The Glasgow Coma Scale (18 page)

Unlike the Kelvingrove, the Transport Museum was not as he remembered from his youth. Though its exterior was the same big corrugated byre, the display inside had entered the space age: it was all about buttons for the kids to press, animations, holographic thingmies that followed you around the place reciting their curators’ scripts. Everything shone, right enough, but there were only so many ways you could display a parade’s worth of jet planes, or chart the car’s evolution from go-kart to gas-guzzler to electric buggy, and Angus, fundamentally, couldn’t give a toss.

What did interest him, not to say astound him, was that China actually turned up – late, albeit, as seemed her prerogative. Black coat, black boots, clunky silver chain around her neck. She inspected the group, and her gaze did not seem to linger on Angus more than on anyone else. Antsy as any schoolboy, he drummed his heels impatiently through the remaining minutes of Dean’s lesson on the basics of perspective.

He didn’t need to look hard afterwards to find her: the museum was one vast open-plan barn, and he could see her from miles off, up on a gantry, sitting on a small fold-out stool facing the car engine she’d picked as her subject. He made his way briskly over to her, businesslike, and said her name. Before recognition had time to seep into her blank look, he saw smoky colour around her eyes that he mistook – it felt like receiving a blow just below the heart – for bruising. She held a pencil clamped longways between her teeth, and when she removed it to greet him, he saw with relief that it was just jadedness in her face, she was worn down was all.

‘Missed ye last week.’

‘Last week . . . Oh, you mean this? I forgot, I guess.’

‘Ye shouldnae,’ he said, embarrassed for them both. ‘You shouldnae jist – forget tae come.’

‘I had stuff to do,’ she changed. She didn’t seem offended, much less repentant. ‘Sometimes you have to prioritize things. What did I miss, the Hunterian?’

‘Aye.’

‘Nice. That must have given this lot a fright. Dead things in jars. Pickled foetuses. What did you draw?’

Angus, not letting on that he hadn’t stuck around long enough to draw anything: ‘Oh, eh, aye, grisly stuff right enough. Ah dunno, this sortay . . . medical cadaver thing. Sumhin deid,’ he laughed awkwardly, ‘in a jar. What did ye huv oan mair important?’

She didn’t acknowledge his question, just kept on at her drawing. Angus didn’t pursue it. Instead, he cast around among the displays for something to draw – settling at length on one of the half-sized military aircraft hanging from the ceiling. A fighter jet, battleship grey, fangs painted in white enamel on its snout. He had the idea that its position, above and ahead of him, might make the perspective interestingly difficult, at least. An old challenge: you chose a problem and, through drawing, worked to solve it.

The jet did not hold his attention long, though, and he was soon sneaking looks sideways at China’s work. She was working in charcoal on heavily textured Ingres paper; her progress was laborious, but what was emerging on the page was a proper response to the way the BMW engine was displayed, set like a votive on a lavender-coloured columnar plinth. She was refiguring its precise machine-tooled lines as organic forms, softening the pistons to resemble plump arteries, the valves to knurls of bone. Angus, who had over the last week or so abstained from his daily wank in the hope that redirecting his energies might aid in making his painting, was discomfited to detect in China’s impressionistic drawing something erotic – machinery that had warmed, swelled, grown muscular, sweaty, grubby as a Howson. He couldn’t help comparing its roughness, its sense of an arrested transformation, with what he’d finally goaded Lynne into drawing on Saturday. Both good, both more than competent, but China’s was the snapped shot of something living streaking by, Lynne’s the painstaking portrait of a subject safely etherized and pinned for study: himself. But not bad, was the point: like China, Lynne was not ungifted, maybe a little heavy-handed, maybe too unwilling to investigate different approaches to working – and yet Angus couldn’t imagine, even with these caveats, praising her to her face.

Momentary guilt regarding Lynne – the person, the curtailed career at art school – made him turn on China. ‘Dean willnae like that,’ he said, indicating her picture.

‘How not?’ He detected a trace of Scots accent then, previously buried, one that had travelled.

‘Well, he’s all about the literal, isn’t he, Dean? Strict figuration, nae deviation. Nae imagination.’

China shrugged. ‘It’s a beginners’ drawing class. I’m sure he’s seen worse.’

‘Well, awright,’ he hedged, ‘he might no dislike it, but he willnae get it.’

She inspected him, one eyebrow raised. ‘Whereas you, I suppose.’

‘Well – ah understaund what ye’re daein at least.’

She didn’t take the bait. ‘Dean’s okay. Why’re you so down on him?’

