The Glasgow Coma Scale (6 page)

‘Ach, stuff whut he thinks. Correct me if ah’m wrang, but he didnae exactly treat ye like a princess, so how come you’re makin allowances for his hurt feelings?’

‘But he’s her father’ – frowning, as though Angus was a half-wit. ‘I’m just the outsider. She might take his side, and I have to prepare myself for that. Only, I’m afraid that when I see her at the weekend, I’ll overcompensate, scare her off by saying how much I’ve done for them both over the years.’

She was breathless, and that was her own fault for draining all the oxygen from the room. It occurred to Angus that she’d throw anything at him, any drama, to try and hold his interest, or solicit from him some reciprocal disclosure. Instead, serenely, he continued to explain her own life to her. ‘Things’re bound tae be weird after a break-up. But it’s a big gap between thirteen and, whit, sixteen, seventeen? Auld enough tae make up her ain mind. Hang in, doll, she’ll come round.’

It was bog-standard psychology of the what’s-fur-ye-willnae-go-by-ye variety, but Lynne seemed to swallow it. Then, rattling like a tin full of wasps, she burst out: ‘Did you – do you have children?’

‘Me! Christ, no. At least ah hope not. Jesus, ah’ve
been
a kid – ah cannae imagine anyhin worse than huvin one ay ma ain. Ye hud the best ay it, bein sortay step-godmother. Bit like me wi ma students, the ultimate father figure.’ He had meant it as a joke, but Lynne sprang up from the table without a word. ‘Whit ye daein? Ye awright?’

‘Going to my room. If that’s okay.’

‘Why wouldn’t it be?’ And off she flounced, leaving Angus bemused. He’d thought it might break the ice, a light allusion to what had failed to occur between them all those years ago. Why was she carrying this torch? He wanted to call after her: ‘Ah didnae winch that girl Elena either, if that’s whit’s upsettin ye. Could’ve, but didnae. That make ye feel better?’

Lynne drew the curtains and knelt by the bed. One thing she could not allow herself to do was believe that Angus’s reappearance in her life was part of some divine plan. Profane thinking. What would he constitute, anyway, the test or the reward? It was hopeless: love had come up around her again, a nimbus, and Angus insisted on speaking to her lightly, ironically, with no sense of any emotion invested in her, as someone who meant nothing to him, someone he barely knew. Okay, that was true, but did he have to make it so obvious?

She was nothing to him: when he talked to her, he was talking to himself. He was smug and implacable: he knew full well what she was desperate to hear, and wouldn’t say it. This situation, or so she repeated to herself, hoping she might start to believe it, would not, could not, work out the way she had hoped, because what she was hoping for was a paradox. For anything to happen between them, both she and Angus would have had to be quite different people. Logically, it followed. So why couldn’t she listen to herself?

She was asking guidance on this and other matters when Angus himself came crashing into her room. ‘Lynne, doll—’ She rose in haste. ‘Oh. Sorry.’ His face blazed: what did he imagine she’d been doing? No, she could tell by his look of impish delight exactly what he thought she’d been up to, crouched half out of sight behind the bed there.

Shame – and she hadn’t even been doing anything! – made her speak harshly. ‘Yes? What is it?’

‘Whut ye up tae, hen?’

‘I’m . . . tidying. Tidying stuff up.’

‘No ye’re no. Are you prayin? Is that what ye’re daein? Disnae bother me.’

Lynne, realizing that her hands were still clasped demurely before her, separated them, then didn’t know what to do with them so put them on her hips, hardly less silly. ‘Was there something you wanted?’

Grinning, he lounged in the doorway. ‘Oh, nothin, nothin. Ah was jist gonnae go doon the shop, get milk for ma tea. Wondered if ye wanted anyhin was all.’

‘No, that’s all right, you go ahead.’

Still he didn’t move. ‘Ye dae this often?’

‘Once in a while I find it useful, yes. It’s not . . . I’m sorry, but it really isn’t any of your business.’ His tone wasn’t mocking, exactly, but curious, which she thought worse. Abruptly, wonderfully, he infuriated her. ‘God, Angus, can’t you just go for a nice walk or something?’

The smile vanished. ‘You’re the boss.’

‘Get some fresh air,’ she added, trying to moderate her tone. ‘It’ll do you good.’

‘Aye. Fine. See ye after.’

She knew she’d been condescending, and she knew she’d offended him. Good. But come eight o’clock the next evening, Angus rubbed his hands and announced that he was off out for
a nice walk
– parroting her words, though his tone was neutral – and the next, again at eight. Evidently he believed he was making a point. The third time it happened, after he’d let himself out quietly with a sad wave goodbye, she ran to the living room’s bay window and watched his rangy figure limp off along Glen-dower Street beneath the patchy street light. She felt a clutch of guilt, cold blue beneath her tailbone, at joining those people who’d banished him – given up on him.

