The Glasgow Coma Scale (8 page)

‘Uh-huh?’ China replied, on a rising note, as though intrigued by this information. She threw aside the pencil she’d been using, took up another, and started shading, just as Dean had taught them.

‘Aye.’ He cleared his throat and then sat beside her on the polished floor, which was a more complicated and painful process than he had anticipated, involving dropping into a crouch then arranging his sore legs like a puppet’s beneath him. ‘That there’s bones, and muscles and tendons, and . . . other stuff. Ye know, the same workings that’re inside us aw.’ His bad knee, folded back on itself like a flick-knife, chose this moment to click into place, emitting a crack that seemed to echo in the hush. Embarrassed, he fell silent, opened up his pad and began to sketch – without the aid of any geometric shapes, mark you – the same Arctic fox, from a different angle. After observing without overt interest what he was doing, China returned to her own work. Frowning, she drew the line of the fox’s back, glancing up at the vitrine every few seconds, wary, birdlike, in case the creature might have moved in the meantime – taken a hesitant step forward, ruined her composition.

In a sense, by watching China work, he was obeying Dean’s first principle: observe. She was using soft pencils, 2B, 3B, and she was leaning rather heavily on them, with the result that the picture emerging was too dark to capture the scrappy fox’s spoiled-milk pelt. Rather than mention this, Angus said:

‘Interesting, but, comin here, seein aw the different stuff folk’re daein.’ Ah,
interesting
, the weasel word that could mean anything you wanted it to. ‘Ma first class, ye see, although ye probably knew that. Ah wis reassured tae see sumdy more in ma ain age bracket.’ This was deliberate provocation – China couldn’t fail to be outraged by the insinuation that she was anything near as ancient as him – yet she didn’t respond to this either. Tough audience. ‘Ah’m glad it’s no jist auld biddies here shelterin from the cauld.’

Beside him, China was using a pocket Stanley knife to whittle her pencils sharp, holding up each in turn to inspect its squared-off nib. Under her hand, the scene that was forming was livelier than the stilted set-up in the vitrine. She’d lent the static beasts some dynamism. Painted up, her drawing could’ve been used on a jigsaw puzzle or a calendar for a child’s bedroom wall; that was the standard he was seeing.

With his own fox nearly completed – though he had misjudged the starting point, so the animal seemed to cower at the foot of the page – Angus had a go at adding a fulmar, which hung by nylon threads from the vitrine’s gridded ceiling. He wanted to show it swooping low and majestic over the animals’ gathering, but instead he inadvertently made the bird look like it was plummeting, petrified, from the air. Flummoxed, he turned the page and debated whether he was better starting over or giving up. Some days you just didn’t have it. It was his first time drawing in God knew how long, yet that made him even less inclined than usual to go easy on himself. He tried again, and this time got a couple of the seabirds down reasonably well. What must China think of him, seeing these half-arsed efforts? He found himself wishing he could show her the paintings he’d done in his old life.
The Losers
– he didn’t even know who owned that any more. He’d held off selling it as long as he could, then let it go hastily, reluctantly, for an insulting sum, to keep body and soul together that bit longer. Whose wall did it hang on now? Whose attic was it shoved in, waiting to appreciate in value? It was not about who owned it, he corrected himself; it’d always be Angus’s, no matter if he never saw it again.

He felt the long point of dejection pressing into his throat, and had to switch his attention back to China swiftly. ‘How long’ve ye been comin to these classes?’

‘Oh . . . a few weeks now, I guess. Yeah, a month or two maybe.’

She didn’t give you much to work with, this one, and he said in desperation, ‘Grand place tae come and work, eh?’ This time she didn’t even open her mouth to reply, but gave a noncommittal hum. Peculiar to think that China, though not exactly loquacious, and Dean, whom he found ridiculous, were the only folk besides Lynne he’d spoken to in a fortnight. And how quickly he had come to take Lynne’s company, her hospitality, for granted! Sure it was a privilege to use a bathroom you didn’t have to share with a dozen other soap-dodgers, yet somehow that made it especially bowfing to find one of Lynne’s unconscionably long, wiry, kinky hairs in the sink some mornings. And as much as he tried to remain grateful to her for never pressuring him to go on the broo, or find a wee temp job seeing as he was not actually disabled, even this had started to rankle. Did she not believe he
could
hold down a job? This thinking was no good, he understood, this was not grateful or noble or whatever he’d have liked to be. He couldn’t help himself.

