The Glasgow Coma Scale (9 page)

Without interrogating what she was doing, she hastened to the kitchen for her own key ring. A digital camera, she reflected, as she searched for the tiny padlock key. You could bring a camera in with you to photograph things as they stood, and that way be sure you’d put everything back properly afterwards. Undetectable. But that would be a tiny bit excessive, would it not?

The cabinet was stuffed full of fabric. A smell she identified as Angus’s, a faint sour gaminess, not unpleasant, came strongly off this bundle, and she realized, as she removed it and it fell apart into a shirt, jeans, that these were the clothes he’d been wearing when she had found him begging. She found nothing in the jeans pockets, no stash rolled up in the disintegratingly soft shirt. Why hadn’t he laundered these clothes? Why had he hidden them?

She pressed them to her face. That smell, redolent of life persisting in lightless places – its
himness
, the same scent discernible through his deodorant and the fresh and staling sweat when he came home at night – made her lift up on her toes, made her feel like she was about to lose hold of herself: not necessarily a bad thing. It frustrated her, though, that she could not turn this inchoate feeling into any fantasy life. She could imagine an embrace – they already hugged each other anyway; sometimes he let her kiss his cheek good night – but when her imagination tried to elaborate on these chaste moments, even just turn his mouth to hers, it felt like trying to recall a dream, the attempt to marshal the details chasing the whole away. Some nights she lay awake for hours, readying herself for something that never happened – fantasizing about having fantasies about him.

Out in the hall the telephone began to ring. Lynne sprang up, face burning. She stuffed Angus’s unwashed clothes back into the cabinet, and it only struck her as she clicked shut the padlock that the clothes themselves must be the secret – that what he had sought to conceal was his fear that he’d have to wear them again.

‘What’s the matter?’ came Raymond’s voice as soon as Lynne picked up.

‘Nothing,’ she stammered. She was so relieved it wasn’t Angus, or someone calling about Angus, she was almost pleased to hear from him. ‘Why?’

‘You usually answer on the second ring. It’s one of your “things” ’ – suggesting by his tone a whole portfolio of tics he’d once found charming but come gradually to despise.

‘No, no, I’m fine.’ She had a bad liar’s voice, bright, high and brittle. ‘I was just finishing up dinner. A lasagne. I was putting it in the oven.’ She fell silent, wary of somehow incriminating herself.

‘I thought . . . Well, I was rather expecting we’d have spoken to one another before now.’

‘I’ve been busy,’ she said, hating the defensive creep in her voice.

‘Evidently. Making lasagnes at nine at night.’

‘You know I like to cook for the week ahead.’ They weren’t strangers, so why did this exchange have the same tenor as their earliest, most faltering conversations? Those first awkward dates at the Russian tea rooms, Sunday afternoons after church. Five years swiftly extirpated, two intimates turned back into strangers. Don’t panic, she told herself: you spend all day at work saying things you’d rather not to people you have nothing in common with; you know how to speed a conversation along. ‘Raymond, why are you calling?’

‘Do I need a reason?’ She could see him passing a hand over his brow in consternation. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ He laughed, contrite, and that made her more nervous. ‘I wanted to see you. That was the reason. That’s a good enough reason, isn’t it? I was hoping you’d be able to come round this weekend. Are you free on Saturday?’

Luckily, she was able to answer honestly that she was not. ‘Siri’s coming for lunch.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Yes.’ Lynne had to fight hard not to apologize. ‘It’s been arranged for weeks. I did email you.’

‘That’s too bad,’ Raymond said, after a pause. ‘Sometime next week, then, Lynnie, is that better? I do need to see you. You left so abruptly last time.’

As if he’d had nothing to do with that! She was about to give an angry retort, but the words jammed in her throat as she heard footsteps on the stairs of the close. An arrhythmic tread, one step emphatic, the next slurred: Angus, favouring his good leg, trudging his way home from class.

Raymond, oblivious: ‘Well, maybe Thursday, then, if . . . Lynnie? Are you still there?’

She was barely listening. ‘Next Thursday, yes. That’s fine.’ Even uncoiled to its fullest length, the telephone cable didn’t stretch far enough for her to look round the door frame into Angus’s room and ensure she’d put everything back as she’d found it. ‘Look, Raymond’ – Angus’s silhouette looming in the glassed front door – ‘I have to go.’

