Autumn and Other Months

by Alistair Shand

  September – Lunch with Mary

  The phone on my desk rang at 11:45. It was Mary. “Hi, John. Fancy going out for lunch?” I said yes. I needed a break.

  We tried to meet for lunch or a drink after work at least once a week. Then we could swap stories and offer each other support through the corporate jungle. When we had both joined the company four years before as graduate trainees, Mary and I were forced together as we knew no-one else in this Scottish provincial town. Over time, we had become close friends. We had a similar sense of humour, a similar approach to work and equal feelings of insecurity. It was always good to have someone to agree with the way you had handled something.

  We met at the main office door. Mary arrived late dressed in a sensible dark blue Marks & Spencer’s suit, the virtual uniform of the company, her long black hair blowing in the sharp autumnal wind. She had been helping one of her team with a spreadsheet. “I couldn’t leave her,” she said, “she was nearly crying about it.” That was typical of her. She often worked late or missed her lunch helping her team. She moved on. “Do I look OK?”

  I nodded. “Stunning as ever.”

  “No need for sarcasm. There’s a new place I want to try. The girls recommend it.” The girls were Mary’s team. They called themselves “girls”, but none of them would ever see 40 again. Mary had built them into a very tight team. She was their manager, but their loyalty to her sometimes verged on the maternal. In return, she was loyal to them and defended them to the hilt. I had seen her defending one of her “girls” who had been accused of some careless work by one of the senior managers– it had been a scary performance.

  “You’d trust their judgement?”

  “I’ll have to try it and then report back. They want to use for a team meal.” At Mary’s direction, their team had an endless social calendar of nights out. She called it team building.

  When we got into Mary’s old Renault Clio, she took her glasses out of her handbag. “I had to take my contacts out. They were really hurting,” she explained. It was a short drive from our out of town corporate head office to the new restaurant. It was on one of the busier shopping streets in town. Mary managed to park in a space I would not have attempted. She returned her glasses back in her handbag. She hated people other than family and close friends seeing her wearing them.

  The restaurant was better than I expected. The cuisine was vaguely Italian. The décor might have been a bit twee and the staff a bit over-zealous, but the food was tasty and was served in hearty portions. It looked the kind of place the “girls” would love.

  I told Mary about the new manager in the HR department who had been pointed out to me by one of his staff. “His nickname is ‘two-buttons-down’. It’s where he looks at female members of staff.” She suggested from personal experience a few other managers who could have earned the same nickname.

  Mary told me one of her girls had spotted “Soapy” Soutar, one of the senior managers, pushing a trolley around Tesco’s with one of the management secretaries. In our company, that was the equivalent of reading the banns. I filed the story away in my brain. Stories like that were a vital currency in office politics.

  I noticed she was wearing new earrings. They were small simple gold discs. She pushed back her long black hair so that I could see them more clearly. “My father got them at the bowling club. He bought them off a guy who said he’d got them for his daughter, but she didn’t like them. Too plain she said.” Her father often bought things from “guys at the bowling club”. Very rarely were there any formalities like receipts and guarantees. But there was always a good story behind why the owner was forced to sell at a knockdown price. It usually didn’t pay to enquire too fully into the story.

  She put down her espresso. “Oh, I haven’t told you about what happened on Sunday. I was at my parents’ house for Sunday dinner.” Mary always returned to her parents for Sunday dinner. I don’t know whether it was to recharge her batteries or to keep in contact with her real world. When she was there, she was a daughter, a sister an aunt. Not a manager. Her family didn’t care about office politics or the other matters that concerned her for the rest of the week. Or maybe it was just to enjoy her mother’s cooking. They were a close and warm family. I had been in their house a few times. It was a small and cosy terraced house in a peripheral Glasgow housing estate, much like the one where I was brought up “My father was down at the bowling club.” I nodded. Her father always went to the bowling club for a drink and a chat with his contemporaries before dinner. “My mother was in the kitchen and I was in the sitting room with Stephen and Elizabeth, my nephew and niece.” I knew the sitting room. It was cluttered with family photographs. You could trace Mary from a baby being christened to her confirmation to her graduation. “Anne, my sister, and Michael her husband were out looking at furniture.” I knew from previous conversations that Anne and Michael had recently moved into a new house.

  “My father came back early with this guy he had met at the club. He had this boy’s bike he was trying to sell. He said he’d bought it for his son and driven up with it in the back of his car from London, but his ex-wife wouldn’t let him give it to his son. So he was trying to sell it. Said he couldn’t be bothered to take it back to London. My father wanted to check it was the right size for Stephen. So Stephen went out and tried it. My father gave the guy £50, and that was Stephen racing up and down the street with a big grin on his face. He had wanted a bike for ages, but his parents couldn’t afford it with buying a new house.”

  “Half an hour later, I saw a police car coming up the street. A policeman got out and spoke to Stephen. Then he came up to the door with Stephen and the bike.”

