The Glasgow Coma Scale (25 page)

And of course folk tired of hearing the story; of course he’d start getting snide remarks, the disapproval he’d been courting, whether he knew it or not. No street smarts, that was Bobby’s problem: hanging out near business hotels, bragging any time he got taken to dinner or given gifts. That this would go badly for him eventually had seemed almost inevitable.

‘Ye know ye couldnae have protected him,’ Angus ventured. ‘Ye’re alwis helpin folk oot anyway, yir texts an that. But sometimes . . . sometimes—’ He faltered, and Cobbsy was straight in interrupting, clearly had not been looking for himself.

‘So I’m sitting there wonderin whether I should be talking to Bobby or whit, feeling a bit stupit like, when this nurse come in tae check his charts – and that’s a laugh, I’ll tell ye. Belter ay a ridheid, six foot zero in her fuckin Crocs, man, in proportion an aw, bendin right doon over him – see the view if he’d opened his eyes that minute?’ Cheered by his own story, Cobbsy attempted a gesture to describe the girl’s physique, but was hampered by his stack of magazines. ‘Wasted oan Bobby, naturally, but see if it’d bin me lying there in a coma, that’d’ve got me sittin bolt upright quick enough, know what I’m sayin,
that
leanin over me . . .’

‘Eh, ye were sayin – his charts?’

‘Oh aye. Well, see, one minute she’s liftin an eyelid tae shine a torch in, next she’s got out these instruments – stickin stuff intae the soles ay his feet an that. Ah wis like, “Whut’s that ye’re daein?” “We check Mr Imison every day to see if there’s been any change in his condition.” Ah’m like, “Show’s that chart a minute?” And ye ken whit they call it?’

‘Dae ah luik like a doctor?’

‘Get this – checkin each day tae see how he measures up on the Glasgow Coma Scale.’

Angus shook his head, whistled. ‘Who’s like us? Christ. Oor ain national measure ay unresponsiveness. And folk wonder if the country’d cope bein made independent.’

‘No joke, pal – how comatose are ye, on a scale ay wan tae fifteen? Kin ye feel yir brain, or no? And Bobby’s scoring, like, a seven or an eight, at the minute, right bang in the middle, and so what ye wonder is, dis that mean his cup’s hauf full or hauf empty? His eyes dinnae open when ye poke him.’ He jabbed Angus in the ribs. ‘Believe me, I tried. And then – then they test his speech.’

‘Guy’s in a fuckin coma. What’re they expectin, a chorus ay
Jesus Christ Superstar
?’ Surprised himself with that one – evidently he had spent too long in the company of Lynne’s record collection.

‘Naw, naw, there’s a whole, like, fuckin list. No just kin he speak or no – which Bobby obviously cannae. But if all he can come out wi’s . . . incomprehensible sounds.’ They kept their heads – Cobbsy solemn but his eyes darting to Angus, daring him to break – until he added, in a strained squeal, ‘Inappropriate words.’

‘Like whit?’ Angus got out with an effort. Incredulous, his voice like air escaping a balloon. ‘Wakin up, call one ay the nurses “cuntybaws”?’

‘ “Gonnae gies ma morphine, Sister, ya fanny!” ’

The guffawing sent pigeons up in flight all round the square.

‘Och,’ Cobbsy said, recovering, speaking with empty optimism, ‘prolly be back on his feet quicker’n ye can say knife. Back oot daein his thing – scuse me a second.’ He stepped forward to intercept the next wave of arrivals from Queen Street station as they made their way diagonally through the square towards the Merchant City. Angus was left glumly pondering Bobby’s prospects, his
thing
. Unconscious or cracking on to random strangers in the hope of scraping through to another day: neither exactly ideal.

‘How ye manage to keep yir spirits up?’ he asked, when his pal returned. ‘Stoap yirsel chuckin yir magazines in a bin and fuckin off?’

‘It’s work,’ Cobbsy said simply. ‘I nivver wanted
not
tae work. Why fuck it up?’

‘But when they jist storm past ye like ye dinnae exist . . .’

‘Got other things on their minds jist, that’s what I tell masel. They’re no in the right frame ay mind this time, but mibbe things’ll be different next time they go by. A potential customer today,’ Cobbsy explained, clearly reciting his employer’s script, ‘will be a potential customer again the morra. Some people’ll always want tae help us, even if they doan know how tae go about it.’ He coughed hard. ‘Talkin ay which, heard ye’d found a place tae stay.’

Angus bit his lip. No point denying it, but the old cautiousness made him play it down. ‘Thinkin ay movin oan soon, but.’

