The Papers of Tony Veitch

by William McIlvanney

  ‘When did you get this call, Eddie?’

  ‘Got it at the pub here. Five minutes ago. I thought I’d better let you know before I leave. I want to look in at the Vicky. The Paddy Collins thing. I might get some famous last words. Anyway, it’s up to you, Jack.’

  ‘Thanks, Eddie. I owe you one.’

  ‘Aye. When the revolution comes, I’d like a press-card. Cheers, Jack.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  Laidlaw put down the phone. The sound of Eddie’s voice had been an injection through the ear. Things were happening in the city. But he had guests. Well, Ena had guests. He tried to be fair and decided they wouldn’t miss him. His absence would probably be a relief.

  Any weekend that Laidlaw wasn’t working was pre-arranged for him. Familiar with the anti-social hours policemen kept, Ena had learned to try and compensate. If Laidlaw insisted on treating the calendar the way an alcoholic treats liquor – big benders of absence, brief domestic drying-outs – she was determined to ensure that his off-duty time was spent exclusively with her.

  She deployed baby-sitters like chessmen – check, mate. She counteracted his thirst for the streets of Glasgow with events carefully bottled like home-made wine, each neatly labelled in advance. ‘Friday – Frank and Sally coming.’ ‘Saturday – Mike and Aileen’s party.’ ‘Saturday – Al Pacino film at La Scala. Baby-sitter arranged.’

  Tonight was ‘Friday – Donald and Ria.’ It wasn’t one of her best vintages, a mild cabbagey flavour that never got you high but which might, Laidlaw suspected, rot the social taste-buds over a prolonged period so that you couldn’t tell a bromide from the elixir of life. He tried not to have anything against Donald and Ria. It was just that the four of them together gave him the feeling of being involved in field-work on group sedation.

  Besides, maybe it was someone who had done him a favour. Maybe it was someone who was dying. Nobody was dying in the room he had left. Maybe four or so of them were dead. But nobody was dying.

  He was wearing a red polo-neck and black slacks. Reaching into the cupboard in the hall, he took out his denim jacket and put it on. He might as well announce his intention to the committee. They’d veto it, of course, but he’d made his decision. He felt guilty but that was a familiar feeling.

  3

  From Simshill in Cathcart, where Laidlaw lived, to the Royal Infirmary in Cathedral Street was a short trip but a big distance. Fortunately, the architecture changed in stages, like decompression chambers, so that you didn’t get the bends.

  One half of the first gate was open yet and he drove in. A lot of cars were in the parking area but there was plenty of room. Locking the car, he was struck again by the size of the place, three huge linked units, each with its own imposing dome. It seemed to him a castle of black stone. It made illness appear not a leveller but an accolade that admitted you to a Gothic aristocracy.

  Across the courtyard was the single-storey casualty department like a gatehouse where they examined your credentials. He went in. It was after eleven.

  The hallway was the parking place for the blue leather invalid-chairs, maybe thirty of them. On one of them a boy of twenty or so was sitting. But he wasn’t an invalid. He looked ill enough to chew railings. The slight skinning on his right cheek only accentuated his appearance of hardness. He was nursing a light jacket the shoulders of which were black with blood, like the patch on a Wimpey reefer. He was waiting for someone.

  ‘Hey, you,’ he said as Laidlaw came in. ‘Gonny give us a fag?’

  Laidlaw looked over curiously. He recognised drink but not drunkenness and the residual aggression from a fight not lost, the adrenalin spin-off that could be captioned ‘Who’s next?’ Laidlaw turned towards the doorway to casualty.

  ‘Hey, you! Big man. Ah’m talkin’ to you. Gi’es a fag!’ Laidlaw went over.

  ‘Here, son,’ he said. ‘So far you’ve only managed mild abrasions. Is this you trying for intensive care?’

  The boy looked momentarily blank at the medical references but the tone was Esperanto.

  The boy said, ‘Come on. Ah asked a wee favour.’

  ‘So don’t make it sound like a threat.’

  Laidlaw gave him a cigarette.

  ‘You put the tipped end in your mouth. Then you light the other bit.’

