The Glasgow Coma Scale (11 page)

You couldn’t do it for long – breath catching thick in their throats – and they collapsed, laughing a fog around their faces, on a softly rotting bench.

‘Come wi me down McCalls for a bit,’ Rab suggested, trying, as Angus had expected, to sound nonchalant, like the idea had just that moment come to him.

‘Come aff it. Loon.’ In a way, he was relieved: now the inevitable proposal had been made, he could get on with rejecting it.

‘Jist the wan, that’s aw. Be like auld times. Big Shelagh’d be over the moon tae see ye.’

‘That’d be right. Prolly keeps a shotgun loaded neath the bar in case ah ivver show ma face again.’

‘Well, we’ve got tae go somewhere,’ Rab said peevishly. ‘Ah’m startin tae no be able tae feel ma toes.’

‘Shoe shop’s whut you need, no a pub.’

‘That reminds me, ye know who’s still aboot? Remember Wullie? Still sittin there all day, every day, hauf a pint shandy in his haun, watchin the telly. Nae place else tae go, ah shouldnae wonder.’

‘Wullie wi nae shoes, wis that whut we used tae call him?’

Rab cackled. ‘Aye, well, that’s a story. Wait’ll ah tell ye.’ He settled his jacket around him and rubbed veinous hands together, swelling with raconteur’s pride. ‘No joke, right, this guy comes intae McCalls one eftirnoon – bout a month ago, this was – no a regular, but Big Shelagh reckoned she’d seen him a couple times before. Anyway, in he comes, big box unner the arm, marches straight over to where Wullie’s sitting gazing intae space, tuned tae the fuckin moon as ivver. Plonks the box down in front ay him. “Here ye go, big man,” he goes. “Winter’s comin.” And whut d’ye think’s in the box? Brand-new pair ay shoes, expensive an aw, hard-wearing, guid grip on the soles. Guy comes up tae the bar, passes Big Shelagh an envelope and says, “Here’s the receipt. Gonnae gie him a haund if they’re no the right size?” She’s giein the guy wan ay they looks ay hers could melt a hole in steel plate, but she says yes anywise, and that’s it, aff this cunt goes again wiout anither word. All the while Wullie’s kept starin up at the idiot box, eyes like marbles – but right enough he makes sure and takes that shoebox with him when he leaves that night.’

‘So he’s Wullie wi shoes these days,’ Angus ventured.

‘Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? So next day Wullie’s back sittin in, hauf pint shandy, starin up at the racing oan the telly, same auld same auld. Oot comes Shelagh fae behind the bar tae see how they’re fittin him, but there’re his wee white toes keekin oot the ends ay his troosers same’s ever. “What the hell,” she goes, “did you dae wi that nice man’s shoes, ye ungrateful so-and-so?” But Wullie just plays dumb, acts the daft laddie, like, whut’s that, ah nivver heard anyhin about any shoes.’

Lines of students, the autumn term’s new influx, straggled past in the gloaming, heading back to halls, uncertain-looking, soft as newborns. The dry leaves drove up in the wind, eddied, fell back, made no sound.

‘Ye’ve missed yirsel,’ Rab offered after a while.

‘Sounds it, aye.’

‘Why don’t ye come for a bit at least.’ A querulous tone had entered Rab’s voice. His teeth were worn to nubs, a dismal colour nearly green. ‘A wee swalley.’

‘You’ll get my dander up,’ Angus warned, trying to sound good-humoured.

‘A wee hauf jist.’

It touched Angus, the effort it must have taken to get that out. When someone was prepared to make that kind of sacrifice, you did have to compromise, you had to meet them halfway. Besides, sixty quid in his pocket, and where else to go but home to Lynne? ‘Fuck yir hauf,’ he scoffed, howking back his shoulders. ‘Whut are we, wimmin?’

They wound their way up Gibson Street, heading for Byres Road. Five o’clock, and dusk coming in: by now, in another life, Angus would’ve been scouting out a place to stay the night. The warehouses where he’d met Rab? No, he’d scoped those out with a practised eye. Rainwater, bin juice and worse would stream down the entrance ramps and in beneath the doors. Roof was in all right nick, but the buildings stood on an exposed corner, and wind’d cut right through the wooden doors and askew windows. Weather this cold, someone might drop off as a man and be discovered the next morning just a body. It didn’t happen often, but often enough. There but for the grace of Lynne Meacher. He did not intend to tell Rab about his experiences. He didn’t want the facts to turn into anecdote, the horror to be diluted.

