Strange Loyalties (34 page)

As I went through there, I heard the sound of a door being kicked open. Locating the sound, I saw the outline of Chuck
Walker. His shoulders almost filled the doorway. He had his back towards me. Ahead of him was nothing but high wall. As he turned back, I thought I might just live long enough to regret that all he had had in front of him was wall.

As he rushed me, his body filled my vision. I knew what I wanted to do but that isn't always a great help. The punch I tried to throw was deflected like a gnat. He hit me in the stomach and then something, his fist or his forearm or his elbow, jarred into my neck. I fell through the doorway back into the space behind the counter. He was on top of me and he had a knife. I stayed very still. I saw the mole on his cheek. I saw the gargoyle malevolence of his face, the eyes lit eerily as if a torch were under them.

‘You're ma hostage, polis,' he said. ‘If they don't let me pass, you're dead.'

For a moment I agreed. I could see my name in the obituary column. He trailed me to my feet and, as he did so, I jabbed my index finger and my forefinger in his face, one for each eye. Stumbling, he hit his hand on the hot-plate, where an abandoned egg was crisping. The knife fell. I kicked him in the balls. His body buckled. His head happened to be about six inches from the hot-plate when I caught it. I held it there. If my hands could feel the heat, his face must have been scorching.

I had thought I was hunting evil. I had tracked the quarry down and found me. The café, the place where people eat and chat, volleyed away from me. I felt it disappear, sucked into darkness, and I was alone with my rage, and with my hands on a man who stood for an almost total contempt for other people. In that moment I hated him in a way that frightens
me still. There was nothing he could do to me now but I still held him there. I felt what I can hardly believe I felt. I said what I am ashamed to have said.

‘Do you want fried face?' I said.

He felt the seriousness of the offer. And he screamed. I was near in myself to what I had loathed in others. His animal terror broke down into garbled speech, the plea to be human.

‘It was Brogan,' he was saying. ‘Tommy Brogan. Did it. He did it. Not me. Not me. He did it for Mason. Ah was just there. Ah'll tell you. Ah'll tell you.'

‘Not enough,' I shouted.

‘Jack!'

It was Brian Harkness. The café came back. The other policemen were with him. People were standing at their tables, staring at me. A woman was hiding her small son's face. Brian pulled me away and Bob Lilley put handcuffs on Chuck Walker. I suddenly saw the separateness of Chuck Walker's enormous hands, enclosed together in the metal, like a predator in a glass case. It was glass in which I could see my own reflection. As we came out, I felt it was like one of those occasions you see memorialised in newspaper photographs, when they're leading the criminal to the car. But the way people were looking at me, I was the one who should have had the coat over his head. With Chuck Walker stowed in the second car, we stood in the street.

‘I wouldn't have done it,' I said.

I was talking to myself.

‘No,' Brian said.

Bob didn't say anything.

‘Anyway, let's go, Jack,' Brian said.

‘No,' I said. ‘You two get Mason on your own.'

‘What? Jack.' Bob wasn't taking me seriously. ‘Behave. You've got to complete the circle.'

‘There's circles inside circles,' I said. ‘I've got another one to complete. There's a man I have to see. Brian, you do me a favour? When you've sorted this out, you dump my stuff at the flat? The bag's in the boot. And there's an ashtray I bought. And don't forget what's left of the Antiquary. I might need it. Oh, and a couple of paintings.'

I gave him my spare keys to the flat. That was what made them accept that I wasn't coming with them.

‘When'll we see you?' Bob said.

‘Monday at the latest.'

‘What about tonight?' Brian said.

‘Maybe. We'll see. Good luck. When you're lifting Matt Mason, make sure you don't drop him.'

‘You watch yourself, you,' Bob said.

They went into the car. I walked for a little, a very little, till I found the first bar. I took two whiskies fast, waiting to see if they would remind me of who I was. I felt strange to myself. I was still hollow with anger. I sat staring ahead and talking to no one and smoking and trying to calm myself. I came out of the pub and went by a very roundabout route to Michael Preston's flat. But by the time I arrived I wasn't significantly quieter. The flat had its own door to the street. It was a woman who opened it.