  The boy was smiling. Laidlaw turned to the casualty room. It is a single, long, arched place, both basic and ornate, like a Victorian nissen hut. Laidlaw entered it like a time-warp.

  The first things he noticed were a couple of ghosts of his youth, two constables whose faces were fresh-laid eggs. Near them stood a group wearing doctors’ white coats. Laidlaw hoped they were students. All of them, policemen and doctors, looked young enough to have been given their uniforms for Christmas. Suddenly, Laidlaw was Rip Van Winkle.

  He checked the treatment room on the right. While two nurses looked on, a doctor was remonstrating with a boy who was stripped to the waist. From hairline to belt, the boy was blood. The red made the place look like a dressing-room for one of the more preposterous Elizabethan tragedies, say Titus Andronicus.

  ‘No problem!’ the boy was saying.

  Physically, he seemed to be alright. Laidlaw could see a long cut on the back of his neck and nothing else. He was obviously enjoying that taste of the heroic your own spilled blood can give you. Probably the worst thing they could do for him would be to wash him clean. Then he would have to settle for himself again. Laidlaw didn’t know him but perhaps he would.

  Starting opposite the treatment room is a row of cubicles. They presented Laidlaw, as he went, with a succession of tableaux that might have come from a contemporary mystery play. A girl whose eyes were still in shock was holding a bloodstained bedspread, waiting for someone or something. There was a young man with a left eye like a piece of bad fruit. He was protesting hysterically about injustice while a doctor attended him. A woman was crying while her arm was being bandaged. ‘He gives me some awfu’ kickings,’ she was saying. A middle-aged man was explaining to a nurse, ‘It’s a kinda shifting pain,’ while two young policemen looked on. Laidlaw recognised a familiar art, that of postponing arrest by young policemen through the contraction of sudden, mysterious maladies.

  Cubicle E, the one Laidlaw knew to be used for delousing, was empty but showed signs of recent use. He recognised nobody, except perhaps the two plain-clothesmen who had just come in. He didn’t know them as individuals but he knew that style of moving on tramlines of professional preoccupation. They merged with the rest of the scene as subtly as Mormons.

  Looking back along the room, Laidlaw found nothing specific to him, only the city processing its Friday night pain. The place was a confessional. You came here to admit to frailty, brittle bones, thin skin, frangible organs – the pathetic, haphazard machinery we make bear the weight of our pretensions.

  Most of all, you came to admit to blood. It was everywhere here, on the people, the swabs, the floor, the coats of the doctors. Like a betrayal, it leaked out of the spurious certainties we make of our natures. Like honesty, it was difficult to look at.

  Laidlaw felt here more strongly what he had against that other room he had just come from, where Ena and Donald and Ria were still sitting. It told lies. This one tried to do the same, no doubt, but it at least was compelled to unavoidable admissions of its common humanity. That other room was simply exclusive. It was based on inaccurate assumptions about what people are like. Laidlaw remembered that one of the things he hated most was élitism. We share in everyone else or forego ourselves.

  ‘Hullo there, captain.’

  He was an elderly man, slightly cut at the edge of his eye and more than slightly drunk. Laidlaw had noticed him wandering along the room accosting people vaguely, an ancient mariner short of a wedding guest.

  ‘You a doctor then, sir? It’s ma eye here. Played at headers wi’ the pavement. Ye know? Pavement beat me wan-nothin’. Ah would’ve won if ah hadny been drunk.’

  Laidlaw smiled and shrugged.

&nbs
p; ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m a stranger here myself.’

  The man went on past the partition at the end of the room. Beyond that lay the legendary Room 9, resuscitation room at the Royal, a place that has seen a lot of what there is to see in the way of physical calamity. The man was ushered out again at once by a doctor who directed him back along the casualty room.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Laidlaw said. ‘I’m looking for someone.’

  Laidlaw showed his identification-card. The doctor looked at it, his tongue resting on his front teeth, and nodded, showing nothing. He couldn’t have been older than late twenties, bespectacled and shaggy-haired, but already he looked the type who might raise his eyebrows at an earthquake. His coat was speckled brown with the statutory bloodstains.

