'See you there,' I said. He got into the car as the roadies slammed the door on the Transit. I could see a couple of pale faces inside, staring out.
I started walking down the slope of Hunter Street, heading for a chip shop and then ma's. The Transit coughed and bounced past me, then the Hillman. It stopped, and Christine Brice stuck her head out.
'Want a lift?'
'Ferguslie Park for me,' I laughed, shaking my head. 'Yer t-ttyres would never get out alive.' She turned back to Dave Balfour and they talked. I got the impression stopping had not been Dave's idea.
'We'll drop you nearby.'
'Ah...' I shrugged. 'Ah've got tae p-pick up some chips first, like; you'd...'
'Aw, get in.' She opened the rear door. 'I'll have some chips too.'
We stopped at a chip shop off Gilmour Street; she gave me the money for their chips. Nobody talked much, and they dropped me on King Street.
Dave Balfour only livened up at one point, when we were waiting at the traffic lights on Old Sneddon Street; a car drew up alongside us, and Balfour did a double-take when he looked over at it. He nudged Christine, and reached down to take something small and black from a door-pocket; something clicked, and he looked anxiously at the back of the small device, glancing up at the traffic lights a couple of times. I thought I could hear a high, whining noise. Christine shook her head and looked away. A little orange light shone on the back of the machine; Balfour held it up against his side window, tapped it against the glass, and sounded his horn. The driver of the car alongside ours looked round.
Balfour waved with his free hand, and was immediately surrounded by a blinding flash of light. I sat trying to blink the harsh reflections away, trying to work out what had happened, as Balfour laughed and sent the car powering away from the lights. 'God, you're so childish sometimes,' Christine breathed. Balfour was still giggling, looking into his rear-view mirror as he drove. 'Give me that flash gun,' Christine said, holding out one hand.
'Sammy Walker,' Balfour said, ignoring her. 'Did you see him? That's the second time I've got him this week!' He shook his head and kept chuckling. Christine looked back at me, raising one eyebrow. I smiled uncertainly.
I walked through the drizzle with the slowly cooling brown packages leaking grease and vinegar onto my jacket, wishing I hadn't agreed to go back to my ma's after closing time. Just what I needed, to go wandering about Paisley all night.
On the way back to the flat I did remember Christine Brice, from my schooldays. She had been fairly good looking even then; one of the well dressed older girls, self-assured, collected, and properly uniformed; very much not a product of Ferguslie Park itself. She'd been in the year above me all right, and I recalled that three years ago, when I still thought my looks could pass for dramatic rather than just horrific, I'd invited her onto the floor at the school's Christmas dance; of course she was older than me and so it was hardly the done thing, but I thought being tall might give me the edge...
She'd blushed and shaken her head; her friends had giggled.
I'd crumbled with shame and left the hall and the school. I'd wandered through Paisley — wretched, cold, humiliated — in my tight new shoes and my thin old jacket, waiting until the dance was due to finish, so I wouldn't arrive home before my ma expected me; she'd only have asked embarrassing questions.
When I had got back, I'd told her I'd had a great time.
THREE
They don't seem to have telegrams any more; they have something called telemessages instead; fake telegrams that come with the ordinary mail. One dropped onto the pile of mail behind the small back door of St Jute's vestry six days ago, on a Wednesday. The pile of mail is three years deep; probably enough to fill a couple of postal sacks. It's junk mail mostly, so I ignore it, just go down there every now and again and kick it around a bit, looking for anything remotely interesting. Important mail gets sent to my lawyers; the people who matter to me know that trying to get in touch directly is usually futile.
Rick Tumber ought to know that, but he must have forgotten. The telemessage skidded across the tiled floor when I kicked the pile of mail and I picked it up, wondering whether I should open it or not. This was unexpected, and unexpected things tend to turn out badly, in my experience. What the hell; I opened it.
ARRIVING YOUR PLACE LUNCHTIME SUNDAY 21st.
IMPORTANT. BE IN. PLEASE. THIS IS GOOD NEWS.
KINDEST REGARDS. RICK T.
Good news. I was instantly wary. Rick Tumber was head of ARC, our record company. When he talked of good news he meant there was lots of money to be made somewhere, somehow. I started making plans to be out of town there and then, though I suspected something would happen to stop me; I wouldn't get round to it.
I put the message back in its envelope and replaced it on the pile, as though pretending I hadn't read it, it hadn't come, nothing was going to change, then I went back up the spiral of stone steps to the choir. I hadn't had any breakfast yet, and what passed for my kitchen and dining room lay in the south transept.
St Jute's, also known as Wykes' Folly, looks exactly like a church, but it isn't. It has what looks just like a graveyard, but it has no graves.
Ambrose Wykes, 1819-1898, was the only son of a successful Dundee jute merchant; he built up the business, turned a small fortune into a large one, and moved to Glasgow to oversee the establishment of another commercial empire in the early 1850s, shipping tobacco from America. He had always been mildly eccentric, dressing his servants as ship's crew — the head butler was the captain, the maids were cabin boys — and equipping his villa in Bearsden with a small lighthouse which attracted the wrath of his neighbours and considerable numbers of migratory birds, but by Victorian standards his oddities were not extreme, and he was a devout Catholic, a responsible husband and a loving father.
At least, he was these things until May l864, when his wife Mary and their only child were killed in a train crash. The boy was only two weeks old, and unbaptised. Ambrose's grief was deepened by the knowledge that the infant's soul was forever denied entrance to the kingdom of heaven; he began to drink too much, and couldn't sleep; his doctor prescribed laudanum.
Ambrose's mourning went beyond the bounds of good taste; he had the whole of the Bearsden house, and his villa at Hunter's Quay on the Holy Loch, draped in black canvas. The furniture was reupholstered in black, the carpets replaced with black felt, black canvas was placed over all the pictures and portraits, and the servants were suddenly required to dress as undertakers. Most of them left.
Ambrose paid frequent visits to his priest, accompanied by an embarrassed but well paid lawyer, apparently trying to find some loophole in the divine legal code which would let his dead son's soul gain everlasting peace. The priest, his bishop, and several Jesuits all tried to reason with him, but Ambrose refused their comfort. He stopped going to church, he refused to confess.
His business affairs began to deteriorate as he spent increasing amounts of time writing letters to priests, bishops, cardinals, and even the Vatican itself, urging that some sort of special dispensation be found which would allow the soul of his son to rest in peace; he published pamphlets advocating the reinterpretation of certain Biblical verses. Then he began to picket his local chapel; sitting outside the church in an undertaker's carriage he'd purchased, while some of his warehouse workers paraded round with placards urging reform.
These workers, themselves Catholics, were persuaded by their own priests that taking part in such unseemly demonstrations, even at triple time, was bad for their souls, and would do no good for the dead child. So Ambrose hired drunks from the Glasgow slums instead; they swore at the churchgoers, pissed against the church and fought with the police.