Bred in the Bone

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Stevie hadn’t, until now.

  He might have turned forty-nine today, but his birthday present had come early. Out of nowhere he’d been offered precisely what he needed to change the game in this city. And like all the best deals, the vendor didn’t have a clue as to the true value of what he was selling.

  Unlike the others, Stevie wasn’t going to let his zest for the present become sapped by the soporific temptations of nostalgia. The future was opening up before him, and it was going to make his past look like a pre-match warm-up.

  He drove the Bentley into the car wash, waved to a space between islands that once housed petrol pumps by a teenager in grey overalls and a Metallica T-shirt. He didn’t know the kid’s name but the kid knew his. He signalled to his mate and they jumped to it, leaving the woman in the Ford Focus at the next wash station wondering what was the script.

  Funny he should be thinking about Tony as he drove to use this place: in a way it was the first sign, way back when, that Stevie was outgrowing him, and that the rules were changing in ways Tony couldn’t grasp. The older man didn’t understand why Stevie was putting money into running a car wash, even after he had explained that it wasn’t just cars that were going in dirty and coming out clean.

  There was some heavy metal rubbish playing from a pair of puny speakers perched on the water heater that fed the cleaning lances. Stevie cranked up the Bentley’s stereo and let the sub-woofer take care of the noise pollution. Bit of Simple Minds: Sparkle in the Rain. That didn’t count as nostalgia; just a basic matter of it being better than any of the shite that was out nowadays.

  The kid in the Metallica T-shirt knelt down and began squirting some stuff on his alloys, while a biker-looking bloke in what most closely resembled fishing waders hefted the lance. He gave the car a once-over with some hot water to start with, then began coating it in foam.

  The windscreen got it first, then the entire vehicle was insulated in a layer of white bubbles. As always, this part made Stevie feel a little uncomfortable, blind and isolated in what suddenly seemed a cramped wee capsule. There was only a thin film between him and the outside world, but he felt suddenly very detached. It was easy to imagine what it would be like to be inside a car buried in an avalanche. He recalled a dream he’d had, two or three times in fact, about being engulfed in a different kind of snow. It piled up around him, higher and higher until he couldn’t escape. That was before he quit sampling his own merchandise.

  This bit never lasted long, however. They’d start with the brushes any second, though they seemed to be taking their time this morning. He considered rolling down the window a little to ask what was keeping them, but thought better of it, as chances were a brush would come right along it at just that second.

  Instead he relaxed, deciding to enjoy the isolation, alone with his thoughts and his music.

  A hole suddenly appeared in both the foam and indeed the windscreen itself, a spiderweb of crazing extending like ripples from its centre. The bullet that shattered the glass carried on through Stevie’s chest, bouncing off a rib and spinning end on end through his heart. It was liquidised midway through its final beat, but his brain had still enough oxygen for him to look through the dissolving suds and glimpse a tall figure levelling a silenced handgun and pulling its trigger three more times.

  He had a skull for a face: death incarnate.

  It was the last thing Stevie saw.

  Waves

  Jasmine slipped her phone back into her pocket and climbed out of the Civic. People had been streaming out of the car park as she drove in, making her worry whether she would find a space so close to the theatre, but there were plenty in sight once she crested the hill.

  She had just read a text from her friend Monica, apologising that she wasn’t going to make it. The message had arrived while Jasmine was driving along the M8 half an hour back, but she hadn’t heard the alert over the sound of the Honda’s stereo, nor felt a vibration as her leather jacket had been draped over the passenger seat. Monica’s own car had broken down somewhere around Cramond, and with the AA bloke telling her the alternator was gone, it wasn’t going to be a quick fix.

  This meant Jasmine was going to be on her own, which made her stop for a moment and consider her options. She felt perfectly comfortable going to the cinema by herself, or even, at a push, seeing a play, but this was a gig. Nobody went to a gig alone, did they? This was daft, though. There was no explicit social convention that she was about to violate; just the threat of her own self-consciousness, which in this case would be a mixture of insecurity and delusion. Why should she be conspicuous? Nobody was going there to look at her.

  Besides, she had paid for the tickets and been looking forward to it: posted as much on Twitter and Facebook like an excitable wee lassie and had luxuriated in the prospect of being an excitable wee lassie for a couple of hours. So despite the doubting voice that was whispering how sad she would look to be sitting there like Nelly No-Mates at a rock concert, she decided it was profoundly sadder still to even contemplate driving home again.

  I’m not sad, she thought to herself. I’m okay.

  She walked down the slope towards the Alhambra, the road in front of which was teeming with excited people. That was when she deduced that she shouldn’t have been surprised to find a parking space, due to the demographic. Only a very small proportion of this crowd would have turned up in a car as they were predominantly too young to be in the position to own one, or even to learn to drive. The fact that it struck her as unusual to be surrounded by so many people her own age or younger – and a clear majority of them girls – warned her she was becoming too accustomed to spending her time around middle-aged men.

  She needed to get out more, even if it was on her own.

