The Glasgow Coma Scale (12 page)

‘Well, see, that’s the question, isn’t it? If ye dinnae draw every day, if ye dinnae paint, whatever, can ye still call yirsel an artist? What about twice a week, once a week? Whaur’s the cut-off? Ah’ve been asking masel that a lot lately.’ He tanned the last of scoop two, watched the rime of foam slither down inside the glass. The first couple of drinks barely touched the sides going down; you certainly didn’t savour them. ‘Ye’ve heard ay the phenomenon,’ he said carefully, ‘ay the phantom limb? Sumdy loses a body part, in an accident or whatever, but to them it’s like they can still feel it. Ah knew a guy’ – at the hostel, he didn’t add – ‘hud his legs amputated, but even years later swore blind he could wriggle his toes, still got cramp in his foot same’s he alwis hud.’ Nixon, the guy called himself: went round in a wheelchair with a sign proclaiming himself to be a war veteran, serge folded and pinned ostentatiously at the knee, when he’d actually had to have them off because of alcoholic’s gangrene. ‘Ma point being, if ye renounce yir occupation, then how long’ve ye got before ye huv to say, “That’s no whit ah do. That’s no who ah am ony mair”?’

Everyone in the lounge seemed to have stopped talking. Angus, a little mortified, sank his face to his empty glass and fixed his teeth around the rim as though to take a bite out.

‘You!’ Shelagh addressed stupefied Rab. ‘Whaur’s yir manners? Get the philosopher here another drink. In fact fuck it. This wan’s on the hoose.’

‘Shelagh, such generosity.’ Shown compassion by Big Shelagh, the Arbroath Colossus. May wonders never cease.

She sneered. ‘Don’t go relyin oan it – ah’m in a good fuckin mood tonight is all. Ah love it,’ and you could tell she was a professional from the way she could slam a full pint down on the bar with no spillage whatsoever, ‘when one ay ma lambs comes back tae the fold.’

Angus took up the drink, touched two fingers to his brow in salute. ‘If ye renounce yir occupation’, fuck’s sake. How many times would he phrase it like that, imply that it’d been a selfless, voluntary act, before he’d start to believe the lie?

Rab had evidently decided that this was the moment to embark on another well-worn scheme. ‘Whaur ye steiyin at the minute, Angus?’ Here, the plan was attrition: he’d start with the innocuous enquiry and slowly, slowly work it round until you found yourself offering the guy your sofa, zed-bed or, if his luck was really in, your whole spare room for the night. Maybe even longer: Angus’d heard stories about Rab inveigling his way into staying with some poor cunt on the Friday night and still being there to wave them off to work come Monday morning.

‘Oh, eh, ah’m up Maryhill weiy these days.’ Smiling to imagine Lynne’s umbrage: North Kelvinside, damn it! ‘Just temporarily, y’know – wi a friend.’

He’d hesitated for maybe half a second, but Rab, busy with pint two, was straight in there. ‘A friend is it, aye?’

‘An old pal. Sumdy ah hudnae seen in years. We bump into each ither randomly wan day, transpires there’s a vacancy for a flatmate, and boom, ah’m in. Pretty peachy.’

‘A good Samaritan.’

‘Ye could say so.’

Rab, grinning broadly: ‘Ay the female variety?’

‘Och, it’s no like
that
.’

‘How won’t you tell me yes or no, then?’

Well, Rab had him there. ‘A she, then, aye.’

He’d dropped his voice, yet way down at the other side of the bar Big Shelagh’s head swivelled around like an owl’s. ‘Who in her right mind,’ she demanded, advancing towards them with a swiftness that suggested she wasn’t walking so much as swelling up like a wave, ‘takes a runt like you in as a lodger?’

‘A guid wan,’ he snapped back. Shelagh raised her eyebrows at Rab, but kept on dichting down the bar taps, unimpressed. ‘Wan that disnae judge, Shelagh. Wan that keeps me right. A generous woman – see these claithes?’ He plucked at his sweater. He was at that stage where he was in danger of being moved by his own bullshit. ‘No that ah’d expect the likes ay yous two tae understand.’

‘Caravaggio in love,’ Shelagh crowed.

‘Aw no. Nothin like that. Defin-
etly
no. Anyhow, Shelagh, ye know fine well ah’m savin masel fer you, doll.’

‘Away tae fuck,’ she scolded, Rab guffawing into his pint, and it was situation normal once again. Pals like these weren’t really your pals at all; betray the least hint of finer feelings, they were on you like jackals. It was exhausting, but you had to keep the sparring going. That was the only way Weegies ever complimented one another, via these what you might call backhanded insults.

