The Glasgow Coma Scale (13 page)

‘Yes,’ said his pal with the lighter, ‘I think that might be best.’

‘Only, before ah go’ – setting down his spent can and slapping his hands on his knees – ‘if it’s no too much bother, ah wonder if wan ay yous might furnish me with a pen and a chitty paper? Or a pencil. Ah willnae steal it. Jesus,’ he laughed, ‘that no wan ay the sorriest promises ye’ve ivver heard?’

The tiny girl brought him an envelope and a biro. ‘You can keep it. It was free anyway.’

‘Oh aye, just hurry up and scram, is that it?’

She did not reply, nor meet Angus’s eye. Under normal circumstances he would have protested, or tried to charm her – what was he, a gorgon? – but her unfeasible minuteness unnerved him. The frame of, what, a nine-year-old, surely too young to be at the uni – or maybe a superbrain, a prodigy he oughtn’t cross. Stuck-up twats, the lot of them, but it wasn’t easy to lambast a group whose hospitality you’d enjoyed, very possibly uninvited, for what might have been several hours. He fought his way out the chair, which clung to him, it alone unhappy for him to go.

No way he could compose his note in the threadbare-carpeted stairwell illuminated by a single yellow wall roundel – he could barely see his hand before his face. Out on the street, in the sharp cold, he slumped against the portico entrance. A clapperless bell hung on one square column; beneath that, relic of the property’s grand former life as a hotel or such, was a printed arrow and a painted note reading
RING FOR SERVICE
, into which notice some wag with a marker pen and copperplate handwriting had inserted the word
ANAL
.

Flattening his envelope against the pilaster, Angus carefully wrote:
THIS IS A HANDWRITING TEST
. Fairly steady hand, all things considered; the letters well formed, the words more or less following a straight line. A sober fellow’s writing, this, he’d go so far as to say. He was relieved: if he rocked up obviously gished at Lynne’s, he’d never hear the end of it.

The pen he’d been given was one of the efforts charities sent you through the post, cast in a white plastic so soft, so cheap, you could bend it into a figure of eight – and right enough, here it was, the RNLI flag stamped on its barrel, a pathetic attempt to sway you to contribute to the cause, but one that drew honest tears to Angus’s eyes: set off not so much by the idea of the lifeboat crews or the drowners being collected for, but the thought of the widows this mean gift would convince to send in their contributions, fifty-pence pieces sellotaped to a bit of card. Drops in the ocean, the little acts of purposeless charity.

He shoved the envelope in his pocket and dunted his forehead against the column. Da, ah outlived ye, and for whit? To be homeless, jobless, aimless, helped oot ma fix by a wummin thinks ah hung the moon but who ah dinnae even – ken why.

The first stage on his journey home – he was back down near where Rab had ambushed him earlier, making Glendower Street an almost unthinkable half-hour’s walk away – involved passing the St Georges Cross subway. In the gloom down there Angus could discern two, three bodies sleeping, or trying to: newspaper packed into their clothes as insulation, damp cardboard for a mattress. While over their heads at street level, the warm all-night glow from interior-design showrooms: gold mixer taps and slate flooring, granite worktops, drop ceilings, induction hobs, lifestyle upgrades glinting beneath halogen lights, but tasteful: coldly, spendily tasteful. Throat stinging from a sudden acidic upswell, Angus looked back to the figures huddled in the underpass. He could climb down there with the others, make a pit for himself beside them: no problem, a doddle. He could describe how easy it’d be to anyone who’d listen. What people couldn’t grasp was how tempting it was – how sometimes it was your dire circumstances, your abjection, that set you free.

He came clattering in, kicked off his shoes, and was so irate to find Lynne sitting at the kitchen table waiting up for him, exactly as he’d pictured, a caricature of herself, that he started to yell before she had the chance. Could she not have come to open the door for him? Had she not heard him scrabbling around out there for ages, vying with a lock that seemed too small for the key he’d been given? Fair enough, he’d taken longer than expected to get home, what with the brief heated exchange he’d had with the students spilling out Clatty Pats at closing time; then his urgent need for a pish and frenzied search for a spot to do it – ending up behind BBC Scotland, aiming his stream between the wrought-iron railings, melting the frost on the undergrowth. He’d put himself away and turned around, and what a fright: this wee fox was standing in the road watching him, bright orange in the street light, and when Angus had taken a charmed step towards it, the bold thing hadn’t fled but only trotted a few steps then looked back at him, like Lassie wanting him to follow . . .

