‘Aye. Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome,’ he replies. Something in his tone tells me I am not. The barman puts the bottle back on the gantry, far from my prying eyes. Mister G goes back into his concentrated form in the dark corner, like a really nasty genie retiring to its lamp. And I take the whiskies back to our table, happy to be still alive.
PITCH AND ROLL
Three o’clock approaches. The Erstwhile Colleagues decide they had better go to work semi-sober and capable. Roy and Grant have only had the two pints, and Ollie’s eight whiskies don’t appear to have made much difference to his general deportment, but the same cannot be said for Douglas Findhorn Elder: five whiskies (Grant insisted on buying me the last) on top of one Scotch pie is not his usual afternoon intake, and he is feeling unlike himself. Then again, it is his fiftieth birthday, and if you can’t feel unlike yourself on your fiftieth birthday, when can you?
Roy and Grant move out to the street for some fresh air, while Ollie and I pay a visit to the facilities.
‘Hello, Dick,’ Ollie says. ‘Long time no see.’
I check over my shoulder. No, we are alone in the room, and the cubicle door is not shut. Then I realise that Ollie is talking to himself. Or, rather, to an extension of himself.
‘We have a purely touchy-feely relationship these days,’ he explains as he steps away from the urinal. ‘Unless I’m standing naked in front of a full-length mirror, which I have to tell you is a scenario I try to avoid. Not lovely. When did you last see your do-as-yer-tellt, Douglas?’
‘My what?’
‘Your welt. Your whang. Your tawse. Your tadger. Your didgeridoo. Ach, but you probably see him every day, your belly elastic won’t have burst yet. Mine went years ago. You’re looking pretty trim, in fact. How come? You on a diet or something?’
‘No, not at all. I try to stay off the pies, and I don’t drink much except on special occasions. Birthdays and funerals and suchlike.’
‘Today’s really special then. But why the self-denial? You’re a man of leisure. What the fuck are you saving yourself for? Because it ain’t gonna happen, my friend. You have crossed the watershed. This is you on the downward slope. Pitch and roll, that’s my philosophy. Pitch and roll.’
‘That doesn’t sound like the fellow who was claiming he was the future half an hour ago.’
‘That was somebody else. I’m like one of those weatherhouses with the wee folk with sunhats and umbrellas. Trouble is I don’t know who’s living in there or who’s going to come out at any given moment. Do you get that?’
‘Aye. I thought it was just me,’ I say, unbuttoning my shirt collar and loosening the tie in solidarity with Ollie.
‘It’s all of us,’ he says, ‘but nobody speaks about it. It’s the times we’re in. It’s like that whole carry-on with money.’
‘What carry-on?’
‘Paper money. The delusional carry-on. We all go around swapping it for things we want or things we think we need, and nobody dares say, “Look at this stuff, it’s just bits of paper with squiggles on it.” We don’t even have to see or touch the bits of paper these days. We just key in numbers on our phones and in some building hundreds of miles away or on another continent a bank clerk types in different numbers or actually nobody types them in, the computers just suck them in, churn them around a bit and spit them back out and that’s the financial system. And so long as we all believe in the numbers everything’s fine. But suppose we stop believing? All hell would break loose. There’d be nothing there. What are you going to barter with, a printout? But that’s all we are really. Numbers.’
We are heading through the bar, back to the real world. ‘That’s what Roy was saying earlier, when you were getting your round in. “We’re just numbers,” he said.’
‘You don’t want to listen to Roy,’ Ollie says. ‘He knows fuck all about anything. Cheers, my friend!’ he calls to the barman. ‘Your pies are excellent, by the way. As is your service and the ambience of your charming wee howff.’
The barman glares and his head nods a fraction. I think the words he mouths silently at Ollie may be, ‘And don’t fucking come back.’
‘I never tire of that old-world Edinburgh hospitality,’ says Ollie. Then, pausing in the doorway, he turns to me. ‘By the way, you never answered the cunningly oblique gardening question I asked earlier. How are you filling your days?’
‘I’ve plenty to do. Amongst other things, I try to write something every day. Keep my hand in, you know.’