‘Well
there
you are,’ came Dean’s voice, preceding the man himself, who arrived via a marine gallery adjacent, aqueous light bouncing off his peanut head. ‘We were starting to think you two had run out on us.’ He seemed to be under the impression that referring to himself in the plural might bolster his skimpy authority. ‘We’re finishing up now, unless you fancy spending the night here?’

‘Widnae be the worst place ah’d steiyed in ma time,’ Angus said, sniffing. Dean laughed like it was a joke. ‘Albie Day,’ he went on, taking the opportunity to showboat to China, though she wasn’t, ostensibly, paying him any heed. ‘Ye heard ay him? Used tae sneak intae places like this just before closin time and hide, so he’d get locked in after hours. He’d wait there the night then reveal himself next mornin to whoever opened up. Ta-dah! Performance art, he called it – ah’m no so sure masel.’

‘Day,’ mused Dean. Angus noticed that the tutor had positioned himself closer to him than to China, body-blocking him. ‘No, never heard of him, I’m afraid.’

‘No, well, that’s no more than the guy deserves. Horrible artist. A horrible human being full stop, come tae that.’ Dean blinked in surprise, but that was how you separated the wheat from the chaff: no artist worth his salt hesitated to slag off his peers and precursors. You had to think about the alternative: lavish praise on someone as uncontroversial as Picasso, say, and you were what, a follower, a slave. Artist, let not the word
influence
slip from your lips. As for more obscure figures, why give them the free publicity?

China, ignored, was packing away her equipment. Angus sensed disaster a moment before it occurred: she fumbled her tin and pencils spilled across the marble floor, delicate leads shattering. He and Dean both dived to be first to help, China scrabbling up the pencils but the sketchbook slithering out then from under her arm. Trying to catch it, she seemed to lose her balance, staggered like a drunk, and Angus suffered a momentary hallucination: China toppling headlong into the display case, shattering it, letting air into the vacuum inside – struggling to her feet while the threadbare specimens in the scene, unbound from their long paralysis, stared around in astonishment . . .

Jesus! He fought Dean off, scooped up the sketchbook and returned it to China, and she regarded him with eyes as blank as those of the creatures in the vitrine.

‘Well,’ Dean nearly shouted, his friendliness seemingly exhausted, ‘I’ve just got to make sure nobody’s done an Albie Day, and then we’re finished. Maybe after that—’

Angus, who could see where this was going – we three are the real talent here, why don’t we find somewhere to hang out together – talked over him at China. ‘Want me tae walk ye out, doll?’ She didn’t reply in words but favoured him with what you could almost, at a stretch, describe as a smile. You could project almost anything on someone so silent: already old Angus was making plans for her to find him charming – shifting things around in his head, wishing he had more than just pennies in his pocket so he could suggest they stop for a drink on the way home. Maybe not a
drink
drink at this stage – though now that the thought was planted . . .

Leaving disconsolate Dean behind in the fake Arctic, they passed into the fake Atlantic from which the tutor had come. The room was lined with tanks of lifeless fish, static-swimming in one direction around the walls. At the centre stood a peculiar diorama: several small tropical sorts arranged in an otherwise vacant aquarium tank maybe fifteen foot across and eight high. China strode right past, but Angus, curious, stopped to read the signage. A curator’s note explained that this display illustrated symbiosis, the mutually beneficial arrangement in which these butterfly fish cleaved close to a hammerhead shark to feed on the parasites that troubled it, nuzzling its cartilaginous hide, liberated in their proximity to the super-predator from their normal position in the food chain. Well, that was how you survived, turning your disadvantages around until they started to look less like problems and more like things you could exploit.

But the shark was absent from the display – removed, according to a supplementary note, for maintenance. Angus barked when he read that: wasn’t that just like a god? So now these fish hung baffled in blue formaldehyde, kissing up to empty space, experiencing, he imagined, the very mildest existential crisis, their scant few seconds of memory never permitting them to fathom what it was that had disappeared so abruptly from their lives.

