The Glasgow Coma Scale (3 page)

Just as any expert will dream, in addition to the common near-nightmare of the undiallable telephone number or the elevator that cannot be compelled to stop at the desired floor, about the wild failings of his particular specialism, so Angus dreamed about a paint palette grown undisciplined – the colours mud-dying into one another, the inexplicable vanishment of a burnt sienna he needed to complete some unrevealed canvas – and woke feeling excoriated, the memory of turpentine stink in his nostrils, in a room he did not recognize.

The telephone had woken him, and it continued to ring as, woozy with sleep, he passed it on his way to the bathroom. It did not strike him as worth his while to answer it: hardly likely to be for him, was it? Nor did he pause to read the extremely comprehensive note Lynne had left for him, beneath a Fort Knox-scale wodge of house keys, on the kitchen table.

He peed standing, but washed his hands at least, drying them on one of what seemed to him an excessive number of pastel hand towels. Leave a woman to do up a place and this was the inevitable result: decorative pillows, ornamental throws, so many cushions piled on the folding futon it was near-impossible – certainly not comfortable – to sit on the thing. Soft furnishings gone rampant, pastels, Regency stripes, valances and frills. The lounge walls were shell pink, a wee girl’s favourite colour. He prowled the flat in search of the beloved childhood teddy bear, tatterdemalion, frayed with caring, and was not disappointed.

From the lounge’s bay window he surveyed Glendower Street, one of a network of well-to-do red sandstone tenement rows packed in dense involutions off the West End’s main roads. Across the street, a building site: diggers pulling down remnants under arc lights left burning all through the brief blue October days. It looked like a school they were demolishing, a sixties Scots Brutalist concrete block of the sort in which Angus had been educated, if you could call it that. Nonetheless, he felt sad seeing another eyesore taken down. They had character; more, anyway, than what was shown on the hoardings advertising the new build replacing the school: some artist’s rendition of vertiginous glass-fronted towers, happy people ambling the connective walkways under a blue and sunless sky, not a scrap of green space. Luxury apartments, naturally –
ONLY TEN REMAINING
– at obscene prices. He scoffed. Pruitt–Igoe in Maryhill.

The consequence of all this redevelopment was that well-meaning mid-earners – such as Lynne, he presumed – who’d bought and done up these century-old tenement flats as fancily as their tastes permitted, would find themselves beached at high economic tide. Buyers were ignoring the well-constructed houses across the way, suckered in by duplex penthouses and window walls providing views over – what – the ranks of ex-council low-rises down Partick way; the big crane motionless on Finnieston Quay, workless relic of a bygone age of actual industry. Places like Lynne’s were left depreciating, unsaleable. As far as Angus was concerned, the only upside was that the rubble of pulverized buildings got recycled, turned into brand-new pedestrian streets, the pavements you walked or slept out on.

On the kitchen pinboard, among plumbers’ cards and a strikingly unflattering photo showing Lynne in full hill-walking ensemble, all sou’wester and crampons, he found a letter from her work: Arundel Property Management. He clucked beneath his breath. So she was the person you called when the lights in the close had gone out and the lock on the close door was busted so any bawbag could come in off the streets and ransack the joint – who you called and called until the company swung into action, weeks later, sending round a crony to botch the repair, followed almost instantly by a vastly inflated bill, and if you didn’t pay timeously you’d better believe the next you heard from them would be a letter from the sheriff officers threatening to take you to court. Sometimes – sometimes – Angus felt he was better off out of it.

He was not surprised, having already surmised it from her home, that the letter should confirm that Lynne was not a career artist. The percentage of graduates who made it – who allowed themselves to feel, wonderingly, that they had made it – was vanishingly small. Arts administrators the remainder became, like as not, or went to work for charities – public sector, anyway, which was fine by Angus, who believed that part of an art school’s remits was to actuate the lefty tendencies incipient in all who enrolled there.

A career in debt-collecting, though, he took as a personal slight. He parted the photos and Highlands-and-Islands postcards that covered the letter and read,
In line with your promotion, from September 2011 the company will increase your salary to
. . . ‘Christ on a bike,’ he said aloud, impressed. ‘Go Lynne.’ Seeing this, he no longer felt he was taking advantage. Although on a budget like that, she might’ve kitted out her flat with a bit more dash.

