by John Niven
Irene laughed. ‘I see. You think you’re starting to sound like an old-timer?’
I watched Walt talking to a couple of his friends, sticks cradled in front of them, their hands in the big padded gloves, like the fists of Transformers, of armoured samurai warriors. For a second I had a keen wave of regret for having spoken so harshly to him just before a game and had to fight back the urge to make my way down to rinkside and wish him good luck. The boys were already getting to the age when a parent approaching them when they were with their friends was becoming a source of embarrassment.
‘Well, I am an old-timer,’ Irene said. ‘And to be fair, kids nowadays, not just Walt, all of them, they do seem to get an awful lot of expensive stuff. I’ll bet it wasn’t like that back in Scotland when you were growing up.’
‘You’re kidding?’ I said. ‘When I was Walt’s age?’ I laughed now. ‘Nothing like it.’
‘Mind you, with all that lovely scenery you wouldn’t have needed much, huh? I’d just love to visit there some day.’ She fingered her brooch, the word ‘just’ coming out as ‘jest’.
‘Oh yeah, we just played in the scenery all the time Irene. It was all you needed.’
I laughed, marvelling at the cliché of how Americans often thought Scotland was one endless, beautifully shot tourist-board ad – the Kyle of Lochalsh joining onto some Hebridean beaches, joining onto Glencoe or whatever – and thought of my home town, of the brown pebble-dash council estates built after the war and already tired by the time I was born in the late sixties. Of the empty prefab factory units next to the bypass, the all-night garage, the sawmill and the rough pubs that dotted the high street. Of the millions of tons of poured concrete that surrounded the place: the roundabouts, ringroads and bypasses designed to get you quickly and smoothly around it and on north towards Glasgow, towards better places.
‘Are you mocking me, Donnie?’ She was smiling, pretending to be scandalised.
‘No, sorry. It’s just . . . most of Scotland isn’t quite like how people picture it.’
The buzzer rang, signalling the start of the game and the two teams sailed forward across the ice towards each other. Walt skated backwards, taking up his position in defence, to the right of the goal. ‘Right, come on, Eagles!’ Sammy said, clapping her hands together as she took her seat next to me. ‘Oh, hi, Irene! Sorry, didn’t see you there.’
‘Morning, Sammy.’
‘Listen, Stephanie’s borrowing our samovar,’ Sammy said, turning her attention to me. ‘I said you’d take it over tomorrow during the day.’
‘Our?’ I turned and looked round at Stephanie Kruger, smiling at me in the row behind. ‘Just leave it on the porch if we’re not in, Donnie,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’
‘It’s in the garage somewhere,’ Sammy said.
‘Well, tomorrow, I –’
She looked at me.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘No problem.’
I still had the car keys in my hand and I dug the point into my palm as the ref blew his whistle. With a clatter of sticks and a scraping of blades, the game lurched into life below us.
10
THAT NIGHT, AFTER Walt was down, we cooked and ate in the kitchen, a simple pasta-and-salad supper, me draining the pasta and stirring in homemade pesto while Sammy sliced cherry tomatoes in half and added them to a bowl of watercress and rocket. Sammy was a good cook, but meticulous, everything seemed to take hours. Like many women she cleaned as she went along, each spoon and bowl rinsed and placed in the dishwasher, every surface and chopping board wiped clean, any unused ingredients neatly put away. I was faster, but I left in my wake a reeking Passchendaele of crockery, a medieval battlefield of spiralling peelings and bloodied cutlery. When Sammy finished cooking the aromas were the only way you’d know she’d been there.
We ate in silence, Sammy turning the pages of a magazine, me half watching the news on the little TV, the sound down low. As soon as she’d finished her last mouthful of salad and dabbed a spot of olive oil from her lips with her napkin Sammy looked up and said, ‘So, what was all that about today?’
‘Huh?’ I put my fork down.
‘Laying into Walt.’
‘I didn’t “lay into” him.’
‘You’re kidding, right? He was really upset. And right before his game too. Nice.’
This was how Sammy did it. She bided her time. Pushed the anger way down deep and chose her moment, usually much later when you had long thought it was over and she’d had time to prepare.
