Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (36 page)

‘He worked in marketing? I didn’t know that.’

‘Yeah. He was always sounding off about how useless the marketing department was, and one day he must have said it a little too loud. Instead of an apology, he was made to go and work there for a fortnight, a kind of “mile in my shoes” thing. Of course, when he got there …’

‘Everybody wanted to be his friend.’

‘You got it. But the punchline was that it turned out he was right. Well, they weren’t useless, but he was better at it than half the incumbents and he’d only just walked in the door.’

‘He always knew the importance of image.’

‘He looked bloody good, and he knew it, if that’s what you’re getting at. He was attractive, in every sense of the word. That was part of the problem. We’re so much more forgiving of the beautiful people because we like having them around. They make the place brighter and more interesting.’

‘Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned/
By those that are not entirely beautiful,’ Ray quoted.

‘What’s that?’

‘Yeats. “A Prayer For My Daughter.” His way of saying the same thing. The beautiful people get things a little too easy and they can be a wee bit cold as a result. Present company excepted.’

Alison gave a qualified‐
looking smile, not entirely comfortable with his remark. He hoped to fuck she didn’t take it as a come‐
on.

‘I’ll accept your compliment with good grace, but I would never categorise myself among the beautiful people. I know I’m not four foot nothing with a hump, but … you know what I mean. It’s the desire to be, the knowingness that makes the difference. Simon seemed to have this constant alertness to how he was being perceived – ironically complemented by a complete lack of self‐
awareness.’

‘Sounds like the ideal marketing executive then.’

Alison laughed, but there was sadness in it. In fact, everything she said hinted that she was skimming the surface of a far deeper bitterness than she was prepared to dip into. Simon, he guessed, had hurt her far more than he had hurt any of those who’d burned their fingers in those petty, self‐
absorbed adolescent days. To Ray, Div, Ross and everyone else back then, even though he seemed to loom so large in their lives, ultimately he was just a pain in the arse with a colossal ego.

Ray looked again at the TV. It had changed to the news, something Simon never watched. The Dark Man had to have been the university’s least militant student, with absolutely no interest in politics, as though it was not only irrelevant, but somehow inapplicable in his case. He poured merciless scorn on Ray and Ross for taking part in student demo marches, whether they were about the Poll Tax, grant cuts, apartheid or whatever, and changed the subject at the first opportunity whenever such matters were being discussed. He liked to portray this as proof of his superior insight into the futility of their enthusiasms, but Ray suspected the truth was that Simon genuinely didn’t give a fuck about anything until it was directly in his way.

They talked on, Ray telling Alison all about his student days, including the sorry tale of the deBacchle. Alison reciprocated with Simon’s version of the same events, evidencing a talent for revisionism that would have won him a job on Pravda.

‘Did Simon get involved with any music up here?’ Ray asked.

‘Yeah, that’s how we met. I saw him playing in a band, at a place called The Sheiling. It was a popular hang‐
out for students and recently former students, if you know what I mean.’

‘Aye.’

‘I can’t remember what the band were called. It was the kind of place you just turned up and watched whoever was playing, then there’d be an alternative club until the early hours. Oh no wait: Book of Dreams, that was their name. Post‐
Goth, pre Nine Inch Nails kind of stuff. They were pretty good, I thought. I said as much to him afterwards in the bar as an ice‐
breaker, then we got talking. And the rest is misery.’

‘What about the band?’

‘The usual. Musical differences. He kept falling out with the other members, especially the singer, Angus. Simon had successfully auditioned for them, because they were already a going concern. Their previous lead guitarist got a job in Texas.’

‘The band?’

‘No, the state. This is oil town, remember. Simon, being Simon, wanted a bigger say in what they were doing.’

‘Don’t tell me: he had a better name for them too. Something pertaining to Euripides.’

‘Bang on. Eventually, they got fed up and punted him. It really was a shame. Musically, he fitted in great. They sounded damn good and he was a big part of that, but he didn’t want to be part, he wanted to be all. Ironically, the band did change their name soon after, because they thought Book of Dreams didn’t sound dark and scary enough. They became Chambers of Torment.’

