Next morning I was fragile. It was after ten before I made it to the office. At lunchtime Martin Moir stopped by the desk.
‘What did he say then?’
‘Who, Lyons? I don’t know, I’m still waiting to hear from him.’
At ten to three Fiona Maguire came over and asked the same question.
‘I’m on it,’ I told her. ‘I’ll let you know.’
At quarter past three I went out for a smoke.
At half-past three I dialled the number.
‘Victoria Quay, Security.’
The civil servants don’t work weekends. On Saturdays the building’s normally empty apart from security personnel. I asked the guard to page the duty press officer. He took my name and details.
‘What’s it in respect of, Mr Conway?’
‘It’s a query for Justice,’ I told him.
‘Let me try the desk,’ he said, and then twenty seconds later: ‘There’s no answer from Justice.’
‘Maybe it’s deaf as well as blind,’ I said. Calls are logged anyway, but there was no harm making sure the guy would remember me. He said he would page the duty officer. Now I just had to sit and wait.
When you leave it this late there’s always a chance. There’s a chance that the PO doesn’t get the message. There’s a chance he can’t get a hold of the subject. That was the best case scenario. Even if Lyons did get the message, it would come too late. He’d have no time to dream up a story. I hung around for half an hour then I went to the canteen.
I lingered as long as I could over a chewy bagel and hazelnut latte. Back at my desk there was no blinking light on the phone. There were no new emails, nothing on the mobile. I called up the story and shined it a little.
‘Any joy?’
Maguire was back.
‘I think he’s hiding, Fiona. He’s in the bunker. I put in the call to Victoria Quay and there’s still no word.’
She lifted a snowman from my desk – a botched ceramic thing that Roddy had made in school – and turned it over in her hands.
‘We can’t run the story, Gerry. If we don’t get a comment we’re pulling it, OK?’
‘But he’s hiding, Fiona. He knows I’m looking for him.’
‘You called him when?’
‘Earlier on. This afternoon. Look, I don’t see–’
‘What time, Gerry?’
‘I don’t know. Three o’clock.’
She glanced at the base of the snowman then replaced it on my desk. She wiped her fingers lightly, and delicately sighed.
‘Stop pissing about, Gerry. Phone his mobile. Do your job.’
He answered on the sixth or seventh ring.
‘Peter, it’s me: Gerry Conway.’
‘Hold on.’ I could hear him closing a door, setting a glass on a table.
‘I’ve been trying to get a hold of you,’ I said. ‘I phoned you earlier.’
‘That’s right. You phoned Victoria Quay. At half-past three on a Saturday afternoon. I’m assuming that it couldn’t possibly relate to a story in this week’s paper or you would have phoned me long before now.’
‘Yeah, well, you assumed wrong, Peter. It’s about a story.’
‘I see. Have you stopped giving right of reply? Does Barbara Tennant know about this?’
‘I’m talking to you now, amn’t I?’
‘You certainly are. I take it you think you’ve found something in Belfast?’
‘A little nearer home, Peter. We’ve got a photo–’
‘Another photo! Jesus, Gerry, you’ve missed your vocation. You ought to be working in Boots. With a wee white labcoat. What is this one? A wedding party? A First Communion?’
‘It’s a more of a portrait, actually. The Minister relaxes. You’re entertaining at home. Your guest’s name escapes me at the moment. He’s about thirty-five, wears a ponytail. Oh yeah: he’s called William Torrins.’
Lyons said nothing. I could hear laughter in the background, a door swinging shut.
‘You can’t place the name? Maybe you’ve heard of his boss. Fella called Maitland? He’s nearly as famous as you.’ Lyons had forgotten to breathe. ‘You still with us, Minister?’
‘What are you doing with this, Gerry?’
‘We’re doing a story. We want you to comment.’
The breathing was back.
‘Look,’ he said finally. ‘I’m not going to comment on this just now. Hold off and I’ll talk to you next week. I’ll give you the story next week. That’s a promise.’
‘Give me it now.’
‘I can’t do that, Gerry. There’s things I need to sort out. I need to talk to people. There’s an explanation for all this. That’s all I can say. Just trust me, Gerry. Hold off for now.’
