mind their own business any more? What in hell was happening to this country? Then the cigarettes were blunted on tables or nipped and stored away, or taken out into the rain, and the dead man’s cousin disappeared and when he returned he had tears on his face, and the barman had his arm around him. ‘I know, I know,’ he said.

A baby gurned in the darkest corner of the pub, bound into a car seat, surrounded by dozens of wet jackets and scarves. Between toothless gums, the mother’s finger was being softly bitten. She was stretched over toward her friends, ignoring the baby, to laugh and sip from a glass of wine, until she glanced over and caught Gillis’s eye. He had drunk enough not to react, and they held one another’s gaze. The mother muttered and rolled her eyes, and her friends looked over. She lifted the car seat onto the table and dug her fingers into folds of white muslin to lift the baby out. Pushed her wine glass to the edge of the table and refused another.

‘I shouldn’t even be drinking, honestly.’ She cut a scowling glance back at Gillis. But his eyes were away, wandering over the pub decoration, framed photos of men with collared horses, kneeling next to trophies, standing beside fishing boats, huddled in ancient uniforms.

Underneath, seated in a long line, the dads and granddads, some silent, others immobile, in wheelchairs and oversized black jackets, a regimental pin glinting from a buttonhole. Standing by them, ignoring them, the uncles and cousins shouted over one another, and when their conversations abruptly ended, they scratched at their stubble and jangled the change in their pockets. Running between their legs, kids were carrying cups of tea and coffee to their aunts and auld grannies, getting a pound or a mint, or a toffee from strangers who held them by the neck, or ran hands through their hair, or told jokes and riddles that made no sense. As his gaze completed a full circle, returning to the woman in the corner whose baby was now burping and retching into a napkin, Gillis imagined himself as a lighthouse, big light beaming from the middle of his forehead, cemented in place by the sugared remainder of spilt drink, warning passers-by to keep away from hidden depths and sudden shallows, from rocks that will sink you.

‘You’re looking lost.’ By his elbow, a man’s head exceeded reasonable limits. For its sheer scale, its breadth, its height, once its present occupant was finished with it, this skull would have to be cleaned, polished and preserved. Startled, Gillis had to step back to take in all of the features. Crow’s feet, drinker’s rosacea, cheeks pockmarked with acne scars, along with two eyes, and a nose, and a grinning mouth. The teeth. The parts reassembled when the man spoke. ‘Can I shake your hand, Father? It’s not an easy job you do.’

The man was almost bald, but closely cropped grey hairs speckled his head and the heights of his cheeks where he had missed shaving that morning. The broad hand which gripped Gillis’s looked swollen, as though the gold watch which pinched the wrist was holding in an excess of blood.

‘How do you know the deceased?’ Gillis asked. The man was still holding him, and smiling. ‘Are you related?’

The man laughed. ‘No. Not related. I’m their boss. I’m Nichol.’ He said his name with a note of false humility, as though it was a title, or a prize that had been won.

‘Whose boss?’

‘What?’

‘I said whose boss are you?’

Nichol let go of his grip on the minister to point across the back wall, where the uncles and cousins, the dads and granddads looked up and raised their glasses, pursed their lips and lifted their eyebrows. ‘All of them.’

‘Fish.’

‘Fish.’

‘Aye, fish.’

Nichol had brought a few of the younger men over, and he pointed at each of them in passing – ‘Fish farm, fishmonger, fisherman’ – then outside, over their heads, beyond the low buildings and houses, to the coast. ‘I own the big salmon farms and all they smokehouses, couple of boats, part share in the harbour, the hotel, the wee vans you see kicking about, all of that, and other wee bits and pieces. Nichol!’ he repeated. ‘Honestly, you’ll have seen me about.’

Gillis had to shrug. He lived alone, the manse lay in the half-rural outskirts of the town. The fields were nothing but scrub and heather, a scrapyard, a tip, and the rusted rigging of abandoned coal mines. The false hills, partly green with moss, unstable mounds gouged from the earth some fifty, sixty years ago. The kirk which sidekicked the manse was a great heap of granite, topped with a crooked spire, off limits for structural reasons. A kitchen, an office and a great empty hall. The pews had been sold to a junk dealer last year, and the floorboards had been left to swell and split. Sanctuary of burrowing mice, nesting pigeons and in each corner and nook a different species of ant, slater and beetle. He had no congregation – the old folk and the Sunday school had died or drifted away as the previous minister passed on. Gillis had been given a rolling contract, to deliver funerals and visit the sick on a freelance basis. He logged his hours on a spreadsheet he didn’t understand, courtesy of a whining laptop, and sent a weekly update to the Church offices in Edinburgh. He tried to keep costs down by eating scavenged dinners of sandwiches and sausage rolls, shortbread, tiffin and scones, collected from the funeral homes, working men’s clubs and veterans’ halls he spent most of his days in. All to say that his only contact with others was in the preparation and delivery of funerals, and the man’s name had never come up.

‘Right, I’ve got one question. . .’ Nichol laid a broad hand on the minister’s shoulder and looked around at his audience. More of his employees had assembled round, waiting with their smiles ready to go. ‘D’you not like fucking?’

