The Glasgow Coma Scale (10 page)

Lynne, not realizing that his attention had wandered, was in full flow now, havering on – with, apparently, no irony whatsoever for somebody who spent her days in an airless sub-terrarium, overseeing folk any disinterested onlooker could tell didn’t respect her one jot – about how these classes were the first step in enabling him to resume what she called normal life, as if that was a thing anybody in their right mind should aspire to.

‘Oh aye,’ he interrupted her, ‘about that, ah’ve actually a wee favour tae ask.’ He jiggled from foot to foot, acting bashful. Ladle it on, son, ladle it on – though in truth he did feel just a smidge of guilt about the coming deception. ‘The thing is, there’s some, like, equipment ah’m needin fer next week. Pens and that. Ah mean, there’s no rush, but ah wis wondering . . .’ A phone was ringing, ringing. He had planned to trail off at this stage anyway, but was as astounded as any petty larcenist seeing a far-fetched scheme come off that Lynne was already pulling ten-pound notes from her purse. ‘Hud tae ask to borrow a sharpener aff ay sumdy last night,’ he continued, startled by how much cash she seemed to be carrying. He began to wonder who was playing who here. ‘Pretty embarrassin . . .’

‘Is fifty enough? It can be expensive, that stuff, as I remember. It’s a shame you didn’t drop in before lunch, I could have come with you to the art store then, in case you needed more.’ She frowned at her watch. ‘You know, I could probably—’

‘No, no,’ he cut across her in panic, ‘that’ll be plenty, ah’m sure.’

‘Well, here’ – eagerly pulling out still more notes – ‘take sixty anyway.’ She believed, no doubt, she was buying his silence about the spying thing. ‘But you will let me know if you need more?’

‘Oh, definitely. Defin-
et
ly.’ How far would sixty quid stretch? Enough for a meal for two, surely, without wine or dessert? Angus hadn’t eaten out, not counting the hostel’s dismal canteen, since the SNP came to power, not that he suspected any causal link.

‘Excuse me,’ Lynne suddenly bellowed over his shoulder, making him start. ‘Is anyone going to answer that phone? Struan!’ A blond youth nearby turned round, none too urgently. ‘How about taking your finger out your backside and doing some work for once? – So sorry.’ She dropped her voice, laughing uneasily when she saw Angus’s startled expression. ‘They’re driving me nuts today.’

‘Well, eh, ah might go aff doon the art store, anyway. Thanks, Lynne, it’s really – really guid of ye. Again. Eh . . . do ye mind, before ah go, if I use the, eh . . . ?’

Lynne giggled, which was, if anything, more discomfiting than her shouting. ‘Of course you can use the eh.’

A sanctuary in a place like this, the bogs – more dimly lit and not air-conditioned to buggery like the office outside. He retreated to a cubicle and settled in for the customary extended stay on the throne. Spending your days camping out on damp pavements wrought havoc on that side of things. He had a haemorrhoid back there that big he could draw a face on it and give it a name. He often wished the human race would hurry up and evolve into sentient light waves or something.

Such was his distraction that it did not immediately strike him as odd that a collage of women in the scud should be stuck to the back of the insultingly brief stall door. Angus, who was as interested in the female form as the next guy, inspected the nudes with middling interest while he waited for nature to take its course. They were pages from newspapers – page three of your Scottish
Sun
, to be precise, the sheer volume of T&A mildly diverting, and that was why it took him a moment to notice how the images had been doctored.

Every office had its colour photocopier, and somebody had gone to quite the effort to run off pictures of Lynne – her rastered likeness scaled up from an ID badge or the like – to stick over these girls’ faces. He blinked. Well, it was a tiny bit funny, her eighties hairdo and faintly glaikit gaze atop these young bodies, and the thought bubbles apparently emanating from the clone-Lynnes’ brains: ‘Curvaceous Kelly, 19, thinks bankers need to get real. “These huge bonuses they’re paying themselves aren’t fair when the rest of us are struggling to make ends meet.” We know whose end,’ the bubble concluded, ‘
we
’
d
like—’

Obviously someone didn’t think much of Lynne. But if you hated her, Angus wondered, studying these topless chimeras, why paste her image over these superficially alluring bodies? A man who sought to undermine a female in authority either feared her outright, or subconsciously fancied slipping her a length and couldn’t cope with the Oedipal implications. This was the work, he concluded as he emerged from the bogs, of one fuck of a sorry and conflicted individual.

Well, there might as well have been a neon arrow indicating the culprit: strawy-haired, his podgy puce face low over his keyboard, defiance in the set of his shoulders – the young guy Lynne’d bawled out earlier for failing to answer the phone. An open-and-shut case of workplace foes. What gave him away was the way he was studiously ignoring Angus, while every other employee bar none was openly gawping at him, not in a friendly way.

