Cold Hands (7 page)

‘Seven hundred dollars in a month?’ I’d asked.

‘Yep,’ Sammy had laughed.

I’d tried. I’d really tried to picture my dad’s reaction to this news. His face as he was told he’d have to find four-hundred-odd pounds to cover a phone bill his eight-year-old kid had run up. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t even conceive of the scenario. ‘So what happened?’ I’d asked Sammy. She’d just shrugged in what-can-you-do fashion.

Sammy sat for a moment looking out the window at the other cars, at the exhaust fumes billowing in the freezing air, kids jumping down with their kit. ‘We haven’t got time for this now,’ she said, tugging the door handle. It closed with a heavy, expensive thunk behind her. I sighed and followed.

Junior hockey was huge in the province. Kids learned to skate not long after they could walk. Today Walt’s team, the Alarbus Eagles, were playing the Saskatoon Blades. A league game. We filed into the hockey auditorium at the back of the high school. There were already dozens of parents crowded into the bleachers on each side of the rink, wearing North Face jackets in black, red and navy. Gore-tex and Timberland boots. It wasn’t much warmer in here than it was outside and the steam rose from their mouths, from their styrofoam coffee cups, misting in the air above them.

There were coolers packed with sandwiches, lite beers and potato chips. Parents stood chatting in groups and Sammy and I returned waves and hellos as we made our
way to our seats on the home side, next to Jan Franklin, the Marshes and the Krugers. On the ice the boys were already warming up, testing the surface, streaking back and forth. The wet slap of stick on puck. ‘Baby Elephant Walk’ rising and falling idiotically in the background.

We’d had an ice rink in our town, at the Leisure Centre, a huge edifice of white-painted corrugated steel that also housed a swimming pool, indoor bowling greens and basketball and squash courts. A cinema too. It was built near the harbour in the late seventies, when I was around Walt’s age. I never learned to skate though; I’d hobble round the side, clinging onto the barrier, my rented plastic skates – Purple Panthers we called them – splaying and juttering out from under me as the harder, older boys screamed by on their Bauer Huggers, sending icy jets of water spraying at those of us clinging on, the music booming, deafeningly loud in the huge, cold space: ELO’s ‘Mr Blue Sky’ and Elvis Costello’s ‘Oliver’s Army’. Slush Puppies and Space Invaders and Asteroids.

Banny was among the skaters, although I only knew him by reputation then. A hard kid in a hard town. I remember watching him speeding past, skating backwards sometimes as he talked to girls, building up speed before twirling to a halt and body-checking some kid, sending them tumbling across the freezing wet ice. I looked out across the bleachers, at the sea of Abercrombie & Fitch. Of Ralph Lauren and Hollister. I couldn’t help but think of all the tribes that roamed the halls of my school, back before everyone looked the same.

Mods. Punks. Rockers. Skins. The heavy metallers with their denim waistcoats over their biker jackets. Their patches that said
Judas Priest, Saxon and Iron Maiden, Eddie’s skeletal features sometimes skilfully emblazoned on the back. The reek of patchouli oil. Goth hadn’t really hit our school yet, though there were a couple of kids in the fifth year with black clothes and spiked dyed black hair, their canvas knapsacks emblazoned with strange band names like Bauhaus, the Birthday Party and Alien Sex Fiend. Having younger parents Banny had more interest in fashion than me or Tommy. He’d been somewhere between mod and skin when we first met. A parka, but with close-cropped hair, rather than the Weller crop. Desert boots with Sta-Prest trousers. More recently he was veering towards what we called ‘casual’: waffle sweaters, slip-on shoes with white socks, stonewashed jeans, Harrington jacket and his hair starting to fall into a wedge that hung over his right eye. He’d blow the hair up out of his face when he talked to you.

I realised someone was speaking to me.

‘Uh? Sorry . . .’

I turned and looked up to see Irene. Sammy was standing, talking to the Krugers behind us. ‘Hi, Donnie.’

‘Oh, hi, Irene. Sorry – miles away.’

‘Is this OK?’ She was gesturing to the empty seat beside me. ‘Of course, here . . .’ I moved our coats and scarves and Irene sat down, untying her scarf and slipping off her parka, her thick red hair spilling out. Irene was always very precisely made up – foundation, mascara, lipstick and hair just so – and perfumed. Her scent was filling the cold air around me now. She often came to Walt’s home games, a gesture of local support and solidarity that, I suspected, was more due to simple loneliness: a widow with an entire weekend stretching emptily ahead of her.

