The Glasgow Coma Scale (27 page)

She shifted along the bed towards the window, and Angus sat beside her, moving the red book he’d been reading. For an astonished moment Lynne had thought it a Gideon Bible, but as he set it down on the table, she realized almost with relief that it was the little book listing football fixtures that was sold at newsagent counters. She turned away, amused – and saw, propped on the carpet, half out of view behind the wardrobe, a canvas, facing the wall.

‘Is that – are you painting again these days?’ she asked, wondering why the idea almost dismayed her. ‘Properly?’

‘Properly ah doan know about, but aye. First time in . . . years mibbe.’

She tried to replicate his tone, which was humorous and lacked sincerity. ‘Am I allowed to see?’

He considered the point. ‘If ye like. Go easy, but, it’s at a delicate stage. Me, whit ah’m daein is no lookin at it, fer a month if ah can manage it, till the next sittin. That weiy, when ah do get tae see it again, it’ll be fresh.’

‘Then I won’t either. “Children and fools”, isn’t that right?’

He laughed. ‘Ah, Lynne.’ His grin faded at last. ‘Ah’m so glad ye came. Ah’ve been thinkin a lot about ye.’

When she did not immediately respond, Angus hastened on: ‘Aye, ehm, about how ye took me in off the streets, bought me all they claithes, aw that. Everyhin ye did. And ah wanted tae say . . .’

He paused, and Lynne, keeping her expression nicely composed, awaited his next pronouncement with trepidation. How would she respond, now that everything was fixed and irrevocable, when he said he missed her? That he’d been wrong and she’d been right all along?

‘Ah suppose whut ah wanted tae say wis, ah forgive ye.’

The view from his window was of the front lawn and the long, curving, tree-lined driveway that bisected it. And there was a person out there, too, Lynne saw: a thin young man, a boy, really. He was crossing the driveway, his gait lurching, pained-seeming. When he reached grass again, he half turned and dropped deliberately on to his backside – a real clowning pratfall, a performance, though he seemed to have no audience and he could not have seen, at this distance, anyone watching him from the house. He rolled around on his back for a while, kicking up his legs and snatching at his clothes with his left hand, trying, it seemed, to remove some invisible encumbrance. His other arm seemed trapped inside his T-shirt. A few moments later, he struggled to his feet and lolloped on over the grass for a few yards, before once again flopping to the ground, writhing there like she’d seen dogs do, disporting themselves amid superscents humans couldn’t detect. Should she say something? Was this a seizure she was witnessing? A pioneering workout?

‘Lynne, doll?’ Angus touched her bare arm, and she started: his dark-haired fingers there seemed tarantula-like. ‘Ye did whut ye thought wis right. Makin me leave
was
the right thing, even if ye undertook it fer reasons that were . . . Well, ye were angry. Ah wis too, ragin, fer the longest time. But ye cannae steiy angry forivver. Anyway. Here, now, on ma ain two feet, ye ken, ah jist feel . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Grateful.’

Outside on the grass, the young man straightened up sharply. He swivelled to face the house and, with his right arm extricated from his T-shirt, began to twine and contort the fingers of both hands, flicking them towards the house, flinging some obeah magic in their direction: take that, and that. Lynne almost ducked.

She wanted to point him out to Angus – make sure he could see the boy, that she wasn’t imagining him. And ask, too, if this was what counted as normal behaviour at Maitlandfield – were there others like that who spent their days alone, going about their strange rituals? Was this part of the treatment? Instead, fearing what else he might tell her about what went on here, she looked down at her hands cradling her mug, and said:

‘So they’re treating you all right, then? Feeding you properly?’

‘Feedin me? Aye – feedin me swill.’ To her astonishment, he leapt up off the bed and went whirling round the room, almost giggling. ‘Aw, Lynne, this place, ah cannae begin tae tell ye. It’s a disaster area. Ah’m surrounded by bawbags like Andy there, no-hopers who’ve drank away their money, their hame, their families. Came here tae dry oot? Fuck naw, they’ve came tae die. Ah’m the healthiest wan here,’ he said in delight, ‘and still the staff keep oan tryin tae get me tae exercise. “How’s about ye go outside, Angus, get some fresh air?” Aye, or how’s about you suck ma chug?’ There was a broad, stupid smile spreading over his face, all beard and teeth. ‘Sorry. But ah mean.’

Frozen, Lynne ran back what he’d said, wondering what in his tone or the words she could have misconstrued so completely.

‘Lynne, your face. Here, go on, huv a peep at the canvas. Honestly. Mair bluddy eloquent than ah could ivver be.’