  The support act was already on stage when she made her way into the stalls. She guessed they were local, or had a lot of pals who had made the trip, as they were being cheered with conspicuous enthusiasm by a portion of the crowd close to the front. The band were lively and enthusiastic, loving their time on a stage that was itself probably bigger than any of the dives they had played before.

  Jasmine glanced around the place, taking in the venue. She had never been inside the Dunfermline Alhambra, and had assumed it would be a nightclub. Instead it turned out to be a grand old 1920s theatre-cum-cinema, a doughty survivor of the great bingo-hall attrition.

  Whilst taking in her surroundings, her professional abilities also noted that somebody nearby was taking an interest in her, and thus she was reminded of another reason why she had her reservations about going to a gig alone. There was a guy leaning against a pillar about ten feet away, and she clocked him staring at her on two separate passes. Suffice to say, she was the better skilled at keeping her scrutiny undetected.

  He looked like he might more usually be occupied outside the venue at this point, breaking into vehicles in the car park, but even if he’d looked like Sam McTrusty, she wasn’t interested tonight. Okay, maybe if he actually was Sam McTrusty, but this chancer looked more like Ned Untrusty. It provided the impetus to swap the standing-only stalls for a seat upstairs, and the chance to enjoy her favoured perspective of any proscenium-arch space.

  Her ticket was for down below, she and Monica having been planning to get sweaty in the mosh-pit, but the bouncers weren’t fussed. The circle wasn’t full, and venues were always more wary of letting you into the standing area if you were supposed to be upstairs.

  Jasmine loved just sitting inside these grand old auditoria. In her head she could hear Dot Prowis, her old lecturer at the Scottish Academy of Theatre and Dance, expounding with typical gusto on how ‘any space can be a theatre, and a theatre can be any space’, but Jasmine’s idea of what a theatre should look like had been hardwired in toddlerhood, and this was it. It wasn’t just the pros-arch (thrust optional) that defined a proper theatre, but the presence of at least one circle, and the more the better.

  The Alhambra’s stretched back from the balcony in row upon curving
row of tip-up cushioned seats, saggy in the stuffing and infused with the fags and farts of close to a hundred years. Jasmine was in the fifth row, the steep rake affording almost as good a view over the rail as the first. She took in the painted plasterwork, the angels flanking the wings, and a part of her was transported to the place all such theatres took her: her mother’s side.

  It would have been her mum’s birthday tomorrow. This was another reason she felt apprehensive about being out here alone, exposed, and yet also a reason she knew she ought not to go home either, stuck in the flat with nothing to distract her.

  Someone had once told her that the pain and the sadness would come in waves. In the early stages, those waves would engulf her, crash against her so relentlessly that she might feel she could not possibly survive. However, as time went on the intervals would become longer, the waves a little smaller. Gradually it would get easier, but the waves would never stop coming.

  This had proven true, but there were no guarantees, no absolutes. Now and again one of those waves would be higher than her head, though she was getting better at anticipating when. The anniversary, Christmas and birthdays – her mum’s and her own – were always going to be difficult, but sometimes it was the unexpected trigger that was the worst: the element that came at her sideways when her gaze was fixed ahead. The lead-up to these painful dates had proven harder than the days themselves, but so far on this occasion she was holding it together; feeling quite robust, in fact.

  I’m okay, she told herself.

  A girl of about fourteen shuffled along the row in front, accompanied by a bearded bloke in a Big Country T-shirt, presumably her dad playing chaperone. Jasmine resisted a twinge of self-consciousness as she looked around, feeling conspicuously the only person sitting unaccompanied. For all anyone knew, her friend was away at the toilet, or getting drinks.

  More pertinently, nobody would be looking at her anyway, she reminded herself. It was an unfortunate side-effect of spying on people for a living that she could occasionally fall prey to an irrational paranoia about what unseen eyes might be trained upon her. Shaking this off, for a wee change she asked herself what anyone might see if they did happen to look at her right then, and decided to her surprise that she liked the answer.

  She recalled a line in Shirley Valentine, one of her mum’s favourite movies, which they used to watch together when the weather got them down, because it was like going on a ninety-minute holiday.

  ‘I think I’m all right,’ Shirley said. ‘I think if I saw myself, I’d say: “That woman’s okay.”’

  I’m okay, Jasmine told herself.

  She’d had a good day at work.

  She’d had a lot of good days at work, in fact. Over the past year or so she had become a great deal more accepting that this was what she did now; this was who she was. It was changing her. She had stopped thinking of herself as tragic, afflicted by circumstance and buffeted by the fates. She was good at what she did, and consequently Sharp Investigations was doing quite well, thank you. Certainly any evening spent in the company of her college friends still trying to eke out careers in the arts these days afforded her a different perspective from the previous one of having her nose pressed against the sweet-shop window.

  It wasn’t just the fact that they were permanently skint; the things that seemed so shatteringly important to them were beginning to strike her as petty and insubstantial, and she was becoming decreasingly shy of saying as much. She recalled with mischievous pride an exchange she had over dinner at her friend Michelle’s place, where Michelle’s flatmate and fellow dancer Gareth was unloading at quite unnecessary length about a review of a show he’d performed in at the Fringe.

