The Glasgow Coma Scale (24 page)

And then it came upon him once more: the luminous non-colour standing out on a field dawning from black to infernal red. Why not? Who else’s fault but Siri’s that he’d been guilted into accompanying Lynne tonight? Struan had fallen, his hands pressed to his face, and people were ignoring Angus in their rush to help him; Angus, standing over his enemy, felt nothing but slow wonder as a bead of blood slipped from his nose and broke on the concrete floor. White light from the still-running copier swept across the archway, its beams and supports, and through his pain and the clearing colour, Angus recognized what he was seeing – his picture, his new work, staring him in his broken face.

‘I’ll sue,’ Struan threatened.

‘Don’t be absurd.’ Lynne hesitated. ‘On what grounds?’

‘Wrongful dismissal.’ He folded his arms emphatically, like that was an end to it.

‘That’s just . . . something you’ve heard on television.’

It was Friday. Lynne, Struan and Scott Flint, the HR manager who’d driven down specially from head office in Aberdeen, were in the conference room, which had last been used to host a leaving do. A foil banner that read
WE’LL MISS YOU
was still strung across one wall, flaring gently beneath the air vent; Lynne couldn’t for the life of her remember whose party it had been. Flint had shut the Venetian blinds on the internal windows, screening them from the office floor, then dragged a seat into one corner, where he sat making notes on a yellow notepad, leaving Lynne and Struan to face one another across the conference table.

‘Yir pal Angus, he’s for it an aw.’ Struan raised a hand to the great patch of bruise that spread around the bridge of his nose, now buckled and puffy – a domino mask of empurpled skin. ‘Ah’m speakin tae the polis. Grievous bodily fuckin—’

‘Please don’t swear, Struan. We all deeply regret what happened at the weekend, but that isn’t anything to do with why we’re – I’m – talking to you today.’ Oh, lies, lies. Under the desk, she was tearing a worn paper handkerchief into ever smaller fibres.

On Sunday, Angus had, after much prevaricating, described to her what he insisted on calling the ‘work’ in the gents’ toilet – first this, he explained, hand to the half-moon bruise on his own forehead, then that horrible impersonator at the party, was the reason for the assault. He’d done it for her sake. Lynne said she wished he’d just spoken to her instead; his taking retribution into his own hands like that had made the situation seem like a private dispute between the two men, from which she, the true wounded party, after all, had been excluded.

‘Ye cannae fire sumdy out the blue one Friday eftirnoon,’ Struan told her condescendingly, ‘jist cos ye dinnae get oan with them. Ye’ve hud it in fer me since that promotion ay yirs. It’s alwis me,’ he averred, swivelling in his chair to appeal to Scott Flint, ‘she’ll call out for no answerin the phone quick enough. Any excuse tae have a go. Who didnae clean up the cups in the kitchen, Christ’s sake.’

He wasn’t mistaken, that was the worst thing. She’d disliked him on sight – his stupid frosted hair, his cheap shiny suits – and rarely kept it hidden. Worse yet, she’d failed him too: a manager was meant to treat her charges evenly. As the HR man nodded, wrote it all down in his pad, Lynne had a horrid intimation that he might take Struan’s side, that this inquiry might all at once turn against her. She might hate working here, but that didn’t mean she wanted to be forced to leave. She laid a hand on the buff-coloured folder on the desk before her, a gesture Struan saw and did not misinterpret.

‘Be reasonable,’ he changed, looking to Scott. ‘Ah’ve alwis met ma targets, which ye must admit’s impressive given this company’s frankly diabolical way ay dealin wi its clients. And ye cannae hold me responsible for that.’ Scott’s expression remained mild – almost disinterested. ‘Maybe ah’m no the maist eloquent oan the phone, but she’ll tell ye ah’ve nivver wance said a bad hing tae a caller. Ye record all they calls, mind?’

‘Yes,’ said Lynne, ‘I’ve heard the tapes.’ She had not heard the tapes. ‘But I’m not talking about how many customers hang up on you – even though you sometimes seem more concerned about winning on that scoreboard in the kitchen than in doing your job properly. It’s about your attitude.’

‘Look, we all know this joab’s gash. None ay us’s daein it out ay love. This might come as a surprise tae ye, Lynne, but workin in a call centre disnae represent the pinnacle ay ma ambitions in life, even if it dis yir ain. And so ah try tae have a little fun, so what?
Fun
,’ he sneered, ‘if that’s a concept ye kin grasp? A wee bit banter. Jist trying tae relieve the cripplin boredom ay workin here.’

