Country of the Blind (32 page)

It couldn't be true. He knew it couldn't be true. Christ, one of the dates was just a week last Friday, and he had been at his parents' house that night. Admittedly at the time stated on the photo, he was fast asleep on the couch, well stuffed with steak pie and Export, but he couldn't quite envisage his dad getting up quietly in the middle of the night to go out to Paisley and screw some office in New Street. It was a wind-up. It had to be a wind-up.

"Was this you, ya lanky bastard?" he asked. "Fartin' aboot wi' the computers at Arlene's work?"

180

Arlene was Spammy's latest relationship-cataclysm-in-progress, a nervefrazzled neurotic who worked as a copy-setter at a graphics bureau in Glasgow. Spammy looked back at him blankly, an almost unprecedented hint of worry in his eyes telling Paul he wasn't lying. "I swear to God, Paul. I know fuck-all aboot this."

The phone started ringing.

Paul and Spammy looked at each other for a second of shared trepidation, then Paul shot up from his chair and headed for the living room to answer it. Spammy grabbed at his shirt from behind as he reached the living-room doorway, forcing himself in ahead of Paul and gesturing to him to let it ring as he fidgeted with the partially dismantled answering machine so that it would record the conversation.

"Hello?"

"Mr McInnes," they heard, metallic, voice-disguiser tones emanating from the small speaker next to the rotating spools of the cassette, which seemed to be operational in spite of the contraption's lack of casing and generally disembowelled appearance. "You got the envelope?"

"Yes. What's this. . . ?"

"Just shut up and listen," it said, the mystery caller's breath crackling electronically as he paused. Despite the disguiser, they could make out that the voice was male, and there was enough tone in the accent for them to reckon he was English. Or from Edinburgh.

"There was another article stolen in each of the robberies," he continued.

"The security videotape. Consequently, the police have found it very difficult to proceed with their enquiries. If you do not do exactly as I say, copies of the pictures you have seen will fall rather serendipitously into their hands. I am also in the position to provide witnesses."

"But, how. . . ? My dad didn't. . . "

"No, indeed, your father didn't. You didn't sell any smack to fourteen-yearolds in Glenburn, either, but I can supply pictures and evidence of that, too. But let's not make this complicated. Here are your orders. Pay attention. You will go directly from here right now, to lot 12b, Gourlay Street, Renfrew. In there you will meet someone who will provide you with further information. If you go to the police, so do the photographs. And if you deviate from your instructions. . . well, as I'm sure you appreciate, if I can make things like these pictures happen, Paul, I can make other things happen. And I can make people die, too."

The line went dead and the dialling tone trilled loudly out of the speaker a few seconds later.

Paul's relationship with Spammy was one of the great mysteries in his life, 181

constantly baffling him as to what each really got from the other's company. Spammy often gave the impression that he wouldn't exactly be daunted by the prospect of not having a conversation with another human being ever again, and when Spammy
was
feeling expansive, Paul often felt he wouldn't exactly be daunted by the prospect of not having a conversation with Spammy ever again.

There's always one weird kid in every neighbourhood, every school. Meiklewood had Spammy. Paul first remembered him from Meiklewood Primary, singled out for having singled himself out, ostracised for being a loner, and of course persecuted for the social sin of being a bit quiet. He was always awkward of appearance, even as a child looking as though he had been assembled from limbs and appendages intended for several other bodies of varied size and build. However, there were a few kids as quiet as Cameron Scott, and plenty more who could make him look a graceful exemplar of deportment by comparison. What made the difference, what sealed his categorisation, what turned Cammy into Spammy, was that he was "wan o'the mental Scotts". In today's parlance the Scotts would be described as a dysfunctional family, but as far as Paul could remember, as a family the Scotts functioned routinely and efficiently. Every morning, Mr Scott went out to his work, the weans went out to school, Mrs Scott stayed home, and in the evening they all returned, ate their tea and then knocked fuck out each other until bedtime. There were three forms of communication in the Scott household: silence, screaming and physical assault. Spammy told Paul that the kitchen was a lot like Beirut, such was the tension between each of the potentially warring parties sharing the place, any two of which could escalate hostilities at any moment. Spammy had come along some years after his two brothers and his sister, not so much a late bonus for his parents as a consolation goal when they were already three down.

