Has Anyone Here Seen Kristie?

In the middle of the night he awoke in a huge, almost too comfortable bed with the taste of Helen on his lips. His erection was painful. Even as he struggled into consciousness, he ejaculated, gasping hoarsely into the soft black air of the bedroom -- gasps that soon became dry sobs.

The vestiges of his dream clung all around him. He imagined he could see them as wispy grey feathers floating in the darkness. He had been dreaming of Helen, but surely it had been too real to be a dream. They'd been back in their bedroom in the flat they'd shared in West Hampstead. A nothing-special day. Nothing special, either, in the fact that they were making love, except that it was always special when they made love. At the start of the dream he'd been lying naked on their bed reading a detective novel, the warmth of the sunlight that poured in the window splashing across his thighs and loins, warming them, so that his penis was full and large, though not hard. She'd come up beside him, dressed only in her briefs -- it was the long hot summer they'd survived together in London. She'd put her hands up to pull her long yellow hair back behind her ears, denuding her breasts, deliberately flaunting their taut, cherry-pink nipples at him, her mouth twitching into a coquettish smile, playing the shy strumpet for him. He'd reached up his free hand to take one of hers, interleaving his fingers with hers, then drawing their joined hands to the crotch of her pants, feeling the cloth damp as it brushed the back of his knuckles.

"And what have you been thinking of?" he said.

"You," she replied.

She leaned forward and kissed him lightly, her nipples swinging through his chest-hair. Then she stood up again and, releasing his hand, touched a finger to his lips.

"Wait."

She was an artist by hobby, not a very good one -- although of course he never told her that -- and the flat was cluttered with half-finished boards, silvery lead tubes of acrylic that she seemed to have tortured and then abandoned, rags that looked like a butcher's aprons. He no longer noticed the smell of white spirit that permeated the place.

"Wait," she said again, very softly, turned away from him, bending over to rootle amongst the litter next to her easel. The pale-blue fabric of her briefs was tight across her smooth little buttocks, the shadow of her sex faintly visible.

"Gotcha."

She was holding a long paper bag as she moved back towards him. The name of Conroy's Art Shop was printed in red down the length of the bag.

Watching his face, she slowly, with both hands, pulled the sides of the bag down along its contents, making a striptease of it. First the head, then the shaft appeared of a large, bushy squirrel-hair paintbrush.

His book fell onto the floor. He didn't move to pick it up. He was totally absorbed by the performance Helen was putting on, his gaze locked on her.

He turned slightly, but instantly she raised a hand, commanding him to be still.

The brush naked, she tiptoed the two paces back to the bed.

"Let me paint you," she whispered, "with my patent invisible paint, available only from the finest magical emporia, and even then only at enormous cost."

She stroked the silky brush-head over his forehead and then down the ridge of his nose to his lips.

"No, don't move," she admonished. "I hate it when my life-models can't stay still."

With quick, neat dabs she delineated his chin, then with a single slow brushstroke traced the line from under one earlobe all the way around his neck, across his adam's apple, up the crease until she just touched his other lobe.

"I think that's the face done," she said, her forehead furrowed in concentration.

His shoulders were next, then his chest. To paint his nipples she leaned close for the detail work, and he could feel her breath, coming slightly irregularly now, against the sweat-sleek skin around them. He dared not move, although he could feel his penis, bolt-hard, pulsing as if it were trying to reach out for her. The touch of the hair was like a dream of breeze, a dream within a dream.

Helen put the head of the brush into his navel and twirled it.

"I think the critics may remark that the artist seemed to have hurried the second part of the portrait a little," she said.

She meandered the brush down through his pubic hair and round the base of his erection to where his balls hung in their slack warm sack. He was aching for her to begin painting the shaft itself, but she just grinned at him and carried on concentrating on his balls, lifting first one and then the other over on his thigh with the broad tuft of squirrel-hair, then jostling the balls through the veiny skin, watching them start to move of their own accord.

When she finally started to brush the invisible, intangible paint up the shaft of his penis in long slow strokes he threw his head back on the pillow and stared at the sun-blotched ceiling, feeling his lips form something close to a grimace of pain. Almost at once he had to close his eyes. Although he was distantly aware of the rest of his body, of the muscles of his arms working as his hands clenched and unclenched, now his consciousness was entirely filled by the sensations coming from his erection, which seemed in his mind to have grown until it was half as large as the rest of him.

She took the shaft between a finger and a thumb to hold it still while she painted around the ridge of the head, then splayed the hair over the bell.

"And now, I think," she said, "my masterpiece is almost ready to be finished."

He felt the rush of air as she flung the brush into a far corner of the room, and opened his eyes.

Helen was pulling her briefs down over her knees with an appealingly clumsy, girlish haste. She stumbled slightly as she lifted one leg to free it, and reached out to steady herself against the side of the bed.

She'd paused in his dream then, had Helen, looking earnestly at him. "Wherever you are now," she'd said, "make sure to be there."

And then she'd been climbing astride his face, her breasts against his waist, both her hands clutching his erection. Her sex had been a fond-remembered swirl of coral pinks and darker reds among sweat-flattened hair as she'd lowered it spasmically towards his mouth, while at the same time she'd slowly eased the head of his penis between her lips, sucking teasingly, lightly flicking it with her tongue-tip.

And then he'd awoken in the broad bed of Mrs Melrose's excellently clean establishment.

He was troubled all through breakfast by the dream. He might have caught a few further scattered moments of sleep during the pre-dawn hours as he tossed and turned in bed, avoiding the broad and spreading damp patch, worrying about how he was going to meet Mrs Melrose's eye during the rest of his stay because she'd be bound to notice the stain eventually even if he made his bed himself, and think he'd been jerking off. He'd been disturbed the most, though, by those final words of the dream-Helen, the firm instruction that he couldn't quite understand. There was a lot of guilt in him, not just because of the dream -- the first sexual dream he'd had about her since her death -- and not just because several times in the gloom his penis had returned to full erection as he re-experienced in his memory the sensations of the dream. The main guilt was the old familiar one, the one that had been burdening his soul for the past eleven months, ever since...

