The Glasgow Coma Scale (28 page)

‘That’s a real shame, Lynne. A bluddy shame. Ye’re worth more than that stupit joab’ll ever gie ye credit fer.’ He stood up again and held out his hand; after a confused moment, Lynne handed the canvas over for him to replace against the wall. He wandered back to the window and glanced up at the sky. ‘Beautiful day the day. Ye should get oot there, get some vitamin D in ye.’ He chuckled. ‘Hear that? Ah’m as bad as the folk ah’m jist after slaggin aff.’

Realizing she was being dismissed, Lynne stammered: ‘Yes, I suppose I should let you get on. Stuff I should be doing too. Ironing my clothes for another wonderful week at Arundel.’ She pulled her cardigan on over her shoulders. ‘Thanks for the tea.’

‘You’re very bluddy welcome.’

She was expecting to have to endure another hug, but Angus didn’t shift from his position by the window, so she went over and laid a hand on his shoulder instead, half patting, half squeezing. ‘It’s great to see you doing so well.’

‘Oh, ah’m prosperin, aye.’ He turned. ‘You’re lookin well an aw.’ Self-conscious, she drew the cardigan round herself. ‘Ah’m likin the brooch, by the way. New?’ She froze – nodded. ‘Silver, is that?’ He put a finger beneath one corner of the brooch and lifted it to catch the light, pulling the cardigan’s stitching. ‘A birdcage, whit’s that, some Christian hing?’

‘No. At least, I don’t think so.’

‘Christmas present?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Check us, eh? New jewellery for you, new gegs for me.’ A thought struck him. ‘It’s no fae . . .’

‘Raymond? Goodness, no.’

He opened his mouth, closed it again, then said: ‘Well, guid. It suits ye. The question is, has the bird flown off, or is the cage door open fer it tae find its way back in?’

The question for Lynne, as she moved away, was why she’d elected to wear the brooch today if she had not unconsciously hoped Angus would comment on it – had she not hoped to actively keep the story behind it to herself? Opening the little parcel on Christmas Eve, she’d made a sharp wordless exclamation that mingled delight and dismay – Too much! Too expensive! Too soon! – as though Scott Flint, her shy and ardent pursuer, had been there to hear her.

‘Lynne.’ Angus’s voice had sharpened: no levity in it now. She turned in the doorway and saw that he’d resumed his supine pose on the bed, legs crossed at the ankles, his thumb holding his book open. ‘Thanks for droppin by. Ah mean it. Ye’re a guid person, ye know that?’

‘Mm-hm?’ she said, on a rising intonation, pretending that he’d volunteered not praise but some mildly diverting item of trivia. Her hand rose to the birdcage brooch. She sensed a conspiracy – these gifts and praises she could not accept, could not trust or surrender to.

‘A terrific, generous person. Ah don’t want ye forgettin that, Lynne, ye hear me? Nivver forget it.’

She shook at his temerity. Would people never tire of bestowing these platitudes on her? Generous, sensible: what did words like these even mean? By contrast, after she’d given Siri her advice at Christmas, the girl had squinched up her eyes to inspect Lynne more closely, then declared, in her offhand way, ‘Lynne, you know what, you’re all right.’ That was as much praise as Lynne deserved. You’re all right, you’re precisely average; you will never attain greatness, nor should you aspire to it.

People said nice, vacuous things all the time, things they didn’t mean, and were at pains to avoid expressing what they truly felt, which was usually the opposite. Tell Angus what she’d done for him and he’d crush her in an embrace for maybe ninety seconds then proceed to resent her interference for the rest of his – mysteriously truncated – stay in the place he found so awful, so perfect. For both their sakes, then, she lifted a hand in farewell and, in that way they had now, undermining by their irreverent tone the earnestness of their words, wished him the greatest good luck.

In reception – ‘Excuse me? Mrs Meacher?’ She didn’t bother to correct the girl – there were forms to complete, signatures in triplicate, small print to scan, and Lynne, who imagined other people might find these practical procedures rather harrowing, seeming as they did to entail the literal signing away of someone’s life, set about them with relish. She received in return a pink carbon-copied sheet of paper with details of her payment, all she’d have to show for her latest gesture. She folded the paper in four, put it in her handbag, and didn’t move.

‘Try not to worry, Mrs Meacher. It’s only been two months.’ The receptionist was spraying room freshener on what Lynne saw now were clearly fake lilies. ‘Sometimes it can take six, seven, eight months before residents are ready to move on.’ Lynne, doing the mental arithmetic, felt her pulse drop, her eyes grow very wide. Her hand went to the silver brooch. ‘But we’ll keep reviewing Mr Rennie’s progress every week. And of course you can see him yourself any time you like.’ She spoke kindly, but a final question hung unasked: why are you still standing around here? ‘There’s nothing more you need to do.’

