Two wet diamonds appeared when he laced his fingers behind his head.
Neve McDonald was sitting across from me, doodling on her schedule. I tried to catch her eye. She wasn’t especially good-looking but she had a sulky mouth I found appealing. I wanted to share a look, flick my gaze smartly skywards – twinkle, if I could achieve it – to signal my wry detachment from the proceedings. She kept her eyes on her drawing.
Rix rose, his PA scuffling papers into a bundle. There was a ferocious crackling as everyone crumpled their sandwich trays.
*
At my desk I checked my emails and shut down my computer. I shared a desk – a cluster of workstations – with the other specialists: energy, health, environment. What else? Education.
Tuesday conference was, for most of the working week, my only commitment. In truth, I didn’t even have to turn up to this, so long as I got my schedule in to Fiona. But I made a point of attending – to keep up with what was happening, and to make sure that my stories (when I had any) got a decent show. After conference, I’d take the afternoon off. A trawl round Borders. Daniel Auteuil at the GFT. Rembrandt’s Man in Armour at Kelvingrove. On Wednesday and Thursday I’d be at Holyrood (when Parliament was in session) or working from home (when it wasn’t). It was Friday evening before I’d be back at the office to write my stories. Saturday we put the paper to bed. Sunday and Monday I saw the boys.
I was packing up to go when Martin Moir came along and sat on my desk.
There were four empty chairs – the other specialists had already left, for the back nine at Eaglesham, or a stool in the Cope, or wherever they went on a Tuesday pm. But Moir was always perching on your desk. He shifted his hams as if dropping a fart.
‘Neve said there was a little frisson this morning?’
‘Oh aye?’
Moir never went to conference but he liked to know the dirt.
‘It go OK?’
‘Wonderful, Martin. Really first rate.’
‘He’s not the worst, Gerry.’
Moir was touchy about this. A year ago, Rix set up an ‘Investigations Unit’ – three reporters whose brief was to develop major stories and report them in a run of double-page spreads. The unit reported directly to Rix, not to Fiona Maguire. Martin Moir headed it up. It made him look like Rix’s golden boy, which is what he was. It wouldn’t have bothered me, but it bothered Moir.
‘He’s actually pretty fair. Once you know him, I mean.’
‘Who is?’
Moir smiled.
‘This is something. It really is.’ He had lifted one of the photos on my desk. The Sinatra. Black and white. Outside Green’s Playhouse in fifty-two. My teenage old man with his arm around Frank’s shoulder; Sinatra looking tousled and wry, feigning diffidence but still flashing a killer smile. The old man grinning with manic brightness.
‘He really played in, Paisley was it?’
‘Ayr. He played the Piv in fifty-two. The place was three-quarters empty. He was more or less a nobody at that stage. This was before the comeback. From Here to Eternity. All that.’
‘Wow.’
He put the photo down.
‘Hey. The horse’s head in the bed, right?’
‘In the movie, aye.’
Moir put his hands in his pockets, flapped his fingers so that his silver jiggled.
‘Whatever else, Gerry, he did a real job on the Mail.’
I reached for my bottle of Volvic.
‘It’s not that bad a paper.’
‘A lot of people buy it,’ I agreed.
Rix had put 10,000 on the Mail. When everyone else was in freefall, he’d boosted the Mail by 10,000 a day. It made him untouchable. It made him look like a Tribune editor, to certain people.
‘You’re not being fair, Gerry. He’s got ideas. If anyone can turn it round, you know? He’s got a feel for the paper. He knows the culture’s different, that we’re not a red-top. He’s actually pretty sensitive. In my experience.’
‘That right? It’s not your arse he’ll be canning, though, is it? Your experience probably won’t include picking up your books.’
It got Moir off the desk.
‘That’s not fair, Gerry. It’s not your arse either. He actually likes you. He thinks you’re sound.’
His vowels got more Ulster when you got him riled. Soind.
‘Well that’s good to know, Martin.’
He might think I’m sound, I thought. But does he think I’m any good?
Moir mooched by the desk. He wouldn’t sit back down, now that I’d insulted Rix, but he wasn’t ready to leave. He lifted the other photo.
