The Glasgow Coma Scale (21 page)

‘There wis meant to be soup tae start too, only . . .’ Angus indicated the open window, the blackened pan balanced on the sill. ‘Ye ought tae get yir smoke alarms tested, ye know, Lynne.’

He upended a fresh can of beer into a glass, tilting both to keep the head level, nice and easy. Noticing her watching with eyebrow raised, he shrugged, still pouring. ‘Thought ah might’ve needed it fir the stew, eh. No sense letting it go tae waste.’ Neither this, nor the impossible task of applying fridge-hardened butter to a slice of supermarket pan loaf could stop him grinning like a maddy. It was making Lynne smile too. Domestic bliss.

It was a new era in their relationship, and it lasted about forty-five minutes.

Lynne scunnered it. She didn’t mean to, but there it was: dabbing her mouth with a napkin – a napkin! The lengths Angus had gone to – she announced that she couldn’t eat any more. ‘I’m sorry, it’s great, but it’s so filling.’ There was plenty left over, but she wasn’t wrong: the stew was sitting heavy on his stomach. Worried that the sauce had seemed too watery, he’d thickened it mid cook by free-pouring flour into the mix. ‘Maybe Siri’ll want some. You know she’s coming round?’

‘Ah did not, no.’ Casually, cautiously: ‘Ah wis under the impression you two werenae . . .’

‘Well, we weren’t, I suppose, for a couple of days. But I remembered what you said about how we have to try and move forward in’ – she sketched quote marks in the air – ‘the “post-Raymond era”.’ Angus didn’t believe he’d ever said any such thing. ‘I have to at least try to keep things on an even keel. I invited her over to talk. You don’t mind, do you?’

‘Naw, naw!’ He topped up his drink, effortfully steady-handed. ‘Ah’ll jist make masel scarce – head oot on wan ay ma walks. Leave yous two tae it.’

‘You don’t need to do that.’

‘Och no. Now the snow’s aw gone . . .’

‘But you got on so well the other day. It’d be . . . I mean, I’d like you to be here.’

He contemplated worst-case scenarios. Perhaps better he stay here as peacemaker after all. Should Siri take it upon herself to tell Lynne that she’d seen him and China at the Ristretto, he could explain what had happened – paint China as a local simpleton who’d attached herself to him – before Siri could put her own interpretation on the situation. There was also the fact that both times he’d met the girl before had coincided with his getting a sense of his next work. He told himself it was trite superstition. No matter. He couldn’t pass up the chance to get more of a fix on the scale, the subject, of what he would do next.

Half eight, and rockets going off outside the living-room window: they shrieked sizzling across the black sky; burst, in petulant silence, into trailing stars; or, the ones Angus had never liked, up they hurtled with a deflating squall then – wait for it, wait for it – exploded lightlessly, firelessly, in a howitzer crack that came from nowhere and everywhere at once, loud enough to rive the night.

In blew Siri, like nuclear winter. She had boosted her height with platform trainers, but seemed unaccustomed to walking on three inches of cushioned sole and staggered like a wet foal to the table. Angus, meek, offered her some dinner. She grunted a refusal. ‘How’ve ye been anyway?’ he croaked. Siri turned her baleful gaze on him and didn’t speak. He started feeling just the faintest misgiving.

‘Answer Angus, then,’ Lynne prompted – kind, decent, oblivious Lynne; couldn’t she see Siri had a face on like a bulldog chewing a wasp?

‘Can’t we just get on with it? Get the gloating over with? That’s what I’ve been summoned for, I take it.’

‘Hey, now,’ Angus protested. ‘Dinnae be mad at Lynne. If ye’ve an issue with anyone, Siri, doll, it’s wi me, only me.’

There was still a puzzled smile on Lynne’s face. ‘What’s going on?’ Someone else’s life flashed before Angus’s eyes: a good and generous someone who life was about to seize up and dash against a rock like an unwanted bairn.

‘Ask
him
.’ Then, without pause, she turned on Angus. ‘You fucked it, you stupid drunk dick. You ruined everything.’

Angus waggled his hands in the air, desperate to stop Siri talking. ‘Hey, hey, there’s no need fer that. Let’s get our facts straight a minute, ah wisnae
drunk
. And what precisely did ah ruin?’

‘You know what Rose said to me? “I like you, just not like that.” This is like the smartest, most articulate person I’ve ever met, and that’s all she could think to say. So, you know, well done.’