That wasn’t entirely true – at least, he wasn’t the one thinking it. Two mornings ago, he’d got up to find a stack of brochures on the kitchen table, one of Lynne’s signature long-winded notes – a dissertation, a justification – clipped to the uppermost magazine. Angus didn’t need to read it; the photo on the cover told him everything. Here were sanctuaries for those unable to cope with the world, with themselves. You had to give Lynne credit for not backing down. Since their showdown at the weekend, he’d honestly been expecting one of the customary reparations – a gift more suited to that other, better Angus she wanted him to be. Climbing boots, maybe, or a cravat. He’d accept the inappropriate gift with good grace, and there would be an end to it. Instead, she’d left him these magazines with their staged photographs of happy people strolling the hypersaturated gardens of former mansions the state had taken over and divvied up into units for, what, the sick, the insane, the unliveable-with.

The kitchen had been looking bonny, all gilded with winter sunshine, but seemed already to be diminished in his eyes, Glendower Street packing itself away, withdrawing from him. But as Lynne was so fond of pointing out, Angus had never asked her to take him in, and like hell, he’d sworn, sweeping the brochures on to the floor, was he going to let her force him out.

Cobbsy was smirking with superior knowledge. ‘Six-week rule, was it, aye?’

‘Whit?’

‘We’re no like thaim.’ Cobbsy lowered his voice, nodded scowling at the folk mobbing past through the square, heads filled with shopping, Friday-night drinks with the girls, trains to catch, real places to be. ‘We’ve seen through aw the bullshit. We’ve seen stuff they don’t know about, wouldnae believe ye if ye described it to thaim. We know whit goes oan round they dark alleyways, whit’s happenin beneath their feet, underpinnin it aw. We see a city their eyes jist skip over, oblivious. Seen that, ye cannae unsee it again, Angus, ye know what I’m saying?’

‘Us who’ve rent the veil,’ Angus suggested.

‘Every so often sumdy feels they kin help, and by helping, help thirsels. We warp the place, disturb their lives too much. Ye cannae just shove a hawk in wi doves, know what I mean? They can put us up all right but they cannae
accommodate
us. And in ma experience six weeks is about as lang as any ay thaim can stand tae put up wi us.’

Angus laughed curtly, howked a gob of phlegm to the ground to show what he thought of Cobbsy’s theory. ‘Mibbe ah should go tae see these
Big Issue
folk an aw, see if they’ll gie me whatever the fuck you’ve been smoking.’ He mocked, but he was counting on his fingers nonetheless: right enough, it’d be six weeks come Sunday since Lynne’d borne down on him on Sauchiehall Street, all fluster and favour. He glowered at Cobbsy, feeling obscurely as if his friend had gulled him. ‘How’d ye hear about me findin a place, anyway?’

‘Well I heard it fae Wullie, and he heard it affay sumdy in a pub somewhere, so he says. Oh, wait here a minute . . .’

Who else but Wullie, Angus was thinking as Cobbsy went off again. Says nothing, sees everything; one unshod foot in the barflies’ territory, another in the homeless’s, a barefoot envoy between worlds. Preternatural sensitivity to all around you: where’d that come on the Glasgow Coma Scale? Like you’d woken from darkness and just carried on, scoring fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, kept on gaining consciousness, insight, couldn’t stop waking up.

‘Mightn’t be the worst idea,’ Cobbsy mused when his tour around George Square brought him back close to Angus. He toted the magazines in his hand. ‘Speakin tae these guys, ah mean. Earn some readies, get a roof over yir heid – no bad, actually, this time. This big hotel wis meant to open up doon by Central, only the purchase fell through, so noo they’ve shoved aw us poor basturts in there till they find another buyer. Tryin tae lower the value ay the joint, no doubt.’

‘Lots ay it about. Money there tae tear the place doon, no so much for rebuildin it.’

‘Ah’m in a suite,’ Cobbsy said proudly. ‘Nae telly, nae sofa, shower disnae work, bare as all fuck, but a suite. Ye credit it?’

On Glendower Street, the gleaming towers on the hoardings round the old schoolyard seemed more science-fictional than ever.
COMING SOON!
And when you looked through the railings you saw just a quarry, nothing whatsoever coming soon. He’d spent Thursday evening, this week as last, sitting on the dyke wall, part hidden by one such hoarding, waiting for the light in Lynne’s window to go out so he could sneak into the flat and avoid having to lie about going to his classes. Come the witching hour, as he watched the boiler steam cascading down the tenement sides in the gathering cold, he’d heard an unearthly grunting and coughing from the schoolyard ruins – a gang of fox cubs play-fighting, nipping each other’s ears, gambolling amid the broken concrete slabs, chasing through thickets of braided steel that had once helped hold together whole buildings.