He went over to the window then, giving her and his painting privacy. She did as she was told, but didn’t turn the canvas round until she was back on the bed.

It was the head of a young woman – that was all she understood at first. Then the elements began to coalesce, and Lynne’s next thought was unworthy of her: she was glad Angus hadn’t picked the lovestruck girl from reception as his subject.

He’d made Siri sickly, like all his subjects: her likeness assembled in broad sweeps of brick red and ultramarine, internal colours; her cropped hair in titanium, a furze of hostile brushstrokes. She wore a fearsome expression, befitting the agitation with which it seemed the paint had been slapped down and scoured away: Lynne pictured Angus obsessively making and unmaking the portrait. Behind the head an apocalypse sky, pollution fire rolling down towards the point of view. And there was a structure there too, maybe – a grid or a cage, parallel lines set at an oblique angle to the portrait, disappearing and reappearing amid the blood red, the orange, the white, the concrete grey.

‘They tell me when the meals’re served and ah dinnae go.’ Angus had turned away from the window and was walking a tight circle in the centre of the room. ‘They recommend these wee courses at the gym – twenty minutes per day oan a treadmill or a static cycle – and ah nod along: oh aye, sounds guid, guid tae be healthy, and nivver set a foot in the place. Ah’ve barely even been outside since January. Seems like everydy’s got a function here and mine is tae resist, resist, resist.’ He paused at the centre of the spiral he’d been pacing, leonine, majestic, until, laughing at himself: ‘Contrary auld fucker, so ah am. There ye go, a dash ay self-awareness, there’s a breakthrough. Maybe these reviews ay theirs’re daein some good after aw – no the weiy
they
think, but encouraging me tae’ – he gave a private little half-smile – ‘keep sabotagin masel.’ He came and sat beside her and, ruining his plan to keep it fresh for himself, took a sidelong look at the canvas. Lynne, hot with guilt, knew this was the nearest to thanks, or apology, she was going to get.

He had built up the paint in thickly textured layers, sponged and chipped and scoured these away, then applied still more paint over the uneven surface. The resulting palimpsest at first seemed like it might reveal something of his working methods, but really it obscured them further, eradicating any indication of what parts he’d painted when. At one stage he had laid down a coat of crimson emulsion over the whole picture, temporarily obliterating it, then flayed that colour away again: something she hadn’t seen before in his work. ‘Ma way ay keepin things interestin,’ he explained, running a finger over one of the red skerricks. ‘Ah remembered how ah used tae start out wi all this enthusiasm, aw this sense ay potential, gaun after the image ah held in ma heid. The first mark ye make on a canvas is like . . .’ He shook his head, held his hands up in rapture. ‘A big moment. Ye make the mark and spring away, almost feart. Go birlin roond the room. But as ye go on, work intae it, ye start tae feel . . . dread.’

‘Of finishing?’

‘Aye! Well, no, no exactly. At a certain stage, the hing starts tae close in around ye like a trap ye’ve set yirsel. The end grows mair inevitable wi every mark ye make. Inescapable. Aw that potential’s gone, and all that’s left is a chore tae complete. Ah alwis found sumhin morbid about that. Ye know the joke: “So, Doctor, now ye’ve completed the autopsy, can ye tell us the cause ay death?” And the doctor goes, “Aye – bein alive tae start wi.” And this’ – he gestured again to the crimson marks that littered the image like survey marks on a map – ‘wis me tryin tae shake it up a bit, introduce randomness intae the procedure. Pretend ah wis givin up and startin over, mair tae fool masel than anyhin.’ He moved towards her, turned his head round to inspect his picture. ‘Tryin to haud ma ain attention, if ye like. Keep masel guessin.’

She was glad for two reasons. His new animation, this apparently unfeigned cheer, had arisen from his being able to work again. And she was thankful, too, for the unassailable self-regard which meant he would not ask her opinion of the new work. Once, his tremulous line and constant, compulsive layering and erasure of the paint had married with his subject choice: you looked at that numbing, terrifying portrait of his parents, for instance, and thought, yes, this was the only way he could possibly have conveyed his feelings about them, communicated to the viewer the regret and regard contemplating his subject had provoked in him. In his head of Siri, they were badly misapplied: a vapid revisitation of old techniques, wasted on a subject whose importance to him it was, for once, impossible to judge. Was this a portrait in praise of Siri or an attack on her? It was so inept, and yet he seemed so pleased with it and himself – a disjuncture that was Lynne’s doing, her fault.

‘Ah’m no pretendin ah understand it, Lynne. All ah know’s there’s no chance ah’d’ve been able tae start this, on anyhin, while ah wis at Glendower Street. Certainly not if ah’d kept oan at the hostel. Wan wis too . . . cosy, mibbe? And the ither, well, that wis just a bluddy nuthouse.’ He squinted at her. ‘Yir place bein the cosy wan.’