‘Oh Jesus. Look, he’s got to learn to have more respect for his things. He just –’
‘I mean, after all he’s been through this past few weeks with Herby and everything.’
‘So what are we meant to do when he breaks and loses stuff all the time? Just say, “That’s fine, son”? “No problem”? “Here’s a cheque”? What kind of message is that sending?’
‘It’s just a phone. You need to pick your battles.’
‘I’ve heard that one before, Sammy. It seems to me we don’t pick any. And besides, that phone cost –’
‘Christ,’ she said, raising her voice for the first time. ‘You can’t keep gauging what Walt should have against what you used to have, Donnie.’
I looked at her. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It’s late,’ she said, getting up.
There was a moment right there when I could have let it go. Where I could have said, ‘Sorry for shouting at him.’ And it would have been over. But I didn’t. I said, ‘If anyone should be pissed off about today it should be me.’
She looked at me expectantly, arms folded, weight on one hip.
‘Volunteering me to run that thing over to the Krugers’ place without even asking me?’
‘What’s the big deal?’
‘It’s half an hour away. It’ll be an hour and a half out of my day.’
‘I didn’t know you were that busy.’
Was there anything in this? I looked at her. ‘It’d be nice to be asked, rather than be treated like, like a fucking . . . I don’t know . . .’
‘I just didn’t think you’d mind. You often go in to Alarbus in the afternoons, it’s on the way. If it’s too much trouble I’ll call Stephanie and tell her they’ll have to pick it up.’
‘No, it’s fine. I’ll do it.’ I picked up the TV remote.
‘Christ, don’t sulk, Donnie.’
‘I’m not sulking.’
‘Fine. Whatever. I’m going to bed.’
I sat channel-hopping for a while before I turned the TV off and walked the long hallway down to my office. I didn’t turn the lights on, there was enough moonlight coming through the three walls of glass to see by. I unlocked the bottom drawer, rooted in below a printout of my screenplay (my own notes scribbled in the margins in red: ‘NO!’ and ‘WHY?’) and fished out a bottle of single malt whisky – a 25-year-old Talisker, a Christmas gift from Sammy’s dad a couple of years back. There was a glass on the desk with a couple of inches of tepid mineral water in it. I tipped the water into my bin and poured a big glug of the pale whisky. I held the glass under my nose for a moment, the strong fumes making my eyes tear, before I took a drink, gratefully feeling the burn, feeling my face flush and my blood elevate. The whisky had come all the way from Skye, less than a couple of hundred miles north along the west coast from where I grew up. I had never been there. ‘25 Years of Age’. Made in 1986.
Mr Cardew’s nicotine-yellowed fingers as they turned the pages; pointing out certain phrases he’d underlined. Asking you what you thought. Seeing if you were understanding everything.
It had been a strange and unexpected thing, coming to love books in my late teens. My father never read anything outside of his tabloid. My mother would occasionally be caught frowning over a dog-eared potboiler lent to her by a friend, or some bodice-ripper she’d borrowed from the library; its lurid covers encased in clear, protective plastic. There had been no books in the house I’d grown up in. As for school, well, the only kid
s who read books for pleasure, who read outside of when a teacher was literally standing over them in the classroom, were the freaks. The kids like . . . like him. Docherty. The Professor. Strange and unexpected then when I discovered under Mr Cardew’s encouragement that what seemed to me to be tracts of boredom and torture actually contained un imaginable vistas, entire worlds of escape. (And you were much in need of escape then, weren’t you?) That you could open one of them and start turning the pages and that, instead of time slowing down and refusing to pass, you would look up at the clock (that clock, in its mesh cage) and the deadly, endless afternoon ahead of you would have vanished.
I thought of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Scotsman’s Return From Abroad’, where Stevenson says ‘The king o’ drinks, as I conceive it, Talisker, Isla, or Glenlivet!’
What had you said? ‘Rather than be treated like, like a fucking . . . I don’t know . . .’ But you did know. ‘A fucking errand boy.’ That had been the phrase forming on your lips. But to say it out loud was to make it real and neither of you wanted that. No – you definitely didn’t want that. This Scotsman wouldn’t be returning home. Ever.