‘You mean you werenae gaun oot? But Lynne said—’

‘Course she did. She put you up to it, I bet. Like that girl said, what, you just happen to be in the Ristretto on a Thursday night? I bet you were back here like a shot last night to tell Lynne the good news, that the plan had worked, you’d managed to humiliate me. In front of your
friend
, too. Or, no, she wasn’t your friend, was she? Your therapist, she said. Or was she one of your students too? Another one you fucked?’

‘Ya wee clype,’ he cried, horrified. ‘Ah nivver breathed a word about seein you and Rose, not one bluddy word.’

Lynne’s face had fallen in on itself like a failed cake, but her voice kept steady. ‘Siri, listen to me. He’s telling you the truth. This is the first I’ve heard of this – any of this. All I told Angus about this girl was what Raymond told me. I didn’t mean to drive a wedge.’

‘Oh. Oh, well, that’s okay, then, if you didn’t mean to. I bet you’re still pleased you did, though. Never mind this is someone I care about, never mind what I feel.’

‘That’s a horrible thing to say. Of course I’m not happy.’ Lynne was managing to stay brisk and no-nonsense. Angus, fearful, thought he understood now what she’d said about fights like this making her feel properly maternal towards Siri. ‘Are you all right? Please just tell me what happened. Was it—’

‘I don’t want to talk about it. She’s made it perfectly clear she doesn’t want me hanging around her. Cramping her style.’

‘Then she isn’t a real friend,’ Lynne suggested.

The sky clapped white. Fireworks popped and popped, feather bursts of soft stars drifting windwards over the rooftops of the tenements opposite. ‘What the hell,’ said Siri, ‘would you know about friendship or anything else?’

‘Siri, lovey, listen. You’re seventeen. I know – I remember – how intensely you
feel
at that age. How thrilling it is when things are going well, and how devastating when they’re not. But Siri, you’ve your whole life ahead of you. You’ll meet someone new – lots of new people. Rose just wasn’t the right one.’ Siri’s face was blotchy and the whites of her eyes had turned ruddy, but she was quiet – seemed to be taking Lynne’s words to heart. Angus started to feel less tense, until, with a look of swinish cunning, Lynne added: ‘You’ve experimented, you’ve tried this thing, and it didn’t work out. So now you can get on with the rest of your life.’

Holy shit, Angus thought. He wondered if they’d notice if he dropped down off his chair and crawled under the table – the old duck-and-cover.

‘You mean now this phase of mine has come to an end,’ Siri suggested pleasantly.

‘Well, no, that’s not what I said.’

‘No, no, I get it. So I take it that since Dad’s dumped you, you might start going out with women? I mean, that was a phase too, and now that it’s come to an end, I guess you’re going to start from scratch again? Because that’s basically what you’re saying. That’s basically your argument.’

‘What I’m saying, if you’ll listen, is exactly what you said to me when I was going to see your father. About how blind we can be to other people’s faults – the things that are obvious to everyone but us. Isn’t that what you said to me before? That I might be too stupid not to let your father walk all over me when I next saw him?’

‘What are you, Lynne, some sort of . . . misery vampire? You’ve failed to achieve happiness in your own life, and now you’re deriving pleasure from other people’s unhappiness as well.’

‘Don’t compare my life with yours. That’s not what this is about.’ But Angus thought it was, almost broke cover by thanking Siri for daring to say to Lynne something he’d felt but failed to formulate, or flunked putting into words.

‘Go on, then – prove to me you were more committed to Dad than I was to Rose.’

Outrage made Lynne’s squawk an octave higher than normal. ‘Of course I was committed.’

‘No, I said prove it. Just look at this place – all the time you were together, you had your bolt hole to flee back to, in case things didn’t work out. How’s that for refusing to commit?’

‘Glendower Street is
mine
,’ she howled. ‘I’ve worked so hard for this place. I’ve slaved. I can’t believe this – don’t you remember begging me to let you stay when you and Raymond were fighting? And now you’re . . . bollocking me.’ Siri had the decency to look abashed. ‘It’s nothing to do with your father. I couldn’t afford to give it up. You don’t understand. I’d have lost so much—’

‘So it’s about money? Gosh, Lynne, that’s principled. Wow.’

‘Please will you stop turning everything I say on its head? Okay, listen – say I had sold, moved in with Raymond. Where would I be now? We’re all on thin ice, Siri, all the time. One bad decision and I could have ended up on the street.’ She gestured helplessly at Angus. ‘Like
him
!’

I am surrounded, Angus thought, in the sense of besieged, by smart women. As Siri thumped ungainly towards the doorway, he retreated from the table until his back was against the kitchen wall. He had the feeling that, were he to push a little harder, the fragile plasterboard might give way, letting him take refuge in the bathroom.