‘Thank you, yes. Whereas here . . .’

‘Oh aye,’ he panted, calming down slightly, ‘here. The Goldilocks Universe, isn’t that the theory? It’s a bazillion-tae-wan chance that conditions’ll be ripe for life tae occur, yet bam, here we all are. Ye’re no followin, ur ye, doll?’

‘Siri’s been recommending books to you, hasn’t she?’

‘Naw, but it’s a fair comparison. Ye’re tryin tae bring a whole bunch ay invisible sights intae alignment, and ye willnae know if ye’ve got it right till it’s too late tae adjust them. Turns out what ah needed tae galvanize me back tae work was a bit mair charity tae kick against, eh.’

It was her own fault for removing the pages that detailed prices before she left the brochures out for him, but that word
charity
struck Lynne dumb. How could he believe – or dare pretend to believe – that a place like Maitlandfield operated as, what, a purely altruistic enterprise? A wealthy philanthropist’s deathbed bequest? She could have set him right, told him what his two months here had already cost her, and once he’d recovered his breath she could have talked him through her calculations – shown him that if you really wanted to do this, if you really wanted to help someone, it meant closing certain avenues off to yourself for ever. She could have told him what she’d been willing to do to benefit him, the consequences her decision had had, the other people – bystanders – it meant stringing along. But it wasn’t right to shame or antagonize him, not when he was so enthused, so effusive.

Besides, different people had different approaches to life. Here was Angus making a show of putting his methods on display, in the accreted and scoured layers of paint; whereas Lynne – well, it had damaged them both when she had kept a secret before, daring to hope but not to voice the hope. Maybe he was right about people’s functions in the working universe, and her station in life was to keep secrets – fine: if these new ones helped protect him, she’d happily adopt the role.

‘Has Siri come to sit for you often?’

‘Three, four times mibbe? Whenever she kin find the time. Startit in December – wan mair sittin should dae it. She’s got exams at the minute, then she’s gaun oan holiday.’ He looked away from the painting. ‘That’s why ah’m takin a break.’

‘She made friends with Rose again, did she tell you?’ It struck her, too late, that she might be breaking a rule Maitlandfield visitors were meant to abide by – perhaps you shouldn’t mention the outside world, allude even to the existence of such a place. ‘It’s half-term at the moment. They’ve gone to Lisbon together.’

‘Oh aye, uh-huh.’ Angus bounced a little on the bed beside her. ‘Ah mean, she said. Disnae seem tae want tae jump Rose’s bones quite so much any mair.’ He preened, laughing at himself. ‘So it all worked oot for the best, ma interference.’

‘I’m pleased for her.’ Angus’s mouth tucked in at the corners sceptically. ‘She came to see me at Christmas, asked me what she should do. It was a test, or a sort of serving of notice – this is who I am, take it or leave it. And, you know, I’m starting to realize, in my ugly old age, that it’s pointless to disapprove of what someone’s doing with their life. You’ll never convince them to change.’ She had mined this statement with several entry points where Angus might interrupt and contradict her, but he let it pass without comment. ‘It usually only makes them more determined to do what they were going to do anyway.’

She did not mention that she had not seen Siri since Christmas; she did not say, could not count on it coming out in a humorous tone, that Angus might, by painting her, have stolen her from Lynne somehow.

Angus sniffed. ‘Best jist tae let folk get on with it, aye.’ She waited, but this seemed to be as much as he was willing to concede. ‘Anyway, what cheer wi you? That joab of yirs. Handit in yir notice yet?’

‘Actually, no.’ Like the student who studies a minimum of the syllabus then twists the examiner’s question so she can give the only answer she knows, Lynne launched into a rehearsed statement. ‘What happened was, I sat down with a calculator and worked it all out – in the office, actually, I made a spreadsheet, I should have been working. I thought about going public sector, getting a job that wasn’t . . . evil, like you said. You know what? It turned out I couldn’t afford to.’ She shrugged, as if it was all beyond her control. To her, the story sounded blatantly fraudulent, and she both wanted and didn’t want him to question her further. To lie by omission, she knew, was hardly lying at all, but she still felt unexpectedly bad about deceiving him. The urge to confess versus the instinct to withhold what didn’t concern him. ‘Imagine. My outgoings just kept going up and up. You wouldn’t believe how much my bills have increased in the last year. What recession? I thought I was doing well, and it turns out I’ve barely been keeping my head above water all this time. So I guess I’m stuck.’