‘Brrr,’ she said, rubbing her hands together. ‘Where’s our
boy then?’ I pointed Walt out. ‘Everything OK?’ Irene asked. ‘You seem a bit distracted.’

‘Oh, I’m fine, just . . .’ I glanced to my right; Sammy’s ass was a few feet from my face, she was deep in conversation with Stephanie Kruger about something. ‘I don’t know, Irene. Kids these days . . . they seem to think they can have anything they –’ I stopped myself. ‘
Kids these days
? Christ, listen to me.’

Irene laughed. ‘I see. You think you’re starting to sound like an old-timer?’

I watched Walt talking to a couple of his friends, sticks cradled in front of them, their hands in the big padded gloves, like the fists of Transformers, of armoured samurai warriors. For a second I had a keen wave of regret for having spoken so harshly to him just before a game and had to fight back the urge to make my way down to rinkside and wish him good luck. The boys were already getting to the age when a parent approaching them when they were with their friends was becoming a source of embarrassment.

‘Well, I
am
an old-timer,’ Irene said. ‘And to be fair, kids nowadays, not just Walt, all of them, they do seem to get an awful lot of expensive stuff. I’ll bet it wasn’t like that back in Scotland when you were growing up.’

‘You’re kidding?’ I said. ‘When I was Walt’s age?’ I laughed now. ‘Nothing like it.’

‘Mind you, with all that lovely scenery you wouldn’t have needed much, huh? I’d just love to visit there some day.’ She fingered her brooch, the word ‘just’ coming out as ‘jest’.

‘Oh yeah, we just played in the scenery all the time Irene. It was all you needed.’

I laughed, marvelling at the cliché of how Americans
often thought Scotland was one endless, beautifully shot tourist-board ad – the Kyle of Lochalsh joining onto some Hebridean beaches, joining onto Glencoe or whatever – and thought of my home town, of the brown pebble-dash council estates built after the war and already tired by the time I was born in the late sixties. Of the empty prefab factory units next to the bypass, the all-night garage, the sawmill and the rough pubs that dotted the high street. Of the millions of tons of poured concrete that surrounded the place: the roundabouts, ringroads and bypasses designed to get you quickly and smoothly around it and on north towards Glasgow, towards better places.

‘Are you mocking me, Donnie?’ She was smiling, pretending to be scandalised.

‘No, sorry. It’s just . . . most of Scotland isn’t quite like how people picture it.’

The buzzer rang, signalling the start of the game and the two teams sailed forward across the ice towards each other. Walt skated backwards, taking up his position in defence, to the right of the goal. ‘Right, come on, Eagles!’ Sammy said, clapping her hands together as she took her seat next to me. ‘Oh, hi, Irene! Sorry, didn’t see you there.’

‘Morning, Sammy.’

‘Listen, Stephanie’s borrowing our samovar,’ Sammy said, turning her attention to me. ‘I said you’d take it over tomorrow during the day.’

‘Our?’ I turned and looked round at Stephanie Kruger, smiling at me in the row behind. ‘Just leave it on the porch if we’re not in, Donnie,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’

‘It’s in the garage somewhere,’ Sammy said.

‘Well, tomorrow, I –’

She looked at me.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘No problem.’

I still had the car keys in my hand and I dug the point into my palm as the ref blew his whistle. With a clatter of sticks and a scraping of blades, the game lurched into life below us.

THAT NIGHT, AFTER
Walt was down, we cooked and ate in the kitchen, a simple pasta-and-salad supper, me draining the pasta and stirring in homemade pesto while Sammy sliced cherry tomatoes in half and added them to a bowl of watercress and rocket. Sammy was a good cook, but meticulous, everything seemed to take hours. Like many women she cleaned as she went along, each spoon and bowl rinsed and placed in the dishwasher, every surface and chopping board wiped clean, any unused ingredients neatly put away. I was faster, but I left in my wake a reeking Passchendaele of crockery, a medieval battlefield of spiralling peelings and bloodied cutlery. When Sammy finished cooking the aromas were the only way you’d know she’d been there.

We ate in silence, Sammy turning the pages of a magazine, me half watching the news on the little TV, the sound down low. As soon as she’d finished her last mouthful of salad and dabbed a spot of olive oil from her lips with her napkin Sammy looked up and said, ‘So, what was all that about today?’

‘Huh?’ I put my fork down.

‘Laying into Walt.’