It came to him that he wouldn’t have minded China’s eyes being bruised, for her to be in trouble – nothing serious, of course; would have liked most of all to be able to help her.

‘Naw, naw, he’s . . . harmless. He’s jist daein his joab after aw – but that’s all it is tae him, don’t ye think? A joab. Now, see when ah wis teachin at the Art School’ – a second’s pause for her reaction, which did not come in any visible form – ‘it wis ma
life
. Ah breathed, ate, slept ma work – if ah slept at aw. And suffered the consequences. Ye imagine Dean daein any ay that? Nah, he’s strictly hands-off. No even a proper teacher, strictly speakin, if ye discount the ditty at the start.’

‘Yet you’ve come back, what, three times now, and still haven’t figured out how to turn up late and miss all that preamble.’

‘Cunnin,’ he said.

‘Yeah, well. You adapt, don’t you. He only has about five stock lectures anyway, they just run on repeat. Drive you mad to hear them over and over. What was it last week? Proportion? Yeah, I’ve heard that enough times.’ In the next breath: ‘So it’s not true what they say, then? Those who can’t, teach?’

‘That’s actually a misquote,’ he retorted hotly, having been insulted in this underhand way before. ‘It isnae
teach
, it’s
criticize
. As any teacher’d tell ye.’ He was growing frustrated by his drawing, which was turning out more diagram than piece of art. ‘Aw – this is baws, this place. Don’t ye think? We urnae engineerin students. We shouldnae be drawin bluddy . . . sprockets all night.’

China, with a mild expression, studied the car engine. ‘I actually don’t mind it. It’s different. Like you said at the Kelvingrove that time? You have to be able to see the way things function, even if it’s mechanical stuff like this. There’ll be people loving these sprockets. Sprockets’ll be what they signed up hoping to draw.’

He was so delighted she’d remembered a remark designed to flatter her in the first place that, in deference to China and her drawing, he shut his yap and sat quietly sketching the plane. He plotted dimly: Drink later? You and me, jist, how’s about it? Aye, very good. Very – what’s the word. Debonair. Going by how little money was left in the kitty, it’d more likely be a case of Hie, China, fancy joinin yours truly after fer a bottle ay ginger and hauf a Greggs bridie?

Unwilled, an apparition of Lynne doing her bloodhound impersonation bobbed up in his mind like something unflushable. Go away, he told it, and take your skelped-erse hard-done-by yearning with you. The way she’d waited for him to ask about Raymond rather than just tell him how she was feeling? That drove him up the wall. Biting her tongue, thinking that any silent suffering whatsoever ennobled her. They’d cleared the air – a screaming match often did that – but he had his doubts she’d react with sanguinity if she strolled in now and saw Angus trying, failing admittedly, to fire into China. Even if he denied it, she’d say she was disappointed, but actually she’d be furious, and for all she was unable to hide the fact, neither did she respect him enough, weirdly, to admit it.

Well, who was he to criticize? He who’d never admit he’d felt a tremor of misgiving on hearing she was visiting the ex. At the time, he’d gone into a protracted, worrying daydream: they reconcile, they decide to move in together, and that’s curtains for old Angus. Later, despite his selfish relief on learning that their reunion had been a disaster, he’d reasoned that if Lynne was allowed to do that, he himself was permitted – even obliged – to try and take China out on this date or whatever.

Beside him, China gave a short irritated expostulation, tore the sheet from her notebook and folded her drawing roughly. ‘Whoa, whoa,’ Angus exclaimed, flapping. ‘Whit ye daein?’

‘Giving in.’

‘Tae whit?’

‘To you! To this constant tutting and sighing you’re doing.’ Angus opened his mouth to deny doing any such thing. ‘Puffing like a grampus. You want to bunk off, let’s bunk off.’

He shut his mouth. ‘Serious?’

‘Deadly,’ she intoned – not the unequivocal enthusiasm he’d hoped for. She stuffed the folded sheet into her leather satchel, followed by the charcoal sticks she’d been using, bundled together with an elastic band round them: he could have told her they’d crumble and smudge black everything she was carrying. ‘Let’s do it.’

Who said persistence didn’t pay off? Angus got clumsily to his feet, his legs aching in novel ways from his cautious negotiation of the icy streets. Had he been doing all that stuff she’d said, sighing and that? So transparent. He was concerned, though – and wasn’t this just like the thing, to achieve moderate success then immediately start interrogating it – about what kind of person gave in so easily to such tactics.