She liked to stand alone in the living room – his room. Open the door, pause, then just a few steps inside, so she was still more or less on the threshold – hardly
in
his room at all. It had become a habit since he’d started going on his nightly walks. Where was the harm? The harm was in telling herself it was a harmless thing to do.

From loitering it wasn’t a huge leap, knowing he’d be out at his class all Thursday evening, to searching. She pretended not to know it was wrong, narrating to herself a justificatory monologue: just seeing what he’s done to the place, making sure he’s settled in okay. She did not succeed, by these means, in hushing the other internal voice, which chided her with the real reason for this snooping. She’d revealed so much to Angus these last ten nights – confessions he absorbed as a black hole absorbs light, disinterested, pitiless – and had obtained almost nothing in return. What more did she know about him now than she had five years ago? Horror stories about sleeping rough, a cast of grotesques. She felt he offered these scraps only to obfuscate. Who was he to let her run her mouth off and give nothing back? With Angus volunteering no meaningful revelations, she had, at some point she couldn’t identify, concluded that it was her right to seek them out herself.

And if she was caught? She free-associated her rationales. For one, she might claim she wanted to check he wasn’t concealing anything illegal. Homeless people were often substance abusers – half the reports she’d scanned blamed drugs for the individual’s homelessness; the other half claimed that homelessness led to drug use – so you couldn’t condemn her. But what if she found something, as she almost wanted to, some leverage? Would she even know drug paraphernalia if she saw it? In her heart she didn’t believe he’d be capable of hiding an addiction from her, any more than she’d be capable of throwing him out – which, she imagined, he would immediately challenge her to do. How, anyway, was she to claim, if she did find syringes beneath the mattress, for instance, that she’d just happened upon them?

It brought her up short when she opened the chest of drawers and saw the two checked shirts, the dun chinos, the five days’ change of underwear neatly folded. He’d barely worn half the clothes she’d chosen for him. Long having viewed with suspicion those who treated shopping as a leisure activity, Lynne had nevertheless relished picking out these clothes, carefully choosing colours, shirts whose labels promised they’d never need to be ironed, smiling as she identified foibles she’d imagined for him – disinclination to iron his clothes, a general aversion to any housework – which were in truth characteristics of Raymond’s she had imputed to Angus with no idea whether they were true.

Every other lunchtime, she struggled back to the office with fresh carrier bags from Buchanan Street. Safety razors and aftershave balm, a toothbrush and dental floss, unscented deodorant, nail clippers, coal-tar soap, anti-dandruff shampoo. He liked tea; she bought him four different varieties. She left her parcels in a prominent position beside her desk, waiting for her colleagues to remark them – willing even to be mocked for them, the important thing being to make it known that she was able to have secrets, another life that people would realize, even as they jibed at her, they knew nothing about. But her colleagues, if they even noticed, didn’t say a word.

She ran her hand over the shirts, feeling sadness: why? It was herself – the lonely woman shopping on her lodger’s behalf – she felt heart-sorry for. Angus had his walks, his classes, was growing back into himself despite all his difficulties, while she was doing . . . what exactly? Mooning. Mourning.

And intruding. Here was a better excuse: she was tidying up, ready for Siri’s visit at the weekend. This was still her living room, after all. But to her surprise, Angus, who piled used plates and glasses in the kitchen sink as if having ideological objections to carrying the washing-up process any further, had kept his room almost preternaturally tidy. He’d not just made the bed, but folded the futon away and replaced the plumped cushions so that it looked unused. It struck her that if for some reason he did not come back tonight, she’d be unable to convince anybody he’d ever been there.

The only evidence was the books he’d stacked on the little cabinet by the sofa, a sort of bedside table. She picked these up one by one – two of the pop-science books Siri persisted in giving her for birthdays and Christmases, and, to her amusement, Angus’s own catalogue – then panicked that she’d betray her presence by failing to replace them in the correct order.

The little cabinet, brick-red ersatz chinoiserie from the furniture shop on Kelvin Bridge, was locked. A cheap padlock had been fastened to its dulled brass latch – the cheap padlock, Lynne realized as she rattled the door, she had bought to secure her seldom-used suitcase. She must have inadvertently included it with the keys she’d given Angus. She wondered what treasures he could want to lock away.