Lynne was talking, but Angus was too busy laboriously checking his pockets to pay her heed. To his dismay he seemed to have misplaced his handwriting test; now she’d never believe he was sober. It tickled him to imagine the fox wandering the West End with Angus’s envelope crumpled in its jaws – though smiling proved not that politic a response to Lynne’s diatribe.

He tried to dodge into his room, and in an alarming, fluid movement she rose from the kitchen table and flew towards him. ‘You know,’ she shrieked, ‘I’ve got Siri coming over tomorrow. You know I’ve been stressed. And this is what you—’

‘Hey, hey.’ He flapped his hands in the air, trying to fend her off or shut her up. ‘No need tae talk tae me like a haufwit. Ah’m sorry, awright? Ah’ll no get cuntit again.’ He saw her wince, so said it again: ‘Nae mair gaun oot getting cunted fer yirs truly. Ah do solemnly swear.’

Space felt like it was scrolling away from him in a four-dimensional way not known to science, and Angus very much wanted to draw a line under this conversation so he could retreat to his futon and lie still until the sensation went away, but for some reason Lynne was unwilling to accept his apology with good grace. ‘The least you could have done was phone me to let me know where you were. You have to start taking responsibility—’

‘Oh-ho,’ he interrupted her again, ‘ah see whut this is now. Sub – sub—’ He coughed, got it out on the third go. ‘Sublimation!’

‘What are you talking about?’ she screamed.

‘Sublimated . . . anxiety, aye. It’s no actually me ye’re angry wi at all, is it, doll? What ye’re worrying aboot is thingy, Siri, comin round the morra.’

He could tell from her anger that he was right. A devil took possession of his vocal cords then, and made him say, his teeth wolf-sharp: ‘Ye know whit’s guid fer tension?’ He took two lumbering steps towards her, unsheathing a leer like a knife. He didn’t have a plan, was improvising based on the situation. ‘ ’Mon, doll, genuine offer, nae strings. No promisin it’d be the greatest night ay either oor lives – ah’m no even certain ah’d be capable – but if ye’d like tae, Lynne, if ye think it might help . . .’

She backed away, face creased, white, but colouring. ‘You’re disgusting.’

‘Disgustin! How’s that? Ah wis offerin a solution. Throwin ye a bone. Ach, forget it. Ye dinnae know
what
ye want.’

She made a strange gesture with her hands, brushing herself down, casting off invisible cobwebs. ‘Go to bed, Angus,’ she said heavily – as if he’d been trying to do anything else! ‘We’ll just try and forget about this, all right?’

‘Urnae foolin me, sweet cheeks,’ Angus called after her as she went to her room. Chortling, he flung himself on the futon, shoving aside the veils and cushions and whatnot. He could hear her stamping about in the next room, and when she slammed her door, the whole flat shuddered. ‘Lynne, Lynne, Lynne,’ he croaked, shaking his head in amusement. Now that he’d forced her to stop tiptoeing round him and reveal her truer, meaner side, he felt something for her close to tenderness.

He woke late, rancid with hangover. A familiar confluence of sensations: queasiness, the apprehension that this was some aftermath, but not much notion to
what
– a general feeling that all the piano keys had been hammered down at once – plus a rapidly mounting horniness. Supine in his pit, Angus let his eyes wander the pink room, searching for anything to help him get himself off. You’d barely know this was a grown woman’s place. Inconsiderate Lynne hadn’t left him so much as a laptop to flick through, a laundry basket stuffed with used smalls to plunge his head into—

Raised voices, plural, from another room. Gradually he deduced – dredging to mind a conversation that seemed to have taken place years ago – that today must be Saturday, and therefore the second voice he was hearing must belong to this girl Siri. Under the covers he had a stauner raging. It’d been, what, six months since he’d last had a lumber? He tugged at himself, trying to bring to mind Siri’s photograph, and whether she was fit.

When he’d finished, he smeared the thin stuff on his bedsheet – that was going to need washing soon if it wasn’t to walk out the house all by itself – then got up, slung on a dressing gown, and dragged his carcass to the bathroom. He stood under the shower, nauseated, feeling like somebody’d been at his brain stem with a machete, until the water ran cold.

It only occurred to him after he’d dried off and primped himself to a more or less acceptable standard and was standing outside the kitchen door, engaged in some gentle eavesdropping, that the shower noises would have alerted Siri that someone else was in the flat. Plan A surely must have been for him to stay undetected, Lynne’s secret. She must be having a fit in there.

