The Glasgow Coma Scale (17 page)

‘It’s the way it reflects so badly on you. If this is the calibre of person you’re attracting – well, then, what does that say about you? Meanwhile, he’s gone off home in a stink too. “That frigid bitch.” ’

‘Hardly. And surely it wisnae like that every time. No wi what’s-his-chops, ah presume.’ She had noticed Angus going out of his way not to use Raymond’s name, a code of practice he’d set himself; she was grateful for it.

‘There were . . . exceptions.’ Two exceptions. She saw them in opposing corners, like boxers: Raymond, who each morning laid his comb against the line of his nose then ran it up over his forehead to determine where his centre parting should start; who believed that wearing trainers if you weren’t playing a sport at the time was tantamount to criminal. And Angus, who was – Angus. Uncapturable Angus: wrong likenesses littered her sketchbook, each failed in its own distinct way. ‘The problem is that after you’ve done that even twice or three times, your stories are smoothed to routines. Putting on your best outfit feels like dressing a doll, and trying to be all confident and optimistic is just another costume you’re putting on. So you go and meet this next person, thinking maybe this time, maybe this one’ll be’ – shaking her head at herself – ‘a catch, but you’re pumped full of bad faith, you don’t give them a proper chance. Totally cynical.’

‘Lynne,’ he said, in all seriousness, ‘if there’s a word ah’d use tae describe ye, it isnae cynical.’

Smiling, she rolled her eyes. ‘It makes me so tired to think I might have to start that again. All that getting-to-know-you stuff, the time you might waste on a person who doesn’t deserve it.’

‘Be a lot easier,’ Angus mused, ‘if ye could jist skip forward, whit, three month? Six? To when yis’re already comfortable with one another. Take all the hassle out. But since ye cannae dae that, ye persevere, like ye tried to with that feller ay yirs the ither night. Mibbe ye can improve him along the way.’ His eyes flicked to her necklace. ‘Besides, yous lot’re meant tae turn the other cheek, urn’t ye no?’

‘Please don’t tell me’ – betrayed again, she fought to keep her tone level – ‘how I am or am not meant to behave. You do not have that right. I get it, Angus, it’s just a joke to you.’ He lifted his chin: he was smiling. ‘
What?
’

‘See that passion? That strength ay feeling? That’s what ye should be putting intae yir pictures. Dinnae bottle it up.
Get
cross.
Be
wild. That passion – try and utilize it.’

‘Passion,’ she exploded. Incensed, she considered grabbing the black pastel and effacing her likeness on his page. ‘What makes you think you have the faintest idea what I’m passionate about?’ Then, afraid that he might respond frankly: ‘Half the time, I barely know myself.’

‘You’ve got your faith,’ he said, eyes sealing in mock piety, ‘and ah’ve got mine.’

Dig, dig, dig – goading and goading her – was this what he was like when he drank? When other people had tried to help him? Or did he save it just for her? She stayed silent and he went on at last: ‘Ah’ve felt the hand ay God maself, ye see, doll.’

‘In your art, you mean?’

His eyes sprang open. ‘No, Lynne, ah do not mean in ma art. Jesus.’

‘Angus, please—’

‘Lynne, naw, wheesht, listen. Believe me, ah huv. Wan time, ah nearly orphaned masel.’

She sat impassive, resolved to do nothing to encourage him, but it did no good. He told the story anyway.

‘Each summer, ma da’d take a week aff and we’d huv a holiday thegither, just the two ay us. This wis after,’ he explained briskly, ‘ma mither’d left us. We’d go tae Elie, St Andrews, they sorts ay places, places he minded gaun when he was wee an aw. He hud quite the gift for choosin the week in August it’d bucket doon rain. Anyway, this wan summer – nine or ten ah might’ve bin – we went tae Kirkcudbright. And it didnae rain! A miracle.’

Angus paused, recalling not the visit itself, too long ago, but elements: the guest house’s yellow window frames; a wolfhound, tall as his shoulder, that had rushed into the garden, sniffed him, made him howl with fright, and rushed off again. And the story he’d rehearsed but never told.

‘The place we were steiyin in sat right on the watter, and there was this sortay wooden pier oot front, sumdy’s dinghy moored tae it. The first mornin ah got up and went oot, and ah saw ma da staunin oot the end this thing, gazin out tae sea – takin a fotie mibbe, evidence sunshine did really exist. Ah saw him there, and ah thought it’d be jist . . . so funny . . .’ – here it came, the isotopic chill that suffused him, even so many years later, any time he remembered what he’d done, the clench of horror heightened not just by the memory, but by Lynne’s look of total incomprehension – ‘tae run up behind him and shove him in.’

