The Glasgow Coma Scale (15 page)

‘Hie, Lynne. Ye want a fight?’ He gestured at the window, against which rain, wind-flung, dabbling with sleet, was crashing now in great sheets – seemed to be hitting the glass from
below
somehow. ‘Away doon intae the street and fight wi yir shadow. Ach, forget it.’ His warmed-over blood had started flowing more fiercely: in the last few minutes his hangover had resurged like a bastard. ‘Know whut, hen? Ah’m headin back tae ma scratcher. This has all been a bit much for me today.’

‘So we’re not going to talk about what happened last night at all, are we?’

By Christ, she did want a fight, the cheeky besom. Left to his own devices Angus might eventually have told her the whole story; instead he gussied up a simper and the usual bundle of half-truths. ‘Look, Lynne, ah’m sorry, okay? Ah bumped intae sumdy ah used tae know—’

‘Somebody from . . . the street?’

‘No. Christ, no. They guys werenae exactly the socializing type, Lynne, ye know? No, jist a pal fae . . . before. We got chatting, went for a couple bevvies, before you know it it’d gone midnight and ah’d hud wan too many for ma ain guid.’ Her eyes went haywire, darting all over his face in search of signs he was lying. ‘Like ah said. Willnae happen again.’

Had he really – the memory drawing up from last night’s murk – threatened Rab with a dart to the puss if he didn’t spring for a last pint at McCalls? No wonder the poor bastard hadn’t been in evidence later on.

‘I wouldn’t have minded,’ Lynne wheedled, ‘only, I’d appreciate it if you could tell me in future if you’re going to stay out late.’ Her anger had dissipated – her whole demeanour altered. It was quite a transformation from the fight-seeker back to her normal pliable, concerned persona. Angus thought he preferred the feistier Lynne. ‘Just so I have an idea where you’ll be. I was worried. The things you’ve told me. How people hurt you before.’

‘Doll. This isnae me renouncing one ay ma life’s great pleasures for yir sake. It’s that ah don’t fancy spendin any more ay ma time wi that lot. In pubs and that. Ah amnae that person ony mair,’ he assured her, knowing that this sounded conciliatory enough to prevent her clocking, for a while at least, that it wasn’t an apology at all.

Lynne’s expression cleared. Boy, even hung over to fuck he could still play a blinder. Now the kill: he went in for the hug, held her long enough to reassure her, not so long as to revivify her hopes. Honestly, he could teach a masterclass. But this safe haven of hers was a bloody minefield.

He was done coddling her anyway – no energy to squander on Lynne, not when he had those pigments to think on: the orange and the dry-bone colour. The thing to do was not try too soon to pursue them; it was enough just to think around them, letting them hang in the mind’s middle distance, protean, choosing their own form. He took himself back to bed, and as he lay there on the low futon he could feel, shining in his arms, the memory of muscle cramps brought on by the nights-on-end painting sessions of old. In his rush of anticipatory elation, Angus felt that this ache was echoing back from a point in the near future, from work he could barely imagine, yet which he must, any day now, be about to begin.

Driving home from Raymond’s four nights later, sad and enraged, Lynne thought she might keep on driving – drive south, disappear. Let Angus have the flat, let Siri go about her life however she wanted. But she ended up on Glendower Street as inevitably as if every street in the city had been designed to draw her home.

Leaving the bin bag he’d given her slumped on the landing, Lynne let herself into the flat. It was cold, and as she went round adjusting radiators and drawing curtains, setting things right, she started to see, highlighted, as thermal imaging shows up where a house leaks wasted energy, all the things Angus got wrong. Glaring from the kitchen shelves, the tumblers he consistently replaced upside down; neon outlined the windows left unlocked; in the washing machine he failed every time to empty, damp clothes, all melded together, seemed to phosphoresce. She shook, angrier with Angus now than with Raymond. Glendower Street was her sanctuary, and with every bit of thoughtlessness, the invader was wrecking it. Yet she could no more have told Angus how his mistakes infuriated her than she could have listed the numerous small gestures she made that favoured him: ironing his socks, making sure she always served him first at supper. In Lynne’s mind lurked the idea – juvenile but somehow persisting – that these subliminal acts would have a cumulative effect in eventually winning him over. She laughed meanly at herself; already hurting, she sought to hurt herself further. You wouldn’t even know what to do if he did fall into your arms.

