The Glasgow Coma Scale (16 page)

‘What ye think, eh? We’re no gaun oot anywhere, so how’s about a bit ay drawin? You dae me, ah dae you drawin me. Back tae basics.’

Lynne hesitated. She couldn’t bear the atmosphere in the house when they weren’t talking, and this seemed as close to détente as they were likely to come. And that offhand remark to Siri as he’d been concentrating so intensely on the girl’s drawing – ‘Lynne hud promise’ – had stayed dimly aglow in her mind for days, a talisman.

‘Okay, then. If you like.’

She’d been trying to maintain her animosity towards him, feeling this would serve her better than apologizing, and here, at the merest hint that he valued her even just as the only available model, she was brimming again with what she thought of as love. It was useless: she thrilled at the notion that she could be model, muse, student, whatever he liked. If he wanted to draw her, Lynne reasoned as she chose a few pencils from the jar, he must find something about her interesting, though she knew his work well enough not to expect it to be anything flattering. Most likely he had noticed a corned-beef texture in her skin that he intended to depict unflinchingly – slab flesh marbled blue and green. Just her luck he’d chosen to draw her under electric light.

She put on an appropriate CD, a cello concerto sere as winter branches, but within seconds Angus came sweeping over to turn it off. ‘Nup. Nae music. Nae distractions.’

‘Serious stuff,’ she joked. ‘And you’re sure you don’t want me to do anything about my face? Put on make-up?’

Angus faltered for a moment, appalled, then smiled hugely. ‘Lynne Meacher, you bluddy dare.’

They took opposite ends of the table. Angus stilled, watching her – she held her expression fixed – then tossed a pastel crayon in his hand like a majorette’s baton and fell to work, making swift, decisive marks on the page. Lynne, unable at this stage even to choose between pencils and watercolours, did nothing.

Drawing had never been her strength. She liked geometries, abstractions, colours arranged in matrixial hives. She liked detail. While her peers assembled, as Angus was doing now, a large-scale sketch of the entire subject as the first step in a new composition, Lynne had persisted, throughout her two years at Glasgow, and despite her teachers’ best efforts, in starting with a detail and working her way outwards. No matter how often she pointed to Klee or Albers – the delicate, precise little grids and nests of colours she admired and wanted to emulate – her teachers told her the technique was childish. That only gave her the ammunition to reject the criticism, persist with her method. It worked for her, or didn’t, depending, but what was the point in doing the same as everyone else?

She settled on starting with the delta between Angus’s eyebrows, which frowning had permanently corrugated, and went to work.

‘I’ve been meaning to say thank you. What you did with Siri at the weekend, that teaching stuff?’

‘Ah thought she’d be better no gettin the wrang idea about you and me, eh. Though ah guess that must’ve occurred to you an aw, specially if ye thought she might report back tae the auld man after.’

Why did he have to invoke Raymond? ‘Whatever the reason, it was really nice of you.’

He blinked. ‘Aye, well, ah am nice.’

It was better they be friends. Intellectually she knew it. So why couldn’t she take it to heart? She wanted to test their new truce, and asked, ‘Will you be going back to your classes next week?’

He ruminated on this awhile. ‘Mibbe. Mibbe no. Depends, ah suppose.’

‘What on?’

‘Various factors. Stuff.’ He cleared his throat. ‘People politics, ye might say.’

She envisaged Angus usurping the teacher, going around critiquing the others’ work, upsetting a whole roomful at a time – secretly enjoying the ruckus that ensued and swearing blind he’d only wanted to help.

‘Ah wantit,’ he began, then halted, thought about it, resumed. ‘See sometimes, wi a piece ye’re planning, it seems within yir grasp – ye’ve worked it all out, put all the plans in place, you can practically
see
the thing hovering there in front ay ye. But ye’ve still forgot sumhin, or there’s a factor still outwith yir control, so when ye come tae put pencil tae paper, so tae speak, poof, it jist, ah dunno, evaporates.’

‘That’s why you left early on Thursday? You couldn’t get a picture to work?’

She wondered what she’d said to amuse him. ‘Sumhin along they lines.’

‘Well, could it be you’re just overthinking it?’ Lynne felt that her own propensity for so doing qualified her to identify and correct the trait in others. ‘Maybe it’s not as unworkable as you imagine?’

‘Very possibly. Trouble is, sumdy like me, imagination’s all ah’ve got gaun fer me a lot ay the time.’

