The Glasgow Coma Scale (2 page)

Angus, as it happened, remembered quite clearly the evening to which Lynne had been alluding, but wasn’t yet prepared to admit it. In her absence, he lay back on her couch and busied himself fumbling in his crotch, trying to extricate his right testicle, which seemed to have retreated beneath his pelvis.

He had some concerns regarding the reasons for Lynne’s kindness, but a decent sleep in an actual bed, or as good as – rather than passing the night beneath a tree in Kelvingrove Park, in a glassy insomniac trance – was motivation enough not to question too hard. There was food here, light, warmth. You couldn’t just turn your nose up at that.

Hearing Lynne scuffling about in the hallway, Angus withdrew his hand from his underwear, sniffed his fingers and, composing himself for her return, arranged his face into what was, under the circumstances, the broadest, most ingratiating smile he could muster.

Lynne made herself late on Monday morning, dawdling in the flat, hoping her house guest would wake before she had to leave. It was unusual for her not to be first to arrive at the office, but despite what had happened over the weekend, first with Raymond, then Angus, there was no question of taking the day off. In the end she had to run, through the smirr of rain, to the underground station, and arrived into Arundel’s offices flustered, her hair damply wadded, an unpleasant trickling sensation under her arms. Late or not, people barely seemed to notice her enter, much less greet her. Only Heather Gillespie, on her final warning for punctuality herself, raised her sleepy face and, to Lynne’s horror, winked at her.

She started up her computer, then went to make breakfast – adding milk to the Tupperware box of cereal she’d brought from home. In the kitchenette, Faraz, beard luxuriant but scalp freshly gleaming from its weekly shave, was adding his name to the list for the office Christmas party, due to take place, because of various apparently irreconcilable scheduling clashes, in the middle of November. Beside him, waylaying him, pink in the face, was Struan Peters.

Most of Lynne’s colleagues came in on a Monday morning keen to discuss the weekend’s football or the new talent contest on TV; Struan arrived vibrating with indignation from a weekend seemingly spent researching ways in which Scotland’s failure thus far to secede from the United Kingdom was causing him personal injury.

‘What they need to do,’ he was telling glazed Faraz, ‘is really go after the sixteen- and seventeen-year-aulds. Get them political, get them fighting for their ain country. These guys’re our future – they dinnae want Westminster making their decisions for them. They’ll vote for independence soon’s that pen’s in their haund, guaranteed.’

Lynne wanted to speak up – declare that in her experience young people were a lot more conservative than Struan was giving them credit for. But this was hardly true of Raymond’s daughter, nor indeed of the young Lynne, who had upped and come to Glasgow alone aged eighteen, on what had amounted to a whim. Even in her silence, however, she was having her customary quantum effect on the debate: observed by Arundel’s sole English employee, it began to modulate subtly towards still-deniable jingoism. ‘Oor oil goes tae England,’ Struan complained. ‘Aw they wind farms blighting the hillsides and the moors, the power they generate? Straight down south.’

‘Aye, they pay for it, but. And there’s, like, tax breaks and that. Och, I don’t know, but it’s no like we give it away free.’

Struan ignored Faraz’s interruption. ‘Keep that fer oorsels, we’d be minted, the richest country in Europe. Ye could dismantle hauf they places and still power the whole ay Scotland. What do we need England for anyweiy? No for money. Moral guidance? Aye, right. What they gonnae teach us, how tae pan in windows and steal trainers and TVs?’

Lynne, unable to help herself: ‘That’s hardly fair.’

Struan’s head pivoted jerkily around, putting Lynne in mind of old films with frames missing. ‘Whit’s fair? Tellin us we’d fail on oor ain? Yis tell us we’re stupit even contemplatin it. Way tae win us over, calling us haufwits.’

Barely mid twenties, he acted like someone who’d survived decades of oppression and exploitation. These embittered youths, these independence advocates who behaved like victims of a totalitarian regime: where did all the anger come from?

‘We’re better together,’ she told him. ‘Co-operation’s how things get done, not by antagonism, not by a race to the bottom.’ On the TV last night she and Angus had watched a young Tory, who seemed to have emerged from the same dressing-up box as the rest of his ilk, stutteringly make this same point. He had embarked upon a clumsy metaphor about long marriages, at which point Angus, yawning exaggeratedly, had suggested they switch off; and you had to think, if this was the standard of speaker the anti-independence movement were using to put their viewpoint forward, they were either very confident or very complacent. ‘Apart, we’re less than the sum of our parts.’

