I laughed quietly to myself as I put the taxi back into gear and drove slowly out of that street in search of the motorway. I wasn’t a nobody. I was somebody that they hadn’t heard of yet.
I’d killed. Carr and Hutchison. More would follow. I was going to be known. And yet here was some gallus bastard with the bare-faced cheek to leave me without a fare. I laughed.
It happened. Door lock was supposed to stop it but you weren’t always ready. Money is coming out of the pocket, handle is released and before you know it they are out the suicide door and off into traffic with your money in their hand. Comes with the territory. But there is no way they’d have had the nerve to try it if they knew what I was capable of. There wouldn’t even be a bare hire if they knew that. There’d be a tip every time.
CHAPTER 10
Life used to have a rhythm. Maybe it still did but while it used to be a constant, understandable, workable, bearable thing now it wasn’t. Hadn’t been for six years. If there was a new rhythm then it wasn’t one I could live with. It jarred. It messed with my head. Clanging noises fucking with my ears and my mind. Even though it was now supposed to be dancing to my tune, it still rang raw and rattling and upsetting.
A long time six years. Where there had been order there was discord. Like Thatcher lying before television cameras, whimpering about harmony as she bastardized the words of St Francis of Assisi yet whipped up more conflict than ever before. What was the norm had quickly become something very different and much worse.
I knew it was the same for her, my wife, but that didn’t make it any easier for me to accept the way she chose to deal with it. Each to their own is all very well but she was way off the mark. Wrong.
It was her rhythm, her solution. But wrong just the same. She filled her days with her campaign; using it to shut out everything else, blot out the world. She would leaflet, she would petition, she would persuade and harangue. She would sit on committees and chair discussion groups. She would carry placards and stand outside Parliament. She was on first-name terms with MPs, MSPs and councillors.
Every fucking minute of it a complete waste of time.
She complained, she moaned, she whined. She grumbled, criticized and bleated. She had achieved absolutely nothing and would achieve absolutely nothing. After all, the one thing that she really wanted to accomplish was impossible.
That morning was just typical of it. It was just after seven and I was slumped over the breakfast table, drowning in a mug of coffee and sinking lower after a long night shift. She had charged into the kitchen, her hair tied back, businesslike. Just a few stray strands of the fair hair that had caught my eye all those years ago managed to escape the clutches of the hairband. She had a waterproof on over a suit jacket. Ready for all weathers and all circumstances.
She had aged maybe fifteen years in the past six. Lines where there had been none. Her green eyes deeper and darker. Her mouth set harder. I think she was smaller too. Not that she had ever been much over five foot but I think it had all beaten her down another half inch.
Not that morning though. She was ready for the day. She was bustling around the house full of the joys of a day ahead, believing all the false promises that it held. She even sang a bit. I caught her humming a few bars of something under her breath, a rarity in our house these days. I bridled at it. Half-witted optimism was not something likely to cheer me up after a long night at the wheel. Glasgow had been enough for me without this too.
I knew I was supposed to ask where she was going, I knew I didn’t care and I knew she would tell me anyway. I just stared into the murky depths of the coffee and stayed silent.
‘Going to the Scottish Parliament today,’ she breezed at me eventually. ‘Train through to Edinburgh then to Holyrood.’
I gave her just a nod in response. Any more would have signalled interest, even encouragement. Any less might have kicked off another row.
She looked back at me for a bit longer. More in hope than anticipation I was sure. Something in her eyes made me cave.
‘What’s happening there?’
She brightened. She enthused. ‘A protest outside the main entrance. Should be a couple of dozen of us and I’m really hopeful there will be press coverage. Maybe television too. BBC Scotland didn’t say they’d definitely be there but it is in their diary. Fingers crossed.’
Uh huh. Fingers crossed right enough. Couple of dozen meant there would be five or six. Hopeful meant very unlikely. In their diary meant no fucking chance. We had been there so many times before.
