Scottish Arts Council

I can’t be doing with fornicating, swearing, drinking and gambling. Not in public. Not on my sister.

I often go and join my sister for afternoon tea. A thermos of Earl Grey and a couple of scones. It’s hard to chat much, as Princes Street is busier and noisier these days, and I get funny looks if I talk to her too loudly, but it’s nice to be together.

Of course, my sister isn’t buried on Princes Street, she’s in Warriston Cemetery with Mother and Father but this is where I like to remember her, sitting on her bench.

Dedicated to the memory of a good woman
She lived respected and died regretted
Jean Isobel Crosbie 1922 - 1956
In God We Trust

I polish the metal plaque a couple of times a year, and I have asked the council to revarnish the bench, but they say it will happen in rotation, like all the other memorial benches in Edinburgh.

I sit with her at least once a week, thinking about when we were young, about how she encouraged me to be a good citizen, with a good name amongst our neighbours.

I don’t always get to sit on the bench; sometimes other people are already occupying it when I get off the bus. But that is perfectly acceptable. I gifted the bench to the city Jean loved, so that others could rest their weary feet.

When the bench is busy, I sit on one of the benches either side and give Jean a cheery wee wave, just like we were passing on different sides of the road, or one of us was in the church choir and the other was in the front pew.

The devoted wife and mother Euphemia Macaskill is on the east side of Jean, and our old friend the former Provost is on the west side.

It’s comforting that Jean’s bench is so near the Provost’s memorial, because when he was a young councillor they spent a lot of time together campaigning for tighter licensing laws, and against the wilder shows at the Festival and Fringe.

I do like seeing other ladies in the prime of their autumn years enjoying a seat with my Jean, or mums with little ones feeding them a snack and watching the world go by.

But it’s a little offputting to discover people shouting into mobile phones on Jean’s bench. She must find the one-sided conversations very frustrating. I know I do.

And I try hard to be charitable when I find German tourists with huge knapsacks packing and unpacking on Jean. Even their grandparents, I tell myself, were probably too young to fight in the war. But I do resent their size and health and freedom. I was that age in the war and so were all the young men who courted me and never came back.

But last month I saw something even worse.
I saw fornicating on top of my sister!

Hands inside clothes, tongues inside mouths, heaven alone knows what else. A pair of shameless immoral hellbound fornicating sinners defiling the memory of my sister in full view of Jenners and the Scott Monument.

However, by the time I had found the rat poison, and baked the scones, and let them cool so they wouldn’t go soggy in the Tupperware box, and caught the bus back to the bench, the sinners were gone.

So I sat down with Jean. I was a bit shaken, but she calmed me down, as she so often does. Soon I started to worry about what she has to put up with when I’m not here to watch over her. How many other people have used her bench for immoral and obscene purposes?

And what could I do with the scones? I was liable to eat them myself absent-mindedly if I took them home, and I hardly wanted to feed them to the poor pigeons.

I could just have put them in the bin, but I know that some of Edinburgh’s unfortunates rake through the bins for food.

So I sat on the Provost next door, to see who else came to disturb my dear Jean’s rest.

An elderly couple. A woman reading her mobile phone rather than talking to it. Three schoolgirls in kilts.

When I returned to my spot after a trip to powder my nose in Waverley Station, a couple of young men with cans of beer were sitting on Jean’s bench, shoving each other, shouting obscenities at passersby. Jean used to write letters to the Scotsman about this sort of thing lowering the tone of our fair city. I think she would approve of my choice.

I walked over to them. They smelt of drink, and they were bigger than I expected.

I nearly walked past, but I thought of Jean and her courage when walking into dens of iniquity to gather evidence against them. I took a deep breath, and prodded the larger one with my umbrella to get his attention.

“Good evening lads. I have some baking here which I was going to give the pigeons, but if it would help you soak up that beer, you’re welcome to a wee bit.”

“Are you sure, missis?” one asked, “Do you not need them for your own tea?’”

I walked away, not to the next bus stop, but to the one further on. I didn’t know how long rat poison takes to work, nor how noisily it takes effect. I didn’t want to be too close to them as they ate; I didn’t want to hear them meet their fate.

I glanced through the Scotsman and the Evening News for the next few days, expecting my eye to be drawn casually to the story of two young louts dying horribly on a bench on Princes Street. By Wednesday I was going through the pages more carefully, sure I must have missed the story.

What went wrong? Did I put the wrong dosage of rat poison in? Was the packet of arsenic past its kill-by-date? Didn’t they like my baking?

