The Blade Artist (7 page)

— Ah’ve nae snout.

— A tragedy. You have my apathy.

— You stoaped?

— Aye.

— Snout?

— Aye.

— Yuv stoaped smokin?

Franco shakes his head. — How many weys dae ye want ays tae say it?

— Hmmph. Joe fixes his brother in a piercing stare. — Any money in this art game, then?

— Ah dae awright.

— Aye, ah read aw aboot that, right enough. Aye, you’re daein fine! Shoes, Joe says bitterly, nodding at the polished black leather on Franco’s feet. It seems to set him off as he suddenly explodes, — You cannae say thit ye didnae make mistakes, Frank!

Frank Begbie retains his composure, hauls in an even, steady breath. — Mistakes are what other people make. People that tried tae fuck ays aboot. They made mistakes. Usually, they peyed for them n aw.

This is enough to turn his brother’s volume down. — California. How’s that workin oot for ye, Frank?

— Fine enough.

— Ah’ll bet it is. Joe’s eyes dance, or rather something behind them does. — How’s it the likes ay you git tae go tae California? he slurs, then snaps suddenly, — Big hoose, ay?

— Five bedrooms. A big outbuilding converted intae a workshop, or studio, as I like tae call it, Franco almost sings, as a sweet taste fills his mouth.

— Near the sea?

— Naw. Well, about three-quarters ay a mile away.

— Big hoose, but, Joe’s accusatory tone continues.

— Aye, though there’s a lot in the neighbourhood that’s bigger. N you? Still livin oan other people’s couches, mate?

— Aye, this is ma mate Darren’s place, ay.

— Cannae be much fun, Franco nods, looking again around the room, the walls of which seem to close in a little more each time he regards them. — Mibbe ah’m just no pickin up on the glamorous side.

Joe is irate, looking at Frank in fury. — Come back ower here tae lord it ower everybody –

— When you’re slumming it, I suppose it must look like the rest ay the world’s lordin it, Franco says.

— Ye goat a sub? Joe asks, in a completely different tone. Franco had realised early into the conversation that external kindness or scorn made zero difference to Joe’s mood. It was purely determined by the units of alcohol flowing through his system, and the fractured, internal narrative his fuddled brain was jumping through.

Franco rises, fishes out a crisp tenner from his pocket. Places it on the table. — See ye behind the goals.

He had walked past the old Leith Academy school in Duke Street, now converted into flats, recalling sitting beside skinny, ginger-headed Mark Renton in the English class. How he struggled to understand the words on the page, and he knew that the teacher, Hetherington, a bullish, rugby-playing man with a beard, and leather elbow patches on his checked jacket, would ask him to read again. In his mind’s eye he saw the teacher scanning the room, making his eyes big, as young Frank Begbie’s insides packed densely and seemed to fall through him. — Francis, if you could read next . . .

The anticipatory glee of his humiliation filled the room. Then, next to him, Mark Renton, whispering, — Julie visited the cinema with Alice.

— Julie visited the cinema with Alice . . . Franco repeated.

— Very good, Francis Begbie. But I’d appreciate it more if Mark Renton would keep his mouth shut. The next line, Francis.

The squiggles danced before his eyes on the page, reverbing. — Sh . . . sh . . . sh . . .

— What did Julie and Alice – remember them? What did Julie and Alice visit the cinema to see, Begbie? What film did they see?

The laughter building in slow ripples around him. He could feel Renton, only Renton, sharing his anger.

— Can anybody help Francis Begbie?

Can anybody help Francis Begbie?

— Elaine! You never let us down!

Then the sooky voice of Elaine Harkins, entitled, impatient.
Francis Begbie held everybody back again
. — They had decided to see
Gone with the Wind
, starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. Alice went to purchase some ice cream and popcorn from the refreshments stand.

The refreshments stand. Paggers at Tyney.

Frustrated by the local electrical shops, Franco decides that his best bet is to get a UK mobile. He opts to pick up a cheap one on a pay-as-you-go deal, and heads to Tesco’s at the Foot of the Walk, which he remembers being a Scotmid. Hopefully, he considers, he won’t be needing this device for long. Stepping outside, he tests it by calling Terry. It goes straight to voicemail (— Terry here. If yir a lassie, leave a message n ah’ll get back tae ye. If yir a laddie, dinnae bother. Simple as.) but at least he knows it works. Looking across the street to the Marksman Bar, he recalls old associations, then thinks about family.