‘We’re running the story.’
‘If you’re running the story you’re running the story. But if I were you, Gerry, I would hold off.’
‘Thank you, Minister.’
I talked it through with Maguire and Rix. Maguire didn’t like it.
‘Why didn’t he phone back when you called Victoria Quay? Why’s he not demanding to see the copy? Why is Kenny fucking Wolfe not bending our ear? He’s playing us, Norman. The prick’s up to something.’
‘Of course he’s up to something.’ I turned to Rix. ‘He wants to kill the story for a week till he works out his excuses. What the fuck, Norman: take a flyer.’
Rix looked at me. ‘A week?’ he said. ‘He wants a fucking week?’ A sneer bunched his cheeks. His vowels were getting longer, more London. ‘Come off it, Fi, he’s fucking about.’ He folded his arms. He was wearing a white shirt, a shirt so white it threw a strip-light glare, seemed louder, somehow, than the others he sported, the lemons, the scarlets, the pinks. ‘Cunt’s at it. He wants a week to make up a story and wriggle out of it. Fuck this. Gerry: file the story.’
I added a single sentence to the final par: ‘The Tribune on Sunday approached Mr Lyons for his views, but the Justice Minister declined to comment.’
Then I filed it to the newsdesk.
Chapter Twenty-Two
We put the paper to bed at seven-thirty. I was eating out that night – I’d been invited to a dinner party near Charing Cross – so I went home to shower and change. The dinner was a boisterous affair. I brought some stupidly expensive wine – two bottles of Central Otago pinot – and half-a-dozen push-the-boat-out Romeo y Julieta Churchills, which were snatched up by the men and two of the women as soon as the poached pear galettes had been despatched. It’s hard to remain sedate and even-handed with a foot of smouldering Havana in your fist and before long we were going at it, waving our arms, shouting each other down and flapping at the smoke the better to jab imperative fingers, quoting stray lines of Scorsese, hogging the biscuits and cheese, lobbing grapes in each other’s wine and shrieking at Logan’s impression of Norman Rix.
Someone nipped out at eleven, returning with an armful of Tribune on Sundays. These were passed out round the table with the night air still cold on their folds and we all fell silent for a moment as if a new party game had been coined. ‘Minister and the Mobster’ was the headline. I got the byline, with ‘additional reporting’ from Martin Moir. There were grunts and appreciative snorts and then, as if on some sort of cue, nine or ten newspapers folded at once amid general drunken acclamation. More pinot was splashed into glasses and a ragged round of toasts was proposed. There was ‘The Lyons Tamer’, ‘The Editor in Waiting’ and others equally silly. Tam Logan got up on a chair and pledged ‘The Brave Men and Women of the Ulster Volunteer Force’. I looked over at Moir but he was laughing hard and he scraped to his feet with his arm braced on a chair back and roared out ‘For God and Ulster!’ The others liked the sound of this and for the next hour conversation was intermittently pierced by this hollered slogan and we’d all hoist our glasses in the air.
At one point a fireworks display banged and whistled into life and we watched from the big bay window the bursting colours over Cowcaddens, glittering detonations in the tone
s of Christmas tinsel.
It was three o’clock, the party still in loud disputatious flow when I escaped, a half-full bottle of pinot sloshing against my thigh. ‘For God and Luster!’ came the slurred shout from an open window and I flapped my free hand and tramped away towards St George’s Cross.
The wine purled sweetly in my gut alongside the Bolognese and the pear galettes, and the story, too, seemed lodged there in my belly, a round warm source of nourishment and succour. The Churchill on my tongue, its aftertaste of warm vanilla mixing with the cool night air, was like the savour of accomplishment.
