2007 - A tale etched in blood and hard black pencel (39 page)

“I know. We’ll just check the science base upstairs. Bound to be somethin worth floggin in there, eh?”

“Fuck knows, but seein we’re here…”

Noodsy doesn’t have a scoob what they could expect to find in there, to be honest, but he thought of it because it’s nearby and it’s where all the gear for experiments is kept. He’s always wanted a snoop round it, and he’ll never have a better chance.

When they get upstairs, they find it’s really just a glorified cupboard: mostly shelves, drawers and cabinets but with a double sink built into the worktop down one side. The shelves are pure stowed, jars of chemicals and boxes of stuff. There’s potassium in paraffin. He remembers that was quite exciting back in First Year, seeing it stoat about when it got dropped into water and then exploding at the end, but there’s nothing leaps out at him as worth knocking. Well, the van de Graaff generator would be a pish laugh to have in the house, but he doesn’t think he could fit it down his jooks for taking home unnoticed after the disco.

Turbo’s opened a cupboard and found a wee scalpel set with spare blades in wee foil packs. He sticks it in his back pocket.

“Whit ye daein wi that?”

“Worth carryin aboot in case ye ever get jumped. That would fuckin show them:
kweesh, kweesh, kweesh
, ” he says, doing a wee stabbing motion with his hand.

“Aye, an if ye fall doon on it, ye’ll cut your arse open. Put it back.”

“Fuck off. It’s mines noo.”

Noodsy doesn’t argue. He just hopes Boma doesn’t ever get hold of the thing. He opens a couple of drawers, finds nothing but Bunsen burners in one and some daft wee trolleys in another. He’s heard Scot Connolly talk about them, thinks it’s something they use in O Grade physics. Then he notices that a big black leather thing on a nearby worktop isn’t a box, as he had assumed, but a covered cage. He pulls the drape away and sees that it’s the school guinea pig, Bubbles, or whatever its name is. He remembers Coleman had it in their class once, but can’t remember why. He was too busy watching the thing to pay attention to what she was sayin. He’d really wanted a wee shot of it, but it was only one of the lassies that got to touch it.

He opens the cage.

“Whit ye daein?” Turbo asks.

“I just want to haud it a wee minute.”

“Ye daft? Come on. There’s fuck all in here. Let’s go.”

“Let me just clap it a wee bit,” Noodsy says, reaching his hand in through the gap as the guinea pig scurries into the far corner of the cage.

Then the wee bastard lunges forward and sinks its teeth into Noodsy’s index finger.

“Aaaaayaaaa, bastart,” he shouts, and pulls his hand back, but the wee fucker’s still attached.

“Fuck’s sake, be quiet,” Turbo urges.

It’s fucking agony. Noodsy’s shaking his hand, but Bubbles won’t let go. He grabs hold of the thing and tries to pull it, but that’s even sorer and lets him know how hard the vicious wee shite is biting down. Then in a fit of either inspiration or desperation, he sticks his hand in the sink and turns on the tap. This causes the wee bastard to let go, then skite about on the porcelain because it can’t get a grip with its feet. There’s blood dripping from his finger.

“Christ. Need tae get this wrapped with somethin.”

“I fuckin tellt ye tae lea it alane,” Turbo says, not exactly bowling him over with sympathy.

“There must be plasters or something in here,” Noodsy says, still running the tap with his injured finger under it.

“Take this the noo,” says Turbo, and hands him a big roll of kitchen paper. “I’ll keep lookin.”

Noodsy rips off a length and wraps it round his finger. Bubbles is huddled up in the corner furthest from the running water.

“Need to get that back in the cage,” Noodsy says.

“Aye, right. I’m no fuckin touchin it.”

“Cannae leave it, but. It’ll no be able tae eat.”

“Has it no eaten enough?”

“Very fuckin funny.”

“Oot the way,” Turbo says. He nudges Noodsy aside and puts a big biology textbook into the sink, forming a ramp. “He can make his ain way back. We better go.”

“I still need a plaster,” Noodsy says, opening another door. This one takes a bit of a yank, and it turns out it’s because it’s actually a big fridge. “Eeuuh,” he says.

“Whit?”