‘No way. As in …? Angus was Angus McGheoch?’

‘The same.’

‘God. I saw them at the Barrowlands two years ago. Sellout tour. I guess their subsequent fortunes didn’t go down well with Simon?’

‘What? You mean getting himself thrown off an express train to success, acclaim and rock notoriety? No, Simon wasn’t bitter.’

‘So did he chuck it after that?’

‘Effectively, yes, but not in spirit. He kept talking about what he was planning, and a few times he thought he’d found sufficiently like‐
minded recruits, but …’

‘They disappointed him.’

‘Yeah. Well, sometimes. But mainly the problem was that he’d rather sit around drinking and talking than actually doing anything about it.’

‘Him and a million other thwarted dreamers. It helps put off accepting the inevitable.’

‘After which, unfortunately, the thwarted dreamer becomes a grumpy old git, ranting in front of Top of the Pops. There came a time when he forgot there was a difference between being an iconoclast and just being a miserable bastard.’

‘I can’t imagine living round here helped much either,’ Ray suggested.

‘You mean the Burbs, or Aberdeen? Doesn’t matter, I suppose: he hated both. But Aberdeen especially. With a passion.’

‘I can picture him in full rant. Usually very entertaining, if you didn’t have an emotional attachment to the target.’

‘Entertaining for a while, anyway. I mean, I’m from Edinburgh and I’ve been here since I was a student, so I’m the last person who needs to be informed of Aberdeen’s shortcomings. It isn’t the warmest or most picturesque place in the world, I know. The locals tend to be a bit reserved compared to other places you could mention, but you get used to that and it’s not actually the locals that are the problem. It’s that half the population don’t want to be here. Have a look down this street: you’ll see For Sale signs outside one house in four. People come here because this is where the oil biz is centred, but it’s not exactly Manhattan and it’s probably a few hundred miles from their roots, their friends and families. As soon as they can get work elsewhere, they’re off, so it doesn’t make for a cosy sense of community.’

‘But you still like it, presumably?’

‘Connor was born here, and this is a nice neighbourhood to bring him up in. Low crime, lots of countryside, terrible accent, but nothing I can do about that.’ She smiled. ‘I feel settled. I like my job, I like my house, and I’ve got a lot of friends here. Plus, I’m a great believer that what you find in places is what you bring to them. People bring resentment because they’ve been uprooted, so it’s no wonder they don’t find it very welcoming. Simon brought all manner of bitterness with him, and it became easy for him to blame everything he didn’t like about his life simply on being here.’

‘He didn’t have his heart set on an oil industry career, as far as I can remember.’

‘No. But what he really resented was that it wasn’t a matter of choice. You know his dad died shortly before his finals.’

‘Yeah. I was very sad to hear it. I met his old man a few times. Lovely bloke, his mum too. They worshipped the ground he walked on.’

‘They spoiled him rotten, more like it. His mum told me she’d had four miscarriages before she carried him to term, and she was in her late thirties by then, so he was extremely precious to them. I don’t think Simon ever fully adjusted to the fact that his “most privileged” status didn’t extend beyond the family home.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Ray said, thinking of his flat‐
sharing days. Everybody could be difficult to live with, especially under the added pressures of student life, but some of Simon’s domestic conduct bordered on the pathological. Never mind an absolute and binding refusal to lift a dishcloth or spring for a pint of milk, he used to do things that gave the impression his flatmates didn’t exist; or at least didn’t count. Other people’s towels, for instance, provided a handy and varied supply of floormats for standing on when he got out of the bath. If he brought a girl home and decided his own bedsheets were a bit whiffy, he’d just lead her into someone else’s, provided they were fresher and their owner wasn’t home yet. And, least forgivable in an all‐
male adolescent household, if he ran out of blank tapes, he’d just record over whatever compilation cassette had been left in the kitchen’s communal boombox. Asking for an explanation or a justification was merely an exercise in Beckett‐
esque futility.

‘Why did you use my towel to mop up the floor?’

‘Because it was wet.’

‘Why did you take that girl into my bed?’

‘You weren’t using it.’

Better to find a nice solid wall and bang your head against it.