Ever since the morning that was the usual basis of his dreams of Helen.

West Hampstead Tube Station. Quarter to eight on a Tuesday. The platform full of other commuters. As usual, there's some kind of hitch on the southbound Bakerloo Line, and the trains are coming only half as often as they should. When they do arrive, they're packed with multi-faced yet faceless humanity, a concretion of fabric and flesh. It may be a while before there's enough room in one of them for Helen and himself to cram themselves aboard. On her face there's the somewhat fraught expression she seems to have been wearing for the past week or two whose reason he's not been able to discover; he's asked her if she's pregnant, but it hasn't been that, couldn't have been, anyway, with the precautions they take; she's told him convincingly that there's nothing the matter, she's joyous as field grass in a spring breeze, and he's allowed himself to believe her.

Hungry, he tells her he's going to gamble a coin in the chocolate machine -- sometimes it produces an overpriced, heat-distorted bar; sometimes it doesn't. She nods, smiles, stays at the front of the platform as he worms himself to its rear.

There's a thunder along the track. There are no sounds of the train slowing -- odd how London Transport always has spare trains to shuffle around empty when there's a shortage of trains on the line. The machine swallows his coin and he tugs at a drawer that obdurately refuses to budge. He's gambled and lost. Behind him the air darkens as the train rushes along the platform, and there's a shriek, abruptly cut off, followed by many shrieks that will not cease.

He knows even as he turns, his limbs clawing their way through treacle, what has happened.

Helen.

She knew.

Hence the sadness in her face.

A confusion of moments becomes a confusion of hours, days, weeks. Somber faces peering into his. Stern faces, some of them. She was pushed. Did he push her? No, he was on the other side of the crowd from her. She was pushed deliberately. Accidentally. Deliberately. Accidentally. No one will ever know. No one will ever be blamed.

Except that he will be blamed, and forever. Blamed because he let go of her to buy a bar of second-rate chocolate that he couldn't even buy. Blamed because he left her on her own when she needed him to be beside her. Blamed because he didn't try hard enough to take the sorrow from her eyes.

Finally, after a lifetime of incomprehension, one morning he makes his way to work, forcing himself to take the tube from West Hampstead Station as if he could exorcize his soul's haunting, feeling as if, all the way from home to High Holborn, he's an explorer treading ground where no one has ever been before. His desk has been dusted. Someone -- probably Jennifer -- has put a fluted blue vase on it with a sprig of out-of-season flowers. They care for him, all the people there, his friends and colleagues, colleague-friends, and they're sorry for him, but it'll soon be Christmas and he can see the reproach in their eyes that he didn't wait until afterwards before coming in, so they could be sorry for him at a time when everybody's pretty miserable anyway.

Only Derek, the office Scotsman, whom he's never really known that well, whom he guesses is gay and senses might fancy him -- only Derek has the time in the season of good cheer to offer him the kind of sympathy that doesn't feel like sympathy.

Days go by. Christmas comes, Christmas goes. He doesn't see the New Year in because by ten o'clock on the last evening of the old year he's drunk the bottle of sherry and half the bottle of whisky he bought for the occasion, thrown up, and collapsed into unconsciousness on the bathroom floor with his hands holding the base of the toilet.

Twelve months ago his hands were around Helen's waist at midnight as she rode on top of him. They'd gone to bed at eleven with a couple of bottles of cheap, warm fizzy wine, and after a while she'd shown him new things you could do with cheap, warm fizzy wine, but they'd somehow managed, giggling frantically, stopping and starting in their lovemaking, both to hold back their climaxes until the first chimes of church bells striking twelve had come in through the window and whistles and bangs had begun carving the night. He was still trembling long after the echo had faded of the twelfth and final chime...

He wakes at five in the morning, this new year, and greets it by throwing up again.

January.

February.

MarchAprilMayJuneJuly.

"You're fuck all use to anybody, you know, the way you are," says Derek, leaning across the desk. "Stop looking at the fucking computer and look at me for a minute. Your work's all shit, and there's a limit to how long the rest of us can keep it from mattering. You come in each morning smelling of puke, and you get smashed at lunchtime, and everybody knows you're sometimes smuggling a half-bottle into the lavs to toke up there. I'm telling you as a friend, before Hoggett tells you while he's firing you, you can't go on like this, and none of the rest of us can either. You've got to let go of her."

"I'm sorry," he mumbles. Eleven o'clock in the morning and he's half-pissed already. "So sorry."

"Take yourself on a holiday," says Derek. "You must have some holiday time due. Don't just use it to drink yourself to death in West Hampstead. Go somewhere."

"Fuck off."

Derek deliberately misunderstands. "OK, if that's how you prefer it, fuck off somewhere. Where's somewhere you've never been?"

"Just about everywhere," he mumbles.

"Have you ever been to the Edinburgh Festival?"

"No."

"It's a great place for forgetting things."

"Don't want to forget."

"Yes you do."

And by lunchtime he finds he's booked himself a room and bought himself train tickets.

On the weekend he uses the fact of his having made the purchases as a stick with which to fight off the need to drink himself into the void. Saturday seems to last forever, the day patterned by sudden cold sweats, shakes, restlessness. That night he can't sleep at all, just watches the streetlights through the gap in the curtains, listens to the pulse of West Hampstead's never-ceasing traffic. Sunday is a little better, and it's with several hours' sleep inside him that he turns up for work on Monday, feeling as if he's a devout medieval monk who's virtuously subjected himself to some especially gruelling form of self-purification.

