Butcher

by Campbell Armstrong

  Nine, sir. Dorcus had thrown coal into the grate. His hands were black.

  I never seem to remember birthdays, not even my son’s, the Judge said, and stared at him in a forlorn way. I live in the afterlife, Dorcus, which is my tragedy. And, unfortunately, yours. I have regrets.

  It was the only time in Dorcus’s recollection that the Judge had ever spoken from his heart, and he’d done so uneasily, quickly. He’d replaced his spectacles and picked up his pen and resumed writing, dismissing the boy.

  As a father, Judge Dysart was as distant, as cold, as the North Star.

  Dorcus rose, left the room, shut the door. Why did he come in here anyway? What did he expect to discover – memories of warmth and affection?

  He thought about the boy in the tree. That stupid-faced boy with his moronic taunts. Forget him. Forget them, all the Slabbites and their spawn.

  Tonight he’d go out.

  He left the study and climbed the stairs.

  He usually moved past the cold spot quickly, but this time he paused when he heard a very faint conversation, voices at a distance. The sentences were splintered. And footsteps, always footsteps, but he could never tell where they came from. He smelled the essence of rose oil his mother used. He heard the tick of the thin gold wrist watch that had lain on her bedside table, a soft sound, like a fingernail against an eggshell.

  He heard his mother’s voice whispering in his ear: Dorcus, let me kiss you, my dear son …

  The chill on those anaemic lips, the smell of dying on her breath.

  He thrust himself beyond the cold, reached the top of the stairs, looked back down.

  There was nothing, there was never anything to see. It was as if he passed briefly through a zone where he didn’t belong, a place where the dead, for arcane reasons of their own, assembled. A congregation of inchoate echoes, dissonant phrases, gutted sentences.

  Hauntit.

  Or it’s my head, inside my head, all of it. He didn’t want to think that. It never happened when Nurse Payne was here. She comforted him. They comforted each other. She’d been deep inside his heart where nobody had been before. Sometimes in her company he felt the world was populated only by him and her, and everyone else had perished in a catastrophe.

  The telephone in his bedroom rang. He rushed to answer it. Maybe it was her. He threw himself on his narrow bed and stretched out for the receiver on the bedside table.

  ‘H-hello,’ he said.

  ‘Dorcus?’ A woman’s voice. Not Nurse Payne’s.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My name’s Glorianna and I’ve got plans for you. Wednesday night, say six-thirtyish, Dorcus?’

  ‘W-wait …’

  But she’d hung up.

  11

  Perlman had fallen asleep on the sofa and his body was stiff from lying in a confined space. He checked the room, a hangover-like blur. He’d taken out his contacts and couldn’t remember where he’d left them. The pain in his shoulder throbbed, what an effort to get up. He opened a drawer in the sideboard and groped for his old Buddy Holly glasses and felt weird wearing them again, like a harness on his face. At least he could see. He walked to the front door in his red and black plaid dressing-gown. A few scraps of mail lay on the floor and as he bent to pick them up his spine creaked like the mast of a sailing-ship.

  Junk mail. Dross. Nothing from the peripatetic Miriam.

  A key turned in the lock and Betty McLatchie, looking drained, came into the hallway.

  ‘Morning Lou, sleepless night?’

  ‘Does it show?’

  ‘A wee bit. I’ll make coffee. I could use a gallon myself. Like the glasses. Will you sing “Peggy Sue” for me?’

  ‘Me? I’ve got a voice that would frighten children.’

  He followed her into the kitchen. She set her bag on the table and she shook the kettle to check there was water inside. She turned on the gas and struck a match. The flame exploded – whoosh, blue and yellow.

  ‘I’ve only got instant guff,’ he said. He opened a cabinet and found a jar of Maxwell House and two mugs, which he placed beside the stove.

  ‘How do you take it?’ she asked.

  ‘No milk, no sugar. Straight and hot.’

  She spooned coffee into the mugs. She took a cigarette from her bag. ‘Sorry I had to leave yesterday.’

  ‘How many times in your life do you see a severed hand?’

  ‘Once is enough.’

  He nodded at her cigarette packet on the table. ‘You mind?’

  ‘Help yourself.’

  Perlman took one of her Benson & Hedges, and lit it from the flame on the stove. Betty poured two coffees. Perlman sat, reached for a mug and warmed his hands around it. He looked at Betty. She had dark circles under her eyes, and the eyes had shed their blue lustre.