* * *
The last time I saw my mother was late November 1982, the height of the trial and all the publicity. It was sleeting outside and it had taken her a train and two buses to get there. Her face was wet and her coat steamed gently in the institutional heat of the visitors’ room. We sat under the merciless strip lighting and shared the bar of chocolate she had brought me.
‘He’s not been keeping well,’ she’d said by way of explaining my dad’s absence. ‘And there’s been some trouble.’ Her lip was trembling as she nibbled on a square of Dairy Milk.
‘What trouble?’
‘A man . . . a man punched him in the street the other day.’ She darted a look at me. Before I could ask ‘Why?’ she said, ‘Because you were his son.’
She started crying softly, her head bowed as she spoke, almost hiccuping the words out between the sobs. ‘The things they’re saying in the paper, the things they say you and yer pals did tae that boy. Are they . . . did ye?’
I stared at the floor, numb, and didn’t reply.
‘Oh, William. Oh, God help ye. God help ye . . .’ She kept repeating that. Over and over.
A few weeks later, just before Christmas, I got a package with some presents (a jumper, a pack of playing cards, an Airfix kit) and a letter. The letter was short and written in my mother’s strange mixture of upper and lower cases. It said:
Dear William,
MerrY Xmas. Here’s a coupLe of Wee presENts. Its no much. Munies a bit tite.
ThiS is a Sad letter to wriTe son. Your Dad and Me have decided we woN’t see yoU anymore. WhAt you’ve dun is Too bad for us too take. I hOpe God Will forGive you BUT we cant. I’ll try and remember You as the nice wee Boy you used to bEe and noT who it says you are in the PaPer. I’ll always think about YE but you are No lONger a son of ours.
I,m SoRRy,
Mum x
I never saw nor heard from them again. I was thirteen.
* * *
I drained the glass and put the bottle back in the drawer, locking it. As I stood up to leave I saw a light was still on in Irene’s house, a yellow square in darkness, about half a mile away. A shadow loomed near it for a second and then, just as I had noticed it, the light went off and the horizon was black.
I went to bed.
11
THERE WERE A couple of hundred guests moving through the large, well-lit rooms of the mansion on Elm Street, the men in black ties, the women in gowns. White-jacketed waiters pressed through the throng topping up glasses from frosted champagne bottles, the bottles smart too in their white neckerchiefs. There were ice sculptures in the hall and a string quartet in the drawing room. I was in my traditional position near the buffet, nibbling on crudités and drinking club soda. (Soda water we called it back home. For many years after I moved out here I thought club soda was a special non-alcoholic cocktail unique to the bar or ‘club’ you were in. Like the ‘house’ soda.) This was very much Sammy’s environment.
In the last few years, ostensibly to help with her mother’s arthritis but, I thought, really, simply to enjoy their wealth, Sammy’s parents had begun decamping to Hawaii around the middle of every December, to a suite in the Ritz-Carlton on Maui, overlooking pineapple fields and the sea. They stayed there until the beginning of March, missing the absolute worst of the Canadian winter. We usually flew out a few days before Christmas and spent a fortnight with them, coming home right after New Year’s. Old Sam had taken to throwing a big Christmas party at the house before they went and now the occasion was set in stone. It was a good chance to schmooze advertisers, the Mayor and the like. I was spearing a shrimp when I heard a deep voice behind me saying, ‘Hitting the hard stuff, huh?’
‘Hi, Mike,’ I said, turning. Mike Rawls, Old Sam’s security chief – six three, two hundred plus pounds – was grinning and nodding towards my brimming tumbler of clear, bubbly water.
‘Driving home later.’
‘That’ll make us the only two sober people here then.’
We stood and surveyed the crush, Mike doing so with the practised eye of someone used to scanning crowds for trouble; for someone getting too close, moving too quickly, or staring too intensely. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘sorry to hear about your dog.’
‘Ah, yeah.’
‘What happened exactly?’
