The Burn

The town was built on seven hills. Just like Rome, they said. The difference was in Rome the Christians took on the lions, not the other Christians. The tallest was Tollbrae, which loomed above the council schemes like a monstrous carbuncle, the fields around it humped and rolled by the detritus of coalmines, ancient pit 'bings.' Under the fields, labyrinths of abandoned shafts, last resting place of miners buried and lost in 20's cave-ins. Grass sprouted from these unmarked graves in fistfuls of emerald and stretched towards our sporadic sun, no one to put a scythe to its lushness, and the old bings, with clusters of tan-and-white Ayrshires like swollen blisters popped out upon them, might now be mistaken for natural swells and indentations.

I supposed it a metaphor of something, being sixteen.

Pollen-heavy Spring nights, we climbed up there to be alone together. Alone. Together. We lay on the clover beds above the Boots factory, nightshift forklifts scooting in the floods, touching, laughing, kissing, talking, stroking, groping. Above us, framed in a latticework of branches, the moon was just a soap bubble gliding around the sky.

That last night, Maggie rolled off me and stared up into the dark.

“Stars.”

“Aye, that's where you usually find them,” I said.

“Do you know," she said, “that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on every beach, in every desert, on earth?”

“I can well believe that,” I said.

“I think all the stars in the universe are locked inside one grain of sand and this grain of sand is on a beach somewhere, and God walks down that beach every morning, after breakfast, leaving these big deep footprints in the wet sand.”

“What's God wearing then?”

“Blue bathing suit,” she said, grinning. “And she's carrying a picnic basket all bulgy with fluffy white towels.”

“I'm not a big God fan,” I told her.

“How come?”

“In the West of Scotland, he just seems way more trouble than he's worth.”

My fingers were walking patterns across her flame hair. She shivered, and whether from the chill night air or my touch I couldn't tell. Night wind whistled through my earring.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” she said.

“Anything. You can ask me anything.”

“How often is it boys masturbate?”

“Eh?”

“How often do teenage boys masturbate?" she repeated. “I just read in this magazine the other day they have to do it all the time practically.”

She looked at me intently and, for once, I didn't want to look too deep into those green eyes of hers, my face burning furnace hot.

“I have no idea,” I stammered. “What kind of mag. . .”

“You must have some idea. You’re a teenage boy yourself.”

“Well. . . I’d have trouble telling you what the average was. I'd have to conduct a poll.”

“Aye, that's what the magazine did as well.”

I gripped her wrist. She looked down, curious, as though her hand belonged to someone else, a girl a galaxy away maybe, strolling on a warm sandy beach hand in hand with God.

“Are us two just totally daft?”

“Aye,” she said. “Mental as anything. You'd better walk me home now. It's time.”

She told me it was safe tonight. Said there were reasons.

“Da went out to Uncle Sean’s for my cousin’s going away party.”

“Where’s your cousin going?”

“Barlinnie. Three years for assault and battery.”

“Oh,” I said. “Not on some ex-boyfriend of yours I hope.” I tried to make it sound funny, but the words came out all quivery. She didn’t seem to notice.

“No. I didn't know the person at all, just some Prod that Pat claimed with a beer glass round back of the Ex-Serviceman’s Club.” Maggie made an emphatic thrust and twist motion with her wrist. “Smashed all his teeth out too, Pat did. Got him in a chokehold and kept on smacking him on the gob till there was just his gums left.”

The cold stars were so far away that night. They chattered in light years as we took the short cut along the high weed bank skirting the curve of the Old North Burn. In summer the burn was awash in wild rose and honeysuckle, but in early spring the growth was still maimed by frost and detritus of summers past—old prams, shopping carts, car parts, rusting squashed tin cans—was strewn around the foot of the embankment. Walking there, away from the view of the flats, my arm wrapped around her shoulder, hers around my waist, a mutual gripping desperate, hopeless, we wouldn't be seen by anyone.

“I can't make it next Saturday,” she said, dropping her hand. “Have to baby-sit Auntie Agnes's wee ones again.”

“How many weans does that aunt of yours have exactly?” I snapped, disappointed.

Maggie counted in her head, visualizing the massive brood. “Eh, seven,” she said finally. “That's nothing. My Uncle Stephen’s got ten. He can never mind their names. When he gets home he'll be like 'Hey, bring me over the Evening Times Thingamyjig.' He calls them things like that.” She thought for a moment. “'Whodjimcallit' is another one. I told him he'd be better off giving the wee ones numbers.”

“I still think this Catholic birth control stuff is a load of shite,” I said.

“I could never ever use one of they condoms,” she said, again, “in a hundred thousand million years.” She looked at me, blinking. “I don't feel I've expressed myself strongly enough.”

She stood, adamant, where the bank crumbled to slate-gray shale. I flopped at her feet, like a supplicant, dislodging a big stone that rolled down the decline towards the water, to be arrested with a clank by an ancient fridge.