With that, she swept up whatever it was she felt she needed and deposited them in a selection of bags and pockets. A last mouthful of tea was knocked back in an exaggerated haste and the cup placed down with the hurried air of a woman on a mission.
A last look round, a wave of her hand as if she didn’t even have time to speak, and she was out and off to catch the eight o’clock train to Edinburgh. I watched the door bang shut and could only shake my head at the shudder that was left behind. It wasn’t just the eight-hour shift that had left me tired.
I tried to listen to her footsteps as they faded away, tried to capture the final, faint smack of heel on concrete, strained to hear the very last sound that I could. With each wilting, softening step I spiralled into sleep until my head was on the table and my mind had drifted to another time, another place.
I sat like that for an hour before waking sore and stiff and dragging myself off to a cold bed for a further four uneasy hours of sleep. As ever, slumber offered no escape from a waking nightmare. It just brought memories and distorted versions of an already disturbed reality. I’d long since given up any hope of finding some sanctuary with my eyes shut.
It was nearly five before she returned, as deflated and self-righteous as I’d expected. She dropped her bags and coat as if throwing off armour. The weary warrior returned from the front.
The same dance as the morning. I was to ask how it had gone. I didn’t care. She would tell me anyway. The truth was found between the lines. She had stood in the rain outside the Parliament for three hours along with eight other well-intentioned, misguided halfwits. Every one of them holding a sign and wasting their time. This wasn’t how it was told to me.
Few MSPs even noticed the dripping bodies littering the entrance to their talking shop and those that did paid little attention. Eventually one made a token gesture and invited three of them in out of the rain for a cup of tea and a five-minute head-nodding session. A cursory chat forgotten as soon as they were back on the Royal Mile.
Suitably patronized, the would-be revolutionaries had trotted off again, overflowing with self-praise and having achieved the square root of fuck all. Oh how pleased with themselves they were on the train back to Glasgow. Making notes, eating sandwiches and taking it in turn to pat each other on the back.
Nor was that the end of her day of busy non-achievement. In the afternoon, she was back in Glasgow pushing for a meeting with members of the education committee. I hated to think what they made of her. Probably filed under nutter or nuisance.
She maybe even knew that but it wouldn’t stop her. Nothing would. She had her mission, just as I had mine. She had tried to get me involved, of course she did, but it was another battle she could never win. At first I made excuses, couldn’t be here, couldn’t make it there. I was working, I was tired. But she kept pushing till I just had to tell her straight that I didn’t want to get involved.
I had stopped short of telling her why. Spared her that added pain and she inevitably responded by resenting me, shutting me out even further. She grudged my lack of involvement, hated my disinterest. Thought I was just sitting back and taking it, doing nothing.
I let her think it. To do otherwise would have meant opening up a deep can of worms we were both desperately trying to keep a lid on.
So she had done her duty, another day of active inaction and now she was home signalling the start of the collapse, the sinking into oblivion.
The first pill was tak
en within ten minutes of her being through the door. She halted her deluded monologue just long enough to sip water and bite tablet. Lockdown had begun for the night.
She was still talking as I sat a plate and cutlery in front of her. She was still telling her self-serving lies when I dropped a breast of chicken, new potatoes and green beans onto the plate. The food was no more than a minor barrier to her. The one-sided conversation was her justifying her existence and it would have been cruel to interrupt.
Finally the food was gone and the talk began to fade. She was dropping deeper.
The television propped her up for a few hours. Staring at the box in the corner, the spirit going and the flesh weakening. Images playing back across her increasingly glassy eyes, soap operas and situation comedies sending her deeper and deeper.
I sat too, in a growing conspiracy of silence. Not watching, not caring, my own plans playing out in the theatre of my mind.
By nine all the pills were rattling around inside her as she made her way upstairs to bed. I knew that in minutes she would be fast asleep.
