All the Colours of the Town (4 page)

The day had gone well. In the morning we’d been to the Botanics and played hide-and-seek in the Kibble Palace, dodging around the primeval ferns. We lunched in McDonald’s and played a game where we pretended that James was invisible. Then we took the Underground into town, James woo-hooing in the echoey tunnels (‘Dad, another James is copying me’), and Roddy straphanging in the half-empty carriage. On Buchanan Street Roddy put a pound in a busker’s guitar case and walked back with that stiff-legged, sheepish look that always makes me want to laugh. In the toyshop I vetoed Rod’s initial choice – a Ninja sword that made electronic slashing sounds – and steered him to a Playmobil motorbike. James chose a pair of jousting knights. In the bookshop we bought
Tintin in Tibet
.

The fish was prepared and the pasta was coming to the boil. I was unstacking the dishwasher and setting the table while James improvised savage unhorsings and
protracted
gory spearings amid the cutlery.

‘That’s like Adam,’ he said, pointing at me.

‘What is?’

‘That.’ He leaned across and touched my chin, pursed my lips between his fingers.

‘Jaggy!’

‘Oh the beard? Right.’

I hadn’t shaved for a couple of days.

‘Adam’s got a ’stache.’

He made a neighing noise and cantered a horse across his side-plate. I added salt to the pasta.

‘Do you like Adam? Is Adam nice?’

‘Yes he is.’

A hissing burst of gunfire – the lances had turned into rifles – knocked one of the knights off his mount.

‘He’s Mummy’s friend.’

‘That’s right.’

The windows were blanched. Condensation showed up the patterns of dirt – a mess of streaks and spots and runnels.

‘Dad?’

I was stacking bowls in the cupboard when James spoke, so what he said next came through a bright
ceramic
clatter. But I still heard him.

‘Adam pushed me.’

I turned round – too abruptly, for he looked up, wary.

‘Say it again, son?’

His shoulder came up and he buried his face in his neck.

‘Adam pushed me.’

I remember looking at the pasta – spiralli, it was – swirling in the boiling pot, and finding it hard to draw breath. I wanted to sink to my knees, a feeling prompted by two consecutive thoughts:
this might be true
; and
I have no way of knowing
. I crossed to the table and hunched down beside him.

‘What happened, kid? When did Adam push you?’

My voice was soothing, low: if I spooked him now, it was over; I’d never get to the truth of it.

‘Don’t know.’ He looked at the ceiling where the steam was massing. ‘Smoke! Daddy, I want pineapple juice!’

‘OK.’

I fixed his drink and then held it away from his
outstretched
hand.

‘James. Listen to Daddy. What happened, James? Why did Adam push you?’

He reached for the plastic cup, his little fist flashing open and closed.

‘Want it!’

‘James!’

I touched his shoulder.

‘Kid. This is important. This is really really important. Did Adam push you?’

‘What?’

‘Did Adam
push
you?’

‘What, Daddy!’

‘Was he kidding on? Was it just pretend?’

He looked up and seemed to decide. He nodded. His lips stretched in a coy grin.

‘Just p’etend!’

He took the cup in both hands and buried his nose in it.

I opened the window and steam billowed out.

*

That night, when the boys had their bath, I studied their bodies for signs of abuse. They stood on the mat in their blithe nakedness: damp, fuzzy-duck heads; big
goose-bump-stippled
bellies; tiny pricks; and plump, slightly knock-kneed legs. Once I’d patted and rubbed them dry I scooped my fingers into the big tub of Epaderm, rubbed my hands together and then smeared their bodies till they shone like seals. Then I unscrewed the tube of Fucibet and dabbed a spot of cream on wrists, elbows, ankles, the joints of the fingers, the backs of the knees. Then I worked these in with my thumb.

There was nothing – other than the eczema patches – to cause concern. Roddy had a fading, pistachio-coloured bruise at the tog of his leg, but Roddy always had bruises and when I asked him about it he couldn’t remember. Probably he had fallen off his scooter.