‘How deep . . . ?’

‘No deep at aw, naw. And all jist rocks. He’d’ve died if ah’d did it. Struck his heid and died, ah know it.’

‘Not necessarily. No. Anyway, it’s academic. You didn’t do it. Did you?’

Angus shook his head. ‘Ah took a big long run-up at it, but. Ah hud real velocity. But see, as I came harin up behind the auld man, jist at the last instant before ah commit patricide, what happens? Ma toe catches in a gap between two gangplanks. No time to throw oot ma hauns – down ah go, face first, sprawlin ma length, chin hittin the wood. Doosh. And ma da turns round and he’s like, “Whit ye daein doon there?” ’ Nausea came up in him: he’d thought telling it might have earthed the horror. ‘And ah start bawlin, partly cos ah’ve dunted ma chin or whatever, but maistly because the enormity ay whut ah wis aboot tae dae’s just hit me, and he husnae a scooby.’

‘And that’s . . . that was a religious experience for you?’

Was she stupid? ‘Being sent flying tae the deck seconds before pitchin ma ain faither tae his death? Aye, Lynne, ah’d say that wis divine intervention right enough.’ In mounting desperation he held up his thumb and forefinger – ‘This close ah came!’ – but all Lynne did was make a face: sympathetic, not empathetic. A confession he’d never again be able to make for the first time, his excuse for an apology, and she hadn’t got it: why wasn’t she letting him feel absolved? His stories were starting to lose their power over her. Cynically motivated, this one: he no more believed in divine intervention than in the tooth fairy. He wished he’d said nothing.

She wasn’t even paying proper attention. Instead her gaze kept slipping past him, towards the kitchen window: at what, a bird on a branch? He turned, frustrated, and saw what had distracted her: snow, coming down fast on the dark – no fannying about with flurrying, no delicate flakes gambolling in the moonlight, just purposeful, urgent fall. He looked back in astonishment at Lynne, her enchanted expression.

Neither of them suggested going out in it; yet in silence, like mummers, they abandoned their drawings, drew scarves round their necks, did up their matchy-matchy windcheaters. Lynne dropped a camera into her pocket, rolled her bobble hat down as far as her eyebrows, then helped tighten Angus’s scarf around his neck, reviving in him a long-dormant and, he hoped, irrational fear of death by strangulation. She raised her chin. Ready? He gave a single nod: Aye.

It wasn’t cold outside, not at first anyway, and they made their way quickly through the wet woolly snow swiftly falling to collect on their shoulders, every so often a stray blotch drawn in by breath to land on Angus’s tongue, shine briefly, then dissolve. Irresistible, the pure wonder of the stuff – the privilege of being first to walk in the fresh, undisturbed settling, feel its stiff scrunching beneath your boots. The merest few early flakes pullulating under street lights triggered an atavistic feeling in the hindbrain, the same primitive awe that must’ve gripped the first folk on Earth ever to see this stuff drop from the sky.

After the fiasco of Thursday night, his impromptu art class tonight had been his attempt to recapture the brief glimpse he’d had in Siri’s drawing of the work he wanted to make. If he patched things up with Lynne in the process, well and good. He’d carefully used the burnt orange and the off-white, hoping that even in an unrelated image, his captor’s portrait, they’d function as a tuning fork, resonating against his sense of the painting to which he sensed they’d be crucial, and by doing so, help reveal it. No spark, no nothing. All he’d produced was a picture of Lynne, a shade haughtier than in life but passable nonetheless. He was just going to have to let that sense of colours, that faintest notion of a structure, simmer away by itself in the subconscious, develop quietly, hoping it would present itself to him as and when.

Lynne wanted to see the university, and Angus took it as a sign that the route there involved going right past McCalls. A test. No worries: as they passed, he’d keep his head down, watching his step. Likely it’d take hours before the barflies registered what was going on outside anyway. He smiled to himself, imagining bleary heads lifting as events penetrated booze-deadened consciousnesses. Shoving each other in the ribs. ‘See that? In the windae? Is that . . .
snow
?’ Armageddon might come and go unremarked.

On Queen Margaret Drive, nutjobs were charging from pubs and houses and engaging one another in snowball fights – violence stored up for the one occasion it was socially acceptable to chuck a missile at a total stranger. The place was hoatching: running battles between instant gangs, cold-packed fusillades that arced from the Botanics to the roundabout in the middle of the road, from there to the BBC building where Angus’d seen the fox that time. Cars crept along the road as though trying to escape the missile-hurlers’ attention. The night sky was a bright, terrible green.