Cabs shushed past like a parade of bowler hats but the night was fine and I kept on walking. At Holyrood Crescent an ebullient Goth swapped a handful of chips for a slug of wine and then a trio of lurching herberts in Ben Sherman checks arm-locked me into a block-long rendition of ‘Danny Boy’. A spirit of carnival bonhomie had taken possession of Great Western Road. The bouncers were smiling. A flat race had broken out beside Kelvinbridge Underground: two whooping lassies on their boyfriends’ shoulders jiggled and jounced up the white line, spurring their staggering mounts with heel-digs and slaps. Even the bearded jakey huddled near the Underground on a filthy tartan rug was happy. Someone had given him a kebab, and a grey-whiskered, tail-thumping Lab was sharing the spoils. I leaned down and placed my third-full bottle of pinot on his rug and the jakey looked up and smiled, the most beatific, gorgeous smile. Beneath the grime and greasy hair he was shockingly handsome – strong teeth and pale clear eyes: the Jesus of Kelvinbridge.
Across the bridge my path was blocked by a hen party, a clacking, shimmering, hooting confusion of shoulder straps and Shalimar, lipstick and gravelled laughter. The bride-to-be was jostled in their midst, her quilted jacket thickly sewn with tissue-paper roses, the blues and greens and whites and pinks, her Bo-Peep bonnet winningly askew. She carried a chanty hung with L-plates, and her gaggle of strappy-sandalled handmaidens shoved her towards me. It was £2 for a kiss and I found a fiver and dropped it in the chanty. ‘Give him his money’s worth!’ somebody shouted and when Bo-Peep’s sheepish osculation was over one of the henchwomen thrust her aside and shouted that she would make up the difference, probing my throat with her strenuous tongue while the whooping and cheering crescendo’d around us.
Outside one of the clubs a sleepy-looking doorman distributed flyers: ‘Sunday Night is Funk Night’. One of the hen party swooped past and snatched the whole wad from his grasp and, with the gesture of freeing a bird, launched them into the air. For two or three seconds they tickertaped round us, rippling and swooping like dayglo dollar bills and the punters who had up till now ignored them were suddenly in full pursuit, snatching them in fistfuls and tossing them back in the air, kicking through the dayglo leaves.
Every two or three blocks the gold lighted windows of Pakistani grocers gleamed like caves in the tenement cliffs. I stopped at the last one for milk and rolls and two chicken samosas and a Tribune on Sunday and every other Sunday paper.
‘You are planning a long lie,’ said the shopkeeper with a mock-forensic air as I lodged the bale of newsprint in my armpit and walked out into the night.
Inside the flat I buttered two rolls and put the samosas inside. Somewhere between the party and my flat I’d been garlanded with a pink Hawaiian lei. I hung it on my utensils rack. I poured a glass of milk and sat at the kitchen table.
The samosas were good – peppery and moist, with big potato cubes and hard little peas – and I slurped two glasses of milk while I ate them.
None of the papers – not one of them – carried the story. I looked again in case I’d missed it. A little knot started forming in my stomach, tightening as the pages turned. Why had they left it alone? As soon as a first edition hits the street, the other Sundays have it taxied to their office. If there’s anything big in another paper, you just lift it. You switch things about a bit and call your own contacts for a quote and then you put it out as your own story. The tabloids do the same thing but slap ‘Exclusive’ on it too. The other Sundays would have seen the story, which meant they’d preferred not to touch it.
I stood at the kitchen window and thought about this and smoked a Café-Crème and decided: big deal. It was nice to knock Moir off the front page, if only for a week. I swilled the last inch of milk, wadded the papers into a slippy newsprint log and dropped it into the pedal bin. I set the alarm for nine and went to bed.
I woke at 8:59 and waited for the numbers to change and the Radio Scotland news to come on. It was pretty far down the running order – maybe the fourth or fifth item – but at least it was there. Justice Minister Peter Lyons is under fire after an alleged secret meeting with a Glasgow criminal. The phrasing of the item was pedantically circumspect – ‘According to the Tribune on Sunday’, ‘The newspaper alleges’. What they were reporting was not the incident but the allegation. But at least they hadn’t ignored it.
I turned off the radio and got to work. I emptied the ashtrays and opened the windows and put all the paperbacks back on their shelves. I emptied and stacked the dishwasher. I took the rubbish down to the back green. I rinsed the bath and squirted thick green liquid under the rim of the toilet. The boys arrived as I was hoovering the living room.
‘Dad!’ James was wrestling out of his jacket. ‘Dad, I got a set-, a setter-. What is it again, Mum?’
‘A certificate.’