‘Oh, Shelagh? Getting a bitty parched down here by the way.’ Angus peeled off another note, careful to conceal from Rab how much cash he was carrying. Fifty-odd remained of what Lynne had given him: more than adequate, he imagined, for his purposes – and if not, he was sure Lynne’d be good for the extra.

An image popped up in his mind then – his rescuer, mouth tucked in at the corners in that despondent way as she told him he should consider the money a gift, not a loan: she’d never ask for it back. Sure it was just a coincidence she should have spotted him in Sauchiehall Street that day, but one whose timeliness could be considered, were you so minded – as Lynne surely was – miraculous.

He clambered down off his stool to pay a visit to McCalls’ primevally familiar lavvies. The wee white sugar lumps marinating in the urinal, cloy of lemon freshener failing to mask the baked-on shit smell, Jeyes fluid on dried boak: all of it Angus’s madeleine. He glimpsed himself, his hackit auld coupon, when he passed the mirror on entering, then conducted a more detailed inspection while rubbing his hands together beneath the hot tap’s incontinent trickle, trying to avoid touching the bullet-mark hole its drip had eroded in the white enamel. He fingered whitish matter from the corner of his eye, rolled it into a tiny lump between finger and thumb and flicked it away who knows where. Well, he looked better than he had done while he was sleeping rough or getting stamped on by strangers in the hostel, but that was about all you could say. So much grey in his stubble, glinting like iron filings, and in his hair too, which stood up either side of his crown in what his poor dead da used to call koala ears.

He’d been alive forty-three years, eight months and a handful of days. Angus Rennie, the pathology artist: criticized by one reviewer as the disease-obsessive turning all his subjects into sufferers, breaking them down, posing them at death’s door; praised by another for his unflinching depictions of human misery. Ironic that what pulled him up now was seeing what indignities simple day-on-day ageing, same as everyone else, had wrought on him – as if, a reverse Dorian Gray, he had hoped to prevent his own decay by projecting it on to the figures in his portraits. So ravaged, in the mirror’s untarnished central oval – like the frame tabloids put round a school photo when someone died young. Well, how about a promising youngster whose life had tragically gone on, and gone on unravelling?

When he returned to the lounge, he challenged Rab to a round of darts, and his game seemed to improve with each fresh gulp of his pint. ‘Painter’s Zen,’ he told Rab in his triumph, plucking his darts from the board’s centre and chalking a line under the game. ‘It nivver deserts ye.’ Rab clucked his tongue, wiped his specs on his sweater and paid the forfeit: one more round.

Some time later, Angus found himself in someone’s living room, surrounded by the students who’d come into McCalls earlier. The room was high-walled, dense with sweet smoke, and lit by a lone red bulb hanging nude from the ceiling rose. He was holding a can of Tennent’s in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other, and he was mid tirade, addressing a crew-cut twenty-something training on him a ferocious frown, borderline psychotic, which would, sustained much longer, come to worry Angus. He hadn’t a scooby how he’d got here, nor how long ago, nor where here
was
exactly. Neither was there any sign of Rab. He could tell, however, from certain signs discernible only to the expert, that he was on maybe his tenth or eleventh drink by now: not steaming by any stretch, but on his way. A certain density to his body, sunk low in a spongy black chair whose pleather cover was clammy on his exposed skin. Angus was by some distance the oldest person present, but he did not feel especially out of place, mainly because every other person had a drink in their hand too. Music, obliteratingly distorted, came from speakers in another room, and also – standard issue for these situations – from a twat with a guitar who strummed a continuous chord that occasionally coincided with the key the record was in. Between Angus’s feet lay oily papers, the remnants of a fish tea he could not remember consuming: a real waste.

‘The poem, y’see,’ he was declaring, ‘gets it wrang. What ye’d actually like is fer other people
not
tae be able tae see ye exactly as ye see yirsel.’ He was emphasizing his rhetorical points with wild gestures, making it impossible for his cigarette to be lit, though the youth continued to hold his lighter steady in his hand, its flame shivering, burning lower. ‘Ah mean . . . Galleries. Art galleries, ken? Museums. They’ve an effect on me. See last year, ah took masel off tae Amsterdam for a week. Two days in the Rijksmuseum, two mair in the St-st . . . the Stedelijk. The Van Gogh. Moochin aboot among the Auld fuckin Masters, yir van Eycks and Vermeers and Rembrandts, then aw the contemporary stuff – yir Beckmanns and Schades. The more ah saw, the more ah startit feelin, like, fingers dandlin over the back ay ma skull. A lover’s touch. The first inklings ay orgasm coming doon the line. Surrounded by these giants and ah’d a chub on like ye widnae believe. The light in they Caravaggios. No jist the portraits either. There wis wan wee Mondrian – white, blue, yellow, black, jist squares, barely there at all – and there was ah, creepin aboot in a state a semi-permanent priapism, like a fuckin . . . sex offender.’ As light at last met cigarette, he brought it to his mouth, drew deeply. ‘Aye, cheers.’

