In our meetings at the Cope we used the same words – diffidently at first, but with growing conviction as the bevvy flowed. Democracy. Truth. Scrutiny. A Free Press. We cared about these things; the Skinners just cared about money. Then we headed back upstairs to file our expenses.
Within a week it was over. Like everyone else who had threatened to leave, I stayed. I had just enough to lose by going. And it turned out the Skinners weren’t as bad as we’d feared. They knew their reputation and they worked hard to change it, emailing Tribune staff – from editor to copy boy – with a list of high-minded pledges. They dined the politicians, soothing scruples at Rogano’s over Loch Fyne oysters and peachy Riesling. And they set up an editorial board for the Tribune and the Tribune on Sunday. Once a month in the function room of an Edinburgh hotel (not, God help us, in Glasgow, far less the Tribune building), they took their places: senior editors, marketers from the Skinner Press, and – this was the bit highlighted in excited press releases and intoned by Eric Skinner to the Media Commission at Holyrood – four representatives from ‘civic Scotland’, respected figures from the nation’s public life. This hand-picked quartet would guard the Tribune’s mantle and defend the paper’s mission. No one was surprised at the appointments: Fergus McCrone, former Scotsman editor and Arts Council stalwart; Madeleine Grant, broadcaster, diarist and author of Scotland’s Secret Gardens; Edwin Reilly, the Booker-shortlisted novelist and veteran Home Rule agitator; and Jarvis Tennant, former Principal of Glasgow University. Then stomach cancer killed Tennant and after the funeral his equally eminent wife – Barbara Tennant, QC, human rights lawyer and occasional Tribune columnist – accepted his seat.
The fact that Barbara Tennant was the former colleague of Peter Lyons in the law firm of Leggat, Lyons and Ross prompted nobody’s eyes to narrow. Scotland’s a small country. A degree of overlap and incestuous messiness is unavoidable. But Barbara Tennant was now on our shoulder, the scrutineer of the Tribune’s morals. And Tennant was out to get us.
I made the call next evening; I couldn’t put it off any longer.
‘Who’s this? Do I know a Gerry? You fucking dipshit, Conway. I thought you’d retired. What is this, your fucking holidays?’
‘Hello, Norman.’
‘Four fucking hours I’ve been trying to get you!’
‘There’s no signal.’
‘Yeah? Here’s the signal. Get your arse back to Glasgow. It’s finished. All right? Get back here and do your job. First ferry.’
I was in the hotel room. The telly was showing golf, with the sound turned off. Sun bouncing off the fairway, the grass a poisonous green.
‘Don’t lie down to her, Norman.’
‘What?’
‘Just, show a bit of balls, that’s all. What can she do? She’s not even management.’
‘Whoa, Gerry. What the fuck. Who are we talking about here? Barbara Tennant?’
‘It’s OK, Norman. Martin told me. She’s been in to see you. You’re going off the deep end here, Norman. There’s no–’
‘Gerry. Gerry!’ He was laughing. ‘Believe me. Barbara Tennant is the least of my fucking worries. Barbara Tennant? Fuck Barbara Tennant.’
‘What then?’
‘Wolfe was in.’
Kenny Wolfe – ‘White Fang’ to his admirers, ‘Cry Wolfe’ to the rest of us – was the Party’s chief spin doctor. He was never off the phone, to Rix or Fiona Maguire, to the PCC, grousing about nationalist bias or misattributed quotes, demanding retractions and clarifications. I once wrote an editorial that stopped short of consigning the Nats to eternal perdition. Wolfe was on the phone that morning, demanding the name of the writer. Rix stonewalled him. ‘Right,’ said Wolfe; ‘I’ll remember this. Tell whoever wrote it he’s got a thistle jammed up his arse.’ This time he’d arrived at the Trib at 9 a.m., and spent forty minutes jabbing his fat finger in Rix’s face. I dwelt on that image for a second or two while Rix ranted on.
‘He’s calling it harassment,’ said Rix. ‘First Martin’s gangland splash and then the leader attacking Lyons. And now you in Belfast. It’s vindictive, he says. We’re defaming the poor guy. We’re out to bring him down. He’s already got the luvvies on the case’ – the luvvies were Tennant and the rest of them – ‘but now he’s going higher. He’s written to the Skinners. He’s threatening the PCC.’
