'It's no' fair,' said Mark. 'Why do you get to drive?'
'We're not driving anywhere,' I said. 'We're sitting.'
'I got the keys.'
'You're too young to drive a car.'
'That's what everyb'dy says. If you can drive you should just drive. I could get a job driving.'
'You could get a better job than that,' I said.
'Doubt it.'
The car had a terrible scent of vanilla air-freshener and something else, something bad. At one point Mark twisted round and gave an exasperated sigh. 'Jesus Christ,' he said, 'that's completely out of order.' I turned round in my seat and saw a dead, deflated bird lying on a blanket of wet newspapers.
'What's that?' I said.
'A dead seagull,' he said.
'What's it doing there?'
'One of the boys,' he said, smiling. 'I bet you it was Chubb. He'd be trying to wind Lisa up. This is his idea of a good windup.'
'But how did he get in here?' I asked.
Mark rolled his eyes. 'He's not called Chubb for nothing. He can get himself in and out of anywhere you like. Cars are no problem tae him. And he knows this car well enough.'
The bird was lying with a cold eye lighted in the dark. Its neck was soaked in blood. There was, to me, something terrible about its presence and its dirty feathers. 'That's really wicked,' I said.
'Yeah,' he said.
'Not like that. Not your sort of wicked. It's just a terrible thing to do to a living creature.'
'It's bad news, yeah,' he said. 'Some of the boys. Not my pals. Just people who live round here. It's sick. They fish off the pier and sometimes they—man, this is sick—they put chips on their hooks and cast them out to the birds, and sometimes the seagulls bite and the sick fuckers reel the gulls in and hit them with bottles.'
'You are joking, Mark.'
'No. They leave the dead ones at the pier or they throw them into the water. It's bad news, isn't it?'
'I can't believe it.'
'Chubb and the boys probably found this one. They put it here for a laugh. That's what they're like.'
We sat quiet for a moment inside the car's shadows. Mark began speaking again, but there was a new tone. He was recounting an experience, something that had happened, and he sounded altogether new as he said the words, speaking from somewhere I hadn't known and that caused him to tighten his slack manners. He spoke of being a child and going to the Auchenharvie baths. He spoke of one day in particular. It was raining that day—black clouds, he said, a long boring afternoon—Dalgarnock feeling strange, a place that seemed far away from the world. At Auchenharvie it was warm, and he said he felt great under the chlorinated water, seeing the white legs of other swimmers.
'Only white?' I said.
'Aye,' he said. 'Black people don't go to the swimming baths here. There are no black people around here anyhow. If there was, they wouldn't go to the swimming.'
'Why not?'
'How should I know?' he said. 'Black people don't like the swimming baths. They don't like dogs either. The chlorine burns the back of your throat. People dive for their rubber bands. The tannoy says: "Would swimmers wearing yellow bands please leave the pool now." The skin at the ends of your fingers gets wrinkled if you've been swimming too long. There's always shouting at the baths, and it sounds as if it's echoing inside you when you're under the water and watching the legs and swimming down.'
'Yes,' I said.
'I was sitting on the edge of the pool when I saw him.'
He was talking about his father. He remembered him coming from the changing room and standing at the metal steps. He was way fat, Mark said, the fattest man in Ayrshire. 'He knew I was coming to the swimming,' he said. 'He must have known I'd be there.'
'He didn't see you?'
'I saw him. Everybody saw him. They were all staring. He looked about and it was noisy and people were laughing at him. Doing the backstroke and laughing at him; diving in right beside him and laughing.'
Mark's father just swam through the jeers and the splashing. And Mark slipped into the water, held onto the side and dipped his face so that only his eyes peeped out of the pool. 'It was horrible,' he said. 'My dad was being shouted at and he just did the breaststroke. Even just swimming like that, because he was so fat he made waves that rolled right across and splashed my head. His face was bright red but he didn't seem bothered. I just hid from him. Imagine that was your dad.'
