The Blade Artist (8 page)

— Aye, official, he announces, looking coolly at her, waving his rings, — no just common law. We had tae, for my immigrant
status. Wanted tae as well but, ay. If you feel the love, why no make the statement?

June bristles a little. — Aye, they say it was that American lassie ye met in the jail.

— She was the art therapist, aye.
She expects me to say, Ah ken how it looks. Fuck that.
— She’s young, good-looking, intelligent, from a wealthy family. We’ve got two lovely daughters. So what about you? Any romantic ties?

June looks up at him and coughs, managing to shake her head before being beset with an eye-watering fit.

— That snout’ll kill ye, he observes.

June sucks in some air and wheezes, — Ye pack them in, likes?

— Aye. Stopped the peeve n aw. Got bored wi it aw, ay.

— What aboot aw the other stuff? The fightin?

— Aye, got fed up with the jail. This art thing’s a good living, and I enjoy it.

June shifts her head, and it seems to sink into her body. Franco can’t discern a neck. — You were eywis good at art. Back at the school.

— Right, Franco laughs.

— Angie Knight, when she heard ye were back, she goes tae me, and June’s expression takes on a coquettishness he finds grotesque, — ‘Tell ye what, June, ah widnae be surprised if you n Franco ended up back the gither.’

— Ah wid, Franco says brutally, thinking:
She’s a fucking simpleton. Why didn’t I see it before? Probably because I was too.

June’s face suddenly and dramatically flushes red. It is such a violently abrupt transformation that for a second Franco
believes that she’s having a seizure. Then she starts to cry. — Oor son, Frank, oor Sean, what are you daein aboot it? Somebody killed our laddie and you’re daein nowt aboot it!

— See ye, he says, getting up to leave. It was a familiar pattern. They would whisperingly condemn his violence with those sour, baleful expressions, until they wanted some cunt sorting out, then he would suddenly become the big hero. Manipulation. He’d discussed all this with Melanie, with his mentor, John Dick, the prison officer. It had suited them all to keep him as he was. It still suits them. He will leave them back here in Edinburgh. They can either shut the door in his face or seize him in a hypocritical embrace, it won’t matter; he will be walking away from them all.

— Find whae did it and hurt them, Frank, yir good at that, she shouts after him.

This stops him in his tracks. He turns to contemplate her. — I mind I battered you bad a couple ay times. Once when you were expecting him, Frank says. — That was just wrong.

— Christ, it’s a bit late tae apologise now!

— Who’s apologising? It was wrong, he accepts, — but I’m not sorry I hurt
you
. I’m just indifferent. Always was. I had no emotional connection to you whatsoever. So how can I be sorry?

— Ah’m the mother ay oor . . . you . . . June stammers, then explodes, — you’ve nae emotional connection tae
anybody
!

— Anger is an emotion, Franco says, opening the door and exiting.

He goes downstairs and out into the street, heading to the bus stop. Thinks of the nights in bed with June. She’d had a flush of desirable youth, her body had been lithe and firm, as arousing as the insolent whip of her fringe, and there was that slutty chewing of her gum that excited and irritated him in equal measures. Yet he can’t ever remember caressing her. Only fucking her hard.

In his pocket, two phones, the Tesco one, so cold and rough and dead. He pushes it aside and gently squeezes the sleek American iPhone. He thinks of Melanie, spooning with her in the night, the fragrance of her, as her blonde hair tickles his nostrils. The sickle-shaped birthmark on her wrist. The love flowing through the skin on their bodies like blood. How she was his tender underbelly. How if they wanted to plunge him with a knife they would go straight through her into him. Into that part rendered soft by loving.

I got to see the blonde American lassie they had all been talking about. The news of her had spread through the prison system like a virus. People flocked to take her art classes; looking for a smile, a whiff of perfume. All about the accumulation of wanking material. The violent sexuality of imaginative space, where you went when you were on lock-up in that box. The last freedom.

I just thought, why? Why was she doing this? She came from money. Why work with the scum of the earth? But she surprised me. As well as being a good person, she was strong and righteous. There was nothing wishy-washy about her. Yes, she’d had all the advantages, but she’d chosen to try and make a difference in the lives of some of the most broken, lost men.