Noodsy opens the door further so Turbo can see in. There’s a set of lungs and a windpipe sitting in a tray, for a demonstration you get in Second Year. Noodsy can’t recall if they were from a cow or a sheep, but he does remember he nearly spewed his ring from the smell. He shuts the fridge and tries another drawer, where, thank fuck, there’s a big packet of Elastoplasts. He bins the kitchen paper and sorts himself out with a couple of plasters. All the while Turbo’s standing there with thon blank look on his coupon, like he’s back in Robbie mode. Then his face becomes determined as he opens the door and lifts the tray out of the fridge.

“Whit the fuck ye daein?” Noodsy asks, but Turbo doesn’t answer.

He walks out the door; no, runs is more like it. Noodsy goes after him, but he’s slow because he’s still trying to sort out the plasters. He heads along the main upstairs corridor, back the way they came earlier. Turbo’s got a head start, so Noodsy’s just got through the swing doors in time to see him tipping the lungs out over the side of the gallery. Turbo doesn’t look; just immediately starts walking back towards Noodsy as shouts, screams and then the sound of somebody puking come from below. Turbo’s face is horrible, his expression worse than anything the old Robbie ever showed: a storm of anger and hatred, but something scared and confused as well. He barges past, through the swing doors, starting to run. They both know they have to get back out and into the disco again sharpish.

Noodsy doesn’t speak until they’re on the stairs, far enough for nobody else to hear. “Whit the fuck was that for?” he asks.

“It was for the fuckin glue in ma bag, that’s whit it was fuckin for.”

“The glue in…? But it couldnae have been Tempo. He’s no in oor science class.”

Then Turbo says it, just as Noodsy works it out. “Naw, but that fuckin slut is.”

M
artin closes his phone and drops it on to the bedsheets as his head slumps back against the pillow, knocked flat by what Karen had to say. The ball is well and truly on the slates, or on the flat bitumen roof even, and he can’t get it back for Noodsy like Noodsy got it back for him. Two things remain consistent from then to now, however. One is that Noodsy’s been the one who got himself in trouble. The other is that despite knowing it wasn’t his fault, Martin feels like shite about it. Christ, at least back in primary school his role was little more than incidental, the ball simply coming off him last. These past few days, he’s been doing whatever he could to uncover the murderer’s trail, only to find the trail led back to Noodsy all along.

Karen was right: we’re none of us the people we used to be; except for, as his experience with Jojo proved, the ways in which we are still
entirely
the people we used to be. Martin would never have believed Noodsy had it in him to hurt anybody, but then who would have believed Martin had it in him to attack Boma Turner? Regardless of the result (and that was the point—in that blind moment he was utterly regardless of the result), he had launched himself at the nastiest, scariest bastard in the school, completely possessed by a compulsion to protect and avenge a wronged, innocent girl. That was how far he was prepared to go when he was nine, just for a girl he was walking home from school. How far would Noodsy be prepared to go for his wee cousin? How far would Pete McGeechy be prepared to go for his wife?

He feels like a tube. Like Jojo said, he hated being here without being the one with all the answers, and the only ones he found merely contradicted what he had hoped to prove. He looks at the alarm clock. It’s just after one on Sunday afternoon. Time to draw a line and beat a quiet, inauspicious retreat. He can be on a flight inside two hours, home to his flat by teatime, back at work on Monday morning like he was never away.

His mobile rings again. He picks it up and flips open the display. It’s Scot. He has half a mind to divert the call to voice-mail, slip away without any further entanglements. However, if there has been one good thing to come out of this wee misadventure, it’s been seeing Scotty again, and all too briefly at that. So he answers: “Hi, Scot, how you doin?”

“I’m awright, how are you? You sound fucked. Heavy night, was it?”

“Oh aye,” he says grimly. “Restaurant, pub, two different women, dirty videos, you name it.”

“Seriously, mate, what’s up? You sound like you’ve got one foot in.”

Martin tells him. “The game’s a bogey,” he says in conclusion.

Scotty is silent a moment, then clears his throat and speaks. “Well, I’m no sure if this means the fat lady’s still in make-up or whit, but there’s somethin you ought to know. I’m at the Bleachfield again.”

“Don’t you get a day off?”

“Normally, aye, but the demolition guys don’t—not when there’s double-bubble to be had. Colin had booked up-front for them to press right on until it was done. Anyway, I got a call from the foreman aboot an hour ago. Christ, you should see this place; there’s polis everywhere.”

“What’s happened?”

Scotty pauses again to swallow before telling him: “They’ve found a body.”

“What, in the hotel?”

