Weekend (18 page)

‘Come on, you,’ Mickey said, taking Donnie’s arm.

‘You a mate of his?’ one of the three locals said.

‘Aye.’

‘Where’s
your
estate?’ another said.

The three of them laughed very loudly.

‘Right, Donnie,’ Mickey said. ‘Let’s go.’

‘What’s your hurry?’ one of them said.

‘We’re going,’ Mickey said, pulling Donnie away from the bar.

‘Take this with you.’

Mickey said he didn’t know which one threw the punch. He didn’t know if it was meant for him or for Donnie. All he
knew was that he got in the way of it. The rest was noise. Fortunately, the barman came round from behind the bar at once and he was a very big man. The authority he instantly exercised among the locals suggested that he might have made use of his size a few times before.

When comparative stillness was restored, the barman was standing between Mickey and Donnie on the one side and the three locals on the other. Mickey’s throbbing and watering eye seemed to demand revenge. But he still didn’t know which one had hit him and the barman was in no mood for a rematch and the other locals in the bar were threatening to join in and it didn’t take a genius to work out whose side they would come down on.

‘You two,’ the barman said. ‘Out. And don’t come back. I don’t want trouble-makers in my bar.’

‘I doubt if I will deign –’

Mickey managed to hustle Donnie out of the door before the people in the bar heard the rest of his statement, which he told to the night air outside, calmly and resonantly, as if it had been waiting like a crowd of reporters to hear it.

‘– to visit your establishment again. The lower orders are revolting.’

Mickey said he walked Donnie as fast as he could, always checking for signs of pursuit. But nobody followed. No doubt they were all drinking to having driven off the aliens. Eventually, he let Donnie sit for a time at the side of the road. He asked Donnie what he thought he had been doing.

‘I thought,’ Donnie said, ‘how sadly curtailed their little lives must be. So I brought them glamour. Where’s my cigar?’

‘Arsehole,’ Mickey said. ‘I wish it was you they’d punched. At least you deserved it.’

He managed to get Donnie almost as far as the entrance to
the drive at Willowvale when Donnie disappeared in the darkness into a small clump of trees. Mickey spent about twenty minutes looking for him but it was hopeless. It was then he had come back into the hotel to hear Harry Beck reading something he slowly recognised.

‘Strange night,’ Mickey said to Kate.

He remained worried about Donnie. A couple of times during the evening Mickey had gone out into the darkness of the grounds in Willowvale, vaguely hoping to come across him. He didn’t want him to catch pneumonia or something. Kate liked that in him but, going out walking with him one of the times, she wondered why he bothered.

Donnie was all right, Mickey said. He just happened to be a chemical loony. Even then he wasn’t nasty with it. He was just off-the-wall and funny. Before he got lost and ended up in the pub, he’d told Mickey he was dreading Sunday. He said he hated Sundays. He went into a whole riff about it, talking a lot more weirdly than he had been in the pub. It was a good thing the locals didn’t hear him then. They would have thrown a net over him. Mickey wished he could remember it to tell Kate.

‘He did it all in what I think was supposed to be a Yorkshire accent,’ Mickey said.

‘Why?’ Kate said.

‘How would I know? The stuff Donnie takes, I suppose he might as well be in Yorkshire. He probably can’t tell Glasgow from Guatemala. But I wish you could have heard it.’

(‘It were a Soonday. I remember it as if it were yesterday. In fact, it were yesterday. Or were it? One thing I’m sure of. It
were the day after the day before. I know this because our Bert were in the upstairs basement, trying to put wheels on the cat. I remember our dad calling up to him. Tha’s mad tha is, he’s shouting. If God meant cat to have wheels, where’s the bloody axle then? Me mam were knitting a small loaf out of stale ends of bread. It were our Sal’s turn for the book. We only had one and our dad would only let us read one page at a time in case some greedy bastard used up all the words before the others had a chance. Our George and I were playin’ ping-pong wi’ the budgie. Or were we throwin’ darts at Granda? Or sucking one another’s thumbs? Or did nowt like this ‘appen at all? I don’t know any more. One thing I do know, though. It were a Soonday.’)

‘I think,’ Mickey said, ‘maybe he can’t bear to live outside his own head for too long. And maybe he’s not alone in that.’

Kate Foster and Mickey Deans told each other about themselves
.

