A Certain Chemistry (6 page)

I started peering around farther away from the monument. Maybe she’d left but had paused—to look in a shop window, say, or to read a mobile-phone flyer—and I could still catch up with her and . . . well, and grovel.

I actually looked at her three times before I suspected it might be her. She was standing staring up at the statue of Livingstone, about twenty-five yards back along the way I’d come—I must have walked right past her. It was because you always expect famous people to look how they look while they’re busy being most famously famous. Even if you’re meeting them for lunch in Kentucky Fried Chicken, your brain expects David Bowie to have a colored lightning flash across his face and be wearing a one-legged leotard, Harrison Ford to be running around avoiding some frightening peril, and Dannii Minogue to be nude. I was looking for Georgina Nye dressed for
The Firth
—wearing factory overalls or a British Home Stores frock with her trademark coal black hair washing animatedly over her shoulders. But here was a young woman in canvas jeans and a baggy Nike sweatshirt. She had sunglasses on—not Ray-Bans or wraparound shades, either, just the kind you’d reluctantly buy from a petrol station while cursing the drawerful of the damn things you had at home—and, crucially, her distinctive locks (a shampoo-endorsing gold mine, undoubtedly, if only
The Firth
didn’t famously include a no-adverts clause in its contracts) were hidden inside a felt hat a little like the one Chico from the Marx Brothers used to wear. Anxiously, I walked over to where she was standing, all the time peering at her with an “is it?/isn’t it?” squint. I stood beside her and coughed.

“Um . . . excuse me . . . are . . .” I suddenly realized I didn’t feel comfortable calling her either Georgina or Ms. Nye, and the full-blown Georgina Nye made me sound like I was about to ask for her autograph, so even if it was her, she might simply lie to avoid drawing attention to herself. “Um . . . I’m Tom Cartwright,” I said. (A world-class disconcertingly unbidden announcement to make to her if she was simply an unfortunate young woman standing there all alone gazing at a statue, but pretty much all I could think of that was appropriate to say if she actually was Georgina Nye.)

Thank God.

She beamed at me, displaying a quite impossible number of teeth, and replied, “Oh—hi!”

I’d already prepared an affecting minidrama where I’d double-take at the clock on the tower of the hotel across the road, glance—startled and appalled—at my own watch, press it to my ear, become spontaneously furious, tear it from my wrist, and hurl it away down towards the railway tracks, cursing.

However, she seemed completely unconcerned about my lateness, and before I’d even arranged my face into the prelude to horrified realization she nodded up at the statue and said, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”

Quite the most hideously predictable thing it’s possible for anyone standing at that point on earth to say. Statue Livingstone must hear that twenty thousand times a day, every day of the year. It’s a wonder that the sheer, maddening repetition of the words doesn’t cause Statue Livingstone to come to life, climb down from his plinth, and savagely kick the speaker unconscious.

“Hahaha—nice one,” I said.

“What’s that he’s holding?”

“Erm . . . it’s a book, isn’t it? Probably a Bible, you know, with him being a missionary and all that.”

“Oh . . . yes.”

“Anyway, you have to hold something.”

“What?”

“If you want to be a statue in Edinburgh, you have to hold
something.
I reckon it’s a bylaw.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. All the people in the statues here have something in their hands. When they did the sittings I bet the instructions said, ‘Come to the studio at eleven.
Bring something to hold.’
”

She grinned at me again and, without a word, strode off purposefully down towards the Scott Monument. I was flat-footed with confusion for a second, and then I trotted after her.

“
All
of them?” she asked, when I’d caught up.

“Um, I . . . yes. I’d say all of them.”

She paused and peered up at Sir Walter Scott, sitting under his monument, with his dog. “A book,” she acknowledged.

“Yes. There you go. I—” But she’d taken off again. She was heading farther down the edge of the park, this time at a jog, to the next statue. Christ—actresses. I gave chase.

Adam Black. Hair a dignified white from copious amounts of pigeon crap:
easily
the favorite of all the crapping pigeons in Princes Park—don’t ask me why.

“What’s he got?” she asked. “I can’t make it out.”

“A scroll, I think . . . some kind of document. He was an MP, wasn’t he? So maybe it’s a parliamentary paper.”