His voice must have been increasing in volume. Other conversations had paused, and people were watching him in silence, some exchanging nodding glances: listen to this, this guy knows what he’s on about, by the way. He had them in his thrall, same as ever. He couldn’t quite work out what point he’d wanted to make, but it’d probably come to mind if he just kept talking.

‘Anyway, later oan ah head doon the red-light zone, as ye dae. And these girls are posing in their garters and their corsets and whatnot, less even, in these windaes dressed as hotel rooms or suburban bedrooms. And in theory’ – he drained the can – ‘in theory, these should be provoking the same response, the same staundin tae attention down below. And they titillate ye, course they dae, ah’m no made ay stone. But there’s something missin too. I was aroused, but ah didnae huv that feeling like static over the surface ay the skin. Which is odd, eh, since on the surface a Hopper painting ay a burd in her medical-sortay underwear sittin oan her bed readin a letter ay abandonment – well, that isnae much different fae these girls staundin in their windae beneath the auld tasselled red lampshade, bestowin thir blank come-hither eyes on the world at large. It’s the difference between a really luxurious wank versus sumdy crankin yir erection like changing gear in a racing car, just tae get oan wi it. They tableaux, they girls, they lack . . . they lack . . .’ He click-clicked his fingers, the word’s shape eluding him.

‘Self-awareness?’ suggested a tiny girl sitting on the empty fireplace hearth. Angus, frowning, tilted his head. ‘It’s commoner than you might think.’

‘Naw, they’ve nae’ – pouncing on the word in triumph – ‘
backstory
. Whut ye see’s whut ye get. Punters dinnae want a story, dinnae want potential. They want, not tae be indelicate, a shag and that’s it. It’s the difference between lust and love, the physical and the brain.’ Found himself tapping his skull, for the avoidance of doubt. ‘Commerce too, but that’s anither story. They ones ostensibly inviting ye in are the ones whose stories there’s no way ay sharin. The pictures dinnae ask anything of ye. That’s why they get your blood surgin and the hookers dinnae.’

‘Fascinating theory,’ someone said drily.

Wide bastards. ‘Naw, naw. Doan gies that. Listen, let me pit it anither weiy. This wummin ah’m friendly with – Lynne. She’s been really good tae me, totally brand new. Anyweiy, she’s got this, like, stepdaughter – well, no really stepdaughter. It’s her ex’s girl. See whut she says to me the ither night? “The moment I felt proudest of her,” she tells me, “the moment I felt most like this was my own daughter, was when she was slamming the door in my face – yelling at me how glad she was I wasn’t her real mother.” ’ Angus sat back and was nearly swallowed in the chair. ‘The simulacrum ay child meets the simulacrum ay mither, they stage a fake fight, suddenly everyin’s happy. That’s what weans dae to ye, mind. Doesnae even need tae be yir ain offspring tae fuck ye up. But it’s why folk go on havin kids, eh, generation upon generation – because it’s their wan and only stab at a medium- tae long-term relationship, dependin on how wily the kid is, wi sumdy entirely blind tae their faults.’ He took a deep breath, hoping for a contact high from the druggy smoke in the room. ‘Me,’ he confided, leaning closer to the student, ‘ah got away wi bluddy murder when ah wis a bairn, all because ah wis sick. Know whut they telt ma da? That ah widnae live. What seems at first tae take kin still end up being rejectit. Ten year ah’d live – twelve mibbe if ah wis lucky. “Don’t go getting too attached”, that wis the subtext. What a thing tae tell a parent! But here ah am, forty-three year auld. And whaur d’ye think he is?’ He raised his index finger slowly ceilingward.

‘Now you’ – he prodded the student nearly in his impassive puss – ‘you’re too young tae huv children ay yir ain.’ He meant it to caution rather than to elicit confirmation. ‘Nivver dae it. Stay true to yirsel, big man.’

In the ensuing silence, someone chuckled. It was not a kind sound, and Angus, who had been impressed by the trenchancy of his argument, began to feel perturbed. Maybe these looks going back and forth had not been expressing awe and admiration after all.

‘Anyway,’ he got out, with the drunk’s gruff misplaced politeness, ‘time ah should be headin up the road.’