Lynne managed next to get the strange sharp line of Angus’s nose down quite well, and, rewarding herself, announced: ‘Well, while you were out having a mediocre time at class, I was down at the Saltmarket having an even bloodier time of things.’

‘With what’s-his-name, aye?’

‘With Raymond, yes.’ She hadn’t been expecting Angus to throw his pastels to the floor in jealous rage, but was disappointed nonetheless that he just kept on sketching placidly. ‘A nice cosy night in with the ex.’ She marvelled at herself. This was the tone to take: wry, putting inverted commas around everything heartfelt or true. ‘He’d done that thing people say on television: “We need to talk.” And I’m just so deluded that I went along imagining he might actually mean it.’ She paused: nothing. She had to stop making these self-deprecating remarks if Angus wasn’t going to bother repudiating them. ‘I didn’t think you knew I was going to see him.’

‘Lynne, darlin! No, look – Thursday night this wis? Jeezo, whut you must think ay me. Ah may be a bit ay a loser, but ah can retain basic information. Ah jist didnae want tae trample all over ye wi ma big size tens wis aw.’ In a jolly, moronic voice, bopping his head from side to side: ‘ “Aw, aw, what happened to you, Lynne? Why so doon in the mooth?” A blind man could see ye werenae in the mood tae talk. So, you’d gone down there thinkin he wis gonnae ask ye back?’

‘You needn’t sound so surprised. I’m not that awful, am I?’

‘Ye’ve never gave me tae believe that was sumhin ye wantit is all.’ He at last set down his pastels. He seemed poised to issue a statement of great profundity. ‘Beats me,’ he said slowly, ‘why ye’d even want tae see that dobber again, after he treated ye like such shite.’ He sniffed. ‘If ye don’t mind me bein candid.’

She was, absurdly, about to defend Raymond, but decided to let Angus’s remark go because of the implicit compliment that she did not actually deserve to be treated like – what he’d said.

Her portrait had gone wrong somewhere, made him troll-like. She rolled a few pencils over her sketch pad to hide it. Here was the problem with her detailed method – the unnoticed early flaw that corrupted the whole image, further distorting it the more you elaborated. On this evidence, any talent she had once possessed had withered to nothing, or else Angus had been exaggerating to flatter her. She didn’t want to accept that, however, and without waiting to be told, she turned to a new page and began afresh.

‘Even if ah hudnae remembered, ah kin put two and two together. Ah huv ma ain special method ay gatherin information, nivver fails.’

‘Which is?’

‘Ah keep ma eyes open.’ Unruffleable, he wrapped kitchen roll around his index finger and blotted at his picture. ‘And ma big trap shut. Seems tae me there’s a load more stuff around here since Thursday, ye know whut ah mean? All what he gave ye back, am I right? Look, ah’m sorry if ye thought ah wis bein insensitive. It’s the exact opposite ah meant. Pussyfootin, ah wis. Ah barely know how tae speak tae people at the best ay times.’ He frowned. ‘Why ye smilin like that?’

‘I was just thinking you were right. Raymond is . . . he did treat me like that. He behaved’ – she drew her shoulders back, gathering herself – ‘like a prick.’

Angus guffawed. ‘Awright Lynne! Tell it like it is!’ He seized a fresh pastel and scrubbed it flat-sided over the paper, laying in a reddish-black background to her emerging portrait. ‘Go on, then. Ye arrived there wi a girlish feeling high up under yir ribcage, couldn’t make it stop even though ye werenae even sure whut ye were hopin fer. Despite that, all hope jist vanished soon’s he opened the door.’

‘It was the lights,’ Lynne said, uneasy remembering it. ‘All on full blast, every light in the place, in case I, what, mistook one bulb on a dimmer for romantic lighting.’

The blaze, and Raymond at its centre. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he’d said straight away. ‘I was worried after I’d spoken to you that I might have given you the wrong impression.’ She’d buckled, gripping the door frame for support, but he’d been too caught up in his own self-important speech to notice.

Now Lynne was glad that Angus had been surly on Thursday night – had denied her the opportunity to rush into badmouthing Raymond. ‘It ended in a great rush, you know. Even if he wasn’t going to take me back, I wanted to be fair, to give him the chance to explain.’ And then reject any overtures he made about being friends again, she didn’t say. Angus’s eyebrows crept ironically upwards. ‘Okay, so the truth is, I wanted to stick my fingers in the plug socket and give myself an almighty shock. And that’s just what I got.’

‘But ye did love him – before, ah mean. Wi all yir heart.’

