Meeting the English (24 page)

Juliet said she wasn't sure, any more, if she was going to set up her business choosing clothes for people who thought they were fat, or if she was going to be a journalist, scribbling her new shorthand in a spiral-bound notebook. Juliet thought she might swing a job on the
Ham and High,
using her father's name. She thought she might start on the property pages, and then work her way up into fashion and make-up. She thought she could write the kind of articles where people go on a lot about how fat they feel and are funny about it. There is always a market for those, she reckoned, even if no one ever did buy another house. Juliet still talked a lot, but less to Struan, more to Mr Fox, who was around so much of the time, Struan worried about him keeping his job.

Struan was pleased for her. He liked her new haircut and hard merry manner. He didn't want to go to raves with his former English teacher, anyway, listening to him go on and on about liberation and Ginsberg. He just missed Juliet, that was all.

Though – Struan braced the wheelchair round a corner – he couldn't get to grips with the way Juliet had got over the Celia episode so quickly. The way the whole event seemed simply to have cheered her up. You should be pleased too, she kept saying to Struan, you're a hero now and we all have to be nice to you and give you pay rises. Come on, smile, you've totally defeated Jake. Which he had, in a way, and he did get a wee kick out of that, there was no denying it. But he still wished, at bottom, that none of it had ever happened. He still worried, every night, that the whole thing was a put-on, that if he hadn't come rushing along the boardwalk, Celia wouldn't have jumped in the first place, that she'd have gone home and read her Virginia Woolf instead.

Juliet pooh-poohed this, but then she hadn't done the actual saving, that was the difference, maybe. Probably it didn't just pop up in her mind, the way it did in Struan's, the whole thing, pond, and dark and ribs, suddenly beside him on the Heath path, real as an opened door. Somehow, too, the experience had liberated a host of memories of Mr Nicholl, the English teacher who had a heart attack back in Cuik: the awful smell of his breath, the prickliness of his stubble, the old man's sorrowful gratitude and lost purposelessness in his wee cottage, the day his wife had asked Struan to tea. Struan wondered if this always happened if you saved people, that you had to carry a bit of them on your belt for ever, like a shrunken head.

He thought, if this was the burden that you bore for saving a life; if just a whiff of death meant you had to carry that earthy smell on your hands for ever: then he, Struan Robertson, was through with heroism. He would not, he resolved, standing at the gate of the Heath, staring out at the stream of traffic, down at Phillip's wool hat, up at the traffic again, be saving any bugger more.

23

Juliet was in the kitchen, eating. She had arranged six scoops of ice-cream in a bowl, interleaved them with digestives, squirted honey over the whole, and was cramming it in her mouth with a soup spoon.

‘Don't start,' she said to Struan as he loped into the kitchen, muscular and baleful in the 501s Celia had given him as part of her on-going, tedious need to thank him for her life.

‘I'm saying nothing, me,' said Struan, picking up the ice-cream tub and starting work with the scoop.

‘I'm having a crisis,' said Juliet, still eating, ‘I'm thinking about chucking Ron.'

‘Grand,' said Struan. ‘Why?'

‘Because,' said Juliet, ‘I'm just not sure that it's real love. The thing is, he gives me a phoney feeling all the time.'

‘He gives me one of those too,' said Struan, licking the scoop, ‘he always did.'

‘He's actually,' said Juliet, ‘always thinking about himself.'

‘Och,' said Struan, suddenly sorry, remembering Ron, crushed by the third-years, ‘Juliet, but he's always round here.'

‘I know,' said Juliet, ‘he wants to save me.'

‘Well,' said Struan. ‘That's nice.'

‘Yes,' said Juliet, ‘it is nice, and he says nice things, but the problem is, when he's being nice, he's always in there thinking how nice he's being. That's the problem. And the way he walks on the outside of his feet. That really gets to me.'

‘Aye,' said Struan, ‘I can see that.' He grinned at her, finishing the ice-cream in the corner of the tub. Then he moved on to the bread bin. ‘You really going to dump him though, Juliet? He'll be awful upset.'

‘I am going to,' said Juliet. ‘Definitely. It's a question of when, really.' Struan dropped four fat slices in the toaster.