Certain streets, Angus knew, he’d have to dingy. He could go no further down Byres Road, for instance, than the Ashton Lane turn-off, because his old regular, McCalls, was on the next corner. Nor could he dodge left on to Ashton Lane itself, since that was just pub after pub: student hang-outs serving from midday until two in the morning, an all-day challenge he had met numerous times in the past.

Great Western Road was a safer choice, though even then he had to stick to the terraced crescents on the north side, because over the road were its Belle, its Coopers, its Captain’s Rest. There was Walker Fontaine’s, from which he’d been barred for surreptitiously draining the dregs from other people’s abandoned glasses after kicking-out time one night. He was bounded on all sides, he realized as he explored, by establishments that might appear innocuous to the uninitiated, but were in reality packed with compressed memories ready to expand at frightening speed, like those dried flowers that bloomed when steeped in water or some other liquid. Worse, these were not at all unpleasant memories – the opposite, in fact, altogether too tantalizing. A worry: alcoholism might be inscribed in his genes, a hand-me-down. Just because he’d never gone too far didn’t mean it couldn’t still happen.

Treating the West End like a maze, each familiar pub a dead end, he walked the quiet moonlit streets night after night. Kicked out that first time, he’d stayed cross with sanctimonious Lynne until it occurred to him that it wasn’t the worst idea for him to be out that flat a bit more. That sad house of memory, whose every tiny gewgaw came accompanied with a backstory she felt compelled to relate to him – what did he care who’d given her it and when, how could that possibly matter – these wee ditties cladding Angus like paste-sodden paper, trapping him just as they had Lynne.

Though the town centre had been gutted by recession, these nightly expeditions yielded evidence that the West End was undergoing a counterbalancing, equally unchecked process of gentrification. Money had spread outwards from the city centre over the decades, and middle-class wealth now surrounded the fallen centre in a palisade. Even the most affluent graduates could no longer afford to move to the South Side as previous generations had; instead, they stayed close to the university, and their demands were changing this area instead. Everywhere shops were selling organic this, hand-foraged that. The sign in the old ice-cream parlour opposite Hillhead Underground now advertised gelato and semifreddos; the fishmonger used bunches of samphire, rather than the old fake-plastic grass, to partition trays marked
RED MULLET
and
TUNA
(
SASHIMI GRADE
). Could you pick up a good old-fashioned fish tea on Byres Road these days? Like fun you could.

Wednesday night he took a right off Byres Road after the big supermarket – newly done out in a style they were calling Mediterranean, meaning, as far as Angus could tell, that they’d laid down lumpy terracotta tiles your conspicuously non-upgraded trolley could no more navigate than it could the Gobi bloody Desert – and up into Dowanhill, where he noticed a sweet smell, like almonds. He laughed to himself; even the air round here was posher. He wandered the rabbit-warren back streets behind student halls and student houses, a bit lost, but in a way that felt safe, and emerged eventually on Great Western Road, where a private school’s playing fields faced rather cruelly on to a private hospital, so any players puffed out could stand by the subs’ bench, bent at the waist, hands braced on their knees, and gaze over the road at their inescapable destiny. Back along towards Queen Margaret Drive, past the black trees and ghostly domes of the Botanics. He strode with purpose, hoping the exercise was helping his duff leg. Forty minutes’ brisk walk and a good few smokes, in the mist, in the silence, alone; that was what he needed, heartening solitude.

He stopped to inspect the noticeboard outside the deconsecrated church on the corner of Byres Road – now an arts centre rather than, as per every other conversion in the city, jerry-built luxury apartments. Here were signs for theatre productions and meditation courses; appeals for missing pets. A solitary
VOTE YES
sticker: aye, good luck with that. Then, on one A4 sheet he read:
DRAWING CLASSES AT GLASGOW MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES. THURSDAYS, 6–9 P.M. NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY
. It tickled him to think there might be people to whom this description literally applied: hairless nude six-foot foetuses who’d never learned to so much as focus their eyes. Still, he didn’t walk on. He missed working, that was the truth of it; moreover, flicking through his old catalogue the other day had given him a pang of quitter’s remorse – the feeling that, because he’d given it up, drawing was the only thing he’d ever truly loved. He lit a cigarette and reread the ad, and scoffed, and did not outright dismiss the idea. After all, he couldn’t picture himself working in Lynne’s flat, great light though there was through the big kitchen window – not because of the demolition across the way, which seemed to be on hiatus, but because the place was saturated with sorry self-deceptions that would creep inevitably, inexorably into any work he attempted there, tainting it.