A heavyset blond guy in fawn slacks and a patterned sweater was stumping up the fairway, fiddling with his glove. This was part of golf’s appeal: physically, there wasn’t that much to choose between the Sunday morning hackers and their million-dollar idols.
‘You’d have to wonder, Norman. Why the petted lip, right at this moment? He’s shitting it. He knows we’re on to something.’
‘Does he? He knows more than I do, then. Or you, unless things have changed.’
‘Norman: that’s the whole fucking point. They know something we don’t: that’s what I’m here to find out.’
Rix didn’t say anything for a bit. The golfer was reading the green, squatting down with the putter in his fist, like a grotesque parody of a pole-dancer.
‘I know, Gerry. I know. Wolfe’s a fucking madman, I know. But this time he means it. He’s out his fucking tree.’
The blond guy was addressing the ball. His knees quivered as he readied the shot.
‘So tell him to fuck himself. You’re a big grown-up man, Norman.’
‘Yeah? Here’s a better idea. Why don’t you tell him to fuck himself? And while you’re at it you can explain to the board where the money’s gone. You remember that money? The government money that kept rolling in, all those public info spots that are going to the cunting Scotsman, now that you’ve gone and fucked it up. You want to tell them about that?’
‘He didn’t say that. Come on, Norman.’
‘Oh, he didn’t?’
The blond guy was still quivering.
‘So call him out. Fucking splash it. That’s a story in itself.’
‘Be your age, Gerry. You think I wear a wire to speak to Kenny Fucking Wolfe? He’d brass it out. He never said it anyway. In so many words.’
I started to speak but he cut me short.
‘Save it, Gerry. It’s finished. You’re coming home.’
The putt sank. Blondie stooped to retrieve it, the spikes on his sole catching the sun. He doffed his visor and tipped it to the crowd.
I put the telly off and reached for the minibar. A plastic miniature Red Label and a fridge-cool Toblerone.
I knew I was wrong. I knew I’d fucked up. But I was having a hard time liking it. Maybe I could go over some things again. I phoned Isaac Hepburn but it went to voicemail. I left a message. I bit down on the Toblerone and hurt the roof of my mouth and tried him again. Finally I drove to the gym and the guy in the blue vest – the same guy who served us drinks while Hepburn promised to help me – seemed fresh out of sympathy.
‘I don’t know. Do I look like his social secretary?’
‘Look, he told me to get in touch. Just give me an address. I need to see him.’
‘You’re not listening, fella. I don’t know where he is.’
‘Yeah, fuck you too. Brain Trainer? I’d take it back, it’s not fucking working.’
I didn’t wait around for his reply. I stomped out to the car and sulked. There was a knot of teens in the car park, hanging about on the disabled ramp, sharing a bottle of cider. I felt like asking for some. I was going home. I had run out of options.
Back on Botanic the hotel car park was full. They were nose to tail down both sides of Cromwell Street. I drove around and finally found a space on Eglantine Avenue. Walking back to the Grania, I spotted a cab and flagged it: ‘City centre, mate.’ In the Cathedral Quarter I found a pub I’d never used. Another well-dressed, disapproving barman – this one looked like a border guard or a driving instructor – raised his eyebrows. I scanned the whiskies and spotted the bulbous neck and angular shoulders of a Lagavulin bottle. I made it a double, with a Guinness to chase.
There were plenty of whiskies. I thought of Mrs Gillies and her tray of coloured bottles. The green eyes and the firm-set mouth. The preposterous clock. Her skinny forearm, when she pulled it loose, had felt about ready to snap. My palm still burned where I’d gripped her. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d touched her inappropriately, intimately somehow, as if it was a breast or a buttock I’d grabbed and not her wrist. I slugged the whisky and quenched its sour burn with a sluice of Guinness. After all, what had I done? I’d forced her to tell the truth. But the truth, I now realised, is not common property. Some truths are private. Mrs Gillies had paid for the truth I’d exposed. That truth was hers and I’d taken it from her.
