The Glasgow Coma Scale (22 page)

‘I can’t help it. It’s what I feel. It’s who I am. I’m not like you, I’m not able to just pretend.’

‘Pretend whit? Who’s pretendin? Ah nivver led you oan. Let me state categorically. Ah nivver said anyhin ye could misinterpret. This is all you.’

‘Yes. No. I know. But you’ve been careful not to rock the boat, or set me right. Go on, deny it – if it was up to you, I’d never have heard about this girl from your class, I bet.’ Her eyes went wide as a thought struck her. ‘There
were
classes, weren’t there?’

‘Of course there were classes. My God, Lynne, listen to yirsel – in fact, no, ye know whit, listen tae me instead. Let me spell this out for ye.
Not – interestit
. There, okay?
Nivver – gonnae – happen
. Ah’m no tryin to fight it, life is not one constant furious struggle tae repress ma base desires, and ah dinnae go tae ma bed nights and crack wan aff thinkin of ye.’

In a tiny voice she said, ‘You don’t need to be crude.’

‘Ye think no? Right, look – here’s me literally haudin up ma hauns. Ah’m sorry ye’re upset.’

‘No, you can’t do that – insult me, then pretend it’s my fault I’m offended.’

Angus, exasperated: ‘Ah love it, aw these rules ye set me, nippin ma heid. “Dinnae say this, dinnae do that, ah’m so innocent and unworldly ye’ll make ma hair curl if ye so much as swear. Don’t dare go treating this gaff as yir ain, ye’re here oan my sufferance and dinnae forget it. Oh, but if ye do happen tae go oot – which ye will, by the way, any time ah demand it – ah’ll need full details on whaur ye go, who ye’re with, et cetera.”
You
, Lynne, cannae dae
that
. Attach conditions tae yir charity, it isnae charity any mair. And sometimes it frightens me, the way ye act.’ He stopped, worried that this last statement might, in a weird way, flatter her: you still have power, even if it’s only the power to scare.

Her face had gone pale and still. At last she spoke. ‘Is there anything you’d like to add?’

He laughed, incredulous. Here was a tactician’s trick, allowing him to exhaust his rant, then, when he was spent, challenging him to begin it all over again. He remained unconvinced Lynne was half the innocent she pretended. ‘Nup. No, ah think that just aboot covers everyhin.’

‘Well, thank you,’ she said finally.

‘Christ, Lynne – can ye no—’

‘No, no, don’t say anything more. You’ve been very thorough.’

She stared out past him, through the scrim of rain streaming down the kitchen window, through the frail screen of bare tree limbs, through the windows of the tenement facing on, into those other kitchens, where other people were living their anonymous, warm-blooded, oblivious lives – going about them so easily. In the tiny twitches of her jaw, mechanically clenching and loosening, he thought one moment he could discern resignation, the next, fresh resolve.

In Angus’s experience, a big blowout of a stramash like this was often followed by a period of strained and excessive politeness. The thing was not to let the fight get forgotten, absorbed into the goings-on of their lives, and to that end he gave a great sigh and asked, ‘So, whut we gonnae dae now?’

To his surprise, Lynne had an answer ready. ‘Did you mean what you said to Siri last week? About your plan being to get a place of your own?’

‘Aye. That wis the plan awright.’

‘Then we need to think,’ she said, and had no difficulty saying it, ‘about finding another place else for you to be.’

Call his bluff; fine, he’d call hers right back. ‘Ah think that might be for the best.’

She stared at him with those big round appealing dolly eyes, but he was resolute: he wouldn’t plead and he wouldn’t apologize. As far as he was concerned, they could each go to their graves convinced they were right. This was the trouble: they’d been complacent. From the day they met, their relationship had been so skewed and unhealthy that neither of them had ever imagined the situation getting so fucked it couldn’t be salvaged. Still, he wondered exactly how either of them would be able to back down from this ultimatum without starting the whole damn merry-go-round trundling again.

‘The waitin lists for cooncil flats, but. Ye any idea? Seven, eight, nine year if ye’re no disabled, if ye’re ay . . . sound mind,’ he concluded, risking a smile.

