‘You go and have your week,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you when you get back.’
I had a temptation to plead my case but I resisted it. I didn’t know which way to plead. I sensed which direction she was going and it might well be away from me. She had given up working in the hotel and was in partnership with two friends in a small restaurant. Her life was orderly and successful. Me, I seemed to be moving backwards. I sometimes get the feeling that I’m on foot while everybody else is driving. It’s as if my life still hasn’t invented the wheel. Maybe this week it would. At least Jan would be waiting. Court was in recess for a week.
Brian was loitering close at hand and I called him over. At Jan’s car she and I took an assessing farewell and she mouthed through the windscreen that she loved me. I drove Brian home.
We didn’t talk much in the car. Outside his house, he stood with the car-door open.
‘Remember, Jack,’ he said. ‘Polismen have even less unofficial freedom than civilian punters. Don’t do anything daft, or not too daft. And keep in touch, if only to tell me how the car’s doing. I want to hear from you. And I might need your advice on the case.’
It was a prepared speech. I found that moving.
‘I’ll phone every mile, on the mile,’ I said.
‘Oh, yes. And take a tip from a good detective. Always check the glove compartment of a new car.’
We waved and I drove off. It wasn’t until I had gone some way that I thought of what he had said. I pressed the switch and the flap of the glove compartment came down and a bottle of the Antiquary fell into my hand. I put it back in and closed the flap.
I thought of people setting out on journeys in fables: warnings from beautiful, dark women and magic potions given to help them through.
4
Graithnock isn’t far from Glasgow, just over twenty miles. But it took me about fifty minutes. I wasn’t breaking any speed records. The nearer I came to the place, the less confidence I had in what I was doing.
I had to think that Anna wouldn’t be delighted to see me. I had phoned her a couple of times soon after the funeral and had been talking to a freezer. Each answer had come back small and cold as an ice-cube. She had had no questions of her own. The third time I phoned there was no answer and no answer any time since. I hadn’t much idea what was going on with her. I felt as if I was driving into a fog bank. That slows you down.
I tried to establish landmarks. It wasn’t easy. If I hadn’t known Scott so well by the time he died, what chance did I have to know Anna? The closest I had come to Scott lately had been a couple of months ago. He had phoned and then appeared at the flat. He was at that stage of drunkenness where you are being amazingly sober. His mouth was carving its words like a stone-mason. I was rather condescendingly solicitous for an hour until I began to get drunk as well. We finished what I had in the house.
We had some night. We went out and started hitting pubs as if they were beachheads. It became a competition to see who could talk the most crap in the shortest possible time. We were pretty evenly matched. Like a lot of benders, it was mainly about hilarious pain, using the alchemy of alcohol to convert grief into farce.
We succeeded rather well in different styles. Scott became ludicrously charming. I didn’t. He kept addressing strangers with great formality, calling them ‘dear sir’ and ‘my good, good man’. Ordering a drink was ceremonious enough to have been accompanied by heraldic trumpets. He placed coins on the counter in the manner of an antiquarian displaying rare objects. He proposed elopement to four different women in four different bars. But if he was Sir Galahad of the Bevvy, I was Mordred. My mood became dressed in black. Anyone addressing a remark to me would find me staring into its innocence and seeing bad meanings there. I was so obnoxious I could hardly bear to sit beside myself.
There is a blessedly hazy memory of one of the last pubs we went into. It was Reid’s of Pertyck, I think — at any rate, a bar with a kind of raised balcony section with tables and chairs. I was at the bar. I must have been ordering. Scott was sitting at a table on the balcony part. Perhaps the setting confused him, transported him to another time and place. For he started to order drinks from where he was sitting in a manner that cocked a few quizzical heads. Some Glasgow pubs don’t go in for the grandiose.
‘My round, I believe,’ Scott was shouting. ‘Another bowl of mead, mine host. Minion.’ Fortunately, he was referring to me. ‘The reckoning.’
He threw a crumpled fiver towards the bar. A small man picked it up and held it in his closed hand. I wasn’t noticing much by then. But I noticed that. Mordred had a kind of malicious tunnel vision by this time. Only the bad things got through. I held out my hand, palm up. The small man looked at me questioningly. I tapped my right palm with my left forefinger, no mean achievement given my condition.
‘That,’ I said and closed my hand into a fist. ‘Or that.’
The small man handed over the fiver but he didn’t like doing it.
‘It was a joke,’ he said.
‘That was a joke,’ I said. ‘Well, you’re about as funny as Arthur Askey.’
I paid and brought the drinks back to our table, not mead but gin and tonic for Scott and for me a Bloody Mary, which was a logical expression of my mood, since I never drink it. I gave Scott his fiver back.
‘No, no,’ he was saying. ‘Give it to the people. Let the people drink.’
‘Behave yourself,’ I said.
The small man was back.
‘Hey, you. That was a joke,’ he said.
‘What are you?’ I said. ‘A bloody budgie? That all they taught you to say? Come back in a month when you’ve learned another sentence.’
‘Listen, you,’ the small man said and grabbed my arm.
I shook him off and he sat down on the floor. Things could have turned, as they say, ugly, except that I helped him up.
‘It was a joke,’ he said again.
‘So was that,’ I said. ‘Let’s forget it.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Just so long as ye know it was a joke.’
The repetition of that statement reanimated the demon.
‘Sorry Ah knocked you off your perch,’ I said.
Thankfully, the small man didn’t turn back. But there followed many mutterings while Scott beamed upon the sotto voce threats as if they were a concert in his honour. Miraculously, we got out of there without any more trouble and out of the next bar as well and eventually bought a carry-out and took a taxi back to the flat.
The evening resolved itself into what it had really been about. We were matching disasters. I think Scott had come to see me for some kind of joint exorcism, a mutual laying to rest of some of the wilder dreams we had spawned together lying in our shared bedroom in our parents’ house. He had started to admit to himself how badly his marriage was failing and he needed to share the admission with me, the keeper of his old dreams, as he was the keeper of mine. Also, he knew my situation and I think he suspected it might soon be his and he was perhaps checking out the terrain with someone who already lived there.
I wished now that I had been more help. We were both too sore at that time. As we drank and talked into the night, we discovered a new kind of sibling rivalry. You think you’ve got wounds? Look at mine. Your compass is broken? My ambition’s got gangrene. Women came in for much meandering analysis. Weighty pronouncements on the nature of relationships were made and forgotten. Past girls who had long since vanished into unknown marriages and for all we knew divorces were conjured from their names and seen in the maudlin glow of nostalgia and knelt before, like shrines we never should have lost faith in. We battered ourselves against the incomprehensible and the unsayable and lay back exhausted.
At about half past three in the morning, Scott sat up suddenly on the floor where he’d been lying. He stared ahead like a visionary.
‘I came here to tell you something,’ he said. ‘I should have told you this before.’