The Glasgow Coma Scale (20 page)

Remembering how China had responded to his treatment of the boy with the crappy Guy Fawkes doll, he figured that provoking her cruel laughter was one way to get her intrigued. ‘Talkin ay destruction,’ he said, and when she was paying attention, proceeded to tell her how he’d lost his job.

‘Ah alwis imagined ah’d get back intae it eventually – the paintin, ma “career” – and the teaching’d jist be an interregnum. Only trouble wis, ah felt nothin. Nae dazzle ay inspiration, nuhin. Ah’d sit in the studio night after night waiting for it, like a visitor ye know’s on the way but not when they’re due. But naebody came. And meanwhile, all these young bucks, ma students, were coming up fast from behind. Ah’d feel their breath hot on ma neck as they moved in tae overtake me. And a few werenae bad, don’t get me wrang. That made it harder, in fact.’

She shifted, sat back on the chair with her left leg folded under her. ‘So what did you do about it?’

‘Ah tripped them up. Ah docked them marks, whenever ah could. Any pretext. Fer bein late tae class. Fer submitting their work late, and since when did an artist ivver stick tae deadlines? Ah fucked them,’ he told China, whose eyebrows slowly lifted. ‘Ah dinnae mean literally.’ Well, in some cases literally, but that was a whole other story. ‘Ah devised this elaborate secret system ay demerits, almost an art project in itself. Taking it oot on the students for ma even being in the position ay
havin
students. Ah hud this deranged notion ah wis keepin the field clear for ma glorious return. But ah nivver did make a comeback, still nivver huv. So it was aw pointless. Even then ah wis popular, at least till they sussed what ah wis up tae.’

China cawed laughingly. Absolution the Angus Rennie way: he could divulge his worst behaviours without censure, and even tell himself he was helping her by taking her mind off her hopeless quest – oh, the two destroyers, they were perfect for each other.

‘Here, listen tae me rattlin oan. Let me get ye anither coffee.’ He had been delighted, going through his trouser pockets earlier, to discover two tenners seemingly left over from his night at McCalls. He strongly suspected he had extorted these from Rab at dart point, and he was keen to spend the evidence. ‘Ma treat, nay arguments.’ He was buying himself time, sure that he had other stories he could tell against himself, worse ones: ‘See when ah hud a comfy bed, a roof over ma heid and a good pal watchin oot fer me? Still ah wanted to crawl underneath St George’s Cross and kip in a bin wi all the other vagrants.’ Try and tell Lynne about that, the eyeballs’d pop out her head. As for revealing his sabotage tactics, ye gods, he could see it now: how she’d chew over the confession for days then ask, white with charity, pretending this was not the very first question that had occurred to her: ‘Was mine one of the careers you ruined? Did I give everything up, alter my life’s whole trajectory, because you were playing some game?’ What could he say to that? Which answer would she find more hurtful: the truth or the falsehood?

This time it was a young man in earnest spectacles taking orders. Angus queued up again, trying to decipher what the items printed on lit panels overhead even meant: what in the name of the wee man was a mango icebox? Rockabilly on the sound system, digitally remastered to preserve vinyl’s susurrations. He was thinking about the café’s painstaking simulation of a time no one here had experienced personally, and how it resembled carefully prepping a corpse for open-casket display, when the colours rushed up on him once more – burnt orange and bone, not the image itself but something like the pools of colour cast by sunlight passing through stained glass; and Angus, as in a dream of paralysis, was unable to turn his head the short distance to see what had generated the amorphous shapes, which were not, properly speaking, even shapes yet.

‘Angus,’ a voice said. He snarled, flailed, tried to shake off the voice. ‘Angus? Are you all right?’

The colours shot away. Still in the coffee shop. He had the sense of having been, for an indeterminate span of time, somewhere else entirely. Someone was still talking at him, and he clocked this person’s constituent elements – the gleam of her nose piercing, the dry wedge of snow-coloured hair – before understanding fully that this was Siri McKenzie herself, not an additional hallucination.

‘Well, Christ,’ he croaked, ‘fancy running into you here.’ Though in his confused state what he meant was: fancy my conjuring you up! He glanced at the table by the window: there sat China, busy with her phone. So she hadn’t metamorphosed into the other girl; they were all here together.

‘What happened? I thought you were having a stroke. Your face . . .’

‘No. No – ah wis in a dwam, jist.’ Impatient customers insinuated themselves between him and the counter; he took a step sideways; Siri did too, a slow
pas de deux
. She was wearing a grey denim jacket, collarless, vaguely military in cut: she was a foot soldier. ‘Sorry tae disappoint ye.’