A wincingly bright clear moon on a blue-black sky, cloudless, frounced with stars. The air sharp with winter; the smell of woodsmoke and frost. He fumbled with his cigarettes, glad that gloves had been among Lynne’s gifts, and, ‘Can I borrow one?’ China asked.

‘Borrow!’ He slid a cigarette from the pack.

‘Ta. And a light?’

‘Where’s it ye steiy?’

‘Not far from here.’ She didn’t elaborate, nor laugh at the implied, adolescent offer to walk her home, and so Angus, keeping silent, simply continued along Dumbarton Road, his own route home, figuring China would soon enough let him know if they were going out her way.

As they turned on to Kelvin Way an ambulance went birling past them, all lights and sirens, on its way to the Western –
URGENT BLOOD
. China clapped her left hand to her right shoulder and murmured a superstitious invocation: ‘. . . hope it doesn’t come for me.’ She might have been right to worry, Angus having inadvertently selected probably the least passable street in Glasgow for a short cut: gnarled roots had deformed the pavement, had at points irrupted right through it, and there was ice, too, bedded deep in fissures in the warped tarmac, the whole street aglitter, a dicey proposition. He proceeded cautiously, while China went on ahead, nimble as a gazelle, in boots up to here. Angus tossed his spent cigarette into the park grounds on their left, drew a smarting breath of unfiltered night air, wondered what she thought his plan was, wondered himself.

When they reached the main road – treeless, safer – China indicated the newsagent on the corner. Angus, who did not want to risk her seeing his eye drawn inexorably to the magazines on the top shelf, waited outside. He sparked up a second cigarette and kept an eye out, just in case, for Lynne’s green windcheater. No people, however, on Bank Street, and precious few places for them to go anyway: a defunct laundromat, a shuttered shop front that had once been a bookshop. He let his mouth hang open so smoke spilled slowly into the frozen air. What businesses might replace these, as gentrification hit Bank Street? A champagne bar? A shop dealing exclusively in pens made from the quills of ecologically farmed porcupines?

A commotion behind him: he turned and saw, through the newsagent’s glass door, that China had barged into the shelves and was scrabbling to prevent magazines plummeting like shot birds to the floor. He was contemplating heading in to help when a voice piped up from his side. ‘Eh, pal? Pal. Penny for the guy?’

A boy, aged maybe nine or ten, was standing beside him. At his side, nearly as tall as he was, stood the upended cardboard box from a DVD player; a sky-blue felt jacket, its nap worn bald, was draped over the box’s uppermost corners. ‘Jesus Christ, whaur’d you spring fae?’

‘Gonnae gies a pound fir the guy?’

‘Hie, it wis a penny a second ago.’

‘C’moan, gies sumhin.’ The lad, with ivory hair and duncoloured eyes, looked scarcely more robust than his creation. ‘Be a pal.’

Angus shook his head, expelled a column of smoke. ‘Wee man, no meanin tae be funny, but that is the single worst effort at a Guy Fawkes dummy ah’ve seen in all ma puff. It’s shockin.’ As China exited the newsagent, Angus dropped his finished cigarette to the ground, scrubbed the dowt underfoot. ‘Couldn’t ye’ve tied a balloon tae it or sumhin? Thing disnae even huv a heid.’

‘Aw, don’t,’ China chided – chuckling, though, enjoying herself, so what was he going to do but pursue what made her laugh?

‘A paper plate wi a face drawn oan even?’ The boy’s chin still jutted out at an aggressive angle, but his eyes had gone round with affront. Angus chapped his fingers against the sad offering. ‘This is constructive criticism, wee man. Take it fae wan who knows, this is no way tae make money oot ay folk.’

The boy’s shoulders straightened. ‘Fuck you, pal.’ He scooped up the guy and went staggering off along Bank Street, leaning backwards to hold the box to his chest, its sorry jacket hanging halfway off, dragging along the dirty ground.

‘Charmin,’ Angus called after him. ‘Kids, eh?’ he marvelled to China. ‘Ivver see the like?’

‘Too right.’ She wiped her nose on her forefinger. ‘You’d have thought I’d raised him better than that.’ Angus stared at her, until she prompted him, not the barest smile on her face: ‘Joking?’

‘Oh, aye, right. Funny. Well done.’

They turned left and started up the hill towards the university, and soon found themselves going against the tide of students tottering homewards after an evening’s cramming. Rucksacks, clumsy rollies, iPads, backpacks weighed down with textbooks; Angus didn’t miss being among their sort every day. China ripped the cellophane from her Lucky Strikes and let the wrapper drop. ‘Here, take one.’