Work goes well that week, swingingly, better than ever.

He doesn't need his holiday to the Edinburgh Festival any more, not now he's returned to the peak of his form. He might as well cancel.

Derek won't let him.

He swears at the man, then invites him out to the pub after work -- he's no longer worried about relapsing back into the darkness. He's come to realize that Derek's his best friend in the world.

Yes, Derek is indeed gay. No, no offence meant, you understand, but Derek doesn't in fact fancy him -- just so we both know. That's all right. He doesn't know what he'd have done if it had been otherwise -- women are so much better at deflecting advances than men ever learn to be.

Helen is adroit at letting men off the...

Helen is dead.

That's something he believes he can now accept.

Only Derek has to pull him out of the pub after the third pint and see him onto his tube for home after extracting a promise that there'll be no detours to the off-licence or the pub after he gets off the train in West Hampstead...

It was a nice morning, so he decided to walk into town rather than try to fathom out the mysteries of Edinburgh's bus service. Mrs Melrose had given him a copy of the Fringe Guide, and he absently leafed through it as he sauntered along the pavement. After a long uphill stretch flanked by grand residential houses -- most of which seemed to be bed & breakfasts much like Mrs Melrose's -- he worked his way through a clutter of shops and then began the downhill stroll into the centre of Edinburgh.

At length he found himself sitting on a bench in the Princes Street Gardens, with the Castle frowning down at him and clutches of kids around him doing their best to seem enthusiastic -- or, more often, not even bothering to try -- about the celebrated floral clock to which their parents had hauled them. There didn't seem to be much in the guide that attracted him: a recital of Belgian bagpipe music, a performance of the Kama Sutra by Native American puppets, concerts of chamber music by composers he'd never heard of whose names were almost entirely made up of consonants, a troupe of poets from Slovenia, a nude enactment of Peter Pan, Shakespeare in Gaelic, Dr Lavengro's Animal-Free Circus, the choir of the Communist Party of East Lothian, fifty thousand different stand-up comedians who'd received favourable notices in Time Out, an exhibition of Cubist photography...

Among the ads at the back was one for a record shop in Rose Street, and a little street map was thoughtfully provided. Helen had been fond of various bands and artistes whose CDs she'd generally had to order specially in London because they weren't readily available outside Scotland: Robin Williamson's solo albums, Savourna Stevenson, various others whose names he couldn't for the moment remember but knew he'd recognize if he saw them. If she'd been with him -- and, after his dream, he almost felt that she was, because he could still, he could swear, taste her on his tongue -- she'd have been stocking up on music by all of these and others she'd not previously heard of. He ought to buy some goodies to take back to London as a return-home present for her.

Checking and double-checking his orientation to make sure he wasn't about to make a fool of himself in this strange city, he worked out that Rose Street wasn't very far from here, just on the other side of Princes Street, it seemed.

He was quite surprised, fifteen minutes later -- about ten of which had been spent waiting for the lights on Princes Street to change -- that his mapreading had been perfectly accurate.

He remembered, now, the reputation that Rose Street had once had: the only thing there'd been more than whores in Rose Street were pubs. But the place had been cleaned up -- the pubs had genteel outdoor seating, and promised delicious viands within; the women walking the sprightly new cobblestones were temps and tourists, he reckoned, rather than good-time girls.

And there it was ahead of him: Gallagher's Music.

A golden oldie was tumbling out of the open door onto the cobblestones: "Job's Tears", the Incredible String Band, from either Wee Tam and the Big Huge or The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter. One time Helen had been playing this song in the kitchen when he'd turned her around, bent her over the table, pulled up her skirt and down her pants, and made love to her so urgently that neither of them had lasted out the track. Images came back to him, layering themselves over the stones and glass of Rose Street's buildings. After she'd recovered from that giddy bout she'd stood up and turned around, hitched up the front of her skirt and stuffed his fingertips into herself. She'd come again on his knuckles, and then, her face and neck blotched with pale pink, had led him to the bedroom and revived him with caresses until he was inside her again and they were yelling as the chicken burned in the oven.

Luckily the lights were low in Gallagher's Music. He pretended to be browsing through a rack of CDs while he waited for his erection to subside.

The titles of the CDs began to swim into focus.

He smiled ruefully as if at Helen standing alongside him. Jimmy Shand and His Band. Andy Stewart. Kenneth McKellar. All the Tartan music.

He moved over to the other side of the shop. Runrig. Simple Minds. Al -- not Andy -- Stewart. Yes, and there was a cluster by the String Band -- but Helen already had all of their CDs that she wanted. Savourna had a new one out, so he grabbed a copy of that, and on impulse, choosing solely by the pictures on the inserts, he added two or three other clarsach CDs by players whose names were unfamiliar to him. If he was going to pick blind among the harpists, he might as well pick blind all over the shop. It wasn't his own money he was spending, after all, but Helen's: they'd both taken out big life insurance policies, thinking it was really a waste of money because they'd not see anything back from them until they were too far into their dotage to notice. Rock'n'roll and New Age, jazz and neofolk -- she'd be sure to like at least some of the dozen or so he piled up.

An elbow jogged the stack, and he had to juggle not to spill CDs all over the floor.

"Oh, I'm sorry. I'm so clumsy."

A slim hand helped stabilize the pile.

"It's OK. My fault entirely," he said reflexively.

A giggle. "You're very polite for an Englishman."

He was slow to register her as a person rather than just one of life's annoying little intrusions. When he looked at her face in the semi-shadows he saw that she was smiling at him as if they were old friends. For a moment he was alarmed -- was this one of the fabled Rose Street harlots, driven indoors by the efforts of the City Council? -- but the thought hardly had the time to form before he realized it couldn't be true. She wasn't coming on to him, not that at all.