I took a bite of whisky, held it in my mouth till the Guinness joined it. I’d established a rhythm with these alternating mouthfuls: the malt cut through the waves of stout like the prow of a sharp little boat. I was getting drunk but I wasn’t feeling any better. I had fucked up – nobody’s fault but mine, as Blind Willie Johnson says – but still I felt cheated. I could see it, in my mind’s eye, the thing that hadn’t happened: Peter Lyons leering with glee as he planted more leather in Gillies’s kidneys. It had seemed so in keeping. In keeping, at least, with the Lyons of my weekly column – the debonair street-fighter, the lush-toned showman who still liked nothing better than a spot of toe-to-toe. I always had fun writing him up. I resisted the leonine conceits of the red-tops, who routinely had the Justice supremo tossing his mane or batting away opponents with a swipe of his massive paw, but my copy ran to extravagant lengths. When Peter Lyons smiles at you, it’s time to run for cover. Yesterday in the chamber, Malcolm Jesmond, the hapless Member for Pentlands West, found this out. The hard way. The Lyons I constructed was a hard man, a smiling enforcer, dishing out punishment to the weak and the wayward. When this image was given flesh by Isaac Hepburn’s memories, I felt almost proud. It was like watching a character come to life.
Even as I was driving to meet Mrs Gillies, I’d been shaping my opening par. The sentences were arranging themselves, slotting into place, as if those words in that order had always been there. Now I had nothing. No leads. No pegs. No story.
The jukebox had started: something tinny and Irish. The maudlin swoop of tin whistles, a bodhrán’s flatulent blatter. I was sick of the whole place, this tinpot Dodge with its crummy back-to-backs, its pot-bellied hard-men. I drained my Guinness, the final inch of yellow dregs. The wershness made me grue.
Out on the street it was almost dark. Warm, with a fresh salt lick in the wind. For a moment I wasn’t sure where to go: was it right or left to the Grania? I paused on the pavement and the door rattled at my back, three guys pushing past, one of them stopping to light a smoke.
He called something to the others as he jogged to catch them up but a bus heaved past and it covered his words. The destination board said ‘City Centre’ in neon tangerine and I started off in the other direction.
I couldn’t shake the image of Mrs Gillies taking my whisky glass, sneering at me through blue cigarette smoke. Had Lyons got to her? Had he told her what to say? It seemed unlikely that he would go to such lengths, but who could tell? And Rix: why couldn’t he see it? If Lyons was this desperate it meant there was a story. Why wouldn’t Rix let me follow it? I thought of my phone call with Lyons, the dangerous rasp in his voice. I could hardly blame him. He thought I would toe the line. Why wouldn’t he? We’d made a deal. The terms were never stated but we both knew what they were. He fed me stories and I made him look good. For a jump on the other papers, I wrote him up in my column. It suited us both. We would rise together, Lyons to the ministerial Lexus, me to the editor’s chair. Only it hadn’t worked out like that. Lyons was already fixed. In six weeks’ time he’d be Scotland’s First Minister. It seemed a poor enough prize, but that was his call, not mine. And where was I? No nearer the top than I had been last year. I was clinging by my fingers to a job I’d grown to hate.
‘Got a light?’
That Belfast flatness; a querulous whine. I looked round. He detached himself from a doorway with a roll of the shoulders and stepped up to me. Short, the ginger stubble on his skull barely cresting my chest, the scalp flecked and grainy in the streetlamp. A lot of chest and shoulders under the T-shirt.
‘A light.’
An edge of irritation now, but still I didn’t speak. I sensed, at some level, what was happening, but I was a beat behind the action, distracted by some bothersome detail, some shortfall in verisimilitude, a glitch in continuity. And then it came to me. He’s got a light. It was the guy from the pub; I’d seen him light a fag just up the street.
He looked away, almost sadly it seemed, and as the bald head dipped I saw the others, his two compadres, shuffling into view, stopping at the corner in a sheepish jostle. There was an alley there, they’d been hiding in the alley, and when I turned back to Ginger that’s when it came, once, hard, flush to the jaw, a blow that jellied my legs, and though I stepped back, once, twice, I didn’t go down. I swayed on the kerb, my toes scrabbling for purchase, the knobbly stone with its chewed-caramel surface rocking under my shoes’ thin soles. Then I stepped back once more, right into the street, let’s get it out in the open, and put my dukes up with a flourish like some cigarette-card pugilist.