On his return to Glendower Street, he made the mistake of mentioning the classes to Lynne, who, predictably, lit up like a Belisha beacon. ‘Oh, but Angus, that’s a terrific idea. When do you start?’

‘Ah only said—’

‘It’d be so good for you. Exactly the thing you need to get yourself, well, you know, back into the swing of things.’ He eyed her in astonishment: the
what
? ‘It might even be good for you,’ she suggested, oblivious, ‘to be a pupil again, to remind yourself what it is to be a teacher.’

‘Hold up a minute there, Advice Shop – ah nivver said ah wis definitely gaun.’ He wondered, given the way she’d wired straight into the psychobabble, what qualified her to know what was or wasn’t good for him. ‘All it’s gonnae be’s ould wifies widowed twenty year, bored ay the bridge club, the community tea mornins. “How’s about we gie these wee classes a go, Senga?” These places are a, a vortex ay talentlessness, Lynne, and whut’s more,’ he warmed, ‘it’s infectious. Ye might turn up knowing how to draw fuckin . . . stick figures, but ah guarantee by the end of the night they’ll have managed tae bore even that skill out of ye.’

She held up her hands. ‘All right, all right! Sorry I spoke.’

‘Ah’m no gonnae humiliate masel,’ he insisted, ‘in front ay some Cambuslang graduate hauf ma age who wants tae teach me the proper way tae hold a pencil. Ah’ve mair dignity than that, believe it or not.’

‘Angus. It’s fine. You don’t want to do the classes. Now, can I go to bed?’

‘Yes,’ he shouted. ‘Fine. Night.’

He’d barely raised his voice, yet Lynne had a face like fizz as she ran a glass of water and swallowed her nightly valerian tablet. It wasn’t fair, her simply shutting down discussion like that, just because she didn’t relish confrontation. In Angus’s opinion, a frank airing of views would do them nothing but good.

Perhaps that was why, come morning, he found his indignation had turned to firm resolve. ‘Ah’m gonnae try they classes,’ he informed Lynne as she was heading out the door. It was as much apology as she was getting.

‘Sorry if I snapped,’ she muttered back, collecting her raincoat and her brolly. He had to admire how she gave no hint how much his decision must have pleased her. Hell’s teeth, he was thinking, you had to keep an eye on Lynne. Underneath it all, she was a sly wee operator.

In recent times he’d been more familiar with Kelvingrove Park itself than with the art gallery at its centre. On Thursday night, after ten days under Lynne’s roof, he entered the park with his stare fixed dead ahead, feart – he’d freely admit it – that lurking in the gardens’ shelters and dead ends and traps were creatures who knew him, watching him approach, readying themselves to pounce. But the reason he’d originally selected this particular park to sleep in was precisely because of the gallery, a place he knew of old as a sanctuary.

In Angus’s day the gallery’s turrets and crenellations had been black with the decades’ shipbuilding smog rolling up off the Clyde. Recently, though, money had been found from who knew where to do the old place up. There was scaffolding over the main entranceway; to its right the untouched wall was still discoloured, but to its left the sandstone had been restored to its former fierce ruddled fox-red. The effect was startling, and the intention behind it not necessarily dishonourable, but Angus, whose da had been laid off from the docks in the 1980s, could not help but feel this was the last stage in a revisionist Thatcher-era project to efface any sign that there had ever been such a thing as industry on the river.

Oh, but there were ramifications time didn’t erase: there were those men, Angus’s da among them, beached redundant, skilled for nothing but the ships, and needing something, anything to fill the hole.

As a child, he’d been brought here after mornings spent across the way at the Yorkhill – the sick kids’ hospital, still standing, its salmon-pink mirrored windows reflecting the sour Glasgow light. Inside, you’d sit silent on the brown pleather sofas, awed by the waiting room’s centrepiece: a nicotine-coloured rocking horse you were first too small to go on, then, seemingly without an interval, too big – or all along too afraid. It had wild rolling enamelled eyes and bared ivory teeth, and there were sooty dowel holes on its glazed neck where an overenthusiastic rider had wrenched out plugs of its black nylon mane. This maiming horrified you, and you half wanted to show your da, your then-immaculate da, what you’d noticed. Yet there was something unspeakable about the holes – they were rude, somehow. Sooner or later you’d be called by nurses you recognized from last time but who didn’t recognize you, and who got your name wrong the same way each time – ‘Rennie? Rennie Angus?’ – making you wonder, even that young, what the hell sort of name that was, your earliest notion of identity and disguise provoked, you believe, by their recurrent error: your vague sense that the person being summoned both was and was not yourself, and there was a minuscule gap in there that you might one day squeeze into, exploit. It also gifted you a treasured memory, the old man pissing himself laughing: months after it first happened, he still, to your bafflement, sang ‘Walk Away Renée’ any time you exited a room, for which recollection you remain grateful.