Laidlaw jl-1

by William McIlvanney

  At the desk the sergeant said, ‘Nothing, Jack? Well, you asked for it. I could have dealt with it. I hope you don’t mind me asking. But why do you sometimes want to deal with whatever comes up?’

  ‘When you lose touch with the front line, Bert, you’re dead,’ Laidlaw said.

  ‘You think you have?’

  Laidlaw said nothing. He was leaning on the desk writing on his slip of paper when Milligan came in, a barn door on legs. He was affecting a hairy look these days, to show he was liberal. It made his greying head look larger than life, like a public monument. Laidlaw remembered not to like him. Lately, he had been a focus for much of Laidlaw’s doubt about what he was doing. Being forcibly associated with Milligan, Laidlaw had been wondering if it was possible to be a policeman and not be a fascist. He contracted carefully, putting a railing round himself and hoping Milligan would just pass. But Milligan was not to be avoided. His mood was a crowd.

  ‘What A Morning!’ Milligan was saying. ‘What! A! Morning! Makes me feel like Saint George. I could give that dragon a terrible laying-on. Lead me to the neds, God. I’ll do the rest. Did I see Bud Lawson on the road there? What’s he been up to?’

  ‘His daughter didn’t come home last night.’

  ‘With him for a father, who can blame her? If she’s anything like him, she’s probably been beating up her boyfriend. And how are things in the North, former colleague? I just popped in from Central in case you need advice.’

  Laidlaw went on writing. Milligan put his hand on his shoulder.

  ‘What’s the matter, Jack? You look as if you’re suffering.’

  ‘I’ve just had an acute attack of you.’

  ‘Ah-ha!’ Milligan laughed loftily, astride a bulldozer of wit. ‘I hear an ulcer talking. Look. I’m happy. Any objections?’

  ‘No. But would you mind taking your maypole somewhere else?’

  Milligan was laughing again.

  ‘Jack! My middle-aged teenager. Sometimes I get a very strong urge to rearrange your face.’

  ‘You should fight that,’ Laidlaw said, not looking up. ‘It’s called a death-wish.’

  He put the piece of paper folded in his inside pocket.

  ‘Listen. Anything you get on a young girl, let me know.’

  ‘Personal service, Jack? You feel involved?’

  The sergeant was smiling. Laidlaw wasn’t.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know her father.’

  3

  His hands, illumined in the lights he passed, rose and fell helplessly on the steering. They were enormous hands that had driven rivets on Clydeside for thirty years. They weren’t used to being helpless. Just now they signalled an anger that, lacking a focus, took in everything. Bud Lawson was angry with Laidlaw, the police, his daughter, his wife, the city itself.

  He resented the route by which he was having to go home: along the motorway to the Clyde Tunnel Junction, right into Anniesland, left out Great Western Road. The first part of it reminded him too strongly of what they had done to the city he used to know. Great loops of motorway displaced his past. It was like a man having his guts replaced with plastic tubing. He thought again of the Gorbals, the crowded tenements, the noise, the feeling that if you stretched too far in bed you could scratch your neighbour’s head. To him it felt like a lost happiness. He wished himself back there as if that would put right Jennifer’s absence.

  He knew it was serious simply because she wouldn’t have dared to do this to him if she could help it. She knew the rules. Only once before had she tried to break them: the time she was going out with the Catholic. But he had put a stop to that. He hadn’t forgotten and he never forgave. His nature ran on tramlines. It only had one route. If you weren’t on it, you were no part of his life.

  It was that inflexibility which trapped him now. In a sense, Jennifer was already lost to him. Even if she came back later today, she had done enough in his terms to destroy her relationship with him. With a kind of brutal sentimentality, he was thinking over past moments when she had still been what he wanted her to be. He remembered her first time at the shore when she was three. She hadn’t liked the sand. She curled her feet away from it and cried. He remembered the Christmas he had bought her a bike. She fell over it getting to a rag-doll Sadie had made for her. He remembered her starting work. He thought of the times he had waited for her to come in at nights.

  He had passed the Goodyear Tyre Factory and was among the three-storey grey-stone tenements of Drumchapel. They didn’t feel like home. He stopped, got out and locked the car.