  She laid her cigarette in the ashtray in a tired manner, and blew on the surface of her coffee.

  ‘No word from Kirk?’ he asked.

  ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘I’ll get on to it today.’ He touched the back of Betty’s hand, a gesture of comfort, something to say I’ll do what I can.

  She smiled at him uncertainly. ‘I talked to a couple of his pals last night. They don’t know where he is.’

  Perlman sipped his coffee, tasteless shite. His shoulder pinged. He’d take a painkiller. ‘Leave it with me. If I happen to need a photo of Kirk, can you get one for me?’

  She opened her purse. ‘Here.’

  She handed him a snapshot so quickly that Perlman was caught off guard, as if he’d been surprised by some dexterous sleight of hand. He hadn’t expected her to be carrying a pic. He took it, studied Kirk’s image. He wasn’t handsome, he could be any face passing on the street, one you’d never look at twice. Where Betty’s face was lively and open, Kirk’s was a hard read. This was Betty’s beloved son, this brown-haired, brown-eyed young man with a sullen air.

  He said, ‘I’m sure I won’t need this.’ Softening the edge of the situation. ‘In case. Just in case. For my own use.’

  ‘Right, I understand. I better get started on the kitchen now.’ She finished her coffee, crushed out her cigarette, rinsed her cup in the sink.

  ‘You sure you’re up to working today?’

  ‘I want to. I need to.’

  He rose. Busy day ahead. He was quickened by the prospect of activity. As he got up he became uncomfortably aware of his pyjamas under the dressing-gown, a motif of horses’ heads on a dark green background. What had prompted him to buy these ridiculous pyjamas? Wait, a gift, that was it, something his Aunt Marlene had given him a couple of Chanukahs ago. She still thought he was a boy. Wee Louis. Here’s a penny, go treat yerself to some toffee and watch the traffic. She was almost ninety and her mind often wandered in the distressed gardens of memory.

  ‘I better get dressed,’ he said. ‘Who’d be seen dead in these?’

  ‘They’re not you, are they?’

  ‘Definitely not.’ He went upstairs to his bedroom, clambering over the newspaper stacks at the top of the stairs. He’d meant to bring them down, dump them. Slipped his mind. He needed to focus. He found a blue and white checked shirt in his wardrobe and a pair of blue trousers. The scuffed brown shoes he chose didn’t go well with blue. He rummaged for a tie, gave up: I need a tie?

  He entered the bathroom, saw his contacts on the edge of the bathtub – how did they get abandoned here? You leave things in places where you always forget them. How much of anyone’s daily life is passed hunting contacts, glasses, other everyday things? He took off his glasses, inserted the contacts carefully, confronted his image. The treadmarks on his face. His life was inscribed in every whorl and wrinkle. This face had been punched, battered, shot at. He splashed soapy hot water over his cheeks and ran wet hands through his hair. To shave or not to? Forget it. He brushed his teeth quickly, spat. He picked up a roll of floss. He despised floss. He squeezed the roll as if to choke it. ‘Who invented you, eh? What dickhead dentist with time on his hands came up with the idea of
waxed thread to jerk between the gaps? You wee gum-bleeder monstrosity.’

  He tossed the hateful floss into the waste paper basket.

  Reconfigured Perlman, prepped for the day.

  Downstairs, Betty was already scrubbing the surface of the gas stove. She worked energetically, sleeves rolled up. The skin round her elbows was glossy and cracked into little lines.

  He hesitated in the doorway, juggling puzzles. Caffeine lit small brush-fires in the canyons. The hand. The missing son. Miriam. The clown. Such an accumulation of enigmas. His brain was warming up. Day one, new life, zoom.

  ‘I’ll be back whenever,’ he said. ‘If I hear anything, I’ll call. And if you get hungry—’

  ‘I’ll know not to look in the fridge.’

  Perlman smiled. ‘Some people who opened that fridge were never seen again.’

  ‘I brought a sandwich with me.’

  ‘Foresight,’ and he stepped into the hallway, grabbed his coat, left the house.

  Halfway down Dalness Street, streaming along in his vermilion Ka, he realized he’d forgotten his painkiller.