With McCalls successfully bypassed – and the odd thing was that for once he didn’t feel the slightest urge to be in there with the other barflies, screened from the world – Angus followed Lynne along the terraced row that led towards the university’s main entrance. With considerable restraint, he stopped himself rushing through the scrim of untouched snow on the quad lawns; when he caught up with Lynne, he had to exercise almost as much self-control not to point out her stupidity in taking photos of the sodium-lit central spire from its foot. Had she no sense for perspective? Did she want her pictures diabolically foreshortened? Instead, he squinted out at the horizon, his eye travelling over the distant river’s glimmer, the static Finnieston crane; Partick, vanishing beneath snow haze; the fortress gallery in the park; the denuded trees useless for shelter.

The snow grew colder, attained more solidity, came down on their faces stingingly as darts. ‘Getting a bit bluddy cauld,’ he called to Lynne, swiping in affront at the air.

‘Cold as charity.’ Lynne studied the camera’s tiny illuminated screen before adjusting the controls with an amateur’s tentativeness. ‘We’ll go soon. I just want a good shot, but the flakes keep getting in the way.’

‘That thing new?’ he asked, and she nodded and – it was visible even in the strange luminous yellow dark – blushed fiercely. Angus did not enquire further, assuming that Lynne, like everyone else, had come to see the potential in owning a device to take photos there was no risk strangers in film labs would see. For all her inhibitions, for all her guff earlier about fast-forwarding through her relationships to avoid, so he assumed, the terrifying business of sex, there must nonetheless be some sleazy side to her after all. For her own sake he hoped so: sex oozing around in there, way down low, strenuously repressed.

Sweet, despite everything, to see her capering about unguarded under the falling snow. He felt sudden solidarity – wondered what she’d been like as a child. Solemn, he imagined. When she saw him watching, she came up beside him and slipped an arm round his waist, and he did not push her away. Flakes in their lashes, they looked up together into the rushing sky. He could afford to be magnanimous, having brokered this reconciliation – not just for their own sakes, trying to patch up their fractured, unsustainable situation that bit longer, but on behalf of whatever was gestating within him. Assembling itself in secret. It made him happy to imagine her reaction when she got to see what he’d painted: so eloquent, so irrefutable, that they would finally understand one another. You couldn’t wait for things to rectify themselves, you had to take command. Not through words, cack-handed diplomacy, but through what you did. Your work. And here she thought he was helpless till fucking divine inspiration struck. Earth to Lynne! The hand of God is a phantom limb.

He hadn’t expected to see China again. When she hadn’t shown up to last week’s class, he had assumed that her attending his first one had been the aberration, rather than the norm. Yet here he was, still hoping, making his cautious way to class once more, along pavements treacherous with ice. The weekend’s snow had frozen and refrozen; along the kerbsides it lay shovelled aside in clods and clumps mottled black with exhaust fumes. He went like a novice skater from lamp post to dustbin to road sign to letter box, arms out stiffly for balance every time he skited, worried that if he lost his footing he’d clutch in reflex at an unwitting passer-by and bring them both down.

This week, Dean was taking the group – Angus had muttered something unkind upon seeing it on the list last time – to the Transport Museum. Another childhood post-hospital distraction, one that Angus’s father, no doubt sick to the back teeth of dinosaurs, had suggested for variety’s sake and one that, after that initial visit, Angus had fiercely resisted repeating. You could, he remembered complaining, see buses and the like any time you wanted just by looking out the window, which you could not say about prehistoric monsters. Quite the advanced argument for a kid. His tired old da acceded, making Angus immediately feel wretched – also pretty advanced empathy for a bairn – but once you’d made such a song and dance it was difficult to climb down, even when you knew that doing so would make the other party feel better. As any Lynne could tell you.

Something was making him so jittery he could barely put one foot in front of the other, and it wasn’t just the black ice. It was the feeling of having stalled. Just as you’d prepare for any impending guest, Angus had got his house in order, bought a canvas to soak and stretch on a frame. And then – nothing. Potential had welled up in him then subsided; colours that had sung synaesthetically in his mind’s eye, possessed something verging on life, now lay inert. What was burnt orange, anyway? What was bone white? Pigments, nothing more. The canvas lay, prepped and obeisant, face down on the desk in Lynne’s womb-pink living room, and he could do fuck all with it.