‘What for, if Liffield isn’t giving you any work?’
‘I’m ever hopeful.’ I hesitate, but only for a second. Ollie is an old and trusted, though also crass and infuriating, friend. If I can’t tell him, who can I tell? ‘Actually, I’m writing a novel.’
He does a very good impression of an aghast gargoyle. ‘A novel? God help us! I knew you were ill. That’s a mug’s game, Dougie. There’s enough stories in the world without you adding to them.’
‘I knew I could count on you.’
‘We need to have a serious chat about this. A novel? Good grief!’
We pick up the others outside. I find myself staggering somewhat as the fumy air of Tollcross hits me. I am fifty years, two hours and forty-four minutes old, and not unpleasantly inebriated.
‘That whisky really was good. Did you ever taste that one before?’
‘I might have done,’ Ollie says. ‘On the other hand, I might not. What was it called again?’
‘Glen Gloming.’
‘Keep a look out for it. You can buy me a case when I turn sixty.’
To save time we walk past the roadworks, and then they hail a cab. They offer me a lift but I’m not going in their direction and anyway will benefit from the walk.
‘We’ll see you again,’ says Ollie. ‘In better circumstances, let’s hope. Don’t be a stranger to us. Oh, and listen. Just watch yourself if you do get any work from Liffield. Make sure he names his price and that he knows what he’s paying you for. He’s likely to make you rewrite something three times until he recognises it for the thing he wanted in the first place. I wouldn’t trust him to piss in the sea and not miss.’
‘But one of us will end up subbing it,’ says Roy, ever the conciliator, ‘so it’ll be all right.’
‘See you,’ Grant says, and they pile into the taxi and it takes them away to the remainder of their shift at the Spear. They seem so relaxed, as if the paper will look after itself – but they’ve already told me that it won’t. Then I remember what Roy said to John Liffield: ‘We’ve got things under control. We put in a couple of hours this morning.’ That’s who they are: professionals, artisans, skilled at their craft. That’s who they still are.
But who is Douglas Findhorn Elder, no longer late, of this parish?
MY ERSTWHILE STEPDAUGHTER
I make my way down Lothian Road, no more enamoured of that thoroughfare on foot than I was going in the other direction by bus. This time I don’t even feel sorry for it. It is noisy and grimy: the traffic is heavy; fast-food detritus spills out of litter bins and is smeared at intervals across the pavement, obliging me to shorten or lengthen my steps occasionally. Furthermore (whisper it), I am an intellectual snob, and Lothian Road has little to offer the intellectual snob. Well, there’s the Usher Hall, Lyceum, Traverse Theatre and Filmhouse, so in fact I am talking bollocks. What I mean is, I am not tempted by a sauna, nor to join a gentlemen’s club, nor to indulge in a spot of pole-dancer spectatorship. There are bars on or just off Lothian Road – shiny, hard-lined establishments, guarded after 6 p.m. by shiny, hard-lined men in black nylon jerkins – which ferocious types from Glasgow and other points west have been known to avoid, acknowledging their inability to read the signs of impending Edinburgh violence. These places have no appeal for me either. Walking, on the other hand, is good. Walking off the overindulgence is righteous. I contemplate walking all the way to the Home, another two miles or more, all downhill.
I am diverted, however, by the sight
of a familiar figure outside one of those dangerous drinking-places – standing on a spot that doubtless will later be occupied by a bouncer in black nylon. The figure is small, female, in a tight silvery skirt, a loose black T-shirt revealing one bare shoulder, and ankle boots with deadly heels. Her hair, cut very short at the back, falls in a red-dyed fringe over one eye, a style which necessitates a flick every few seconds so that she can see out. Her whole attitude, one of defiance against the world, is further enhanced by the way she is taking abrupt and frequent smoke-sips from the cigarette held like a dart in her right hand. This is Paula, daughter of Sonya: my Erstwhile Stepdaughter you might say if you dared, but she would not thank you for saying it and legally speaking it would be untrue in any case.