She came from Graithnock. He came from Shawlands. She had had a maths teacher who taught solid geometry in midair, just by pointing and drawing imaginary lines with his fingers. It was tricky to follow. He had had a brief moment of triumph in primary school once. The teacher asked if anyone could tell her what BC meant. He was the only one who knew it meant ‘Before Christ’. It was a brief moment because she then asked what AD meant. ‘Ah, Mickey Deans to the rescue again,’ she said. ‘After the Death,’ he had said brightly. It was only later he understood what a short life-span he was giving Jesus. She said Coldplay and he said the Strokes. She liked
Pacino and he liked De Niro. She said, ‘Heathcliffe,’ and he said, ‘Mr Rochester – if they ever met in a pub, I know which one I’d bet on.’ Her father had once been caught trying to put a pair of Y-fronts on Reba the dog because she was in heat and might get pregnant. Her mother had managed to stop him. ‘Makes sense,’ Mickey said. ‘He was obviously trying to make the other dogs think she was male.’ He had an uncle who knocked out his own brother when he came into the house in the early morning without putting the lights on. The brother was moving about in the dark so as not to disturb anybody. His uncle clocked him because he thought he was a burglar. He couldn’t believe she thought Shirley Bassey could sing. ‘Ferrari of a voice,’ he said. ‘Pity she can’t drive. I read that somewhere, by the way.’ She used to like going to Calella de Palafrugell with her family. That was on the Costa Brava. He had never been there. ‘I’ve been to Saltcoats, though. Twice, as well.’ She didn’t go on holiday with her family any more. It didn’t exactly offer a wild time. He thought maybe they could go together. Get student rail tickets and do the Continent. She fancied it. He thought Arnold Schwarzenegger had all the acting skill of a talking totem pole. He had read that somewhere, too. He’d had a maths teacher who gave a boy a terrible row for blowing his nose. Seemed to take it as a personal affront. Maybe there was something weird about maths teachers. No, he
had
been further than Saltcoats. Last year he went with two of his mates to Benidorm. But he thought he might like to go to Spain some time. Instead of just going on your holidays to an English pub with sunshine. She was a Catholic. He was an agnostic, or he thought he was. He couldn’t be sure. Had she seen
American History X
? One of the best pictures in the world. Had he seen any of the
Lord of the Rings
ones? Just the first one. It was too long. He thought
he might have rectal bleeding by the end of it. She liked them. She liked this place. Willowvale. It made her think of all the people who must have been here just after it was built. Maybe there were dances by candelight, with beautiful ballgowns. The whole place lit up. Did he like this place? He really did. ‘Especially now.’ And he gave her the smile that excited her.

The memory of their being together so closely was all she would remember of this weekend, she thought. Everything else, the other people and the place, had just been a backdrop for them. They were the only show in town. She would have felt guilty about leaving Jacqui in their room except that she was too full of other things to feel. Anyway, if Jacqui had succeeded in what she was obviously trying to do when she came up to Mickey after his story was read, Kate was the one who would have been on her own. And she didn’t imagine that Jacqui would have been alone for long.

The only thing that troubled her was that the feeling in her was too intense to last. Could Mickey possibly be feeling the same way she did? She took the lapels of his coat, which she had put on over her knickers, and pulled them together.

Kate Foster sat nude except for her lover’s coat
.

She didn’t want the day to start. She rose and very gently pulled the curtains open. The dawn was up. The sky was ribbed with red. She sat back down and leaned her elbows on the desk and stared out of the window. She was suddenly wistful for a time she was still experiencing. She allowed herself to be absorbed into the stillness of the scene, the dark silhouettes of the trees, the grass growing slowly more green, the softly dissipating morning mist, as if they could hold her there.

His hands on her shoulders sent a shiver through her.

‘Hullo, you.’

His voice was deep in its closeness. He lipped her ear. His hands crossed each other under the coat, each cupping a breast. They both stayed like that in silence a while.

‘We’ll never have this time again,’ she said.

‘We won’t have to if we can stay inside it.’

She sighed.

‘What if I become like the old woman?’

‘What old woman’s that?’

‘The one in your story.’

He laughed. ‘Come on.’ He put on an old man’s voice. ‘That’s just a story, hen. A wee story. Don’t greet now. The bad monster has went to its bed. All better. And they all lived happily ever after.’

His lips moved softly against her face in a smile. She echoed it. But she wondered for a moment if the scene and the two of them being there in it weren’t a mirage.

‘I suppose I better put some clothes on and look for the mad Yorkshireman,’ he said. ‘That’s two nights he hasn’t slept here. Lucky for us, right enough.’

But she didn’t move. She didn’t want him to.