‘Yous English,’ he said, ‘want tae keep us in fear. Alwis huv, alwis will.’ The kettle popped; with his colleagues distracted, Faraz made his tea and departed the kitchen at speed. ‘Ye know full well that without us, England’d fester and shrivel.’

To quell, at least temporarily, the unease rising towards her throat – such was her dread of these daily debates-turned-confrontations – Lynne resorted to exercising her authority, shaky though she felt it to be: ‘All right, Robert the Bruce, it’s gone nine o’clock. Time to start making calls.’ He scowled. ‘Try not to proselytize to the customers, will you?’ – hoping the word would baffle him.

Suddenly and unexpectedly promoted over Faraz, Struan and the others two months earlier – the interview process had comprised one telephone conversation with someone at head office in Aberdeen whom she hadn’t met then or since, followed by an email headed
CONGRATULATIONS
, which she now viewed ironically – Lynne had received no training in how she should address people transfigured overnight from colleagues to juniors. She understood the pitfalls – too familiar and they wouldn’t respect her, too severe and they, longer-serving Arundel employees who already resented her promotion, would turn to openly loathing her – but hadn’t yet worked out the right tone to take.

‘You’ll miss us when ye’re gone, boss,’ Struan jeered, vying for the last word.

‘What makes you think I’ll be the one who leaves?’

He smirked over his shoulder. ‘Whit makes ye think ye’ll huv a choice?’

She watched him saunter back to his desk, insolence radiating off him, even with his back turned. Had the man ever hurried to do anything she’d requested? She tried to console herself, as she returned to her own desk, on its own in the far corner, that his animosity wasn’t specific to her. He resented anyone being his superior – would act this way with whoever succeeded Lynne, just as he had with Tony, her predecessor.

One of the cleaners came to tidy around her, pushing aside her keyboard and swiping a bleach-reeking cloth over the desk as though Lynne were not actually sitting there. ‘Good morning, Marta,’ she said, having made the effort, unlike the other employees, to establish the cleaners’ names and that they were Somalian; hoping by example to educate the others into at least acknowledging the pair’s presence, a scheme that had not met with marked success. And now, though she tried to make eye contact, Marta’s glance slid away from her. For all her efforts to befriend them – to be civil, anyway – the cleaners treated her the same way they treated the people who ignored them entirely. Lynne felt a swell of irritation. Would it crack your face, she wanted to ask, to smile?

She deleted all Raymond’s emails, then reinstated them, then deleted them again. Then it was on to work: numbers in columns, spreadsheet cells marked in dayglo. She totted up figures, entered them in the database, plotted the results as graphs. Since her promotion, Lynne was, nominally, department head, although a moderately intelligent child could have completed these tasks – a moderately intelligent chimp. Her real role as manager was to take the calls her subordinates weren’t paid enough to deal with: the abusers, the customers who swore they’d come to the office and take revenge. For what? For billing them, albeit belatedly, for gutters cleared, stairwell lighting fixed, drying greens trimmed back from the feral. They had signed a contract, these people, but thought, what, that magic elves carried out the maintenance? It grew wearing being ranted at by strangers day upon day. No one ever seemed to believe that what Lynne said – that she understood their anger, that she empathized – was the truth.

Around her she heard her colleagues making calls – demands delivered with varying degrees of menace. ‘I’m sorry,’ Faraz was telling a caller, without much sincerity, ‘but that’s just the way our accounts are made up, six-monthly, in arrears. So you will sometimes see that there aren’t that many charges for one period, but those’ve actually been carried over to the next bill, and that’s what seems to have happened here. That’s why it’s more than normal. So, can I take your credit-card details?’ He listened for a moment. ‘No, we don’t offer a payment plan, sir, I’ll be needing the full amount. No. No, sir, sorry, sir, the full eight hundred. There’s no mistake.’

