Strange Loyalties Page 2

  Scott, my dead brother, had become the focus for that manic feeling, so long suppressed in me. I needed his death to mean more than it seemed to mean. If the richness of the life in him could be snuffed on the random number-plate of a car, and that was all, I was ready to shut up shop on my beliefs and hand in my sense of morality at the desk. The world was a bingo stall.

  But I didn’t want it to be. I needed Scott in death as I had needed him in life. I needed a reunion in meaning between us.

  I was completing my pretence of tidying up the bathroom when I realised that Brian was standing in the doorway, watching me. He covered his surveillance with talk.

  ‘Make something to eat?’ he said. ‘With what, like? Your fridge might as well be in a shop-window. There’s bugger-all in it. What you want me to do? Make soup out the curtains? I put the kettle on. At least you’ve laid in a stock of water, I see.’

  ‘The frugal life, Brian.’

  ‘Frugal? You’re a one-man famine.’

  ‘Eggs,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right. Four eggs in a wee plastic container. That’s your whack.’

  ‘So boil them. And make some toast. Two eggs each. With toast and coffee.’

  ‘The bread’s like bathroom tiles.’

  ‘You don’t notice when it’s toasted.’

  ‘Okay, Egon.’

  While he rustled up a gourmet breakfast in the kitchen, I went through to the bedroom. I dressed and laid my black leather jerkin on the bed – multi-purpose gear, suitable for cocktail party or dog-track. I didn’t know where I might be going. I found the travelling-bag in the cupboard. What to put in it was the question. I’m hopeless at packing. I usually leave it to the last minute so that I’ve got an excuse for making a hash of it.

  I might be away for a week. There were five clean shirts on hangers in the wardrobe. I kept them like that because I didn’t have an iron. God bless the tumble-drier. But it meant I had to work out how to fold them. Button each one first, lay it face down on the bed, fold each side in very slightly from the shoulder, fold the sleeves the other way, fold up the tail slightly, double up what’s left and an object of beautiful neatness was before you. (Personal column: home-help for hire, all domestic skills.)

  Five shirts should be enough, plus the one that I was wearing, if I packed a couple of pullovers to hide any second-day grime on the collars, should that prove necessary. I put in whatever else I thought I would need and then applied Laidlaw’s Infallible Packer’s Law: check everything from the feet up and the inside out. I had forgotten an extra pair of shoes. I put them in. All right. Shoes. Seven pairs of socks. Seven pairs of underpants, unironed. Five shirts. Two tee-shirts to wear under the polo-neck if the shirts proved unwearable a second day. Two ties, in case I was feeling formal. Two extra pairs of trousers, rolled cunningly to prevent creasing. A blazer jacket.

  The toilet bag. I went through to the bathroom, put what I needed in the toilet bag, brought it back and packed it. The travelling-bag didn’t look well. It was tumoured in a lot of places. But the zipper closed. I found my migraine pills and squeezed them into a side pocket. St George was ready.

  So was Brian. We sat at the table by the window and had breakfast. It looked a nice day. I hadn’t packed a raincoat.

  ‘This toast’s exhausting,’ Brian said. ‘The kind of stuff you should eat in groups. Too much for one person. Team chewing.’

  ‘I like it. Makes you appreciate food. You don’t just pop this in your mouth and swallow it. It demands your attention.’

  But I knew the vaudeville couldn’t last. The serious act was waiting in the wings.

  ‘Jack. What do you hope to prove doing what you’re doing?’

  ‘Whatever I prove.’

  ‘That’s very good. Come on, Jack. Scott’s dead. He just got knocked down. He was drunk. You blame the driver?’

  ‘I don’t blame the driver, Brian, be your age. Why would I blame the driver?’

  ‘So what’s the score? Are you going to indict the traffic system?’

  ‘It’s just something I want to work out. I’m doing it in my own time. Who am I harming?’

  ‘Yourself. I would think.’

  ‘Anyway, what’ll you be up to?’ I said, changing tack.