‘Hey. How’s the Hey You?’
Moir grinned, put the picture down.
‘Good. It’s going really well, in fact.’
At conference, when he mentioned the Investigations Unit, Rix had started calling it the ‘I.U.’
‘They still think we’re cops, though.’
The Hey You’s current project was organised crime. Gangland Glasgow. They spent most afternoons in the East End, trying to find someone who would talk to them. At first they’d taken a car and worn their office clothes – Austin Reed suits and glossy oxfords. Even when they wised up, when they swung down from buses in their Sambas and jeans, their distressed leathers, they weren’t fooling anyone. Wee boys on stairwells would hum cop-show theme tunes. They were polis, or they were social workers, or maybe journalists. They sure as fuck weren’t local.
‘Oh here, look at this.’
He had his wallet out and was fishing for something.
‘I meant to show you earlier.’
A slippy square of paper. I couldn’t make it out at first, this smudgy black expanse traversed by spidery lines of white. Then I saw it. The dark mass of the skull, edged in brilliant light, like a planetary eclipse. A narrow nub of heel. A tiny fist, upraised as if in victory or protest.
‘We had the twenty-week scan on Friday. Unbelievable, eh?’
‘That’s great, Martin. Really. Look at the wee hand. Do you know what it is?’
He slid the photo back into his wallet.
‘Nah, we just decided to wait and see. Clare thinks it’s a boy, though. What about you: how’s your own two?’
‘Great, Martin. First class. We’re going to Carradale on Sunday.’
*
Depending on mood, my stop was Hillhead or Kelvinbridge. The flat on Clouston Street was equidistant between the two. Tonight was a Kelvinbridge sort of night. Coming out of the station I turned left onto Great Western Road and bought a fish supper at the Philadelphia Café.
On the way up I passed the Mormons from the second floor, a blond, well-spoken twosome. As ever, they were winningly polite, wishing me well in frank Midwestern accents. With their neat haircuts, preppy short-sleeved shirts and matching satchels they looked pretty gay, which may explain the trend – surely a recent one – for laminate, corporate-looking name tags clipped to the Mormon shirt pocket. I like Mormons. There was a duo living near us where I grew up. I used to stop them in the street, quiz them about their lives. I asked about the clothes, the smart, navy duds: were these standard-issue from Mormon HQ, or did you get to choose your own? There were guidelines, it turned out, but, yes, the guys were free to assemble their wardrobe, and though the clothes were spruce they weren’t expensive. ‘Good enough,’ said one, nodding. ‘Good enough for getting doors slammed in your face,’ said the other, with a wryness that surprised me. It was like Israeli national service: they did a two-year stint, a tour of duty, pressing doorbells in a far-off land, and then they got to go home and get on with their lives.
They were good guys, with one damning flaw. At that time I had a milk round in the mornings before school. I’d trot up people’s paths with bottles wedged between my fingers (you could carry three in each hand, their short necks lodged between your knuckles) and I’d walk back down with the empties. To carry the empties you stuck a finger in the neck of each bottle: they clacked together as you walked, like the trill
ing of happy glass birds. Everyone else on my round knew to rinse the bottles in hot water before putting them out on the step, but the Mormons – whether from ignorance or indifference – never bothered. Every morning, these twin unwashed bottles, a crusted swirl round the shoulders, a curd of yellow gunge inside the neck, and I’d be forced to plunge my fingers into these foul, sour-smelling receptacles. Every morning I cursed the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, though it never occurred to me, or else I was too diffident, to raise it with the Mormons when I saw them in the street.
For me, in any case, the gunky bottles said it all. The futility of the Mormons’ mission. How could you hope to convert a people to your religion when you couldn’t do something as simple as rinse a milk bottle? What kind of theology ignores the basic principles of domestic hygiene?
They don’t sell milk in bottles any more, so I couldn’t tell whether my current neighbours shared this foible of their predecessors. But I suspected them of grave and heinous lapses, sensational breaches in elementary sanitation, and when I saw them at their door, I tried to glimpse, beyond the neat, well-barbered heads, the chaos and squalor lurking within.