  ‘You’re exposed up there: you lay yourself completely bare, utterly vulnerable. So when you read something like this you feel violated. These people know what they’re doing: they aim to wound you. They want to see you bleed.’

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ Jasmine had said, perhaps one glass too many of vino bringing forth veritas. ‘Man up, it’s only a review.’

  ‘Of course it’s only a review to you,’ Gareth retorted. ‘You’ve never had one, so you wouldn’t know. You’d need to have been up there on a stage to understand what I’m talking about.’

  There had been a time when this might have crushed Jasmine, to have her former aspirations thrown back in her face. That time was over.

  ‘Well, Gareth, you’ve got me there. But look at it from my point of view: once you’ve been shot at a couple of times, by somebody who is not aiming to wound, it kind of makes it hard to see what’s so violating about some wee wank at the Scotsman only giving you two stars.’

  She was developing – some might say cultivating – a reputation for being spiky and a little unsympathetic, and she had stopped worrying about whether this meant she was wounded and embittered. Instead she had decided to wear bitch and see how it fitted. It wasn’t an everyday garment, but like the leather jacket she had on for the gig it felt just right now and again, when the context called for it.

  She was okay. She was definitely okay.

  Then she saw a ghost.

  The support had finished and the seats began to fill up more while the road crew got busy dismantling their kit. People returned from the bar bearing pints in plastic tumblers, while others, arriving in time for the headliners, scanned the rows for a free spot, the seating being unreserved. Jasmine felt a growing buzz as the roadies made the final preparations: taping set-lists, draping towels, checking pedals.

  She watched a guy and a girl make their way along the row two in front, apologising cheerfully to the people having to stand up to let them past. They were around her age, both wearing T-shirts bearing the band’s name, though not identical garments. They didn’t look up as they progressed, only at the people they were shifting and occasionally at the stage, so they didn’t see Jasmine, meaning she had no way of knowing whether the guy recognised her, but she definitely knew him. Having realised he was familiar, it took her a few moments of mentally thumbing through images until she could find a background against which he fitted, but when she got there it froze her.

  His name was Scott, or possibly Sam. She didn’t quite remember that part, but she remembered that he had still been in fifth year at school, although looked older. She could remember which school (Glasgow Academy); she could remember the drainpipe jeans and Diesel-logo belt he’d been wearing; and she remembered how he kissed. It had been soft and slow, each kiss all there was and all he wanted: no wandering hands, no impatiently thrusting tongue.

  The reason the context took a while to come up was because it was so close to her current one. She had danced and chatted and eventually snogged with him the last time she’d seen Twin Atlantic play.

  It had been just before her mum got the diagnosis.

  They’d traded numbers and he’d phoned, leaving messages. She never called back.

  The lights went down and the Queen track playing on the PA was silenced, replaced by a sudden upsurge of excited screams. The band took the stage rather modestly, walking to their instruments with quiet purpose, almost as though conscious they hadn’t earned these cheers yet.

  An electric guitar picked out its first notes with delicate precision, rousing more screams of recognition, then Sam McTrusty raised his head to the mike and began to sing.

  ‘Yes, I was drunk . . .’

  It was her favourite song, one that always moved her, and the one she had most been hoping they’d play. Right then, though, it was more than moving her. She felt it wash over her. Felt a wave wash over her. Felt herself go under.

  There was something intangible about watching a band play live, some quality that could not be recreated on any format, so that the most perfect recording, reproduced on the most sophisticated equipment, would never be more than a shadow on the cave wall. Despite having listened to both albums hundreds of times, it was as though she hadn’t truly heard Twin Atlantic since that other gig, and it connected her to that time in a
way she just wasn’t ready for.

  The ghost was herself, the person she had been that night.

  And as the music played, the ghost possessed her. Suddenly she could see through that girl’s eyes again, see everything she had back then, everything she imagined was still before her.

  Everything she was about to lose.

  This wave was swamping her, rushing in over her head. She was drowning.

  She couldn’t be here. She had to get out.

  Jasmine shuffled along the row, her petite frame allowing her to squeeze past without asking people to stand up. She kept her head down, face angled towards the stage so that no one could see it.

  We never want strangers to see we are crying. Why is that? She didn’t know. All she did know was that she was so very, very much alone.

  Her mother was gone. She had no father, no boyfriend, and tonight, no friends at all.

  She was not okay.

  She managed to hide her tears until she reached the stairs, where she failed to stem the outpouring of huge, blubbing, abject, snottery and undignified sobs. She grabbed a banister for support, fearing she would collapse if she didn’t have something to hang on to.

  ‘You all right there wee yin?’ said a voice.

  She couldn’t see properly for tears. It took a moment to focus once she had wiped her eyes.

  It was Ned Untrusty. Christ, had he followed her up to the circle?

  She wanted to tell him to go away, but she could hardly answer ‘Yes, I’m fine.’

  A dozen sarcastic replies failed to reach her tongue. She felt so weak and insubstantial that he could have mopped her up and wrung her out into a bucket.

  She could hear other voices now, and became aware that house staff were gathering to enquire and assist.