Gillis laughed along with the fishermen. He remembered to look up, arch his back and open his throat, smile not just with the mouth, but push the cheeks up to crinkle the eyes. Don’t sip the pint too early, don’t hide in the glass, don’t nip the elbows in. Say, ‘OK, take it easy.’ He chose one of the men and said, ‘Did you like that one?’ To divert and laugh at the laughing. He held out for as long as he could until, by impulse, he sheltered in the pint glass. Eyes in a kaleidoscope of lager, their figures drowned in orange light, until he surfaced and shook his head, then stared at the floor.

‘Sorry buddy, cheap shot,’ said Nichol. ‘I don’t mean to be coarse, but honestly, what’s a young guy like you, in the prime of your life, doing being a minister?’

‘Oh. . . there’s got to be someone. And. . . it’s just a job.’

‘Settle down, lads.’ Nichol waved a hand over his acolytes. ‘I’m just kidding, pal. Ignore me, and ignore all them.’ He passed his credit card to one of the schoolboys running past and the boy was given a beer mat and a biro and a small crowd of the kids walked around tallying pints and whiskies and glasses of wine.

‘No, I’ll be honest.’ Nichol gripped the minister by the bicep and leant in. ‘You weren’t to know. But see you taking the manse? That kind of fucked me up.’ Nichol was prodded and pointed toward the barman, who was standing on a chair, waving the credit card. Nichol yelled his pin number across the crowded room, then returned to Gillis. ‘We’ll talk about it, doesn’t have to be now. Enjoy yourself. Give the lad your order. It’s on me. . .’ Nichol’s presence dissolved part by part, the swollen hand left the minister’s back, and his heavy shoes depressed the floorboards further and further away, until only the eyes remained, watching Gillis between shoulders, through door frames and chasing his gaze from the back fire door to the broad mirror behind the bar.

Gillis downed the last of his pint. His mouth was full of peat, mud, silt and grass, he couldn’t taste the alcohol any more, only the waters and grains, the tannins which backed it. He rolled his tongue about the inners of his mouth and pursed his lips. Then, a harsh acidic belch. Couldn’t taste anything. Felt ill. His stomach grappled with his ribs, and he went outside.

‘See you later on, Father.’ Smokers huddled under a tattered awning shouted him over and shook his hand. Was he away? He was. He wasn’t driving, was he? No, no, just looking for something in the back. He jangled his keys as he crossed the road. Checked his watch and his empty pockets, looked thoughtfully at his phone until they turned back to their conversation. Then got in the front seat and started the engine, warmed his hands at the heater, turned on the radio, rummaged through the glovebox and under the seats, filled his mouth with toffees to sober up a little. And when the smokers walked back inside, he drove away, very carefully and very slowly, squinting through the blemished windscreen. Took the back roads, and kept in close to the high hedges. Going thirty in a sixty, he pulled to one side to let a bus go by, and rolled down the window. He waited and waited. Was he going to sneeze? He retched into the gorse and hawthorn.

‘You OK, mate?’ A car had pulled up alongside his, the man had his window down, and his elbow out, hazards on. Gillis stuck two fingers up. The car left. Others beeped their horns. He was half on the road, half off to the side. He forced another couple of toffees into his mouth and carried on. Ditched the motor at the bottom of a hill and walked the last winding stretch up to the manse, taking deep breaths, pressing from his thighs as it started to rain. His ears were burning red, warm at the core, but chilled at every edge. From the crest of that hill, he could see back to his car, the red paint glowing beneath the last street lamp, a burning ember flit from a fire. All around him, in the darkness, his parishioners. Stone dykes, barbed wire and pylons, sheep and cows that would soon be low-grade mutton and beef, and the moon, his favourite congregant, and the rain, the black trees, the piles of leaves, the rabbits, the screeching foxes, the tarmac and tar, the cat’s eyes, the dandelions, the rusted tin cans, and up there on top of the hill, the manse and the old kirk, whose dark cross could be seen, sitting squint, black against the heavy grey and blue of the sky.

He hardly recognized the kirk, or the manse. Up until a week ago, there had been a dark and rotten elm tree which stood between them, overbearing the manse and poisoning the harl, splitting the brickwork of the kirk, running a long crack that wound from the foundations through the hall and set the spire askew. The building was pinioned by scaffolding and metal cables tethered to heavy blocks of concrete. The tree had to go. Its stump now sat severed and heavy in the pit of its roots, pulled and abandoned, its great oxters exposed where the council workers had dug through and run ropes underneath, attached them to the towbar on their van and tried to haul the stump out of the ground, but failed. Like a desperate drunk who in self-disgust refuses to stand, the broad stump of the elm tree had only lifted a few feet, then dropped down and refused to shift from its excavations.

Gillis stepped carefully around the broad empty hole it had left, to the doorway of the manse. In the kitchen he drank two glasses of cold water, then ate the outsider from a loaf of bread, slicked with margarine. Held a cup of tea against his stomach and sipped it carefully. Rooted through his jacket for a cigarette. He had given up, of course, but still smoked one or two when he was alone, and threw the packets away three-quarters full, and bought one again an hour later, or the next morning, so in all the back and forth of chucking out and buying new, he paid for a habit he didn’t really have. He walked out the back for some fresh air and sauntered about the house; carefully tiptoeing around the edge of the hole, he leant against the stump of the elm tree. Stared into the dark sky, looking for space junk and satellites. He drew deeply from the cigarette and watched the smoke as it formed a strange shape that held in the air for a moment. It was the head and shoulders of a man, a little shorter than himself, whirling in the still air, an uncanny mirror.