Spammy's brothers weren't really feared as hard cases around town because they seemed to expend so much of their aggression on each other that there was seldom much left for anyone else. It was as though the complex history of resentfully recorded Scott politics that sparked or fuelled their frequent intersibling atrocities made the notion of extra-familial violence seem a pointless frivolity, like casual sex when you're in a consumingly passionate long-term relationship.

Spammy's sister, Lizzy, was a far scarier prospect. Paul's abiding impression of her was formed at the age of nine, having scaled the swingpark climbing frame and noticed with some distress that "Belter" Burns, a weasel-eyed and nasal-toned hard-ticket from the big school, was heading his way, past the seesaw, smoking as demonstratively as possible for the instruction and edification of junior on-lookers. Paul hadn't noticed that Lizzy was among the crowd of 182

"big lassies" standing near the roundabout, until she sprang from the group and assaulted Belter with a ferocity that Paul had never witnessed before, and seldom again. Not since Roy Aitken retired, anyway.

The ex-hard-ticket had staggered away, his T-shirt covered in blood from his nose, mouth and several cuts about his face, as three of her pals restrained Lizzy from committing further damage. Little as Paul understood it, he heard in school the next day that Lizzy was exacting punishment for Belter "puttin'

it aboot that he'd shagged her".

Tales of further acts of retributive - or equally often, random - violence by Lizzy were legion. Unlike her brothers, Lizzy didn't need that intimate, personal aspect to her brutality. This was because she was a psychopath. Spammy, therefore, was less a product of his environment than a by-product of it. He had been afforded some degree of protection amidst the Elderslie Crescent theatre of war by his parents' indulgence of their wee yin and by the fact that they and his siblings regarded him as having nothing to do with their battles, a cross between a neutral state and a defenceless refugee. This didn't stop him being a civilian casualty now and again, though. Paul and Spammy had become pals at primary school, sort of. He could remember things they had done together, could remember being in the same classes, but couldn't remember anything they had said to each other. Which was natural enough - that's how kids get on. They strike up an unspoken rapport and can be happy to be around each other, even if not much is being said. What naggingly disturbed Paul was that their adult relationship seemed to work on much the same basis.

Spammy had taken Paul round to his house once when they were about ten, which was when he was shocked - and indeed, at first, horrified - to learn that Spammy lived in a cupboard. It was basically an alcove with a door on it off the upstairs hall, with room enough inside for Spammy's single mattress and precious little else. Paul was only slightly relieved to learn that this had been Spammy's decision, and not some parental cruelty or deprivation. There were three bedrooms in the wee council semi: Mr and Mrs Scott had one; "the boys"

occupied another; and Lizzy had one to herself, ostensibly on the grounds that she was a girl, politely avoiding the reality that no-one of either sex would want to share close quarters with someone so terrifyingly unstable anyway. When he had grown too big to sleep in a cot in his parents' room, Spammy had been moved in with "the boys". And as soon as he was big enough to lift his mattress, he had moved into the cupboard. This seemed to suit everyone, particularly Spammy. His clothes and toys and stuff remained in The Lebanon, but the cupboard - with its shelves five feet up and its bare bulb hanging from the ceiling - was his sleeping quarters and, most importantly, his retreat. Spammy had taken Paul there right away, to just sit and look through annu183

als and swap football cards. It had been okay. Weird, but okay. Then they had gone downstairs for a piece and jam, and the cupboard had suddenly revealed its sanctuary qualities. Paul often wondered, later in life, if his own fears and knowledge of the family's reputation maybe projected something, but the tension in the fragile-ceasefire atmosphere of mutual suspicion, resentment and latent hostility as they walked through the living room and into that kitchen was like nothing he had ever imagined.

Paul didn't see so much of Spammy at secondary, and saw even less of him after his dad went to jail. That was when Paul started running about with that bunch of, well, arseholes. Stealing motors, getting into barnies. Paul's Wild Years.

