Four New Words for Love

by Michael Cannon

  FOUR NEW WORDS FOR LOVE

  First published August 2013

  Freight Books

  49-53 Virginia Street

  Glasgow, G1 1TS

  www.freightbooks.co.uk

  Copyright © Michael Cannon 2013

  The moral right of Michael Cannon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or by licence, permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-908754-24-0

  eISBN 978-1-908754-25-7

  Typeset by Freight in Garamond

  Printed and bound by Bell and Bain, Glasgow

  For Denise and Rachael – my girls

  Michael Cannon was born and brought up in the West of Scotland and worked variously as an apprentice engineer, tax officer, various temporary occupations and oil worker before returning to higher education to study literature. He now works for the University of Strathclyde. His debut novel The Borough was published in 1995 and A Conspiracy of Hope followed in 1996, both published by Serpent’s Tail. His novel Lachlan’s War was published in 2006 by Viking to much acclaim. He lives on the south side of Glasgow with his wife and daughter.

  “If equal affection cannot be/ Let the more loving one be me”

  from ‘The More Loving One’ by W.H. Auden

  CONTENTS

  PART 1

  PART 2

  PART 3

  PART 4

  PART 1

  Nick didn’t take long. Quick Nick. I lay back and thought of Eng... I’ve no particular reason for thinking about Nick at this particular time. I’m in the flat, with Lolly. She’s rolling her third spliff. The air’s layered with strata of smoke, turned rust coloured in the late light. You can puncture two layers just standing. I don’t touch the stuff but people have become passive addicts just being around her. With Lolly there’s always a danger of proximity.

  Sometimes I feel I don’t actually have thoughts in this place, I encounter them, suspended in this haze. But then that sounds like the kind of intellectual wank you hear from students on the top deck of buses, putting the non-matriculated world to rights with their annoyingly loud voices.

  Lolly’s got two speeds: dead-stop lethargy and high-octane hustle. Both infect people around her in some way. I’m the only one here to bear the effect of tonight’s sloth. It takes me all the effort I can manage to stand up and walk to the window. It’s getting on for the magic minute. I always stand here and watch it, weather permitting. The sun’s cast an oblong of light on the opposite wall, catching Lolly in its passing. She keeps herself air-hostess orange. Her colour looks even more ridiculous in the bronze rectangle. Either it’s the passive dope or she’s radiating some kind of inner light, like a catechism picture of the Holy Ghost, sweating piety. Maybe there’s more to her than meets the eye. But that’s rubbish. There’s exactly as much to Lolly as meets the eye and she spends a lot of effort making sure men spend a lot of time taking the sight in. She’s got hips to breed gladiators and breasts like missile silos. She’s got a theory of fat women. Some women are dumpy fat, some gloomy fat, some shy fat, some aggressively fat and some, very few, are erotically fat. There’s no mistaking Lolly’s category. She aims her breasts at men and they surrender. I don’t know if it’s got to do with genes or attitude, but it hardly ever fails. Maybe her reputation adds to her attraction. I can’t say I understand it. But in a way I do. If I’m depressed I’ll rest my head against her chest, and it’s got the same effect as wrapping yourself in a duvet that’s been blown dry in the fresh air.

  She’s put the spliff to one side and turned her attention to the camera. I groan. She insists I sit on the sofa. Every time something happens, or doesn’t, she takes a picture of us. She’s got shoe boxes of those stamp-sized photos you get in booths, black and white graduating to what passes as colour of the two of us, faces squashed together or at the wrong height because the seat won’t screw up or down, cataloguing our reckless Saturdays through boiling puberty and beyond. She’s always saying we should pour them on the carpet and sort them out. I don’t think so. I usually deflect her attention. It isn’t hard. I’m thinking of history. She’s talking nostalgia. If you don’t know the difference it can be fatal. She doesn’t know the difference. I don’t have the energy to explain. She doesn’t have the attention span to listen.