Mark spoke of the noise he could hear as he swam down into the depths of the pool and saw his father's body passing above his head. Like a shark's view of a passing boat, I thought. Mark got to the steps, climbed out and went to the changing room. 'I was shivering next to the lockers for ages,' he said. 'I wanted to go back and get him.'
'Why didn't you?' I said.
'They were all laughing at him.'
Even in the dimness of the car, I could see there was a look of defiant hurt in Mark's eyes. 'He used to be quite a sharp guy,' he said. 'He had all the cool gear before everybody else. He got a trial to play football for Kilmarnock one time. He used to read books and that.'
After a moment I clicked off the headlights and looked up. Stars were beginning to show above Arran and we breathed out. I thought of the distance and listened to Mark speaking, and after a while I forgot the scent of the dead bird. 'I'll take you and Lisa over to see Ailsa Craig,' I said. 'If you want to.'
'To the rock?' he said. 'Is there a boat?'
'I'm sure I can use my influence. If you want to.'
'I'd like to see it,' he said. 'Just the once.'
'Then leave it to me.'
'You're mad,' he said. He flicked a lighter on and off for a minute or so and tapped on the dashboard. 'Some people would think it weird, wouldn't they, a priest and a young guy sitting in a car?'
'I'm sure they would.'
'Well,' he said, 'that's their problem, isn't it?'
I wished suddenly that I had a good glass of wine to take away the taste of the meal and the conversations. There are days when you realise you haven't enjoyed one lovely thing, then when you do have it, as I had the company of Mark for that hour, you want something to complement the pleasure, to raise it further and make it last.
'Okay,' he said, 'I'm going back to the wedding.'
I asked him to take that thing with him, the dead bird on the back seat, and he complained before lifting it up in the newspapers and walking to the sea wall to dump it over.
'Shit, that was horrible,' he said.
'Yes.'
'Quite a cool joke, though.'
'If you say so,' I said.
He took the keys and walked away from the car, Mark going ahead, while I came behind and hesitated before crossing the road.
'Look,' I shouted, and he turned round with a strange, pleased smile on his face. Mark always seemed as if he were humouring others while gaining in his own estimation. There was never any telling what really mattered to him. I was standing at the kerb looking up at the sky and I pointed to a place above the sea.
'Look at that,' I said.
'What about it?'
'Out there,' I said. 'The bright one is the North Star.'
'Cool,' he said, before skipping up the steps of the hotel and making as if to disappear into the universe beyond the doors. He looked round in the final second and creased his brow and smiled again. 'I wonder if you can, like, see that from America,' he said.
CHAPTER FOUR
Ailsa Craig
MRS POOLE ONCE TOLD ME something one couldn't forget. She was making her bed at home one day and found a piece of paper under the mattress, dug in deep beyond the valance on her own side. The paper had writing on it, a solitary line across the middle of the page. She said the ink was faded and the writing was in Jack's hand. Her husband always wrote in capitals, and he used those poor pens that came free at the betting shop. It made her wince to remember it, but the words were very clear:
I DON'T LOVE YOU ANYMORE
She sat on the edge of the bed, s
he said, for what seemed like hours, with the piece of paper on her lap and the house looking at her. She stared at it until her vision began to go in and out, and then, standing at the window in what she called a state of shock, she wondered how long she had slept on that terrible message and why he had put it there. To make the nights more bearable for himself? To send a message through the sleeping hours to a person he couldn't speak to with honesty? Was he drunk? She told me she stayed in the bedroom considering all these things, and others too, before finally asking herself whether the great boldness of his feeling might not in fact have faded with the ink.
Her story came back to me one morning in the rectory when she handed me a letter. It said 'Crosshouse Hospital' across the top. I can't recall the letter's exact words, though I know it was badly written. It said something about steroids not performing as expected, about genetic factors, something with regard to the growth of cells, and the word 'purpura', which stuck in my mind because of its oddness and beauty. She said the letter explained what the consultant had said to her. 'I haven't told Jack,' said Mrs Poole. 'God forgive me, but I can't tell him. I don't want sympathy, and he'll just give me sympathy and that's not what I want. Do you know what I mean, Father?'