Back in the flat, I took down the new DeLillo and flicked through the pages. It was Elaine who put me onto him; she bought me White Noise for my twenty-fifth birthday. This is the problem with divorce: your whole life is suddenly steeped in irony. The books on your shelves. The shirts in your wardrobe. The photographs lining the hallway. Even my job was ironic. I was Scottish Political Editor for the Tribune on Sunday. It was my job to know the dirt on the nation’s leader, to sniff out the factions and fault lines, the party cabals, the imminent splits. All this I dissected for our readers. But I couldn’t do the same for my own house. The face that scowled out with such sceptical robustness from my byline photo, the cleft chin and hooded eyes that promised I’ve got the down, were those of a clueless sap: he didn’t know the politics of his own front door.
It turned out my marriage was in trouble – had been for a couple of years. This was news to me and maybe right there is the problem. But at the time I didn’t think there was much amiss, and even now, if I’m honest, I still don’t. We talked it through, or at least we faced each other over the kitchen table one night when the boys were in bed, and Elaine spoke to the polished wood, looking up from time to time as if to check I was still listening. There was a bottle on the table between us, and two glasses, but I did most of the pouring and drinking. She covered a lot of ground in that oration, and the problems, which were partly about me, were about other things too. Things I couldn’t have helped. Though there was no want of things that I could have helped, either.
I put down the DeLillo and fetched a beer. It was hard to relax, lacking distractions. I tried not to notice the quiet of the flat, its menacing stillness. Silence can impinge on you like a persistent noise. It can seem to fill the room, rising like a fluid, forcing you to act, to assert yourself against it.
When I was a kid, my dad used to take me to Mureton Baths. He had this ability to float on his back, to lie there in the pool with his hands behind his head, as if he was lying in bed. I could never do it, and for a long time this unmanageable feat was my private definition of manhood: when I was a man I’d be able to float on my back. But it never happened. My heels still drop, my neck stiffens, and I have to start kicking to stay afloat.
The silence in my flat was like this. It overwhelmed me, and soon I was out of the chair, clattering dishes in the sink, banging cupboard doors, and cranking up Elmore James on the Bose. I thought about Elaine, the house on Monument Way. In Conwick the noise was constant. Even when the boys were in bed, we would interrupt each other. ‘Wait a minute,’ she’d say, her hand upraised for silence. ‘Sorry. I thought I heard him crying. On you go.’ We’d do this all the time. Pulling up short, halting mid-sentence, straining to hear. As the kettle clicks off or you close a cupboard door, something flares briefly behind the noise; you freeze, head cocked like a spaniel. Nothing. But when they do cry, when that heaving rhythm fills the house, there is no mistake: at its first gathering note something dips behind your chest.
I still hear it, sometimes, late at night. There’s a baby in the building, in the flat above or next to mine – it’s hard to tell. Late at night, a baby’s wail, and the parents moving through to calm it. And sometimes it wakes me, in the early hours, and my feet are on the carpet before I realise my mistake. It sounds like Roddy, it sounds like James. A crying child always sounds like your own.
I remember my surprise, through the first few months of Roddy’s life – just the power of this noise, its ardour and intensity. A baby crying. What did it signify? A full nappy. An empty stomach. And yet it carried the world’s own weight of woe. It made every utterance – all the novels and epic poems, all the death-bed confessions and battle orations; it turned all this to a meaningless gloss. When he cried, the sound that came from Roddy was universal. When he stopped, when we’d lifted and patted and soothed him to sleep, the crying would continue somewhere else. I came to think that this was what we were hearing, those times when we’d thought he was crying; we’d caught a gust of that universal lamentation, had tuned in to the frequency where the crying never stops.
I gave out at the time, but secretly I relished those nightly disturbances, padding through to retrieve our crying child. When I eased him from the cot and cradled him close he’d crane round, rooting against my T-shirt, the little head bumping my chest, the mouth worrying my nipple.
‘Cannae help you there, wee man. Sorry.’