"Are you a tourist here yourself?" he said, the question out in the air between them without his having intended to put it there.

She laughed.

"Good guess. I'm not quite a stranger to Edinburgh, because I was born here. But I was still a girl when my Dad died and we moved to Durham."

"You've not lost your accent. Not completely."

"If you lived in the same house as my Mum you'd have a Scottish accent too -- wouldn't matter where you were."

She had quite prominent cheekbones. Her hair was dark, falling in natural curls to her shoulders. He thought her eyes were dark as well, but it was difficult to tell here in the half-light of Gallagher's Music; he could see the gleam in them, though. Full lips, smiling, their darkness a contrast to her very pale skin.

They stood there a few moments longer, caught in the embarrassed pose of two people who've just been slightly stiffly introducing themselves at a party when someone has interrupted their nascent conversation.

"Look, I'd better buy these," he said.

"Hope you've got a good big credit limit on your card." She nodded at the stack, eyebrows raised.

"Enough."

He went to the counter with the cases to settle up. The man there, his face geologically creased, told him one of his selections was crap and he should put it back, but agreed to sell him the rest.

When he turned for the door, the bulky carrier bag at his side, he was startled to see the woman waiting there for him. As he came out into the sunlight she walked alongside him.

"You're here on your own," she said. It wasn't a question.

"Yes."

"Me likewise. Lonely?"

He didn't reply at once, couldn't. It wasn't a question his inhibitions wanted him to answer. Then:

"Yes," he said.

"Don't get me wrong," she said, "but..."

She abruptly stopped walking. He took a step or two further before coming to a halt, turning to look at her. She was wearing a long blue and silver-grey peasant dress, all ruffles and checks. Her feet in her open sandals were fetchingly grubby.

"Och, damn!" she said, a crease of annoyance crossing her face. "I'm being an idiot here. You will take it the wrong way. Of course you will."

"Try me."

"Well, I was just wondering if you'd like us to do the Festival together. I'm not saying we should..."

"I know what you're not saying. You need a friend. I need a friend -- ye gods, but how I need a friend. I think I like you. I hope you think the same of me. So let's be friends for a few days."

"Someone to share things with," she said, nodding emphatically. "That's all."

"Don't say it like that," he responded, reaching with his free hand for her arm. "Who knows? We might just be starting a lifelong friendship. Let's not count that out."

"Aye, but let's not rely on it either."

"Live for the week, the rest can take care of itself."

"That's right," she said. "No claims."

"Come on, then, um..."

"Kristie. Like Agatha, but with a 'K' rather than a 'C, h', and it's a first name, not a last. And you are?"

He told her his name.

As they walked back to busy Princes Street he felt himself smiling -- not just the muscles of his face moving into the appropriate position, because practice had rendered him adept at making them do that over the past months, but a smile that started somewhere deep inside him. The icy core of him warmed for the first time in a long while.

He had Mrs Melrose's Fringe Guide, and Kristie had the Official Festival Handbook. On the corner of Princes Street, ignoring the annoyed glances of the pedestrians shifting around them, they consulted the two schedules.

"OK," she said at last. "I'll hold the program open at the page, but upside-down, and you jab with a finger."

They ended up at the Assembly Halls listening to one of those string quartets by an all-consonant composer, and to his astonishment he adored every minute of it.

Later in the afternoon they were passing a record store -- not Gallagher's, not Rose Street -- and decided they needed each to buy a CD of the quartet they'd heard. It was only once they were inside the shop that they discovered neither of them could remember the composer's name.

By the time they'd looked it up in the handbook the impulse had passed.

Later he'd view most of his week at the Festival with Kristie as a time of forgetfulness, because the details of all the things they did together tended to slide one into another, but he would never for the rest of his life become unaware of the sensation of those days with her. It was as if they were bonded by something far more than merely a recent friendship, as if somehow in some different lifetime they'd been close for years, and yet the prospect that they might -- probably would -- say their farewells at the end of the week, promising letters that'd likely never get written and scribbling telephone numbers that'd get lost, didn't dismay him in any way. It was as if she'd brought into his life an appreciation of living that had such an intensity it couldn't -- mustn't -- last for long. So he'd know that he went with her round the Castle one day and Holyrood Palace the next, and that they looked at everything there like the good little tourists they were, and he'd know they saw plays and folk operas and even the Belgian bagpipers, although they drew the line at the nude Peter Pan ("I'll bet you Wendy's fat," hissed Kristie), and he'd know they laughed at some of the art in the Modern Art Gallery but together declared undying love for a couple of the pieces; he'd know all of this, but his visual memory of these sights and countless others showed him only dancing eyes, a slight overbite of wicked little teeth, fingers being pulled through dark curls...

Once or twice, he knew, he'd suggested to her as they parted last thing at night on the pavement outside her bed & breakfast -- just a couple of hundred yards up the road from Mrs Melrose's -- that perhaps they didn't need to say goodnight at all, but she'd smiled and kissed him briefly, fiercely, on the cheek and then pushed him away with the kind of dismissal that didn't make him feel either rejected or gauche.

And he slept at nights.

The only thing wrong with Mrs Melrose's was breakfast, and yet he found himself cheerful and refreshed even as he battled with gristly bacon and tepid porridge. By nine o'clock precisely he'd be waiting on the pavement for Kristie to emerge, and together they'd dawdle into the city, laughing and teasing, making transitory plans for what they probably wouldn't end up going to see today.

Yet he didn't forget everything. What he remembered were the things that had nothing really to do with the Festival itself, but everything to do with Kristie.

Once, in the middle of the afternoon, they'd been passing Jenners -- a department store whose windows were filled with dummies clad in a mixture of aphrodisiac and purposively anti-aphrodisiac clothing -- when Kristie had tugged at his arm.