‘There
is
something the matter—’

‘I’ll call you back.’ As the key scraped in the lock, Lynne slammed down the receiver. With no time to go elsewhere, she remained beside the phone, one hand resting awkwardly on the bookcase, for all the world like she’d stood there for hours awaiting Angus’s return.

He came in, yanked the black hat off his head and blinked gummily at her. ‘Creepin’ Jesus, Lynne, whut happened to you? Sumdy run over yir cat?’ The heat of her guilt she assumed Angus would immediately detect what she had done, and when he simply strolled past her, whistling, patting at his hair, she detached herself from the bookcase and followed him into the kitchen.

‘How was class?’ To her, her voice still sounded unnaturally high.

‘Who wis that ye were on the phone wi?’

‘Oh, nobody. You seem awfully sparky all of a sudden. You enjoyed yourself, then?’

‘Funny business,’ he chaffed her, ‘getting a call aff ay nae-body. Nae wonder ye look spooked.’ He put the kettle on, then hung his jacket – another thing she’d bought him – over a chair. Underneath he was wearing the black jumper and blue checked shirt she’d chosen, the jeans still with the crease in them. He didn’t put those other things on during the day when she was out, did he? Didn’t still go begging with a cup? The dirty clothes she had—

‘It was braw, aye. Interesting. The class?’ he clarified, rolling his eyes, mistaking Lynne’s panic for incomprehension. In fact she was trying desperately to remember what she had done with her keys when the phone had rung.

She patted her pockets: nothing. ‘And it was . . . the Kelvingrove you went to?’ Surely she’d set her keys down beside the telephone? She couldn’t see the bookcase from here.

‘ ’Sright, aye. Don’t let me keep you,’ he said snidely, as she inched towards the door.

She halted. ‘No, I’m not going anywhere. But, so, tell me. What did you have to do? What were the other students like?’ If she couldn’t escape the room, perhaps she could waylay him here indefinitely instead. It wasn’t much of a ploy, but nor, as her foray into espionage had shown, was Lynne much of a plotter.

‘Actually, ye know whut, hen? Ah’m bushed.’ He lifted the bag from his tea with his fingertips, tossed it dripping into the sink, and turned to her, opening his mouth in a theatrically vast yawn. ‘Amnae used tae these late nights. Think ah’ll jist head straight to ma bed. Ma . . . fut
on
,’ putting strange emphasis on the second syllable.

Defeated, Lynne took a seat at the table. Angus paused in the doorway and scowled at her. ‘Sure ye’re awright?’

Lynne nodded. ‘Never better.’ When he withdrew, mouth pursed, she groaned quietly and rested her forehead on her arms. Well, so what: either the keys were in his room or they weren’t, which meant it was fifty-fifty whether she’d been discovered. She readied futile excuses. It’s my house. I had every right. Then, when Angus didn’t come charging back through to bawl her out, she raised her head. The living-room door was shut and no sound came from within. Cautiously, Lynne allowed herself to consider the possibility that she had got away with it after all.

They called it the clockwork orange: a tiny subway chasing its tail in a perpetual loop beneath some rum parts of the city. Train carriages scaled down, suited to troglodytes. Time was, Angus would have joined his students on a Friday night for the traditional crawl – sinking a pint at the pub nearest each station, then back underground and onwards to the next stop, fifteen in all. The high point came with his charges’ trepidation on alighting at Cessnock, a place whose name threatened to oversell its charms, comprising as it did one massive flyover and a maze of pebble-dashed back alleys, walls topped with scribbled battlements of barbed wire – defence against what, who knew; what could there be in these sagging houses and junk-filled back yards worth thieving? Angus riffing on this theme as he led the way to their destination, an auld-man pub whose Friday-night air of barely suppressed violence – Friday night, hell, any night – thrilled the youngsters. With Angus there to protect them, they were free to feel dangerous. He knew the regulars. They’d never lay a finger.

None of that today, more’s the pity, the cramped wee train with its distinctive staticky, fusty smell rattling through a mere three stops, Angus emerging into the city-centre fug: stale smoke, vinegar, the ozone of recent rain.