‘I didn’t “lay into” him.’

‘You’re kidding, right? He was really upset. And right before his game too. Nice.’

This was how Sammy did it. She bided her time. Pushed the anger way down deep and chose her moment, usually much later when you had long thought it was over and she’d had time to prepare.

‘Oh Jesus. Look, he’s got to learn to have more respect for his things. He just –’

‘I mean, after all he’s been through this past few weeks with Herby and everything.’

‘So what are we meant to do when he breaks and loses stuff all the time? Just say, “That’s fine, son”? “No problem”? “Here’s a cheque”? What kind of message is that sending?’

‘It’s just a phone. You need to pick your battles.’

‘I’ve heard that one before, Sammy. It seems to me we don’t pick any. And besides, that phone cost –’

‘Christ,’ she said, raising her voice for the first time. ‘You can’t keep gauging what Walt should have against what you used to have, Donnie.’

I looked at her. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It’s late,’ she said, getting up.

There was a moment right there when I could have let it go. Where I could have said, ‘Sorry for shouting at him.’ And it would have been over. But I didn’t. I said, ‘If anyone should be pissed off about today it should be me.’

She looked at me expectantly, arms folded, weight on one hip.

‘Volunteering me to run that thing over to the Krugers’ place without even asking me?’

‘What’s the big deal?’

‘It’s half an hour away. It’ll be an hour and a half out of my day.’

‘I didn’t know you were that busy.’

Was there anything in this? I looked at her. ‘It’d be nice to be asked, rather than be treated like, like a fucking . . . I don’t know . . .’

‘I just didn’t think you’d mind. You often go in to Alarbus in the afternoons, it’s on the way. If it’s too much trouble I’ll call Stephanie and tell her they’ll have to pick it up.’

‘No, it’s fine. I’ll do it.’ I picked up the TV remote.

‘Christ, don’t sulk, Donnie.’

‘I’m not sulking.’

‘Fine. Whatever. I’m going to bed.’

I sat channel-hopping for a while before I turned the TV off and walked the long hallway down to my office. I didn’t turn the lights on, there was enough moonlight coming through the three walls of glass to see by. I unlocked the bottom drawer, rooted in below a printout of my screenplay (my own notes scribbled in the margins in red: ‘NO!’ and ‘WHY?’) and fished out a bottle of single malt whisky – a 25-year-old Talisker, a Christmas gift from Sammy’s dad a couple of years back. There was a glass on the desk with a couple of inches of tepid mineral water in it. I tipped the water into my bin and poured a big glug of the pale whisky. I held the glass under my nose for a moment, the strong fumes making my eyes tear, before I took a drink, gratefully feeling the burn, feeling my face flush and my blood elevate. The whisky had come all the way from Skye, less than a couple of hundred miles north along the west coast from where I grew up. I had never been there. ‘25 Years of Age’. Made in 1986.

Mr Cardew’s nicotine-yellowed fingers as they turned the pages; pointing out certain phrases he’d underlined. Asking you what you thought. Seeing if you were understanding everything.

It had been a strange and unexpected thing, coming to love books in my late teens. My father never read anything outside of his tabloid. My mother would occasionally be caught frowning over a dog-eared potboiler lent to her by a friend, or some bodice-ripper she’d borrowed from the library; its lurid covers encased in clear, protective plastic. There had been no books in the house I’d grown up in. As for school, well, the only kids who read books for pleasure, who read outside of when a teacher was literally standing over them in the classroom, were the freaks. The kids like . . . like him. Docherty. The Professor. Strange and unexpected then when I discovered under Mr Cardew’s encouragement that what seemed to me to be tracts of boredom and torture actually contained un imaginable vistas, entire worlds of escape. (
And you were much in need of escape then, weren’t you?
) That you could open one of them and start turning the pages and that, instead of time slowing down and refusing to pass, you would look up at the clock (
that clock, in its mesh cage
) and the deadly, endless afternoon ahead of you would have vanished.

I thought of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Scotsman’s Return From Abroad’, where Stevenson says ‘The king o’ drinks, as I conceive it, Talisker, Isla, or Glenlivet!’

What had you said? ‘
Rather than be treated like, like a fucking . . . I don’t know
. . .’ But you did know. ‘A fucking errand boy.’ That had been the phrase forming on your lips. But to say it out loud was to make it real and neither of you wanted
that. No – you definitely didn’t want that. This Scotsman wouldn’t be returning home. Ever.