As he crosses through the Kirkgate Centre, Franco is aware that a gaunt but wiry young man in a red Harrington jacket is staring right at him. It’s Michael, the younger of his two sons with June, whom he has heard is gaining a reputation.

As he moves over to the wall by the shuttered store, the boy’s slitted eyes widen slightly. — Aw, it
is
you, Michael says, dismissively. — My ma said ye were coming back ower.

Franco wants to retort,
no, it’s somebody else
. Instead he manages, — Aye. Want tae get a cup ay tea?

Michael considers this for a second. — Aye. Awright.

As they head down Junction Street, Franco notes two youths, wide and loud, coming down the road towards them. On spotting their approach, the young men fall abruptly silent and avoid eye contact. Franco is accustomed to inducing such a reaction in Leith, and turns to his son in a half-apology before realising that Michael hasn’t seen the boys and is striding ahead, lost in thought. Franco examines his profile, can’t see anything of himself, or for that matter June. The boy seems like a totally discrete entity.

The Canasta Cafe in Bonnington Road is still hanging in there, albeit as an even more depleted incarnation than when he’d last been in town. They find a booth and settle down and are served the traditional milky coffee, both repulsive and oddly reassuring to him. Franco asks his son, — What’s the story wi Sean?

Michael starts talking; grudgingly, sparingly and in terse, economical sentences, as he would do with a cop. Franco learns little new. Michael talks about Sean in a general way, revealing nothing about their closeness or otherwise. They could have been bosom buddies, or had a relationship like him and Joe. Both his sons’ backstories, from the meagre info he’s garnered, appear to offer few surprises. It seems Sean was prone to mood swings, his life-and-soul-of-the-party flamboyance followed by June’s brand of broken resignation, which made him an ideal candidate for junk’s levelling ministrations.
Michael, on the other hand, looks like he’s picked up some of Franco’s own brooding aggression. It’s hard for him to work out who landed the worst inheritance. One would be bent out of shape, then crushed by the world, offering no resistance to the heroin- and alcohol-soaked streets. The other would attempt to bend it to his will, then be broken by it. Franco feels disappointed, as part of him had hoped that his own rags-to-relative-riches story might have somehow inspired his sons. He realises how paltry and unrealistic this conceit on his part is.

Michael keeps a searching gaze trained on him, as if demanding some kind of deeper revelation than the super-ficialities his father is prepared to offer. Franco feels like he knows that look from somewhere, and can’t quite place it, but it isn’t the shaving mirror. Wherever its origins, it’s annoying him. So Frank Begbie shrugs, takes a deep breath. —You know, I never changed his nappy. Nor yours. Not once. Left youse full of shit till your ma came back. There’s another couple of kids that are mine, around here somewhere . . . I don’t know them, barely knew their mothers.

Michael’s intense scrutiny of him never wavers.

— My girls though, my sweet Californian girls, Franco says, almost wistfully, — I changed them without thinking about it. I always thought I wanted boys. ‘If it’s a lassie, it’s gaun back,’ I used to say. Now I’m different. I like girls, I don’t like laddies.

— Good for you –

— Fuck laddies, Franco cuts him off. — It’s youse I never wanted. No really.

At last his son blinks. He takes a cigarette from a packet. A woman behind the counter looks like she is going to say something, but instead turns away.

Franco feels his own mouth tighten in a satisfied smile. — I liked the
idea
ay having sons, but I was never really interested in you or Sean. Never loved youse like I do my girls. My beautiful, rich, spoiled daughters. You boys, he shakes his head, — tae me there was never any real point in you boys.

Michael’s tight sneer of a mouth suddenly flaps open. The cigarette between his fingers is directed at Franco, — Is that aw you’ve got tae say tae me?

— Naw, Franco says, rising to depart. — Whaire’s it your ma steys again?

Michael smiles for the first time. Lights up the cigarette. Looks at his father. — Fuck knows.

Michael’s ostentatious non-cooperation is superfluous; the address he is heading to has stuck in Franco’s mind, as it’s next to the stair where a much-hated rival of his had once lived. Walking from the Foot of the Walk along Duke Street, to Easter Road and up Restalrig Road, he looks at a video clip that has come in, on his almost-dead US phone. Grace and Eve are sitting on the couch, waving to the camera, one with enthusiasm, the other coyly guarded. Melanie’s text:
We miss you and we love you!

