Brond (8 page)

‘If she’s about, that should fetch her.’

‘Will she hear that upstairs?’

She laughed.

‘You can’t get away from it. Even the loos are wired.’

When it had become pointless to wait any longer, I wandered down the hill to the Men’s Union. It was another hot day. A small wind lifted dust from the gutters and blew it round the wheels
of parked cars.

After the empty spaces in QM, the Men’s Union seemed busy. A group were talking on the steps; I heard voices from the billiard room; in the lounge a scatter of figures nested in the deep
shabby armchairs.

‘Have you broken anyone’s jaw since I saw you last, dear pacifist?’

He is wearing a tartan waistcoat louder than a pipe band in a phone booth. Even in this heat he looks cool, despite the fact I know he’s wearing woollen underwear down to his ankles
– he always does and has a theory about it. He is a very old student in anybody’s book.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asks. ‘Are you ill?’

I sat down and the room settled steady again.

‘I just remembered when I last saw you.’

He stared at me suspiciously.

‘I suppose there’s a joke there I’m missing for some reason.’

I shook my head. I didn’t have the strength to explain. He nibbled a biscuit with large yellow teeth; there was a plateful of them in front of him, round small ones sparkling with crusted
sugar.

‘It’s annoying,’ he complained, swivelling his big head and spraying as he chewed. ‘The people in this place get more ridiculously juvenile every year.’

‘There’s a reason for that, isn’t there?’ I responded automatically.

He had to be in his fifties, if those scars he claimed from the rifle butts of patriots were anything to go by. A life member of the Union, there was no good reason why he shouldn’t be
sitting in that chair twenty years from now senilely sucking on sweet biscuits.

‘Just before you came in,’ he said breaking the biscuit with a sad little snap, ‘I was thinking of my fiancée. She was torpedoed in ‘43, you know.’

The last time I had heard him say that, someone in the group had snarled, ‘Torpedoed in the middle of the Mediterranean like?’ and he had looked puzzled while everyone laughed.

‘As a writer,’ he said, ‘I live in my memories.’

‘The last time I saw you,’ I said, ‘I was ill.’

‘It’s wretchedly true,’ he said, not listening as usual, ‘that here in Scotland we have this difficulty in finding our voice. I imagine at Oxford or Cambridge every
fledgling can strike off an effect because he pulls on the teat of tradition. We, on the other hand, have to invent our manner as well as our matter. The Americans used to be the same –
everyone having to begin all over again each time – but I suppose all those PhD theses helped to cure that – very self-conscious people, Americans. Unfortunately, not being English or
Americans, for us that’s neither here,’ he broke his biscuit in two, ‘nor there,’ and popped the smaller piece into his mouth.

‘I was ill.’

He blinked slowly and moved his lips like a goldfish surfacing.

‘You look disgustingly healthy.’

‘The last time we met I was ill. I was on the operating table the next day. My system was full of poison.’

‘But now you’re healthy.’

‘I heal fast.’

‘Show me your stitching,’ he said and smiled disquietingly.

‘I wanted to ask you about— a dream I had.’

‘The afternoon’s improving.’ He edged up the collapsing slope of chair; the struggle producing inches of grey underwear over the belt of his trousers. ‘I love dreams
– and people so rarely offer them now.’

‘I was walking over the bridge in Gibson Street and I saw a boy being killed.’

‘By a red Jaguar.’

‘No. He was lifted over. He fell on the wooden pier. A man lifted him over.’

‘Can you describe the man?’

‘No. It was a dream. Only . . . it’s stupid – I heard his bones breaking.’

He settled back with a cheated look.

‘I’ve heard more lurid adventures of the unconscious. I’d put it down to a presumptuous little cheese for last night’s supper.’

‘Not last night. I told you – the last time I met you. On the steps outside. It was the night I . . . fell ill.’

‘You remember your suppers uncommon clearly. Was it the cheese put you in hospital?’

When he laughed, the black spaces showed where soldier guards were supposed to have knocked out his teeth. I wondered if it might be true. Perhaps it was that night which had beached him among
these easy chairs.

‘I’m not sure it was a dream,’ I said.

He took that calmly enough.

‘Pretty serious if it wasn’t,’ he said.