‘Leave me alone.’ He reached into the smoke to break its shape, and the ghost was gone.

He let the cold settle on his body. The hands of his watch glowed in the dark. He forgot where he was standing, and with a melancholy sigh, walked blindly forward. His front foot fell into the hole before him and he dropped into darkness, tumbling forward, kneed himself on the chin and bit his tongue. The fall was over as soon as it started, but he had been thrown topsy-turvy, the trouser cuff of his trailing leg snagged in the roots overhead. He pressed his forehead and elbows into the muck, twisting until his legs suddenly dropped as the trousers tore. Folded in half, pinched at the neck, he scrounged on his back until he could turn and sit upright.

He started to cough and laugh, imagining a rose landing on his shirt front and a scatter of dirt across his face and a prayer and a hymn and a word or two from a man dressed just like himself. But stopped as soon as he felt something move. It was a rustle, or a scurry. An animal, a rat? Beneath him, or to his side? At his ankle? Disgusted, he kicked back and scrabbled away. He reached above his head, but the sides of the hole were slick with rainwater, so he dug his fingers and the points of his shoes into the soil and clambered upward. He had ruined his funeral suit. He rolled free of the hole and stared back into the empty depth. A primitive urge demanded that he stamp on and kill whatever animal had touched him. He found his phone in his pocket and shone the torchlight into the midden of black roots and dark mud. There was a spot of bright white. Torchlight reflected against pale skin and red blood. He peered closer. It was a severed hand. Four fingers and a thumb, a broken wrist and a bracelet of ragged flesh. He slid one leg down through the muck, reaching for it just as it began to move, and it turned slightly and curled as though pointing a single accusing finger at his forehead.

CHAPTER TWO

It was hard for Gillis to believe, but there was a whole world outside his house. Billions of people who were wandering around, buying and selling, sleeping and dying, all in ignorance of these moments, this room and this man. They couldn’t see him, as he stood with a shovel in hand, dressed in funeral shoes, funeral trousers and funeral jacket, streaked with clay and mud. Half a bucket’s worth of soil lay on the careful French polish of his dinner table, on top of an embroidered table runner, now stained beyond use. The fruit bowl had fallen on the floor. An apple had been crushed, and as the minutes passed, Gillis could see its pulp ageing already, beginning to brown. It was part of the world as it had always been. By rotting, it was playing by rules that had been set a million or more years ago, that no object had thus far dared to contradict. But alongside the apple lay a man’s severed hand. A left hand. Its white skin, ragged nails, the raw, red portion of wrist, cut squint across the bone. It didn’t bleed, but it was full of blood. The skin was painfully cracked. At first, it moved the knuckles only occasionally, as though it was settling or drying out. But as Gillis watched, it opened and closed, grasping for something that wasn’t there. It moved around as though orientating itself, then turned toward him and again pointed the accusing finger.

He had seen hundreds of dead bodies. He had grown used to them. They were no longer people, they had become objects. But the hand that rocked back and forward on the table was somewhere between, like a bulb or a seed just planted, both dead and alive. Gillis needed to feel something solid behind him. He took two quiet steps to the side, away from the pointing finger. The severed hand seemed to notice, consider this, then crawl toward him. A streak of mud lay across the table in its trail. It moved to the edge and teetered there. Imagining that it might suddenly drop down and scrabble across the linoleum, Gillis backed toward the kitchen bunker, lifting his feet from the floor. His heart was beating in the wrong place, in his throat, in his head, in his ears. The hand felt the edge of the table, dropped a finger underneath and cannily retreated.

In the deepest kitchen drawer, Gillis had an old shortbread tin, printed with a castle suffering an ecstatic sunset. A coat of arms and an elaborately folded display of bright red tartan surrounded the castle. Inside, the tin was dazzling gold. He threw the plastic wrapping and the last broken remnants of shortbread into the sink, and tiptoed back to the table, holding the upturned tin. He pounced and captured the hand as though it was an enormous spider, and dragged the shortbread tin to the edge of the table, scoring the varnish as he went. The gold interior flashed as he pulled the tin to meet the lid, and flipped both parts at once, then rapped each corner with a closed fist and pressed down, buckling the lid and sealing it with all his strength.

He found an atlas, a dictionary and a great heavy stone, hauled from the garden. He stacked them on top of the lid, then rooted through his rucksack to find his Bible, opened it to the Psalms and laid it over the rock. Maybe God’s word would seep from the ghostly thin pages and disinfect whatever demon inhabited that poor bit of humanity, squirming alone in darkness, in ground sugar and shortbread crumb.

Too scared to turn his back on the tin, Gillis ran out the back door, circled the manse and returned by the front. Once inside, he barricaded the kitchen with an armchair and a low bookcase. Trembling in his bed, he unfolded his penknife and slept with it clasped dangerously close to both his aorta and his jugular vein.

He had dreams of animals. A hawk on his arm. A dog’s head. An insect with a lot of legs. He woke from each believing less and less in all that had occurred, until he folded the knife away, and laughed when his clock radio jostled and reinstated the ordinary world with a jingle for a carpet showroom. These things can’t coexist. Sacred ground can’t be upscaled or redecorated. As he sat up, he downgraded the severed hand from a miracle to a hallucination, and all of last night’s fear began to shift from something out there, to something within. Was this the beginning of a terrible madness? He washed his face and shook his head as he pissed. He tried to pray, but he never knew how. Now that he was a minister, now that he served at the table, should he still have to beg for scraps? Lord, keep me sane, he said to the mirror, and the window, and the descending stairs.