  He came in to Sadie at the fire. She was wearing the housecoat out of his sister Maggie’s club catalogue. On her its flowers looked withered. She looked up at him the way she always did, slightly askance, as if he were so big he only left her the edges of any room to sidle in. Her very presence was an apology that irritated him.

  ‘Is there ony word, Bud?’ she said.

  He stared at the tray-cloth he had pinned above the mantelpiece, where King Billy sat on his prancing charger.

  ‘Ah went tae the polis.’

  ‘Oh, ye didny, Bud.’

  ‘Whit the hell wid Ah dae? Ma lassie’s missin’.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  He sat down and stared at the fire.

  ‘By Christ, there better be somethin’ wrang wi’ ’er efter this.’ He looked at the clock. It was a quarter to seven. ‘If there’s no somethin’ wrang wi’ her the noo, there’ll be somethin’ wrang wi’ her when Ah get ma haunds oan ’er.’

  ‘Don’t say that, Bud.’

  ‘Shut yer mooth, wumman.’

  His silence filled the shabby room. He took off his scarf and dropped it on the chair behind him. Sadie sat rocking very gently, making a cradle of her worry. He looked across at her. She looked so gormless that a suspicion formed in him slowly.

  ‘Ye widny know anythin’ that Ah don’t, wid ye?’

  ‘Whit d’ye mean?’

  ‘Ye know whit Ah mean. She’s never done anythin’ like this in her life afore. She’s no up tae something that Ah don’t know aboot, is she?’

  ‘Bud. Hoo can ye think that? Ah widny hide anythin’ from you.’

  ‘Ye tried it before. The time she wis goin’ aboot with the Catholic. Till Ah put a stoap tae it.’

  ‘Ah never knew aboot that till you found oot.’

  ‘Aye, that’s your story. An’ ye’re stickin’ tae it. It’ll no be tellin’ any the two o’ ye if ye’re in cahoots aboot somethin’. Ah’m warnin’ ye.’

  He stared at her and her skinny obsequiousness offended him. One child. That was all she had been able to produce. And four miscarriages, small parcels of blood and bones that hadn’t got enough from her to make a human being. There wasn’t enough room in her to hold another child.

  Seeing him watching her, she talked a smokescreen.

  ‘Wid ye like a cup o’ tea while we’re waitin’, Bud? Will Ah make ye wan?’

  Since he didn’t say no, she went through to make it.

  A baffled rage fermented in him. Normally, he went headfirst through whatever threatened him. But this was different. This was squaring up to fog. The difference pumped up the pressure of his anger into something awesome.

  Sadie had kept the fire going. It was dying down. He lifted the poker and halted with it in his hand. Jennifer had wanted them to have a gas-fire put in. But he liked coal. On that irrelevant thought he blacked out into a lonely fury.

  When he came out of it, he stared at the poker twisted to a staple in his hands. It was an I.O.U. made out to someone.

  4

  The boy had slept. That amazing fact alone put him back inside his own body. It was a terrifying place to be. He woke lying awkwardly against the wall where exhaustion had left him. Consciousness had burned out suddenly like a bulb. Now just as suddenly it had renewed itself. He was still himself.

  The scabby wall against which his head was leaning seemed to be pressing against him, as if about to topple. He felt pinned against it by th
e impossibility of ever getting up and doing something. The enormity of what he had done had hardened into fact during the night. He knew it was there and inescapable.

  Yet strangely it was still not a part of him. The feeling wasn’t so much that of having done something as of having been part of an event outside himself, like an explosion. He saw her body, the odd splay of her legs, the head cocked in an absurdly human way, the position into which the blast had thrown her. He felt pity for her.

  But he was left wondering what she was doing there. Something had happened of which he was only a part. What was it that had happened? He didn’t know. He knew that he was in a strange room, that he was dirty, that he was very cold. To get from where he was to what had happened seemed impossible. But it was what he had to do.

  It didn’t help to close his eyes again and try to hide. The terrible fever was finished. The luxury of being overwhelmed by guilt was gone. He had thought he was drowning in it but instead it had beached him here. He was left to go on living, to find out how he could inhabit what had happened.