He watched Cobbsy entreat the crowd: ‘Gie it a wee try, ye’ll find it’s awright . . .’ What did he get in return? Talk about incomprehensible sounds: a shamed phoneme, a mumble that might’ve been ‘Sorry’; often nothing at all, not even eye contact; occasionally a ‘No thank you’, either po-faced – what could
you
possibly have that
I
might want? – or apologetic; occasionally outlandishly chirpy: No, ta, content to be complicit in denying you the bare minimum standard of life. Maybe one in a dozen said yes, smiled, paid up, had a blether. He was making a go of it – Cobbsy, who Angus, perennially scornful of the good-natured, had thought was basically doomed, his consideration for others likely to get him exploited. The kind who’d become involved in something bad because he was too guileless to say no, who’d end up like wee Bobby, passed out in Intensive Care, his head staved in, unresponsive on a scale of one to fifteen.

When rain started to spit, Cobbsy drew up his hood, then favoured Angus with a brilliant smile. The tiniest luxury. As the rain stung his ears, Angus tried to imagine himself in Cobbsy’s place, could not, realized he actively feared the idea.

Undeterred by the rain, another batch of youngsters was wailing as the octopus swinger trundled into life. A safe peril, likely none of these tots worrying, as Angus did watching them, about a connection working loose, a bolt coming away, your helpless body being flung off into the void. Lynne, God love her, must have wondered, each time he blundered in the door, what nick he’d be in this time: drunk, crabbit, fresh from dropping anchor in some bird whose existence he’d then proceed to deny. What role for her this time: confessor, counsellor, victim? Never the one she wanted. It would never stop, he knew that now. Her two conjoined, paradoxical hopes would remain undimmed, no matter how long he stayed in Glendower Street: half of her wishing he would stride in one day, seize her up in his arms and cover her face in kisses; the other half praying she’d be able to cope if it actually happened – that it wouldn’t scare her half to death.

Untenable, that was the word. His position was untenable, in the sense that he could no longer be Lynne’s tenant – could no longer, unlike the bairns birling round faster and faster on the fair rides, screaming with delight because they knew nothing could go wrong, just keep holding on.

* * *

Scott Flint had worked on in the conference room all afternoon. It had given Lynne the fear. Was she about to be called in? Dismissed too? She carried on working, and at six o’clock, after everyone else had left for the weekend, he emerged and insisted on giving her a lift home. Relief made her overly grateful – all that had been visible through the light wells all afternoon had been brownish rainwater coursing down the hill outside, inches deep, from which you might extrapolate the whole city underwater.

He’d claimed to know Glasgow, but picked an odd route home, and near Garnethill they became enmired in traffic. He put the heating on full blast and turned the radio to a classical station. Rain hammered against the windscreen, too dense for the wipers to clear. It struck the road and bounced back into the headlights’ beam.

‘You did well back there,’ Scott said over the music, as they waited for the traffic to move.

‘Oh, no, you helped.’ Instantly she corrected herself, afraid that this sounded high-handed. ‘You did the hard bits.’

‘It was like a good cop, bad cop thing we had going, wasn’t it? I hadn’t planned it that way, had you?’

There had, to Lynne’s surprise and relief, been no scene: Struan had gone out into the office, where an anticipatory silence had fallen, and after retrieving his jacket and backpack, he simply walked out, leaving his computer terminal on, a mug of tea cooling half finished on his desk. On his phone console, three lights blinking: three disenfranchised clients stuck listening to muzak as they awaited an answer that wouldn’t come.

‘I was always going to be the villain. You could have said anything. I just can’t believe he’s gone.’ She stretched out her legs, turned up her toes and felt her tendons stretch. Hot air in the footwell. ‘My heart’s still hammering.’ The earlier pleasurable feeling stole over her again – the obverse, she now realized, of the dread being at work normally gave her – when she pictured the ground giving way beneath Struan’s feet. ‘It never occurred to me I could just fire somebody like that.’

Scott smiled, a little uncomfortably. ‘Well, yes. Of course. But I’d prefer you didn’t make a habit of it.’

‘I feel like the door to the cage has been left open and I don’t know whether to fly free or not.’ She supposed this wasn’t the way a colleague should speak to a colleague, but she had such a high-wire feeling that no admission seemed too frank. Or maybe she was sugar-crashing? She’d been trembling so badly after Struan’s departure that as Donna was taking orders for the Friday-afternoon sweets run, Lynne had for the first time ever timorously requested a packet of fruit gums, a chocolate bar, anything. From her juniors’ astounded looks, you’d have thought she’d demanded the still-warm carcass of a freshly killed gazelle. And now she was ravenous, faintingly hungry again.