“Naw, the hotel’s rubble noo. In the foundations, the concrete. Been there since it was built. Male, they reckon. I don’t know anythin more than that, but I thought, you know, it could hardly be a coincidence. Colin’s in a desperate hurry to get this place demolished. Johnny Turner’s equally desperate to stop it. Wants to
buy
the place, as it turns oot.”

“Colin told Pete he could guarantee Turner would be out of the picture if the committee gave him the green light,” Martin says. “They both
knew
there was a body to uncover. That’s what this was really all about.”

“How Johnny Turner knew is pretty easy to work oot,” Scotty opines. “But how the fuck Colin knew is a different story altogether. Don’t suppose you’ve any bright ideas on that? Or on who the poor bugger was?”

“No,” Martin admits. “But I do know somebody who might.”

§

“Fuck her, Marty, she’s just a stupit wee lassie. Never bother. Forget aboot it. Mon, we’ll go up an ask for the Pistols. The DJ’s got
Pretty Vacant
, I saw it. We’ll get that on then go fuckin mental.”

Forget about it. Easy for Scotty to say. It wasn’t him who just got KB-ed. Martin has to share about five classes with Helen and umpteen more with folk who just witnessed that train crash. Easy for Scotty to say, aye. But not as easy as ‘I told you so’, which he would be well within his rights to come out with. Why didn’t he just leave it; why didn’t he just enjoy the carry-on with his pals? God, he wishes he could wind time back five minutes. What a fucking mess. So much damage—weeks’, months’ worth of grief—self-inflicted in a reckless matter of seconds.

Girls, he now knows, are just not worth this.

“C’mon, Marty,” Scot urges, nodding towards the dance floor.

“In a wee minute,” he says. “You two go ahead. I’m gaunny go to the bogs, then maybe get a can.”

He doesn’t feel in need of either, but he can’t be on the dance floor right now; can’t be where everyone can look at him. He can’t go to the toilets either, he realises, at least until he’s seen Helen return, because he most definitely can’t afford to pass her in the corridor.

Fuck.
Fuck
.

He wanders disconsolately over to join the queue at the serving hatch. He waits and gets himself a can of Irn-Bru and a Mars bar and finds a quiet spot to consume them. He unwraps the chocolate and remembers Scotty talking earlier about the miniature variety: “Fun-size Mars bars? I’ve never understood that, mysel. Wee totey things. Whit’s fun aboot that? My idea of fun-size would be roughly the dimensions of ma bed.” But nothing’s funny right now. Not since he threw himself to the wolves, again, just like when he asked Diane Murray at the Christmas disco. The music seems hollow now, too, even though it’s
Pretty Vacant
. It’s lost that magic energy. It’s just background noise.

Scotty will be looking for him to join in, but he still doesn’t feel like it. He finishes his drink and walks over to put the can in a bin. That’s when he sees Linda Ogilvie walking in his direction. At first he’s sure she’s just on her way to put something in the bin too, but he catches her eye and realises it’s him she’s heading for. Linda is one of Jojo’s crowd, so this, like Jojo herself, is not going to be pretty.

He feels a lump in his throat, hopes to Christ he doesn’t fill up.

“Martin,” she says, “c’mere a minute,” and beckons him against the wall. This is odd, as slaggings are best conducted in the widest possible field of vision. “I need to ask you something,” she goes on.

“What?” he asks tersely.

“Will you dance with Jojo?”

“Aye, right, very good,” he says. So it is a slagging, but a very private and horribly self-indulgent one.

“No, I’m not messin,” she insists. “And don’t worry, she’s not askin you to go oot with her or anythin, just to ask her up.”

She must think he came up the Clyde in a banana boat.

“Pish,” he declares.

“I mean it.”

“How come? She doesnae even like me. I’m no stupit. In fact, I’m the brainy wan, remember?”

“She does like you. You just don’t know her. Jojo’s a good laugh. Christ, you’ve probably barely spoken to her since yous were at St Elizabeth’s.”

This, he realises, is true. He can’t remember having exchanged any words with her in years. He’s exchanged a few with Helen, polite but functionary, and that doesn’t seem to have done much to aid his standing.

“Well if she hasnae spoken to me since primary, why the hell would she want me to dance with her, when she’s got Tico and K-9 and that lot?”

“She heard what happened. That’s how she wants
you
to go up an ask
her
—not just for a dance, but so that snobby wee cow Helen sees ye daein it.”

Okay, so
now
we’re getting to something plausible.