Laidlaw

by William McIlvanney

  It was a bad joke but there were no good jokes here. The deadness of his own remark was like a tuning-fork for Harry. Here anything but silence would be discord.

  Tommy was standing against the wall. He needed a shave and his clothes were grimy with the dust. His eyes, raw with sleeplessness, looked as if they had a horizon of two inches. Already he seemed as derelict as the building. He had been crouched at the wall as Harry came in and had risen when the door opened. Fear had given him focus for a second. But that dispersed instantly and left him looking eerily past Harry, having forgotten why he stood.

  Harry thought he understood why Tommy had no reaction to him. What had entered wasn’t Harry Rayburn. It was the non-appearance of whatever monster of fear Tommy was making in his head. And therefore it was irrelevant, because that obsession could admit nothing but itself.

  ‘I brought some more stuff. Have you eaten anything?’

  Tommy nodded vaguely. But the food Harry had brought for him yesterday seemed hardly to have diminished. A roll lay on the floor, one bite taken from it. It was unfilled, just dry dough.

  ‘Tommy,’ Harry said. ‘Let me get you out of here tonight. Will you?’

  Tommy wasn’t looking at him.

  ‘Please.’

  He moved along the wall until he was in the corner at the back of the room. It was a kind of answer.

  ‘The police have been to see me.’

  Tommy’s attention flickered towards him and moved away again. His stillness took the place of questions. He was waiting to hear what more there was.

  ‘They don’t know anything yet but they’re looking. They’ll find you if you stay. You’ll have to get out of here, Tommy. Out of the city.’

  Tommy stayed completely still. Watching him, Harry ran out of words. His eyes went out of focus and he saw only Tommy, distending hugely, relentlessly in front of him. He was aware of traffic noises, someone shouting, and Tommy, utterly alone in the middle of it all. He couldn’t speak.

  ‘There’s nowhere to go from here.’

  It was said quietly – by the way. It had the gentle sound of an absolute certainty, something that needed no force to maintain itself. For Harry, having been taught despair as the necessary result of what he was, it was a familiar sound, so familiar that it came to him not as an expression of what Tommy had done but of what he had been made to believe he was. The route didn’t matter so much to Harry because he knew the destination was predetermined. Tommy was where so many people wanted homosexuals to be, trapped in a ghetto of self-loathing.

  He had seen it happen often enough before to people he cared about. They opposed the presumption of others with the reality of themselves until the pressure became too much for them. They lost the necessary tension of their natures and became caricatures of themselves, capable of nothing except offering their arses to the world, like animals whose only recourse is placation.

  He despised that. He had been taught despair but he had learned defiance. Out of its tension he had earned his own sense of himself. He wasn’t a poof, taking his identity from a failure to be something else. He wasn’t gay, publicly pretending to a uniformity that had no meaning in private. He was a homosexual, like everybody else one of a kind.

  It was the hardest thing to be and, looking at Tommy, the difficulty of it hurt him again, enlarging his love for Tommy. He saw a nature that was driven by demands incompatible with the reality it inhabited. He remembered how good bed had been together, so good that it had frightened Tommy by offering him definition. Finding himself becoming one thing, he had rushed to try to prove himself another. Harry thought he understood the pressures that had made him make the attempt. They were a kind of absolution, as far as he was concerned. A lot of people had been present at that murder. Why should one person answer for it?

  Tommy was speaking now – odd, unrelated statements. ‘Thomasina. That’s what they used to call me.’ ‘My uncle took me for a drink once.’ ‘But I embarrassed him. Just by being me.’ ‘I always felt I needed to prove people wrong.’ ‘I remember playing with a boy once and I got excited without knowing why. The way he looked at my face. It was like having a birthmark you hadn’t noticed yourself.’ ‘They were right.’ ‘There’s nowhere for me to go, Harry.’

  The disconnection puzzled Harry until he noticed a couple of discarded sheets of paper on the floor and decided that Tommy was giving him some pieces of the past he had been trying to make sense of by writing them down. He had been looking for understanding of what had happened, and every moment of his own suffering he had unearthed had only added to his despair. Beside the enormity of what he had done, they were so trivial. They constituted no case for the defence. But then, it seemed to Harry, nobody’s experience ever did until it was informed by the compassion of another person.