It was tempting to leave the bag out there in the close, but eventually she retrieved it, humping it into the flat, then tore open the plastic knot and, disconsolate, began removing the junk it contained. It was as if Raymond had kept a list for the past five years, noting down everything she’d ever left at his house. Certainly, what he’d returned to her seemed extraordinarily comprehensive, including items even she wouldn’t have remembered – she who sometimes prided, sometimes excoriated herself for remembering everything. Here was her little plastic vial of sweetener, a nail file she’d left in his bathroom years ago. Their time together itemized in objects that now seemed at once imbued with significance beyond themselves, yet to be lacking, too: vapid reminders of nothing very much.

He’d sounded conciliatory on the phone before, and she’d driven over to the High Street smugly confident. She would be aloof, she would be superb: he’d end up begging her to take him back and she’d say so nicely, so sweetly, ‘I’m sorry, but there’s someone else in my life at the moment.’ Then it’d be his turn to go to pieces. If she left it at that, it wouldn’t even be a lie.

How green could a person be? In fact, she had been lured into a trap. She understood it, that was the worst thing: when she thought about the times she’d cursed Angus for smoking in the house, or sluiced from the bathroom sink the toothpaste spit he’d slathered it with, she understood why Raymond would want to expunge every trace of her from his home.

She hung the old clothes in her wardrobe, then filed the books. As well as hurt and indignant, she felt an odd disquiet she only identified when she went to return to the living-room mantelpiece a travel alarm clock she’d taken to Raymond’s years ago, and found she didn’t need to clear any space for it. There was a gap there between ornaments, a gap that had waited patiently for the clock’s inevitable return. In all this time the house hadn’t changed – no, worse: Lynne had never allowed it to change. Never fixed the toilet flush, the work of minutes. When she heard Angus’s key rackling for the lock, rage swelled up in her, a howl stoppered in her throat. Soon, far too soon, barely eight o’clock. Was she not entitled to one single uninterrupted evening to herself? At that moment, offered a lit match, she might gladly have burned Glendower Street to the ground.

But being who she was, she tried to compose herself and met Angus, when he came panting and huffing into the flat, with feigned warmth. ‘You’re back early.’

He grunted and shoved past her. ‘Spot the genius.’ She blinked. From his room, he called, ‘Been in here again, huv ye, Lynne?’

She took her time inhaling and exhaling. ‘I was simply putting something back on my mantelpiece. How was class?’

Again he walked straight past her, into the kitchen this time, where he deposited his bag on the table and went to fill the kettle. ‘Oh aye. It wis jist dandy.’

‘Really. Because you don’t seem—’

‘Naw, Lynne,’ he interrupted, pityingly, ‘no really.’ He didn’t seem to have registered her sarcasm, as though believing her incapable of it. ‘
Really
, ah’d say it was a waste ay fuckin time.’

‘Angus, why don’t you try and be civil, and tell me what happened?’

‘Let’s jist say,’ he at last condescended to reply, ‘you urnae the only wan hus it tough.’

Lynne felt tears gathering. She must not let him overrule her – let whatever had happened to him swamp her own upset. Wallowing, she jagged herself, tried to make herself feel worse, with the thought that he hadn’t even remembered this was the night she was seeing Raymond. ‘After all I’ve done for you,’ she could have said, squeezing her eyes shut, forcing the tears to flow. But, able neither to speak nor leave Angus be, she stood ramrod straight at the kitchen counter, watching him drink his tea. Her hands behind her back found an edge where the finish on the counter had started to come away, and she began to pick at it like a scab.

‘Giein me the third degree,’ he muttered when she didn’t say any more. He had trimmed his beard, she noticed, razored the sharp stubble from his cheeks, run a comb through his hair. Even before this, she’d been aware he was walking taller, his confidence growing. He had been getting better, and Lynne had been happy enough – conceited enough – to give herself credit for helping him heal. Like any scientific theory, though, a single contradictory reading could trash the hypothesis. She had been quite consistent in her behaviour towards him, and yet tonight he was sniping and raging at her. How on earth had she not seen it before? Nothing she’d done, the explicit charity and the secret, was making any difference to him.

Angus finished his tea and went to retrieve the kitbag from the table – a bag that did not, it struck her, seem any fuller since she’d given him all that money for materials – then just stood there, awkward. ‘Right then. Ah’m away tae bed. Ah’ll see you in the mornin.’