  He tried to stand up and found that he could. The ache of his legs was things becoming possible again. He watched his hands automatically dusting his trousers. He started to walk. The stairs which were completely strange to him gave him the sensation of leaving a place without ever having been in it. He had to be careful of the broken bannister. Light showed through the corrugated iron sheeting across the outside door, where he had forced it to get in. The metal bent before his hand and he looked out.

  The street was empty. He stepped outside. The sunlight dispelled his purpose for a moment. He stood baffled in the empty street, just a part of the dust and silence. It was very difficult to know whether to go right or left. He walked to the right. Within yards, he came out onto a road junction. It was then he recognised where he was.

  Across from him was Glasgow Green. The Clyde was over a hundred yards away on his right. Being in a real place was being where people could find you. The knowledge frightened him and the fear gave him an arbitrary purpose. He crossed the road.

  Outside the Green was a phone-box. He went into it. The door swung shut behind him, nudging him into the booth. He lifted the receiver and held it to his ear. The phone was working. He put it back down. The word ‘Cumbie’ was written with black paint on the metal fixture where you put in the money. Above it was written ‘Blackie’. Was ‘Blackie’ the name of another gang? Was it somebody’s nickname? He took change out of his pocket and laid it on the small black ledge. He lifted the receiver and put it to his ear again.

  He dialled a number without having to remember it. When he heard it ringing, he was surprised that he had made something happen. He stood with patient dread, trapped inside the silence of the city while the phone drilled in the distance, trying to break his isolation.

  5

  The room was a permanent hangover. Waking up in it, Harry Rayburn was always faced with coming to terms with himself all over again. It was the room in the house where he spent most time and it was furnished with the debris of past attitudes. Those attitudes were an unresolvable argument in which he was a very tired chairman. The two Beardsley prints looked uncomfortable beside the framed photographs of boxers. The largest one was Marcel Cerdan. The huge, elaborately patterned lampshade clashed with the ascetic whiteness of the walls, making the room look like a Calvinist brothel. The round bed appalled him, obliged him to sink nightly into his own embarrassment. His dressing-gown was a kimono.

  More than once he had lain here and laughed at his pretentiousness. The room was such a wardrobe of psychological drag. But this morning he had no time to achieve that distance from his attempts to come to terms with his own nature. The phone pulled him out of bed and he put on the kimono without thinking. He bumped towards the phone in a confusion that was part hangover, part way of life. He felt momentarily bad about answering the phone in such a mess. As he lifted the receiver, he ran his hand through his hair.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Harry? It’s Tommy. Tommy Bryson.’

  The name went through him like a spear.

  ‘Tommy! Where are you? Do you want to come up?’

  It struck him that the last word was strange, unless it meant upstairs, to the bedroom. He was fussing with his hair again.

  ‘I can’t. Harry.’

  The way he said the name made a crossroads of feeling in Harry. It was a plea and that was what Harry had longed to hear but it was so fraught with pain that he dreaded what it was going to lead to. He waited to find out what he would have to feel.

  ‘Something’s happened. Something terrible.’

  ‘What is it, Tommy?’

  ‘I need your help. I’ve killed a girl.’

  The statement spread between them like a steppe.

  ‘Tommy,’ Harry said.

  They listened to each other’s silence hopelessly.

  ‘Tommy.’

  The name died out between them. Harry was amazed to find that his voice knew what to say.

  ‘What is it you want me to do?’

  ‘You bring me paper and a pen. I need to write things down. I need to know what’s happened.’

  It was pathetic, as if somebody dying of throat-cancer should ask for pastilles.

  ‘But first. Would you go and see my mother, please? Do you remember the address?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Tell her something. Make up something. I don’t want her to go to the police. I don’t want that.’

  ‘You could come here, Tommy. They’ll not look for you here.’

  ‘No, I can’t,’ Tommy said, ‘no, I can’t.’

  ‘Where are you, then?’

  The pause was self-deception, a choosing whether to trust, but the choice had already been made.