He stood there until he unnerved the cunt into looking up, whereupon Angus poured into his glare all the warning he could. Don’t mess with ma Lynne, you little wank stain. You do not know what ah am capable of. The wee guy feigned bovine indifference, but Angus could tell he was rattled.

Then the victim herself materialized at Angus’s side. ‘You’ve not a class tonight, though, do you?’

‘Oh – no.’ He broke away from the staring match. ‘Jist wan a week. More’n enough.’

‘Then I’ll see you at home later? Thanks for . . . you know.’

‘The keys,’ he reminded her, not to spare her. ‘Aye, nae bother.’ That Struan guy still had an eye on him, waiting to be exposed. Belatedly it occurred to Angus that he should have torn down the display in the bogs. Why hadn’t he? Maybe because it was, in some sense, despite its meanness and crudity, still a kind of artwork.

When he looked at Lynne he saw a wee soul, high-strung but harmless. Likely she was a terrible boss, but still Angus found it extraordinary that anyone could take such exception to her. Nothing. Do nothing. No need to be cruel, taking her in there to confirm what she either suspected or knew full well already – that she was despised.

Leaving Arundel’s offices, Angus did indeed set off, as though Lynne might be monitoring him, towards the art store: not the one in town where the wannabes shopped for their handicrafts crap, but the serious one up by the School of Art. Be as well, he figured, to buy a few bits and pieces, give the impression he was putting Lynne’s loan to good use, and better yet not to have to use the cheap stuff Dean had given him. Plenty money left for his other purposes. The apprehension he’d felt earlier at the thought of running into Cobbsy and that lot had dissipated. And if he met someone he knew at the art store, so what? He was a man with money, a man with secrets, and until such time as one or both ran out, he walked with purpose, he owned the streets once again.

He cut through Blythswood Square – a lot less prostitute-rich by night than by day, it turned out – then broke into the first tenner Lynne had given him to buy himself twenty cigarettes. The headline on the hoarding outside the newsagent:

CITY POOR
SMOKE LESS
DRINK LESS
FEEL SAFER

– reportage or edict, he couldn’t tell.

He lit a smoke to help him up Dalhousie Street’s killer hill. There was a bad ache in his shins, in addition to the usual pain in his gammy leg. Bone scraping on bone. The gash pavements didn’t help – here were potholes, fissures, unbedded flagstones that recoiled when stepped on and made his leg shriek; one deep rift between patchworked zones of friable tarmac had been filled in with just random chunks of rock, courtesy the Department of Roads, Lighting and Fuck It, That’ll Do. Cold air, smoke and exertion made his lungs feel wire-woolly. How weak he was, how lacking practice. Worse, one consequence of visiting Lynne’s office underworld was to have lit in him that rare, fierce desire for a drink, a feeling that only intensified when he turned the corner and came in sight of the School of Art.

Here, in a cold room under the eaves, Mackintosh leadwork on the tiny windows, Angus had taught his first-years, through torturous repetition, the rudiments of drawing. They had only one subject the whole year: an old high-backed dining chair with a busted seat he’d found on Woodlands Road one morning. The rubric was simple: in week one, he’d ask them to call out adjectives; thereafter, week in, week out, he quoted from the list they themselves had put together. ‘Draw the chair as if it’s curious. Draw it lonely. Draw an embarrassed chair.’ If they coped with the banality without cavilling too much – though he did welcome signs of resistance once they grasped that this was going to be the extent of things, a certain spirit – it showed they were ready to progress. In their second year he might even get around to inspecting the portfolios rammed with the life drawings, sensitive charcoal portraits, pastel fantasia,
unicorns
, that’d got them on his course to begin with.

He did not tarry at the art-school gates – too cold to drop pace, for one thing – nor enter the art store after all, but carried determinedly on down the hill to where the street became a cul-de-sac abutting the motorway. His desire to drink didn’t vanish when the school was behind him; the pride he felt in bypassing the locus of his cravings soon began to pall: like betraying no recognition when you passed an ex-lover in the street, afterwards all you felt was nigglingly, unquantifiably depleted.

To his left stood a row of disused warehouses, a wide ramp leading down to former loading bays, and as Angus was passing these, he saw movement – the cessation of movement – out the corner of his eye. He turned, squinted. A figure, silhouetted on the dimming sky, had paused on the ramp: someone who’d been caught short and nipped down between the overflowing dumpsters for a cheeky pish, no doubt. Angus started to move away – then heard a high, nervous voice call his name: ‘Angus?’ He faltered, kept walking. ‘It is Angus, isn’t it?’

