Butcher

by Campbell Armstrong

  Chuck slid into the back.

  Mathieson said, ‘I’m still chasing gypsies. Not a sausage yet.’

  Chuck jammed his hands into the pockets of his camel’s hair coat. ‘Where is she.’

  ‘She’ll turn up.’

  Chuck, fighting anxiety, said nothing.

  32

  Betty McLatchie’s sleep had been shallow. No calming black sea had come to claim her, despite the bottle of Chilean red she’d drunk, and a couple of Dalmane tossed back. She rose unsteadily, glanced at the bedside clock: nine forty-five. Morning, evening. Did it matter?

  Her throat was dry and she felt she was listing at a peculiar angle. She pulled on a long unflattering woollen robe and put on her slippers and left her small darkened bedroom. From the living room window she saw streetlights glow. So it was night, not morning. She switched on a table lamp, blinked. Traffic rattled past along London Road. She drew the curtains.

  The doorbell rang.

  She hoped it wasn’t another neighbour with flowers or words of solace or oh my God a homebaked cake. Why did they feel they had to bring food anyway. They knew she wasn’t going to sit down and stuff herself with sponge cake or rhubarb pie. Kindness, simple human kindness motivated them, and she was touched, she really was. But even so she was reluctant to open the door and admit another face white with shock and sympathy.

  She wouldn’t have minded if it was Perlman. He’d been so kind to her earlier, walking with her in the park, taking her arm, saying little – his presence was comforting. He had a quality she liked. More than just sympathy, an unexpected gentleness. He looked as if he was forever on the edge of a gruff mood, but that wasn’t the real man.

  She knew that much.

  She didn’t recognize the young woman on her doorstep for a moment. Her mind needed time for memories to slot into place. Slowing down, sluggish, wine, medication, grief. It was a fuck of a concoction.

  ‘Betty,’ the woman said.

  ‘Annie?’ Betty was surprised. She lost her bearings, time collapsed around her. How long was it since she’d seen Annie Cormack? Years, how many years, she couldn’t calculate.

  ‘Have I changed that much, Betty?’

  ‘No, no, love, it’s me, I was out like a light, and I’m fuzzy-heided. Come on in, come in, oh it’s so good to see you—’

  ‘I can come back another—’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ and she hugged Annie for a time, then led her inside the sitting room, thinking the light from the lamp was just about right. Stronger illumination she couldn’t take. She must look as haggard as she felt.

  Annie, slender little thing, kept a tight hold of Betty’s hand. ‘I had to come. I saw it on TV. It’s so … oh Christ, unbelievable. What can I do? There must be something I can do.’

  What can I do? They all said that. All the sad-faced neighbours. And then they all said, You think of anything, let us know.

  She wanted to tell them, Do this for me, resurrect my boy.

  She kept to herself the gruesome details of Kirk’s death. Why impose them on others, on well-wishers who were shocked to know he’d been murdered, but not by the way he’d been mutilated – which hadn’t been broadcast on TV or in the newspapers? Yet.

  Annie and Betty sat on a colossal sofa Betty had bought at a going-out-of-business sale. It was unfashionable, beige with a big floral print, and it was a bugger to move, but it was satisfyingly comfortable. You could lose yourself in its depths.

  ‘I always cared for him, Betty.’

  ‘I know, I know. Sometimes things just don’t work out.’

  Annie was so pretty, Betty thought. She always had been. Now she was even more so, but with an authority to her looks. She’d grown up. One time, Betty had hoped that Annie and Kirk would go the distance – but Annie drifted in other directions. It happened.

  Annie said, ‘I heard he got married.’

  ‘He chose the wrong one.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Betty had seen daughter-in-law Debbie somewhere during the blur of the afternoon, when people were coming and going. Debbie was tearful and crumpled. She didn’t stay long. Bereavement suited her equine face. She’d want to do the whole widow thing, black clothes and a veil with a tragic inconsolable air.

  Annie, dressed in baggy black pants, black sneakers and a rainproof black jacket with big pockets and a hood that hung at her back, played nervously with a tiny lace-edged hankie she took from her black leather purse. All this blackness – Annie had always preferred bright colours in the old days. She was uneasy, but Betty didn’t ask why. Probably the situation made her tense. The death of Kirk, flashes of the past, and coming back to this flat when she probably thought she never would.