  I get crushed as she sits beside me. She leans forward to put on the autotimer. I get the full heft of her breasts in my neck. She’s got no sense of private space, and I’m not just talking about rubbing her tits into the back of strangers on the tube. When I started to cry in the cinema toilets it was Lolly who kicked the door in and snatched the thing from my hand. We watched the line appear. ‘Try another,’ she ordered. You only get one in the pack. I sat crying on the pan while she left to get another and then she stood beside me, holding my hand, as I tried to accumulate enough pee for another try. And even then we got on one another’s nerves. She told me crying leaked out the liquid I was trying to muster. ‘Hardly,’ I said, ‘I don’t think your bladder works that way. You’ve got your biology all wrong.’ And she said, ‘No. You’ve got your biology all wrong.’ And even although she was annoyed, she was crying. And that’s when I had an unkind thought. Why me? Why me and not Lolly? When it comes to men she’s got no powers of discrimination that I can see. And I know her best. I know her better than she does. I knew who it was because there was no process of elimination. I spent all my time discriminating at the expense of the fucking obvious precaution. And the irony was that Quick Nick lived up to his reputation. I wouldn’t have minded so much if it had been more memorable, but it lasted as long as a jolt with a cattle prod, which was the same length of time it took him to work out his exit strategy. I only found out his nickname later. Lolly told me. She told me she’d named him. I was too depressed to ask. Biology or not, I tinkled out another pee. We waited. The result was the same. She squeezed my hand. She’s been near at every crisis in my life.

  There are girls around here who use abortion as a form of contraception. I’m not religious and I’m not superstitious, but I’ve an image of those potential mothers, old women about to croak, going towards the white light when they realise there’s a little queue waiting for them in the tunnel, a line of foetuses in various stages of development, eyes, when they have them, deep black with reproach.

  I wasn’t keen on telling Dad. Lolly’s idea was not to tell him and let the news seep in.

  ‘Are we talking about the same person?’

  Dad’s ability to pick up a signal is as good as Lolly’s. His idea of a hint is a boot in the balls. They both live in a world where they confront, or are confronted. Facts arrive, they aren’t foreseen. The reason I wasn’t keen on telling Dad is that he’s built this little fantasy round me to separate me, in his own mind, from Mum. He calls me ‘Princess’. This has more to do with him than me. I don’t need any fantasies to separate me from Mum. But he’s fragile enough. If it takes this little delusion to keep him standing I wouldn’t deny it unless I had to – like giving him the news that I’m pregnant.

  Rumour has it that Mum in her prime cou
ld give Lolly a run for her money in the fornication handicap. Maybe she still can. She left us eight years ago, when I found out how I got my name. Dad said it was because of his favourite film star. ‘Your namesake,’ he said, ‘my little Gina.’ Dad and Gina Lollobrigida. A cosmopolitan Italian beauty and a skinny alcoholic Glaswegian ex-plumber with nicotine stains, shakes and a volcanic cough that sometimes spots the furniture with glistenings of lung. Some fantasies are so fantastic they’re sad. Dad and Gina Lollobrigida. As much chance of that pairing as walking into the living room and interrupting the Yeti doing sums. It turned out that Dad didn’t name me at all – Mum did. It turns out that she got her inspiration from some third-generation Italian waiter she was granting favours to, ankles behind her ears on the gingham table cloths. He was the owner of a trattoria up town, with his fake wop accent and straw Chianti bottles with candles in them. At least that was Dad’s description, that came out much later when he had a bronchial infection that obliged him to dry out for two weeks. Mum’s bit of stuff said he was going to the Amalfi coast to set up a place of his own and he’d send for her. Turns out the place was closed down by Health and Safety after the seafood pasta turned half the customers into double ended squibs, that Carlo’s real name was Frank, that he’d gone as far as Newcastle to contaminate the locals there and shag hopeless Geordie housewives.