The manse was scattered with last night’s confusion. His jacket was thrown across the hallway floor, arms flung out in mimicry of his panic. The dirt from his shovel and boots had been trodden across the carpet. The furniture stacked against the kitchen door embarrassed him, testament to his silliness, so he quietly returned the bookcase and armchair to their places. Then carefully opened the kitchen door. The atlas, dictionary and Bible had fallen from the table, their pages overlapped and crushed together. As he swung the door wide, it struck the heavy rock which he had taken from the garden – it had pierced the linoleum in its fall. His stomach began to ache when he saw the shortbread tin lying open, completely empty. Then he saw the severed hand, pale and bloody as before, writhing up against the fridge. He almost said hello. Fear rose from his stomach, clambering up his body, soon saddling his head and shoulders, blinkering his eyes and pulling at his mouth. He was lost to it. At least God gives you a choice whether to believe in Him or not. Angels and devils discreetly hide themselves, polite enough to veil their faces with mountains, trees and rivers, but now, even the spirits had to shout and scream and force themselves in front of you like adverts for incredible bargains and once-ina-lifetime deals. This disgusting hand. He stared at the mess it had made of his kitchen. What ill-bred miracle intrudes on a man outside working hours? In his own home? Outrage suddenly bottled, he blinked and squinted. Something was happening, a terrifying noise, a frantic rattle. His phone was on the floor. The number blaring from the screen looked kabbalic. He raised it to his ear, expecting a heavenly choir, the tambourines and trumpets of God’s faithful.

‘Am I speaking to the minister of Kirkmouth?’ the voice asked. ‘Did we have it wrong? We were expecting you.’

It was only another death. A fisherman, flung into the water. A thin, delicate woman answered the door. Grey hair clipped into a set of overlapping fringes, all tinted ashen blonde. Tears pushed to the edges of her face. She had dressed up to meet the minister. Pressed black trousers, shimmering blouse overlaid with a cardigan, handkerchief hidden in the sleeve.

‘I’m sorry I’m late. I had a. . . thing.’

Gillis skulked toward the kitchen table while she made him a tea. He dissolved a biscuit between his tongue and the roof of his mouth as she showed him pictures. The dead man at work, on a boat, in his garden, with the wean on his knee.

‘You’re so young for a minister. . . you’d be ages with my son. Maybe you’d know him?’

He shook his head.

‘Are you sure I can’t take your coat?’ This time Gillis relented, and unveiled a battered track jumper, emblazoned with colourful logos and sponsorship deals. Why had he worn that? He took it off; he had a black polo shirt underneath which had a collar at least. ‘You don’t look well,’ she said. ‘Are you feeling ill?’

‘No, I’m fine thank you.’ Only an hour ago he had been stalking a severed hand across his kitchen floor. Could the thing see? Of course it couldn’t. Could it hear? No. Could it feel his footsteps? Maybe. He’d lunged, dropped the tin back over the hand, then slotted the lid beneath. Like a rugby player mid-scrum, he had pressed his neck and head into the fridge, rocking it back until there was just enough space to slide the tin underneath. Then he’d carefully laid the full weight of the fridge down on the shortbread tin, which bowed at its edges, but held.

‘If you’d like to delay?’

‘No!’ He shuffled a set of documents that he needed to give to the family. ‘No. I’m good, I’m grand, I’m good to go.’ He cleared his throat and began his little spiel. ‘Now, when we bury your husband. . .’

‘My husband? I’m sixty-five! He was my son.’

Gillis hid in his papers, frowning through his collection of pamphlets. He started to read aloud the titles and keywords, passing them one by one to the grieving mother, until the focus drifted from himself to the grim finality of it all.

‘Of course, a funeral is a time to honour the deceased.’ Gillis knew this part by heart. ‘But we must make time to think of ourselves. What do we want to say, that we might not get a chance to say again?’

She stared beyond the pamphlets, to the table, then turned to him, eyes misting over. ‘Will my boy be in heaven?’ It had always been hard for Gillis to stomach the clichés, the soothing visions of endless wheat fields and summer holidays, white robes and clouds, streets of gold, all your old cats and dogs, and a full cast reunion of your dead. But now he could answer with conviction, thinking of the severed hand.

‘There’s some kind of life after death, yes.’

‘I know that’s where he is. Waiting for me. . .’ The woman tried to prompt the minister into his duties.

‘Yes.’ What if the hand had overturned the fridge and escaped? ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if he was.’

‘I can just imagine him saying, Mum, don’t fuss over me, stop your silly crying. I won’t be back for dinner, I’m up here in heaven. That’s the kind of thing he’d say.’

‘That’d be nice, wouldn’t it.’ Maybe the severed hand belonged to someone he hadn’t buried right, who had come back to strangle him in his sleep or poke his eyes out. Try me, he thought, come for me and see what happens.

The woman stood and walked to the window. ‘Here she is now.’

‘Who?’

‘The wife.’

There was a rattle of keys before the door swung open. ‘Look who it is,’ the young woman said as she came in. ‘Marathon Man.’ She had brought in a draught of cold air, and there was rain speckled across her jacket. She held a few shopping bags and a folder full of paper under one arm. For a moment, Gillis was so startled that he forgot her name. It was weighted down with so many memories and associations that it required near on physical hauling and dredging through his skull to unearth.