She clocks me a moment after I clock her, throws away her fag and disappears through the door of the bar. Could she be avoiding me? Highly likely. Now, Douglas Findhorn Elder in normal circumstances would get the message, swallow his disappointment and move on. But the present Douglas Findhorn Elder is outside a considerable quantity of malt whisky, and it is this that fuels him as he follows Paula through the door into the establishment, which goes by the name of the Lounger. The outside decor – silhouettes of dancers and drinkers on opaque glass, blue lighting over the entrance – makes it look like a strip joint aspiring to be a casino, or vice versa. Inside, the theme is continued: cheap and nasty done up to look superficially sophisticated. It is empty, but far from quiet. Deafeningly loud music, of some techno-synth genre well outside the appreciation range of a fifty-year-old intellectual snob like me, is bouncing off the walls and ceiling, stopping unexpectedly, then starting again, driving me almost against my will towards the bar.
Behind which, Paula is standing. The look of distaste on her face is all too obvious.
‘Hello, Paula.’
‘Oh. Hiya.’
Swaying slightly, I shout an idiot question at her: ‘What are you doing here?’ The words come out of my mouth in a rush, tripping one another up, a sort of slurred accusation – as if I have caught her somewhere she shouldn’t be. I try again, aiming for a quieter, more conciliatory tone. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I heard you,’ she says. ‘I’m minding my own business. What are you doing?’
‘I’m on my way home.’
‘It’s the middle of the afternoon.’
‘What about it?’
She assesses me. If she still had her cigarette she’d no doubt take some more of those tiny drags from it while doing so. Paula has long regarded me, unfairly, as standing in some kind of moral judgement over her. Perhaps it’s my surname. Now she’s doing it to me.
‘Oh yeah, I forgot, you don’t have a job any more.’
‘Actually, I’m on my way home from a funeral. Hence the suit.’
She dismisses the suit with a glance. Then she says, ‘Had a few, have you?’
‘I have, as a matter of fact.’
‘Thought so.’
‘Is that a problem?’
‘Not for me.’
I half-persuade myself that this is all friendly banter, then try my opening question for the third time. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘What do you think?’ A flick of her head causes the red fringe to bounce. Even her hair is sneering at me. ‘I work here.’
‘Oh. Is this you starting your shift?’
‘Uhuh.’
‘Four till midnight, something like that?’
‘Something like that.’
The conversation dies. I kick-start it once more.
‘There used to be an Edinburgh magazine called the Lounger.’
She looks suspicious, as if I’m trying to catch her out. ‘Never heard of it.’
‘No, it was before your time.’ Before mine, too. Eighteenth-century, in fact. I’m ashamed to say I was trying to catch her out. ‘How’s college?’
‘All right.’
‘Working hard?’
She shrugs. ‘Aye.’
‘That’s good.’
Her intention, with every terse response, seems to be to impress upon me how utterly tedious it is to converse with anybody over the age of thirty, and with me, her mother’s partner or ex-partner or whatever I am, in particular. This irritates me. After all, we shared the same house, the same bathroom and kitchen, for a dozen of her formative years. For some of those – the early ones – she appeared to quite like me. Which is probably why she doesn’t any longer.
‘What do you want?’ she asks.
‘I saw you outside. I was just passing. So I came in to say hello.’
‘Well, now you’ve done that.’
‘True. But since you ask, I’ll have a whisky, please. A malt whisky.’
‘No you’ll no. I’m no serving you any more.’
‘You haven’t served me anything yet.’
‘Any more than you’ve already had.’
‘There’s one up there behind you, Glen Gloming, a very fine tipple. Surprised to find it in here but I’ll have one of those, thanks. Make it a double.’
‘I will not.’
‘What’ll you have yourself?’
‘Nothing. Go away, Douglas. You’re embarrassing.’
‘Embarrassing who?’
‘Baith of us.’
She is right, of course.
‘How’s your mother?’
‘All right. Ask her yourself.’
‘I will. How’s Magnus?’
‘All right, I think.’ She pauses, assessing how to get me out quickly. ‘Are you and my mum finished then?’
‘Not sure. We’re having a break. What do you think?’
‘It’s nothing to do with me.’
‘How about that whisky?’
‘No.’
