My Life as a Man (12 page)

The swear word put me in a state of shock. I knew it, of course, and had used it since I was five in a primary school playground. My father had sworn, but not often and only when he and I were
on our own. Respectable working-class women didn’t swear, and decent men didn’t swear in front of them. Even the Hairy Man hadn’t sworn much in front of my mother.

The word was like a blow, but to my surprise Mrs Morton didn’t flinch under it. ‘I don’t know you,’ she said. ‘And even if you do know my husband, I’m sure
you’ve never been to our house.’

‘Why would that be?’ She looked at him without answering. ‘I mean, I could have been there when you were out, or up in your bed with a headache maybe – you look like the
kind who’d have a headache. What makes you so sure I could never have been in your house?’

His voice was the same harsh grumble, and he didn’t raise it. From the corner of my eye, though, I was conscious of an alteration in the stance of the big man in the blue suit, a kind of
heightened alertness, an easing of his weight off the wall. It made me think, Oh, God, you’ve made him angry, and that made me angry with her. That’s what fear does to you. I remembered
my stepfather saying, ‘The wee guy was a madman,’ staring up at me from the hospital bed with his broken face.

‘It’s possible,’ Mrs Morton said, and I found myself nodding, but then she spoiled it: ‘But I don’t think so.’

‘Tell you this for nothing,’ he said. ‘I could buy and sell your fucking husband. That’s why I’m here.’ He gave a sneer that included me and the house around
us. ‘
And
throw in whoever the boy’s whore of a mother’s got herself as a fancy man.’

‘Oh, really!’ On the exclamation of disgust, Mrs Morton stood up, but as she moved to leave the kitchen the man in the blue suit, still leaning against the wall, without looking at
her or saying a word, put an arm across the doorway and barred her way. When she came back and sat down, her expression was different and she seemed smaller, as if she had only now understood how
badly this might end.

‘What do you want?’ she asked.

‘Either you know or your man’s lied to me.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ She glanced at me. ‘Neither of us does.’ She was trying to protect me.

He went on as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘If that poncey shite’s lied to me, there’s a problem. I might have to kill him.’ He looked round at the big man. ‘That
not right?’

He smiled as if he was making a joke, but the big man stared back at him. It would have been nice to imagine he was waiting for the punch line. On the other hand, it might be he felt the answer
was obvious.

The small man shook his head. ‘I looked all over Glasgow for you two, sonny, and you’ve been here all the time, staying with your mammy. What room did she put you in?’

‘How do you mean, room? We don’t . . . What room? I mean, there isn’t . . . There isn’t a room.’ The strange thing was that it wasn’t fear for myself or Mrs
Morton that made me babble. It was fear that in coming here I’d put my mother in danger from this terrifying little man.

‘The one she put you in, either by yourself or’ – he jerked a thumb at Mrs Morton – ‘with her. Putting the two of you in the one bed wouldn’t bother your
mother, eh? From what I hear, she’s an easy bitch.’

And with those words I knew, not who he was or why he had come here or his connection to Mr Bernard, but how he’d found us. I’d heard Alec Turner sneer about my mother too often not
to know where that ‘easy bitch’ came from. I remembered him in the hospital whispering through his broken mouth that he’d tried to placate his tormentors by telling them he
wasn’t my father. Of course, after that he must have told them about my mother, everything he knew, including the last address he had for her. These two must have followed the same trail as
us from the boarding house to here. What a fool I’d been.

Mrs Morton said, ‘We haven’t slept in this house at all, and we certainly haven’t slept together here or anywhere.’

It was as if she hadn’t been listening. I didn’t think the little man was here as a messenger from Mr Bernard. Whatever he wanted, it was for himself. Why would he care whether
we’d shared a bedroom?

‘Where have you been, then?’ He frowned at us. ‘If you haven’t been here, where the hell have you been the last two nights?’

Messenger or not, I hoped she wouldn’t say one night in a car and the other in a hotel room; together and asleep.

She said the next worst thing. ‘What business is that of yours?’