In the bedroom Elaine would have fixed the pillows and sat up, tugging open her jammy top. A pillow across her lap. She pats it. I lay him down and he clamps on straight away, the crying mouth instantly plugged. There is no silence like it. No silence like that of a child no longer crying. I get back into bed and the last thing I see, between sagging lids, inches from my nose, are the baby’s twitching feet, these little spasmodic kicks of satisfaction.
*
Thursday lunchtime. The office was quiet, the monitors blind, their dark screens latent, waiting to be touched to whiteness by the nudge of a mouse, a three-fingered tap on the space bar. Someone’s television gave out the financial report. Money is important, the voice implied, but not serious; the newscaster’s tone lacked the gravitas of the regular news; the timbre was peppy, bright, the light modulations of the showbiz slot or the sports round-up. There was something secret and promising in the stilled room, some echo of afterschool classrooms, and I had a vision, fleeting and sepia-toned, of brown-and-orange carpet tiles and chairs upturned on desks. A white Speedo clock on a wall.
Almost everyone had gone to lunch. A few heads bent to take bites from wrapped sandwiches or tipped to swill coffee from styrofoam cups. Burnt, bitter, mocha laced the air. The moist warm smell of focaccia.
I’d put in two good hours’ work. I’d eaten lunch and was ready to nip out for a smoke, a sly toke on the Liberator, when I spotted the mail, overlooked on my desk. The biggest item was a brown, card-backed envelope, locally posted.
Inside it was a single sheet of A4. It was a Xerox of a photograph. It’s a photo I have studied in some detail, and even then, as I laid it on my desk, it seemed familiar, something I’d known for years.
It’s an interior shot. Seven men are grouped against a bare white wall. The two men in the foreground wear black balaclavas, army pullovers and webbing belts. They stand with their legs apart and their hands clasped in front of them. The clasped hands grip pistols, the barrels pointing to the floor. The other men, unmasked and in civilian clothes, stand behind the gunmen. Two of them hold up a UVF flag. The head of one of the men has been ringed with a marker pen, and the words ‘Minister for Justice’ have been written beside it. At the foot of the page, in the white margin beneath the photograph, are the digits of a mobile telephone number.
I lifted the handset and punched the number.
‘Uh-huh?’
‘Gerry Conway.’
&n
bsp; A whistle. A scratchy laugh.
‘Hallelujah. You’re a hard man to impress. Did I finally get your attention?’
The lift door opened and Martin Moir stepped out, shrugging out of his jacket. I lifted my hand to return his wave.
‘It could be anyone,’ I said. ‘It could be me, in those specs.’
‘You think so? It’s Peter Lyons all right.’
Moir draped his jacket over his seat. He pointed to the lift door and then tapped his watch; held up five fingers. I nodded, gave him the thumbs-up. We’d arranged to meet for lunch.
‘So what do you want?’
‘You mean, what do you want. You don’t want to know more? Your curiosity isn’t piqued?’
I met Hamish Neil that afternoon, at the Costa Coffee in Queen Street Station. Moir and I had lunch in the Merchant City and then I strolled on down to the station. There were solitary men at three of the tables in the forecourt, but I knew which was mine. I knew the smile. It went with the voice. I bought an Americano and sat down.
‘Just so you’ve seen it,’ he said, and opened his satchel. He slid a seven-by-nine across the table.
It looked a lot different. Lighter and paler, like someone had upped the brightness too far. The black smudges, the violent chiaroscuro of the photocopy had gone. The five civilians had features now, eyes and mouths in place of savage black holes. Everything was sharper, more professional, but something vital had gone, some quality of impromptu brutality, a sense of the makeshift and illicit. The figures looked almost innocuous, posing there in the adequate light.
The man in the glasses was certainly Lyons.
‘Assuming it’s even him,’ I said. ‘That’s twenty years old, maybe more. What’s it meant to prove? That he used to know people who liked fancy dress?’ I tossed it onto the table. ‘That’s not a story.’
‘Isn’t it?’ He took back the photo. ‘Anyway, the photo’s not the story.’
‘What is it then?’
He was putting it back in the satchel.
‘The story is the New Covenanters. Ever hear of them?’
All the Colours of the Town Page 2
