The Glasgow Coma Scale (19 page)

‘Christ, you were serious.’ One cigarette was extended from the middle of the packet – slightly confrontational, Angus felt. ‘It was a gift, ye ken? A gift?’

‘I just don’t like being beholden to anyone. Is that okay?’

He snorted. ‘Beholden. Fine, whatever makes ye happy.’ On the evidence thus far, China seemed no likelier to exhibit happiness than an Easter Island statue might. He took the proffered smoke and tucked it behind his lug. ‘Ah don’t huv tae be watchin the number ay sentences we say tae one another, do ah?’

Up the hill, along a high-walled alley that skirted the library and overlooked Ashton Lane’s festive lights and alcopop two-for-ones, then led back down towards the fine hostelries of Byres Road. China must have seen his expression because, misinterpreting it totally, she asked: ‘So, do you want to, like, take me for a drink?’

‘Oh God, no. Ah mean, aye, obviously ah do, but that wisnae the only reason ah wantit ye tae come wi me . . .’

‘Okay, that’s . . . Yeah. That’s cleared that right up.’

‘Dinnae get me wrang, it’s jist it might be better if we dinnae huv a drink – better fer me, that is.’ China didn’t react. Angus faltered – usually folk didn’t need it spelled out. ‘But you, ah mean, you can huv anyhin ye like.’

A change occurred in China’s expression – understanding dawning with tectonic slowness – and then, casual as anything, even considerate, she said: ‘Well, shall we go to the Ristretto instead?’

Angus had long eyed with scorn those who spurned McCalls in favour of the try-hard café on the facing corner – whose signage peed you off before you even entered by declaring it not a café but a coffee shop, a distinction he found the height of pretension. Well, here he was giving in, joining the enemy. Though now, warily scanning McCalls, he spotted the words
SALOON BAR
graven on the pub’s frosted windows, which was pretty pretentious too when you thought about it; misleading as well, implying something significantly more salubrious than the reality.

The Ristretto was stuck in a post-war time warp, faithfully recreating a mod era that to Angus’s mind wasn’t Glasgow at all. Northern soul on the PA, vintage poster prints on the walls. In the front window, a vintage Vespa was parked, as if having stopped in on its way to the Transport Museum. To Angus, the groups and couples jawing over their teas and coffees gave off an unmistakably smug air:
we
don’t drink beer, not like those hoi polloi across the way.

He let China go ahead in the queue. When it was his turn to order, he didn’t know what to ask for – what was he, one of those no-experience-necessary folk he’d once laughed at the idea of? – so simply parroted what China had ordered, something called a bowl latte. He murmured the order, had to repeat himself when his request coincided with a great screeching release of superheated steam from the coffee machine, in whose chrome sheen he could see his worried face distortedly reflected. ‘Full milk or half ’n’ half?’ the girl asked, and Angus, experiencing a brief vision of a maid milking Damien Hirst’s heifer sawn in two, made a muttered request for full.

‘Be a devil,’ China twitted him.

They took seats by the window. Angus scraped at the tabletop with his thumbnail, unable to tell whether the circular marks patterning it were rings left by coffee cups immemorial, or a print designed to seem that way. ‘So,’ he said, then couldn’t come up with anything to add. He wondered how China and he must look to strangers: the world’s oddest first date. A pro-independence sticker had been gummed to the table edge and he started digging at it with his nail. ‘Is this somewhere ye like tae . . . hing oot . . . often?’

‘I guess. I’m slightly obsessed with the retro thing. No one in the fifties knew they were going to be retro one day, did they?’ He had a worrying feeling she might not be asking rhetorically.

Their drinks came in a vessel more cauldron than cup. The first sip wasn’t bad, though the stuff bore scant resemblance to coffee as Angus knew it, which was black, brutally strong, and customarily administered as an emetic to individuals who’d overdone it, in an attempt to sober them the fuck up before wives, parents or offspring could see them. With his second mouthful he set about parsing the mouthfeel: warm rather than hot, sweetish but strangely salt too, and viscous – like blood! he thought wildly: he was sooking on a bowlful of blood.

China must have seen his expression. ‘Don’t you like it?’

‘Very . . . substantial,’ he said weakly, setting down the bowl.

‘I was just thinking, no offence, but doesn’t you being a teacher make you overqualified for these classes? Don’t you find them a bit primitive?’