I phoned Elaine when the boys were in bed.

‘Don’t be daft, Gerry. It’s just something he says.’

‘You think?’

‘He says it all the time. He said it about Stacey,
remember
?’

This was true. Stacey was the ‘tweenie-room’
supervisor
at the Rocking Horse. When Elaine took the nursery manager aside, and then Stacey was summoned, there was a difficult scene, with tears and testimony and earnest declarations. Stacey’s shock was so patently
genuine
, her hurt so real, that Elaine felt embarrassed, and sorry for having mentioned it at all.

‘It’s something kids say. It doesn’t mean anything.’

‘I don’t know. The way he plays with his knights, the little action figures? Was he always this …
bloodthirsty
?’

‘What are you saying, Gerry?’

‘I’m just saying.’

‘Gerry. If my boyfriend was hitting my children, believe me, I would know. I’m not some junked-out lassie on a sink estate. He’s not a hitter, Gerry. He doesn’t even raise his voice. He doesnae swear.’

Unlike you
, said the silence.

‘Right.’

She rung off shortly after, sounding a little sore. I sat in the living room with the
Weekly Guardian
and a bottle of Rolling Rock. But I couldn’t read. I kept picturing Adam standing over my sons, his black eyes narrowed, white teeth bared below a black moustache. From the boys’ perspective, the figure foreshortened, he’d be as tall as a building.

I finished my beer and fetched another. I thought of Big D. I was already in my teens when Big D came into the picture – Derek Maxwell, Mum’s post-divorce boyfriend – and the question of discipline never arose. Though on one occasion it nearly did. We were in London for a weekend break, one of Big D’s minutely planned
excursions
. This one involved a Saturday-night dinner and West-End-show combination. The restaurant was a fancy one and I was supposed to wear a shirt and tie. I actually liked wearing a shirt and tie – getting dickered up, as Mum called it – but I was kicking up stink. I wanted to wind Derek up, force him to intervene so I could tell him he
wasn’t
my dad and where he could stuff his poxy show. Mum kept on at me in this ineffectual wheedling voice, until finally she turned to Big D with a help-me-out-here shrug. Big D wheeled round from the mirror, where he was briskly folding a four-in-hand, and surveyed the scene. Then he turned back to the mirror, still knotting his tie, and, addressing no one in particular, announced: ‘He’ll do what his mother tells him.’

This was cute, I thought. It sounded decisive and
authoritative
, but it still left the onus on Mum. If I’d really
wanted
, I could have picked a fight at that point, but I went to my room and got ready.

I was fifteen when this happened, a surly six-footer in a cut-off T. Roddy and James were still babies. What chance did they have if Adam turned heavy?

My acoustic was propped against the fireplace. I ran through some blues riffs but they sounded stale – I’d played them too often and I was a shade out of tune. I footered with the tuning pegs for a while but it was no good; something was always a semitone out.

What worried me was Roddy. I knew what Roddy was like, how maddening he could be in that wild half-hour before teatime. He would leap around on the furniture and howl like a coyote. And I knew how quickly you could lose the rag. It was scary how abruptly I could turn. One minute I’d be asking him, in a tone of studied
evenness
and balance, to please not climb on the sofa, and the next I’d be springing from my armchair in a crash of crumpling newspaper and yanking him by the arm right up the stairs.

It startled me as much as it did him, this instant
murderous
rage. Where did it come from? And this was my own son, a boy I would cheerfully die for, a boy whose life’s load of pain I would gladly endure in his place. If your own kid could rile you like this, what about
someone
else’s? Every day, the inside pages carried the same scenario: a toddler shaken to death, a baby taken to
hospital
with multiple injuries. And always, without fail, it was the boyfriend, some boorish lummox with a
Friday-night
skinful, the big cat who killed off the other cat’s cubs.