  ‘Yes there is, Tommy,’ Harry said. ‘There are places you can go, all right. I’m making arrangements. All I want is that you let me get you out of here. I’ve been in touch with a friend. He’s going to help. We’ll get you out of here. You’ll be all right.’

  Tommy shook his head. But Harry had succeeded in reconvincing himself. The helplessness of Tommy intensified his love for him. It would happen. Whatever had been done, they had earned some right to be with each other.

  The bleak, empty room they stood in was for Harry a kind of natural precipitation of their experience. It was their portion of the noise and busyness that was going on around them. In this moment there hardened in him the admission of a knowledge he had been a long time acquiring. He knew the viciousness of public virtue, how it subsists through the invention of its opposite. He made a simple rule for himself: unjust suffering eventually writes a blank cheque for the sufferer. They would collect theirs.

  ‘You’re getting out, Tommy,’ he said. ‘You’re going to get out. And later I’m going to join you. We’ll live somewhere else. Together. You’ll be all right. And that’s the truth.’

  He didn’t feel it as a vague lover’s promise. The nature of his experience precluded that. He knew the danger of the police getting hold of them. He knew the risk of trying to use Matt Mason. But he also knew precisely where his own strength was. It lay in his rejection of everybody else, in the loneliness they had taught him.

  He wondered at his own ability to bury a dead girl in indifference, and every other scruple with her. But then he had been well taught.

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ he said again.

  Tommy waited.

  26

  Harkness was still fascinated by knocking at strange doors. As a teenager, he had sometimes gone for evening walks through wealthier neighbourhoods, imagining what dramas were being acted out behind the picture windows. The subsequent suspicion that they had probably been making instant coffee was something he didn’t dwell on.

  One of the bonuses his job provided was a licence to fulfil that adolescent curiosity. You pushed a bell, showed a card and were admitted to the exoticness of every other person. They covered up, of course. But in the vapour trails left by interrupted conversations and in the subtle realignments your presence caused, you glimpsed strange vistas. In this instance he had a special interest, because he remembered Mrs Stanley.

  ‘This is a terrific-looking woman,’ he said at the door.

  ‘Down, Fido, down,’ Laidlaw said, and when the door opened thought maybe he was talking to himself.

  Harkness was right. She was wearing a nylon overall, she had no make-up and her black hair was slightly mussed. Having none of the marketable props to beauty, she simply rendered them irrelevant. She would be about forty and thinner in the face than should have been acceptable. But they both accepted it. It was the intensity of the eyes that mattered most. They were still looking. Whatever it was she had come to do, she hadn’t done it yet.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mrs Stanley?’ Laidlaw said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Police, Mrs Stanley.’ He showed his identification. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Laidlaw. This is D
etective Constable Harkness. It’s about Jennifer Lawson’s death.’

  ‘Oh. Yese better come in.’

  Before she closed the door, she glanced down the entry to see if anyone was watching. Harkness liked the living-room. It was attractive, tidy but lived in. It was a place where pride hadn’t surrendered to circumstances.

  ‘Ah saw you last night, did Ah no’?’ she said to Harkness.

  Harkness nodded, pleased she remembered. She had gestured them to sit down.

  ‘It’s actually Sarah we want to talk to,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Could we see her, please?’

  ‘Oh. Sarah’s at her work.’

  ‘At her work?’

  ‘Ma man an’ me thought it wid be better,’ she said, attacking the surprise in Laidlaw’s voice. She crossed and pushed the living-room door to. ‘Ma man’s on the night-shift. No. Sarah wis jist gonny go tae bits. So we managed tae get her oot the hoose the day. My God, it’s a terrible thing. It doesn’t bear thinkin’ aboot. Least of all by somebody o’ Sarah’s age.’

  ‘She was Jennifer’s best friend, I understand.’

  ‘Well. For a while she wis. There wis a time Ah thought ye wid need an operation tae separate them. Like Siamese twins.’

  ‘But not lately?’

  ‘Well. Not so much.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘People change. Ah suppose. Grow up. At different speeds.’

  ‘And who was growing up faster? Jennifer or Sarah?’

  Mrs Stanley smiled. It was a beautiful smile, sad, preoccupied, unselfconscious. It hit Harkness like a ray-gun, and he felt his concentration atomise. He found himself imagining what she must have been like, say, fifteen years ago.

  ‘Jennifer was a strange wee lassie. She used to like jist comin’ here. An’ sittin’. She listened an’ she watched. Ah think she wis comparin’.’