  “The bike had been stolen from outside a house a couple of miles away. Some wee kid had left it outside his house for a minute and when he came back it was away. The policeman took the bike and put it in the boot of his car and drove off. Stephen was crying his eyes out. My father went down to the club to see the guy who sold him the bike, but he wasn’t there and no-one there knew anything about him. When Anne and her husband came back and saw the state of Stephen there was an almighty row. It made for a great family meal”

  She continued, “I don’t know how anyone could do that. There’s the wee kid whose bike got stolen. I bet he got a row from his parents. Then there’s Stephen crying his eyes out, the whole family rowing and my parents down £50.” She shook her head at the iniquity of it all. Then she took another sip of espresso and looked around the restaurant.

  Mary’s eyes narrowed. “The bastard!” Mary rarely swore. “He’s over there. The guy that sold my father the bike.” She nodded in the direction of someone behind me. “Don’t look!” She frowned. “He’s staring at me. Stuffing his face with a cream cake.” She bit her lip. Her face had gone white. I’d never seen Mary this angry before. But I knew how much she valued her family.

  She stood up. “I’m going to give him a piece of my mind and ram that cake right into his fat face.”

  “Be careful,” I cautioned. But I knew I couldn’t stop her.

  She came back a few minutes later and sat down heavily. “It wasn’t him. All the way across, I was sure it was him. He was looking at me strangely the whole way over. Then when I got there, I realised it wasn’t him. I had to pretend I was looking for the Ladies. And he kept looking at me.”

  I paid the bill – it was my turn - and we left. I glanced at the man Mary had nearly accosted. Outside, I told Mary, “Just as well you didn’t shove that cake in his face. That’s two-buttons-down, the new HR manager. It wouldn’t have been a good career move.”

  October – Autumn

  My grandmother loved birds. She had pictures of them covering every wall and every available surface had a bird ornament on it. She wasn’t a birdwatcher or an ornithologist. It was just the freedom of birds she envied. Their ability to fly and soar while we were stuck on the ground. She used to say, “When I die, I want to come back as a bird – so I can shit on everyone tha
t has shat on me in this life.” She may have seemed frail and ladylike but she knew her way round offensive language.

  She was also a woman of strong opinions. “I’m not going to an old folks home!” She would say. “God’s Waiting Room! They all sit just waiting for the call. “God will see you now!” And the rest are just happy that it wasn’t them this time.”

  When she finally admitted that the family house was too big for her, she moved to a small flat. She showed no sentimentality whatsoever about disposing off all the heavy old furniture but she retained all her bird ornaments, from the china robin my grandfather had bought her on their first date, to the scarily realistic kestrel I bought for her Christmas.

  After Grandma moved into her flat, I visited her a couple of times a week. I would do her shopping, a bit of ironing and dusting and then we would have a cup of tea, a biscuit and a chat. “Och, yer a good lad, Jack, and you make a good cup of tea,” she would say every time. Then she would launch into some amusing tale from her past. But one day I didn’t get the usual anecdote.

  “Dr Johnstone came to see me yesterday. Nice man! Doesn’t beat about the bush. I like that! Anyway, he says, “Mrs Campbell, the news isn’t good. You are a very sick woman. In fact, if I were you, I wouldn’t bother getting in any Christmas presents.” Two months, he says. I suppose, Jack, I could have wrapped up nicer for you, but you are old enough and smart enough to cope. More than your father could anyway!” My father was always one for emotional over-reaction, at least in his mother’s eyes. She sipped her tea. “Anyway, the doctor says the end is going to be pretty grim. I’ll be able to do less and less. And the pain will get worse, the doctor says. Until even the strongest drugs cant control it. But I have a plan. That’s where you come in.” She looked at me anxiously. “You’ll help me wont you?”

  “To do what?”

  “To help me end it. I don’t want to be stuck here in constant pain unable to do anything for myself. I’ve seen enough people in that state. Remember wee Mrs Brown?” I didn’t, but I nodded my head anyway. “She was a pathetic soul at the end. But that’s not for me.” She produced a small box from beneath her pillow. “The doctor gave me these pills. He said to take one when it gets really sore. But no more than four in a day. And no more than two at a time. I’m going to save some of them. For when it gets too much.” She smiled. “I think the doctor was telling me what to do.”

  I didn’t know what to say. She smiled, “You will help me, wont you?” I nodded.

  Two months later, it was time. On each visit, she had given me another pill. I put them in a a small box decorated with a supercilious owl I kept in the sideboard. It was getting so that she could hardly move and her pain was constant. “The funeral plan is in the top drawer with all the other documents,” she said. She told me that every time I visited. I helped her to sit upright on the bed so she could drink her tea. This time, as she watched some thrushes arguing on the wire outside her window I mixed some of the pills she had saved into the tea. She smiled with a familiar twinkle in her eye “This tea tastes funny!” She had a garibaldi biscuit – always her favourite. She watched the birds for a while, then lay back in her bed. “Thanks, Jim. I’ll just have a wee nap now.” Jim was my grandfather’s name.

  I couldn’t take any more. I went out into the familiar street. I could smell the burning wood of autumn and felt the first chills of approaching winter. In the sky, I saw a formation of geese preparing to fly off to warmer climes. I waved to them, just in case.