‘When his dad died, he left a lot of debts,’ Alison continued, ‘and Simon really had to take the first job he could to bail things out.’

‘He was very dedicated, then.’

‘To his mother, yes. That was one of the few psychological weapons I was ever able to use to get the upper hand: he hated the thought of being in her bad books, so I’d threaten to tell her when he was being particularly loathsome.’

‘You clipe.’

‘I’m not talking about him leaving the toilet seat up, here.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Can you?’ Her tone was suddenly challenging, indignant. Don’t presume to understand, she was saying.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—’

‘No, I’m sorry. The thing is, I’ve never really spoken to anybody about a lot of these things. Not to anyone who would understand. I barely know you, but you probably know better than anybody what I’m talking about. Other people, I’d start telling them things but they’d end up cajoling me into defending him, even friends of mine who I know hated Simon. They didn’t want to be disrespectful of the dead, I suppose, and certainly didn’t want to be encouraging the bereaved to start pissing on his grave.’

Alison gave a hollow laugh. ‘Christ, I’m saying bereaved because there’s no courtesy term for the state I was left in. Is there such a thing as a common‐
law widow?’

‘To be honest, I was surprised to learn Simon had settled down for so long.’

‘I think laziness was as big a factor in that as anything else. It would have been too much bother to move out. Besides, Simon knew he could have his cake and eat it with me. I provided all the comforts and conveniences of home, but without the monogamy trade‐
off. I don’t know whether he thought I was too stupid to suss or whether he knew I’d always be daft enough to forgive him, but he got around, let me tell you. It tended to be when he was feeling sorry for himself, like he was owed a casual shag as compensation for whatever he believed he was missing out on in life.’

‘Sounds like the early onset of midlife crisis. I’ve had a fair dose of it myself since the wee one was born. Hasn’t manifested itself the same way, right enough. I don’t have the energy.’

‘You’re married, aren’t you?’

‘Aye. Kate, my wife’s name is.’ Ray feared he would fill up at the mere mention.

‘Simon would never have married me. Not that it seemed a big loss by the end, but, well, there was a time when I thought … Stupid. I thought I could mellow him, or maybe just that time would if I hung on long enough. Eventually I realised Simon wasn’t going to marry anybody. Marriage is for squares, daddy‐
o. We lived together all those years, but it was mainly out of habit. There was no trace of commitment, and I was either too blind or too desperate to see that. We were renting this place for more than three years until Simon died. Actually buying somewhere would have been a surrender, you know?’

‘You’ve bought it now?’

‘Yeah. The owners were oil people, uprooted to the Middle East. They’d told us the place was theoretically up for sale, but there was a price slump, so they were happy to have the rent cover the mortgage until things picked up. I bought it with compensation money. There was a fund; I think the airline and the Norwegian government were the main donors.’

‘And Simon didn’t have a hefty life insurance policy all paid up?’

Alison laughed. ‘Yeah, that would have been him all the way. Actually, maybe he did, and there’s a baffled insurance agent trying to track down a beneficiary called Morag.’ She pronounced it with scorn, looking Ray in the eye to check whether he understood.

‘Morag, was it? I was going to ask. I was Larry.’

‘No point in asking …’

‘None at all.’

She shook her head, both of them laughing. They were referring to Simon’s initially irritating but ultimately rather disturbing habit of referring to people by names he had given them, instead of their own. They weren’t nicknames, because nicknames had to have some kind of frame of reference, usually shared among a social group. Some of Ross’s pals, for instance, called him Sneckie, due to his hometown being Inverness; while Div used to call Ray Apollo because he was always calling Houston. Simon’s names had no such derivation. He just one day started calling Ray Larry and Ross Hamish. He neglected to rename Div, which was an early indication that he had been the first among them to achieve non‐
person status.

Ray tried steadfastly to ignore it and to refuse to respond, but Simon was dedicatedly persistent, and utterly deaf to protest, as though he couldn’t see what Ray’s (or indeed Larry’s) problem was. He would even introduce Ray as Larry in company, and when challenged, offered no explanation other than ‘you’re just Larry – can’t you see?’