Hyndland Road, Glasgow, 9.20am

on the trail of the dead.

A morning so beautiful it’s almost unbearable. Red sandstone tenements lining the smooth curve of the Hyndland Road as it veers to the left, wreaths on shop doors, rime on pavements, stupid boots on my feet, Christmas trees propped against a wall, netting machine silent, sky silver and white, the low sun will stay that way for the rest of the day. This city used to haunt me. Used to kick around here aged 19, nights in beer halls and days at Loch Lomond gave way to memories it’s impossible to be nostalgic for. This spring, an invitation to a book festival combined with the need to do research specific to here. Those old hauntings overwritten by those few days spent on the trail of the dead, in the company of the living. Afterwards, a job I nearly applied for, lost my nerve. There comes a point when you’re not longer sure of the distinction between brave and stupid. I say you as if to pass the buck. I mean me. I was no longer sure if I was brave or stupid or some combination of both. Wish it was more clear cut. There are no shades of grey, the elders used to say from the platform, and how do you recover from a thing like that? Where else do you learn to live, apart from right in the mire of uncertainty.

Today, back on the trail of the dead. A strange endeavour made easier by Scotland’s central records systems. Years piecing together birth certificates, death certificates, census returns, property rolls, newspaper archives, family myth, trying to be guided by Janet Malcolm. The dead are easy targets, it would be nice to surmise, given the limits of evidence, it is tempting to fill in the gaps; it would also make for bad writing. You can push the limits of a discipline, but not transgress them, after all the dead can’t answer back. I like this work as much as I like making things up.

In my family women disappear. Or at least, in my Grandmother’s retelling of events, many women are missing from the story. I thought it was 2021 when I became interested in these missing women, but checking my notes, it was 2020. Shades of grey, again. To begin with, I want to know who these women were and where they went. It quickly becomes evident this is impossible, although there are many clues I could deduce things from, I don’t want to rummage around in the drawers of the dead. Instead I am left with the what of what happened, unable to know the why with any certainty. The dead as much of a mystery as the living.

There are things I know for sure. I know it was a morning like this when she left home for the last time. First snow of the second decade of the 20th century. I know because the newspapers report things like that. I want to think it was dusk when she left home, because I want what happens next to have taken as short a time as possible. I know she would have left her home on Royal Crescent, not rendered in chipped lime as it is now, but white still, and new, and as I walk the same route into the city, I try to subtract the ugly glass buildings, imagining it as it was for her. Make a mental note to check early photographs, city plans.

Does she walk past her father’s medical practice or the family’s church, does she avoid it, thinking some lingering congregants might have spilled onto the street, does she turn away from news stands full of headlines about the Treaty of Versailles and reparations. What was it like for her to be half Scottish, half German? Later, when my great aunt hurt herself as a child and bled, she said good, maybe the German blood is out now. What was it like to live with that loathing? She walks and is walking every time I come here, I feel them sometimes when I get off the train, tell myself I’m making the sensation up, she walks past Glasgow Central to the Clyde where is the water is black and unforgiving and she climbs the bridge, this much is certain, climbs, and where is everyone this freezing Sunday afternoon. I say afternoon because it has to happen as briefly as possible. She cannot be in the water long. I cannot let her freeze there. And there cannot be a time lapse. She cannot be said to be missing. This final walk must not have taken place the day before, there must not be a mother waiting at home for the duration of a night, not with the frost and the snow outside and Louise as thin as she was, no, this must happen on a Sunday afternoon and there must have been no one around to stop her because around 4.30 in the afternoon of January 11th 1920, Louise Dun is found in the Clyde, near the Broomielaw Bridge but by the time the death announcement is in the paper three days later she is simply decreased and friends are invited to visit the house but no mention is made of the funeral or where she will be buried. Afterwards, she is remembered as a victim of the Spanish flu and we do not think to ask questions because that’s not what you do, in a nice respectable family.

On the outskirts of the city, there is a cemetery. In this cemetery, near the boundary wall is a space, flanked on either side by stones. It is a space no one would think to notice. I have seen spaces like this in kirkyards and never thought to ask what they might be. This space is two people wide. Specifically two women wide. More specifically still, the width of Louise and her mother, Elisabeth. 212 bones occupy this space. Two unmarked lives. People are there and then they are not, or at least until someone goes looking for them.