‘Now,' he said. ‘You can't just keep him hanging on.' Juliet picked up her bowl and licked it.

‘I can,' she said, putting it down again, ice-cream on the end of her nose. ‘If I want to. If I've got good reasons. I mean, I'm not going to chuck him before the zoo – did Giles and Bill tell you? We've organized you a party! I mean, that would be socially awkward for him, and he wouldn't be able to come, and he's known you longer than anyone.'

‘It wouldnae bother me,' said Struan, ‘and I'm the birthday boy.'

‘But,' said Juliet, getting Struan's toast out of the toaster and smearing it with butter, ‘I have to do it pretty soon after, or he's going to demand full sex and I'm going to run out of excuses.'

‘Och, Juliet,' said Struan, at both the sentiment and the toast theft.

‘Well,' said Juliet, folding the toast and stuffing it in her mouth. ‘It's true. There's only so long you can fob someone off. I made him get an AIDS test already. It's just not fair. Urges, you know. But, when it comes right down to it, I just don't want him to be the one.'

‘The one?' said Struan.

‘Yes,' said Juliet, ‘the one you love. The one you want to, you know, lose it with. It. You know?'

‘Oh aye,' said Struan. ‘That'd be right.' And Struan, as he so often did these days, sank down into one of his slumped, irritating glooms when he honestly didn't seem to see a foot in front of him or remember who Juliet was. Juliet tutted and moved for the fridge. Sugar Puffs would hit the spot in the present crisis, she reckoned, a large bowl.

‘Juliet,' said Struan, as from the bottom of a well.

‘Yup,' said Juliet, fetching the cereal from the larder.

‘Do you think honesty is important?'

‘Don't,' said Juliet, pouring the puffs into the bowl, ‘start on me, Struan. I'm
saying
that honesty is important.
That's
why I'm thinking about dumping him.'

‘No,' said Struan, ‘I wasnae ticking you off, honest I wasn't. I was just saying, do you think, if you love someone, you should just say, you should tell them, even if you know for certain that they don't love you?'

‘Oh,' said Juliet, pausing with her spoon, ‘like a crush?'

‘Aye,' said Struan.

‘Well,' said Juliet, ‘I think crushes are like boils, you know? I mean, if it's a small one, and it's on your bum, then you should definitely not tell anyone, and wait for it to go away, otherwise you will be totally humiliated. But when you get big, big crushes, like as big your head, right, then you should just tell, because that's like lancing the boil, right, just letting all the pus out. Because otherwise, it gets really toxic, like you know a dream deferred and a raisin in the sun? Ron is always going on about it. Frustration, basically. It's bad for you.'

‘Right,' said Struan. ‘Thanks. I think I'll have a wee lie down. Your dad will be up, soon enough.' And he headed off up the stairs, leaving Juliet to finish her bowl of Sugar Puffs, and wonder who it was that Struan had a crush on, and to find the only realistic candidate to be Celia, though how he could think his feelings weren't reciprocated when Celia was round once a day, flinging herself at him like a static-filled duster, she could not imagine.

And if, thought Juliet, pouring herself a second bowl of Sugar Puffs, it was Celia, then really, she was sad. Because she had Struan in her head as the only boy in the world who saw through all that, who didn't fancy girls with triangle faces and no body and no humour. Ron Fox preferred Celia, she strongly suspected. He kept making them visit her. Celia definitely needed saving, way more than Juliet, these days, and Ron loved saving people. She betted he'd have asked her out, not Juliet, if he'd just been tall enough.

*   *   *

Struan sat in the study by the sleeping Phillip, whirling the Scrabble board on its turntable. He'd glued the pieces on the board: the whole alphabet, a section of diphthongs, and a ‘yes' and a ‘no'. You could stick it in one of Shirin's easels, adjust it to Phillip's vision, and twirl it. To be honest, he still preferred it to the Amstrad.

He wondered how Phillip would wake up: sweaty and despairing and semaphoring messages with ‘Jake' and ‘Myfanwy' and ‘die' and ‘stop' in them; or in the more placid, suggestible mood when he would tap out a word or two and Struan would turn it into a quote from
The Pit and Its Men
and Phillip would signal ‘Yes' over and over. They'd retyped quite a lot of the play now, in no particular order, interspersed with bits for the
Supplementary Material,
and wee snippets from the Bible that Struan happened to know.