  ‘I’m in the Bridgegate. Off Jocelyn Square. It’s condemned. Above “Alice’s Restaurant”. There’s corrugated iron across the door of the entry. But I forced it. Don’t come till later on. When things are quiet. But see my mother just now. See her right away.’

  ‘Tommy,’ Harry said.

  ‘Will you do all that?’

  ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I love you, Tommy. Don’t forget that.’

  But the phone was already down. It wasn’t until he had said it that Harry realised how true it was. As he laid down the receiver, he knew he had just had a terminal conversation. This was a kind of arrival. The pretence that he wasn’t really bothered by not having seen Tommy for the past couple of weeks was over. All the pretences with which he had furnished his house were over, or at least their compulsiveness was over. If he used any of those roles again, it would only be to help Tommy.

  He remembered what he had said to Tommy the last time they spoke. ‘You’re terrified that you’re gay. I know I’m a homosexual.’ But although he had admitted his homosexuality to himself for a long time, he had admitted it only to contrive more effectively ways of protecting himself from other people. His life had been spent acquiring compensatory qualities that weren’t natural to him but which enabled him to survive. The hardness of his own experience made him forgive Tommy at once, whatever he had done. As far as Rayburn was concerned, everybody else deserved to be Tommy’s scapegoat.

  The toughness he had learned would have an honest purpose now. He would use it to help Tommy to get away. It was his revenge on his own experience.

  6

  Sunday in the park — it was a nice day. A Glasgow sun was out, dully luminous, an eye with cataract. Some people were in the park pretending it was warm, exercising that necessary Scottish thrift with weather which hoards every good day in the hope of some year amassing a summer.

  The scene was a kind of Method School of Weather — a lot of people trying to achieve a subjective belief in the heat in the hope of convincing one another. So the father who lay on the grass, railing in his children with his eyes, wore an open-necked shirt, letting the sun get at his goose-pimples. Two girls who were being cha
tted up by three boys managed to look romantically breeze-blown rather than cold. An old man sitting on a bench had undone the top two buttons of his overcoat, heralding heatwave. A transistor played somewhere, evocative of beaches. People walking through the park moved unhurriedly, as if through an air muggy with warmth.

  But it was the children who were most convincing. Running, exploring bushes, they had that preoccupation which is at any time a private climate. It was one of them who found the reality hidden in the park’s charade of warmth.

  A boy of about eleven, chrysanthemum-haired, he was on his own. For some time he had been stalking the park mysteriously, ignoring everybody else, with that cut-off look children achieve when following corridors of private fantasy. He parted bushes, he skirted trees. Exploring a dense clump of bushes, he suddenly stopped. His head came up, his mouth gagged open. He looked as if the day had stuck in his throat.

  Then, ‘Mister!’ he was screaming. ‘Hey, mister, mister. Mister!’

  The man in the open-necked shirt came at a run. Others came. The voices clustered and scattered like gulls. The park became a vortex with those bushes as its centre, pulling some towards it, pushing others away as they shooed their children.

  The hubbub rose and travelled beyond the park. The screams of panic and horror were translated into even, professional voices.

  7

  There was this girl. Called Margaret. She was twelve. No brothers or sisters. She lived alone. With just her Mammy and her Daddy. Aw! One night her father wanted to go to the pictures. Her mother agreed. But it was an X-film, so Margaret couldn’t go. They decided they’d need a baby-sitter. But Margaret got all huffy. “I’m twelve now,” she said. “I’m not a baby. I can look after myself.” But her mother said she must have a baby-sitter. And there was Anne, just down the road, who was nineteen and liked baby-sitting with Margaret. And Margaret’s mother happened to know that Anne wasn’t doing anything special tonight. And Margaret’s father said anyway it was illegal to leave somebody of Margaret’s age alone in the house. But Margaret insisted. She took a tantrum. Just like our Jack when he starts to chew the legs of tables and things. So at last her parents went out. There was Margaret, sitting by the fire, watching the telly. The house to herself. And thinking: “This is great! I’m just like a grown-up.” When suddenly-’ He snapped his fingers. ‘The lights went out. The electric fire went cold. The telly blacked out. Total darkness. It was like going blind. Margaret was very frightened.’