“He’s absolutely
covered
in shit. Look at him.”

“Yeah, well, if you’re a Scottish politician, you’re pretty much bound to get crapped on.” A winning joke in a fabulous number of ways, I congratulated myself. Before noticing she hadn’t heard my off-the-cuff brilliance because she had already begun running along to the next statue down.

“Aha! Got you. He’s not holding anything.” She pointed triumphantly at John Wilson. “You can’t count that cloth, or whatever it is—that’s just draped over his shoulder really.”

“No . . . look at his left hand. See? Another scroll.”

“Where? Oh, right. Damn. Where’s the next statue?”

“The next? Um . . . there, down across the junc—”

She was off.

Allan Ramsay. Staring across with huge gravitas at Barratts shoe shop. And—I win again—holding a book.

“
Another
book.”

“Well, it’s Allan Ramsay. He would be. But anyway, Edinburgh is a town that takes books seriously,” I said, self-servingly.

“Next.”

“Next?”

“What’s that up there?” She made off, at very nearly a sprint, up the Mound towards the Old Town before I could reply. I could have done without this. I’d had a big bowl of Sara’s spaghetti-and-clotted-cream stew before I came out, and it was lurching around in my stomach like a moderately sized live dog. And they don’t call it the Mound because it’s flat, either, by the way. Nye, however, seemed utterly oblivious to its being leg-defeatingly steep and sped up the thing like a scampering rodent. I had to will myself to catch up with her; overruling my muscles with every stride and picturing £150,000 floating slightly above her head.

“Erm . . . can I just . . . you
are
Georgina Nye, aren’t you?” I asked as I drew up, gasping, alongside her.

She grinned at me again. “Do you generally follow women round Edinburgh at random, then?”

“Much less since the injunction,” I tried to say, but I think it was lost in the wheeze.

“Mmm . . .” She pulled to a halt. “A rifle. I
suppose
I can let you have that one.”

“It’s the Black Watch. It’d look stupid if he were holding a cake.”

“Right. Let’s carry on round. I bet there are some more up there.”

“No!” I instructed. Well, okay, “pleaded,” then. “No!” I pleaded. “We can cut through there . . . if we
have
to—”

She went bounding away up Lady Stair’s Close.

I’d pointed out the shortcut hoping to plant another psychological suggestion in her mind by taking her past the Writers’ Museum, but she was five yards ahead of me and I didn’t have the chance, nor anywhere near the breath for that matter, to point it out.

She was glancing up and down the street when I reached her. I had half a second to gather myself before she cried, “There!” and sped away towards David bleeding Hume. (A tablet of some description—damnably, as his being empty-handed would have been a desirable defeat for me because it would have brought this nightmare to an end. Sodding philosophers.) “There!” again, and—faster, if anything—she shot off across the road. I was beyond the farthest shores of knackered. I wasn’t running in any accepted sense of the word anymore. You know how children gallop odd-legged—like Igor crossing Frankenstein’s laboratory carrying a torso—when they’re pretending they’re riding a horse? That’s how I was moving.

She was standing squinting carefully up at the statue.

“I think I’ve got . . . oh, bugger it!” she said. “A pair of damn gloves! Where’s the next one?”

“That’s it.”

“What?”

“That’s it. Really, that’s it. There are
no more statues in Edinburgh
. I swear to God . . .” I slumped to the ground below the 7th Duke of Queensbury, sweating like a pig. “That’s it.”

My heartbeat was hurting my eardrums, and there was this buzzing noise that seemed not to be localized in my head, or even simply my body, but engulfing Scotland generally. I sat gasping on the cobbles, my forehead inconsolably sobbing tears of perspiration that wriggled down my nose and dripped onto the stones. Georgina Nye leaned back against the plinth and tugged a packet of cigarettes out of her pocket. Great. She smoked. She smoked, and yet she’d reduced me to this. Either she had the lung capacity of a whale, or I had no more than five working red blood cells in my entire body.

“Want one?” she asked, offering the cigarette packet down to me.

“No, thanks. I gave up years ago.”

“Sensible. I wish I could.”

“Yes . . . I’d take today as a warning shot across your bows, if I were you.”