  ‘With her own home?’

  Mrs Stanley looked up at Laidlaw, impressed by the speed of his understanding.

  ‘That’s whit Ah think. But lately she wis changin’. It was as if she had made up her mind about something. Ah don’t think she needed us any mair. No’ even Sarah. But they still went out thegither sometimes. Sarah went to the disco with ’er on Saturday night.’

  The living-room door swung open. The man knuckling his eyes in the doorway wore a vest and trousers. A belly like a vat overhung his unbuckled belt. His feet were bare. A rumple of receding hair and a chin like a hedgehog completed the ensemble. Beauty and the Beast, Harkness thought.

  ‘Did we waken ye, Airchie?’ Mrs Stanley asked.

  ‘Aye. Ah heard the talkin’.’

  ‘It’s the polis wantin’ to see Sarah.’

  ‘About Bud’s lassie, is it?’

  Airchie didn’t acknowledge Laidlaw and Harkness. While one hand trekked across his stomach, he yawned enormously. He sat down by the fire.

  ‘Sarah was with Jennifer on Saturday night,’ Laidlaw said.

  ‘Aye. But she lost her at the disco.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well. They don’t go to meet ither lassies, do they? Jennifer got a click.’

  ‘Did Sarah see him?’

  ‘No. She says she lost touch wi’ Jennifer early on.’

  The silence wasn’t accidental. A tension had come into the room with Airchie. He sat casually, resting his arms on his stomach, one forearm tattooed with an anchor, the other with a dagger. He was staring at his bare feet. He looked as if he was counting his toes.

  The tension puzzled Harkness. He felt that Mrs Stanley had said something which troubled Laidlaw, but he didn’t know what it was. He sensed that Airchie’s presence was a warning to his wife. He wondered how specific the warning was, if it was more than just the reflex ‘Tell the polis nothin’ that might have been the motto for a Drumchapel coat-of-arms.

  ‘You talk about Jennifer making comparisons with her own family,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Was there something wrong at home?’

  As soon as Laidlaw said it, Harkness recognised inspiration. It was asking exactly the right thing at exactly the right moment, because it evoked not an answer but an unrehearsed reaction.

  ‘Whit’s this ye’ve been sayin’?’

  Airchie had wakened into anger. His wife ignored him carefully.

  ‘Ah mean Ah don’t think she wis happy at home.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Her father wouldny give her room to breathe. He runs that house like a prison-camp.’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Airchie shouted.

  ‘Her mother hasny the life o’ a scabby cat.’

  ‘Ah said that’s enough!’

  ‘No. It’s not enough.’

  They stared across at each other. Laidlaw and Harkness sat silent. It wasn’t the kind of look to interfere in. That stare was about twenty years of marriage and it was carrying more complicated traffic between them than the M1. It was no longer about a dead girl or policemen’s questions. It was about other kinds of death. It was about how much a woman had never got out of a relationship and the decency she had maintained in spite of it, about how much a man had hidden from promises he perhaps didn’t even know he had made. It was about pride kept and pride lost.

  Across that long look they defined each other. Nothing he had ever been able to do had bullied out of her her hunger for whatever it was she wanted more than this. In her eyes there was still a light that he could neither feed nor douse. The only one his blusterings had intimidated was himself. He sat behind his enormous mound of Dutch courage and wilted. He did it gracefully. He had been practising for years.

  ‘An’ he did something to Jennifer once that she never forgot.’ She spoke very clearly, very deliberately, carving her words carefully on her husband’s silence. ‘Ah think that was what changed her.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Bud did whit anybody else would’ve done.’

  They all looked at him. He was raking the ashes of his self-esteem, looking for an ember to blow on.

  ‘She wis rinnin’ about wi’ a Pape. An’ he put his foot down. Ah don’t know whit youse boays are. But Ah’m tellin’ ye this. Nae lassie o’ mine’ll ever mairry a Catholic. Nae offence.’

  ‘Sarah’ll marry whoever she picks,’ Mrs Stanley said. ‘An’ say Ah’ve said it.’

  Before the frankness of her face and the intensity of her eyes, Airchie began to contemplate his belly.

  ‘Ah’ll no’ be at her weddin’ then,’ he confided to it.

  ‘The only wan that’ll miss ye’ll be the barman.’