She wasn’t looking anyway. She had reached into the cupboard over the sink and was turning mugs upright, checking inside each one first to ensure it was clean. He had the sense she was already putting things back how they’d been before she’d taken him in – how they would be again once he’d gone. Fresh skin growing over a healing wound. The other day he’d noticed that her old artwork had disappeared from the wall above the telephone, replaced by a framed photograph of some forested Swiss valley which might have been the original she’d once worked from. ‘Just leave it with me.’

‘Ah could alwis try makin masel a mair suitable candidate so ah could jump the line,’ he suggested. ‘Hack off a limb or sumhin.’

Lynne turned to him, a mug in each hand, looking ready to smash them together. She didn’t laugh. Indeed she seemed, for a while, to be taking the suggestion quite seriously.

A big fuck-off unfriendly city, this, in many regards, but at other times it felt like just a small town with ideas above its station. Angus was not, therefore, altogether surprised, as he waited beneath the arches of Central Station for Lynne to park nearby, to spot Cairry-Oot Aidan entering the Arundel office party. A cracking bird on his arm, as well, the sly so-and-so: one of those ladies impressed by the silent type, Angus presumed. The others entering comprised a glum set of Lynne’s more or less antipathetic workmates, filing like doomed animals into one of the arches and down a brick staircase towards the unhinted-at catacombs underground.

On the tracks overhead, with a shattering roar, a train accelerated south out of Glasgow, shaking down fat droplets of brackish condensation from the tunnel roof.

What people forgot about the phrase ‘the least you could do’ was how it tended to lead to doing a lot more than you actually wanted to do. When he’d agreed to accompany Lynne to what she had described as just an office party, Angus had anticipated something low-key at the St Vincent Street offices – 5 p.m. kickoff, couple of boxes of supermarket wine, paper hats, a chance to act on the year’s pent-up resentments and crushes. You’d see snogging, you’d see fighting, you’d be home by ten. It was his fault for not asking, but he resented her withholding the information that this was an actual night out.

In his back pocket, his newly reactivated mobile phone quivered. He assumed this’d be Lynne saying she still couldn’t park and he should go on in alone – a suggestion he would disregard – so he was surprised to see Cobbsy’s name come up on the screen. Still sending out APBs about likely easy touches to everyone in his address book? When the little electronic envelope opened, all the message said was: ‘Hear about Bobby?’

The only Bobby Angus knew was Bobby Imison, the gay kid who Cobbsy’d once introduced him to, who’d come to Glasgow hoping to find a sugar daddy, or whatever they were called. Bit daft, but harmless – he wondered what the boy might have done that called for one of Cobbsy’s messages. He texted back: ‘Heard what?’

Lynne turned up as he was sending the message. ‘Everything all right?’

‘Oh, aye, uh-huh. Think so.’

‘Shall we go in?’

The party was taking place in a section of disused tunnel deep beneath the railway station, converted into a nightclub for folk who didn’t mind a curved roof so low over your head you could touch it without stretching. Poor Arundel folk, going from one lightless underground location to the next. The air smelled of mildew; there was the tang of brick dust too, as though the chamber had been very freshly excavated. For the party, it had been filled with superannuated office furniture – old chairs and desks topped with unwired computer screens. Seamily illuminating one end of the arch, an antediluvian photocopier lay open as an invitation to anyone stotious enough to hop up and scan their underwear, or worse. The sound system was playing what seemed to be music composed for kitchen cutlery, over which a robot-tuned voice gabbled at a pitch no human being had ever reached, and two individuals were reeling about in a strobe light’s twickering green cone. Angus checked his phone. Hardly seven o’clock and dancing already: a worrying sign. Noticing him watching them, the pair in the strobe paused and turned to face him. They were suited and booted, but in the flickering he glimpsed inhuman countenances: one wore a clown’s sinister gurn, the other had the head of a donkey. Masks, just masks, but for a moment his heart froze in real misgiving, and he wondered what underworld Lynne had brought him to.

‘Fuck is aw this?’ he asked Lynne.

‘This is the reason you’re lucky you’ve never had to work in an office. It was Struan Peters’s idea to have all these computers and things.’ She indicated, standing by the neon-topped bar, the strawy-haired cunt from Arundel, who was conferring with a short, rotund wifey old enough to be his mother.

‘Awright, now ah get it – theme ay the office pairty is “the office pairty”. That’s . . . postmodern.’ Still difficult to say the word, despite two decades’ practice, without his lip involuntarily curling.