‘I thought Lynne said you had some drawing class on a Thursday night?’

‘Usually ah do, aye. Only tonight it wis . . . it finished early.’

‘And you decided,’ she concluded, in the ironizing tone teenagers employed when stating simple fact, ‘to come here.’

Angus, who had since their drawing lesson come to imagine them pals, wanted to tell Siri she had inspired him, however unwittingly, to – what, see colours? He stalled, struck with a primitive fear that even to admit the possibility of the new work might chase it away for ever. ‘And, eh, whut brings ye here yirsel? You wan ay these . . .’ He indicated the overhead light boxes’ mysterious legends. ‘These coffee folk?’

‘I’m meeting Rose, actually. Her shift just finished.’

Oh, thought Angus, of course, why not. This is just Christmas. ‘Rose is here?’

‘Wasting my time if she wasn’t.’ She tipped her head backwards: a little behind her stood the girl who’d taken Angus’s order earlier, shift finished, a black leather biker’s jacket zipped over her barista’s uniform. ‘Rose, sweets? Don’t loiter. Come and meet Angus – remember I told you about him?’ As Rose approached, Siri gripped his shoulder, a reminder that she could probably ju-jitsu him into next week. Out the corner of her mouth, and none too sotto bloody voce: ‘Be nice, okay?’

‘Ah am nice,’ he protested. ‘How’s naebdy ever believe that?’ Demonstrating it, chivalry incarnate, he bobbed as he greeted Rose, grabbing her slim hand in his apelike own. ‘Delighted tae meet ye. Delighted.’ Brunette, cool-eyed, with a point of high colour on each cheek: a knockout, all told. The age difference between the girls didn’t seem all that pronounced to Angus, to whom both fitted into the generic category ‘young’. The resemblance was in their standard-issue lesbian undercut hairstyles, and their clothes: Rose’s leathers similar in cut to Siri’s military-effect jacket. For some reason, what looked natural on Rose hung on Siri like dress-up.

Jackets. Why had he been thinking about jackets earlier? Windcheaters. ‘Ye’re no,’ he ventured, ‘meetin Lynne too, ur ye?’

‘God, no. Could you not tell? Things are a bit weird between us at the moment.’

‘Och, that’ll pass, doll, doan ye worry, jist . . . gie her time. Try not to be too hard on her,’ he ventured. ‘Lynne’s . . . guid, ye know? She’ll come roond.’ Addressing Siri, he was monitoring Rose, who looked on, guileless, face dollishly blank: oddly uninvested, he felt, in Siri’s problems.

Ignoring his attempt at bridge-building, Siri said dismissively: ‘Anyway, we’re going to see Ten Dwarves? At the QM Union? Not exactly Lynne’s scene.’

‘Gaun tae see . . .’

Siri said pityingly, ‘It’s a band?’ – like he was meant to keep up with the trends.

‘It’s just one guy, really.’ Rose, stepping forward, mistook Angus’s mystification for a desire to know more. Her description involved conjoining unrelated words – eight-bit, chip-hop – and left Angus as baffled as, no doubt, she would have been had he started prattling on about armatures, contrapposto, egg tempera: terms of art meaningless to the outsider. Then she shrugged in winning self-deprecation. ‘It doesn’t sound much, but I find his stuff really moving. There’s something so appealing about how he never lets you forget the primitive technology he’s using. These ancient, clapped-out synthesizers.’

‘A sortay sleight ay hand.’ Something about Rose – how her eyes opened very wide as she gave this explanation – made Angus keen to show he was keeping up, even to impress her. ‘Misdirectin ye, makin ye look at wan particular hing while really there’s a whole load other stuff gaun on simultaneously. Like Bacon’s arrows.’

The imaginary graph you might plot to describe his regard for Rose would peak here, in the gap between his stopping talking and the look of pretty bewilderment forming on her face – the instant where he still mistakenly believed he was making a connection, that she understood what he was on about.

Too much to hope, too, that China would have remained meekly sitting at the table, waiting for him to return with their coffees. Nonetheless, he was taken aback when she stropped over, long black coat already on, and said: ‘I’m leaving now, just so you know.’

‘Oh, naw, don’t go, ah wis jist . . . Wait, no, look, this is Siri, ma, eh, ma landlady’s sortay stepdaughter, wid ye say?’ First the exertion of the evening’s walking and now this prolonged standing around had brought hot, slick, pulsing pain to Angus’s knee, and he went to clutch a chair-back for support, free hand flattened to his spine. He was grateful for the frosted windows of McCalls: no danger of anyone from over the road seeing him in this Mexican stand-off. ‘And Rose there is her—’

‘The world’s best barista,’ Siri supplied, with odd haste. ‘And my best friend.’ Rose’s smile waxed faintly mortified: the look of a minor celebrity accosted in public by a fan.