By day a misdirected human dynamo. By night a spent force. By day the accidental campaigner. By night a lockeddown impenetrable cell. The day was the fuel and the night the hunger.
Day and night shutting out demons that were hurling themselves at her door, battering to be let in. Better to let them inside. Welcome them with open arms and use them to your ends. Better by far.
With her gone I still sat and gazed at the television. No more or less lonely now that I was alone. The night was mine and there was work to be done. I’d drive the streets and see what the morning was to bring.
CHAPTER 11
Sauchiehall Street is now a straight, mile-long broadway but it used to be completely different. It was once a winding, narrow lane with villas each standing in an acre of garden. I liked that. The idea of random, winding roads turned into a direct route. The name came from two old Scots words that have since been bastardized into English, much like the entire country. Saugh is the Scots word for a willow tree and haugh means meadow. That’s why I started counting at Miss Cranston’s old place near the corner of Blythswood Street, the Willow Tea Rooms. Good a reason as any.
I’d begun walking at the Donald Dewar statue in front of the Royal Concert Hall but didn’t begin a countdown until I got to the tea rooms and the windows full of the Mockintosh stuff that would have had Charles Rennie spinning in his art nouveau grave. The tea rooms were Glasgow history though, a tourist’s favourite.
The Room De Luxe had silver furniture and leaded glass work, a genuine thing of beauty produced in a city of sweat and ugly temper. Mackintosh’s genius was to harness Glasgow’s contrasts, mixing right angles and curves, traditional and modernist, poverty and prosperous, beauty and beaten brow.
A good place to start.
The place you begin is always important. Not as vital as where you finish but important all the same. There is logic and logic. Some would have considered me crazy but I had my own reasoning.
I counted as best I could.
One. A youngish guy in a Rangers away top. Cap pushed back on his head, tracksuit trousers and trainers. Classic ned look. Crappy chain round his neck. Lovebites and at least one tattoo.
Two. His mate. Same uniform except with the addition of a scar from ear to mouth. His hands thrust in his pockets, his mouth going at a hundred miles an hour, man.
Three. A girl. Just a bit older than Sarah would have been. Perhaps nineteen or twenty. Knee-length boots and a short skirt. Way too much make-up. She looked at me. I didn’t like that. She was someone’s daughter. Some father waiting to be hurt.
Four. A jaikie bouncing from bin to bin. That special Scottish pallor on his face; white skin gone grey, red nose and battered cheeks. He was smiling all over his face and just for a second I envied him. He most probably didn’t have any more than a couple of quid in his pocket and his brain was fried with Bucky but he was happy. Remember happy?
He stopped me, cut across my path and stood there so I couldn’t pass. He started singing to me with his hand held out in front of him. This wasn’t good, not good at all. It was changing things and it would make people look at us. At me.
I could smell him. Dampness on his clothes, foul BO and rancid breath. He was murdering ‘Danny Boy’ with this stupid grin on him. I wanted away, wanted past, wanted to keep counting. People were flooding by and I wasn’t counting them.
I scrambled into my pocket and pulled out a couple of pound coins, thrusting them at him to buy freedom. I needed past him, had to get on. But instead of getting away, it made him thank me, grasping at my hands, his breath hammering at me.
Panic took a hold. I wanted to shake him off, throw him to the ground. People were passing by and everything was changing. The dirty, drunken old bastard didn’t know what he was doing. I couldn’t have this.
He treated me to another verse of ‘Danny Boy’. I was his new best friend but I wanted to be anywhere else but there.
I tore my hand out of his, breathing hard and dancing round him. He was shouting at me as I moved. I ignored him and prayed everyone else was doing the same.
I marched on, counting and walking. Ticking them off as they passed me, then and not before. Walking. Counting. Waiting.
Five and six passed in a blur. Seven, eight, nine rushed by and I felt as if a flood was going over me. Business suits and green school uniforms, ladies doing lunch and builders’ bums. I was drowning in possibilities and realities.