Maggie hunkered beside me and pointed to a semi-submerged rock in the midst of the burn, obstructing the water's spate. “See yon massive big rock over there? What would you say it looked like?”

“Kylie Minogue’s head.”

“I'm dead serious, you.”

“A chair maybe?”

“Aye. There you go. It’s called Maggie's Chair. It’s dead old.” She smiled, thoughtful now. “You've never heard of Maggie Ramsey? Nobody told you that story?”

“No.”

“Want to hear it? It's a big local legend and that.”

She scratched at her jeans with her fingernails, took a breath, smiling like the cat got the cream. For tonight she got to be the seanachie of the auld north burn.

“If this is a scary story,” I told her, “I might need you to hold my hand. Or some other part of my anatomy.”

“Oh, I think you'll cope fine,” she said. “See, this Maggie Ramsay was a woman lived in the town back in the 1700’s. She was the daughter of a wealthy family. Big landowners. From Rochsolloch to Thrawrigg was all part of the Ramsay farm. It was an awful wealthy estate and as a young girl she never wanted for anything, except her mum, who died when she was a baby. Every day was Christmas. But then, when she turned sixteen, a pretty head-turning thing, she went and fell in love, like silly wee lassies do, with a boy passing through, on his way elsewhere. The Ramsay family had great things planned for her. Maybe they thought he was after her money. Anyway, when her father and brother found out about the two of them, they broke it up and made the boy get out the town, threatened to kill him.”

“Was he a Protestant?”

She ignored me, carried on.

“Well, Maggie was never the same after that. Just heartbroken, she kept to herself in her family’s big stone mansion, moping the years away, hardly ever going out. Her family worried themselves sick, called in the doctors. But there was no getting to her now. See, something had shut down inside her forever. Then this one spring afternoon, she had the weirdest visitor. This tall, dark stranger with a gold-plated ring in his left ear comes riding into town on a beautiful black stallion. He came up the Old Town Brae, speaking to no one and, weird thing, afterwards they couldn’t remember his face well enough to describe him even. He stops at Maggie's house, walks right up to the front door, chaps three times, waits for an answer, slapping his black leather boots with a riding crop, like he's expected. Well, when she comes to the door and sees his face, she faints dead away, out cold. The stranger turns on his heels and he’s away. Gets right back on his horse and rides off, back to wherever it was he came from.”

“I think I see where this is going.”

“Hush now. Let me tell it. Was the stranger Maggie's lost love come back from a distant land? Or was he a darker love? Maggie wasn’t saying. But she changed from that day. She moved into a little hovel by herself on the banks of this burn. The locals left her well alone. Most were terrified of this place because the banks, right where we're sitting the now as a matter of fact, were called Fiddlenaked Park. Know why?"

“Involve fiddles and nakedness?”

“According to legend, all Scotland's witches had a sabbat on the banks here one night every year. You'd hear laughter and the sounds of reels and jigs and weird shrieky music.”

“Like a medieval disco?”

“Aye, that sounds about right.” Maggie smiled at that one. “Anyway, ever after, she would take long walks along the banks of the burn by herself. Folks said you could hear her speak as she walked. Some said she talked to herself, that she was a few pennies short of a pound, others that she walked with some invisible companion. Well, between one thing and another, most of them were sure she was a witch, in league with Auld Nick himself, or a spey wife. Matter of fact toffs would come from as far away as Edinburgh and Dundee to have their palms read by old Maggie Ramsay. Seeing as how she saw into the future.”

“What happened to her?”

“She just vanished. She might have fallen in a well in the dark or been swept off down the Calder by the flood of 1762. Of course it was also rumored that the dark stranger came back for her. It was said he came riding through town years later on his big white horse."

“You said it was black.”

“No way. It was white. Like that arsehole King Billy's horse, you know?”

“Aye, that makes sense.”

“Before she disappeared, though, she put a big curse on the Ramsay farm. Her ne'er-do-well brother drank himself into the grave. The father blew his brains out all over the bedroom. They had to put up all new wallpaper. The estate fell to ruin and was sold to the mines. She cursed the burn too. She’d sit on that rock for hours, brushing her red hair like a machine. . .”

“She had red hair as well, eh?”

“And it’s still called Maggie's Chair. To this day, no one dares sit in it.”

“Because of the curse?”

“Because of the curse.” Maggie was speaking slowly now, her eyes fixed on the rock. “In the 30’s, they say, a local teacher got all mad at her class for believing in the legend and said she’d sit on that rock all night to disprove all this daft lowland superstition. So she did it too. Just to prove a point.”

“And?”

“Found next morning hanging from that old willow over yonder.”

Maggie had a faraway look in her eyes. She so much wanted to believe it.

“That’s a right crappy story,” I said. “It’s got no point.”

“My curse is that I can't see other people's futures,” she said. “Only my own.”

She sounded dead serious when she said that and the tone of her voice made me uncomfortable. I scraped the heel of my sneaker in the muck.