Faraz listened for a moment, then set the phone receiver gently down on his desk. When he realized he was observed, he whispered, ‘Crier,’ and gave Lynne a rueful look. Next time in the kitchen, though, he’d be adding a new mark under his name on the whiteboard. A game Struan had invented: two points for a swearer, three for a crier, the maximum four for any customer who threatened violence or legal reprisals, whereupon they would be put on hold and transferred to Lynne to talk down, this process generally only infuriating the caller further. In the early days they had awarded themselves a point whenever a client hung up midway through a call, but it had started to get away from them. After a pause Faraz lifted the receiver again. ‘Sir? Can I take payment now?’

And Faraz was one of the good, the more courteous ones. ‘I only hate the Jews,’ she’d once heard Struan say, after hanging up on a client, ‘because my ex-wife’s one.’ She watched now as he swaggered out from the gents’, a tabloid newspaper under his arm. How long had he stayed at his desk: five minutes? He was sniggering, for reasons Lynne did not wish to contemplate, and on his way past Heather’s desk he leaned to whisper something that made the girl recoil, slap at the air, call him minging.

She yearned to fire them all, advertise for a whole replacement staff. Did that fall under her remit? ‘Necessary qualifications: you will not make your boss’s skin crawl. You will not make her feel sick coming to work each morning.’ They were parasites – herself as well – even though being paid to take money away from people represented, she supposed, the ultimate capitalist
reductio ad absurdum
. It did not escape her that the cash she’d distributed among the homeless yesterday, trying to alleviate their suffering a little, she had earned through increasing the unhappiness of a different set of strangers.

So get up, she told herself. Walk out, go back to Glendower Street and Angus. Don’t come back. Arundel merely needs a human being, something borderline living, approximately sentient; Angus specifically needs you.

Just to picture Angus in her home provoked a giddy salmon-leap of excitement in her breast. Nobody ever truly grew up: she wanted to call him, but she wanted to be cool too. And when, she derided herself, have you ever been
that
? To distract herself, she imagined dialling Raymond’s number instead. Guess what, she’d say cheerfully. Five years ago, when we first met, I wasn’t thinking about you, I was still stuck on this other person. I never told you that. And now you’ve broken up with me, he’s come back into my life. What do you think about that? Doesn’t that just pull the carpet out from under you? He’d be speechless, she thought proudly – might even, she allowed herself to imagine, break down completely. Him with his ‘Can’t explain’ on Sunday morning, his ‘Something just doesn’t feel right.’ You, she might brag, aren’t the only one who can be cruel.

Ordinary human decency prevented her. You couldn’t just use one human being as a device for injuring or getting over another. Besides, it was bad faith to assume too much about Angus. He might not, she thought, taking perverse pleasure in pillorying herself, even be there when you get home. The reality is you have no one.

It worked: loneliness caught like a bone in her gullet.

‘Sir?’ she heard Faraz. ‘Sir, please don’t raise your voice to me. Sir, you’re going to have to speak to my supervisor—’

Lynne snatched up her phone before Faraz could patch through his call, but the phone at home rang out unanswered until the machine picked up. She hung up without leaving a message. Faraz gave her a sullen stare as his caller raged on.

Angus had gone to bed, shivering with fatigue, at eight in the evening. Surely he should be up by now? But then, for him, a full night’s rest must be an uncommon luxury. She’d decided against waking him this morning, but had then set about making a noisy fuss of emptying the dishwasher to try and rouse him. She had wanted to explain to him about the rocker switch for the hot water, the boiler’s eccentricities, where she kept the washing powder – well, he hadn’t been raised in the woods by wolves; he’d have coped with a dicky pilot light before now. She’d settled for leaving him a note on the kitchen table, paperweighting it with the vast bundle of her spare keys, since she could hardly lock him in the flat all day like a pet, nor bring him into the office with her, also like a pet. She tried to scandalize herself, visualizing copies of her keys distributed to every
Big Issue
seller in Glasgow by now, and even that didn’t staunch her current feeling of tension – which was not, she realized, the type she was accustomed to feeling in the office, but instead a kind of elation, of anticipation.

‘Put it through,’ she mouthed to Faraz, who shook his head at her then cut his caller off without another word.

Funny, she thought, taking a deep breath as she lifted the receiver, how a primordial feeling like this could hide out in you until you presumed it extinct, then one day come idling back in, exactly the same as when last you’d seen it. Unchanged, revenant. A coelacanth.