I thought about this, taking big pulls on my Rolling Rock and forcing myself to imagine it. I opened another bottle and something struck me. What if Elaine was right? What if Adam
was
this big benign guy? Captain Benevolence. Mister Pacific. Wouldn’t they choose him over me? Wouldn’t they be right to? Maybe I’d got it all wrong. Maybe my departure wasn’t a burden to the boys. Maybe it was a deliverance. I had lightened everyone’s load.

I sat for a while, not knowing which worried me more – the mean Adam or the good one. I opened the last beer. The couple from the flat below came home. There was a splash of dropped keys and some laughter and the guy’s voice, low and smooth and sexual. Then music came on, low, an alt/country thing with pedal guitar. I listened till the beer was done. I checked the boys and went to bed.

*

I woke in the small hours, panting, hunched on my side, sweating like a racehorse. My knees were stuck together and as I raised one leg and flapped the covers the night air rushed wetly in. I was in a house. It was our house in Conwick but also it wasn’t: it was a large, wood-framed mansion of a kind familiar from black-and-white films.
To Kill a Mocking Bird. It’s a Wonderful Life.
Elaine was there with the boys. Some people were coming to kill us and we were looking for a place to hide. From an upstairs window I watched two men come down the path. One of them stopped to close the gate, and as he turned back to the path he glanced straight up to my watching-place and nodded.

They wore full-face balaclavas, and heavy revolvers swung at their sides. They had bowler hats on top of the balaclavas, and instead of army-surplus jumpers and jeans they wore dazzling white suits of a beautiful cut.

When the men passed out of sight on their way to the front door I found myself in a kind of closet at the end of the first-floor landing. Elaine and the boys huddled behind me. I could hear the gunmen moving around downstairs. I was watching the top of the stairs from a keyhole in the closet door. Then there was a heavy,
creaking
tread and then one of the gunmen appeared. Just the one. ‘He’s killed the other guy,’ I remember thinking. Smoke was lifting in plumes from his handgun. Suddenly I was alone: Elaine and the boys had escaped. There had been some sort of tunnel or trapdoor, but it was no longer available; I would have to face the gunman on my own. With his free hand he took off his bowler and skimmed it, Oddjob style, across the landing. Then he gripped the hem of his balaclava and tugged, peeling it free, tossing his hair and baring his teeth in a dazzling smile. It was Adam. He was looking straight at me, as if he could see right through the keyhole, and he moved towards me in great clipping strides. I saw his hand reach for the
doorknob
as I scrambled back against the closet wall, and then a flash of white as the door was tugged free and I woke.

It was almost light. The bedroom, still unfamiliar after five months, took a moment to remember itself, to settle into its established contours.
It’s OK
, I thought.
I’m all right.
Then I heard a hiss, a slurping suck. Shallow breathing, close, right behind me in the room. Panic swelled and died, like boiling milk coming off the heat. I reached behind me and found a foot, a warm parcel of flesh which I gripped and squeezed. I laid the back of my forefinger against the sole, feeling the pudgy creased
coolness
. Glissade of the instep, the crust of eczema over his ankle. The foot moved and James inhaled noisily, settling down with little slurps of mastication. 

I clattered downstairs to Floor 3. There was an
understanding
, our own floor being busier, that we could use the subs’ facilities. They hated it. They viewed us, not even as the enemy (we weren’t clever enough for that), but as salaried schoolkids whose mess they cleaned up. Their communal areas were full of snidey notices, tacked up like cards at an exhibit:

This wasn’t internal Floor-3 housekeeping: you could tell these were directed at us, the interlopers. They probably wanted notices that read ‘FUCK OFF AND LEAVE US ALONE’, but this was the next best thing.

The coffee had done its job but I sat on, wallowing in my stink, feeling the blood prick and fizz along the backs of my legs. There was a frosted dormer at my back but I left it closed. Twice, the handle rattled and footsteps dwindled up the hall. When I was finished I took out my pen and subbed the notice over the cistern. I put a line through everything except ‘PLEASE FLUSH’. Then I left without flushing.

When I got back to my desk the phone was ringing.

‘Gerry, it’s Darren.’ The voice was languid, suave. ‘Darren Bryce.’