This was not a direction Angus was keen for the conversation to take. ‘Ah could say the same fer you, eh. Show’s yir picture again?’ She made a face, but retrieved her sketch from her satchel anyway. ‘Aye, ye’ve somethin gaun on there right enough – compared to the auld coffin-dodgers jist takin the class tae steiy oot the cauld.’

‘You almost had it there. That was almost a compliment.’ She contemplated her picture, the brawn she’d given the engine, its pugilist lines. ‘Well, I’m definitely better at this than some other things I’ve tried to draw – for the time being, anyway. I swear there’s a connection not wired properly in my brain. One week I’ll be getting the hang of whatever technique I’ve been shown, but next time I’ll have completely lost it. Same pattern for years now, week in, week out.’ She swept her hair off her forehead, an oddly vain movement that undermined her plangent words.

‘Years? Ah thought ye said ye’d only been goin jist a month or so.’

‘Oh, that was just to Dean’s classes. I took a break over the summer and then I came back again.’

‘But how? Ah mean, why keep comin to these same classes that long? Ye think ye’re gonnae learn anyhin new now?’

‘Imagine what Dean’d do if I left now,’ she drawled, not answering the question. ‘His face when I came back after summer? I reckon he’d top himself if I abandoned him’ – then fell about laughing, or as near as she was able, a cold, staccato ha-ha-ha. ‘Adored by Dean, resented by the fogies – I’d say it just about balances out, wouldn’t you?’ Angus, feeling unexpected empathy for the tutor, object of so much disdain, did not respond. ‘I signed up for life drawing first of all. And I was good, if I do say so myself, when I started at least – but by the end I was noticeably less competent, that’s what they said, at producing a likeness of a living person, and there’s only so many times you can blame the model for being ugly.’ Rattling this out, proud of her failings. Over-caffeinated or nerve-ridden? Angus couldn’t tell. ‘So I swapped. Painted landscapes instead. They gave me an easel and a little plastic tray of watercolours, and off I went with them to “places of outstanding natural beauty”. And the same thing happened again. By the end I was drawing trees that were more like bodies stretched on racks. When I tried to paint Culzean Castle it was like you could see it being ransacked and falling to ruin right there on the canvas as I went.’

‘Disnae sound so bad.’ Angus pictured beautiful devastations. ‘Who’d want tae be on the production line, anyweiy, turnin oot stuff identical tae evrydy else’s? See some of them? They’re jist copyin actual existin paintings each week. Ah mean, why even bother?’

‘I tried to do a beautiful sunset on Loch Lomond and it came out like a chemical spill had caught light on the water.’ She set about tugging each finger on her left hand until the knuckles popped. ‘
I
wouldn’t be a teacher,’ she remarked, with the young person’s aggravating assumption that every avenue in life would remain open to her indefinitely. The young were tiring, they’d never be told. ‘Having to try and dream up kind things to tell no-hopers like me. Not in a fit.’

‘Neither’d ah. No any mair. This class, but. Ah’ve seen yir pictures and they’re guid.
You
’re guid. There ye go, there’s yir compliment, honestly offered.’ As China set to work on her right hand: ‘Ye know ye’ll gie yirsel arthritis ye keep daein that.’

‘Early days,’ she said, ignoring the medical advice. ‘Come back to me in a few weeks, I guarantee I’ll have reached my usual nadir. My taxidermy animals’ll look stillborn. This’ – she tapped her fingernail on her drawing – ‘will have rusted on the page. I don’t mind. In a way, now that I know it’s going to happen, it’s become the point. I destroy all the pictures afterwards anyway.’

He was, despite his earlier keenness, starting to lose patience with her. ‘Quite the wee Metzgerite, urn’t ye, China?’

‘No, because I’m not designing the work to decompose, or to unmake itself. It just happens.’ She gave no sign she was pleased to catch him out in his name-dropping. ‘It’s a young person’s project, I suppose. Ecological thinking taken to extremes.’

Despite her quips, her goth-with-means clothing, she was older than she pretended – too old for this nihilist schtick. Angus didn’t mind a pessimist but couldn’t be fashed with anyone behaving more smugly negative. He would lay bets that on her bedside table sat at least one volume of Nietzsche, at least one of Bret Easton Ellis. Much more bettable: odds against Angus’s ever being in a position to verify this first hand.

‘So why keep oan, then? If you feel yir efforts’re doomed?’