"I remember my Mum used to take us for afternoon tea here," she said. "If we were good, was what she told us. It was the last place in the world my brother and I wanted to go, but just because Mum thought it was a treat meant it really was a treat for us too, so we'd do our best to be good, like she said."

"You reckon we've been good as gold?" he joked.

"Aye." She tilted her head as she looked at him. There was a curious, almost calculating look in her eyes before, almost immediately, the laughter returned to them. "Let me buy you an afternoon tea to reward you for being good, gentle sir."

Today's peasant-style dress was oranges, yellows, reds and golds; the colours, so alive in the sunlight, became suddenly restrained and solemn as she led him in through the heavy doorway. It was as if the place had the same effect on her, too, because she was strangely muted as they rode up in the elevator.

But once they were in the café she recovered her vivacity again. They took a table by the window, and almost filled it with a pot of tea and a plateful of small, cubical, plasticine-looking cakes in the kind of bright hues that insects use to warn birds that they're poisonous. The tea was surprisingly good -- they both drank it without milk or sugar, to the apparent horror of their waitress -- and the cakes proved perfectly palatable.

"What I used to like to do," said Kristie after a while, oblivious to the bright yellow cake-crumb stuck in the corner of her mouth, "while Mum was reading her newspaper and Ian and I were busy not making pests of ourselves, was look at all the old ladies who'd be having their tea here" -- she swept her hand around to indicate that the clientele hadn't much changed -- "and imagine what kind of knickers they were wearing."

He chuckled. "And what did you guess?"

She pulled a long face.

"Tweeds," she said in a gloomy voice. "Tweed underpants, the boringest colours possible, and stitched so as to be difficult to get on and almost impossible to get off."

This wasn't the kind of eatery where he'd feel easy laughing aloud, so he bottled the sound up, feeling the pressure building behind his nose.

"They were only allowed to take their knickers off every fourth Saturday night, because that was the only time they ever went to the lavatory," Kristie pronounced, picking up a cake daintily and then jamming it whole into her mouth.

This time his laughter burst out of him in the form of a half-sneezing, half-coughing fit. Heads turned incuriously to watch him as he pounded his chest. Kristie decorously lifted her plate and spat the remains of her cake onto it, then came round the table to beat between his shoulderblades.

"What about sex?" he said, once he'd recovered himself.

"Ah," said Kristie, seating herself once more, looking at him archly over her teacup. "Ah, sex. The great mystery to the ladies from Corstorphin. Why did everyone else make such a fuss about it? The ladies knew, after all, that all sex was was what the coal was brought in."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," he said grinning, leaning back in his chair and stretching his legs out straight. "And maybe all the ladies are looking right back at you at this very moment and wondering what kind of knickers it is that you're wearing."

"Och, that's an easy one." The tip of her tongue at last found the crumb and dislodged it. "I'm not wearing any. I never do."

The mental picture of her exposed to the air under the loose rumples of her dress instantly sobered him, instantly aroused him. If it weren't for that interposed millimetre of cloth he could reach out under the table and touch her taboo nakedness. He imagined he could smell the subtle scent of her sweet clean sex. Now his consciousness of her nudity expanded: her belly, her small breasts. The moment for him was as erotically charged as any he could recall, and yet she was not naked, and she was not looking at him with passion in her eyes, and she was not, in the only way that mattered, within touching distance of him. Instead she was leaning across the yellow-topped table towards him, her face animated, her eyes innocently playful, her manner entirely chaste.

He tried to speak lightly. "And how do I know you're telling the truth?" he said.

She held his gaze with hers, and her smile faded.

"You'll just have to take my word for it," she said carefully. "Now, is there any more tea still left in that pot?"

The last day -- the last day of this year's Festival, the last day of his vacation, his last day with Kristie.

"You may call me a very clever girl," she said as she joined him on the pavement outside her bed & breakfast.

"I would never call you anything else," he said gallantly, bowing in what he imagined was Edwardian style, "but why in particular this morning?"

"Because I've decided what we'll do tonight, that's why."

He bit back an obvious response. They had only a few hours left together. Tomorrow he was catching an early-morning train back to London. They didn't have enough time for him to risk spoiling it with a wrong remark.

"And that is?"

"We're going to watch the last night of the Edinburgh Tattoo."

He stared at her. "But you can't get tickets for love nor money. Or have you somehow...?"

"No." She threw back her ringlets and treated him to a big grin. "We're going to have the best view in the entire city of Edinburgh, and we don't need tickets for it at all."

"What do you mean?"

"Pray exhibit patience, my dear friend," she said in an affected voice poached from one of the Beeb's Jane Austen serials. "All shall be revealed to you at the proper moment. Now, will you take my arm as we promenade into town...?"

From time to time during the morning (bad poetry remedied immediately afterwards by good mime) he quizzed her again, but it was obvious she wasn't going to tell him anything more. There was a feeling in the city that the Festival was already well on its way to winding down: the pavements were less raucously crowded; the pedestrians no longer wore the masks of cultural intentness as they walked along; many of the flyposted advertisements on walls and the windows of dead shops were torn and faded. It wasn't yet the morning after the circus had melted away into the night, but this was the sense that hung in the streets.

They shared a ploughman's lunch in a pub just round the corner from the old Traverse Theatre and then, rather than go prospecting for performances to watch, they just strolled aimlessly through the central parts of Edinburgh. A couple of second-hand bookshops on Leith Walk drew their absorption for a while, but not their money. Otherwise they just talked.

And for the first time he told her about Helen.