“What do you see in your future?” I asked her, not wanting to know.

“This town. Gray rainy days. A job at Boots. Tesco at the weekend. Bunch of weans. A blue second-hand Cortina. Mass twice on a Sunday. Majorca in the Summers. A three bedroom council flat in Rawyards.”

I laughed. “Aye, and miserable unhappiness?”

“No,” she said, not laughing. “I don’t see me being unhappy.”

“And me?”

She looked at me, her eyes this desolation. “I can’t see your future, Billy. Only my own.”

“I mean, you don’t see me in your future?”

“Ach, you'll be up at the Uni this time next year, winching some toffee-nose bird from Bearsden, working overtime to forget where you're from, knocking back martinis with yon pan-loaf brigade in some ritzy West End pub.”

“Oh, come off it.” I was angry now. “You're clever as anything, smart as me. Smarter. You could go to the Uni too. You don't have to. . .”

She took my hand, turned it over, gazed along the length of the palm, leaned over further. I felt strands of red stroke my fingers, couldn’t see any expression on her face. Then I felt the single tear splash warm on my wrist.

“Are you O.K.?” I didn’t know what was wrong.

“You’re a strange one,” she said, looking away, achieving a smile.

If she looked sad then, it was not for her imagined future, but how she imagined mine.

“We have to go,” she said, standing up.

“I don’t want to go.”

“I have to go. I need to make my old man’s tea. He'll be wondering what I'm doing.”

“What are we doing?”

An age later I see that we didn’t know. The pair of us didn’t have a fucking clue.

“You know what that is over there?” Maggie asked, pointing at the expanse of the St Serf's playing fields.

“A football pitch?”

“Fear of nature,” she said. “It’s men’s fear of nature, which is also, bye the bye sonny, a fear of women. It’s the same thing in these parts.”

“Oh, come off it,” I said. “Don’t be daft.”

“It’s true. This whole culture is terrified of women. It’s fucking pathetic. All of you are scared shitless. You know what else?”

“What?”

“You damn well should be too.”

I walked with her along dark streets backlit by the pale blue glow of a thousand television sets. But we didn’t go all the way to her close. We couldn’t. Under a guttering streetlamp, flicking away the year's first midges, we kissed and kissed like we’d die without it. Skeins of high clouds broke up the stars.

“I’m seeing you soon?” I asked.

“Aye.”

I felt her teeth close around the lobe of my ear, nipping slightly. I thought how easy it would be to bite someone’s ear off. Her cousin Pat would know.

“When?”

“When you see me.”

“Tomorrow?”

“No. Next Wednesday maybe.”

“Wednesday!” That was almost a week away.

She shrugged. “It’s awkward."

The street lamp’s bulb was cracked and a mesh cage of wires covered its orange glow. The wires spider-webbed the light across the pavement as the lamp rocked in a night breeze.

“Do you like me?” she asked.

“Do I like you? I. . .”

“Wednesday.”

She pulled away from me and turned towards the corner of Kelvin and Aitken.

“Stay,” she said. Like I was a puppy. “Don’t you move.” She came back, stopping an arm’s length distant, and reached out and dragged a finger down my cheek. “Aye, that’s about right,” she said, tracing the curve of my lip with her thumb. “So I don’t forget.”

A young girl came strutting past us with clown make-up pancaked on her cheeks. She was wearing these arse-clenching Chemin de Fers, the kind with six buttons on each hip making a flap when unbuttoned and a metal buckle across the back. It looked like she was strapped in a medieval chastity belt. We watched her disappear, her rump rotating like an ice cream mixer.

“Christ, I’d rather off myself than be seen in a pair of them things,” Maggie said.

Then she was gone, off into the darkness. She didn’t want to be seen with me. Even then I didn’t know we were over. I was that slow on the uptake, that fucking thick. It’s sad.

I walked home in the dark, on either side of me an unbroken vista of stolid blocks of gray dingy flats, rows of opaque glass wedged open by cardboard toilet paper rolls. Whatever planned to be colorful lost its heart quick in that desert with windows. Closing-time drunks poured themselves out the Boar's Head, tiptoeing with the exaggeratedly practiced care of the semi-wasted, pawing the dyke for support, bawling ‘A Soldier’s Song.’ What a place. What a life. Catholics and Protestants, the lot of them in need of a good nuking. The street smelled like bad beer. The pavements were shiny with wet rain in the reflected orange glow. I watched a petrol spill rainbow down a drain.

Next year I’d be at the University, it was true, a better class of friends waiting for me, pretty dumb rich bimbos from Paisley and Edinburgh who’d sleep with me at the drop of a hat, the chance to make up stories about myself, become someone new, burn the bridges that needed burning. Leave it all behind me. Not think about it at all. Not think.

I saw a shadow sway under the bridge by the redbrick bakery, heard a faint clinking also. It was either another rat or old Maggie Ramsay toasting my possible futures.