She laughed. “Oh, I try to do five miles a day. That and some aerobics keep me slim. Well, that and some aerobics and the cigarettes keep me slim.”

“A three-point plan. Maybe that’s the book we should do?”

She smiled at me. She was friendly enough, but I couldn’t read exactly what she was thinking. Still a bit wobbly, but at least no longer feeling like someone was sandpapering the inside of my chest, I pulled myself to my feet.

“I’d like to see the city,” she said, blowing out cigarette smoke with more vigor than my smoke-free lungs could dream of. “I’ve only been here once before, and I was four years old at the time. All I can remember is people’s knees. I was thinking we could go up the Scott Monument. You can do that, can’t you? That’s why I suggested meeting there, so we could look over the whole city.”

I might have been up for that, but only before I’d made a casual remark about statues that had resulted in a near-death experience (I was sure I was floating at one point, because I
definitely
couldn’t feel my legs). The very last thing I wanted to do now was go all the way back to where we’d started, then climb about three hundred steps. This book might be worth about fourteen years’ worth of money to me, but it would be no use if I was dead before I signed the contract.

“Going to the top of the Camera Obscura is higher, if you want a view of Edinburgh,” I replied.

“Really? Where is it?”

“Just up the road there. It’s really close.” Better for her
and
not requiring anywhere near as much exertion from me. There was a bit of luck, eh?

“Cool. Let’s go, then.” She bounced off again. Where did she get this kind of springy energy? It wasn’t normal. She was like a woman in a tampon advert—she even had the white jeans on, for God’s sake.

We made our way up the road, paid the entrance fee, and climbed up inside the tower to the observation deck. I was pretty smug, I don’t mind saying, about getting all the way up to the rooftop viewing area without passing out. Nye leaned against the rail and lit another cigarette.

There were only a few people up there, looking at leaflets and talking excitedly in Italian. We stood silently side by side for a few moments and gazed out across the stony browns and grays of Edinburgh towards the distant cranes pinned along the waterfront. I wanted to get down to business, of course, but I thought that if I stared wordlessly over the rooftops for a bit, I’d come across as contemplative.

“So, you want to write my autobiography, then?” Georgina said suddenly.

“Yes. I think I could do a good job of it. I’ve had a lot of experience ghostwriting, for all kinds of people, so you can be sure that I’d produce something you wouldn’t be ashamed of.” Ugh! What a moron. I should have said, “. . . that you’ll be proud of”—that would have sounded far more emphatic. “Sara, I’ve just lost us one hundred and fifty grand. Yeah . . . litotes again.” Hell and arse.

Nye, however, seemed focused on other things.

“Hugh Mortimer recommends you highly.”

“Well, that’s very—”

“He says you’re a genuinely talented writer.”

“I’ve never missed a delivery date yet.”

“No, not just efficient. He said you were a natural, that you could be an author in your own right.”

“It’s awkward for me to say I’m great, of course,” I replied with a smile. “But I like to think that I’d produce a book for you that read well. That had a little flair in the prose.”

“That’s not what I’m getting at. I’m wondering why you don’t write for yourself.”

She didn’t have much of a Scottish accent. It was there, if you listened, but distant or vestigial. The accent of her character in
The Firth
was far broader—like Sara’s. I realized that she must put it on for the show.

“Oh, don’t worry.” I smiled again. “I won’t leave you in the lurch because I’ve suddenly dropped everything to go off and write the classic, epoch-defining novel.”

“Are you deliberately being evasive?”

She managed to say this without it sounding accusative or irritable—simply innocently curious.

“Um, no . . . I just meant . . . I ghostwrite. I ghostwrite books, or do magazine features where my name, some other name, or no name gets a byline, as needs be. It’s what I do.”

“No desire to make your mark? No yearning for fame?”

“Fame’s bollocks.”

She simultaneously smiled and looked like I’d just said the pope was really a woman called Trixie who used to work down the docks. I backtracked a little.

“Well, not
utter
bollocks. You know, I don’t want to
ban
it or anything. It’s just . . .”

“Worthless?” I think she was teasing me.

“Illusory. You know why I think most people want to be famous?”

“Um . . . money? Power?”

“No, not—”

“Adoration? Respect? Getting to refer to Denzel Washington as ‘Washy’?”