  ‘Typical fucking wop,’ was Dad’s pronouncement, in front of Mum, although we all knew he was no more an Italian than any of us. Maybe it was aimed to hurt, because she hurt him so much. Maybe it was because Frank was tainted by association. He pretended to be Italian so he was a ‘fucking wop’. I live in Glasgow, with people. Dad’s surrounded by ‘fucking wops, fucking spicks, fucking chinks, fucking darkies, fucking pakkis and fuck knows who else.’ A short sally for his half dozen cans and we’re told ‘It’s like Liquorice fucking Allsorts round here now.’ It wasn’t like that back then, the glory days of national pedigree, before the population became this mongrel, whenever that was. I pointed out that he wouldn’t have had Asian shopkeepers servicing his habit at half past ten on a rainy Sunday night back then, but he was past reasoning a thousand bottles ago. He’s fighting to keep the ethnic purity of him and his cronies, so they can all lie gurgling drunk on their various piss-stained mattresses across the city.

  I don’t know if her shagging drove him to drink or if he’d have got there on his own anyway, but she timed her departure to perfection – just after Kevin’s. She left, Dad imploded, and any pretence of being a family disappeared with her.

  He answered the door before I could put my keys in the lock. Lolly was holding my other hand. We couldn’t get in with him barring the way. From my hesitation he knew something was coming. He’s never fully sober but he wasn’t drunk. ‘My little Gina...’ He touched my face. I could feel the beginnings of a tremble, like a washing machine that’s about to go into spin.

  ‘She’s pregnant.’

  He dropped his hand. For a moment nothing about him seemed to change and then, very slowly, he looked like one of those sea-side inflatables at the end of holiday that’s leaked just so much air, still afloat but you wouldn’t trust your weight to it. And then he turned round and walked back into the living room and turned up the telly. Lolly followed shouting explanations. ‘She knows who he is! She’s not like her mother!’ I bundled her out, grateful and angry at the same time.

  I didn’t see him for a week, but heard him come in in the early hours, coughing, flushing the toilet, shouting in his sleep, aggressive static caught up in whatever goes on in the jumble of that fucked-up imagination. I confronted him early afternoon mid-way from his bed to the toilet, hunched, vulnerable.

  ‘Is this supposed to be role reversal?’

  ‘This can wait till the morning.’

  ‘You haven’t seen the morning since Mum left. I’m the one who’s pregnant. I’m the teenager – at least for the next couple of months. I’m supposed to be the one who misbehaves. I’m the one carrying the kid. I need support – not another passenger.’

  He swayed a bit and sucked in some air. ‘Gina, my Gina...’ He touched my face. His eyes welled with tears and then he stood stock still, a thought struck him and the tears vanished, as if they’d been turned off at the tap.

  ‘He’s not a pakki is he?’

  I didn’t give him the satisfaction of an answer. He spends three days off the sauce and interviews me, looking like something that lives under a rock. It seems he’s prepared to put the unknown ethnic background of his grandchild behind him. In itself this is no small thing as he tries to explain to me the change he’s undergone. His liver must have gotten up at a count of nine while the booze was sent to a neutral corner. He says he has a calling to become a grandfather. We both know the fucked-up job he made of being a dad, although neither of us says so, and he sees this as a second chance.

  ‘Well, Dad, here’s a grenade in the guts: there’s absolutely no fucking chance of me staying here with a kid to get the kind of upbringing I got – or didn’t.’ I don’t actually say it but it’s the first thing I think. If I say it now the bottle will come out the neutral corner and knock seven shades of shite out his liver. If this fantasy will keep him going till he gets some kind of normality, whatever that might mean, where’s the harm? These are conversations I’m having with myself as he sketches out his plan, in fits and starts, over the next week. He’s going to dry out. He’s going back on the tools. We’ll move – the city is no place for a young one. I get quietly angry. Why did none of this occur to him before? Why were Lolly and me allowed to smoke fags in decommissioned lift shafts when we should have been doing homework? Why did I have to bribe strangers to sign my report cards? Did he know anything about my whereabouts, never mind ambitions, between the ages of eleven and nineteen? Does he now? Any recrimination will crush this fantasy so I let it run on. As for moving from Glasgow, I know that Dad’s internal geography consists of a series of drinking dens, linked by bus routes, with houses and the occasional shop between. Beyond this is an enormous, vague, threatening place called The Rest of the World, filled with famine, theme parks, unimaginable dangers, fucking wops, fucking spicks, fucking chinks, fucking darkies, fucking pakkis and fuck knows who else who, even if they spoke the same language, wouldn’t understand his accent. It’s a place you don’t go but, according to Dad, we’re going there with my baby. I think he’s glimpsed bits and pieces from day-time telly and formed some image of a cottage with ivy, the friendly country parson, Mrs Miniver dropping in with warm scones. If there ever was such a place, and he went there, the residents’ committee would have him turfed out before he could piss in the bus stop. Everyone has fantasies of some kind. Some can be achieved. Most can’t, but it’s the fact that they’re just out of reach that tantalises and keeps you going. The distance of the gap in Dad’s case startled me. I could imagine the sense of dislocation he must have felt, happily wandering round in his mind then opening his eyes. Out goes the cottage with the big-titted dairy maids, in comes the sofa with the burnt fag marks, the fridge sprouting algae and the final demands for the electric. I don’t know if drink drove him to imagine something impossibly better, or the realisation of the distance drove him to drink. While he ranted he was eating more or less regularly and I debated with myself the advantages of a staple diet versus the danger of letting the fantasy run. The decision wasn’t mine.