I told him the whole story, having gotten it down to a routine pitch. ‘It was horrible. Just ripped the poor bastard to pieces. The policeman even found a kidney in the snow. They’re going to –’
‘That’s odd, huh?’ Mike said.
‘What’s odd?’
‘Well, you’d think it’d be one of the first things they’d eat, wouldn’t you? A pack of hungry wolves? The kidneys, the liver, the sweetbreads? Anyway –’ Mike raised a hand to another security guy who was signalling him from the main door across the hallway – ‘I gotta run. I think the Governor’s arriving. Catch you later, Donnie.’
I watched him go and suddenly I had the urge to check on Walt. I headed for the back garden, passing through the drawing room where the string quartet were starting The Four Seasons again, taking out my cellphone and dialling as I went. Irene answered on the third ring, just as I stepped out onto the back porch, into the freezing December air, shivering in my tuxedo.
‘Hi there, Donnie. How’s the party?’
‘It’s fine. I’m about ready to leave. How’s Walt?’
‘He’s fine. We’ve been playing his video game thingy. He’s just about to go to bed, aren’t you, Walt?’ I heard some kind of protest in the background. ‘Don’t rush home on our account.’
‘No, I’ve done my thing here. Shown my face. Can I talk to him?’ A muffled fumbling and then Walt’s voice on the line. ‘Hi, Dad.’
‘Hey, son, how’s things?’
‘OK. I beat Irene at Medal of Honour!’
‘Did you? I’m sure that’s not really Irene’s thing.’
‘She’s pretty good. Better than you!’
‘Really? Well, look, it’s nine thirty. Time for bed.’
‘When are you coming home?’
‘In about an hour or so. But you’ll be asleep by then, won’t you?’
‘Yes, Dad.’ He says this automatically, dutifully.
‘OK. Sleep well. Night, son.’
I hung up and looked out over the trees. The air was so sharp now that to inhale was to feel a stinging burn on the rims of your nostrils, a wintry crackling in your lungs. The black sky felt heavy above me, like it was swollen with the impending snow.
You’d think it’d be one of the first things they’d eat, wouldn’t you?
I heard the door opening behind me and turned to see the old man himself coming out, a thick coat over his shoulders and a great cigar clamped between his teeth and already lit, his cheeks bullfrogging as he puffed, getting it going, grey, perfumed smoke wreathing his bald head.
‘Donnie,’ he said simply, nodding.
‘Hi, Sam.’ I held up the cellphone by way of explanation for what I was doing out here, feeling, as I often felt in Sam Sr’s presence, that I had been caught doing something inappropriate. ‘Just checking in on Walt.’
‘How is the little fella?’
‘He’s fine. Just off to bed.’ I remembered now how Walt’s first instinct when we told him about Herby had been to try and get the old man to do something. Get Grandpa to . . .
‘Want one?’ Old Sam said, patting his pocket, holding up the cigar.
‘No, I’m good. Some party. I hear the Governor’s here.’
‘Yeah,’ he yawned, stretching, looking at his watch. ‘Took his time getting here too. I’m gonna have to kick all these freeloading bums out soon.’ The old man was in his late sixties now but in good shape, lean and trim, the hair loss the only concession to ageing. Hard, clear eyes, the kind you wouldn’t want to look into and bullshit. I’d once seen a drunk at a restaurant downtown get too mouthy, too familiar with Sam, and he’d knocked the guy out. Clean. One punch. He’d had to pay the guy off in the end, of course. ‘You get your picture in the paper now and then,’ he said afterwards, ‘people figure they can say anything to you.’
‘What time are you getting off tomorrow?’ I asked.
‘Five fifty in the a.m. Chopper to Winnipeg then the flight to LA.’
‘You want to get to bed, Sam.’
‘Ah, you don’t need too much sleep at my age.’ He puffed on his cigar and we stood looking out over the lawn, the elms, the moonlight as the party thrummed in the house behind us, the hum of conversation, the music. ‘Might be last time we throw one of these,’ he said.
‘How come?’
‘Well, I’m nearly seventy, Donnie. You start to think in terms of “lasts”.’
