The Glasgow Coma Scale (5 page)

By now, Angus had moved on to describing the converted hotel out Dennistoun way where he’d been assigned a bed. ‘And when ah say a bed, that wis about the extent ay it. Walk in the room, bam, there’s yir bed. Barely open the door. Well, it made sense, the kinds ay people coming in there didnae huv that much tae store. What were we gonnae dae, decorate? Arrange wee ornaments on the mantelpiece?’ She opened her mouth and he bellowed, ‘We didnae
huv
mantelpieces, Lynne.’

Tonight, at least, she was able to smile. ‘But at least then you were . . . off the streets,’ she suggested, dabbling in the unfamiliar vernacular.

‘For a while, aye. Three weeks oan the street, three nights aff, then back oot again. An endurance test – two endurance tests.’

‘That was all? Just three nights?’

He laughed. ‘That wis
enough
, ye mean. Worst three nights ay ma life, and that’s saying sumhin. You ivver tried sleepin while folk literally scream the place down around ye? Screaming fer drugs, or families who’ve abandoned them? Brawlin in the corridors ootside? Ye get some right bampots in they places, Lynne. Ah wis so tired ah wis hallucinatin, and still ah couldnae sleep, couldnae relax, too feart some basketcase’d barge in ma door and assault me. People get savaged in they places. This.’ He rapped his knuckles on his hurt leg. ‘How did ye think this came aboot?’

‘I hadn’t . . .’ She didn’t want to admit that the injury had seemed intrinsic to his homelessness, his general ill-fortune. Street people often had these wounds, and she supposed she had concluded that they occurred as part of the same process by which they lost their homes: things that happened all at once, by mysterious means, to people she didn’t know.

‘Funny thing is, ah’d always taken pride in callin masel a loner. It’s romantic tae be self-sufficient, isolatit by choice. Not so much when the description’s foistit on you by ither people. Then ye jist feel a reject.’

She could do it now, touch his leg, re-enact that old evening, do it right this time. Back then she had not dared, and so the evening had ground on into morning, the old, fierce, confident Angus holding court and the two girls enraptured in their different ways: brash Elena finding points to argue in his every proclamation, Lynne oddly boosted by his unfailing derogation of any artist mentioned – that one’s a failure, she’s a bore, he’s just an arse – as these remarks put her, who he had derided in similar, albeit milder, terms, in the same general category as these
proper
artists.

‘Of course the gender thing makes a difference,’ Elena had berated Angus, while Lynne was interrogating her desire to touch him. ‘I mean, if you’re calling people like Smithson or fucking
Ruscha
conceptualists, you are going to have to make room for Eleanor Antin, Susan Hiller, a whole load of other people.’

‘Bull
shit
.’

‘It is not bullshit whatsoever.’ Elena, standing, levelled two fingers weapon-like at Angus. ‘And I am going to tell you exactly why, in exactly four minutes, when I come back.’

Lynne and Angus had sat frozen until they heard the bathroom lock go. Then they sagged, smiled at each other. Angus blew air out of his mouth. ‘Talks a guid fight, that one, eh? Ah mean. Who the hell’s Eleanor Antin?’

The booze was finished, and Lynne had got up to start clearing things away. Angus had followed her to the sink, still holding his glass with the last inch of neat vodka warming in it. Behind the tenements opposite, light was starting to rise. ‘God, wid ye look at it.’ He put an arm round her shoulder. ‘Ah’m sorry tae’ve took up so much ay yir time, Lynne. Kept ye up all night.’

‘No, no, it’s fine, it’s good. I’ve enjoyed having you here.’ A current was going through her, bright as dawn. It was the simplest thing to pivot beneath his arm and lift her face to his, already downward-angled; to press her lips to his mouth and feel it yield. Not a good kiss, mouth botching on mouth, but a kiss. What she remembered best was his stubble swiping and scraping over her mouth, and wondering whether she could ever come to like it.

‘Oh, right,’ he’d said when she stepped back. There was a great grin broadening across his face, but he hadn’t even taken his free hand out his pocket during the kiss. ‘
Right
.’