‘Rachel.’ He managed it. They had known each other most of their lives. Sunday school, primary, secondary. Kissed her on a dare. Tormented one another for years, cheating and fighting through high school, renting a flat together, splitting the bills, settled into domesticity at twenty, abandoned for good at twenty-two. Her hair was naturally blonde, but she had dyed parts of it blonder. A small boy followed after, muzzled by the overlapping collars of his shirt, jumper and jacket. The older woman began to witter as she unzipped the boy’s jacket and pulled at his wrists, while Rachel laid down all her burdens and unexpectedly, when she stood again, pulled Gillis close and kissed his cheek. His face and neck were cooled by the rain on her jacket. She still wore the same perfume. A decade ago, Gillis had strained his bank balance, gritted his teeth and sprung for the bigger bottle. Maybe she’d managed to eke it out, all these years, dilute it a little, but keep the essence. Or maybe she’d been smelling the same for years, through birthdays and boyfriends, bottle after bottle.

They lingered in an awkward silence until Gillis nodded at the boy and asked, ‘What age is he?’

She hesitated. ‘Si. . . Seven.’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake.’ Her mother-in-law looked disgusted. ‘He turned eight in the summer. Didn’t you?’ She prodded the boy, but he didn’t speak. ‘Your mummy doesn’t even know your age.’

A quick scan of the timeline worried him. Almost ten years since he had left Kirkmouth. Time enough for a pregnancy and a curtailed childhood.

‘Anyway,’ Rachel ignored her mother-in-law. ‘You’re a minister now?’

He quickly explained what she already knew. The running, the medals, the trip to England, the disaster, the knees, the physio, the attempts to start over, to try shorter distances and different disciplines. All that failure, and he wasn’t going to admit to the job-seeking, the redundancy, the unfair dismissal, and the year or so spent living in his dad’s front room, so he just said, ‘I wanted to help people.’ Though all he had done was bury them. He was a step away from walking through the streets and ringing a bell. Bring out your dead. His mouth hurt a little. He was gathering all the flesh of his face in tight points on either side of his head. It looked more or less like a smile.

‘And you?’ Gillis tried to divert attention. ‘What have you been up to?’

‘I’ve been grieving.’

Gillis was sorry, he couldn’t imagine. He hadn’t known she was married, he had never asked anyone about her. He had sort of assumed she was still waiting in her parents’ kitchen, trying to get him on the phone.

‘He always tried to call himself a fisherman, but he was an accountant really.’ Rachel pursed her lips. ‘He shouldn’t have been anywhere near the water, I don’t know why they had him out there. He didn’t know what he was doing.’

‘When was this?’ Gillis asked.

‘Two Tuesdays back. They gave up looking a week ago. They say with the currents, and the depth of the water, the body could be anywhere. We thought we may as well go ahead.’

‘Closure,’ the old woman called across the room.

Rachel nodded along. ‘We’re looking for closure.’

‘And it’s been a week? Sorry if you couldn’t get in touch, I’m bad for not getting back to people.’

‘It’s not me that’s seeing to it,’ she leant a little closer and whispered. ‘Mother-in-law’s not letting me.’ Jerked her eyes toward the older woman and tightened her face into a prim, stoic smile, then walked to the boy standing with jumper, jacket and scarf piled at his feet like autumnal leaves. ‘Come on, I’ll get your shoes off.’ The boy sat on the sofa with legs sticking out. As she untied the laces, she said, ‘We tried other places. But they were all busy.’ She took a seat next to the boy and tangled her fingers into his hair. ‘This is Jamie,’ she said. ‘He’s named after his dad’s dad. Aren’t you? And your dad’s dad’s dad. There’s generations of Jamies.’

Gillis waved, but the boy was sulking and staring at his knees.

‘I don’t think he understands what’s happened. Or it hasn’t hit him yet.’

‘If only we could see the body. He could have said goodbye.’ The older woman fussed at the table, refilling a little basket of biscuits, arranging them in a line. ‘For me, seeing my mother at peace. . . it was a big help.’

They talked over the options. What the Church could do, what the funeral home would handle. Rachel let her mother-in-law decide on everything. ‘Abide with Me’, ‘Amazing Grace’, ‘There is a Redeemer’, a passage from the Bible of the minister’s choosing.

‘In my Father’s house there’s many mansions, I go to prepare a place for you?’ Gillis quoted. The mother-in-law nodded. They’d have teas and coffees at the end.

‘Can we have that in the church?’

‘It’s not in any shape for that. But the funeral home can organize something.’

‘Mr Nicholson offered to help.’ The mother-in-law raised her palms and shrugged her shoulders, surrendering slightly to Rachel’s frustration.

‘We spoke about that,’ she said.

‘The poor man feels responsible. Which I told him was ridiculous. Accidents are accidents. Fishing is a very dangerous profession.’

‘He was an accountant.’

‘An accountant for a fishery.’

Rachel rolled her eyes as her mother-in-law bustled from the room. ‘I’m sorry about this,’ she mouthed at Gillis as they followed.