‘Jack?' she said.

‘That's right.'

‘I'm Bev.'

The accent was Australian. We shook hands. She preceded
me up the stairs. She moved well. Michael Preston appeared in the hallway at the top. He shook hands with me.

‘Jack and I'll talk in the study, Bev,' he said.

‘He always hides the good-looking men from me,' she said.

‘I must be the exception that proves the rule,' I said.

He took me into his study and closed the door.

T
he story of the fox in the tunic has haunted me since schooldays. I can't remember which teacher told me it. But some forgotten day in some forgotten classroom, an adult casually told a boy a story, perhaps as incidental illustration of some more important matter, and the moment went into the boy's mind clean as a knife and left a scar there. The scar may have healed into a fairly wilful shape, as scars will, but this is how I remember its origins.

In Sparta, if I can trust that teacher, it was all right to steal. The crime was in being found out. A Spartan boy one day stole a fox. He hid it in his tunic. I wouldn't mind going back now as an adult and asking that anonymous teacher a couple of questions. He stole a fox? He hid it in his tunic? I assume foxes were wild even then, so maybe he stole it from someone else's land. Maybe what he did was poach it. But it must have been either a very small fox or a very large tunic. Perhaps it was a baby fox. I don't recall.

What I do recall is the impact of what followed. On his way home, the boy met a family friend who detained him in conversation. I've often wondered what they talked about – perhaps the price of sandals. As they passed the time,
maintaining the social niceties, the fox began to eat the boy's stomach. Not only did he avoid saying, ‘Wait a minute. I've got a problem here'. He also managed to keep his face so composed that his friend had no idea of what was happening to him. They talked. They parted. By the time the boy came home and could acknowledge what was going on behind his public image, it was too late. His very entrails had gone public. He died. He became, it seems, a kind of Spartan hero, representing the ideals of their society. Some society.

I don't think that was so heroic. It was formidably tough, all right. But I think he would have come closer to heroism if he had breached the accepted rules. I don't think the boy should have said, ‘That's right' and ‘Yes' and ‘Really?' No wonder the Spartans gave us the word laconic. I think the boy should have said, ‘Listen. I don't want to talk about this shit. There's a fox eating my guts away. All right, so I stole the bastard. Do what the hell you want. But I'm not having this.' Something like that.

For me as a boy the story was first of all simply a stunning event. It left my mind gaping. Subsequently, more meaning gathered around it in my head. The shock of disbelief became a slow sense of recognition. I thought I saw in the behaviour of the Spartan boy a metaphor for how we live. I realised that it wasn't just in Sparta that people smile and nod and talk trivialities while their self is unseaming. It was what we were all taught to do. Certainly, in Scotland, I decided, a lot of us had evolved social conventions so cryptic they almost amounted to mime and must be sustained, no matter what tragic opera was unfolding in the head.

I had come to think that the story had stayed with me so
determinedly because it contained this central significance. After talking to Michael Preston, I began superstitiously to wonder if there was another reason why that anecdote from an old culture had claimed my attention beyond rationality. For it was the story of my brother's life. It had lain about my awareness for many years, patiently, as if it knew its purpose and I didn't. Then, suddenly, in the small, comfortable study of a spacious, attractive flat early on a Saturday evening, I looked at it again, that familiar hieroglyph, and saw in it the features of my brother's face.

The realisation brought a terrible stillness to me. I had knocked at all those doors and at last one had opened and brought me to a place from which I did not know how to go on. Michael Preston sat and told me what I had become so desperate to know. I had looked into so many blank faces, listened to so many unhelpful voices that I went to him ready to force my way past his defences. Instead, he simply invited me into the truth. Once there, I wasn't so sure it was where I wanted to be.

Discovery is not merely knowledge, it is obligation. I had decided that, sitting in the Red Lion in Thornbank. It came back to haunt me in the West End of Glasgow. I had gone into Michael Preston's room with eyes like weapons. I came out with eyes like wounds. I strode towards his flat. But I wandered away from it. The streets I had known most of my life were strange.