‘I wonder where he is,’ he said.

Donnie was sorry he had come. He didn’t like this place. But he knew he couldn’t go until the man let him out. The door was reinforced with steel on the inside. It was closed, with several large metal bolts pushed home. Making a run for it was not an option. He could hear people talking outside the door. Their conversation seemed deliciously ordinary. Somebody was talking about gardening. ‘Perennials,’ he was
saying. ‘Better with perennials.’ Donnie wanted to be where they were but he knew there was no way he could do that. He hoped that one of the people would knock on the door so that the man would open the flap inset in the steel, check who it was and let them in. That way at least he wouldn’t be alone with the man.

The man was frightening. Donnie admitted it to himself: he was afraid. He was very afraid. He was so afraid that he could barely follow what the man was saying. But he understood what his talk meant. It meant threat.

He seemed to hate everybody. Perhaps that was why the room was like a fortress. It was a very well-furnished fortress. There was a huge music centre from which such loud sound came that Donnie was more or less having to lip-read. There was a large ornate dresser. There were two chairs and a couch covered in what looked like purple velvet. In the corner of the room lay a black dog roughly the size of a Shetland pony. It stared constantly at Donnie. The man said it was his pet.

The man was almost bald except for his ponytail. He wore a denim shirt with several buttons undone and jeans. He had a lot of rings. He had a length of rope tied round his wrist. The other end of the rope was tied round the handle of a door, which was closed. The rope was very loose and dragged on the floor. Occasionally, as he talked, the man would make a face at Donnie and jerk his arm so that the rope rose off the floor and formed a straight line in mid-air between the man’s wrist and the door.

‘For those that misbehave,’ the man said.

The man talked about hating the people he had to deal with, and Donnie was sure the hatred included himself. They were animals, the man said, and that was how he treated them. He held up a long knife. That was what he would give them, he said, if they caused him any trouble. They would get
it in the guts. If that didn’t sort them out, there was always the final answer. His arm tugged on the rope and the door juddered and the man grinned at Donnie.

‘Right,’ the man said, and produced a transparent packet of white powder and laid it on the table in front of Donnie. ‘Your money.’

‘How much?’ Donnie said.

‘One hundred pounds. Now.’

Donnie knew he had only coins in his pocket. The man was waiting. Donnie took out the coins and laid them on the table. The man stared at the money, then stared at Donnie.

‘You bastard,’ he said. ‘Wasting my time. Your life’s over.’

He jerked the rope at the end of his wrist and the door sprang open. A massive Rottweiler came snarling into the room, ran at Donnie and jumped for his throat.

Donnie woke up. The faint light lay on him like a benison, letting slowly materialise around him some harmless furniture among which he gradually found himself. It was the lounge of a place called Willowvale. He was lying on one of the double chairs, his feet protruding into the air. He lifted the jacket he had been using as a blanket. His torso was naked under it. He wasn’t sure what had happened to his T-shirt. Sweat stood out on his chest like blisters. He wrapped the jacket back around him, wondering where Mickey was.

He drifted back into sleep, looking for a better dream.

The water soothed her, silk against her skin. She liked the way a bath seemed to cleanse the mind as well. She needed that. She lay letting vague thoughts pop like bubbles in her head. He
was a nice man. The niceness went with him even into making love. It had been more slow waltz than tango. That had suited her. It gave her time to relearn the steps, even if she wasn’t sure how often she would need them again, if ever. She suspected they had been relearning together. She wondered if, given his wife’s long illness, it had been his first time for years too. She had heard that his wife was completely bedridden. She tried to rationalise her guilt by telling herself that the woman would never know what had happened. Perhaps what you didn’t know had happened hadn’t happened. (She remembered a lecturer saying someone called Bishop Berkeley had suggested something like that. Something about a tree in a quadrangle, she thought. If you didn’t see it, it wasn’t there.) But Andrew knew, of course, and so did she. She hoped the knowledge didn’t hurt him too much. For herself, she tried to take some solace from the fact that his wife was not the only one who was ill. She pushed the thought away at once, because it seemed a mean thought and because she did not want to go there in her head for her own reasons. She had promised herself this weekend must be utterly self-contained. That was impossible. Thoughts didn’t follow the instructions of your wishes. They arrived without invitation and you couldn’t uninvite them. At least with their talk and the things they had done she had not allowed her fear too directly into her presence. Perhaps she had just been using him as an exorcist. But then hadn’t he been exorcising something too? Perhaps the grief of his increasing loneliness.