‘Here’s what we have,’ the mother-in-law led Gillis upstairs, trailed by Rachel and her son. On the floor of her bedroom, an empty suit was laid out next to an empty football uniform, as though two men had lain on the floor and evaporated. Shirt inside waistcoat, inside jacket. Black tie carefully knotted, trousers belted and zipped, spring of heather in the lapel, and a pair of good black shoes, freshly polished. Next to a bright red goalkeeper’s jersey, grass-stained shorts, long socks and football boots, and two absurd goalkeeping gloves, palms open and expectant. ‘We’ve agreed on the suit, haven’t we?’

‘Have we?’ Rachel dragged the back of her hand across her forehead.

‘We said it was more fitting. Now, will we need to weigh it down with something?’ The mother-in-law turned to Gillis.

‘Weigh what down?’

‘The coffin.’ She pointed to the side of her bed. ‘Here’s what we thought we might put in, but none of them are very heavy.’ A couple of trophies, a games console, a watch, a stack of photographs. ‘Those are the definitelys. That’s the maybes over there.’ A favourite jar of jam, a favourite tin of beer, a favourite film on DVD. To one side, a set of red and black barbells. ‘Those might be too heavy?’

‘I was dreading this.’ Rachel walked him through the front door. ‘Seeing you again. I didn’t know if you’d know? How I got with Douglas after you left. Or that we were married and had Jamie. You’re not on any of the social media. So. . . I didn’t know.’

Now that her son and mother-in-law were hidden inside, watching cartoons and eating biscuits together, her movements relaxed a little.

‘What is it you were studying again?’ It was on the tip of his tongue. ‘Total. . . Totality Management?’

‘Hospitality. And Tourist Management.’

He nodded. That was it.

‘All that did was qualify me for the job I already had. And when Jamie came along, Dougie’s wages were enough for a while.’

‘You’re letting in the cold,’ her mother-in-law yelled from the living room.

‘In a minute,’ Rachel called back. She stepped out, closed the front door behind her, folded her arms and leant against the door jamb, steadying herself against a shiver that rustled her shoulders. She let her eyes meet his. Although each of them had long prepared for the silence that followed, although they had both rehearsed airtight accounts of their actions, and memorized the chain of events which justified their own failings and cast the other’s as pure, unjustifiable sadism, they both let the moment slip by. So in place of anger or recrimination or even forgiveness, they could only pass back and forth a polite, embarrassed smile.

‘We think we’ll burn him.’ Rachel broke the silence. ‘Feels silly to bury an empty coffin.’

‘Seems sensible.’

‘All they said is it wasn’t suicide. Just an accident. You forget these things happen. What with all the technology. You’d think it wouldn’t. Maybe this kind of thing happens all the time?’

Gillis shrugged. Though he knew it didn’t.

‘Want to hear something funny?’ Rachel asked. ‘I prayed last night. Not prayed since I was a little kid. Want to know what I wanted? My shopping list?’

He nodded.

‘I asked God to send him back to me. And if He couldn’t manage that, just to send a bit of him. To know what happened. You feel like. . . maybe he just buggered off. Ran away from his responsibilities. From his debts.’

Gillis thought of the severed hand, and the severed arm that it once must have joined to, the severed torso and severed legs and severed head. For the first time, he wondered who was missing.

‘Calms you down a little, doesn’t it? Praying. It’s like sucking your thumb.’

Gillis could only agree. ‘But what’s wrong with that?’

‘Nothing wrong, nothing right.’ She shook her head, and shivered again. Pulled her jumper sleeves over her fingers. ‘Anyway, I’ve got the tea to cook, and the boy to bath. . . It was good to see you again.’

‘You too.’ As he turned from the front door, away from the words just spoken, he was surprised to have meant it. All those years avoiding her, all for that? His bad leg twitched and he thought again about the empty suit, laid across the floor. The shirtsleeves and the cufflinks looped around nothing. The severed hand must have been severed from something. He was struck by the obvious. He had pulled it from the ground without checking for an accompanying arm, or torso, or head. He hurried to his car, fussing in and out of the wrong gears as he rolled into the street, watching as the lights in Rachel’s house turned off, staring at the empty windows as he passed by.

He drove recklessly. Parked and left his keys in the ignition, headlights scalding the manse garden, the stump of the great tree and the hole below. He ran across to the kirk and ransacked a back cupboard. A jumble of mismatched tools collected over half a century, scraps of piping and tiling and two-by-four pine. An ancient pick with a rind of cement encrusted along its edge.

Envisioning a shallow grave set into the roots, an unquiet spirit, a victim calling for revenge, he dug at the edges of the hole until the sun began to set. Striking root after root, the blade began to slacken from the handle. His muscles warmed as his skin froze and he began to emanate a haze of steam. He gouged and scored away at the depths until his back trembled, as though it might collapse in weakness. He drove the car closer to the hole, but saw nothing. He wanted another hand, or a foot, or a face. A corpse to reanimate. An ear to listen to him, an eye to see him, a mouth to tell him what to do.

Hands prickling, fingernails full of dirt, he gave in and warmed them under the kitchen tap. After a long period of fearful countdowns – ten, nine, eight, I’ll do it, seven, six, I won’t, five, four, I will, and two, two, two, I will, one. . . and zero, now, do it. Now – he bowed and drove his shoulder into the fridge, freeing the shortbread tin. Jumping back as he pulled it free and popped the lid, he had expected the hand to attack; instead it opened finger and thumb as though shyly reaching for something. Scrolling through his phone, he tried to find photos of Rachel and her husband online. He found a profile picture, now the headstone of a memorial page dedicated to the dead man. He zoomed in further and further, examining the shape of the man’s hand. The hair that covered the knuckles. The blunt, stubby fingers. He held the image close to the severed hand. From one angle, they looked similar. From another, completely different.