  Betty felt herself space out, seeing the room and not seeing it. She was lost in a ball of lamplight reflected in the panel of the glass display case where she kept her good china and some other possessions dear to her, including a framed photo of her and Kirk taken on the beach at Saltcoats when he was about two, a tousled plump-faced boy in baggy swimming-trunks saddled on a stubborn donkey.

  Annie went to the cabinet. She paused once, as if she felt pain in her leg.

  ‘You OK?’ Betty asked.

  ‘I pulled a stupid muscle at my exercise class. Sometimes it twinges. It’s getting better.’ She looked at the picture of Kirk. ‘He was a wee charmer, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Aye, he was. I remember he couldn’t get that bloody animal to move. Kicked it, shouted, even whispered in its pointy ears, but the donkey was going nowhere. He couldn’t say donkey. The word came out as denka. Denka, giddy-up, giddy-up, denka.’

  Annie came back to join her on the couch. Betty patted her hand. She felt the need to keep a conversation going in banal everyday words, safe words that didn’t have depth-charges buried in them. ‘How long has it really been?’

  ‘Four years and a bit.’

  ‘That long? Where does time go? How are you doing? Bring me up to date.’

  ‘Oh, getting along.’

  ‘Working?’

  ‘I do a bit of this, a bit of that.’

  Betty wondered what this meant. She didn’t pry. ‘So are you still living in The Drum?’

  ‘No. Kelvinbridge. Up near the top of Belmont Street. Dead posh, so it is.’ Annie delivered this, not in a boastful way, but as if she were ridiculing the neighbourhood for its airs and graces, and herself along with it.

  Betty said, ‘It’s very nice there.’

  ‘Aye if you like cheese shops and fancy French pastries.’

  Betty still couldn’t get over how strange it was to see Annie again. She hadn’t even known Annie still lived in Glasgow. Twice she imagined she’d seen her on the street, but it was somebody else both times.

  ‘Your parents, how are they doing?’

  ‘Dad retired. Mum’s busy as ever.’

  ‘I can’t remember what your mother does.’

  ‘She delivers flowers. And Dad mopes, feeling old and useless.’

  Betty waited a second before she asked, ‘So is there somebody special in your life?’

  ‘There was somebody.’ A strange look crossed Annie’s face. Betty thought it was indescribable, in part resentment, in part trepidation. ‘Men can be so bloody disappointing. They’re like weans. They want you to do things you don’t want to do.’

  ‘Aye and throw a fit when you don’t.’

  Annie said, ‘Can I get you something to drink?’

  ‘You remember where it’s kept?’

  ‘Unless you’ve moved it.’

  ‘I’ll have a wee glass of the vino if there’s any. Wait, I should go if your leg hurts—’

  ‘It’s nothing.’ Annie disappeared into the kitchen. Betty heard the rattle of glasses, a cupboard door opening on a squeaky hinge.

  ‘I found some red and some white.’ Annie carried two glasses. ‘What’s your preference?’

  ‘You choose.’

  Annie gave her the red and said, ‘I was just thinking Kirk alw
ays liked movies.’

  ‘His great passion.’

  ‘We’d see a film and we’d come back here and sit in your kitchen and drink your wine.’

  ‘So that’s where it all went,’ Betty said.

  Annie smiled. ‘It didn’t matter if I fancied doing something else, he dragged me off to the cinema every chance he got. Always those action things, aeroplane hijack flicks, every one the same as the last. He thought they were the berrs. We used to come out trying to imitate Yanks. He’d say, “Let’s kick ass”. And I’d come back, “Hey whaddya say we go chill out wid a coupla brewskies”.’ Annie’s impersonation was good. She laughed very quietly at the memory, but a sombre note lay submerged beneath the laugh.

  Reconstructing Kirk. Fleshing out the dead. Betty put her glass down. She started to cry.

  Annie hugged her. ‘There, there.’

  Betty said, ‘I’ll be OK.’

  Annie didn’t release her. She seemed to want the connection as much for her own sake as Betty’s. Annie’s shoulders shook. She sobbed quietly.

  Betty stroked her back. ‘Ssshhh, sssshhh.’

  ‘It shouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘I know, love.’