His shoulders dropped. Recognized twice in a fortnight – getting on for celebrity. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Ah’m no wrang, am ah? It is you.’

Over his head the red street lamps warmed to amber, and Angus, taking two steps towards the warehouses, made out round glasses, a cadaveric face. ‘It’s nivver Rab,’ he called back, trying not to let dismay into his voice.

‘As I live and breathe.’ His grin twitching, Rab came forward into the lights’ shallow cone to confirm it, though as far as living and breathing went, the old man had only ever seemed barely to do either.

‘What in God’s name you daein here?’ By
here
, Angus meant more than the merely geographical. He was trying to remember if he had ever before seen Rab in daylight. Pubs at night, that was where you found him, and once he’d hitched on to you it was impossible to dislodge the bastard. He’d cling to you all night, encouraging you into bad habits, cajoling you, ‘Jist wan mair scoop,’ expertly managing to ensure he was served at the same time – and Angus had never been much averse to being led astray. The merest thought of a drink and who should materialize? It was as if the wish, misdirected, had brought his old acquaintance into being.

‘Ma neck of the woods,’ Rab said, sounding astounded that Angus didn’t already know this. ‘Ah’m alwis somewhere herea-boot.’ He came forward and, fist balled, slung his arm around Angus’s neck. How much weight had he lost? The clothes were hanging off him. ‘You, but. Huvnae seen you oot an aboot in’ – he calculated – ‘pure ages.’

‘Takin a bit ay a break fae aw that,’ Angus said, shrugging. ‘Nae big deal.’

‘Angus Rennie, taking a break fae the bevvies?’ Rab scoffed. With great scorn: ‘Ye’re no in recovery or sumhin?’

‘Aye, right.’ How could he explain? Quite simply in one way: when I reached the age my father was when he died . . . Rab wouldn’t get it, or, worse, he would understand completely, evince sympathy. ‘Naw,’ he settled for saying, ‘jist keepin a low profile a while.’

Rab released his grip, tapped a finger to his nose. ‘Say nae mair.’ Angus wondered what he’d managed to imply. ‘Which way ye headed anyway? Chum ye along fer a bit.’

You had to give the guy credit: he’d found a formula that worked and stuck to it. ‘Just bein friendly,’ he could claim if anyone resisted; and what was Angus going to do, tell him he didn’t want to walk beside him?

They crossed the bridge over the motorway, cars bustling beneath them – halfway across, Rab leaned over the edge, sniffed clotted matter into his throat and hawked a mouthful down on some unsuspecting driver below. With Rab at his side, Woodlands Road became for Angus a magic-eye painting in which every other doorway was a boozer: the heraldic gold motifs painted over the doors of the Uisge Beatha; vile Sam’s Bar; Russell’s, where for a bet he’d once shaved the eyebrows off a comatose drinker, sustaining severe bruising after Angus’s so-called pals woke the victim up; the Cellar Door, Bar Bola, Barracuda, Harvey’s, the Hamlet . . . Not helped by the chuntering monologue Rab maintained the whole time, a factoid for every establishment they passed: which bartenders had moved where, which regulars had disgraced themselves and how – none of it of interest to Angus but its ceaselessness good reason for him to keep silent.

Soon enough, though, Rab switched his attention back to Angus. ‘So whit’s gaun oan wi you yirsel, big man? They’ve bin askin after ye down at McCalls.’

‘That’ll be right. “When’s that tight basturt comin back tae settle his tab?” ’

‘Noh, man. No like that.’ Rab, grinning slimily: ‘Nae fun without you there – place is deid these days. Big Shelagh’s never done askin if ah’ve seen ye.’ If you were unversed in it, you could mistake Rab’s obsequiousness for genuine warmth – could start to believe you really had been missed.

On their right: the Ravenscroft, the Dolphin Bar, O’Ceallaigh’s – daft Davy Breen once paid a dealer there fifty pounds for what proved to be a gram of salt, then spent the evening smearing the stuff on his gums, swearing he could feel it starting to kick in. These memories! He had to get off Woodlands Road. To the left, after the cash and carry –
SPICES AND PULSES AT WHOLESALE PRICES
– a relief: the park. He managed to steer Rab through the gates and they went crunching up the hill through the blue grass and frost-stiffened leaves, Rab at last leaving off talking. Twilight was coming in and the cold starting to bite, but it made the place beautiful. When a breeze flurried up the fragments of leaves, Angus found himself moving quicker, chasing them, stamping them down to powder, Rab joining in: a pair of auld jakeys japing about like kids.