  ‘Working with Bob Lilley. His neighbour’s off work as well just now. But not for reasons of insanity.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Anything on?’

  ‘There’s a body been found near the river. Across from the Rotunda. Not identified yet. Wearing a rope cravat.’

  The Rotunda was an old building that had been turned into a trendy eating-place, symbol of the regenerating Glasgow. Across the Clyde were some of the derelict sites where industry died. I thought of people eating and drinking in the high brightness while, in the darkness across the water where the light didn’t reach, a dead man lay abandoned. Maybe it was just my mood but the conjunction of those two images came to me like a coat-of-arms for the times, motto: live high on the hog and don’t give a shit about other people.

  ‘Advance word is he was an addict. Bob’s got the report. His arm had been broken recently. And they seem to have given him a sore time before they killed him. Like breaking his fingers one by one.’

  ‘I think my egg just addled,’ I said. ‘My compliments to the chef. If you would just ask him not to talk during the meal next time.’

  We cleared up the debris of the meal and, at Brian’s insistence, washed the dishes.

  ‘This place is depressing enough to come back to,’ he said. ‘Come back to dirty dishes into the bargain, and the first stop could be your head in the oven.’

  ‘It’s electric.’

  ‘So you could cook yourself to death.’

  ‘I didn’t realise the time,’ I said as I hung up the dish-towel. I would have to wash it some time soon. It was beginning to make the dishes dirtier. ‘I got up later than I thought. Jan should be here soon.’

  ‘Jan coming?’

  ‘We thought we would go to the Lock. Have some lunch there. Then she would run me to the station.’

  ‘Which station?’

  ‘Central.’

  Brian held up his hand.

  ‘Tell me no more,’ he said. He held his hand to his chin like Sherlock in an old print, pointed his finger at me. ‘Graithnock.’

  ‘Jeez, you’re good,’ I said. ‘It’s only where Scott lived.’

  ‘Revisiting the scene of the crime. Except that there is no crime.’ He was kind to my silence, covered it with words. ‘So Jan’s coming.’

  ‘That’s the idea. A farewell lunch before I venture into the outback.’

  ‘What’s going to happen with you two?’

  ‘Ah she’s great,’ I said. ‘What a marvellous woman.’

  ‘That’s not what I asked.’

  ‘Brian. I’m in enough shit to fertilise Russia. How do I know what I’m going to do? I know I love her. Whatever that means. But what I do with that, I’ll have to find out. Put your question on hold.’

  ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘That gives me a problem. Jan coming. I was going to give you my car.’

  ‘You’ll need it.’

  ‘I’ll use Morag’s. She can’t drive anyway, the way she is. She’d need to steer from the back seat.’

  Morag was eight months gone. It was their second. Stephanie was fifteen months. They weren’t loitering.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Be like driving a dodgem car. But I’ll be all right.’

  ‘Hey, thanks. That would help. You’re not so hard-bitten after all, are you?’

  ‘I’ve got a soft spot for lunatics. You should never have given Ena the car, anyway.’

  ‘She needed it more than I did. For the kids.’

  ‘But how do I get home now? I was hoping you’d drive me there.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘But you’re seeing Jan.’

  ‘Then you come too.’

  ‘Oh no. That’s private business.’

  ‘Brian. We’re going for
lunch. Not to the back row of the pictures. We’re all sophisticated adults now, wee man. I think we’ll manage.’

  While we waited for Jan, Brian asked me about Ena and the children. I had seen them the day before, Sunday: the day of the child, the new agnostic sabbath when all over the western world diffident fathers turned up to catch a glimpse of the only things they still believed in from their marriage. They brought gifts of ill-fitting clothes and books that would never be read and membership-cards for leisure centres.

  I was enlisted in their ranks. The idea depressed me. How about years of that stuff? If I died on a Saturday, they would be losing a stranger. I turned away from the contemplation, bruised. I had bumped into another bad thought. Too much of the furniture of my mind seemed to be constructed these days from despair.