  The war was over. Among the dead Laidlaw and Harkness had found what they hadn’t even known they were looking for. It was time to leave them waging peace on each other. Laidlaw stood up.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if we’ve caused any trouble.’

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ Mrs Stanley said, and smiled. ‘We can do this any time.’

  ‘We’ll see Sarah at her work.’

  ‘She works wi’ MacLaughlan the Printer.’

  ‘Aye, we’ve got the address. Thanks very much for your help.’

  The street was very wide after the tenseness of the house. There seemed to be a lot of sky.

  ‘You think she’ll be all right?’ Harkness asked. ‘In there with him after that?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Laidlaw said. ‘She’s a lot bigger than him.’

  ‘I wondered what it was that was bothering you. Till you asked that question about Jennifer’s home life.’

  ‘That’s not what was bothering me.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Something else altogether. There’s one thing she said that doesn’t fit at all. Just a small thing. But then it usually is. It’s the way lies are linked that give them away. There’s a bum conjunction in Sarah Stanley’s story.’

  ‘So tell me, tell me.’

  ‘Wait till we talk to Sarah.’

  There was a man already at the bus-stop, sounding as if he was in training for the world whistling championships. It was a pe
rformance of amazing intricacy, full of cunning chirrups and sustained flutings. He stopped suddenly to say, ‘Aye, boays. It’s no’ buses they’ve got on this run, Ah think. Bloody stage-coaches.’

  ‘Maybe the Indians’ve got them,’ Laidlaw said.

  It was sharp weather for standing.

  ‘That Mrs Stanley,’ Harkness said, warming himself at the thought. ‘Makes me wish I had a time-machine.’

  ‘I can see we’ll have to requisition you iron drawers,’ Laidlaw said. ‘April is the cruellest month.’

  27

  MacLaughlan’s was a small family-owned firm in York Street. It was all blank walls and windows blind with dust. Upstairs there was a big communal room that served as canteen, locker-room and fly smoke area. That was where Laidlaw and Harkness found themselves, waiting among oily jackets, the smell of print and abandoned tea-cups brown with tannin.

  While they were waiting, a small man in a boilersuit came in.

  ‘Hullo therr, boays.’

  It was a vaudevillean’s greeting to his audience. Instant theatre. He looked the part. The boilersuit looked as if it had been made for somebody else and he was just standing in. It had been washed far away from its original colour and it was covered in oilstains of varying intensity, like a collage of his past. The bonnet hung miraculously on the back of his head. His face showed whisky-veins.

  ‘Jist in fur a quick yin before we lowse. Ah only enjoy smokin’ in the firm’s time.’

  He pulled up a leg of his boilersuit and fished in his ruler-pocket. A dowt black with oil emerged. He dusted some of the fluff off it and lit up.

  ‘Like smoking T.N.T.,’ Laidlaw muttered to Harkness.

  ‘Travellers, eh? Listen – Ah’ve got a story fur youse. See that press there?’

  He pointed to a big walk-in cupboard with the door ajar.

  ‘This is gospel. No’ last week but the week before. Big Aly Simpson. Bloke in the work. He’s fond o’ his nookie an’ that, ye know? Me. Ah’d rather hiv a fish-supper. Anyway, there’s nane o’ us perfect. Dinner-time. The horn goes. Back tae the galleys. Except Big Aly an’ Jinty. Jinty’s a big lassie that works wan o’ the machines. Well, she’s no’ that big, but everybody’s big tae me. Ah yince broke ma leg fa’ing aff the kerb. But she’s gemme. So the two o’ them wait in the canteen here an’ lock the door. Jist gettin’ doon tae it, when they hear somebody tryin’ the door. Then there’s the voices talkin’ aboot gettin’ the key. Panic stations. Big Aly’s a mairrit man. Likes tae think that everybody else’s heid buttons up the back. So he hides in the press there. Jinty sorts herself an’ sterts yawnin’ an’ that. Goes tae the door an’ opens it. “Ah must’ve fell asleep,” she says, blinkin’ like Snow White. Well, Wullie Anderson comes in. Whaur dae ye think is the first place he makes fur? The press there. Tae get a new brush-heid. Opens the door. There’s Big Aly. Standin’ like Count Dracula. Ye widny credit it. Know whit Big Aly says? Cool as ye like. “Is this where ye get the bus for Maryhill?” An’ that’s the truth.’