Late in the evening, it occurred to him that the hand might have something to say. To him, or to Rachel, or to pass on from the other life, wherever that was. He laid blank sheets of paper down like bedding for a dog, and used a wooden spoon to coax the hand from the shortbread tin and roll across the paper. Then he placed a pen between its forefinger and thumb. It seemed to sense that it was holding something, gripped and rolled the pen, scribbled a little, relaxed for a long moment and suddenly, in a tight squirrelling motion, drew a face that stared upwards, with a tiny little man striding across the eyeballs.

Hundreds of years ago, a dark, heavy cloud collected its water from the rivers and lakes of a dozen countries and condensed these waters high in the atmosphere, in a vast construction of towers and battlements. The cloud blocked the sun, and cast the following days into dreadful shadow, until the cracked earth and the weakened sinews of old rivers began to demand that the rain fall. When the cloud broke, water fell unevenly across the dozen countries, respecting no borders, punishing one corner while sparing another.

Beneath its anger lay a young man named Jan, an apprentice painter and a terrible swimmer. His clothes and his boots dragged against him as he struggled in the currents of the river he had been thrown into. Insults and laughter followed in the wake of the boat above him. A sailor shouted, ‘And take your magic book!’ From the railing of the boat which had carried him over the channel and up north, into the open mouth of this country, his book burst open in the wind like a frantic, flightless bird. With a heavy slap it landed on the water, divided through its middle. And the embossing on the cover rushed through with water, the leather blushed black and all the gilding, all the ivory and vermilion and verdigris, carnation and turquoise, the thousand colours which had been dutifully mixed by the apprentices and applied by the masters of the Guild of St Luke, rushed into the cold water and began to dissolve. Jan, the apprentice painter, struggled into the draw of the ship’s passage to catch the last corner of the book as it sank, cold water sotted to the hilt of the binding. He hefted it from the river like the wheel of a cart sunk into boglands. As the water carried him away, contradicting the passage of the boat, the jeers and gobs of spit which arced from the deck receded and he lay on his back and allowed the river to carry him. He opened the book and laid it over his head like the roof of a tiny house, uprooted and loose in the terrible waters of a world-ending flood. A woven red ribbon, a bookmark sewn into the hilt, dropped across his face, and he held it in his teeth as he lay back in the coursing currents of the river.

Saltwater ceded to fresh, and the in-drawing tidal currents slowed. The wide sails of the boat carried it seaward. Too weak to swim, Jan lay on his back and concentrated on the sky. There was blue in its black. Ignoring the painful cold and the shore he couldn’t see, he drew his knees up and clutched his hands tighter around the book. The river ran through a violent spot and the book dropped into the water again; at each dousing, it lost saints and angels overboard, and the tight script of Psalms and prayers unravelled into the water. As he entered the country, he left a thin golden tail of rippling paint, like a comet falling to earth, his passage unnoticed.

As he tired, his legs drooped, and his toes grazed over what could only have been an enormous fish, here to swallow him or grant his wishes in return for its freedom. Then close to his eyes passed a blade of grass, a brave flagpole, jutting from the course of water. Another, a spear or standard, a reed, a teasel, bent against his shoulder and buckled as it passed him. Then the fish returned to his toe, and transfigured into silt or sand, and he burrowed down and found he could stand, just barely. Sinking in muck, he steadied the book on his head and tasted the cascade of water and paint running from the illuminated pages. Gilt, rain, river water and gold leaf ran through his scant beard and cropped hair. Like bristling pins or paintbrushes, clumped reeds and blades of grass stuck out from the water. He grabbed a handful and pulled himself forward.

As the sun strained against the horizon, Jan witnessed the creation of land, a country of his own. The Lord separated light from darkness, then divided the water above from the water below. A blaspheming witness, he trudged back and forth on the bare tread of land that emerged in the middle of the wide river.

‘God’s blood, God’s wound, God died,’ he repeated. Through the dawning morning the water receded, down past his knees and ankles, to expose a long sandbar that split the river. He pressed an armful of reeds down over the slop of mud and tried to sleep, clasping the ruined book to his chest like the fastenings of a jacket, and muttering. God bless these sandbars, he thought. Miraculous little nations created anew every night, which have no religion, no walls or forts, that welcome every stranger and couldn’t care what they believe or where they were born. Turning to one side, he crushed the left-hand pages of his book, and as he slept, the territory diminished.

CHAPTER THREE

The spine of Gillis’s Bible was deeply scored in just a few places. Left to fall open in his hands, the pages collapsed to either side, revealing, one by one, his funeral verses.

‘The righteous perish, and no one takes it to heart.’ Though he had started with confidence, he could feel the spine of his Bible straining as he cut a new division into the glue. He had strayed, and didn’t recognize the verse.

‘The devout are taken away and no one understands.’ Sitting before him, Rachel stared determinedly at the middle of the lectern, ignoring the words he read. Her son sat by her, watching the floral arrangement and the coffin it concealed. Beside the boy, gripping his shoulder, the dead man’s mother grimaced at the minister, gritting her teeth through the words that Gillis spoke in a steadily slowing monotone. He was trying to make them so dull that they would be ignored.