I recall in that first class she wore a tight green sweater and black leggings, with a green band in her hair. Afterwards, I thought I’d be pulling the fuckin end off it all night thinking about her. But I didn’t wank for a second. I just lay there, remembering her words, her voice, constructing romantic fantasies about her. They made me feel pathetic and weak. But I imagined talking to her, alone. Without the giggles and comments of all the arseholes in the group. How could I talk to her? I didn’t try. I worked.

There was the portrait I started,
Dance Partner,
of Craig Liddel. Seeker. He was the guy I’d got the big sentence for killing, my second manslaughter conviction, reduced from murder, as the court (correctly) deemed it was self-defence. It was our third confrontation, the first being in jail, when he came off best, the second at an old mill house in Northumberland, where I had the advantage. The decider bout in the car park was conclusive. In the picture Liddel’s face, not set in a sneer, or crumpled with cold contempt or murderous rage, as it was when we met, but open and smiling. Around it, a series of ghosts of men, women and children. Then, Melanie Francis, approaching me, intrigued. Asking me about my work. The way she called it that; not my painting, but my work.

I told her it was the man I’d killed. The people whose lives around him I had changed. His family and friends. There were others; the women he’d never know, the children he’d never have, and the places, the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, he’d never see.

— Do you aspire to see those places? she asked me.

I looked into her deep blue eyes and realised for the first time, to my shock and horror, that I did. — Yes, I told her.

I was falling for her from day one. It seemed ludicrous. I was daring to dream, to fantasise a future for us together when I’d barely spoken a word to her. I thought of us being together in America, in a big convertible, driving to Big Sur and the Joshua Tree. I could find no weakness in her warm, missionary light, couldn’t even determine its source; political, religious, philosophical, or just rebelliousness against her own privileged class? I didn’t care. I read as much as I could, fighting through my
dyslexia, now I had motivation, till my brain hurt. I was listening to audiobooks, and finally learning to decode all that jumbled nonsense. She was a powerful catalyst, yes, but this change wasn’t just about her.

I grew bored with the staple True Crime books I had used to develop my reading skills; most were shabby affairs of self-serving bullshit, ghostwritten by grubby journos to impress kids, and wankers whose balls would never drop. I read more challenging stuff. Philosophy and art history. The biographies of the great painters. To learn, yes, but also to impress her.

But who was she? She was good and strong and I was bad and weak. That’s what hit me most of all from being around her. That I was weak. The notion was ridiculous; it went against everything I’d come to believe about my persona and image, against the way I’d consciously forged myself over the years. Yet who else but a weak man would spend half his life letting others lock him up like an animal?

I was one of the weakest people on the planet. I had zero control over my darker impulses. Therefore I was constant jail fodder. Some mouthy cunt got wide; they had to be decimated on the spot, and I was back in prison. Thus such nonentities were in total command of my destiny. That was my first major epiphany: I was weak because I wasn’t in control of myself. Melanie was in control of herself. In order to be with somebody like her, to live a free life, not in a tenement or scheme on the breadline, or even a suburb and crippled with a lifetime of debt, I needed a free mind. I had to get control of myself.

I told her this.

Franco had returned to Elspeth’s quite early the previous evening, and called Melanie on the American phone. The battery finally died in mid-conversation. This frustrated him, as he sensed that she was ramping herself up to say something important. The Tesco device seemed to belong to an era from about three prison sentences back. It sat in the palm of his hand like the last of an endangered species. He plugged in the charger and pumped electricity into this corpse, seeing if it might reanimate. He’d put ten pounds on the account, at the sales clerk’s advice. — Twenty’s too much, she’d told him earnestly. He’d shaken his head in disbelief. Now he saw what she was on about, the thing seemed designed to fall apart as soon as he exited the supermarket. Now he had to remember to get an adaptor for the US charger. Then, suddenly, the jet lag he thought he’d mastered hit him like a sledgehammer, and he retired early, sleeping deeply and restoratively.

Rising into a dull morning, Franco makes his usual breakfast, with provisions he’d picked up in Waitrose, substituting feta for Swiss cheese, and this time is able to tempt his sister into joining them. As they sit around the kitchen table, with
the exception of Greg, who has gone to work early, Elspeth asks, — So how is June?