I had to come up with a better way of guarding Jean’s honour. One that would be available at all times, so the miscreants couldn’t get away; one I wouldn’t have to use within a few days of baking for fear of it going stale.

I reread a few Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh books, hunting for hints. Sharpened knitting needles? Icicles as daggers? Mysterious mushrooms?

Poisoning you can do at a distance, but if they won’t eat up, then it doesn’t work.

I didn’t think it would be appropriate for me to be caught red-handed. Jean wouldn’t approve of me dragging the family name through the mud, or even worse, the papers. So I had to be more subtle.

I tried to think what Jean would do; even years after her death she’s still my inspiration. When she died suddenly in the nursing home up north, where she went to recover from that persistent tummy problem which made her so bloated, I thought I had lost her forever, but I can still find guidance by using her as an example.

I spent a few days sitting on Jean’s bench, watching the people who use and misuse the benches.

In many ways I’m glad my first attempt didn’t work. It wouldn’t have been very seemly for them to have died on top of Jean.

I noticed that many of those who abuse the benches come back again and again, lacking anything better to do with their days. The two louts who spurned my scones were sitting on Euphemia Macaskill last week, and they gave me a very funny look.

“Your scones are bowffing, hen, go and buy a Delia cookbook,” one of them shouted after me.

And the girl who wrapped herself round her consort on Jean, I saw her again, with some other shaven-headed creature, on the Esperanto Society bench in Princes Street Gardens. (The dedication on that bench is in English. I’ve never understood why.)

I realised that I must target the repeat offenders. The ones who abuse not just Jean’s bench, but the benches erected in memory of so many of our good citizens. I will watch them, follow them, and punish them elsewhere, so it doesn’t make a mess of the benches.

IT’S NO FARE! BUS STOP MYSTERY
Lothian and Borders Police have asked the public to be vigilant at city bus stops after six mysterious deaths on Princes Street in the last fortnight. Six young people have died, and another three have been seriously injured, when they fell, jumped or were pushed under the wheels of passing buses.
Detective Inspector Watson appealed for witnesses to come forward, adding “We’re particularly keen to trace a possible witness to a couple of the incidents: an elderly lady, below average height, described as wearing a brown tweed coat, a dark green hat with a feather, and carrying a furled tartan umbrella.”

I am taking afternoon tea with Jean while I glance through the paper.
I take my hat off, and pull the pheasant feather out of the stagshead brooch.
I’d better pop over to Jenners and get a different umbrella, once I’ve finished this scone.

Lari Don; Photo: Alan McCredie

About Lari Don

Lari Don is a writer and storyteller who lives in Leith with her husband and two daughters. She has worked as a political press officer and a radio producer, but now works fulltime juggling written words, spoken words and children.

Her fiction writing got off to a flying start when she won the Canongate Prize in 2001 with ‘Melons 69p’, but then she had her second baby, so she didn’t have time to think again for several years.

Once her older child was old enough to read to her younger child, the juggling act got a bit easier, and in the last couple of years Lari has had short stories published in several anthologies and in magazines like Northwords and Markings.

Her most recent solution to the balancing act of motherhood and stories has been to write children’s fiction, and her first children’s novel, First Aid for Fairies and Other Fabled Beasts, has just been published by Floris Books.

Inspiration for this story:

Lari says:

“Juggling children and words can be inspiring as well as tiring! My younger daughter loved using park benches to grip onto when she was learning to stand and walk. She would get very excited whenever she saw a bench, so I got to know the benches of Edinburgh and their dedications very well. I particularly enjoyed by the Esperanto bench with its dedication in English, and for a while I was very attached to a bench dedicated to a man from the Royal Circus. Was he a trapeze artist? A fire-eater? Which kings and queens had seen him perform? I was so disappointed when I realised Royal Circus was a respectable New Town street name, and he had probably been an accountant.

“I spent a lot of time sitting on these benches thinking about the people to whom they were dedicated, but also about the people who had dedicated them, and how they would feel sitting on their friends and family. I wrote the first draft of this story sitting on a bench, keeping the girls quiet with rice cakes and apple slices.

“Benchmark used to be twice as long; I originally had a feisty detective chasing and unmasking the bus stop murderer. It took me years to realise that I was forcing the reader to watch someone else work out what the reader already knew, and then I just deleted the last couple of thousand words. There is very little in writing more satisfying than improving a story by cutting it in half!”