She picks up a cloth and wipes something that doesn’t need wiping. I consider my options. I am being unfair. I should leave her be. But before I do, something – a protective instinct, I suppose – makes me inspect her, from fringe to heels. This involves leaning over the bar in what might be misconstrued as an attempt to ogle her legs, which is not my purpose. I am consciously having to remind myself, not for the first time, that Sonya is her mother. There is not an obvious likeness. Paula has a self-awareness that her mother doesn’t. She’s not as lovely as Sonya, but she is more, well, desirable, and this isn’t anything to do with her being nineteen, it’s to do with the way she carries herself. What I mean is that Paula seems innately to know that men – women, too, perhaps – will desire her, and secure in that knowledge she both encourages and rejects their desire. And this, especially seeing her dressed as she is in a place like the Lounger, where she is going to be working for the next eight hours, worries me. I am worried for her. Both the wide neck of her T-shirt and the way her left breast seems to be constantly on the point of exposing itself contribute to my concern. The partially glimpsed breast reminds me of a comment about Paula which my father, most unfortunately, once made in the presence of her and her mother, which is another story. What also worries me is that I don’t have the right to be worried for her, and we both know it.
(Paula’s big brother, Magnus, doesn’t look anything like his sister, and not much like his mother either. Maybe he looks like Ben, his father: I wouldn’t know, never having met the man. Ben left when they were quite young, and now lives in Australia. There is no contact between him and Sonya, and none, as far as I am aware, between him and the children. I could be their substitute dad, and for a little while I kind of was, financially and emotionally, but now I’m not and never will be again.
That’s the way it was and is.)
‘Well,’ I say. ‘Better get on. Nice seeing you anyway, Paula.’
‘Aye. You too.’
‘You look after yourself.’
She rolls her eyes. That’s the sort of substitute-dad thing I shouldn’t say. And then I compound the mistake by doing the sort of thing I shouldn’t do. I lean across the bar and kiss her on the cheek.
She recoils, anger flashing in her eyes. I
have totally blundered, nullifying the hint of warmth with which her last words blessed me. What is doubly unfortunate is that at the moment of transgression a man appears, as if from nowhere, and witnesses it. The bar is an affair of glass and mirrors, with edgings made of a plastic material meant to pass for chrome but which fails to convince by some margin. What I haven’t realised is that one of the mirrors is also a door, leading to some inner sanctum. It is through this door that he comes, this man in a dark suit – a much classier number than mine – with a polo shirt buttoned to the neck underneath. The neck is very thick, barely contained by the collar of the shirt. In fact the man is built in much the same way as Mr G up the road, only about three inches bulkier all round, which makes him very impressive indeed, a kind of unanswerable argument on legs. He has a shaven, shiny head, more cone-like than spherical, and thick black brows over lazy, dangerous-looking eyes like those of a snake disturbed while snoozing. I assume he is Paula’s employer or at least a working associate. If he were also a close relative of Mr G – Mr F perhaps – I wouldn’t be surprised.
‘All right, Paula?’ he says in a growling drawl, or perhaps a drawling growl, and gives me the once-over, as if it would be a waste of eyesight to look at me twice.
‘Aye, Barry.’
‘You sure?’ Barry says. He is just checking, obviously, because he’s thorough like that. ‘Didnae look all right.’ And a horrible thought occurs to me: that not only might Barry be connected by blood to Mr G but he also might have more than a purely business relationship with Sonya’s only daughter.
Perhaps this thought shows on my face, because now Barry does give me a second glance.
‘Whit?’ he barks. You see? The same no-nonsense approach as Mr G’s.
Paula raises a hand, patting the air between us, calming the situation. How has it got to be a situation in the space of about five seconds? ‘There’s no problem, honest,’ she says.
‘If you say so, darling.’
Again, it’s unfortunate he calls her that. Paula has just allayed any reasonable concerns he might have about me, and I am on the point of departing, and then he calls her ‘darling’. It spoils the moment. Mixed up with the whisky in me, it reinforces a somewhat negative opinion I’m forming of Barry, and this causes a reaction.
To Be Continued Page 5