It was the one thing he'd deliberately kept back from Kristie all week. She'd set the parameters of their relationship, and he'd sworn to abide by them. It would have seemed somehow to have been in disobedience to the spirit of that law if he'd blurted out to her how he'd become a widower not a year back, as if he'd have been trying to worm sexual favours from her using one of the oldest and certainly one of the shabbiest ruses of all. But now, with the deadline of tomorrow's train fast approaching, he realized that, if he didn't open himself up today to this closest friend whom he'd so suddenly, so unexpectedly, discovered, this almost magical person, he never would have the chance again, so that their friendship would be left forever incomplete. So he let it spill out about the overwhelming love he'd had for Helen, and the guilt that had consumed him when she'd been gone, and the obscene, obsessive, suicidal drinking, and helpful Derek who'd been a brother to him, and the loneliness that had become all that his life contained until one morning, just a few days ago, when someone in Gallagher's Music had nearly knocked his stack of CDs out of his hands.

It took him a long time to tell Kristie all this, and by the time he finished they were sitting back in the Princess Street Gardens on what he was pretty certain was the exact same bench by the floral clock where the advertisement for Gallagher's Music had first caught his eye. It wasn't quite evening yet, but the afternoon was turning its attentions that way: the sky behind the Castle seemed to be taking on some of the colours of its bleak stones.

When he'd done, they sat in silence. She'd taken his hand in his at some stage and rested it on her lap, but her fingers applied no pressure to his: there was just the contact between their skins, just the warmth.

As he stared at their joined hands, he discovered that all of the things he'd been talking about were no longer a part of him: they belonged to someone else, the person he'd been until just a few minutes ago. Through the past few days of Festival-going with Kristie he'd been progressively shedding his miseries and his guilts, his longings, even the brightest edges of his memories. The title of one of Helen's Incredible String Band albums came back to him suddenly: The 5000 Spirits, or The Layers of the Onion. It had always seemed meaningless to him, but now he felt as if he'd sloughed five thousand ghosts from himself, one by one.

"Which means, I guess," he murmured, "that all I really am is the core of an onion. Rather undignified, but..."

"What did you say?"

He glanced up at her. She wasn't looking at him. Instead, she was gazing out fixedly over the emptying gardens. To his astonishment, he saw there were tears in her eyes.

He misunderstood them.

"Don't feel sorry for..."

"I wasn't." Sharply.

"Oh."

He hadn't got words. Whatever was going on within her, all he could do was let it run its course. And then, maybe, she would tell him.

He almost missed her whisper.

"You're not the only one who's been lonely."

He leaned towards her. A pigeon landed near them and strutted in search of crumbs.

"I'm here. I'm listening," he said.

She released her hand from his and wiped the back of it crossly over her eyes.

"I ... I can't," she said at last.

"Why not?"

"For the same reason you couldn't tell me about your own causes until this afternoon. Before today would have been too early. After today would have been too late. You had to open yourself to me, but to do so at the wrong time would have been to make a mockery of all the rest of" -- gesturing at the air with spread fingers as if to try to seize the right word from it -- "of this. Of us. Of what this week has been."

"I..."

"Don't speak. Don't talk. Don't litter words all around us. Just be still. Just be here beside me."

Minutes drifted away. In one sense he felt as if she'd erected a stone wall between them as thick as any in the Castle; in another it was as if there was no boundary between them at all, as if every breath that she took filled his lungs, where his bloodstream picked up the oxygen to carry it around her body.

"When you're at home," she said at last. "When you're back in your wee flat in West Hampstead going through all the bills and junk mailings that have amassed while you've been away, that's when you'll know what my own loneliness is all about. Until then -- well, it'd always be the wrong time, no matter what time I chose."

And then she was leaping to her feet. She stood in front of him, smiled down at him, pressed his face briefly to her midriff.

"Let's go find somewhere you can buy a thirsty woman a drink and maybe a salad or something to eat, and after that we should be getting ready to take our places to watch the Tattoo."

In Deacon Brodie's Tavern he had a pint of heavy, chosen at random, while Kristie had her usual, which was a pint of Guinness. They lingered for a long time over their drinks, talking in the desultory way one does when one knows one should really be packing in as much meaningful conversation as possible because there's a strict limit to the amount of time available. There wasn't any food on offer that appealed to them right then; maybe it was just that neither of them was hungry for anything. When their glasses were empty Kristie made her way to the ladies'; on her way back she paused by the bar and picked them up another couple of pints.

He looked at his watch.

"Won't they be getting ready to begin?"

"Hush," she said. "We don't need to see the start of it."

"But our seats...?"

"There'll be plenty of space for all. Don't worry. Drink up. I know what I'm doing."

And he believed her. All week, except when she'd bumped into him in Gallagher's Music -- and he suspected even then -- she'd seemed to know exactly what she was doing, and he'd followed her guidance without question. The dozen or so years she must have lived in Durham seemed to have dimmed her memories of Edinburgh not at all, for she'd not only known all the shortcuts and sneaky ways from one place to another, she'd been familiar with the activities of the city, with its soul. Helen had often teased him about the fact that he was always the certain one, where she might haver before making a decision; his sureness had disappeared with Helen's death, of course. This past week it had been Kristie who'd been the certain one in everything the two of them did together, and he'd been contented enough to follow her lead; and yet, paradoxically, it had been as if through the very subordination of decision to her he'd begun to recover his own decisiveness. Now, here, tonight, he chose to let her determine what they should do.

At last the second drinks were finished. They both disappeared to their respective lavatories for a precautionary pee, and then met back in the bar before leaving hand in hand into the street. It was cooler now, and he began to wish he'd brought a light jacket this morning; at the time his sleeveless white cotton shirt had seemed more than adequate.

Kristie led him down the Royal Mile as the shadows lengthened and the shops closed. They could hear the sporadic applause behind them of the crowd at the Castle, once a crackle of shots, for a while the oompah, oompah of an English military brass band. She seemed to be hurrying him along a little now, as if, despite her complacency back in the pub, she was just a trifle worried they might be late for wherever they were going.