  ‘A heavy night,’ Laidlaw suggested.

  ‘No. This is a quiet one. Although a couple of R.T.A.’s and an M.I. through here.’ He nodded towards Room 9. ‘So who are you looking for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Laidlaw said.

  The doctor didn’t show surprise or amusement or interest. He just waited. He was checking the progress of the elderly man along the room. Laidlaw knew that an R.T.A. was a Road Traffic Accident. He thought he’d better not ask about the M.I. The doctor didn’t look in the mood to stand in for a medical dictionary.

  ‘I’ve been told somebody was brought in here asking for me. Asking for Jack Laidlaw. An old bloke. Unshaven. Probably well bevvied.’

  The elderly man had found the haven of a nurse. The doctor’s eyes came to rest on the floor. He looked up at Laidlaw, as if measuring him for an improbable connection.

  ‘You mean the old wino?’

  ‘I might.’

  ‘Yes. That was the name, I think. Kept repeating it. I thought maybe it was his own. Could get nothing else out of him. Having trouble with his airways. They had him in E. God, he was filthy. Didn’t know whether to dialyse or cauterise. A walking Bubonic.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘He just got worse. Seemed to use the last of himself just getting here. Cleaned him up. They had him in the Lavage Room. Alcohol and Belair were about all they got, I think.’

  ‘So what’s wrong?’

  The doctor shook his head.

  ‘How about everything?’ His eyes were moving around the room again. ‘The nearest they got to a diagnosis was imminent death. The respiratory problem was getting worse. Rather than intubate him here, they took him straight to Intensive Care. He’s just gone.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Surgical block. That’s—’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But they’ll probably not welcome you.’

  ‘They don’t have to,’ Laidlaw said.

  On the way out, he threw a cigarette to the young man on the invalid chair. Placate the gods.

  4

  It was cool outside. Laidlaw took his bearings. The middle unit of the main building, the one in darkness, was administration. The unit on the right, nearest the gate, was medical. He went left.

  Crossing the courtyard, he took the doctor’s point. It probably was a quiet night. It was all comparative. Laidlaw himself had a simple shock-absorber he used to enable him to cope with some of the things he had to look at. He remembered Glaister’s Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology – a quiet name for the most harrowing book he had ever looked through. Talking reasonably about horrifyingly exotic deaths, reproducing good photographs of decapitation, strangulation, genital mutilation, its depiction of accidental and compelled brutality made the Marquis de Sade look like the tourist he was. Once you knew that’s where we live, you had to accept the need to face what you would rather not see.

  Laidlaw accepted. He climbed the curving stair to the first floor. The blue board with white lettering said ‘Intensive Care Unit’. He went through the swing doors and found himself in a short, wide corridor, faced with another set of swing doors.

  Immediately, a woman looked out from a side-room. Her face became a prohibitive notice, the professional’s annoyance at the clumsy intrusion of the layman. Laidlaw felt as if he had a camera round his neck. She came out, pointing herself towards him like a gun.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Excuse me. I believe you’ve just had someone brought in. He was asking to see me. My name is Laidlaw. Detective Inspector Laidlaw.’ He showed her his card.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I wondered if I could see him.’

  She gave a short, monosyllabic laugh, like the barking of a distant guard-dog and as indicative of humour. She shook her head in officialese and offered that stern, condescending look that’s supposed to make the hordes of the uninformed flee for the longboats.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Trying to be,’ Laidlaw said.

  ‘This is an Intensive Care Unit.’

  ‘I didn’t think it was a café. And I’m in a hurry.’

  She stared at Laidlaw, presumably reassessing him: not just your average idiot – Nuisance Grade One. In such cases it may prove necessary to provide a façade of minimal facts, preferably incomprehensible.

  ‘We’re preparing to use a ventilator. Dialysis may be required.’

  ‘Is he conscious?’

  ‘Not coherently.’

  ‘But conscious.’

  ‘For the moment.’

  ‘Well,’ Laidlaw said. ‘He wants to see me. It must be important to him. It’s what he wants and I assume he still has rights. So. If you don’t want me to go in, you’d better find a way to stop me.’