Lynne hesitated, sighed, gazed from corner to corner of the ceiling. ‘With all my heart I don’t know about.’ Over the boiler, a long woolly strand of cobweb drifted in the upward air. How had she missed that when she was cleaning? ‘With the eighty per cent that was on offer, maybe – available for the purpose. I’m trying to be honest,’ she told him. ‘I know my limitations.’

She squinted at Angus’s drawing. ‘Ho, love’s young dream! Nae peepin.’ But in the instant before his hand swept down to cover his work, she’d glimpsed what he had made of her: a solitary figure in a darkened room, like the widow or spinster of a Hammershøi.

‘It’s not easy being a woman.’

Angus shifted in his seat. ‘That right?’

‘I know so many women – colleagues, old school friends . . . and I am talking about women, my age, not girls – who choose to go out with men they know are unsuitable, even ones they’ve already broken up with once before, just because it’s so difficult to meet anyone new.’

He nodded, absorbing this, then said: ‘Well, then, they wimmin’re lunatics.’

She drew. She worked down the edge of his beard, twitching the pencil to describe the unkempt line of it, then the side of his neck, the broad tendon disappearing into his collar. ‘There’s this real fear’ – she made herself phrase it impersonally – ‘of being alone. And anyway, “dating”.’ She dangled the word at arm’s length. ‘Surely only teenagers
date
.’

‘Did you?’

‘Hardly.’ Teenaged Lynne had spent her time trying to figure out sex – worse, love – from questionnaires in magazines, acquiring from these a patchy and unreliable knowledge base. To actually try to put what she’d learned into practice had been unthinkable: the sense that everyone around her was already
doing it
, that she was permanently disadvantaged, made it easier to absent herself. When she thought back to those days, she remembered picturing herself as a small candle guttering in a vast cold sepulchre – she had wallowed in the notion that choosing to be alone was in some way noble – and her palm itched with the wish to slap sense into that girl.

‘Well, then. Nae shame gaun oan dates. Ye know – websites and that.’ As she’d pronounced
dating
, so he enunciated
websites
, cautiously, apparently by no means sure that such things existed.

‘But it’s humiliating,’ she protested, dismayed to hear the whine that had entered her voice.

Angus set down his pastel crayon and pressed his smudged blackened fingers together under his chin. ‘Awright, well – talk me through it. Lynne Meacher headin out on a date. Tell me how it goes.’

‘Oh, no, Angus—’

‘Naw, ah’m interestit. Whut’s the worst you think’s gonnae happen?’

This conversation was uncomfortable, yet she didn’t want it to end; it was not unpleasant – not unproductive – to play this game of discussing your feelings with someone to whom you couldn’t fully admit them. You had to talk in allusions, name no names. Not that it mattered: she knew Angus would treat everything she said as confession regardless.

She had created a passable likeness of his face’s lower right quadrant, but when she tried to draw his mouth, it all went wrong again. Everything pulled downwards and to the right, as though stroke-afflicted. She scrapped it. Started over.

‘I guess the worst thing . . . and I’ll admit’ – she was lying – ‘this is based a little bit on personal experience . . . is to go through that process of dressing up, polishing all your best stories, slapping on the make-up, the veneer of confidence and optimism, then hauling your carcass down to whatever busy, well-lit, non-threatening environment you’ve selected, only to find—’

‘Wasted effort?’ Angus nodded. ‘The guy’s wearing a fleece smells like he’s no washed it since the year dot. He husnae bothered tae shave. He’s boring. If he notices he husn’t impressed ye by his total gash effort at gallantry by buying ye wan drink, he takes the sulk, blames you.’

‘God, were you there at the next table?’

‘Jist the ither side ay the experience, darlin’,’ he said sadly.

‘Maybe that isn’t even the worst part. That’s when you realize, maybe during the date, maybe once you’ve refused a second drink and safely extricated yourself—’

‘Refused the second, that’s harsh, Lynne – surely ye should at least get in one round each?’

‘You’ve never heard of cutting your losses? Why waste your money on someone you’ve already written off?’ She’d never in her life walked out on a date in the way she described: she was extemporizing, but enjoying seeing Angus intrigued by the novel, unforgiving Lynne she was inventing. ‘I’m hardly
obligated
.’

‘Well anyway, ye’re off, with or without yir second drink. And as ye’re on yir way back hame, you’re turnin it over in yir mind, dissectin whut went wrang. And that’s when it sinks in. Mibbe they boring things he said
were
his best stories. Maybe that fleece genuinely was his best claithing . . .’ He trailed off, possibly remembering that Lynne herself favoured a fleece as outerwear.