— Same. But fatter, he adds.

George and Thomas smirk, then stop under Elspeth’s reprimanding stare.

— Did she tell you about the funeral arrangements?

— Aye, but there’s nothing much, other than what we already know: it’s on Friday, two o’clock at Warriston, and I’m footing the bill.

— Well, it is your son, Elspeth glared, — and you can afford it and she can’t.

— I didn’t say I was complaining.

Elspeth looks doubtfully at him, but sees the boys taking an interest, so pulls back. — Greg says he’s taking the afternoon off.

— I told him that there’s no need.

— We’re still family, she states, her gaze challenging him. But there is no response; his eyes are on his plate.

— Wonder what happens when you die, George says.

Fuck all, Franco thinks. You cease to exist, that’s it. He is about to say something, but considers it might not be his place.

— Never mind that, Elspeth barks, — finish your breakfast.

— But it’s just so strange to think we’ll never see Sean again, George says. — Never ever.

— Nobody knows, Franco offers.

— Do you think you go to heaven or hell? Thomas asks him.

— Maybe both, Franco says. — Maybe there’s some kind ay transit between the two, when you get bored with one, you can mix it up a bit, and head to the other.

— Like on holiday? Thomas wonders.

— Like a bus between two airport terminals, George volunteers.

— Aye, Franco considers, — why not? If nobody knows, what happens after could be anything we imagine, or maybe nothing at all.

Thomas is still in holiday mode. — Holidays in hell, he says dreamily.

— Been there, done that. Frank Begbie looks at his sister. — Mind the time we went to Butlins at Ayr? He turns to the boys. — Nah, your mum won’t, she was just a wee baby.

The boys seem to look at their mother in an almost mystical light, trying to envisage this. — I can’t imagine Mum as a baby, George says, half shutting his eyes as if to conjure up the image.

Elspeth turns to her sons. — Right, you two, jildy.

— Ah’ve no heard that word in years, Franco says.

—What does it mean? George asks.

— It means
hurry up
, Elspeth says briskly, — so less talk, more rock.

As his nephews depart, Franco leans back in his chair. — Who was it that said that? Was it old Grandad Jock?

— Like Butlins at Ayr, that was before my time, Elspeth says snootily. — What have you got on today?

— I’m meeting an old friend.

— Another auld lag fae the nick, I expect. Elspeth crunches on a slice of toast.

— Aye, Franco grabs the teapot and tops his mug up, — and he’s done even more time than I have.

Elspeth shakes her head in contempt. — You’re such a loser, Frank. You just cannae help yirsel –

Franco raises his hand to silence her. — He’s a screw. A prison officer. The guy who got me into reading, writing, painting.

— Aw, right . . . Elspeth says, and she looks genuinely ashamed and penitent.

Franco decides to quit while he is ahead, gulping down his tea and going to his room to get ready. The Tesco phone has, to his astonishment, shot into some kind of life. It glows a radioactive lime green. He tries to type in Melanie’s number, but the zero key sticks to send 0000000 flying across the screen. — Fuck, he curses, drawing air down deep, filling his lungs.

Of course he’d see John Dick. Before Melanie there was John, the man who believed in him, despite Franco being determined to present all the evidence to the contrary. The radical prison officer, who went against everything established, from the narrow, reductivist government economic and social policy, the institution’s petty rules and procedures, to the self-defeating fatalism of the cons themselves. Dick brought in the writers, poets and artists, to see if anything would gel. Saw a spark ignite in a few, Frank Begbie being the most unlikely.

They meet in the Elephant House cafe on George IV Bridge, close to where he’d started out yesterday, at the
Central Library. His impression is that John Dick looks well; longish face, dark-framed glasses, black hair cut short, a permanent five-o’clock shadow, and baggy clothes which conceal a wiry but muscular build. Franco recalls that when they first met, Dick had the relaxed bearing around him that he knew came from possessing a physical confidence. Amid all the other chunky, aggressive screws, John Dick seemed like a prisoner whisperer, his soft voice having the gift of turning down the volume in others. With the exception of Melanie, he probably listened to nobody in his life like he did to this prison officer.