‘You think I know two Darrens?’

Bryce was a senior aide at Justice. Lyons’s bagman.
That was quick
, I thought. Does he know already? Is he
in
on it?

‘Peter’s in town,’ Bryce said. ‘He wonders if you’re free for lunch.’

‘He has to, what, negotiate for lunch now? He can’t pick up the phone?’

‘He’s tied up, Gerry. Busy busy. But he’s very keen to see you.’

I opened my desk drawer. The photograph was still there, under a couple of magazines.

‘Sure he is. So, what: the Townhouse?’

‘Yeah? Peter was thinking maybe the other place.’

The other place was Ferrante’s, an old Sicilian
basement
in the Merchant City. It was some sort of Party haunt, the place they chose for their victory dinners.

‘I don’t know. It’s a little cramped.’

‘Peter was hoping Ferrante’s.’

I sighed.

‘Was he hoping a particular time?’

‘One-thirty, we thought.’

I slipped the photo out from under the magazines, put it in my briefcase.

‘Bryce?’

‘What?’

‘Can he eat the stuff himself? Can he do that much?’

‘He’ll see you at half-one, Gerry.’

*

On sunny summer afternoons, Glasgow is Manhattan. The buildings instantly lofty, colossal. Black diagonals of shade bisect the traffic, cut across the cabs on St Vincent Street. The city looks like a photograph,
black-and-white
, something out of Berenice Abbott, Bleecker Street or Union Square.

Fratelli Ferrante was packed. Usually, on visits here, I’d be shown to the toilet corner, where the two-seaters
clustered
like bubbles so that you ate with your elbows pressed to your sides. Today, though, I followed the
waiter’s
twisting hips to the sunflower centre of the floor, to a table right below the bladed fan.

Lyons was finishing a phone call. He half rose from his seat, his hand raised in greeting and deferral. As I reached the table he snapped the phone shut, glanced at his watch.

‘Gerry Conway,’ he said. ‘The late edition.’ The smile showed he was joking. His fingers wiped mine in a brisk shake. There was skittishness, a little flourish to his movements. The eyes were bright, brief scintillas of light fizzing in the blackness. He’s on something, I might have thought; the guy’s buzzed. If I hadn’t known better.

It was cool: even on a day like this, when shoppers wore the plaintive gaze of martyred saints in Renaissance paintings. Fan-freshened air on my nose and cheeks. You wanted to press the back of your hand to all the
restaurant’s
surfaces: the dark wood of the chair-backs, the tabletop’s pink marble, the starched napkins that gave off the cool of hotel bedsheets, the blades of the big-handled butter-knives.

There was no menu on the table.

‘The special’s sole. And it is special, in here. I took the liberty.’ He had fished a bottle from an ice-bucket beside the table and was filling my glass. ‘I hope that’s OK?’

I hung my jacket on the chair. ‘That’s great, Peter. Spot on.’

He laughed. ‘It is Friday after all.’

The wine was cold, sharp, appley. It tasted pleasantly neutral, as if the chill had dulled its flavours.

The place was busy. Business suits and well-heeled shoppers. A toothy woman three tables away had noticed Lyons; she was leaning over to her companion, fixing Lyons with that furtive, hungry squint that is so much more blatant than a stare.

‘What’s the occasion?’

Lyons chuckled, shook his head. ‘I’m meeting an old friend,’ he said. ‘Do I need an excuse?’ He lifted the
bottle
again. Lyons didn’t drink, but he made sure your glass was full. I’d noticed this about him, how he was always buying rounds, pouring wine, as if his continence wasn’t enough on its own; it needed the relief of the other guy’s indulgence.

‘All right. Keys, OK? I’ve a couple of things I thought you could use.’

