The fish was prepared and the pasta was coming to the boil. I was unstacking the dishwasher and setting the table while James improvised savage unhorsings and protracted gory spearings amid the cutlery.
‘That’s like Adam,’ he said, pointing at me.
‘What is?’
‘That.’ He leaned across and touched my chin, pursed my lips between his fingers.
‘Jaggy!’
‘Oh the beard? Right.’
I hadn’t shaved for a couple of days.
‘Adam’s got a ’stache.’
He made a neighing noise and cantered a horse across his side-plate. I added salt to the pasta.
‘Do you like Adam? Is Adam nice?’
‘Yes he is.’
A hissing burst of gunfire – the lances had turned into rifles – knocked one of the knights off his mount.
‘He’s Mummy’s friend.’
‘That’s right.’
The windows were blanched. Condensation showed up the patterns of dirt – a mess of streaks and spots and runnels.
‘Dad?’
I was stacking bowls in the cupboard when James spoke, so what he said next came through a bright ceramic clatter. But I still heard him.
‘Adam pushed me.’
I turned round – too abruptly, for he looked up, wary.
‘Say it again, son?’
His shoulder came up and he buried his face in his neck.
‘Adam pushed me.’
I remember looking at the pasta – spiralli, it was – swirling in the boiling pot, and finding it hard to draw breath. I wanted to sink to my knees, a feeling prompted by two consecutive thoughts: this might be true; and I have no way of knowing. I crossed to the table and hunched down beside him.
‘What happened, kid? When did Adam push you?’
My voice was soothing, low: if I spooked him now, it was over; I’d never get to the truth of it.
‘Don’t know.’ He looked at the ceiling where the steam was massing. ‘Smoke! Daddy, I want pineapple juice!’
‘OK.’
I fixed his drink and then held it away from his outstretched hand.
‘James. Listen to Daddy. What happened, James? Why did Adam push you?’
He reached for the plastic cup, his little fist flashing open and closed.
‘Want it!’
‘James!’
I touched his shoulder.
‘Kid. This is important. This is really really important. Did Adam push you?’
‘What?’
‘Did Adam push you?’
‘What, Daddy!’
‘Was he kidding on? Was it just pretend?’
He looked up and seemed to decide. He nodded. His lips stretched in a coy grin.
‘Just p’etend!’
He took the cup in both hands and buried his nose in it.
I opened the window and steam billowed out.
*
That night, when the boys had their bath, I studied their bodies for signs of abuse. They stood on the mat in their blithe nakedness: damp, fuzzy-duck heads; big goose-bump-stippled bellies; tiny pricks; and plump, slightly knock-kneed legs. Once I’d patted and rubbed them dry I scooped my fingers into the big tub of Epaderm, rubbed my hands together and then smeared their bodies till they shone like seals. Then I unscrewed the tube of Fucibet and dabbed a spot of cream on wrists, elbows, ankles, the joints of the fingers, the backs of the knees. Then I worked these in with my thumb.
There was nothing – other than the eczema patches – to cause concern. Roddy had a fading, pistachio-coloured bruise at the tog of his leg, but Roddy always had bruises and when I asked him about it he couldn’t remember. Probably he had fallen off his scooter.
I phoned Elaine when the boys were in bed.
‘Don’t be daft, Gerry. It’s just something he says.’
‘You think?’
‘He says it all the time. He said it about Stacey, remember?’
This was true. Stacey was the ‘tweenie-room’ supervisor at the Rocking Horse. When Elaine took the nursery manager aside, and then Stacey was summoned, there was a difficult scene, with tears and testimony and earnest declarations. Stacey’s shock was so patently genuine, her hurt so real, that Elaine felt embarrassed, and sorry for having mentioned it at all.
‘It’s something kids say. It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘I don’t know. The way he plays with his knights, the little action figures? Was he always this … bloodthirsty?’
‘What are you saying, Gerry?’
‘I’m just saying.’