  I was glad when Jan tooted the horn. I picked up my travelling-bag, a week in prospect, and Brian and I came out into bright sunshine. Brian waved to Jan and held out his hands and nodded at me. The translation was ‘Blame him’. She smiled. Her smile was a beautiful absolution.

  In the car Jan and I kissed, nothing too hot, just checking that the pilot light was still on. After she had pulled away, she referred to the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He’s following us. He’s coming too.’

  ‘You feel you need support?’

  ‘Brian’s lending me his car. I’ve got to drive him back home. What else could I—’

  ‘Jack.’ She could stroke you with your name. ‘I’m kidding. All right? Just as long as we get some time together to talk.’

  With that voice and the smell of her, a few of the hormones started to bristle: okay, we might be needed here.

  Just when you think you’re dead, life tickles your feet.

  3

  Where do they come from, those times? They are no respecters of persons. You’ve decided a day’s just bad business. You’ve coloured it grey, when suddenly it’s blinding you with hues you didn’t know were there. You’re ambushed by pleasure. It was like that at Lock 27.

  We ate outside at the wooden tables. It was a place that had meant something to Jan and me a few times before, slow drinks and long talk that was winding to bed by a devious route, pausing to pick the odd flower from our different pasts, while her mouth turned into an astonishing organism, exotic as a sea-anemone, and I became briefly infatuated with the lobe of her left ear. Those times.

  Today was like an orchestration of them all. The particulars that created the effect didn’t seem too great. But then the notation to Solveig’s Song doesn’t look like a lot, at least not to me. (A music teacher once showed me when I was at school.) Heard, it can melt you.

  Jan and Brian shared a bottle of white wine. I, as prospective driver of some distance, was on Perrier. We ate some kind of food. And we talked. That was about it.

  But then May was out, laying tracks of scent in the air like mysteries you would want to follow till they buried you and the sunlight was showing off with the canal – see what I can do with water? – and a young couple were walking up and down the bank with a child and people were talking and laughing and you felt this wasn’t such a bad species to be part of and I thought, what a game this is to play. Freeze the frame. This’ll do.

  After Jan and Brian had delicately kidded me throughout the meal about my incompetence in living alone (no mention of Scott), Brian insisted on paying and went off for a walk along the canal.

  ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ Jan said.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘That should make a change.’

  ‘Come on, Jan. Not you as well.’

  ‘Me especially.’

  Her eyes were in the sunlight and she had a stare it wasn’t easy to confront. She looked as if she could see, as the man says, ‘quite through the deeds of men’. With me, that must have been easy for her, I thought. She had a lot of confessional moments to draw on. But she contradicted me.

  ‘Who are you, anyway? I still don’t know. I thought I did. But watching you lately’s been like trying to find someone in a crowd. By the time I get hold of what I think is your arm, it’s someone else. It’s not just Scott’s death. It was there before. But it’s worse now. Look at what you’re up to now. What made you decide to do this?’

  ‘I think it was the funeral.’

  ‘The funeral?’

  ‘I think it was. You don’t get any good ones, Jan. But this was the worst. Scott wasn’t there. Don’t smile. I didn’t expect him to walk in with the mourners. I mean, among the mourners I didn’t feel him there. Except maybe with David and Alan. And the kids didn’t know what was going on. But at least their shock was real. Anna was hurt, of course. But, Jesus, she was cold with it. You know there was nothing afterwards? Nothing. Not a sausage roll, not a cup of tea. We stood outside the crematorium a couple of minutes. A bunch of strangers, looking as if the host hadn’t turned up. The man who was his headmaster spoke to me. “You must be the brother. He was a fine teacher.” A fine teacher? Shove it up your arse. He was a lot more than a fine teacher. Anyway, we all know he wasn’t such a fine teacher towards the end. What we don’t know is why. None of us there had a clue. “Fine.” That word pisses me off. It’s not a personal response. It’s a box in a report card. Poor, fine, excellent. Tick the appropriate place. Some of the rest of them spoke to me. There was a John Strachan. I need to speak to him for starters. I was too numb at the time. We all just got in our cars and came away. We might as well have been at a football match.’