I pushed my cutlery aside to make room for my
notebook
. Lyons sighed, then leaned towards me. I wrote while he talked, getting it down, stopping now and then for a gulp of wine. He spoke in a low tone, unhurried, matching his words to the speed of my pen. He gazed off while he spoke, glancing down now and then – I could sense the big chin tipping towards me – to check on my progress with an air of slightly pained distraction, like he was waiting for someone to finish pissing. As summer stories go, these ones were worth a punt. Lyons was announcing a review into ‘slopping out’ in Scottish jails. He also leaked me a report into private prison finance. These were fine, but the third was a page lead. A sex offender on early release had assaulted a woman in Queen’s Park. The news would break tomorrow and the tabloids would go for Lyons, calling on him to intervene. He wanted me to draw the sting on Sunday with a piece blaming the Lord Advocate. When I tucked the notebook away, Lyons clapped his big hands and rubbed them together.

A waiter bore down on us, promisingly, and passed on, his two plates bound for other stomachs, and I rode the little stab of disappointment.

‘How’re things down there, then? How’s Rix?’

Lyons’s phone jiggled on the tablecloth, like a beetle trying to right itself. He opened it, checked the number, and closed it again.

‘How’s Norman?’

A smile was already snagging his lips. He loved to hear Rix getting slagged.

‘Rix? The Englishman abroad?’ A vegetable smell – asparagus? fennel? – rose from the table behind. I hadn’t realised I was hungry till the waiter passed us over. The bread basket was empty.

‘Stormin’ Norman. He’s, like, the worst news we’ve ever carried. This sentimental cynicism. He’s a fucking zealot. I’m right and you’re all wrong. Doesn’t matter the numbers don’t back him.’ I looked over Lyons’s shoulder; a head flashed past the porthole in the kitchen door. ‘In a month or two he’ll be flying round the Quay, handing folk their cards. He’ll still be wrong, but the numbers’ll look better.’

‘Heavy weather, eh? The new regime.’

‘What can you do? They don’t last for ever.’

‘You said it.’ He was smiling.

‘What?’

‘I’m saying nothing.’

His smile wouldn’t be quelled. Even when he frowned at the tablecloth it kept springing back.

‘MacLaren?’

He rolled his eyes innocently.

‘You mean, you wish?’

‘No.’ He shook his head briskly. ‘No, he told me
himself
. He doesn’t want to fight the next election. He’s standing down next month. He wants to announce it at conference.’

‘Why? What is it?’

‘I don’t know. His wife’s ill. He’s had enough. He wants to spend more time on Mull. He’s nearly sixty, Gerry. He’s by with it.’

I sighed. ‘Tch. And no one waiting to fill the breach.’

He grinned. The waiter was back and this time it was us. He set the plates down and the warm bland reek of the tatties rose with the uriney tang of the fish.

‘Who else has it?’

I had my notebook out once more. He put down the salt and swept his hand towards me in a showman’s flourish.

‘For real?’

‘Would I trust such an item to anyone else? Only, don’t sit on it; if he’s told me, you know?’

I lifted my knife and fork. The waiter was back again, with a peppermill the size of a rifle. He presented it to Lyons, gave its base three sharp twists and then clutched it diagonally to his chest. I waved him away.

‘By the by, Gerry, the photo? The one you used last time? Desperate. I’ll get Bryce to send one over.’

‘Uh-huh.’

Leave the big shots, Eric told me. Eric Aitken, this was. My first week at the
Tribune
. Don’t waste your time. The leaders, the lieutenants. They’ll only spill what suits them. Look to the new ones, the up-and-comers. It’s like the cuddies, he said. Study the field. Pick out a couple. Cultivate them. Take them to lunch, slip their names into your copy, talk them up a little. When they rise, they take you with them.

He was right. The only advice I was ever offered, and I took it. And I chose well. Not the others, maybe, not the two or three rookies I’d coaxed and flattered, but Lyons, whom I’d rated from the start. It was pure luck. I caught him at the City Halls, at the start of the referendum
campaign
. It was a yes-camp rally: ‘Scotland United’. He took the stage like a boxer, his big shoulders rolling, and faced the mike. Nobody knew him. But he frowned out into the crowd and started to talk. The big flat hand – chop, chop – falling in time with the words. He had the trick of rhythm, starting low and calm and then
throwing
out phrases, beating the air with his hand, till he signed off on a strong indignant quiver. As he built to each crescendo the hand fell faster, till it seemed he was chopping a log, and then the log gave way in a crash of applause. His hair was longer then, a swart pelt, and with every juddering salvo his fringe worked loose, till it dropped across his eyes and he forced it back with a swipe of his paw.

