First Christmas - a story for the season by Herald on Sunday columnist Ron McKay

He switched off, the radio died and there was just the ticking of the cooling engine. As his eyes adjusted he began to see that the snow was now heavier and beginning to stick to the windscreen. Christmas Eve, it might even be Christmas Day, although it was too dark to see the time on his watch. For several minutes he sat, just remembering, as the outside world was closed out by the gathering snow.

He had first seen her through a window of a studio in the art school where a life class was taking place. She was on a stool in the centre, in profile, facing to his left, but with her head turned slightly towards him. To look at him, he seemed sure, the voyeur spying her through the glass. Her right leg was straight out to the floor, her left bent at the knee, foot firmly on the ground. She was naked apart from a pair of ankle boots, which somehow seemed entirely the appropriate touch, as if she couldn’t take it all entirely seriously. Or perhaps it was just that she didn’t want to catch skelfs from the rough wooden floor. In the winter sunlight streaming into the room her auburn hair, tumbling to her shoulders, seemed shot through with streaks of blood. Her lips were slightly apart, full and dark red, and her expression, to him, seemed to be saying “you can’t ever reach me”.

Then he noticed her left hand, which was clasping the side of her thigh, and her nails, which seemed to have a different pattern on each one, too far away from him to recognise. He must have stood at the window for a couple of minutes before he became aware that a small group of students had gathered behind him, the hiss of conversation making him look back at them. There were four of them, three boys and a girl dressed in combats and track gear, giving off waves of disapproval. He shrugged and walked off, trying to look nonchalant, hoping they wouldn’t notice his reddening face.

He had some books to pick up before the shop on Byres Road closed and nothing much to do after that. When he had paid for them he decided to walk over, back to the centre of town, swinging the carrier bag. The light was almost gone but the dying sun glinted in the high windows of the tenements and turned the sandstones a light rose. When he reached the Lobey Dosser statue he stopped, looked across the street at the sheriff, the two-legged El Fidelio and Rank Bajin locked forever together, and decided to go into the Halt Bar for a drink to wash off the trail dust.

It was busy and when he finally had his pint of Guinness he decided to move through to the back room to try to find a seat. They were all filled except for a chair at a small table and as he began to ask was it taken he realised the woman sitting there, the girl, was her. He thought about moving away, shuffling back with his bag and pint to the main throng before she caught sight of him, but she was looking straight up now, and it wasn’t a friendly look.

“I’m surprised you recognised me with my clothes on,” she said.

In front of her was a full glass, colourless liquid with bubbles rising to the surface, probably something with tonic, or perhaps unadulterated. He could only see her from the waist up above the table but he noticed the dark jumper up to her neck, a tiny necklace around it, and a hooded parka draped over her shoulders. Her left hand held a book and there were the painted fingernails, what looked like different aspects of small skulls on all five of them.

He was still standing. “I’m sorry. It’s not what you think ...”

“You’re not stalking me?” There was the suggestion of a smile.

“It’s coincidence … honestly … look sorry again, I’ll ...” he nodded back over his shoulder towards the main bar.

“Oh, sit down,” she said. “You have explaining to do.”

She was enjoying this, he could tell.

So he told her that he had been giving a talk to a class at the art school, a favour to a friend who was a lecturer, that he had gone to the art school as a student, although he bailed out half-way, more than five years ago, that everyone called him Steen, and that he had been a minor celebrity for a while but was once more a nonentity.

She had raised an eyebrow. “In a band you’ll never have heard of,” he went on, “now defunct, formed at the art school, a couple of minor hits, a lot of tours, major pretensions, a wealth of differences, the least of them musical.”

He was embarrassed to tell her the name of the band. The Semiotics. “You’re right You should be” she said, “I’ve never heard of them. But major pretension is spot on. I suppose you came up with the name?” He raised his shoulders slightly, tacitly admitting it. “And what were you talking about, to the students, before you got gawping?”

“I didn’t mean to”, he had said, sitting down, his glass on the table, parking the bag of books under his chair. “It was the whole scene. It just seemed so incongruous, you on a stool, wearing boots, crouched heads over drawing pads. I just couldn’t stop looking.”

“You have seen a naked woman before, then?” She sat back in her chair and narrowed her eyes slightly, before dropping the book on the table. “So what were you talking to the class about, the art of Peeping Tomery?”

She was smiling openly now. He would learn that pressing advantages was as much part of her as the way she tended to pronounce th as f when she was angry, or refusing to talk about anything in her past. She made him promise never to enquire. Particularly about her family. He had agreed, thinking that was just something she said at the time.