Pathetic, really.

He had been pretty angry, right enough. Angry and confused and fragile, and a teenager, which was a volatile enough state under the best conditions. The shock and the loss hit him pretty hard, but it was the abuse that triggered off the anger. He had been one of the "good boys", see. Got his sums right, read books, did what he was told. So that lent a truly malicious joy to the relentless slagging, as if he had been knocked off some perch he had never even bloody attempted to occupy.

"Watch, hide your gear boys, here comes McInnes."

"Lock the windies, it's the burglar's boy."

"Heh McInnes, your da been fucked up the arse yet?"

And so on.

And it was all his dad's fault. Not just for being a criminal, not just for going to prison, but for everything. For making him work so hard at school. For drilling it into his head to be respectful and obedient towards the teachers. And for going on and on and fucking on about fucking Uncle Greig and his fucking physics professorship and how there were fucking brains in the fucking family.

Paul was shite at physics. Maths too. He had tried, Christ knew he had tried, especially as his dad was so bloody married to the idea that he had genetically inherited a genius-like aptitude for the sciences that would show in time if he worked hard enough. But he didn't even
like
science. He liked history. He quite liked English, apart from interpretations. He liked to read. And he liked plays. The class had been taken to the Citizens Theatre in the Gorbals once, and he had expected it to be the most tedious evening since Hibs were last at Love Street. But it was wild, this ancient Greek thing. The language was a bit pompous, and everybody seemed to be English, but there was so much action. There was fucking blood everywhere and by the end there were only about three folk lefi alive. No monsters, but it pissed on
Clash Of The Titans
. The first of the trouble, the first evidence of Paul becoming a bad boy, had 184

been the fights. Finally snapping at one robber or burglar or prisoner jibe too many, and going in in a storm of fists, feet and forehead. Then the full-on delinquency had set in: the
attitude
. Dogging school, doing close to fuck-all when he did show up, failing exams, winding up the teachers, running with the gang. He thought he was doing it because he didn't care about nothing no more, because nothing matters, man, what's the point of anything in this world etcetera etcetera snore snore. But really he was doing it because of who it would hurt. Who it would punish.

Christ, the psychoanalysts would have fucking loved it. He might as well have shagged his ma as well, taken it to its logical conclusion. Oedipus McInnes.

He ran into Spammy again a few years later, one Friday night at Paisley Tech Union when he got signed in by a mate, Kev, who had subsequently run into the girl he was there to get pished to "get over". Paul had seen this sort of thing before. He stood a few polite metres away from them at the bar when the relationship-dissection process began, biding his time as he expected it to get acceleratingly acrimonious before concluding - within five-to-seven minutes, on average - in shouted insults, highly judgmental analysis of sexual technique, and finally tears on the girl's face and a red slap-mark on the guy's. This one didn't quite run to form. Within three minutes Kev and the girl he

"never wanted to see again" were attempting to eat each other alive in front of Paul, before stumbling off to some chairs nearby, where their rediscoveryof-lost-love-please-forgive-me-you're-the-only-one-I've-ever-wanted snog continued for the rest of the night. Paul had been left standing at the bar like a prick at a dyke wedding, holding his plastic pint-pot and feeling conspicuously abandoned. He wandered over to a nearby table where he could rest his drink and keep an eye on whether Kev and "that fuckin' two-faced bitch, fuck knows what I ever saw in her" had come up for air at all.

Spammy had plonked his pint down next to Paul's and collapsed himself on to the bench opposite without a word. Ordinarily, this encounter would have been well off the end of the awkward scale, the pair barely having exchanged a dozen words in more than ten years, but it just didn't happen like that. And within three pints it felt to Paul like each of them had actually just been waiting for the other to get back from the bog, even though ten years was a hell of a long time for a slash.

Seven or eight months later, Spammy's flatmate had got a life and moved out, and Paul was sucked in by the vacuum.

Paradoxically, living with Spammy had actually given Paul a sense of dynamism about his life. He had considered himself a bit of a waster before this, moving from crap job to crap job with periodic bouts of dole-somnambulance 185