  ‘You’re wanted at the Social,’ Lolly said.

  ‘What for?’ he asked.

  ‘Cause she’s trying to get a place fixed up.’

  ‘They’re staying with me.’

  ‘I’m only the messenger.’

  ‘Actually, Lolly,’ I said, ‘you’re a fucking newspaper.’

  ‘Gina... My little Gina...’

  He welled. Anybody crying in the same hemisphere sets her off. She spoke between pants. She was going for the big one.

  ‘I’ve caused untold hurt.’ She got that from the re-run of Crown Court on afternoon telly.

  ‘Put a
sock in it. The hurt isn’t untold because I’m telling you about it. It’s not difficult to see who’s the brains in this outfit. Dad, you stop too. You were never going to leave here. You in the countryside? The only plumber in Brigadoon. When you’re on the sauce you can’t change a washer.’ I spread my arms encompassing the sofa, the scarred table, the flat, the lock ups, the circle that enclosed all those piss-smelling pubs he lives in that burp out drunks at closing. ‘This is all you know. I’m not going far. Me not being here doesn’t mean you won’t see your grandchild. You can come round. You’re miserable sober. I’d rather my kid had a happy granddad who takes a drink than some gloomy sober bastard.’

  He wiped his eyes. I pressed home the advantage ‘And no, Dad, he’s not a pakki.’

  ‘Let’s have a cup of tea,’ Lolly said. After he’d gone she said she thought we should give him the benefit of the doubt about trying to dry out.

  ‘We could give him a nudge. It might make a difference. We could look it up in the phone book and get him to go. One of those groups where all the dipsos get together and tremble, but don’t say what they drink.’

  ‘They do say they drink. That’s the whole point. If they admit it to the others then they’ve admitted it to themselves. That’s supposed to be the first step to getting them off the sauce.’

  ‘I thought the whole point was to keep it secret.’

  ‘Keep what secret?’

  ‘What they drink.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what they drink. It could be anything. It’s the end point that’s the point.’

  ‘I thought it was anonymous.’

  ‘It’s the alcoholics that are anonymous, not the alcohol. How much stuff have you been smoking lately?’

  One thing I lied about was getting a place near him. I’d intended getting as far from Bridgeton as I could. It turned out to be not very far. There’s a reason why housing is readily available round here. I went down to the Social and threw a crying jag, claiming Dad had turfed me and my unborn child out. He backed me up. I’d scripted it for him: shame on the family... bastard grandkid... no daughter of mine... Lolly went along to feed him the prompts. There was another reason too. She said it went badly from the start. The social worker was a woman, so pointing tits at her didn’t work. She seemed to think she was some kind of custodian to the slums she was in charge of, and she wasn’t impressed by a trembling drunk stammering badly rehearsed lines about the shame of it all. Nothing in Lolly’s armoury worked, and she did cause untold hurt by calling her a hatchet-faced cow who could stick her slum accommodation up her arse.