I let him have it hard on the back of his skull, then twice more on the way down when I didn’t really need to. He was out cold, but all of the tension and adrenalin of the chase in the woods took over and I rolled him onto his back and fixed his face for him. I guess I only hit him three or four times, and not with all my strength, but it cost him several of his teeth and his sense of smell. I wanted the others to find him and see what happened when you went Lennox-hunting but you didn’t make the kill.
I went through his pockets and took everything he had, not taking the time to look at it but stuffing it into my jacket pockets. When I was finished I got into the car. I was shaking: my hands, my legs. That was how it got me. It wasn’t the scares, it was the adrenalin and the testosterone and whatever the hell else your body flooded with. And it never got me at the time, only after.
I had it now, I had had it after the fight in my office, and I had gotten it regularly during the war.
I eventually found the ignition with the key and drove off.
I got back to my digs about nine-thirty. The Javelin was back, parked outside. I could have just gone in and gone up to my rooms, or I could have played who’s-the-gooseberry in Fiona’s living-room, but I didn’t have the stomach for it. Once I’d opened the floodgates like I just had with the goon on the country road, I generally found that I was too quick to get handy again. And I really, really wanted to get handy with that smug little shit.
I headed down Byers Road and along Sauchiehall Street. Something gnawed at me as I drove: maybe the real reason I hadn’t gone home and stood my ground was that I knew, deep down inside, that Fiona would be better off with James White. Brother of her dead husband, dull but reliable type, the kind of steady Joe that I could never be. Maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe it was just that I was no good for Fiona. Or just no good.
I got the same curt nod of recognition from my neckless chum on the door. No meeting with Hammer Murphy this time: I was at the Black Cat to get wet and set about it with great alacrity at the bar. The funny thing about good jazz is that it slows down your drinking and I turned my back to the bar, leaning my elbows on it cowboy style, and listened to the trio who were doing something mellow with a baroque piece; taking the mathematics out of it and playing with its rhythms. When they finished I turned back to the bar and inadvertently nudged the guy next to me.
‘Why don’t you watch what you’re doing?’ he whined, making a big deal of holding his drink up as if I’d spilled some of it, which I hadn’t. He was a big guy, and I could see that he had had a few, but I could tell at first glance that he was no fighter.
‘It was an accident, friend,’ I said. ‘No harm done.’
‘You spilt his drink …’ One of his buddies decided to chip in. But over his shoulder. ‘You should buy him another one. And it was a malt.’
‘No, I didn’t spill it. And like I said, just an accident.’
‘You calling me a liar?’ The big guy, emboldened by his friend’s support, turned to me, square on, but still holding his glass. I sighed, put my drink down and faced him.
‘Look, I didn’t spill your drink, and it was an accident. But here …’ I slapped his hand up and the entire contents of the glass splashed over his shirt, jacket and some on his face. ‘Now your drink is spilled,’ I said as if explaining arithmetic to a five-year-old. ‘And that was deliberate. And yes, I’m calling you a liar. And I’m calling your mother a filthy whore who took sailors up the ass. Yours too, by the way …’ I leaned to one side, smiling, and addressed his chum as if I didn’t want to offend him by leaving him out. ‘Now if either of you two queers are man enough, which I doubt, not to take that, then I’ll happily put the pair of you in hospital. And trust me, you’ve picked the wrong night.’
Glaswegians are as pale-complexioned as it is possible to be, yet I could have sworn both of them turned an even whiter shade.
‘Do we have a problem, gentlemen?’ Neckless the doorman was beside me. Buzzer behind the bar, I reckoned.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said cheerily. ‘These two gentlemen and I are just going outside for a stroll, aren’t we?’
‘Listen, I don’t want any trouble …’ The big guy now looked scared. The doorman wouldn’t care what happened between us if we took it outside.
‘Lennox …’ I felt a hand rest gently on my shoulder and got a blast of perfume. I turned and saw Martha. She smiled nervously. ‘No trouble, Lennox, okay? Why don’t you and me sit down over here and have a drink? On the house. These boys didn’t mean any harm.’
The two guys next to me were now turned back to the bar, doing the don’t-make-eye-contact-with-the-psycho thing. Neckless backed off a little and I let Martha lead me across to the table. I noticed her nod to the barman and our drinks followed us quickly.
I sat and glowered at the two guys at the bar for a while longer, but eventually the jazz started to soak into my bones and dissolve the tension in my muscles.
‘You’ve got to watch that temper of yours, Lennox,’ said Martha. ‘It could get you into bother.’
‘Wouldn’t be the first time,’ I said, easing back into my chair. I stopped watching the two guys at the bar, mainly because they were breaking all the laws of probability and never casting a glance anywhere on my side of the room. The next time I looked up, they were gone. ‘Anyway, I wasn’t looking for trouble. Those guys all but picked a fight.’
‘But the way you go at people … the way you lose control … it isn’t right, Lennox.’
‘You think I’m ready for the psycho ward, Martha?’
‘I’m not saying that. I just think you should ease up a little. Someone’s going to end up hurt. Bad.’
‘It wouldn’t ever come to that,’ I said, trying to tuck away in some dark corner of my mind the image of the goon I’d left on a country road with few teeth and a lifetime of mouth-breathing ahead of him. I smiled at Martha. She was pretty and, despite her job, she was a good kid. There was something about her, about the architecture of her face and the high cheekbones that reminded me in a vague way of Fiona White. ‘Enough of the gloomy talk,’ I said. ‘Let’s have another drink …’
I drove Martha home. Which was quite an accomplishment given the amount of bourbon I’d consumed. For a lot of the way I was confused by the sudden presence of so many dual carriageways in Glasgow, but managed to resolve the problem by keeping one eye shut while I drove. Martha had had a few as well, but I’d left her pretty far behind. When we got to her place she made me some of that coffee that came out of a bottle and you mixed with hot water. It tasted like crap but started to do the trick.
Martha’s place was in a newish building with shops on the ground floor and flats above. We had only ever tangoed in my car so this was my first time there and I was surprised at how tasteful it was. The furniture was the Modernist type of thing that was coming out of Denmark and she had a few Impressionist prints in cheap frames on the wall. A small bookcase was filled with book club novels and there was a two-month-old copy of Vogue on the coffee table, to be seen as much as read, I guessed. The place screamed of someone trying to break out of the rut they were stuck in and the bright, stylish, cheerful flat depressed the hell out of me.
We talked for a while and I drunk more coffee, but the booze in my system was messing with my visual recall and Martha began to look more and more like Fiona White to me. I moved in, as we both had known I would, and experienced a lack of resistance that would embarrass an Italian general. We ended up on the floor and her dress became a crumple around her waist. What followed was unlovely and almost brutal and I eased off when I saw a touch of fear in her eyes. I became more gentle and kissed her, but with my eyes closed it was still Fiona White and not Martha I had under me.