The books on Lynne’s shelves were best sellers, the CDs greatest hits and soft-core classical: Vivaldi, Handel, Bach,
Dusty in Memphis, The Timeless Helen Prine
. And musicals. Some people were beyond help. On the bookshelf he saw and seized up something called
How to Manage
, but found to his disappointment that it was about business.

Further investigation revealed that Lynne was among the few people to own the sole exhibition catalogue ever to have been dedicated to Angus’s work,
A Drawer of Knives: Paintings by Angus Rennie, 1991–2005
. He opened it at the end and flicked backwards through the plate section, marvelling that there had once been, for a while anyway, prodigious output.

He encountered first his later paintings, vivid, animated affairs full of colourful lesions, trackmarked arms, arthritically buckled hands grappling empty air. Here was
The Joke
, one he remembered reviewers knocking themselves out over. ‘Rennie drags us down into the pit,’ his favourite had gone. ‘The dead or dying figure lolling on its bier looks back at us – we seem to have dropped to a crouch to stare upwards through the pallbearers’ legs, an improbably contorted viewpoint – and its face isn’t quite human. This is no Chapman Brothers–Goya détournement, but a creature disfigured, like all Rennie’s subjects, by sinister illness. Its caried teeth are bared in a leer, making us complicit in the deception: “They all think I’m dead.” And you laugh too, with and at this grotesque, because you get the other, titular joke, the one the monster hasn’t understood – because you know that what the pallbearers are going to do next is bury this poor sod alive. At last Rennie has found his place. He’s Glasgow’s own Caravaggio.’ God, how they’d loved that, the drinkers down at McCalls, as though Angus was answerable for the reviewer’s hyperbole. ‘He is’ – because they never could resist the pun, could they, reviewers, resist telling you about their own cleverness as well – ‘the Weegie Weegee.’

Strange to see some of these images for what seemed like the first time. Once, he’d been so averse to viewing his own completed paintings that he’d stacked them facing the studio wall, almost afraid he’d catch a stray glimpse – a superstition he had neither fully understood nor tried to. Dust had settled on the canvases’ upwards edges. This reluctance to look at his work did not mean he hadn’t also resisted selling or exhibiting it; but a man had to eat. Evidently a change had come over him, unnoticed: in those days, he’d have sooner chewed off his own hands than voluntarily inspect those finished paintings.

Colour drained from the paintings as he travelled backwards through the plates, back to when he’d worked in straightforward portraiture – derivative stuff, made before he’d started to feel realism restrictive and stultifying. His old drinking companion Rab had posed on Ashton Lane for
First Pint, Friday Evening
. The page before that was
Girl in a Striped Shirt
: Angus couldn’t mind that lassie’s name now, though he did recall trying, and failing, to get her to pose without said shirt. Its stripes had been red, he remembered that much, but he’d rendered them in sepia, and his earliest works shared this earthy, grimy colour scheme: browns, greys, blues, storm tones, rutted soil, granite and shit.

When questioned about his restricted palette and the unwell-looking characters he portrayed, Angus referred to these early works as exorcisms. A set-up, plain and simple: ‘Exorcisms of what?’ his interlocutors would inevitably ask, enabling him to reply, grinning, boasting really, ‘All the bad stuff yet to befall me.’ Not believing, of course, that it could ever prove more than a glib soundbite.

Each reproduction was a time capsule containing, invisible to all other viewers, his own imago, forever frozen at the age he’d been when he made that painting – the earliest dating to when he was twenty-three, almost unthinkably young. As with any picture album disinterred years after the fact, he had forgotten some of the names and much of the context, yet open this book at random and he could recall, with a clarity that eluded him in many other matters, not just whereabouts he’d made the painting in question – in most cases at his Garnethill studio – but also something about the process, his mental state at the time; even, in one or two cases, what he’d been wearing as he painted.