‘It would be murder.’

‘Probably yours.’

‘The boy’s,’ I said stupidly.

‘If you got a look at the man, yours too I should imagine. Assuming he ever comes across you. You would be the missing witness – in better days you might have been the death of him.
Still he could feel strongly enough about these modern effete reproofs to return the compliment in the old style.’

He drew a finger across his neck. Above the collar, flesh sagged like a bag of soiled crepe. He was obscene and omniscient. I heeded the oracle.

He spoiled it by guffawing, wriggling as he settled into the depths of the chair.

‘I’ve heard better but you told it well.’ He patted his breasts in congratulation. ‘Mind you, I doubt it would be hard to decide which of us had the other one going
there.’

‘Was a boy killed that night?’

‘Naughty,’ he said. ‘Know when to stop. That’s a mark of the artist too.’

Yet, outside I felt better. He was a gossipy compendium of information about what happened in or near University. No boy, no death. He had taken it as a joke. No death then. That night I must
have been as sick as hell. Without bravado I stopped in the middle of the bridge.

It was another hot, still afternoon. The shadow of the bridge was black on the oily polluted water. Somebody had dropped a mattress over the parapet on to the wooden pier; its stuffing leaked
out between beer cans and a jagged rubble of broken glass.

The footsteps coming from the far end of the bridge were very clear since the afternoon was so still. They limped light and heavy. On the whisky sign, painted on the gable end of the warehouse
up river, a white letter hung like a swollen ladder, one rung to heaven. I was no sacrificial victim.

As the limping man came level with my shoulder, I spun round, and almost knocked the woman leading a child by the hand.

‘Drunk! drunk!’ she mouthed at me. ‘Drunk’ as a talisman against violence, not because the staring shock in her eyes believed it.

Their mingled footsteps faded as I lay against the parapet, more helpless than any of her children.

In the Kennedys’ hall, it was a silly technical scruple that made me hesitate about using their phone to make a call. I was sure the house was empty. It felt empty, settling in the heat,
old timbers complaining. I put the parcel by the phone and looked up my diary for the date I’d taken ill.

I gave the date and asked, ‘Was there a report of a boy being killed that day?’

‘Would you give me your name and address, please, sir?’

‘It might have looked like an accident.’

I told him where the body had lain.

‘And your name is?’

Would they insist on that if you phoned to say you were bleeding to death? Probably. How else would they know it was you when they got there – apart from the blood?

‘You don’t need my name to give me a piece of information. It’s your district. A boy who died that day. By the river.’

I realised I was not alone. Kennedy stood in the doorway of the back sitting room. When he saw I was looking, he shook his head.

I put the phone down.

‘You shouldn’t make such a racket. I was well away to sleep.’

It seemed to be true: he was in bare feet, braces dangling from his hips. He yawned and ran two hands through his hair until it stood up in a bush. At the uncovered roots, there was a streak of
what must be white hair that looked blond against the black.

‘Sorry. It was a bad line. I didn’t know anybody was at home.’

A bad line. Did anyone die, please, sir? All the time. Every minute of every day behind those stone tenement walls. Neighbours found them, the old solitaries, the unburied dead, like the old
woman’s corpse her daughter had kept secret until the soft corruption dried into a shape on the bed.

‘I’m awake now anyway. Come through into the front parlour.’

As I followed him, I wondered if I should offer at once to pay for the phone call.

‘It’s the kind of day a drink is forgiveable. There’s only Guinness mind. Not that it needs an apology. The only good thing the Irish ever made, eh?’

By this time I had learned that Kennedy was that odd kind of Ulsterman who thought that Irish was whatever he was not.

From the sideboard he fetched two glasses. It was another milestone, I could see by the careful ritual he made of it, that I should be given a drink by him. I would have sworn there was no
alcohol in the house. With his dour northern look, I had taken him for a sabbatarian and a teetotaller.

‘Better days!’ he said and drank in a long hungry swallow.

I followed his example though it wasn’t a drink I liked. The stupid idea came into my head as I drank that the dark bitter liquid tasted of death and the ambiguous lights on a city
river.

Kennedy watched me with pleasure.