‘Planning to get up at a decent time for once, are you?’

Angus paused, squinted at her. ‘You all right, Lynne?’

Oh, now he notices. But perverse Lynne, her own nemesis, just shook her head. She wanted him to know what had happened to her, but she didn’t want to have to
tell
him. He was the immature one, forever taking, taking: why shouldn’t she be infantile for once – hold something back to spite him? In a tone that belied the words: ‘I’m fine.’

‘If ye’re sure.’ His expression was doubtful, and she felt a small heat in the base of her spine, a shameful pleasure at the pointless deception she’d undertaken. ‘Night, then.’

He went into the bathroom, and through the thin dividing wall she heard him gargle, spit, swallow water the wrong way and commence hacking and coughing – the same disgusting routine every night. It wasn’t fair to expect him to be something he wasn’t – though wasn’t that why it was called a crush? Years ago, in the wake of their kiss, Angus had become, in her imagination, an effigy of a man she’d barely known, and all she had been doing since his re-emergence on Sauchiehall Street was trying to cram all his real person’s contradictions and excesses into the not-even-two-dimensional avatar she’d conjured. It was no more logical or dignified to feel aggrieved at his failure to conform to behaviour patterns she’d invented for him than it was to feel she was showing largesse by forgiving him for it.

Let the silence grow between them. Let it sour. It’s good to be angry, she counselled herself: if you’re angry at him maybe it means you’re starting to get over him. But there remained a nub of chill in her heart, and a mocking internal voice that said: Don’t lie to yourself.

Raymond had been wearing a V-necked navy sweater and tan pressed chinos, clothes she seemed to remember choosing for him. She’d been too distracted to comment, anyway, galled as she was to recognize that, dressed like this, he closely resembled Angus. His excuses and self-justifications, his accusations – you’re too keen, too pliable, I need an equal, an opponent – had gone mostly over her head as she laboured with an ontological paradox. Evidently she had, unconsciously, been buying Angus clothes like Raymond’s, but it seemed that she’d used to dress her lover in a way that reminded her of her old teacher. Had she been harder on Angus than she ought because he reminded her of Raymond? Or forgiven Raymond so much because he recalled Angus? Round and round it went, the sheer improbability of these two unsuitable men’s inter-resemblance a Möbius strip that had neither beginning nor end, but had generated a waste by-product, Lynne herself. Who’d come first, who was modelled on whom? No matter. Everyone had a type: Lynne’s just happened to be the type who disdained her.

‘I need to spend more time with Siri, too,’ Raymond had said, and had her attention. ‘She needs a stable home environment.’

‘But the three of us,’ she gasped. ‘That was a nuclear family. How much more stable could it have been?’

‘I just need some space,’ he’d said, brow wrinkling at her intransigence. ‘You understand? A little time.’ So, what, she possessed no dimension of her own? ‘Maybe then we might—’

‘You must think I’m stupid,’ she’d blurted. ‘A real fool.’

‘Of course not, Lynnie!’

‘I get it. You
know
I am.’ He’d looked startled, even frightened. She would never have taken this tone with him in the old days, the pre-Angus era.

Tears prinked at the corners of her eyes as she tried to think of other hurtful things she might have said to Raymond. How dare he try and reason with her, con her into accepting the blame for his throwing her out of his life?

The living-room door flew open and Angus, shirt untucked from his jeans, came barrelling out. ‘Lynne. Listen—’

She screamed and screamed and screamed at him to go away, until, in his shock, he softly closed his door. The flat lay still once more.

Winter gripped the city, winter wouldn’t let go. Work had long since stopped on the school; the diggers lay inert in the frozen furrows they’d excavated, mechanical arms folded to their sides, resembling nothing so much as the people you saw rushing home at street level, muffled up, hands tucked beneath their armpits for warmth.

On Saturday afternoon, with both of them trapped in Glen-dower Street and the central heating set to tropical, Angus at last ended their two-day deadlock.

‘Lynne,’ she heard him softly calling. ‘Oh, Lynne? C’mere, doll.’ She padded into the kitchen, where she found him sitting at the table, surrounded by the equipment she’d funded him to buy: sketch pads, a huge box of pastels, a jam jar crammed with pencils, their sharpened tips uppermost like arrows in a quiver. He was, to her surprise and faint discomfort, smiling broadly. His lunch dishes, she saw, were stacked unwashed by the sink.