He remembered working day and night, feverish, not pausing to wash or sleep or change his minky clothing for fear he’d lose whatever fire-thread he was pursuing, and he felt an intellectual interest in the fact he’d once been able to work so fervidly, but the pictures as he revisited them possessed no greater emotional charge than a stranger’s might. He didn’t mind them, exactly – was not disgusted by the failings he saw in them – but there was nothing left dangling, nothing he could take up now for a new work. Part of him, though he didn’t like to call it
inspiration
, a word with unpleasant New Age overtones, had been quietly cauterized. Every artist – so Angus told his students and his interviewers alike – paints himself by painting others, makes himself as he makes his works. So who are you when you stop?

Not the telephone’s repeated ringing so much as his reluctance to answer it brought to mind other ways in which he’d rather not be contacted. He upended his blue kitbag on the futon and guddled through the sad jumble of his earthly belongings for his mobile phone: a cheap model intended for scadges, schoolkids and the like, not that the manufacturers tended to emphasize this. Pay as you go, made to last six months at a time on a tenner top-up.

He deleted a text he’d received the day before from Cobbsy, a not-quite-pal from the streets. It was a tip-off, and it contained four vital pieces of information: ‘F35, green, W Sauc, 5’ – meaning that Cobbsy had sent it out after receiving five pounds off a woman in her mid thirties, dressed primarily in green, last seen heading west along Sauchiehall Street: be vigilant, you derelicts. A fiver was remarkable – unheard of. A few minutes later, right enough, Lynne’s green windcheater had swum into his peripheral vision and Angus, as was his wont, didn’t acknowledge the do-gooder, only geared himself up to mutter something abusive if she gave him nothing. Then she’d said his name: he’d looked up in proper surprise – confusion – and over her shoulder had seen Cobbsy himself, his texting system made redundant as he jumped up and down in the entrance to the Savoy Centre, pointing and giving Angus the big thumbs-up.

The letter box clattered, startling him. Naturally enough, he went to fetch the post in, first inspecting it – he laughed at himself – for further clues. Two items for Lynne, bills most likely, and a letter addressed to a certain Miss S. McKenzie at this address – given, he was amused to note, as North Kelvinside, though the area was most definitely markedly less glam Maryhill. He imagined Lynne dissembling as she gave out her address, and liked her more for it.

This letter for Miss S. was the first hint that Lynne might not be the only resident here. He resurveyed the flat and was bamboozled. Two folk sharing a place this size, at any given moment you’d have one person’s clean clothes drying on the pulley over the bathtub, for instance. It was a one-bedroom place, and evidently nobody normally slept in the room where Lynne had installed him. This left the possibility that she’d turned lesbian, but despite all the fleeces and leggings in her wardrobe, Angus wasn’t convinced.

It didn’t take much more searching to find, on the bedroom window ledge, the wood-framed photo of a blonde teenager, sharp-featured, sixteen or seventeen by Angus’s estimate: old enough to have left home, but young enough still to receive bank statements with a cartoon character franked on the envelope. Not a daughter, for sure. Lynne Meacher, teenage mother? No way. He examined the girl’s picture for some time without discerning any resemblance to Lynne.

He was propping the letters up beside the telephone when it began once more to ring. Angus again made no effort to answer it, counting off the rings. On the wall over the bookcase with the phone on it hung a watercolour in sage greens, foggy blues, regularly sized lozenges of colour that had bled faintly into one another – semi-abstract, though the colours suggested a deciduous forestscape somewhere ascetic and Mitteleuropean. He squinted at the lower right corner:
LM
pencilled in. He recalled her work now, all a little faltering and delicate. He was amused by the slight conceitedness of her hanging something of her own, though this was no less deserving of wall space than the picture-postcard stuff and stock photos in cheap frames he’d seen in other rooms.

At the eighth ring, an antiquated answer machine clunked into life. ‘You’ve reached Lynne’s number,’ he heard the recording say, harried-sounding. ‘Leave me a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’ Another thing this lovingly curated flat was not: a place whose owner’s hectic social schedule meant she was seldom home. He listened on, amused, and after the bleep Lynne’s less assertive live voice came through. ‘Oh, hi, Angus, it’s me – just phoning to make sure everything’s okay, you’re finding everything all right . . .’

Angus stood in the hallway listening to her blether to nobody. Next time. He’d answer the next time she called – he gave it half an hour. You had to save some things to treat yourself. And he didn’t want her to worry – did not, above all, want her to come home and fuss over him.