It was a shock when old Andy Baranov died. Sudden deaths are always a shock: it was a car crash – brake failure on the steep, winding descent of the Braeport, near his house in Dunblane. As well as a good neighbour, he was my favourite opponent at the chess club. Although over-the-board chatter is frowned upon, the club is a friendly place and we had become firm friends, continuing to play at each other’s houses during the summer months, when the chess club was closed. Naturally, I went to his funeral at the crematorium.

Gordon, the chess club president, was also at the crematorium; we sat together. Gordon was surprised that the service wasn’t at the Orthodox Church. I explained that, although Andy was the grandson of Russian refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution, the family weren’t members of the Orthodox Church. They had fled the revolution because they were social democrats, opponents of both the bolsheviks and the church-and-state czarist regime…

Gordon muttered, ‘OK, gimme the history lesson later.’

The service was pretty grim. Afterwards, Gordon and I felt obliged to accept the family’s invitation to the Drummond Arms for afternoon tea. I have a weak bladder (age-related) and was fiddling with my half-empty tea cup, wondering when I could decently leave, when Andy’s daughter, Sophie, came up to have a word. Gordon and I were giving her our condolences, but she cut us short. Addressing me, she said, ‘It’s Frank, isn’t it? I was hoping to catch you here, I have to travel back to London tonight. Dad wanted you to have this…’

She fished a book out of her capacious shoulder bag, handed it over, and moved on. The book was Harry Golombek’s account of the World Chess Championship, between V. Smyslov and M. M. Botvinnik held in Moscow in 1957*. Gordon and I stared at the book, rather underwhelmed. A hardback, with its original, but torn, paper cover. I turned a page or two: Andy hadn’t written anything on the inside of the front cover. The book recorded all those 1957 world championship games in the old descriptive notation. A simpler algebraic notation had been universally adopted in 1981: for example, a pawn move to the fourth square on the king file changed from ‘P-K4’ to the simpler ‘e4.’ Only a few old-timers like me were still familiar with the old notation. So the book had little intrinsic interest or value. Gordon shrugged and muttered, ‘Well, at least it’s a memento of Andy.’ I nodded, slipped the book in my jacket pocket and asked Gordon if he thought we might leave.

When I got home, I changed out of my suit because I was planning to go down to the allotments and and sow some peas. As I was hanging up my suit in the wardrobe, the jacket slipped off the hanger and fell on the floor. When I picked it up, Andy’s book (already forgotten) fell out of the pocket and landed, spread open, on the bedroom floor. I picked it up and noticed what I perhaps should have noticed before, namely that a folded piece of paper had been sellotaped to the inside of the spilled paper cover. I separated the folded paper from the cover and spread it out. It read as follows:

Dear Frank,

I write this in haste. If you receive this book from my daughter, it will be because I have died suddenly, possibly violently.

I know you are a supporter of Russian freedom (even though you are a misguided follower of Kropotkin, rather than Kerensky). I have left a memory stick, hidden in an old spectacle case, at the back of the chess club cupboard at the kirk hall. Please take the memory stick and catch the 10.10 to Glasgow from Dunblane on May 1st. Board the second carriage at the door nearest the engine and take the second seat on the left. Push the memory stick into the seat upholstery. Leave the train at Stirling. A friend will recover the stick and pass it on to those who can make most use of it. Please do this in the cause of Russian freedom and as a token of our long friendship.

With every good wish,

Andrei Baranov

Shit!

I was shivering, and not just because I was in my socks and underpants. ‘… a supporter of Russian freedom… a misguided follower of Kropotkin’?? As an undergraduate botany student sixty years ago, I’d read Kropotkin’s book, ‘Mutual Aid,’ a Pelican paperback, a scholarly corrective to the popular view of Darwinist evolutionary theory: Kroptokin had pointed out that evolution was not just a competitive struggle of all against all, there were plenty of examples of the importance for survival of co-operation both within and between species. I’d enthused about the book to Andy one night in the pub, after the club had closed. And I’d then been surprised when Andy told me that Kropotkin had been an anarchist revolutionary who’d escaped from the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul in Czarist St Petersburg, and had written ‘Mutual Aid’ in exile in a London suburb.

I didn’t think that having read Kroptkin’s book made me an anarchist. Similarly, I wasn’t a fan of President Putin (who is?), but to describe me as a devotee of Russian freedom was quite a stretch.

Why me, Andy? Why the hell pick on me?? OK, Andy and I were the only key-holders to the chess club cupboard. But as a 75 year-old retired botany lecturer, I was hardly a match for the Russian security services.