"Where are you taking me?" he said at last.

"I promised you the best view in Edinburgh of the last night of the Tattoo," she said, pulling at his wrist. "You'll see."

They were nearing Holyrood Palace when she abruptly cut off to the right along a narrow cobblestoned sidestreet he didn't notice was there until they were walking down it.

And then, as the walls to either side seemed to melt away like a sea mist in sunlight and they came out onto grassland, he knew where she was taking him.

"I'm not sure this is entirely legal," she said laughingly as she clambered up and over a fence, skilfully controlling the skirt of her dress so it wouldn't become tangled in her feet.

"Arthur's Seat," he said. "That's where you think we'll get the best view of the Tattoo from. The top of Arthur's Seat."

"Near enough," replied Kristie, gesturing that he should hurry himself over the fence after her. "It's the top of Salisbury Crag. Now come on, come on."

They weren't the only ones making this pilgrimage. Although the evening had descended rapidly, he could see other shapes moving through the greyness. Many of them were couples like Kristie and himself -- mostly relatively young, but some older. He guessed that watching the distant spectacle from the top of the Crag must be a traditional practice for Edinburgh's lovers: an annual tryst under the night sky. It filled him with a pleasure he'd almost forgotten how to experience that some of those shapes he saw were moving with the uncertainty and awkwardness of age.

There was a path leading to the left of the Crag, and Kristie moved briskly along it, her arm linked through his. The moon was only about a quarter full, and thin clouds paused frequently to drape themselves across it; the Plough was a dramatic jag across the opposite half of the sky. He could hear his own breath, and Kristie's, and the distant wail of a pipe band, but nothing else -- no traffic noise, no longer the steps of the other pilgrims he'd detected in the gloom.

The path doubled almost back on itself to the right, and now they were seriously climbing.

"Isn't this a great adventure?" said Kristie. He could hear the smile in her voice.

"This whole week's been a great adventure for me," he said, annoyed at himself that he was puffing a little. "Thanks to you."

"And it's been the same for me," she said seriously. "Thanks to you."

She steered him off the path onto rough grass and weeds, all shorn short by the sheep that roamed this hillside during the day -- there were little piles of sheep-droppings, too, which he felt beneath his feet once in a while as they continued to climb.

And then suddenly they were on top of a ridge, and the whole of Edinburgh was laid out before them. Gazing at its lights, the breath coming noisily in his throat, he was reminded of how he'd seen the city as the train had slowed towards Waverley Station. The lights then had seemed to be accepting him reluctantly, greeting him with the kind of courtesy one should always offer a wayfarer but at the same time keeping themselves reserved, not giving him any real welcome. Now he felt as if he could have reached out across the darkness to cradle nests of those lights in his palms, that they would gladly accept his touch. The city had made him a part of itself, and now it was a part of him, too.

And this was all thanks to Kristie.

He lowered his gaze from the cityscape. She'd knelt down in front of him, facing away from him, herself gazing out at the lights of the city, her eyes fixed upon the pool of silver glow amid a heavy black fist: the great auditorium at the heart of Edinburgh Castle.

"Don't stand towering over me," she murmured, reaching around behind her to pat the ground.

He knelt. A chilly breeze combed the top of the Crag, and without thinking he clasped his arms around her, linking his fingers, to give her his warmth. He tried not to be conscious of her breasts, uncovered inside her flimsy dress, pressing softly against his sleeveless forearms.

She relaxed against him, and turned her head. He could see her eyes were closed.

"Kiss me," she whispered.

Craning his neck, he kissed her full on the lips. Reflexively his tongue probed to open mouth, but she pulled her face away before he'd had time to do more than touch her teeth.

Again looking out over the city, she knelt upright and very gently unpicked his fingers. Before he knew quite what she was doing she'd put his hands one on each of her breasts. He could feel firm little nipples couching themselves into his palms. The cloth of the dress seemed as sheer and insubstantial as finest gossamer; her breasts could have been naked in his hands.

For an instant he almost recoiled. Surely this was wrong. Kristie was his deepest friend, not his lover. He shouldn't be handling her like this. His penis shouldn't be hardening. He shouldn't be desecrating the memory of sweet Helen with someone else. He shouldn't be...

Shouldn't be...

Shouldn't be...

Should be.

This was the perfect rightness, to be here touching at long last her nakedness. This was the natural conclusion to the week in which he'd shed -- Kristie had teased away -- the five thousand tragic spirits that had been holding him in their deathly thrall. The week in which the guilt he'd been clutching to himself as if it were a poisoned treasure had slowly leached away through the pores of his skin. Helen had been telling him in his dream of her that this should be so, that it was time now for him to be where he was. He'd been loitering in the shadows of half-death for too long, far too long; now these two women, Helen and Kristie, one dead but not gone, the other all too evidently alive and very much here, in front of him, her behind pressed into his groin -- her behind that was strange to him in that it was a little larger and a little softer than Helen's had been, and yet seemed every bit as familiar, and cherished -- had combined their efforts to bring him, against his will, back into aliveness.

Moving slowly, so as not to unseat her breasts from his hands, Kristie leaned forward, taking her weight on one palm spread on the coarse grass. The action had the effect of pulling her rear away from him, and he almost tried to follow her, to retain the warmth of her buttocks against himself; but then something told him to stay where he was.

He could just see her other hand reach round and clumsily tug her loose skirt up. He settled back on his ankles, watching. Watery moonlight showed him two pale rounds. His mouth twitched in a smile: it seemed she'd been telling him the truth back in the café at the top of Jenners.

She spread her legs a little further. Inviting him. Inviting him into her secret, her unseen sex. But "Wait," she said. "Hold me again."