  He turned along Shettleston Road. A very cold sun hung in the sky and a chill wind cavorted between the tenements. There was a mean quality about this area, a desperation, a shabbiness. A few bleak bars, a bakery or two, a grocer, a fruit shop, everything rundown.

  Break out the bright paint, Christ’s sake. Get some fucking pride in your community. Perlman, civic booster. There was no energy here to provide a makeover. Listlessness prevailed. A drugged girl in soiled clothes lay comatose in a filthy doorway. Weary teenage mothers, resigned to a future promising only more babies and little affection, wheeled prams along the pavement.

  He passed a pool hall where a coven of hard men, pretending to be immune to the cold, stood bare-armed in the doorway, displaying their vivid blue tattoos. They sneered at Perlman. Their inbred radar scanned him: they knew he was polis.

  His shoulder ached as if pinched in big crabclaws. On Duke Street, which connected the East End with the city centre, he looked for a chemist’s. It was a long street of grey-brown tenements, rinkydink shops, stuttering buses blowing smoke. A sad anachronistic horse, blinkered and in obvious need of feelgood drugs – Perlman instantly bonded with the poor trudging animal – hauled a cart crammed with mismatched furniture held in place by crisscrossing ropes.

  In new Glasgow, a daguerreotype of the old.

  He parked on a double yellow line and jumped out, hurrying inside a chemist’s, where he chanced his arm and asked if he could obtain some pethidine without prescription, a request sternly rejected by a pinched-mouth lady in a hairnet behind the counter. Perlman fumed under his breath and settled for Solpadeine with codeine and flamboyantly tossed two down his throat in front of the woman: fuck your scripts, hen, I don’t need em.

  He thought about stopping at Coia’s café for some decent coffee, changed his mind. The air from Tennents’ Brewery, below the Necropolis where crosses and obelisks rose in the sky, was lushly bitter with the scent of hops. If the wind was right, you could get stewed on these fumes. The Great Eastern Hotel loomed up, once a famous flophouse, now a dark shell slated for conversion to flats. Old cigarette factories, abandoned churches, shutdown schools – they were all being converted to flats. Flats, flats, flats.

  Glasgow was Flat City.

  He drove past the blackened edifice of the Royal Infirmary, where he’d been taken immediately after the shooting. He remembered waking hooked up to a drip, the excruciating pain, a sourpussed nurse miserly with the pethidine. Nurses, pharmacists – oh, he could get a nice wee rant going about how they hoarded all the good drugs, and doled out a few only when they were obligated.

  He finally arrived in the area of Central Station and found a parking place in Wellington Street. He stuck a coin in a meter and walked, with the wind against him, a couple of blocks to the station. Scullion was waiting for him at the fruit and nut stand in the concourse. He had a bag of Trail Mix, which Lou considered a fancy-schmancy name for parakeet chow. Trail Mix, let’s all hike this way in our big tackety boots, dudes.

  Scullion had a look like a ruined crumpet. He stuck the bag of Trail Mix in his pocket. ‘Why the fuck did you phone my house so late last night? Madeleine asks me what’s the big urgency, why is Lou calling at 2 a.m.?’

  ‘Two a.m. That late? I swear I didn’t know the time, Sandy.’

  ‘A 2 a.m. phone call unnerves my wife … I swear to fuck, Perlman, there are moments I’d like to throttle you. You never know the time. In all the years I’ve been associated with you, I’ve never seen you wear a watch or carry any kind of timepiece. You go through life not knowing the hour, and sometimes you don’t even know what day it is.’

  ‘Aye, well, I’ve got a genetic inner-clock malfunction,’ Perlman said, trying to ease the hostility in Sandy’s voice. He pictured Maddie waking, irked by the interruption. Scullion was angry because Maddie was angry. Probably the two kids and the fucking cat were angry because Maddie was angry.

  ‘Everything is what you want when you want it.’

  ‘You believe that?’

  Scullion wandered off without answering. He was a few steps ahead of Perlman and crossing the concourse. People rushed to catch trains to places like Bogston, Williamswood. Places Out There, where Perlman never went. Beyond the pale. There was hurry, and the clatter of heels on platforms, loudspeaker announcements. The train now standing at Platform 4 is the Interplanetary Express to Mars …

  ‘I could get scalped, Lou. You don’t ever think about that, do you?’

  ‘So you feel you’re fraternizing with the enemy?’