'Yes,' I said. 'I think I do know.'
She had held onto the letter for a number of weeks and now her hand was shaking as she took it back from me and wiped her eyes. Over her shoulder, through the landing window, the oak trees were showing large green leaves and the early morning appeared to broaden over the fences. She had breast cancer and something in her kidney; she spoke of an operation, of convalescence and time off work. The way she spoke brought to mind an instant panorama of snow-topped chalets and sanatoria. I thought of a bald-headed Nijinsky practising his famous entrechat in the Alpine evenings.
'They are trying things,' said Mrs Poole, 'but these drugs don't do anything.'
'You'll need peace and quiet,' I said.
She looked puzzled and seemed to struggle for a moment to find her bearings at the foot of the stairs.
'Give it time,' I said. I knew then it meant nothing to say such things, but the right words escaped me. I looked down at my rucksack by the door and was overwhelmed for a moment by the smell of furniture polish.
'Life's short,' she said.
'Come on, Mrs Poole.'
'It's been coming to a head these last three months,' she said. 'And God knows where I'm headed now.'
The school bus was beeping outside, but I asked her if she would like to say a prayer, and she said she would. So I dipped a hand into the water font and we sat on the stairs and said three Hail Marys. We stood back up and I could see a person wearing a baseball cap through the frosted glass of the porch door. I hugged her and said that God would find a way, and her shoulder softened as I placed it under my chin, a smell of figs and almonds rising from the wool of her jumper.
'That's just as good as a prayer,' she said.
It never escaped me that Mrs Poole considered my general tactility to be yet another aspect of my falseness, and it seems now, when I look back, that she reproached herself for responding to it. I believe she observed the impossibility of sexual interest on my part, but we each found it hard not to play sometimes the parts of man and wife, even if only for vivid moments engraved more with pain than pleasure. Only once that year did I stop inside my own thoughts to consider her differently. We had gone to Glasgow to buy chairs from one of those superstores, and we passed through the aisles on either side of a massive trolley, stopping to look at lamps and bookshelves and little bedrooms with bunk beds that accused us with their multicoloured pillows.
'They have such nice things nowadays,' she said.
For a brief moment that day, I had thought of the children we might have made together and the father I might have become. I saw myself lifting a child up to the top tier of that plywood bunk bed; I saw myself pulling up the duvet, kissing the child, and Mrs Poole standing at the door with a mug of tea in her hand and the child's trousers under her arm. How absurd. It is the only time I have ever thought of fatherhood. I believe it was the impossible colours and the atmosphere in Ikea: it kindled a notion of another life, a life of domestic contentment and heart-shaped lights. It must have touched Mrs Poole too, because we went downstairs to a lunch of meatballs and chips and she told me the story of her only son.
'He lives with my sister, Irene,' she said. 'I don't know if that was the right decision, but it was the decision I made. He is a good-looking boy. I don't see him much. He has his three cousins and he calls them his brothers and Irene is good to him.'
'But why?'
'Simple,' she said. 'I couldn't bear to bring him up with his father the way he is, the drink and everything.'
'That was the only reason?'
'That's a big enough reason. It is to me anyhow. Jack talks like he loves families. But he only likes them at a distance. He doesn't actually know how to be in a family. So that was it. I wasn't having the boy suffer from all that, a father who didn't know how to be a father, a family full of disappointment and blame. So my sister took him.'
I closed my hand over Mrs Poole's, and she let it rest there for a second, moving her fingers in compliance.
'In life,' she said, 'you've just got to do what you can to improve the situation.'
She pushed the lunch plate away from her that day. She bent into her shopping bag to examine a packet of night lights she had bought and never mentioned her son again.
The young people were banging on the rectory door.
'Hurry the fuck up!' shouted Mark.
'Really,' said Mrs Poole. 'You shouldn't let those youngsters speak like that around you.' I opened the door and Mark was smiling amid all his stripes and hoods.