‘Now ah,’ he was saying of his brief stay at the hostel, ‘hud royally ballsed up, ah don’t mind admitting, but at least ah wisnae in denial regardin ma situation. Wisnae castin aboot, unlike some ah could name, for weiys tae blame society rather’n take a bit ay personal responsibility. And what that amounted to, so ah wis told, was that ah didnae huv the right
attitude
, wid ye believe. So that wis me, “Fuck yis aw”, and back oot under ma faithful beech tree. Lynne, doll,’ as she opened her mouth, ‘say “Oh Angus” like that one more time, so help me ah’ll skelp ye wan.’

The funny thing was how nostalgic she felt being told off by him. Back in college days, whole lessons had vanished into Angus’s famous, feared rants – starting out as regular crits, these had veered swiftly off into invective against, it had sometimes seemed, the first things that came into his head: from the works of Barbara Kruger to the sinisterly bourgeoisifying influence of a TV schedule filled with home-improvement shows. Lynne didn’t like to think what it said about her that she had rather missed being so hectored. Even when arguing with her, Raymond’s tone by contrast, had been so unfailingly reasonable that she had sometimes come away uncertain she actually
had
been chastised.

Angus noticed her smiling – not at what he’d said. ‘Oh, hilarious story, aye. Ah’ve spent the last few nights clutchin ma sides, trying tae get ma breath back.’

‘No, it was that thing about your attitude. It’s exactly what Ray– Raymond said to me last time I saw him.’ Lynne, seeking an opportunity to mention him, had focused so hard on sounding offhand that she tripped herself up, gulped his name. There followed a brief interrogation:

‘Yir boyfriend?’

‘Ex.’

‘Recently?’

‘Fairly.’

‘Long term?’

‘Four years, nearly. Long enough.’

‘Ye break up by mutual agreement?’

‘Not especially, no.’

‘How no?’

‘I didn’t bring – let me see – the right openness, the right flexibility to our relationship. I lacked spontaneity.’ She did not add how fresh this itemizing of her faults had been the morning she’d found Angus. ‘I’d been under appraisal for three years and this was the firing meeting.’

‘A gent ay the auld schuil, eh. Ah wonder – hus there, in the history ay the human race, ever existed a person ay any merit or distinction by the name ay Raymond?’

‘Oh, no, he’s not as bad as I’m making him sound.’ To her irritation, her voice started to skew upwards in pitch, betraying her. ‘He’s got his quirks, that’s all.’

Angus regarded her pensively. ‘Christ, we’re a couple ay wee saouls, urn’t we?’ Then a sly look entered his eyes. ‘Ah remember, one time in the studio, ah came over tae see whut ye were working oan, and as soon as ah came near, ye threw a sheet over yir easel, stuck oot yir chin and went, whit wis it, “Children and fools—” ’

‘Shouldn’t see unfinished work.’ She beamed. Here was a breakthrough, acknowledgement that the Lynne he was talking to now was the same person he’d once taught. ‘Something my mother used to say when I’d come into the kitchen and see her cooking. Handling the raw meat, rubbing the lard and flour for pastry. I thought all that stuff was disgusting.’

‘Couldnae believe ma ears. Children and fools! Talk aboot the mouse that fuckin roared.’ He shook his head in admiration. ‘Ma point is, that didnae sound like sumdy lackin spontaneity – who didn’t ken her ain mind.’

They
had
kissed. It had happened, even if Angus had forgotten the fact; even if for the scant seconds it’d lasted Lynne herself had not been fully able to enjoy it because of the immediate low-level fretting it had sparked in her. They’d kissed and, because of the person Lynne was then and continued to be, her first thought had been to worry whether the futon she slept on then would comfortably accommodate two.

Nonetheless, ‘You could stay, you know,’ she’d blurted. ‘Stay the night – what’s left of it.’ She had addressed this invitation first to the tumblers she was rinsing of suds, then, having run out of props, and remembering that barbed word
sensible
, she had turned to look Angus unflinchingly in the eye. ‘If you’d like that.’