‘Dad, I got a certificate! It says I’m a dolphin.’
‘That’s great, son.’
‘Everyone’s a dolphin,’ Roddy said. ‘You don’t even have to dive.’
Elaine checked herself in the hall mirror, rubbing lipstick off her teeth. She was wearing a sleeveless print dress patterned with languid, sexual poppies. Her heels, belt, bag, nails and lipstick were a blatant glossy red.
‘You look nice.’
‘Thanks.’
They were driving to a wedding in Dundee, which is why they were able to drop off the boys. They would pick them up tomorrow on their way back to Conwick.
‘Adam in the car?’
‘Yeah, we’re double-parked. He says hello. So what’s the plan for today?’
‘I don’t know. Hello back, by the way. What do you think, boys?’
The boys looked at each other.
‘Swimming!’ shouted James. They thundered through to the living room and the telly’s strident contention started up.
‘Heavy night?’
‘How’s that?’
She leaned towards me and sniffed. Her own smell – or anyway that of her perfume, an overripe musk that might have seeped from those lurid poppies – reached me.
‘I had a glass or two,’ I said. ‘In celebration.’
‘Yeah, I saw the piece,’ she said. ‘Roddy, don’t put your jacket on the floor!’
‘And?’
‘Yeah.’ She bent to retrieve Rod’s jacket. ‘It was very well done.’ She smoothed out the jacket and draped it on a chair.
‘But?’
‘But. I don’t know, Gerry. The guy’s your friend.’
‘He’s not my friend! For Christ’s sake, Elaine. He’s a contact. He came to the house a couple of times. Jesus. And so what? What if he was my friend? I turn a blind eye? I don’t write the story?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘The guy in the photo? He works for Walter Maitland, Elaine. Walter Maitland the gangster? The guy’s a criminal, a flat-out bad guy. And our Minister for Justice is meeting him for drinkies? I mean, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Oh that’s nice, Gerry.’ She nodded at the living-room door. ‘You want them saying that in the playground? All I know is Peter Lyons was very nice to us. He’s been good to you, too.’
‘OK. Thanks, Elaine. Why don’t you leave the editorial comments to me. All right?’
Roddy came through with the Hawaiian lei round his neck. He was doing a hula dance. Elaine looked at me. She hitched her shoulder bag.
‘You be good now, boys. I’ll see you tomorrow. Give your mum a kiss.
’ She went to the window and waved down to Adam. ‘Can you have them back for twelve? Adam’s folks are coming for lunch.’
‘Message received.’
*
I took them swimming. Before we left I tried to catch five minutes of the lunchtime politics show but the boys were eager to get to the pool.
After the swimming we went for burgers.
‘I want it. I want the green one!’
James reached over the tabletop, clutching for the plastic toy. Rod held it out of his reach.
‘Want the green one! Want the green one!’
Every time we come here there’s a fight over the toys, the hunks of plastic junk that come with the food.
‘Just give him it, kid. Would you?’
Roddy couldn’t believe it.
‘What does it matter, Roddy? He’s just a wee boy. Keep him happy.’
‘Fine!’ The toy skittered onto the table and James snatched it up. Roddy folded his arms in a comic-book huff. ‘Why does he always get what he wants? I never get anything.’ He leaned across to his brother. ‘Idiot.’
‘Hi! Less of that.’ I should have given him a proper row but I only had a day and a bit with them now and there wasn’t time to waste on falling out.
He threw me a look.
‘Hey. C’mon. We’re having fun, right?’
I passed out the food. I put a straw in James’s Sprite carton, unwrapped his cheeseburger and made a tear in his bag of fries. In its warm wrapper, my burger felt soft and moist – it seemed to grow heavier as I held it, liquefying in my palm, its fibres collapsing. I put it down and opened my coffee.
As I knew it would be, the coffee was scalding, and though I tried to take the slightest of sips, merely vacuuming the topmost layer of liquid with a short intake of breath, it was enough to burn my mouth. The groove of my tongue was throbbing.
The boys brought skinny fries to their mouths. In the kitchens, a fat server in a maroon polo shirt was moving back and forth. No one in the restaurant was talking.
All the Colours of the Town Page 23