‘And awright, ah admit it, the two ay us’re skiving off our class. Gonnae no tell embdy?’

‘Yeah,’ China said, the one word somehow contradicting him. ‘Nice coincidence us all being here at the same time. You two don’t mind taking over my shift as his therapist, do you? Tell him about yourselves – really dig deep. Then wait and see – is he going to sympathize? Is he going to ask you how you feel? Hell no, he’s going to muscle on in with
his
story instead. Has he told you about his students? Get him to tell you that one, how he fucked them all.’

Siri turned on her. ‘
Excuse
me?’ Even Rose looked startled, then abashed.

‘Aw, she disnae mean . . . China, pal, a joke’s a joke . . .’ In his rush to tell his misdemeanours, he hadn’t anticipated that what he revealed might make China despise him. To the others, scoffing: ‘Dinnae listen, she’s no ma therapist or any such hing.’

‘Well, no, that’s true, I’m the cheap alternative. Take a girl out for a drink and just let it all spew.’

‘China!’ he shouted. ‘Gonnae shut up a minute?’

‘Yeah,’ she snorted, turning to leave. ‘Yeah. That’d be right. Let you get a word in edgewise.’

He had changed his mind: he’d welcome being spotted from McCalls if it meant Big Shelagh might come sprinting in right now with a tray of glasses, hot from the dishwasher, to smash over his head. He held out his hands to Siri and Rose, supplicant. ‘Ah’m sorry aboot that stuff. Ignore her, she’s . . . Christ, ah better go after her, try and sort this oot.’

‘I dunno, Angus.’ Was Siri
smirking
, the wee besom? ‘That didn’t sound like someone wanting you to chase her.’

‘Ah’m sorry ye hud tae . . . It was so nice,’ he said in panic, stumble-john, ‘meetin ye, Rose. Yous two make a cute couple.’

He was surprised to see the faintest, sweetest quizzical crease deepen on Rose’s brow. And Siri, smile erasing itself, turned her head with appalling slowness, slowing still, as though to forever defer meeting her friend’s eye.

A hoarse bellow from the barista wiping coffee-machine steam from his glasses: ‘That’s two bowl lattes to stay on the bar!’ Angus’s coat and bag were still by the table where he and China had been sitting, and on the tabletop, between their empty cups, coins were neatly stacked – payment for the coffee he’d gone to buy her. Owe nothing to no one: it wasn’t a bad philosophy. He wondered if it was too late to ask the barista for his money back. He could even make a moderate profit.

Between him and the counter stood Siri and Rose, looking deep into each other’s eyes, but not with romance. Oh, but what was unfolding on Siri’s face: a story of fear and hope and being caught out, a weighing up of whether to confess or devise a swift, corrective lie. He could have stood for days and watched the look’s minutely evolving modulations, a work of art itself. And the slow, rich blush creeping upwards from her collar to her nape, where her cropped-clean hair had begun to shade faintly in once more.

Even his set-to at the Ristretto didn’t prevent Angus waking energized the next morning, in the slate-grey near-dawn, laughing at something he’d been dreaming, which hadn’t migrated into his waking consciousness. The soles of his feet were prickling; he knew this feeling of old. Something thrilling was drawing near. New work.

He’d chased after China as she tramped down Byres Road with the stilted gait of the person who knows she’s being watched. ‘Don’t follow me,’ she’d called over her shoulder. ‘Don’t you dare.’ Okay then: he’d taken her at her word, though she hadn’t spoken with conviction. He’d spun on his worn heel and headed for Glendower Street. What had she got so het up about? Hadn’t they just been swapping darkest secrets, quite contentedly? Years of experience and he still couldn’t fathom the young.

When Lynne came home that night, it was to find him hard at work over the stove. ‘Guid evenin! How wis yir day? Ah’m makin supper – dinnae argue, sit, sit.’ In her astonishment, Lynne complied without argument. ‘Pour yirself wine. Or a beer, there’s plenty mair in the fridge. Or both! Ah’m making beef bourguignon – at least ah hope ah am.’ In the instant he’d taken his eye off the pot, the stew had agglutinated into one large lumpen mass. He turned the heat off and cast round for an implement to divvy it up, possibly a carving knife.

‘What a treat to be cooked for,’ she said when he deposited a plateful in front of her. Cautiously she nibbled a lump of the stuff from the tip of her fork. ‘Delicious.’