Instead of exploding, he turned to the man against the wall. ‘What business is it of mine? What business is it of mine?’ He started laughing, rattling the pebbles hard, the
unfunniest sound in the world. ‘What fucking business is it of mine? You’re either smart or helluva stupid, sweetheart. Which is it?’ What answer could she make to that?
Certainly, sitting there too frightened to draw a full breath, I was no help to her. ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’s my business, it’s my own business I’m here on.
Where’s your stuff?’

Again I had no answer. The sudden change of direction left me baffled.

‘Clothes, do you mean?’ Mrs Morton asked. ‘I brought some with me from the house. Does Bernard grudge me that? My own clothes?’

‘They’re in the car,’ I said. ‘We just got here. They’re still in the car.’

He stood up and said to Mrs Morton, ‘Let’s go and have a look.’

‘I didn’t take anything but clothes,’ she said indignantly. ‘And . . . a little money.’

‘Show me.’ He pointed at me. ‘Not you.’ I sat down again.

She picked up her handbag and the two of them went out. When I heard the front door close behind them, I stood up at once as if the sound had been a signal. ‘I’m going, too,’ I
said. She had tried to protect me. I was ashamed of myself. I started for the door.

The big man said, ‘Be a pleasure to give you a tanking, son.’ He put out his hand and covered my chest with it. ‘Just give me an excuse. See, when we were at the hospital I
took a right scunner at you.’

‘I just want to make sure she’s all right.’

I didn’t have the courage to step round him, and we stood like that till his eyes lost focus and he frowned to himself. To my surprise, he took his hand away.

‘We can have a look out the front window,’ he said.

As I followed him through the hall, the only thing I could think of was that he was curious about what was happening; or else he wanted to check that his boss hadn’t driven away without
him.

When we went into the front room, I went straight to the window from which my mother and I had looked out. Mrs Morton’s car was still there, but two men in uniform were getting out of a
police car, which had pulled up in front of it. Mrs Morton was straightening up from the boot. The lid was still down, so she must have been about to unlock it. Her companion stepped back as the
two policemen came round the car to them.

I just had time to register all of this, when something that had to be a fist the size and density of a wooden club struck me on the side of the head.

The desk sergeant, though, was the genuine article of an enthusiast. He came out to the pavement to take a look at it. ‘You could do well over eighty in that very comfortably. Not that
I’d advise you to.’

‘Because it’s against the law,’ I said, feeling better now we were out in the open air again.

‘And we don’t have the roads for it,’ he said.

He showed no sign of moving. They’d contacted Morton in Glasgow and were – reluctantly, I felt – letting us go. Mrs Morton had already got in on the passenger side and I just
wanted to climb in and get away from there.

‘The lady’s husband is expecting you back. And that’s where you’re going. Right?’

I nodded.

He studied me for what felt like a long time. He had thinning red hair and lashes so pale you could hardly see them. When he opened his mouth, I thought he was going to threaten me. ‘The
gentleman in question wanted you held till he got here. I explained to him that we had no reason to do that. He wasn’t pleased. I asked him about those other two, as well.’

‘What did he say?’ I asked before I could stop myself.

‘He had no idea who they might be, just like the lady and yourself. And I’m told they weren’t questioned. They got into their car and drove away. They should have been
questioned.’

To be fair to the two constables, the sergeant hadn’t seen the size of the man in the blue suit. When I came to, alone on the living-room floor, I’d staggered outside, clutching my
ear. The little wrestler had taken one look, clutched the sleeve of the big man as he crossed the road ahead of me and pulled him towards their car. In an instant they were off.

‘At that point,’ the sergeant said, ‘Mr Morton hung up on me.’ And he stopped again, as if he might say more but was thinking about it, blinking at me with those pale
lashes. ‘I was wondering if your mother would have any idea who those two were – not that I’ll be asking her again.’ I remembered that Bobbie was a lawyer. ‘I was in
the middle of a sentence when the man Morton put the phone down. I thought that was rude. Hard to tell what was going on.’

After a bit, I asked, ‘All right if we get off now?’

I was round the car and halfway in, when he said, ‘You’re just a laddie, a silly one, maybe. You should be careful.’