‘There’s nourishment in that. You could live off it.’ His face crinkled at some private thought. ‘I’ve known men who lived off it.’

I was astonished by the look of the room. I had been in it once before – the day I came in search of my new lodgings; that had been after my father’s only visit, when he had taken
one look at the old tenement where cats fell like fruit from windows and asked me to find somewhere else. That day this room had been like the rest of the house, neat, clean, nothing new but
everything polished. Now it smelt stale. There was an overturned glass on the sideboard; on the arm of my chair an ashtray balanced dangerously full of stubs.

‘Put it on the floor,’ Kennedy said, rubbing his hand over his face. ‘Filthy habit.’

I had seen Jackie smoking but so fastidiously I could not imagine her building that mash of blackened ends.

‘You’ve a grip like death on that. Is it University stuff?’

He tapped a finger in the direction of the parcel. I was holding it on my knee with one hand cupped over it protectively.

‘It’s not mine. I’m supposed to be keeping it for Peter Kilpatrick.’

‘You’d better let him have it then.’

That sounded simple.

‘I would if I knew where he was.’

‘Upstairs snoring if he’s on form.’

‘Didn’t you know either? He’s gone off to some uncle in the country.’

‘Either?’

‘Jackie.’ I was so involved I used her joke name without thinking; but he paid no heed. He must have been used to us calling her that. ‘She hadn’t heard either. She
thought he might have skipped his rent.’

‘She wouldn’t like that. It’s a big upkeep this place. Still, I wouldn’t worry. He seems honest enough. Bit impulsive maybe – but then he’s young.’

He irritated me blethering on without an idea in his head.

‘Impulsive isn’t the name for it. Jackie checked his room and he hasn’t even taken a toothbrush with him.’

He seemed hardly interested, heavy sleep weighting him down as he drank.

‘Just what I said – impulsive. The country’ll do him good. There’s more important things in life than washing your teeth.’

Like getting rid of this damned parcel before Brond came asking. I had sat too long. I could go to the library and check the back numbers of newspapers to see if the death of a boy had been
reported that night.

‘I’ll have to be off.’

I stood up, putting the parcel familiarly under my arm again.

‘Already?’ Kennedy widened both eyes. ‘I thought we would have a wet and a talk. I don’t often have a chance of a talk.’

He followed me out into the hall.

‘Are you not leaving that thing here?’

I was tempted. But I didn’t want Brond anywhere near the house. Anyway Jackie would throw me out if she found I’d palmed it off on him after all she’d said.

‘I’m going to get rid of it. There’s a girl who’ll take it.’

He reached out and touched the parcel.

‘Is that the girl Val was telling me about? What’s her name . . .?’

‘Margaret.’

Suddenly I wanted to get away.

‘Margaret Bridie – was it?’

‘Margaret Briody.’

‘Ah, Val’s no use at names.’ He looked at me sadly. ‘That’s not a Protestant name.’

Tribally, in this city, you could tell.

‘If I were you,’ he tapped the parcel to mark each word, ‘I’d think – twice – in – that – direction. I’ve seen many a lad ruined for life
with a hasty marriage.’

Impulse being a funny business.

SIX

T
he Reading Room consists of a set of concentric circles, the lending counter at the centre, department sub-libraries in rooms round the gallery.
The entire structure acts as a reflector of noise; a shuffle echoed round the place. It was such an atrocious drawback in a library I was sure the architects must have won a clutch of awards. On my
second circuit, heads came up, signalling fury or hope. At night when everybody was bored or desperate with studying it was a good place to pick up a girl.

As it happened the one I wanted was not there.

I was leaving when I wondered about the department rooms in the gallery. What else had I to do? My first plan had been to go to check the newspapers. The lure of old newspapers was not strong; I
was tired and did not want to find out more that night. I was not sure if I wanted to find out more any time or ever. I was walking with only one stick. Properly, they should have a rubber ferrule
on the end. Mine did not. My heel came down with a bump; my stick tapped. As I circled the gallery, all the heads below swung up like blind moles sniffing the air.

She was in the history library, a room about fifteen feet long, books on the walls, a table and half a dozen chairs in the middle. I looked at her through the glass. As if feeling my eyes, she
glanced up. Her look was not welcoming.