I was spinning, reeling out of control and had to regain it. Ten, eleven, twelve, they kept coming. I was counting, trying to slow my breathing and calm my nerves all at once.
It was eighteen before I was remotely settled. A balding businessman with a briefcase stuffed under his arm. He caught me looking at him and glared. That was OK. He’d never think anything of it.
Nineteen and twenty were a young couple hand-in-hand. I was composed now. He was tall and fair, she was short and bottle-blonde. I was fine again. They were giggling and whispering.
I slowed, I breathed out. I kept counting. Walking and counting. I had crossed Blythswood Street and had already counted past thirty.
So many people. It wouldn’t be long.
There was a rush through the mid-forties and a lull before a few more crossed my path. Not for the first time it struck me how many of the population of the dear green place came in only two colours, ash grey or sunbed orange. The browbeaten and UV beaten. Glasgow was all-sorts. All races, shapes and sizes and they kept coming past me. I tried to paint quick pen pictures of them in my mind but how could you tell the reasonably well-off from the struggling, the Protestant from the Catholic, the asylum seeker from Jock Tamson’s bairn, the Pole from the Partick boy? How did you differentiate the oppressed from the oppressor, the trodden down and those that trod on them, the deserving and those that deserved it?
I didn’t know and it didn’t matter. Maybe better that I didn’t know.
Past the queue at Greggs and past Paperino’s. Three to go and I had a definite feeling of how close it was. I itched for it. I wanted to look ahead but stopped myself.
Fifty-four, near the corner of Douglas Street, was a young bearded guy with a bag over his shoulder and a look of superior stupidity on his face. A student. A member of the most feckless, pampered bunch of idiots on the planet. Time was he’d have been planning a revolution or protesting against the occupation of Iraq. At the very least he’d have been tending his cannabis harvest. This guy was probably going to see his financial adviser or going home to watch Neighbours. Oh he’d have done.
Still he was only number fifty-four.
My heart was pounding. I told myself to be calm. Fifty-six would be here and nothing could stop it any more than worrying would hasten it.
Fifty-five was an old Chinese woman. She was maybe about 120 and seemed less than five foot but then she was bent near double, forced over by time and rain. Something about her reminded me of an old neighbour. I couldn�
�t think of her name but then I couldn’t think of much else but the next person that would walk past me. It could be anyone at all. It excited me, sickened me, slightly scared me. My pulse galloped.
I dragged my eyes along the pavement but saw no feet. There was no one in the three or four yards of me. Then I saw a pair of shoes. Small shoes.
I raised my eyes and saw a boy of about eleven or twelve. Fuck.
He had a mop of fair hair and a squint grin, scuffing his feet along Sauchiehall Street as he gazed half-heartedly into shop windows. Oh fuck.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
He seemed in a bit of a daydream, this kid without a care in the world. The tail of his shirt was hanging below his jumper in the way that boys liked to wear it. Faded jeans. That silly, quirky grin.
Rules. Number fifty-six.
I felt sick to my stomach. Rules. My rules.
The boy glanced up, curious. I must have been staring right at him. Of course I was. He was still walking and I willed him to stop. He wasn’t going to. He was nearly in front of me. Stop, you have to stop.
Two more steps and he would be number fifty-six.
Then, from somewhere off my radar, a shape pushed past the boy, barging into his shoulder and knocking him over. The shape charged past me.
I watched the boy pick himself up and offer a dirty look to the person that had shoved him.
I followed his gaze and saw a short, stocky guy in his mid-twenties barrelling back up the street, not mindful in the least of anyone around him. I was looking at the back of number fifty-six.
Or number three depending on how you looked at it.
CHAPTER 12
I followed him, this little guy who liked to push wee boys out of his way. Not just kids either. The squat, weaselly man didn’t have much care for anyone in his path. He barged past women, he got in the way of men bigger than him. He walked with the disregard of a bully and the confidence of someone twice his size.
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