She took her phone out and began flicking through it, her thin shoulders curved inwards as if in anticipation of a blow. Her fingertips tapped, twitched, slithered on the device’s screen. ‘I wanted to ask you something.’

‘Oh aye?’

‘My father was an artist, you see. Amateur. Still is, for all I know. We didn’t know him, growing up.’ Apprehension came off her in heat lines.

‘No even his name?’

‘My mother doesn’t like to talk about him. All I’ve got of him is a painting from a catalogue, which she’d cut the margin off – so no, I didn’t have his name. But I . . . Well. I know it’s stupid,’ she said, miserably, ‘but it’s just something I’ve thought about, ever since I found out I could draw too. That it might mean something.’

‘So you go tae these classes in case yir auld man turns up one night? Haud oan – did you think
ah
wis . . . ?’

‘I didn’t think it was
you
. I mean, I didn’t know. It’s like, I feel I’ll know at once if I ever do meet him – you know, my hair’ll stand on end. I know,’ she said again, ‘how stupid it sounds. Here.’ She turned the phone around to show him, surprising him in an attempt to unobtrusively pick his nose. ‘You can . . .’ moving her fingers to stretch the image, delve into it, kindly demonstrating how to use a device she probably imagined ancient Angus considered indistinguishable from magic. ‘Have you ever seen this before?’

His first response, peering at the screen, was relief. Not his
Losers
, not his
Best Company
. Not even his style: a landscape in watercolour, sunset over an empty beach, hard stones protruding in silhouette through a graduated wash of sky-reflecting sand, an idealized scene in reds and pinks and muted purples. Summer dusk at the end of the earth. ‘Nup,’ he said. ‘No, ah huvnae.’ With clumsy fingers he zoomed the picture right out and saw at its corners, photographically preserved, the multiple worn punctures where the original had been tacked and retacked to various walls. But the sad fact was he
had
seen it before, or if not this precise example, then numerous identically meticulous, pedestrian watercolours. You’d step back to admire this landscape the day you hung it on your living-room wall – doesn’t the clouds’ mauve match that tone in the curtains? – then never once look at it again. Some quality in it slid off the retina; even now he had a hard time focusing on it, though his top lip had pulled away from his teeth in unintended reaction. Say what you like, as an artist he’d never taken the course of least resistance. Whatever he did next, this thing bobbing at the edge of his mind, it wouldn’t be
pretty
like this.

He returned her phone, smiling in embarrassment. ‘Sorry, doll. That could be anebody’s.’

‘No worries. It was a million to one chance. I just thought . . . Whatever.’ She smiled, an uncanny thing to see, and dropped her phone into her pocket. ‘It doesn’t matter what I thought. But you seemed like someone stuff had happened to.’ He looked down over himself, feeling less hurt for himself than for Lynne: her ministrations, the money she’d spent, but the essential him still showed through. ‘And then when you said you’d been a teacher . . .’

Outside, a child in a pushchair hurled a toy into the road, and they watched together as the mother bolted out into the traffic, nearly causing a pile-up, retrieving the stuffed toy just before it was swallowed up. It left Angus wondering what he habitually did seeing kids out after dark: why wasn’t that wee girl home in bed by now? Two year auld at most. What sort ay parent—?

China had fallen silent. Glumness had settled down over her. He couldn’t have said exactly what he’d been hoping for the evening, but it wasn’t to spend time in the company of an attractive girl unanimated, as if calculatedly so, by any magnetism whatsoever, sexual or otherwise. Even if she’d been different, keen, how could he flirt with someone who’d imagined – the ultimate cock-witherer, this – he might be her long-lost father? Here was the antithesis of Lynne, who could mistake a slammed door for a declaration of love; Lynne, with her blandishments too freely offered, her gifts, her sulks, the way she sidled up close beside him, assuming proximity and intimacy were one and the same. This disparity between what you hoped somebody was and how they actually behaved was what she, too, was trying to resolve. He should be kinder to her. The flip side was that China’s total disinterest in him made it seem like he might talk to her more openly than he could to Lynne. Here was a girl he had no stake in – no longer wanted to plant his stake in, ha-ha – and that meant he didn’t need to care what she thought of him. How frustrated he’d been when Lynne had totally missed the point of his story about the trip to Kirkcudbright – but he’d told it seeking a particular reaction. It seemed unlikely that China here, her shoulders slumped, would admit to being shocked – would react even that strongly to anything he said. He might not just talk, then, but confess.