He patted his hands together and blew into them. A weird smell like acetone in the air here. ‘So tell me,’ he said to Rab as they reached the top of University Avenue. On their left rose the uni’s jagged towers, speckles of blackening sky visible through the golden-lit, stencil-cut main spire. ‘Catch me up. Ye still see whut’s-his-chops proppin up the bar? Alwis used tae try and sell ye pills?’

‘Oh, Barney, aye. Nup. Got put away, didn’t he?’

‘Barney did?’

‘Tellin ye. Last year this wis, mibbe? Year before? Possession wi intent tae supply.’

‘Fuck’s sake. Whit he get?’

‘Three year, sumhin like that? Judge wantit to make an example ay him – nae matter the useless cunt couldnae’ve selt ye a bucket watter if yir face wis oan fire.’

‘Nae luck, eh.’ But what interested and saddened Angus was not John Barney’s shame – even taking into account the forced camaraderie of barflies, they’d never been pals – but the notion, since he was sure he’d seen Barney last time he was down at McCalls, that it might have been years since he’d set foot in his regular.

The pub was visible now, down the bottom of the hill. The paintwork had been done up, red now rather than the black finish he remembered, and with the brass-covered lights coming on over the frosted windows for night-time, the place looked braw. Angus swallowed. So welcoming, so inviting, you could say that objectively, and now it wasn’t just the gradient of the hill making his pace pick up. These lights on Byres Road went in a long sequence: you didn’t get to them at just the right time, you could wait an eternity to cross the road.

McCalls: less a pub and more an entertainment complex for the alcoholically inclined. There was a dive bar in the basement – walls painted black, snakebite on permanent special offer – for students, who might find the street-level lounge bar that bit too auld-mannish for their liking, but also to benefit the auld men in question, who did not like to be reminded about such things as youth, as potential. A gaggle of youngsters was heading in now, each essaying a pimp’s loose-kneed gait, glancing around before descending the stairs, pretending they were up to something illicit. Oh, and they were, they would be.

Next to that entranceway, the off-licence open till midnight for takeaways – Angus peered over, and there he was right enough, Cairry-Oot Aidan, a sweet guy with a fierce expression, who’d been working there since he was a student himself: more heavily bearded than Angus recalled, but otherwise essentially unchanged for a decade or more now, an elemental. Each time you saw him he was wearing the T-shirt of a different death-metal band. A man of few words, he just glowered out from behind his counter, where he guarded the bottles, the quivering fridges of Tennent’s cans, with the air of someone dealing in arms, which – well, you only had to walk down Sauchiehall Street on a Sunday morning, glass from Buckfast bottles crunching underfoot, to see that that was actually perfectly true.

At last the lights changed. Gammy leg nothing: Angus was across that road like a greyhound out a trap.

Into the lounge bar, the familiar smell hitting him as he entered: hops, spilled spirits, peppery underarms, with a nicotine top note still lingering, ineradicable, long after smoking had been banned. The bell-shaped wall lamps, the framed Tennent’s ads going back decades. And there behind the horseshoe bar, Big Shelagh herself – six foot nothing in her stocking soles, the black polo shirt he remembered from years back, hair dyed the yellow of a smoker’s fingers – performing the old ballet, stepping
en pointe
from the lagers to the stouts and back, then a wee pirouette and lunge, one hand aloft pressing tumblers to the optics, the other down at the fridge picking out a miniature of mixer. See nothing else of her, you’d still know her by her arms, the way the tendons stood up as she worked the taps.

‘Well, well,’ she went, clapping eyes on him, though she didn’t so much as pause in her routine. Rab hung back, looking sheepishly between Shelagh and Angus, trying to decide which one he had betrayed. ‘Look whit the cat dragged in. Cara-fuckin-vaggio.’

‘Christ, Shelagh, ye no self-respect? Barely one step in the door and you’re already off tryin tae entice me wi yir vaggio.’

‘Finally happened, did it? Ye finally got barred fae every single other pub in toon.’

‘Hie, hie,’ he protested, waving his arms. ‘
Wan
time ye telt me ah’d overdid it. Can a guy no live down his mistakes?’

She never even needed to ask him what it’d be. Dodd and Wilson’s, pint, just the colour of the stuff as it filled the glass – a deep maplewood red, head the colour and consistency of buttermilk – switching something back on in Angus’s head, dabbing some dormant taste centre in the midbrain. ‘Saved ma life,’ he told Shelagh, taking back the handful of shrapnel from his second tenner, but all she did was curl her lip.