‘Gerry. If my boyfriend was hitting my children, believe me, I would know. I’m not some junked-out lassie on a sink estate. He’s not a hitter, Gerry. He doesn’t even raise his voice. He doesnae swear.’
Unlike you, said the silence.
‘Right.’
She rung off shortly after, sounding a little sore. I sat in the living room with the Weekly Guardian and a bottle of Rolling Rock. But I couldn’t read. I kept picturing Adam standing over my sons, his black eyes narrowed, white teeth bared below a black moustache. From the boys’ perspective, the figure foreshortened, he’d be as tall as a building.
I finished my beer and fetched another. I thought of Big D. I was already in my teens when Big D came into the picture – Derek Maxwell, Mum’s post-divorce boyfriend – and the question of discipline never arose. Though on one occasion it nearly did. We were in London for a weekend break, one of Big D’s minutely planned excursions. This one involved a Saturday-night dinner and West-End-show combination. The restaurant was a fancy one and I was supposed to wear a shirt and tie. I actually liked wearing a shirt and tie – getting dickered up, as Mum called it – but I was kicking up stink. I wanted to wind Derek up, force him to intervene so I could tell him he wasn’t my dad and where he could stuff his poxy show. Mum kept on at me in this ineffectual wheedling voice, until finally she turned to Big D with a help-me-out-here shrug. Big D wheeled round from the mirror, where he was briskly folding a four-in-hand, and surveyed the scene. Then he turned back to the mirror, still knotting his tie, and, addressing no one in particular, announced: ‘He’ll do what his mother tells him.’
This was cute, I thought. It sounded decisive and authoritative, but it still left the onus on Mum. If I’d really wanted, I could have picked a fight at that point, but I went to my room and got ready.
I was fifteen when this happened, a surly six-footer in a cut-off T. Roddy and James were still babies. What chance did they have if Adam turned heavy?
My acoustic was propped against the fireplace. I ran through some blues riffs but they sounded stale – I’d played them too often and I was a shade out of tune. I footered with the tuning pegs for a while but it was no good; something was always a semitone out.
What worried me was Roddy. I knew what Roddy was like, how maddening he could be in that wild half-hour before teatime. He would leap around on the furniture and howl like a coyote. And I knew how quickly you could lose the rag. It was scary how abruptly I could turn. One minute I’d be asking him, in a tone of studied evenness and balance, to please not climb on the sofa, and the next I’d be springing from my armchair in a crash of crumpling newspaper and yanking him by the arm right up the stairs.
It startled me as much as it did him, this instant murderous rage. Where did it come from? And this was my own son, a boy I would cheerfully die for, a boy whose life’s load of pain I would gladly endure in his place. If your own kid could rile you like this, what about someone else’s? Every day, the inside pages carried the same scenario: a toddler shaken to death, a baby taken to hospital with multiple injuries. And always, without fail, it was the boyfriend, some boorish lummox with a Friday-night skinful, the big cat who killed off the other cat’s cubs.
I thought about this, taking big pulls on my Rolling Rock and forcing myself to imagine it. I opened another bottle and something struck me. What if Elaine was right? What if Adam was this big benign guy? Captain Benevole
nce. Mister Pacific. Wouldn’t they choose him over me? Wouldn’t they be right to? Maybe I’d got it all wrong. Maybe my departure wasn’t a burden to the boys. Maybe it was a deliverance. I had lightened everyone’s load.
I sat for a while, not knowing which worried me more – the mean Adam or the good one. I opened the last beer. The couple from the flat below came home. There was a splash of dropped keys and some laughter and the guy’s voice, low and smooth and sexual. Then music came on, low, an alt/country thing with pedal guitar. I listened till the beer was done. I checked the boys and went to bed.
*
I woke in the small hours, panting, hunched on my side, sweating like a racehorse. My knees were stuck together and as I raised one leg and flapped the covers the night air rushed wetly in. I was in a house. It was our house in Conwick but also it wasn’t: it was a large, wood-framed mansion of a kind familiar from black-and-white films. To Kill a Mocking Bird. It’s a Wonderful Life. Elaine was there with the boys. Some people were coming to kill us and we were looking for a place to hide. From an upstairs window I watched two men come down the path. One of them stopped to close the gate, and as he turned back to the path he glanced straight up to my watching-place and nodded.