  ‘Jack. That’s what those things are like.’

  ‘You don’t bury a dog that way, Jan. You don’t bury my brother that way. That’s for sure. I may have been numb at the time but I knew even then. This won’t do. Did they know what they were dealing with? This was some man, you know. I knew him when he was him. A head busier than an anthill. He painted. He tried to write. He wanted to be into everything. He was thirty-eight when he died. How the hell did that happen?’

  ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘I know it was an accident, Jan. But where did the accident begin? That’s what I want to know. In the middle of the road? At the kerb? In the pub before he went out? In the fact that he drank too much? In the reasons why he drank too much? When did the accident begin? And why? When did my brother’s life give up its purpose? So that it could wander aimlessly for years till it walked into a car? Why? Why did it lose itself until we found it lying in front of that car? I want to know, Jan. Why do the best of us go to waste while the worst of us flourish? I want to know.’

  That was on Perrier water. It was lucky I wasn’t on the whisky. A few minutes before, I had been wanting to stay here. Now the idyll was broken. I had rained on it with my words. The sun was still there and the people, but they didn’t look the same to me any more. I think I resented them a little. I think Jan resented me.

  ‘I don’t know how much longer, Jack,’ she said.

  The remark should have been surprising. But love has its own grammar. Unspoken clauses pass between you, understood. I wasn’t surprised. A familiar dread appeared in the sunshine like a fin in a bright bay.

  ‘I never intended to fall in love with a band of guerrillas. You take up a new cause every day. Group sex was never my thing. We make love the best. But outside of bed, who are you? I never know who’s getting out of bed, never mind who’s getting in. I need a Jack Laidlaw of my own. I’m thirty now.’

  She had been talking lately of having a child. I knew I was first choice as the father, but only first choice. She seemed to think there was potential in my genes, given the right training, which obviously I hadn’t had. The clairvoyance of women amazes me. They can project a smile into a relationship and some embraces into a future. They can nest in a promise you didn’t know you had made. Jan saw a future in us but, if I didn’t, she still saw a future. I could understand her impulse. I wasn’t the only one who stared into the darkness above the bed and heard age whispering around me. Jan had her own dark voices. Somewhere inside her, s
he knew the faces of her young glowing hopefully, featureless as candle flames. If the features didn’t take after me, they would take after someone else. Time was running out for her, too. Wasn’t it always for all of us?

  ‘You go and have your week,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you when you get back.’

  I had a temptation to plead my case but I resisted it. I didn’t know which way to plead. I sensed which direction she was going and it might well be away from me. She had given up working in the hotel and was in partnership with two friends in a small restaurant. Her life was orderly and successful. Me, I seemed to be moving backwards. I sometimes get the feeling that I’m on foot while everybody else is driving. It’s as if my life still hasn’t invented the wheel. Maybe this week it would. At least Jan would be waiting. Court was in recess for a week.

  Brian was loitering close at hand and I called him over. At Jan’s car she and I took an assessing farewell and she mouthed through the windscreen that she loved me. I drove Brian home.

  We didn’t talk much in the car. Outside his house, he stood with the car-door open.

  ‘Remember, Jack,’ he said. ‘Polismen have even less unofficial freedom than civilian punters. Don’t do anything daft, or not too daft. And keep in touch, if only to tell me how the car’s doing. I want to hear from you. And I might need your advice on the case.’

  It was a prepared speech. I found that moving.

  ‘I’ll phone every mile, on the mile,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes. And take a tip from a good detective. Always check the glove compartment of a new car.’

  We waved and I drove off. It wasn’t until I had gone some way that I thought of what he had said. I pressed the switch and the flap of the glove compartment came down and a bottle of the Antiquary fell into my hand. I put it back in and closed the flap.