Here was Lynne’s moment. ‘All right, then. Let’s talk about fun.’ Willing her eyes to go colourless, neutral, and her hands not to shake, she opened the folder and withdrew from it the diorama of doctored page-three girls. She unfolded it like a map, looking over it briefly to show she could, before sliding it across the tabletop to Struan. She wanted to see his face change colour until it matched the redness round his eyes, which of course it did not, since that would have meant admitting he felt even the slightest shame. ‘Why don’t you explain, then,’ she asked stiffly, ‘how this particular display fits into that category?’

She had intended to come in early on Monday and take the thing down before her colleagues could see her, but in the end, due to an alarm clock she’d failed to set properly – a Freudian slip – and a delay on the Underground, she’d ended up getting into the office well after nine. Plan B: devil-may-care, with everyone watching, she’d rapped twice smartly on the gents’ door, waited a beat, then stepped inside. As she’d stood in the warm, fetid gloom, so distinctly different from the ladies’, listening to the snigger of a recalcitrant cistern refilling, she had experienced a feeling like satiation. Partly it was the sense of trespass, partly it came from imagining what the others might be saying outside about her – but mostly it was because she knew, even before she saw the pin-ups stuck to the stall door just as Angus had described, that Struan was finished.

But Struan didn’t seem to grasp that. Inspecting the images, he stayed silent, toying with the
YES SCOTLAND
lanyard round his neck, to which she’d turned a blind eye rather than quoting workplace dress regulations. Calculating, maybe? Or maybe he thought that if he remained still and silent long enough, Lynne and the HR man might, like hunters frustrated, simply lose interest and move on.

‘Struan,’ Flint said, voice soft, ‘we’re going to let you tell your side. If you’ve anything to say in your defence, now’s the time to talk.’

‘You cannae prove ah’d anyhin tae dae wi that . . . whatever it is,’ he said at last. ‘What about Faraz? Donna? Ah take it ye’ll be hauling all thaim in as well? Interrogating thaim an aw?’

Flint’s eyelids flickered. ‘I already spoke to your co-workers, Struan.’ This was his masterstroke: he’d started to describe to Lynne before the meeting how he intended to claim that the others had already pinned responsibility on Struan, so that—She’d cut him short; she knew all about the prisoner’s dilemma. But surely Struan would see Flint’s eyes shifting, as Lynne did, and realize it was a lie. ‘They all said the same thing. That’s why you’re the only one in here.’

‘Is it fuck.’ He addressed this complaint solely to Lynne – Scott Flint, a nobody from head office, seemingly undeserving of acknowledgement. ‘Yous’re stitchin me up here.’

He drew a breath, and Lynne, uninterested in whatever grandstanding he was going to attempt, found herself entranced by the single fibrous black hair that seemed to have sprouted from Struan’s left nostril in the time they’d been talking – questingly, like an insect’s proboscis, vibrating when he inhaled. When she tuned back in, he was mid spiel: a mixture of appeal and attempt to shift blame on to others, even Lynne herself. The quaver in his voice was as good as an admission of guilt, an invitation to punishment. ‘Mebbe if we hud a better workplace environment – if there wisnae jist this unending conveyor belt ay targets and deadlines, the same routine day in, day oot, makin folk plead wi us—’

Lynne thought:
enough
of this.

‘Struan,’ she cut in. ‘You may have a point. But the fact remains, you chose to make things harder for other people – for
me
– to work here than it might already be. Before I go any further, we should thank you for the contribution you’ve made at Arundel over the past two years.’ What his contribution had been was to help Lynne realize it wasn’t necessary to believe anything you came out with, or even
act
like you did – just deliver the appropriate rote-learned speech at the apposite juncture. She drew herself up, though the urge she felt was the opposite – to slouch down in her chair, cackle, let the inebriated feeling swamp her. She foresaw a future, and it chilled her, in which she had come to relish the speeches. The hollow platitudes. ‘We wish you luck in finding employment elsewhere. But your contract here is terminated, with immediate effect.’ The death sentences.

Showstoppers of sunsets you got this time of year: tangerine and ice blue, acid greens, a luminous red sun standing cold and near-static in the sky for hours on end. Braw colours, but useless for Angus’s purposes. In George Square, street sweepers were collecting up the previous night’s detritus, using stiff-bristled brushes to scrape disintegrating paper off the sodden red tarmac, retrieving cans and wrappers from the meltwater-pooled cenotaph and between the paws of the two stone lions that guarded the city chambers. Before it vanished into the maw of a dustcart, Angus glimpsed a mud-besmirched leaflet with the CND symbol printed on it, which made him feel a brief nostalgia, imagining what his da might have asked, bemused, upon seeing it: they still daein that?