When he finished, when he left the stage to the stamping of feet, his plum shirt black and a long damp leaf up the seam of his jacket, I was waiting at the stairs, my card between two fingers. We ate lunch the next day. For the rest of the campaign I looked out for him. He wasn’t around much. I caught him at a hustings in Ayrshire. He spoke from an open-top bus in George Square. And then I saw him at the count in Edinburgh, before the big screen with a Coke in his hand, raising his glass as the votes thumped home.

And then he just vanished. Not vanished, exactly, but he dropped out of sight. He’d been promised the
nomination
to one of the Glasgow seats, and when this didn’t happen he took it badly. For four years no one saw him. And then he was back, elected on the Glasgow list, rising in Holyrood to give his maiden speech. The speech was special. It had none of the rancour, none of the
field-preacher
cadences of the referendum tour. He was witty, dry; nervous at first, you could see that, but enjoying himself, in full control. He spoke without notes, in a courtroom style, swinging round suddenly and pointing his finger, spreading his arms in cajoling appeal. His voice carried, an educated baritone, dropping an octave for prickly little asides in Glasgow Scots. Afterwards, in the Garden Lobby, everyone pouted and shrugged, leafed through their press-packs. But the hacks were stirred, skittish as horses, tossing their heads as they kept an eye on the members’ door. I listened to the talk and kept my mouth shut. And that Sunday we ran a profile, a full page with quotes from his law-firm partners and wry
reminiscences
from primary teachers.

He was holding the bottle now, tipping it towards me.

He’s missed the boat, I had thought, when he lost the nomination. But watching him now, I could see it had made him, the four-year delay. It looked like precision timing. By the time he got elected, the country was
yearning
for someone like Lyons. The new dispensation had waned. The promise had dimmed, the lustre dulled, and here came Peter Lyons, with his rational charm, his
chat-show
eloquence, his Mafioso neckties. Peter Lyons, who was new, untarnished, and yet a link with the old brave days, the calendar of hope.

I put my hand over the glass.

‘It’s only going to waste.’ Lyons waggled the bottle.

‘They can put it in the gamberoni,’ I said. The second glass had made me sleepy. Already the thought of the office was turning sour, like the first twinge of a headache.

‘Anyway, we’re not all demob happy. Some of us have our work to go to.’

‘Yeah?’ The bottle clanked as Lyons set it down. ‘It seems to me I’ve just about done your work. I’ve just about sorted you out. Or is that not right?’

He was nettled. I’d only meant to josh him, find a
tactful
way of declining the wine. But his face was dark now, with sullen bumps below his mouth.

The glass wobbled as I pushed it to the centre of the table.

‘Yeah, you’re right. It’s only three thousand words, Peter. It writes itself.’

‘Bryce’ll send you the quotes.’ He was smiling again. ‘Drop him an email. He’ll send them over. You string them together; top and tail.’ He laughed. He leaned forward, telling me a secret. ‘Nobody reads it all the way through, Gerry.’ He leaned back, raised his hand for the check.

His smile failed as the money fluttered down. Two twenties and a ten.

‘That cover it?’ I put my wallet back in my pocket.

‘Gerry.
Gerry
.’ He caught my sleeve as I negotiated the tight table, chairs squealing on the tiles. ‘I’m kidding, all right? I’m kidding. Jesus. Touchy, Gerry.’ He clapped his shoulder. ‘Sit down for Christ’s sake. You’re worse than MacLaren. Come on, Gerry. You know what I think of you. You know I rate you. Did I help out a wee bit? Did I help things along a little?’