In the lime trees, birds sang without cease. The daffodils seemed to have gone from buds to blooms in the hour she’d been indoors. Places like Maitlandfield House existed in a fold in space, an interzone all goodwill and forgiveness and the buzzwords from the posters in reception: growth, development, harmony, tenacity. But she’d introduced into this anodyne controlled environment a rogue element, and because Lynne – contrary to what people kept telling her about herself – was spite personified, a grudge-bearer, a hopeless case, she took pleasure in imagining how, over time, Angus would warp it. She walked back down the driveway, and the ground already seemed a little aslant beneath her feet.

As she was passing the car park, she saw from the corner of her eye a figure burst out from among the trees and speed towards her. She turned, half expecting to see Angus, but it was the boy she’d spotted rolling on the lawn earlier. Reaching her, he slowed to walk at her side, watching his feet to ensure they struck the gravel exactly in time with hers. He was maybe nineteen – too young, surely, for this place – with dark skin and slightly protuberant eyes that, when he glanced at her, seemed to look towards yet not actually at her: something absent, or depleted, in his gaze. She smiled at him, but he didn’t speak, and Lynne, who did not want to seem to be fleeing him, though that was her instinct, found herself slowing her pace. His right arm was back inside his T-shirt, the empty sleeve flapping.

After a while, he withdrew his arm from inside the shirt and showed her what he had been holding to his chest: a home-made card on which glitter, the felt-tipped word
CONGRATULATIONS
and a photograph of two leaping dolphins, clipped from a magazine, were equally prominent. She wasn’t sure whether she was being offered the card, though she did not, in any case, want to take it. Instead, she read aloud, in a bold, schoolteacher’s voice: ‘Congratulations!’

The young man’s response was too garbled for her to catch. When she asked him to repeat himself, again all she heard was a random jumble of syllables. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, cringing, ‘but I don’t quite understand.’ He didn’t seem offended, this time asking instead, perfectly clearly – though she was certain this was not what he had been trying to say before – ‘When’s
your
birthday?’

‘Oh,’ she said, so surprised by the question she was momentarily unable to think of the answer. ‘Oh, not until September.’

‘September,’ he repeated, digesting this information.

She didn’t know how else to speak to the boy except as to a small child. ‘Yes. Not for a long time yet. Months and months.’

The boy made an extraordinary noise, as though shifting coins around inside his mouth, so that Lynne felt that another voice might now emerge from him. ‘Mine’s next week.’

‘That’s why you’ve got the card!’

The boy pointed at one of the cars parked nearby, a red hatchback. ‘Is that your car?’

‘No, I don’t have my car with me today. I walked here.’

‘Walked,’ he echoed, awed.

‘Yes – well, just from the train station. Since it’s such a nice spring day.’ They were nearing the gates, and she started to feel panic’s slow squeeze: envisioning not just that he might try to pretend that he too was merely a visitor, but that the guard – was he a guard? – in the gatehouse would wave them through, lumbering her with him for life. Slowing slightly, though she did not want to prolong the conversation, she pointed again to the boy’s card, which he held in his hands as delicately as a butterfly. ‘I’ve got to go back there now. But I hope you have a lovely birthday when it comes.’

‘Can I come with you?’

The boy was watching her – not hopefully, not trepidatiously, not with any real expression, she thought, so that it didn’t seem possible he could have asked the question, until he made the coin-rattling noise once more and repeated, a bland enquiry as if on someone else’s behalf, ‘Can I, though?’

‘Oh – no. I’m sorry. I don’t think that’s going to be possible.’

‘I’m ready, though. I’ve made amends, I’ve said all my apologies.’ She faltered in her step. This was the sort of person who properly belonged here – someone who could evidently barely function without Maitlandfield’s help. It wasn’t right for Angus at all. Yet he had stayed uncomplainingly – happily! – for two months already. Had the possibility of going elsewhere not occurred to him? Or had his resistance drained away once he realized she’d surrendered him, signed him over? Either she’d got things very, very wrong, or this was a joke at her expense and, as she foundered, Angus was watching from his window, doubled up with laughter.

‘Well, that’s good. It’s good that you have. But I don’t have room in my house, I’m afraid. No space for you to stay.’ How much more simply could she put it? ‘I’m sorry. I really am sorry.’

‘That’s all right.’ Dazed-seeming but apparently satisfied, he raised the card to her in salute. ‘See you, then.’

Still, he accompanied her a little longer, keeping in lockstep with her, unspeaking, an amiable companion. Then, as the man in the gatehouse looked up from his newspaper, and as Lynne noticed that the petals of the daffodils here were already edged as if in lace with the first brown of decay, the sound of the boy’s footsteps on the gravel began to diverge from her own. When she glanced over her shoulder, he was heading for the grove of trees where the driveway curved out of view, his head down, their conversation forgotten as he concentrated instead on the long walk back to the house.

I would like to thank Alistair and Vida Stewart, Rebecca Fortey, Tim Jarvis, Paul Murray, Paul Ryding, Sarah Castleton and all at Corsair, Natasha Fairweather, Walter Donohue – and Mark C. O’Flaherty.