They wore full-face balaclavas, and heavy revolvers swung at their sides. They had bowler hats on top of the balaclavas, and instead of army-surplus jumpers and jeans they wore dazzling white suits of a beautiful cut.
When the men passed out of sight on their way to the front door I found myself in a kind of closet at the end of the first-floor landing. Elaine and the boys huddled behind me. I could hear the gunmen moving around downstairs. I was watching the top of the stairs from a keyhole in the closet door. Then there was a heavy, creaking tread and then one of the gunmen appeared. Just the one. ‘He’s killed the other guy,’ I remember thinking. Smoke was lifting in plumes from his handgun. Suddenly I was alone: Elaine and the boys had escaped. There had been some sort of tunnel or trapdoor, but it was no longer available; I would have to face the gunman on my own. With his free hand he took off his bowler and skimmed it, Oddjob style, across the landing. Then he gripped the hem of his balaclava and tugged, peeling it free, tossing his hair and baring his teeth in a dazzling smile. It was Adam. He was looking straight at me, as if he could see right through the keyhole, and he moved towards me in great clipping strides. I saw his hand reach for the doorknob as I scrambled back against the closet wall, and then a flash of white as the door was tugged free and I woke.
It was almost light. The bedroom, still unfamiliar after five months, took a moment to remember itself, to settle into its established contours. It’s OK, I thought. I’m all right. Then I heard a hiss, a slurping suck. Shallow breathing, close, right behind me in the room. Panic swelled and died, like boiling milk coming off the heat. I reached behind me and found a foot, a warm parcel of flesh which I gripped and squeezed. I laid the back of my forefinger against the sole, feeling the pudgy creased coolness. Glissade of the instep, the crust of eczema over his ankle. The foot moved and James inhaled noisily, settling down with little slurps of mastication.
Chapter Three
I clattered downstairs to Floor 3. There was an understanding, our own floor being busier, that we could use the subs’ facilities. They hated it. They viewed us, not even as the enemy (we weren’t clever enough for that), but as salaried schoolkids whose mess they cleaned up. Their communal areas were full of snidey notices, tacked up like cards at an exhibit:
THE MICROWAVE IS NOW CLEAN. PLEASE LEAVE IT THAT WAY.
CLEAN ALL 6 SURFACES.
IN THE INTERESTS OF HYGIENE, PLEASE FLUSH THE TOILET AFTER USE.
This wasn’t internal Floor-3 housekeeping: you could tell these were directed at us, the interlopers. They probably wanted notices that read ‘FUCK OFF AND LEAVE US ALONE’, but this was the next best thing.
The coffee had done its job but I sat on, wallowing in my stink, feeling the blood prick and fizz along the backs of my legs. There was a frosted dormer at my back but I left it closed. Twice, the handle rattled and footsteps dwindled up the hall. When I was finished I took out my pen and subbed the notice over the cistern. I put a line through everything except ‘PLEASE FLUSH’. Then I left without flushing.
When I got back to my desk the phone was ringing.
‘Gerry, it’s Darren.’ The voice was languid, suave. ‘Darren Bryce.’
‘You think I know two Darrens?’
Bryce was a senior aide at Justice. Lyons’s bagman. That was quick, I thought. Does he know already? Is he in on it?
‘Peter’s in town,’ Bryce said. ‘He wonders if you’re free for lunch.’
‘He has to, what, negotiate for lunch now? He can’t pick up the phone?’
‘He’s tied up, Gerry. Busy busy. But he’s very keen to see you.’
I opened my desk drawer. The photograph was still there, under a couple of magazines.
‘Sure he is. So, what: the Townhouse?’
‘Yeah? Peter was thinking maybe the other place.’
The other place was Ferrante’s, an old Sicilian basement in the Merchant City. It was some sort of Party haunt, the place they chose for their victory dinners.
