Naming the Bones by Louise Welsh Read Free Book Online Page B

fresh blood, the bringer of new topics, the excuse to get another round in and postpone the moment when the pub door swung home and they each stepped out alone.
    ‘Hello, stranger.’ Phyllida McWilliams’s voice had lost its usual edge and now held the full throaty promise of a pack of unfiltered Camels. She leaned over and gave Murray a kiss. ‘Why do we never see you?’
    Murray didn’t bother to mention that she’d passed him in the corridor three days ago, her head bowed, looking like Miss Marple’s hungover younger sister.
    ‘You know how it is, Phyllida. I’m a busy little bee.’
    Phyllida picked a blonde hair from Murray’s lapel and raised her eyebrows.
    ‘He’s a B , all right,’ said Vic Costello. ‘Leave him alone, Phyl, you don’t know where he’s been.’
    The woman let the hair fall from her fingers onto the barroom floor. She nodded. ‘Many a true word.’
    ‘He flits from flower to flower.’
    Rab conducted a little minuet in the air with his hand.
    Phyllida laughed her barmaid’s laugh and started to recite,
    ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly . . .’
    It was worse than he’d thought. They must have been there for hours. Murray wondered if they suspected about Rachel. He should go home, make himself something to eat, think things through.
    Lyle Joff began an anecdote about a conference he’d attended in Toronto. Phyllida clamped an interested expression onto her face and Vic Costello rolled the beer around in his glass, staring sadly into space. Over by the bar Mrs Noon turned up the music and Willie Nelson cranked into ‘Whisky River’. Vic Costello placed his hand on top of Phyllida McWilliams’s and she let him keep it there for a moment before drawing hers away. Murray wondered if Vic’s divorce was finalised and if he had moved out of the family home yet, or if he was still camping in the space that had once been his study.
    Phyllida leaned against Murray and asked, ‘Seriously, where have you been?’
    She took his hand in hers and started to stroke his fingers.
    ‘Around.’ Murray tried to return her flirt, but he
could see Vic Costello’s slumped features on Phyllida’s other side and, despite the rips in its fabric, the banquette they were sharing was reminiscent enough of a bed to invite un­welcome thoughts of ménage à trois. ‘I was at the National Library today, working though what’s left of Archie’s papers.’
    ‘Oh.’ Phyllida’s fascination was a thin veneer over boredom. ‘Find any fabulous new poems?’
    ‘No, but I did find notes for a sci-fi novel.’
    ‘Poor Murray, out to restore and revive, and all you get is half-boiled genre fiction.’
    Murray laughed with her, though the barb hurt. He took out his notebook and flipped it open at the pages where he’d copied down the contents of Archie’s jotter.
    ‘I found this, a catalogue of names.’
    Phyllida glanced at the scribbled page.
    ‘Obviously trying to work out what to call his characters, and doing rather badly, poor sod.’
    Murray wondered why he hadn’t realised it earlier. The disappointment sounded in his voice.
    ‘You think so?’
    She gave his hand a sympathetic squeeze.
    ‘Undoubtedly.’
    ‘Shit, I thought it might have been something.’
    He snapped his notebook shut.
    Murray’s curse seemed to wake Vic Costello from his trance. He necked the last three inches of his beer.
    ‘It’s my shout.’
    ‘Not for me, thanks.’ Lyle Joff raised his glass to his lips and the last of his heavy slid smoothly down. ‘It’s past my curfew.’ He gave Murray a complicit look. ‘Bedtime-story duty. Winnie the Pooh – a marvellous antidote to a hard day at the coalface.’
    As preposterous as the image of chubby Joff at a coalface was, it seemed more feasible than the picture of him sitting at the bedside of freshly washed, pyjama-clad toddlers reading about a bear of little brain. Murray