  ‘I’ve got a lot on my plate right now—’

  ‘Plate? Aw, send in the clichés. Tell me the last thing you need is me becoming another turnip on this crowded plate of yours. Is this a preamble to a brush-off, Sandy?’ He saw a look of fierce annoyance on Scullion’s face and wished he could take back the words he’d just uttered. The instant leap into sarcasm – ah, he was pissed off with himself, pissed off with certain irrepressible elements in his own nature.

  ‘Do you think I’d just drop you, Lou? I’m sorely tempted.’

  Perlman made an extravagant gesture of appeasement. ‘Forget what I said. I’m jumpy. Here, let me buy you a coffee, maybe a Danish, a peace-offering,’ and he pushed open the door of a coffee shop, where rich espresso scents magnetized him, but Scullion kept moving away, striding toward the timetable boards.

  Perlman shrugged, went after him. ‘So coffee’s out.’

  ‘I don’t feel like sitting.’ Scullion stopped, leaned against one of the timetable boards. ‘Mary Gibson had a meeting with Tay this morning about you.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He doesn’t want you back.’

  Perlman tried to hide his disappointment. ‘Predictable. He was at the end of the fucking queue when they were handing out grey matter. By the time they got to Tay all they had left was pinhead oatmeal.’ OK, he’d guessed it was coming, he’d foreseen Tay’s response, but he’d elected to look on the positive side for once: hope makes you vulnerable, that’s the drawback. ‘That bastard Tay’s barring me from the investigation of this hand, which incidentally I didn’t have to report. This same hand God knows I should have kept to myself.’

  ‘Kept to yourself? I’ve never heard anything so daft.’

  ‘So I’m daft? Perlman: madman of Pitt Street.’

  ‘Christ, you’ve been girning since you got here.’ Scullion imitated a man playing a violin. ‘One thing about you I always admired was your resilience.’

  ‘OK, I had my hopes up.’

  Scullion moved again like a man who wants to be alone to compose his feelings. He entered a chemist’s, and Perlman followed. Scullion scrutinized the shampoos. Trying to be of some assistance, Perlman said, ‘I recommend this,’ and he indicated a bottle of coal tar.

  Scullion ignored him, picked up Head & Shoulders and carried it to the cashier, paid for it, went back outside. ‘Do you
want to hear what I have to say?’

  ‘If it’s not about clocks.’

  ‘Promise to keep a padlock on your tongue.’

  ‘Scout’s honour.’

  ‘You were never a scout, Perlman.’

  ‘I’ll show you the badge I got for tracking stoats.’

  ‘Stoats my arse. Where do you come up with stuff like that?’

  ‘My brain’s cursed.’

  Scullion rolled his eyes. ‘Sid Linklater’s estimate, the hand was severed about two to three months ago. Neat cut by saw. A pro job.’

  Perlman listened with the intensity of an eavesdropper even as he tried to imagine somebody entering his house and leaving the bag. Let’s give Perlman a hand: hardyhar, a bad joke.

  ‘What about fingerprints?’

  ‘The bag’s clean. Sid’s working on the hand, which is in a serious state of decomposition, and impossible even to ascribe gender.’

  Perlman considered this. No gender.

  Scullion looked at his watch, making a big play of it, shoving back the sleeve of his coat and baring the watch. ‘You fancy flying solo, don’t you? Detective Sergeant Biggles, watch his jetstream. I know you.’

  Perlman poker-faced Scullion.

  ‘I can’t condone it, Lou. But remember this – I don’t want you keeping anything back that you might come across. And I don’t want it known I’m feeding you. Clear?’

  ‘Screw my head to a plank of wood and tweezer my toenails out, I’d say nothing.’

  ‘One last thing. Don’t you ever imagine I’m not on your side. But that’s not a licence to call me in the dead of night.’

  ‘I’ll get a watch, I swear.’ He thought, I’d only lose it.

  ‘Why do you make everything so bloody difficult at times?’

  ‘When was I ever difficult?’

  ‘Every bloody chance you get.’ He edged away from Lou just as a gang of travellers rushed past, scurrying for a train about to depart.

  ‘You want to do dinner some night next week?’

  ‘Dinner? You think Maddie will lay out the welcome mat?’

  ‘She’s always quick to forgive. And you know what we’ll be eating, don’t you?’