‘The righteous are taken away to be spared evil.’ Behind the widow, the son and the mother, rows of black suits, with occasional dark grey or deep navy mixed throughout. Workmates and school pals, cousins and uncles, his mother’s friends. In their laps, in their pockets, at their mouths, shrouded in sleeves or encased in gloves, rooting through bags, clutching handkerchiefs or folding orders of service, their hands lay in a hundred different expressions.

‘Those who walk uprightly enter into peace.’ Gillis was too distracted to notice the heads turning upward, smiling slightly, feeling the resolution of the Bible verse. He carried on. ‘They find rest as they lie in death.’ Some faces flinched at that last word. ‘But you – come here, you children of a. . .’ The next word was sorceress. The verses went on to cover adulterers and prostitutes. Rebels, offspring of liars, who sacrificed children in ravines, who placed pagan symbols on the walls and behind doorposts; Gillis flushed red as he scanned down the page, searching for a phrase to end on. The paragraph before the page break seemed, at first glance, suitable. Clean of any insults at least. When you cry out for help, let your collection of idols save you. The wind will carry them off, a mere breath will carry them away. He slowed, trying to find the sense of the paragraph, pronounced the last few words deliberately and underlined them with a religious expression and a soft thump of his hand against the Bible. ‘But whoever takes refuge in me will inherit the land.’ He gripped the lectern and stared out at the collected mourners. They bowed their heads, they stared at their hands. Then he chanced his eyes toward Rachel. Her head was tilted upright, her expression was stern, her face was sallow and drawn as though she was biting the insides of her cheeks.

‘If you’ll please rise.’ On command, all hundred and fifty of them stood, and sang. The organ played, and the coffin disappeared.

‘Have you burned it yet?’ Gillis stood over the coffin, massaging his right hand. It was aching from all the handshakes he had been subjected to, a tendon behind his thumb trembled. Men sought to leave an impression. They grabbed at the flesh, and tried to mould it into the shape of their own.

The funeral director solemnly shook his head. ‘There’s a backlog.’ They were in the basement beneath the funeral home. ‘We couldn’t get the furnace hot enough this morning. . . It’s only getting there now.’ A convoy of black and brown coffins lay along the corridor, a patient traffic jam interrupted by several coffins that lay at an angle, cutting in line from recent funerals, eager to burn.

Gillis had his satchel gripped underarm. It had been hidden inside the lectern throughout the funeral. He had been standing on it while reading from the Bible. Inside, behind his papers, bound with several leather belts and a few pointless shoelaces, was the shortbread tin, within which the severed hand scratched and tapped.

‘I always think the mechanism just leads straight into the fire!’ Gillis shouted above a clatter of trolleys jostling over uneven concrete flooring.

‘People worry they’ll see flames!’ the funeral director shouted back. ‘They don’t want to think about hell!’ He had missed a few greying hairs from the base of his nose, and it looked as though he was growing a minuscule moustache. Gillis couldn’t remember the man’s name, even though he worked with him nearly every week.

‘It was a good turnout,’ the director said.

‘It was. . . Are you actually going to burn it?’

The director looked puzzled.

‘They never found the guy that died. It’s just got clothes and a couple of CDs in it. I thought you might empty it out and use it again?’

He shook his head. ‘They bought it. We burn it. That’s the deal.’

At the end of the corridor, next to a line of three coffins, men in blue overalls were throwing spanners and screwdrivers into a toolbox. They rubbed their hands and laughed loudly as they explained why the furnace had been failing to ignite. It was something to do with clogged filters, a build-up of ash.

‘Listen,’ Gillis had been trying to build up his confidence to ask for something strange. ‘You know the widow, Rachel? She wanted me to have a last look inside the coffin. Just to say a prayer. And chuck one last thing in there. Something she forgot.’ He patted his satchel. ‘Can I?’ He tried to lift a corner of the lid.

‘It’s all bolted down. . .’ The director looked up at a sudden grunt, then whine, from the conveyor belt, as the trolleys began to jostle forward now that the furnace was back up and burning again. ‘I’d have to get permission. I’d have to check with the mother. She’s paid for all of it, so it’s more her decision.’

‘Do you know,’ Gillis contorted his face at the funeral director, trying out eye rolls and raised eyebrows, none of which broke through the man’s cold exterior, ‘I wouldn’t bother. To be honest, she said it to me kind of off hand, I don’t know if she expected anything. It was more like, Maybe I should have done that? And I wanted to say to her I’d tried.’

The director nodded. ‘It’s easy enough to call her?’

‘No! I wouldn’t. Not now, let’s just get it moving. I’ve never seen it, you know, I’ve never seen it going in.’ Gillis loosened the shortbread tin from his satchel, his hand veiled by the folds of his jacket. He hoped that a moment would appear – maybe the funeral director would turn his back – when he could throw the severed hand into the flames. Before or after, or on top of the coffin. Laying the whole thing to rest. Forgetting everything. He could sleep through the night again.

‘I’m happy to tell her you added it in?’ the director said. ‘For all the difference it would make.’

‘Don’t tell her anything. I don’t know if she expected it. It’s one of those things, she was crying and she said something, and I made a promise, but did she mean it, did she not, it’s that kind of thing. Y’know?’