  Annie drew back from Betty, and blew her nose into her hankie, and when she looked at Betty again her eyes were blurred with tears and her mascara was like black wax melting. ‘Oh Christ, I’m supposed to comfort you. And here I am … dammit. I’m useless at this, Betty. If I’d married him—’

  ‘Oh, don’t even think that.’

  ‘I had other ideas, such big ideas, I wanted to make something out of my life—’

  ‘And Kirk was happy enough just getting along from day to day.’

  ‘He was sweet, considerate—’

  ‘But no ambition.’

  ‘Who says ambition’s such a fucking great thing anyway?’

  Betty was surprised by the sudden vehemence in Annie’s voice. She sipped her drink and looked inside the glass at the purple disc of wine shimmering. ‘I don’t know about great, but my old ambition was to be a backup singer. I wanted to stand behind the guys and go ooobie do-wap-do.’

  Annie crumpled her hankie. ‘You went to Woodstock. I just remembered that when I came in tonight. The pictures in the hall.’

  ‘Ah but those pictures don’t tell the whole story.’ Betty plucked a cigarette from her pack of B&H and lit it. Her fingers shook so badly she was embarrassed. She’d smoked a lot today. She’d drunk too much coffee. ‘Some other time.’ She looked at Annie fondly, remembering better times. ‘He once told me, “Ma, I’m arse over elbow in love with this girl.” He’d been drinking and he’d slipped into one of those God’s honest truth moments. Then he said you’d found somebody else.’

  ‘I thought I had.’

  ‘He always felt he couldn’t compete—’

  ‘He was so good to me, Betty.’

  ‘But the new fella turned your head. Was it love?’

  ‘I don’t know what love is. It’s not all flowers and gifts, I know that.’ Annie sounded bitter. Betty had never considered her as bitter or sour in any way; the break-up with the boyfriend had affected her. She wanted to ask but thought: I’ll mind my own business.

  ‘Kirk was never romantic, Annie.’

  ‘And how would you know that? I could tell you a few things.’ Annie nudged Betty’s knee, smiled thinly, and then dabbed her ruined eye make-up with the hankie. ‘Do I look like a washed-out rag?’

  ‘I’m the washed-out rag, pet.’

  Memories then tears. Was this the cycle of moods ahead? Betty finished her drink. She tilted her head against the back of the sofa, sighed long. Somehow you had to find yourself again. If you could. If you could put a finger on a place and say, This is me.

  ‘Listen, want me to spend the night?’ Annie asked.

  ‘That’s awfy sweet of you, Annie.’

  ‘I could sleep here on the sofa. I’d like that.’

  ‘I’ll be OK. Really.’

  ‘Seriously, I’m happy to do it.’ Annie looked like an eager child. ‘We’ll sit up and chatter about the old days.’

  Betty thought Annie’s persistence probably rose from her concern, her willingness to be useful, but there was something just a little desperate in the way she asked – as if she was the one bereaved and in need of company. Betty considered the prospect of more hours spent dredging the past, every square inch of Kirk and Annie’s lost love excavated, and more wine drunk. She liked Annie, she always had, but if she lingered it could only mean further reminiscences – and when these were exhausted they’d be recycled.

  The doorbell rang. Annie jumped a little. She wants it to be just her and me, Betty thought. No outsiders, no strangers. Then it struck her: Annie’s lonely, she needs to be here.

  ‘I better see who that is, love.’ Betty hauled herself out of the sofa and went out into the hallway, where she passed under the famous old pictures of herself at Woodstock – coloured, fogged by time. That bright smile, the long hair centre-parted, the loud floral blouse and the mini-skirt up to here and the knee-high boots; youthful, you sexy beast. Hello world. A young girl who was ready to seize experience by the scruff. And she had. Jesus she had.

  She opened the front door.

  Perlman stood outside. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Lou, I wasn’t expecting …’ She reached up and adjusted the twisted lapel of his overcoat. She couldn’t help herself. She felt silly – maternal, but not entirely that. Somebody has to care for this man.

  He appeared not to notice her rearrangement of his clothing. ‘I just wanted to see how you’re doing,’ and with a shy movement he produced a bunch of flowers he’d been hiding behind his back. ‘For you.’

  ‘Oh Lou.’ She took the flowers, a mix of carnations, a half dozen roses, a wedge of ferns. She suspected he wasn’t a flower-giver generally, if ever.