Rab took a seat beside him at the bar and contemplated his still-settling pint of Guinness. It seemed that simply manoeuvring Angus into McCalls represented the limit of his ambition, which made Angus feel slightly like he’d let himself down by yielding even reluctantly to the pressure. But he wouldn’t have believed anyone who described to him the comfort this drink would provide – slipping down good and easy now, his thoughts already turning pleasurably to a second. This, now, this was what it was all about. He forgot everything else, or everything else came back to him – like hearing a song on the radio you haven’t heard in yonks yet whose lyrics, you discover, you still know off by heart. For instance: half an hour ago, Angus could barely have told you Rab’s full name, but now he recalled, without consciously retrieving the information, that Rab Hanna only ever ordered Guinness, out of pride for his Irish heritage – pride undented by the revelation one uproarious St Patrick’s Day that he’d never once crossed the sea to what he invariably called, making sure you heard the reverential capital letters, the Old Country. Angus, awed by this sudden capacity for recollection, watched Rab raise his pint to his lips and slowly shook his head, wondering what he’d plugged himself back into here. He held up his finger and indicated the half-sunk glass to Big Shelagh. ‘When ye’ve a minute?’

He had been scanning the lounge for familiar faces, still skeery in case the person he did recognize proved to be the enemy he didn’t remember making back in the day. It was dispiriting, nonetheless, to look around more openly as he grew braver, and see next to no one he knew. Round the far side of the bar, a choochy wee face – the face less familiar to Angus, in all honesty, than the faded corduroy bunnet atop it – clocked him, craned round the draught taps, confirmed his identity, nodded, withdrew.

‘Here,’ Angus apostrophized gloomy Rab, ‘ivver see anyhin that guy Dooley these days?’

At the mention of the name, Big Shelagh, down the far end of the bar but equipped with superhuman powers of hearing, emitted a cackle like a hyena.

‘Got married, if ye please.’ Rab gave the word hoity Kelvinside pronunciation,
merried
.

‘Fuck’s sake.’ Part of the deal in a place like McCalls was that you understood your social circle to be stable in that regard, its comprising fundamentally unlovable people. ‘Bluddy traitor.’

‘New burd keeps him on a tight leash. Got him goin to AA an aw. When’d ye ever see him stotious? Wife comes storming in here wan night, bawls him oot right in front everydy, drags him aff haim by the lug. See him mibbe wance a fortnight now? Aw cowardly he creeps in – ye dinnae hardly even notice him at first. Then ye’re like, “What’s it ye’ll huv?” and he’s all, “Oh, eh, a ginger beer please.” ’ Rab’s voice dropped. ‘Big Shelagh near enough glessed him first time she heard that. “Sure ye widnae prefer a pint ay milk, Dooley?” Ye ken how she can be icy polite when she hates sumdy. “A
coffee
mibbe?” ’

Telling this story had perked Rab right up, and Angus tried to bring other names to mind. Even a conversation this straitened had its uses – slowing down your drinking, for one, which must be a what-did-you-call-it, an evolutionary strategy.

‘Big Gary Sykes, seen him?’

Rab paused for maximum effect. ‘Found God.’

‘Christ Almighty.’

‘Did we not alwis say there’d be wan?’

Angus shook his head. ‘That’s depressin.’

What he was pushing for, he realized, even hoping for, was appalling news – for Rab’s face to split open in a big sick helpless grin, the sort you can’t suppress even when reporting a death. Just as there’d always be one guy in a group like the McCalls lot who got religion, another who got clean, so too there was one they’d afterwards agree had been doomed all along. What Angus wanted was reassurance that somebody else had got there first – that it wouldn’t be him they’d be saying it about.

The door opened, admitting sharp cold and a shock of students, bright eyes peeping out from the gap between muffling scarves and woollen hats tugged down low. A few each year picked McCalls as their favourite, its cheapness and proximity to the uni making it a popular place to recuperate after a gruelling two-lecture day. They started out in packs like this in the autumn, numbers winnowing down across the year till only the dedicated remained, the next generation of regulars. There’d be one who ended up working here; another – because there was always one of these too, getting carried away – who’d take to walking the West End supping from a Bell’s bottle ineptly disguised in a brown paper bag, thinking himself the new Bukowski.

‘Here, Angus,’ Big Shelagh bellowed along the bar, ‘you still a teacher?’ – making it sound like she considered this an affectation Angus should have outgrown by now.

‘Ah dinnae teach any mair,’ he called back, more cheerful than he felt, ‘so ah’m guessing ah’d huv tae say no.’

‘Still an artist, but,’ Rab put in, worried.