‘I don’t know. It’s a little cramped.’
‘Peter was hoping Ferrante’s.’
I sighed.
‘Was he hoping a particular time?’
‘One-thirty, we thought.’
I slipped the photo out from under the magazines, put it in my briefcase.
‘Bryce?’
‘What?’
‘Can he eat the stuff himself? Can he do that much?’
‘He’ll see you at half-one, Gerry.’
*
On sunny summer afternoons, Glasgow is Manhattan. The buildings instantly lofty, colossal. Black diagonals of shade bisect the traffic, cut across the cabs on St Vincent Street. The city looks like a photograph, black-and-white, something out of Berenice Abbott, Bleecker Street or Union Square.
Fratelli Ferrante was packed. Usually, on visits here, I’d be shown to the toilet corner, where the two-seaters clustered like bubbles so that you ate with your elbows pressed to your sides. Today, though, I followed the waiter’s twisting hips to the sunflower centre of the floor, to a table right below the bladed fan.
Lyons was finishing a phone call. He half rose from his seat, his hand raised in greeting and deferral. As I reached the table he snapped the phone shut, glanced at his watch.
‘Gerry Conway,’ he said. ‘The late edition.’ The smile showed he was joking. His fingers wiped mine in a brisk shake. There was skittishness, a little flourish to his movements. The eyes were bright, brief scintillas of light fizzing in the blackness. He’s on something, I might have thought; the guy’s buzzed. If I hadn’t known better.
It was cool: even on a day like this, when shoppers wore the plaintive gaze of martyred saints in Renaissance paintings. Fan-freshened air on my nose and cheeks. You wanted to press the back of your hand to all the restaurant’s surfaces: the dark wood of the chair-backs, the tabletop’s pink marble, the starched napkins that gave off the cool of hotel bedsheets, the blades of the big-handled butter-knives.
There was no menu on the table.
‘The special’s sole. And it is special, in here. I took the liberty.’ He had fished a bottle from an ice-bucket beside the table and was filling my glass. ‘I hope that’s OK?’
I hung my jacket on the chair. ‘That’s great, Peter. Spot on.’
He laughed. ‘It is Friday after all.’
The wine was cold, sharp, appley. It tasted pleasantly neutral, as if the chill had dulled its flavours.
The place was busy. Business suits and well-heeled shoppers. A toothy woman three tables away had noticed Lyons; she was leaning over to her companion, fixing Lyons with that furtive, hungry squint that is so much more blatant than a stare.
‘What’s the occasion?’
Lyons chuckled, shook his head. ‘I’m meeting an old friend,’ he s
aid. ‘Do I need an excuse?’ He lifted the bottle again. Lyons didn’t drink, but he made sure your glass was full. I’d noticed this about him, how he was always buying rounds, pouring wine, as if his continence wasn’t enough on its own; it needed the relief of the other guy’s indulgence.
‘All right. Keys, OK? I’ve a couple of things I thought you could use.’
I pushed my cutlery aside to make room for my notebook. Lyons sighed, then leaned towards me. I wrote while he talked, getting it down, stopping now and then for a gulp of wine. He spoke in a low tone, unhurried, matching his words to the speed of my pen. He gazed off while he spoke, glancing down now and then – I could sense the big chin tipping towards me – to check on my progress with an air of slightly pained distraction, like he was waiting for someone to finish pissing. As summer stories go, these ones were worth a punt. Lyons was announcing a review into ‘slopping out’ in Scottish jails. He also leaked me a report into private prison finance. These were fine, but the third was a page lead. A sex offender on early release had assaulted a woman in Queen’s Park. The news would break tomorrow and the tabloids would go for Lyons, calling on him to intervene. He wanted me to draw the sting on Sunday with a piece blaming the Lord Advocate. When I tucked the notebook away, Lyons clapped his big hands and rubbed them together.
A waiter bore down on us, promisingly, and passed on, his two plates bound for other stomachs, and I rode the little stab of disappointment.
‘How’re things down there, then? How’s Rix?’
All the Colours of the Town Page 4