It wasn't so bad, those bits, typing away while Phillip blinked and twitched, watching the green words up on the screen. Struan was adjusting wee bits of it as they went along, giving Angharad a few of Pip's speeches for instance. He thought he might let her go to London at the end of the play, instead of staying in the grim village of Armprys with the baby. Phillip would be quite happy with that, he thought. Phillip was happy with all of the writing stuff, you could tell, especially when Struan set the hefty hammer printer going, with its pleasing banging typewriter noise. Struan made carbon copies of everything, sat the piles of paper in Phillip's lap, under his fingers, held the inky pages under his nose for a sniff of the ink. After a good session, he would become quite malleable and sleepy, twitch Yes! Yes! Yes! to his suppository, his snack, an hour with the racing.

The only problem was: only Struan could do it. The writing bit. The therapists were hopeless: kept trying to get Phillip to study phonics, or signal diphthongs; activities which just made him close his eyes. Giles had tried to do a shift, but couldn't get to grips with the computer; Juliet lost patience; though Mr Fox had a go, once, and did pretty well, wrote most of a scene. Maybe, if Juliet didn't dump him too quickly, he might come back and do it again, because when it came down to it, Phillip didn't need a speech therapist or a physiotherapist or post-stroke specialist, he needed someone who knew
The Pit and Its Men
well enough to get an A Band One at Scottish Higher Certificate, and that meant Mr Fox, or preferably, Struan Robertson, formerly of Cuik. And the only problem with
that,
when it came right down to it, was that Struan the faithful secretary, Struan the tender nurse, was actually a snake in the grass, fast in love with Phillip's wife.

*   *   *

How It Was Going With Shirin: a Review by Struan

Physically: much the same. He still slept badly, felt peevish, had a bad taste in his mouth, sank readily into glooms. The hole in the chest continued to ache, though strings of sinew seemed to have sprouted across it now and these contracted painfully from time to time, pulling him into a stoop. Other odd symptoms: ache in the jaw, when he saw her; mouth sweats; weakness down the centre of the body, as if being unzipped; stiffness and aches in unexpected limbs, from holding oneself up when the weakness happened; obsessive compulsive midnight masturbation.

In compensation: Struan was that bit sexier, he could feel it. He was in his body, for the first time in his life, and found he liked for example being tall, and the way his muscles had hardened from all that swimming. He liked the jeans Celia had bought him, and he liked wearing Phillip's old cashmere jumpers on top, with no collar showing. Folk fancied him, now – Celia, Bill – and that was something. Just not the right folk.

As to how it was going otherwise, as in, was he getting anywhere, did she like him, well that was a comedy, wasn't it, thought Struan, whirling the Scrabble board faster and faster.
Yes,
no,
a,
e,
i,
o,
u.
A joke.
Th,
wh,
ch,
ght.
A boil, as Juliet said, on the bum. But not static, that was the thing. Things kept changing, just enough to keep him on his toes, to keep him here, in the study, enslaved, typing out versions of
The Pit and Its Men
when he knew fine he should be back in Cuik with his gran.

The first two weeks after the Celia Night had been the worst. Shirin had been so correct: explaining everything to the police and making them go away; giving him a very substantial pay rise,
If, that is, you wish to stay, Struan?;
smoothing and soothing Celia's parents, getting them out the house, off his back; saying:
I don't see that there is any reason why you should have to see Myfanwy again, Struan,
and sorting it; hauling Mr Riley in and emphatically sacking him, leaving the windows without top coats all through the house.
Distressed,
said Shirin,
I quite like the look.

And she had said, about the car, hadn't she, straight off? Said to him on the stair, on the way up to bed, on the Celia Night:
Struan, I did not know Myfanwy accused you of taking the car. Juliet did not mention this. If I knew that, of course, I will tell her, I have given the key to Jake.
And Struan had nodded,
yes,
and not believed her,
no,
and believed her,
ae,
and not,
oo,
all night and ever since
. A,
e,
i,
o,
u.
Oh, you.