The guy must have realized they’d been talking about him, because he suddenly turned and bellowed across the space, ‘Awright, Lynne! ’Mon over tae the dance flair, show’s yir moves.’ No chance of his seeing Lynne’s minute, forced smile of response at that distance: Angus could hardly make it out, and he was standing right beside her.

She was dressed to the – to the sevens, let’s say – in a sleeveless top of gold-tinted fabric seemingly designed by NASA to be worn in space: fancy for her, almost a disguise. She had put in a hairband and worked it forward so that her hair, backcombed, rose over her forehead in a springy coxcomb. Angus, meantime, had allowed himself to be compressed into smart clothes, even a tie. Not his style at all: he felt that at any moment the buttons might start pinging off the shirt, the fabric rupture as the real him, the unwashed animal, the werewolf, long repressed, burst forth.

Lynne was frowning. ‘You must have to get permissions to do a place up like this, don’t you think? Certificates?’

‘Lynne! Wheesht. Gonnae stop bein so practical aw the time. Let folk enjoy their enforced fun.’

The place was filling up around them – he spotted the beardie from the office, then the G-string wearer, who was strutting about, obviously inviting compliments on her new hairdo. Side-swept fringe gelled flat at the front, the back of her head sprayed up in a rigid chrysanthemum: did she and all the other plus-size ladies dedicated to the style not realize it was the exact same worn by neds and teenybopper pooves as well?

‘The way ah see it,’ Angus said, smacking his palms together, ‘there’s basically wan way and wan way only we kin make the best ay this situation.’

‘And what’s that?’

He grinned, daring her to be appalled. ‘Get hammered.’

A term Lynne had encountered in one of the science books Siri had pressed on her kept recurring to her: punctuated equilibrium. Some scientists thought that evolution proceeded not smoothly but in hops and starts – that life forms that had gone about their business unchanged for centuries suddenly took an apparently spontaneous evolutionary forward leap, as if, bored or demented by their current way of life, they had decided en masse to try something new. Though Lynne suspected she might be projecting.

In the week since Siri’s visit, she and Angus had circled one another like cats. She’d set her alarm a few minutes earlier than usual to ensure she’d leave the flat each morning well before he woke; Angus had contrived either to be out in the evenings, or to shut himself in his room before she got home from work, staying in there all evening, never emerging, making no sound. She tried not to worry what he was doing. Dosing himself with sleeping tablets? Drinking beer all night, urinating in the empty bottles? When they did encounter one another, they conversed civilly. Funny how they could coexist so easily now, maintaining a dual pretence: that she didn’t want to evict him any more than he wanted to escape her.

She would have liked not to care. She could easily ask, too, now that they seemed to converse exclusively within quote marks: when you take care to make everything you say sound facetious, you can get away with the most heartfelt questioning. ‘Not drinking yourself to death, are you?’ ‘Nup. And yirsel? No wastin away wi loneliness, ur ye?’ ‘Goodness, no.’ Sweetly smiling all the while.

He’d even learned to tidy up after himself. No more dishes piled by the sink; she felt like joking that they should have got that fight out the way much sooner.

The woman Struan had been speaking to was working the room, interrupting conversations as she went. She was made shorter by stooped posture, and her expression was a little wild. Lynne didn’t know her, though she rather coveted her dark-red tank top, and she watched as the woman barged in on one knot of guests, then the next. People seemed nettled at first, then she spoke to them for a while and they broke into smiles, peering at one another in delight. What could she be saying? She had the obnoxious manner, discernible even from afar, that Lynne associated with the charity workers who obstructed her route to work every other morning. She thrilled for a moment to the appalling idea that, to spite her, Angus might have invited China – but surely this creature couldn’t be her? Angus, on his way back from the bar, walked past her without a flicker.

He returned with his hands behind his back and a mischievous expression. ‘Ah’ve an important question for ye, doll. Could be a life-changer, so dinnae rush it.’ He revealed his hands, each holding an identical bottle. ‘Alcopop or alcopop? Red or blue? And before ye ask, that is literally all that’s on offer. Free bluddy bar, ah thought ma luck wis in.’

‘Red it is.’ The liquid – she couldn’t quite consider it a drink – glowed in the bottle like a cartoonist’s idea of toxic waste. She sipped; it was like swallowing a whole packet of sherbet in one go, sour-sweet, throat-scaldingly sugary. ‘Goodness. Goodness me, that’s . . .’