I struggled to think clearly. I poured out and drank the last of the bottle of Highland Park, left over from my birthday. Then I realised I was still in my underpants and put some more clothes on. May 1st was tomorrow. Logically, the first thing to do was to find the memory stick. When I stepped out the front door, I couldn’t help looking cautiously up and down the street. As I walked off to the kirk hall, a builder’s van suddenly pulled away from no.22. I spun around like a whirling dervish, but it simply drove past me, down to the Perth road. Truth to tell, I then went back home to change clothes, as I’d wet myself.

Pulling on another pair of jeans, I wondered if I shouldn’t try and pass this whole thing over to Andy’s daughter, Sophie. But she would be already on the train back to London, I didn’t have any contact details for her, and I knew from chats with Andy that his only child didn’t share his interest in family history and politics. The obvious people to deal with this were the British security services (not that popular opinion viewed them as a match for the Russian security services), but I imagined I could only contact them via the local police. And I knew I’d have a better case once I’d found the memory stick. I set out again for the kirk hall.

I got there just after five o’clock. The door was locked. I pressed the bell – no response. I pressed the bell again, for several seconds. A large, elderly lady appeared and wanted to know my business. I explained I needed to retrieve something from the chess club cupboard. As I said it, I could see that I ought to have dreamed up a story which implied an urgent and important errand. Did I mean the cupboard in the large meeting room? Yes, I did. The Kirk Presbytery were currently meeting in there to discuss the accounts: I would need to come back later. This was said in a tone that brooked no dissent. I went round the corner for a pint in The King of Prussia.

Fortified by the pint, another whisky, and a plausible cover story, I returned to the kirk hall half an hour later. I rang the bell and I rang it again. Then I realised there were no lights on. Damn it, of course, they’d all gone home. Befuddled, I stood for a minute outside the kirk hall.

A helmeted and black-leathered motor-cyclist rode slowly down the street, stopped and parked the bike twenty yards away, and started fiddling with some straps. I panicked and walked quickly away. I thought about heading for the police station, despite lacking the memory stick. But home was nearer. And in my panicky, befuddled state, home seemed safer.

Jeez, what a pig’s breakfast I was making of everything. I set the alarm, though I was sure I wouldn’t sleep a wink. But of course, as an exhausted 75 year-old, I slept like a baby til I woke up bursting for a pee, had a pee, and then slept like a baby again.

I was at the kirk hall at eight o’clock the next morning – I thought there might be a cleaner there. But the door wasn’t unlocked til just after nine, by the beadle. I explained I needed something from the chess club cupboard. He followed me to the meeting room, but seemed satisfied once I produced my key to the cupboard. There was a lot of stuff in there – chess sets, chess boards, chess clocks, score sheets, old minute books, old photos – but I found the spectacle case eventually. I put everything back, locked up, shouted my thanks to the beadle, and headed for the station.

Dunblane is a terminus for Glasgow commuter services. So the 10.10 train was empty when it drew up at the platform. I was the first person into the second carriage and bagged the second seat on the left. Four other people entered the carriage and I found myself scrutinising them as they entered and walked past me. I discounted a mother with a toddler, and an elderly lady with a walking stick, but I fancied that a powerfully built middle-aged man with a shaved head gave me an apprising look as he walked past. I was uncomfortable that he was sitting behind me, where I couldn’t see him, but I didn’t dare quit the designated seat.

As the train drew out of the station, I laid my raincoat beside me and, under the cover of the coat, pushed the memory stick into the gap in the upholstery. The ticket-collector arrived; he didn’t even look at me or my raincoat, just at my ticket. Then I got a shock: I’d completely forgotten the train stopped at Bridge of Allan before it got to Stirling. Several girl students came into the carriage and one of them came and sat opposite me. I felt sick, my mouth was dry and I couldn’t swallow.

She ignored me and sat swiping her phone.

The train pulled into Stirling station, where there were a score or more passengers waiting to board. I got up, picked up my raincoat, and noted that the memory stick was invisible, nestled in the gap in the upholstery. The shaved-headed guy also got off the train. I didn’t linger at the station for a return train to Dunblane, I headed straight for the taxi rank – an extravagance, but I would’ve given half my pension pot for a quick getaway. To my shame, halfway home, I had to ask the taxi driver to stop so that I could pee into a hedge.

A year’s gone by. I haven’t been on a bloody train since.

*H. Golombek, ‘World Chess Championship 1957,’ London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1957.

Biography:

Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).