“Oh,” he said, “the talk. It was meant to be about the influence of art and presentation in music, in the industry, but as I didn’t have too many views on it or album covers to show I just busked, with a few funny tales and defamatory stories about famous people we’d supported.”

Thy talked for half an hour. He learned that her name was Ava, she was 20, also a student at the art school and that she posed for life classes whenever she could get them to help pay her living expenses. He wanted to ask if she had parents who supported her but that was a proscribed topic. She told him she was here in the bar because it was the closest, she lived just round the corner, and she was waiting for her boyfriend. He tried to disguise any sign of disappointment. “I come in this time every week,” she said, “and he’s always late.”

Steen couldn’t understand why anyone would delay meeting her or, indeed why she would tolerate it. She looked past him. “There he is now.” So he quickly got up, grabbed the carrier bag, left what was in the glass and nodded at the good looking young man now glaring at him.

“I’ll leave Ava to explain,” he said by way of a goodbye, “and I probably won’t come out of it too well.”

“He’s off to peer through windows,” he heard her say to his back.

He had been with other women, of course, but never before felt like this. It was totally illogical, what might be called love at first sight which, as far as he understood, was either some kind of ideal identikit composed by the subconscious, or perhaps just a manifestation of neediness in the person experiencing it. He didn’t like to think of the attraction in that way. It was not just sexual, he knew that. He just couldn’t figure what had happened to him. He knew little about her, not even her second name. But he intended to find that out and more. And to come back to the same place at the same time next week, hoping she would be there as she said she would.

He did, and she was, and for weeks following. He found out her second name, Kendall, and what she felt about everything from art to politics to history, although never going into her own. They even met several times for coffee and one time, unselfconsciously, she briefly took his hand when he was trying to make a point, waving a spoon, declaiming about something he now couldn’t remember. It must have been around six weeks later – it was, because the dates were indelibly inscribed in his memory – he found her in the bar, wearing a beret, the hair pulled down over one eye, trying to avoid his. It eventually came out, that the boyfriend, Cal, had hit her. Rage flamed in him but all he could stutter was, “Why?”, an inane, totally insubstantial response.

“It was about you. I talked about you sometimes, not all the time like he said, don’t flatter yourself. Jealousy.” Then, “I’ve left him.”

He took her hand across the table, the one with the skull fingers, the tiny portraits she had somehow drawn on the nails in coloured pens and lacquered in what he thought was an homage to Leonardo da Vinci, although she denied that, saying his drawings were just an inspiration, and that sometimes she copied Picasso, although only his blue period.

“Where will you go?” He said, hoping that the answer would not involve a family he knew nothing about and distance, but she simply shrugged. “You can stay with me, until you find something,” trying not to sound too eager. “There’s a spare bed. You’re welcome. You must.”

That’s how it had begun, more than 20 years ago now, until it ended when he opened the door to the west end flat and two police officers, male and female, stood there and he knew right away just by the way they looked at him that she was no more. He remembered how she had been in the last minutes he would ever see her, dressed in a dark suit for work, hunting for her handbag, alternately slurping on coffee and biting into toast, hair falling over her eyes. When she kissed him goodbye and left for the last time and the door closed behind her there were buttered crumbs left stuck to his cheek. Without thinking he brushed the side of his face where they had been.

The officers made him sit on a sofa, they told him that she had been hit by a car, a suspected drunk driver, that it had been very quick. He stood up, but his legs began to give way and he felt the taste of salt tears in his mouth. “Can I see her?” His voice was breaking.

“You really don’t want to, sir, you really don’t. You don’t want to remember her that way,” the woman PC said, she had told him her name but he had forgotten, “you really don’t.”

So he had nodded and agreed although he still didn’t know if that had been right, because what you imagine can be as awful as reality. Worse. One of the officers made tea, which is one of the rituals of these situations. He sipped at it but it was bitter in his mouth and he knew that it he drank it all he would throw up. And then after a few desultory questions, then telling him where the undertaker could pick up her body, wishing him well, they left.

That was more than six months ago. Should he have insisted on seeing her for the last time? he asked himself once more as he looked out the side window of the car. He tried to focus, instead, on the snapshots he carried in his head, of her laughing, scolding him, of that first sight of her in the art class but they were all painful. Every other emotion seemed to have bled out of him and all that was left was pain. He told himself once more that he was being self-pitying, that’s what Ava would have said for sure, but the worst thing was that he could never say to her all the things he had never said, or would say.