When Lynne’s call had come, he’d made sympathetic noises and promised to search the flat top to bottom for her lost keys – all the while withholding the information that they weren’t lost at all, he could see them right now, exactly where she’d left them beside the books on the red cabinet. Either that or the paint-chipped Snoopy fob, which got him feeling sympathy for the daft mare despite himself, had come to life and walked itself into his room. Snoopy was right – creeping round, checking up on him. Were her daily phone calls home to ensure he hadn’t topped himself or burnt the flat down not enough? He’d called back after a decent interval to say he’d found the keys, and agreed to come and drop them off at her work.

The city centre had a special air of desolation about it this lunchtime. With the bone-white daylight already fading, Angus hurried through dreich streets, spooked by the atmosphere, as well as by the prospect of encountering one of his erstwhile peers: Cobbsy; needy wee Bobby Imison, always on the lookout for the rich older guy who’d help him off the streets; the mental bam girl who sold drugs out the baby carriage she wheeled about the place. On the streets, you quickly learned a whole lot about what had happened to whom, and one constant was that you weren’t given fair go if it got out you’d found accommodation. Just look at these whole office blocks lying empty, but: their blank or broken windows, the
TO LET
signs drooping, efflorescent with scum, from their walls. Here was the solution to your
homeless problem
, as the politicians called it, like an abstract conundrum: the old Odeon on West Regent Street, boarded up and years obsolete, but in decent condition nonetheless. You could accommodate everyone in there no bother, put a roof over the heads of everyone needing it.

He was eyeing the restaurants he passed, too, though the only things that seemed to be prospering were shoddy Italians, all-you-can-eat buffets. He was getting ahead of himself, not least in the small matter of his lack of disposable income, but you had to have plans in mind for all eventualities. Next time he’d disarm China with his old-world charm: flatter her with questions – make her feel she was fascinating – then suggest, as if the thought had just occurred, this Italian place he knew . . . Think positive and you’re halfway to success. He scoffed at himself. Says the guy hasn’t two brass farthings to his name. Who could resist? Leaving the gallery in her company the night before, or walking beside her anyway, he’d asked if she had to dash off, or . . . Stupid way to phrase it: just meant she could agree she did and swan off with a peremptory ‘See you next time.’ Then Dean had emerged, head turning like a surveillance camera, and Angus, in the tutor’s full view, had loped off without a word in the opposite direction.

It wasn’t altogether surprising to discover that Lynne worked in a basement, given the perpetually sun-starved look she had to her. Not even a decent basement, either, not even a renovated one from which the faint reek of its nearby neighbour the sewerage system had been entirely expunged. The only natural light seeped in from scuzzy light wells set high in the walls, tiny panes yielding an ant’s-eye view of pedestrian feet tramping down St Vincent Street. Packs of sweeties lay open on every desk, the employees seeking to comfort-eat their way out of the oppressed feeling the place gave them – the consequent bad skin jaded further by the harsh overhead tube lights. Loaners’, lawyers’, benefits offices: they all had this same despondent sweaty air. He bet people cracked wise here and called the office the orifice. He bet there was a lottery syndicate. Five minutes waiting for Lynne, on a purple sofa set oddly close to the cludgies, and he was contemplating taking his own life.

In the middle of the open-plan office, in plain view of colleagues and underlings, Lynne took back her keys without, somehow, acknowledging how they’d come to be in his possession. Almost admirable, the scale and extent of her denial. Angus was keen to get back to the West End and safety, but Lynne, to his dismay, chose this occasion for one of her daily pep talks.

‘We didn’t have much time, did we, to chat last night’ – colouring on this last phrase as she realized she was making oblique allusion to her wee slip-up. ‘I wanted to make sure it had gone all right, the class?’

‘Oh, aye, uh-huh. It was grand.’ He glanced upward, feeling like the polystyrene ceiling tiles had descended an inch or two since he’d arrived. ‘Useful an aw.’

‘Well, I think it’s great you’re going out there and doing it. Brave, too.’

Oh, this was low, keeping him talking like this. She must’ve been hoping to set her subordinates gesturing to one another behind their cubicle partitions – here, see that, ould Lynne knows people, ould Lynne has friends after all. From what he could tell, though, no one seemed that fussed. Few seemed to be at their desks, even: the slaphead with the mad beard who’d let Angus in was collecting empty cups from the unoccupied desks; a fattish bird was hunched over the photocopier, unaware that her shirt had ridden up at the back and she was showing off her G-string, the sight of the black fabric taut across mottled white back-flab obliging Angus to visualize, unhappily, the gusset sunk deep in her flesh like cheese wire.