  ‘Are they OK? Do you like them?’ He looked so hopeful.

  ‘They’re beautiful.’ She sniffed them. They had barely any scent. She’d never tell him that. Anyway, how long since a man had brought her flowers?

  ‘I can exchange them if—’

  ‘What for? Don’t be daft. I love them.’ She helped him out of his coat and hung it on a wooden rack. ‘I’ve got company.’

  ‘You want me to come back another time?’

  ‘You will not.’ She led him inside the living room.

  Annie looked up at him.

  Betty said, ‘This is Annie Cormack. Annie, Lou Perlman.’

  Perlman smiled, shook the young woman’s hand. ‘Nice to meet you.’

  Annie slid her hand from the clasp. ‘Likewise.’

  Perlman stared at her, trying to place her. She was a little disconcerted by his scrutiny. She scratched the side of her face, shifted her position.

  ‘Funny, you remind me of somebody.’ Perlman narrowed his eyes.

  Annie opened her purse and fidgeted with whatever it contained. Car keys, lipsticks, tampons. Rummaging and engrossed, she said, ‘People always say that.’

  There was a chill in the room, something that hadn’t been there before. Betty felt tension, and it came from Annie: a mood swing.

  Perlman said, ‘An actress. What’s her name?’

  ‘What film was she in, Lou?’ Betty asked.

  ‘That film with whatsisname. Tip of my tongue.’

  ‘That’s helpful,’ Betty said.

  Perlman snapped thumb and middle finger together. ‘Paul Newman—’

  ‘She reminds you of Paul Newman? You got your contacts in, Lou?’

  Perlman was obviously determined to unearth the name of the actress. Annie kept ploughing through her purse.

  ‘That film where he’s a boxer. Rocky somebody. His wife … Italian. Got it, Pier Angeli. Lovely girl.’

  ‘I remember her,’ Betty said. Lovely girl. The phrase bothered her. Perlman comes to see me, and here he is concentrating on Annie. How bad do I bloody look? If she’d known he was coming she’d have made an effort to be
presentable, she’d have tossed the long boring robe, junked the carpet slippers. This mode of dress wasn’t fetching – oh, come on, you’ve only known the man a matter of days and yet you’re troubled when he compares Annie to a ‘lovely’ actress? Hold your horses, McLatchie. This is a bad day and your head isn’t screwed on right and Perlman didn’t come here expecting to find you done up like a nightclub hostess.

  ‘Annie looks like her, Pier Angeli,’ Perlman said.

  Annie snapped her purse shut and glanced at Perlman. ‘I’ve never heard of Pier Angeli. Is this an old movie?’

  ‘Long before you were born, dear,’ Betty said – too quickly, clumsily.

  Perlman searched for a place to sit. He couldn’t find his way out of a paper bag, Betty thought. She liked that about him, the way he bumbled, the vagueness that overcame him at times.

  ‘There’s a chair by the cabinet, Lou.’

  ‘Oh right. Either it’s the light in here or I’m going blind.’ He sat down and propped his elbows on his knees and continued to look at Annie, who rose from the sofa and slung the strap of her purse over her shoulder.

  ‘I was about to leave.’

  Perlman smiled. ‘The Perlman Effect. Want a room emptied? Call Lou.’

  Betty said, ‘You don’t have to, Annie.’

  ‘It’s OK. I just remembered some place I said I’d be.’

  ‘You wanted to stay …’ Betty wasn’t unhappy. She’d prefer Perlman alone. She was curious about the change in Annie’s manner – but on a day like this, so finely balanced on the edge of deep feelings, so turbulent under the false surface of putting a bold face on death, people went through all manner of emotional currents.

  ‘I’ll come back another time,’ Annie said.

  ‘Stay by all means.’

  Annie took a small compact mirror from her purse and looked at her own reflection. ‘Christ, I’m a sight.’

  Betty said, ‘You are not. It’s me …’ I must look a ghost, she thought. She hurried from the room, saying she needed to find a vase.

  Annie popped the mirror back inside her bag and walked to the living room door. ‘Tell her goodbye. I’ll phone her.’

  ‘Wait,’ Perlman said.

  ‘I really need to leave.’ She opened the door to the hallway and walked away. He went after her.