The three exchanged glances and stepped off the kerb, Ginger coming straight towards me and the other two cutting behind. I edged down the block a few yards, further from the alley mouth and when Ginger lunged I stepped inside and socked him, hard and then again, deep winding digs in the gut. He folded up and back-pedalled across the road, his feet moving with comical deftness, and for a brief, euphoric moment I thought, I can do this, I can take these fuckers. Then his two mates caught him under the arms and propelled him back over the road. He was grappling, he had my arms clamped to my side before I could swing a punch and then we fell, together, toppling in the roadway.
In the moment of falling – a long, almost tender interim, during which I fell as you fall in dreams, endlessly, with a distracted anxiety – everything changed. The fight went out of me. Something inside, some internal committee of the will, just opted not to bother. We bumped to the ground and Ginger was already scrambling to his feet. I could have struggled up after him but I didn’t. I just lay there, with my eyes closed and my legs drawn up, fingers laced on the base of my skull, my body tingling as it waited for the blows.
For a second, all I could hear was his breathing, Ginger snorting and blowing like a winded horse, and then the ground slid away from beneath me and then it slid away again. He was booting my guts, shifting me a little with each kick, and I hunched tighter, balling my body, shielding my front. He stepped around me now, picking his shots. Kidney. Spine. Head. Head again. One of my knuckles burst as his toecap smacked it. Then there was nothing. The horse sounds again. Then a guttural rush, like a throat clearing phlegm and the ground was moving again, my heels jiggling over cracked tarmac as they hauled me into the alley, my skull smacking brick as they tossed me down.
His face was in mine, a sour porter stench. I opened my eyes to the moving mouth, the working lips and teeth, the darting tongue. Our eyes locked. He had finished speaking. He put his finger out slowly and touched the tip of my nose. Then they were gone, six legs clipping off round the corner, and I lay there letting the sounds he’d made, the tight, level tones, resolve themselves sedately into words.
Chapter Fifteen
The rain had come on, a light smirr ticking into my hair, wetting the backs of my hands. It misted my brow and cheeks, fell coldly on the cut above my eye. I closed my eyes and the water rinsed my lids, sifting into the lashes. It felt good, therapeutic, to lie in the rain, in the dark of the alleyway, cars hissing past on the street. There was a smell down here in the dark, stale piss and petrol, not unpleasant. I moved my tongue. My mouth tasted rusty, like matchbox cars.
In a minute, I told myself. A minute, Gerry; give me a minute. A voice in my head was telling me to move. I didn’t want to move. Once I moved I would know how bad i
t was and there would be no way to change it and go back to not knowing. I would move soon. Three more cars. I counted them off. When the third hissed past I flexed my right ankle, stretched it out like this was 7 a.m. and I was waking to the traffic report. It felt OK. Now the other. I shuffled my hips to bring the leg out from under me. Fine. Then I eased up on one elbow and braced my palm against the ground and a white pulse of pain wrung my shoulder. I braced my arm again, as if I might trick the pain, catch it off guard.
The shoulder, then. OK. What else? The head. I raised it six inches. A dull cold ache at the base of the skull, a bluish pain, metallic. Shoulder; head. And the finger, of course. The middle finger on the right hand, already standing up from its fellows, fake-looking, a plastic banana.
‘Take a telling,’ he’d said. Those were the words. His mouth half an inch from my own, a lover’s closeness.
Take a telling.
The beating had discomposed me. I was no longer a unit but a rackety assemblage, a jerry-built contraption of a man. I stood up in stages. Then I leaned for a while on the wall and pushed myself off and stumbled towards the street, man of iron, a spatchcocked thing, my bones clanking like stair rods.
The car was parked on Eglantine. It wasn’t too near the hotel, but that was good. I wasn’t going back to the Grania, not till I knew it was safe.
All the Colours of the Town Page 16