‘That’s it, Lynne, I’m going. I hope you’re happy to have got all this stuff off your chest. Honestly, though, I doubt it. I doubt you ever will be.’

After Siri had left, Angus and Lynne took their accustomed seats at opposite ends of the kitchen table. Siri had ruined, by one thoughtless mention of China, the ideal Lynne had hugged close for so long – that she alone could heal Angus, regenerate him, have him fall into her arms. In the manner of anyone in a crisis for which he was partly responsible, he found himself regretting, far too late, not having been straight with her from the start.

Lynne fiddled with the salt and pepper shakers at the middle of the table, and he, unable to dream up any panacea to rectify the situation, waited with dread for the tone she’d take. Resentful, cringing, furious; it wasn’t going to be good.

‘What’s her name, this girl?’ The fight had hoarsened Lynne’s voice, and the words came out strangely staccato – a wooden doll that had just learned to speak.

‘China,’ he mumbled, feeling an obscure desire to invent a pseudonym for her.

‘What an interesting name.’

Angus struck the table edge hard. ‘Aw, don’t gies it.’

‘I don’t know what you mean. Or is it a nickname? Fragile, is she?’

‘Ye know fine well what ah mean. Play the innocent,’ he muttered, shaking his head. ‘This is gonnae turn intae yir usual passive-aggressive guff, and ah’m no staunin fer it, okay? Ah went oot wi sumdy fir coffee. And no, she isnae ma therapist either, so ye can forget that angle. Ah’ve nuhin tae be ashamed of.’

‘Of course not.’ Lynne drew a breath he fancied he could hear go cold as it entered her mouth. ‘I just think it’s funny that this is how you repay me.’

‘Coffee,’ he repeated, with frosty emphasis, ‘wi a pal.’

‘Contrary to what seems to be everyone’s opinion, I do have a brain in my head. Feelings, too, if you hadn’t noticed. I gave up a lot for Siri, not that she’d thank me. And now you—’

‘Feelins,’ he scoffed. ‘Ye mean prejudices. Lynnie, one thing ah
have
noticed—’

‘Lynne! My name,’ she nearly screamed, ‘is Lynne.’

‘All right,
Lynne
. Sit down, doll,’ as, disgusted, she started to get up, ‘this may come as a shock to ye. See when ye’re confronted wi sumhin disnae suit ye? Sumhin ye dinnae like? Ye never seem tae consider altering yir attitudes, jist bulldoze blindly oan. Achieve yir aims by way ay sheer bloody-minded persistence. Try and make things ye don’t like jist – disappear.’

She went silent. You’re doing it right now, he wanted to cry out. Then, ‘I took you into my home,’ she croaked. Oh, that he might live without ever hearing that again!

‘Aye, took me in’s right.’

‘I dressed you, fed you—’

‘So an act ay charity,’ he leapt in, ‘is just a way to make yirsel feel good? A donation tae the karma fund? Lynne, listen, let me reassure ye, you are gonnae be rich, rich, rich in the next life.’

She stood. ‘My God!’ It burst from her, a real scream. ‘I can’t do this any more. I was stupid to think I could.’

The wind picked up; rain, startled, slapped against the window. ‘Christ, Lynne.’ He recalled his resolution at the Ristretto: be kinder to her. With an effort, he moderated his tone. ‘You saw what nick ah wis in, that day on Sauchiehall Street. How much longer d’ye think ah’d huv managed unaided? That wis jist
days
’d done that tae me.’ Expecting her to break in at any moment that now was their chance to find out, and kick him out. Of course she didn’t. ‘Ah am . . . profoundly grateful. Every time ah pass by Kelvingrove Park ah nivver fail tae think whaur ah might be without ye, and ah give thanks. Okay, mibbe ah should huv thanked ye directly once in a while. But – and ah do mean this kindly – ah cannae give ye whit ye’re after. You know that. You’ve alwis known that, just willnae admit it.’ Her face was morose, cowish – and despite everything, she
still hoped
, Christ’s sake, you could see it in her eyes, unwilling to believe that this wasn’t just a test of her selflessness. He dropped his voice. ‘Admit it tae me now, darlin.’

She drew a deep breath. ‘What I’ll admit,’ she cried, and though her shoulders rose as she tried to rile herself up again, he could hear right away that her heart wasn’t in another tantrum, ‘is that it’s made it damned easy for you. It’s given you all kinds of licence, knowing how I feel, knowing I’d never . . . say anything. Try and push things.’

‘Ye nivver needed tae
say
anyhin,’ he protested. ‘Ye think ah huvnae got eyes in ma heid? What you call not pushin things isnae how the rest ay mankind would describe it. Christ, do ye think ye’ve
nuance
?’