Since I didn't know what was to be done, it didn't matter what I did. I walked. I went into pubs. I observed the bizarre purposefulness with which other people moved and talked. I saw a man in passionate conversation with his friend and then,
going to the bar, heard that he was discussing the ridiculous price he had been charged for garage repairs. I watched a woman watch herself in the mirror as she chatted. I went to several places. I drank a lot. I wandered through the evening like a wraith, feeling substanceless.

Only my head was rabidly alive. I had to think that Scott had probably committed a kind of suicide – not through a deliberate, conscious act but through a deliberate carelessness that was inviting the worst thing to happen. I could imagine he had lived so long with the fox that he couldn't take the pain any more. He, too, had died of a guilt he couldn't declare.

The anger I had set out with this week had found so much to feed on. I remembered talking to Jan at Lock 27 about Scott's funeral. I had thought that was anger? Look at me now. My anger had grown on Dave Lyons and Sandy Blake and Michael Preston. And Anna. I remembered my feeling in the car after talking to the stranger outside Scott's old house. Muzzle the dog, I had said to myself. How did you muzzle this one? That had been a chihuahua. This was a Great Dane. I felt such rage.

But that day in the car I had also told myself that my rage had to find an address to which to go. Now I knew it never could. For it was a rage not just against certain people, Chuck Walker or myself, but against the terms on which we have agreed to live. My quarrel was with all of us. Where did you go to deliver that one?

I went anywhere my feet took me. One of the places must have been the Chip, for I have a memory of talking to Edek and Jacqueline and Naima Akhbar. I have not much memory of what was said. I remember the concern on Naima's sweet
face. I think she told me a Muslim saying that was supposed to help me. But it couldn't have worked because I have forgotten it. I'm left with an impression of many people jostling as we drank, as if someone had installed a gantry in a football crowd. And then I was outside again.

Why I did what I did next, I don't know. I went to the party in Jan's restaurant. A less likely party-guest than I was at that moment it would be hard to imagine. I was drunk but it was an odd, dislocated drunkenness. Some cold, bleak part of me was watching the meanderings of the drunken part, like a sober man who is too weary and indifferent to help his befuddled friend and can only look on as he stumbles into places that he shouldn't go. I think perhaps I was trying to reconnect with the city, where I felt like an alien, by plugging into the energy of others as if it were a generator.

There was certainly plenty of energy at Jan's place. The party was going well. Music was playing. Some people were dancing. Talk was loud and laughter louder. In the midst of these festivities I suddenly appeared, girt in rough thoughts, like John the Baptist at a disco. Someone had left the restaurant door unlocked. As soon as I entered, Betsy clocked me and her face had an attack of dyspepsia. She came across at once and bolted the door – securing the locks once the burglar is in. Then she went to tell Jan, who was talking to Barry Murdoch. Barry had one arm round Jan's shoulder. I reckoned from the way Betsy was speaking to Jan that she wasn't bringing her the good news. She was warning her of impending trouble. I saw Barry scan the room until he found me. He gave me the long, macho stare. It was like looking down the barrel of a pop gun. Jan came across.

‘Are you all right?' she said.

‘What's all right?' I said.

‘Uh-huh. I see. It's one of your metaphysical nights. Well, we're just trying to have a party.'

‘Let the party proceed,' I said grandly.

‘Oh, thank you. Will that be all right? Listen, Jack. You're welcome here if you can behave yourself. But I'm not having any trouble.'

‘Could Ah talk to you, Jan? About Scott?'

‘Jack. You ever heard of timing? Enjoy. If you can. I'll maybe see you later.'

She went off to mingle. Unable to have what I needed, I made for what I needed least of all – another drink. It was white wine I thought wouldn't have been out of place in a vinegar bottle.

‘The champagne's finished,' someone told me.

‘It is, it is,' I said darkly.

That opaque exchange, as if we were speaking different languages, crystallised how alien I was to the others. I wasn't part of the occasion. I was something unnecessary that had been added, a quibbling footnote to the text of their enjoyment. I wandered about the place, wilfully editing their pleasure into the significance it had for me.