Cobbsy had received his
Big Issue
seller’s accreditation and a stack of magazines. ‘The hoops ye huv tae jump through,’ he marvelled, grabbing Angus’s hand and making a botched attempt to turn the handshake into something Masonic. He indicated the red gilet he had on. ‘Six month I wis tryin tae get one ay these.’ Banter ensued – comical remarks that centred mostly on the yellow-blue bruise on Angus’s forehead – but it was like trying to hold a conversation with the parent of a new baby: Cobbsy was forever breaking off to step forward, shrink-wrapped magazine brandished before him, to declaim: ‘Help this guy find a place for the night, gie it a read, you’ll find it’s awright –
Thaa Biig Ishhoooo-ahh
!’ Angus didn’t know, but he speculated the company must vet people for the public-facing positions: ‘You’re too obviously skaggy. And you look too down in the mouth – folk’ll think you’re a lost cause. Ah, but you, Cobbsy, big man, you’ve the kind of face we’re looking for – the approachable homeless. Out there and do us proud.’ Nevertheless, the passers-by defied him, intent instead on mobile phones, smokes, chewing gum.

‘Ye no wantin tae sit doon a while, Cobbsy?’

‘One ay the rules ay the joab, eh, no sittin aroond. Looks lazy. Gaun yirsel, but.
Big Issue
, madam? Sir? Naw? God bless yis anyweiy.’ Angus couldn’t fathom how his pal tholed the rejection.

Angus took a pew on the nearest bench, planting his carrier bag between his feet. Cobbsy eyeballed the bag but said nothing. Angus knew you never asked what the homeless were carrying around; the answer would only upset you. In fact he’d come straight from the art store on Queen Street, a place he’d sworn never to set foot in, and the bag contained a starter set of acrylics, half a dozen hog-hair brushes, a few other odds and sods he’d spanked the remainder of his money on. Dilettante’s equipment, as if by pretending to be a novice he might ambush art itself while its back was turned, so to speak.

With a month until Christmas, half the square was cordoned off for the winter carnival. Behind low walls patrolled by overzealous security guards stood a half-height helter-skelter; a gently undulating thing that failed on the most basic levels to qualify as a roller coaster; a whirligig in the form of a big, sappy-faced purple octopus. Angus watched this last as it gathered speed, lifting and lowering its thick plastic arms, drawing delighted screams from weans in accelerating orbits.

‘So ah got yir texts aboot Bobby,’ he said, when Cobbsy returned. ‘Poor basturt. Is he—’

‘Went tae see him yesterday, aye. Intensive care it wis – a room ay his ain, not that he’d know it. Christ, man. Like a fuckin piece ay meat. His chest gaun up and doon’s the wan sign ay life, and even that’s a respirator daein the work, no him.’

‘Whit happened exactly?’

Cobbsy swung his head from side to side. ‘Got his heid kicked in, eh.’ Funny to put it that way, passive, as if no one but Bobby himself had been responsible.

‘Aye, but how?’

‘I doan know, dae I?’ Cobbsy grew defensive. ‘Bobby certainly isnae tellin. For sure he hadnae anyhin on him worth stealin.’ He rubbed a finger under his nose, trying to pretend, Angus felt, he wasn’t frightened. You looked out for one another on the street, but that didn’t bar stuff like this from happening, and when it did, you didn’t dwell on all the things you’d done to help folk – only grew skeery it would be you it happened to next. ‘Mebbe sumdy jist didnae like the look of him. Followed the wrang guy doon the darkened alley. Or wan ay they what’s-it, they motiveless crimes mebbe?’

‘Nae luck, poor fucker.’

‘It’s his folks I’ve been thinkin about,’ Cobbsy confessed. ‘How they’ll feel when they find oot – if they even do.’ Everyone knew the story: it had been the first thing Bobby said about himself, challenging folk to take his parents’ side, though he never seemed placated by the universal condemnation: fancy kicking your bairn out the hoose just because he likes it up the jacksy! The boy had held it out like a calling card: in the three weeks Angus had been on the streets, he had heard Bobby’s story maybe three, four times. He couldn’t move on from his misfortune – he revelled in it.

‘Bein fed nutrients through a tube up his you-know-whit. Lookin like a fuckin . . . sea urchin, by the way, aw these tubes comin and gaun in and oot ay him. Felt heart-sorry for the wee bugger, so I did.’ Cobbsy shook his head. ‘I should hae done sumhin before. I dunno. Bin a bit mair kinder.’