‘So when,’ the voice he took to be Siri’s was asking, ‘are you coming over? So I can stay out your way.’

‘Thursday. Thursday night. But please, I don’t want Raymond thinking we’ve been talking behind his back.’

‘It’d be weirder if we hadn’t. You know, I’m pretty surprised he made the first move on this. He must really want to work it out with you.’ As Angus, to whom Lynne hadn’t so much as hinted at wanting to be reconciled with this guy, listened in fascination, she made some sort of mouth noise. ‘No offence to you, Lynne, but Ray’s a stubborn old bugger. You’ll say something, and he’ll just sit there silent, waiting, until you . . . compromise yourself. Like, I’d ask him permission to stay at a friend’s house on a Friday night and he wouldn’t say yes or no, just sit there, completely blank, and before you know it I was admitting that this guy we’d only met online was driving me and my pals down to Ayrshire for an all-night rave.’

‘You never came to
me
for permission—’

‘My point is,’ Siri got in hastily, ‘you mustn’t let him overrule you, or manipulate you into giving ground you don’t really want to. You’re a good person, and I’m not saying Dad isn’t, just . . .’

‘You’re saying a lion doesn’t change its spots,’ Lynne hazarded. In the surprised silence that followed, Angus, boggling, shifted his weight and made the hall floorboards creak, after which he had no option but to stride purposefully into the kitchen as if this had been part of his planned grand entrance. ‘Hi!’ He sped past the table where both were sitting and went straight to the kettle. Of Siri he had only a brief impression: a skelf of a girl, pale, with white-blonde hair.

Lynne was straight in there with the guilt trip, asking, ‘How’s the head?’ with the infuriating superior tone of a person who never, ever overdid it – who’d probably felt she was going off the rails ordering a white-wine spritzer to see in the millennium.

‘Ah’ve hud better, let’s say.’ On the table, breakfast dishes with gluey slithers of muesli drying to the sides, food scraps that made Angus feel he might still boak.

‘Better
heads
?’ asked the girl.

You couldn’t play fast and loose with a literalist, so he settled for just going ‘Aye.’

She wasn’t so much thin as wiry, with firm biceps, in a grey T-shirt and trousers that were all pockets, combat chic Angus remembered from first time round and still found faintly distasteful. Her hair was brush-cut and peroxided, her expression one of great distrust.

‘Siri, this is Angus, who I was telling you about. He’s staying in the flat for a while, till he gets himself settled again. He had a late night last night, didn’t you?’ – this last in a tone that could’ve flaked plaster from the ceiling.

Oh, so she was going to go on tearing strips off him, was she, for a perfectly innocent – well, several perfectly innocent errors of judgement? He chose to ignore her, sweeping round on Siri instead. ‘Delighted tae meet ye.’

‘Hi,’ Siri said, inspecting him with curiosity. ‘What is it you need to get settled, exactly?’

Lynne floundered. ‘Oh, well—’

‘Ah wis homeless,’ he interrupted. An intake of breath from Lynne; he bugged his eyes out at her in reply. Evidently she’d got as far as deciding that the truth was too much for Siri, but not as far as devising a cover story. ‘Ah wis out on the streets, and yir . . . eh, Lynne here, she saw me and invited me to steiy awhile. Just till I find a place ay ma ain, ye understaun. A temporary measure. Wisnae fer her, ah’d be wan more ay they jakies ye see shufflin up and doon Byres Road, waitin’ – he faltered – ‘for the pubs tae open.’

‘Angus used to be a teacher, at the Glasgow School of Art – used to be my teacher, in fact, many years ago.’

‘You? Went to art school?’

‘Paintin and printmakin’, aye.’ Angus knew this only because she’d reminded him. He rubbed under his nose, worrying, even though he’d washed, that they’d smell spunk on him. ‘Second year.’

Siri was watching them with greater anthropological interest than the young usually took in their elders. And why not? This guy turns up out of nowhere and spins this yarn. And it was a yarn. He felt a cold worry that Lynne might have implied something going on between them. ‘Lynne,’ she said, ‘you know what? You’re full of surprises. I never knew you had an art degree.’

‘Oh, no – not a degree, no. I only went for two years.’

‘Hold up. Ye mean ye quit?’

Lynne sniffed, puzzled. ‘You knew that.’

‘Ah nivver did. Ye walked, after two year jist? Och, but Lynne, that isnae even a qualification.’ To cover his dismay, he turned to chastising her. ‘What that is is a waste ay time – yours
and
mines.’