Once more he put both arms around her.

Kristie eased a little forward and put one hand between her legs, guiding him past the curve of her rump and then slowly in towards the folds of her sex. Some other time he might have plunged himself fully into her then, driven by the urgency of his passion to encase himself entirely within her, but there had settled about him a sense that she was introducing him into not just an act of sex, not even an act of love, but into something much more than that: a profound mystery that was as much spiritual as it was carnal. There was a ritual involved here, a ritual that he could not understand but which was clearly of enormous significance to her; as so often during this week, he must be content to let her lead, while he followed.

The noise from the far-off Castle was increasing now, the powerful, inexorable tidal sound that large gatherings of people make when a spectacle is approaching its culmination. Kristie was pushing herself slowly backwards, engulfing him. There was a roaring in his ears that surely couldn't be the distant crowds. He'd long since lost his hold on her breasts; now his hands were at her hips, fingers trembling and jerking against the ridges of her pelvic bones. There was no urge left in him to thrust himself into her; everything was completely under her control.

A crescendo of sound washed across the diamond lights of the city, a thunder of cannon, and a sudden curtailment.

And she had taken him fully inside herself, her buttocks squashed against his thighs. He was experiencing flashes of perception, as if a strobe light were playing across his senses: the fire of her about his penis, that smoothness again of her buttocks against the rough skin of his loins, the scent of greenness in the cold evening air, the far yet nigh lights of the city that had made itself a part of him.

Still she did not rock himself backward and forward along his shaft, just held it firmly in place, letting the only movement between them be chasing, fleeting pulses of herself up and down his length. He felt his own response beginning to build, as if some weighty monster were being hauled up from the core of him.

Edinburgh was entirely still and noiseless, it seemed, except for the solitary, infinitely lonely sound of a piper playing a last lament into the silence.

And as its loneliness died, so did his.

His orgasm was a storm wind, sweeping all before it. He closed his eyes before the hurricane could strike blindness into them. He felt the wind blustering up the seemingly immense length of his hardness, as if it would never stop, as if nothing could ever stop it. And then the force burst from the end of him, searing him, again and again, fragmenting his experience of time so that it came to seem as if he'd always been gouting out his seed, spending himself forever.

But it did stop, eventually.

He found himself on all fours on the cold grass.

Alone.

Much, much later, fully clothed once more, he picked his way cautiously down the side of the hill. He wasn't the only one doing so. Even though it was darker now than it had been earlier, he could see these fellow-pilgrims more clearly than before -- see them as if they were lit.

Couples had climbed the Crag earlier in the evening. Those descending it, each of them moving with the same wariness as he was himself, were on their own.

In the strange light-that-was-not-a-light he saw the eyes of the nearest of these unaccompanied men. There was puzzlement in them, yes, but also the vitality of life freshly reborn, as if an obscuring hauntedness had been washed away.

He approached the person closest to him, a tall middle-aged man who carried himself with intense dignity. His eyes were merry glitters within the darkness of his skin. Those eyes watched him, seemed to be waiting for him to speak.

"I was here with someone," he began. "Have you seen her? She's been my friend this past week and ... She was with me, but now she seems to have vanished and I don't know where she can have gone to. Have you...?"

The man frowned. "I was with someone as well when I climbed up here, but she's gone now. Have you seen her? Short red hair, tall, very pale. Kristie..."

A guy clambering down above them had clearly overheard the exchange, because now he interrupted. "Kristie, you say?" The accent said Chicago loud and clear. "I've been looking all over for her..."

At the base of the hill beckoned the ocean of night, and beside it the men who had been lonely gathered, becoming ripples at its edge. An eddy was split by a small stone, and the sound of the splash became words: "Has anyone here seen Kristie?" A wave broke into a rock pool, scattering its waters far across darkened sand, and the droplets that rained down were words, too: "Has anyone here seen Kristie?" Two breakers intersected in a complex pattern of diamonds: "Has anyone here seen Kristie?" The water sucked back, tearing at the shingle: "Has anyone here...?"

And a piece of bleached driftwood lay on the shore well clear of the waters, waiting for someone to come strolling along the beach and pick it up.

© John Grant 2004, 2005.
"Has Anyone Here Seen Kristie?" was first published in The Third Alternative and is on the list of stories recommended for a 2005 British Fantasy Award.

John Grant's most recent collection is Take No Prisoners (Willowgate Press, July 1 2004).
Copies of Take No Prisoners are available from the usual online booksellers and from the author's website.

Order online using these links and infinity plus will benefit:
Amazon.com / Amazon.co.uk.

Elsewhere in infinity plus:

• fiction by John Grant (aka Paul Barnett) - The Far-Enough Window (or The Reclaiming of Fairyland), an extract from the novel; Has Anyone Here Seen Kristie? (a novelette); Mouse (a novelette); Qinmeartha and the Girl Child LoChi (a complete short novel); Wooden Horse (a novelette); The World (extracts from the novel).
• non-fiction - John Grant interviewed by Lou Anders; Notes on The Dragons of Manhattan by John Grant; Gulliver Unravels: Generic Fantasy and the Loss of Subversion (a feature by John Grant); reviews of John Grant's work and reviews of Paul Barnett's work.
• other stuff - about the author.

Elsewhere on the web:

• John Grant at Amazon (US) and at the Internet Bookshop (UK).
• John Grant/Paul Barnett's home page.
• The World (fan site).
• The Rising Sun (Lone Wolf fan site, with coverage of the Legends).
• Paper Tiger (contains The Paper Snarl archive).
• Blue Ear (home of John's serialised-as-it's-written novel, The Dragons of Manhattan).
• BeWrite (publishers of John's The Far-Enough Window).
• ISFD bibliography.

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