It was chilly inside the car now and he could see that the snow had stopped, that it was almost bright outside, moonlight casting a faint yellow glitter to the ground. In the distance was the dark outline of the hills against the grey-streaked sky.

He hadn’t known who to contact close to her about the funeral, but death has an insidious way of communicating. They had no children, there had been two miscarriages, some problems with her uterus and laparoscopic surgery hadn’t worked. It was always a regret they could not talk about, but for all the time they were together they, or at least he, would have described it as extremely happy. They were independent and inter-dependent, she had got her degree and diploma and a job teaching art in a busy school, working on her own canvases at the weekends and on holidays. Framed portraits, several of him, landscapes, pen and inks and charcoal drawings, dotted the walls of the flat until he took them all down because he couldn’t bear to look at them again. He worked as a freelance music producer, often for the BBC, and had even produced three small hit records he was slightly embarrassed about. They, too, were framed somewhere. Then, after the brief service at the crematorium, which was packed with students, former students, teachers and people he know from the business, a man he didn’t recognise, but who seemed eerily familiar, came up to him outside the crematorium. There was a smirr of rain, droplets were clinging to his dark red hair and shimmering on his black coat.

The man shook his hand. “I’m Ava’s brother, Sean,” he said, “I suppose you have many questions.”

No, he had none. He had made a promise to Ava and he wasn’t going to break it even although he presumed he was now released from it. Steen shook his head and walked away. That was more than six months ago.

Now here he was, on the first Christmas without her, sitting in a Highland lay-by with no-one around for probably miles, no vehicles, no tracks in the snow, just him and the package on the passenger seat, the urn holding her ashes. He undid his seatbelt, grabbed it and opened the car door, pushing it shut behind him, not bothering to lock it, and began walking over the light, untouched, white underfoot covering on the narrow, single-track road.

He kept walking, without purpose, past one lay-by then another, his ungloved hands stiff and almost losing grip on the urn. He knew there had to be houses, small hill farms out there, and if he kept walking there would be a village or a hamlet, but that’s not why he continued to crunch out the steps. He didn’t understand it himself but there was no need to. He pulled her remains to his chest and kept moving.

Several minutes or miles later he stopped. Ahead in another one of the passing places set back from the road, through the ghostly light, Steen thought he could see a figure, which seemed to be hunched, or bunched over. He was a couple of hundred metres away and the person was unaware that he was near. He took a few more steps over the shimmer of snow and he could see that, whoever it was, seemed to be scratching at the ground with what looked like a stick. Steen felt a shiver of alarm, this made no sense, was he imagining it? Perhaps it was a signal of hypothermia? He took another few steps, silent on the ground, but the figure looked up from its task and, although he couldn’t make out whether it was a man or a woman beneath a heavy, hooded parka, he believed it smiled at him. Then it went back to scratching at the snow.

Steen stood there, arms folded across his package, for several minutes as the work continued. Then the figure stood upright, looked briefly back at him, hurled the stick away into the darkness and then began walking away from him up the road.

To Steen it didn’t seem at all incredible that he should come across another walker in the wilderness in the early hours of Christmas on a snowy Highland road. He waited until the other person had disappeared and then, curious, he began to walk towards the lay-by to discover what the man, or woman, had been doing.

At first he couldn’t make it out, the lines and loops and circles cut through the thin top lining of snow to the dark tarmac below. And then he saw that it was a drawing, a profile facing leftwards, with the outlines, the features, depths and cavities just as Leonardo had drawn the human skull six centuries before. There was also what looked like a scrawl, perhaps a signature, in backwards writing, right to left, as da Vinci had done. Steen stared at it, took a couple of steps back and smiled for the first time in all those months, warmth suddenly filling him. He remembered that what Leonardo had been looking for, when he examined cadavers and then drew them, was to find the seat of the human soul. He shook his head slowly, the smile still on his face, then looked back up the road to where the figure had disappeared. There was nothing. Clouds had now slid across the moon. He had been intending, when he set out, to sprinkle Ava’s ashes by the side of the small lochan where they had first camped on their first holiday together. But now he unscrewed the top of the urn and began to sprinkle along the lines of the drawing.

He stood there for several minutes as a light rain began to fall. If the thaw kept up it would all be washed away by the morning. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that if he told anyone about this, not that he would, they wouldn’t believe him, that it must have been some manifestation of his grief. But although he could never explain to himself what he had seen, he knew that it had been real. And he now knew what he had to do. To just go on, that was all.

Still holding the empty urn he turned away and began walking back to the car.