'Morning all,' he said, tipping his cap with a stick of lip balm. His appearance was always very sudden; as soon as he presented himself all the oxygen seemed to be swallowed into the vacuum he created. I could feel Mrs Poole becoming rattled at my side.
'I hope you crowd are going to behave today,' she said. 'It's a treat, Mark McNulty. Do you realise that? Father David is taking time out of his own work to give you all a nice time.'
'Definitely, Mrs P. A day off school and everything.'
'It's Mrs Poole to you.'
'Whatever.'
'Okay,' she said. 'Just mind yourselves.'
Before joining Mark in the lane, I went into the sitting room to lift my mobile from the piano, and I spent a minute listening to my messages. One was from Father Michael, the priest at St Margaret's in Irvine, telling me about a restoration and repairs meeting the following week. The second was from my mother. She always spoke to the answering service as if she were giving a small public speech, uttering things very deliberately and quite formally, seeming never to believe that the only likely listener was me. She said something about the goodness of a certain Lebanese red wine, reasonably priced, that she'd found in the buffet car of a train and which was now available in half bottles. And she asked whether I might want to join her for a morning at the Royal Botanic Gardens, where some interesting new items had just appeared in the glasshouses. After listening to these messages, I scrolled down my inbox and found three texts that had come from Mark a day or two before. They had come roughly forty minutes apart:
'80,000 Celtic supporters in Seville. First final in 33 yrs.
Come on da Celts! Come on da Bhoys!'
'Kissing telly. Larsson scores. Estadio Olimpico total
uproar. Please say prayers. Have 2 win.'
'We got beat 3–2 in extra time. Did u say a fuckin prayer
or not? Hail, hail the Celts! We will never walk alone.'
Lisa Nolan clapped her hands as we passed Ayr and began singing in that show-offy, reaction-dependent way of hers.
'All the ladies in the house, yeh, yeh! All the ladies in the house.'
'What are you talking about, Lisa?'
'I'm singing my thang, Papa,' she said, laughing. 'All the babies go crazy when I get m
y milkshake on.'
'You do talk some infernal rubbish,' I said.
'She's the money,' said Mark.
'Too right, nigger,' she said. All the ladies in the house!'
On the way to Girvan to pick up the boat for Ailsa Craig, I tried to read a book at the back of the bus, while the four youngsters—Mark, Lisa, a boy called Colin and a girl with black nail varnish, Michelle—talked about chemist shops and their contents, each of them assuming I wasn't listening or couldn't understand what they were talking about. But I kept my head down and took in every word.
'Don't be daft,' said Mark. 'They keep them in the drawers. You have to ken what you're looking for. Diazepam under "D". Always in a big grey plastic jar.'
'Same as Valium,' said Colin.
'Yellow but,' said Mark. 'The Xanax comes in packets.'
Lisa was swigging from her can. 'They're called Roches,' she said.
'Like on a joint?' Colin asked.
'No, you fucken idiot,' said Mark. 'That's the name of the firm that makes them. The big factory in Dairy.'
'Tell him about Phenos,' said Lisa. I saw him rolling his eyes, indicating to her to keep her voice down.
'Phenobarbitone,' he whispered. 'Make sure you get the 60 mg. And try for Napps. What's their right name?'
'Dunno,' said Lisa. 'Morphine something.'
'Or look on the shelf,' said Mark. 'Try and find Codeine Phosphate Syrup. It's mad. Comes in a litre bottle.'
Lisa laughed towards the ceiling of the bus and put her hand over her mouth. 'Watch for Ritalin,' she said. 'It's as good as E but speedier. Watch. Sometimes it's in a locked drawer.'
The janitor turned the radio down and his eyes appeared in the rear-view mirror. 'What's all the whispering for?'
'We're not doing nuttin,' said Lisa. 'Nothing,' she added.
'You better not start any of your carry-on today,' he said. 'I know what you two are like, and if there's any carry-on during this trip, I've told Father David just to call me and I'm taking you right back up to the school.'
'I hope you're a good swimmer,' said Mark. The janitor craned round from the wheel and bared his teeth.
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