I crashed the gears pulling away and watched him dwindle in the mirror. He stood watching us until we turned the first corner.

I tried to make a story of it for Mrs Morton. The way I told it, the big Heilanman doing the daddy bit, it might have struck a listener as funny.

Slumped down, she didn’t seem as if anything would make her smile ever again. The afternoon had turned dark-skied. The ocean she was staring at, if she saw it at all, spread to the horizon
cold and grey.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked, straightening up.

I hadn’t thought about it. Back to Glasgow? The game was up. Presumably, Mr Bernard could protect his wife. I couldn’t.

And suddenly I was angry with her again. It was as if I couldn’t help myself.

‘Tell you what, I’ve an idea,’ I said. ‘Let’s go back and ask my mother what made her think the car was stolen.’

‘Is that why she phoned the police?’ she asked dully.

‘What else was all that about?’ I felt Mrs Morton could have told the police I might not look like much of a chauffeur, but who she got to drive her car wasn’t any of their
business. She could have told them something – anything – instead of sitting with her head down, lost in a dream. ‘All right, forget my mother. Let’s go back to Glasgow.
After all, your husband’s expecting us.’

A bad dream: mention of her husband had been the touch that turned her to ice.

When she told me to stop, I stamped on the brakes, jerking her forward, and pulled in at the side of the road.

Without a word, she got out, came round and opened my door. ‘I’ll drive,’ she said.

‘Do whatever you like.’

It’s your fucking car, I thought.

Even on a main road there were quiet times. She spun the car across the road, misjudged and hit the opposite pavement, put it into reverse and then we were heading back the way we’d
come.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘This won’t take us to Glasgow. We have to go back.’

Wherever she thought we were going, she must have taken a wrong turning for we finished up at the harbour. We sat staring at the boats packed tight as herring in a box. When I wound down the
window, you could smell fish and oil, with the tang of salt behind it. A group of men were standing close enough to touch the car, but when I tried to overhear, the language pouring out of them was
strange to me – Norwegian or Gaelic, maybe, or just the way they spoke in Aberdeen, fast and guttural.

‘What were they looking for?’ I asked.

‘He didn’t say.’

‘But he told you to open the boot?’

‘And then the police came.’

I wound up the window and the men’s voices faded.

‘The only thing I can think of,’ I said, ‘is the small case.’

‘The one we took into the hotel?’ She frowned at me. ‘The one I couldn’t open?’

I nodded. ‘I know where it came from. When we were sitting in the police station, it came back to me. Just before I came out of the factory and drove the car away, did your husband’s
secretary come out and put something in the boot?’

She stared at me. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I was there when he told her to do it.’

‘If the case is Bernard’s, what interest could that awful little man have in it?’ But then she went on at once; whatever you said about her, she wasn’t stupid:
‘Unless it really belongs to him?’

‘And, for some reason, he gave it to’ – I stumbled over the next bit, almost said ‘Mr Bernard’ – ‘your husband.’

I told her what the sergeant had said about Mr Bernard Morton denying all knowledge of the men who’d pushed their way into my mother’s house, and then I described how he’d
shown the three men round the factory. Even then the one I thought of as the little gangster looked as if he came from a different world from the man in the gold-rimmed glasses and the red-faced
farmer. She didn’t say anything. I watched gulls swoop and curve above the boats.

‘Don’t you remember her coming out to the car?’ I asked after a while, for the sake of something to say. ‘That secretary, when she put the case in the boot?’

She looked at me blankly, and then with an odd defiance. ‘Whenever she appeared, I ignored her. I tried to ignore all of them.’

Instead of saying something to show I understood, I sat in silence, staring at the gulls. Two of them squabbled at the edge of the pier, wings spread and beaks gaping. If I wound the window
down, I wondered, would they sound like Aberdonians?

‘If we’re not going to my mother’s, where are we going?’

‘Not to Glasgow,’ she said. ‘Those two will be waiting for us on that road.’

That made an awful kind of sense.

‘They can’t be sure we’ll go that way,’ I said slowly.