  He walked past her. She caught up with him before he reached the double doors.

  ‘Wait here, please,’ she said and went in.

  In a few moments she came back out and collected a hospital gown from a pile of freshly laundered ones neatly stacked on a shelf. She enjoyed watching Laidlaw trying to work out how it went. Having seen the right films, he managed to decide that it was worn back to front. She didn’t offer to help with the tie-strings, so he followed her with his hands behind his back, feeling he was infringing the Duke of Edinburgh’s copyright.

  Once beyond the second double doors, she said, ‘Wait here, please.’

  The room was dim. Down the right-hand side there was a row of glass-partitioned cubicles, from some of which came muted sounds. You got the sense that life was lived on tiptoe here. A couple of nurses moved almost soundlessly around, vestal virgins of this inner sanctum.

  The god appeared to be technology. Across a television monitor ran three recurring serrated lines. In the middle of the room, like an altarpiece, was the only patient Laidlaw could see. He lay terrifyingly still, plugged into a ventilating machine, an aerated corpse. Watching him, Laidlaw understood something he had heard somewhere, that if such patients aren’t oiled and turned every two hours, they develop bedsores.

  From where he stood now, Laidlaw saw the people in casualty as extras with delusions of grandeur. Their declarations of their nature seemed outrageously crude. Their stridency was apprentice stuff. This man bore witness to all of us without melodrama. He was honed to the act of breathing. He made no further claims, his humility was absolute. Pull a plug and he died.

  Some sounds were coming from the first cubicle on the right. Laidlaw assumed that was where his man must be. Sure enough, the sister who had treated him like bacteria was now beckoning him into the cubicle.

  Coming round the partition with some trepidation, he experienced the shock you feel when you see death engaged with someone you know. All the past confident moments count for nothing. You realise that you want death always to be anonymous. Otherwise, it’s got a fix on you.

  He saw the confirmation of a suspicion that had already been forming. It was Eck Adamson. And if he wasn’t dying, Laidlaw was immortal.

  A doctor came between Laidlaw and the bed. He was Indian, young and delicately handsome. His voice was a startlingly pleasant contrast to the gutturals of Glasgow, soft with the consonants and original with the intonations, a sari in Townhead.

  ‘Now
you may see your friend, if you wish. We are about to put him on a ventilating machine. The thing which is the most essential at the moment will be to stabilise the breathing. If you can get through to him, you must see if you can learn what has happened.’

  Laidlaw nodded. The first thing that struck him was that this was the cleanest context in which he had ever seen Eck. They made you nice for dying. Only the several days’ growth hinted at the kind of life Eck had come from; that and the eyes. Always jumpy, they had now gone completely over the top, darting crazily, as if Eck knew finally that the world was out to mug him. The doctor and nurses were waiting to relieve him of himself.

  ‘Eck,’ Laidlaw said. ‘It’s Jack Laidlaw.’

  As he repeated it, Eck’s eyes passed him several times but kept coming back until they hovered on him, still mobile, but at least moving within the orbit of Laidlaw’s presence. They didn’t settle on his face but seemed to take in different parts of him, as if Eck was piecing Laidlaw together like a jigsaw. Eck was trying to speak.

  ‘Right,’ Laidlaw heard.

  ‘Right,’ he replied.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Right.’

  Eck’s head jerked in distress.

  ‘Write it doon,’ Laidlaw thought he was saying.

  Laidlaw found an envelope in his pocket and took out a pen.

  ‘What happened to you, Eck?’

  But he might as well have tried to talk to a teleprinter. Eck was receiving no messages. On the last of himself he was sending out information. His pain was obvious. The way he dragged the words out past it suggested they were very important to him. Listening, Laidlaw wondered why.

  Eck was incoherent. He spoke like someone after a stroke, afflicted with that slow-motion glottal drunkenness that compounds the grief of physical trauma by rendering its expression of itself idiot. Out of the distorted mouthings, like a record played too slow, Laidlaw thought he could decipher one repeated statement. He wrote, more out of respect for the disintegrating identity he had known than because of any significance he saw in the words, ‘The wine he gave me wisny wine.’