Franco feels something stir inside him, but clicks off the phone and fights it down. It is Lochend, and in the drizzle the darkening streets surrounding him conjure up nothing but a steady flow of paggers and vendettas past. This is no place for him to be conflicted. He hunches into a bus shelter and pulls out the Tesco phone, trying to punch in Melanie’s cell number through the use of antiquated, multi-function keys. Rage rises in his chest, and he tries to breathe slowly, as with the activity of his big fingers and the jumping display on the liquid crystal, the shifting hieroglyphics slowly take shape as her number. Present with him in the bus shelter: a dead pigeon, a discarded kebab (which looks in better shape than the deceased bird) and two empty tins of Tennent’s
Super Lager, one stacked neatly on top of the other. Euphoria rises in Franco as Melanie’s full number, with the US +1 dialling code is completed in its entirety.

Then the phone dies. It just switches itself off.

Franco presses the buttons feverishly. Nothing. It has perished. He looks at it in searing fury, thinks about crushing it under his heel. Instead he boots the cans down the pavement and stuffs the phone back into his pocket.

Breathe. One, two, three.

The rain has whipped up and beats on the back of the bus shelter, as Franco briefly succumbs to a phantom memory, warm and good, but never completely dancing out of his mind’s shadow to reveal itself fully. A girl’s hand touching his, her hair grazing his face, her scent in his nostrils. Did things like that happen to him, before Melanie? Surely yes. But he can’t allow it; can’t permit this place to be anything other than what he’s made it. Then the drumming eases off as the wind drops and the rain peters out, back into a thin drizzle.

The stair is easily found. At one time he’d made fairly advanced plans to fire-bomb the house next door, which was occupied by Cha Morrison, his old nemesis. It astonishes him now to think that he cared enough about this guy to consider doing that. What great crime had Morrison committed against him, or he against Morrison? Nothing whatsoever sprang to mind. It had all been talk, which had then ramped up, becoming a bizarre sequence of threat and counter-threat. Otherwise there was zero basis for their rivalry. They had jointly manufactured this conflict to give their lives drama, imagining it into brutal reality.

He goes into the neighbouring stair and realises that of the six flats, he can’t recall which one is occupied by June. He has no idea what name she will be using. There is no sign of ‘Chisholm’, her maiden name, or, to his relief, ‘Begbie’, which she’d taken to calling herself, and had registered Sean and Michael’s births under, although she and Franco had never married. No door suggests great wealth, so he opts for the one that gives the strongest impression of teeming squalor. It is painted black, some of which has spilled onto the frame, and it looks battered, with a Sellotaped, yellowing piece of paper, indicating that a J. McNAUGHTON resides there. He taps on the door and, sure enough, June answers.

Even since he’d last briefly seen her at his mother’s funeral, surprisingly obese, June has massively expanded. It’s impossible to square this version with the thin, brittle one of his memory. She looks at him, and, for an excruciating second, seems as if she is going to hug him. Her lips quiver, and her eyes implore. But then she turns abruptly, and heads inside. Assailed by the smell of cats and old, congealed deep-fried fat and, most of all, stale tobacco, he follows her into the flat.

Franco finds it hard to believe that he is facing her. She has sat opposite him in a faded floral-pattern armchair, part of a suite that is way too big for the cramped council flat. He can barely fathom how small the homes are. The room seems to conspicuously flaunt poverty.

— The game’s no straight, aye, she says, obviously doped up on antidepressants. Her eyes seem dulled and set far back into a now-bulbous head, which was once little more than a skull.

— Aye, he agrees, as a wary boy of around fourteen comes in. He fixes June with a sneer of defiant belligerence as he picks up a packet of cigarettes from the coffee table, then swiftly leaves.

— Yours? Franco asks.

— THEY ARE MA FAGS! she shouts after the departing boy, as she sparks up again.

— No the fags, the laddie.

— Aye, that’s Gerard. June takes a drag, her cheeks buckling in. — Ah’ve goat Andrea and Chloe tae. As well as oor Michael and Sean . . . Her eyes glaze over and a tissue, torn from a box on the coffee table, goes right to them. As she coughs raucously, Franco watches June shake: her fat wobbling inside shapeless, washed-out leisurewear garments. Her first pregnancy and Sean’s birth had seemed to wreck her body, but rather than bloat, June had shrunk into a Belsen skeleton, and he’d pretty much lost interest in her after that. He had muttered something like ‘fuck sake’ when she told him she was expecting Michael. There had been the jail, and their domestic life together, in which he recalled her swathed in blue light from the television set, through a fog of cigarette smoke. Although still a specialist in tobacco consumption, June is now obese and looks as grey-skinned as he’d done after his longest prison stretch. She inhales again, her chunky face caving in so radically it is as if her teeth have been extracted. — So you goat married again, ay?