‘Oh,’ he’d said, surprised, stepping back, and she’d seen instantly she’d got everything wrong. ‘Oh, well. Lynne.’

‘It’s fine,’ she’d interrupted, desperate not to hear what he’d come out with next. ‘You don’t have to—’

‘The thing is, Lynne . . .’ He butted his shoulder against the kitchen wall. A faint quavering in his tone, the big man; she’d found him so sweet then, until he brought his eyes to her, brows raised, caricaturing sincerity. ‘Ah like ye, but ah don’t fancy ye – ah mean, ah do, but ah don’t. So as long as that’s . . . understood?’

‘No.’ It was not. She did not. Effortfully, she reformulated what she’d been about to say. ‘No, you’re quite right. It’s the student and the teacher, isn’t it? I have this rule, you see, about who I let myself get involved with.’ A lie, invented on the spot, that must have made her sound conceited, forever fending off the attentions of unsuitable men.

‘Ah’m no yir teacher any mair,’ Angus had pointed out equably. It wasn’t meant to persuade her: it was a way to withdraw his almost offer without offending. In the next room, she heard Elena crossly addressing the lavatory as she tried to get it to flush. They had seconds, and all she’d done was stare at Angus wide-eyed, trying to transmit wordlessly what she wanted – barely knowing that herself.

Then Elena had come striding back in: ‘Fucking Christ, Creature, that toilet of yours, I’m telling you. Look, it’s five in the morning and I’m due in work at eleven, so I’m calling a cab. Angus? Go halves?’ And it had all been over: Angus shrugging, daring to shrug, at Lynne before he followed Elena out into the hallway, where she was already on the phone haranguing a taxi company. Lynne could invent no pretext for making him stay behind. In any case, she wouldn’t have dared suggest it a second time. Her nerve had failed her; seemed for a while, as it always did on those infrequent, uncharacteristic occasions when she screwed up her courage and did something reckless – like applying to art school in the first instance – to have failed her in perpetuity, at least until it happened again.

Lynne had sought Elena out in the week that followed, shown far more interest in deepening their friendship than she ever had when they were classmates. All a ruse. Feigning prurient interest, she’d tried to find out what had happened after they left Glendower Street, but Elena’s only responses had been tirades about patriarchy and power imbalances, in which Angus was heavily implicated, but which could have meant anything. Lynne imagined their bodies colliding as the cab turned a sharp corner, Angus’s hand on Elena’s leg, crawling up beneath the wool skirt. She imagined their constant bullying one-upmanship as flirtation, the only way to halt hostilities being to fuck, and this she visualized in every foul permutation her imagination could conjure. The ways they’d stop each other’s mouths. Going over and over it, she made herself literally ill – sluggish, inattentive, heavy-limbed. Her eyes streamed: summer flu, though she recalled dire convent-school warnings about the dangers of self-pleasure. Self-pleasure! It should have been her, Lynne, arguing through the night with Angus. After Elena returned to Athens – something to do with the economic crisis and a poorly father – Lynne had found reasons to walk through Garnethill, hoping she might spot Angus on the art-school steps, smoking, so she could – what – proposition him again?

Into this, months later, had come Raymond, sidling in beside her at the church on the Trongate one Sunday when she’d felt especially abject. Sick of her own company, her contorted fantasizing, she had accepted his amateurish advances with relief – too readily, it seemed to her now. It was rare to encounter anyone made more nervous than herself by the cat’s cradle of early romance. And here was a man who seemed gentle, who seemed earnest, whose job as building-society branch manager seemed appealingly uncomplicated; who, without acknowledging how much turmoil she must have seemed to be in, had taken it upon himself to try and make her feel better.

‘I do, but I don’t.’ Well, here was proof that
l
’
esprit de l
’
escalier
didn’t stop generating smart-alec suggestions, even half a decade on. ‘You,’ she might have told Angus, unflappable, ‘need to work a bit more on your chat-up technique.’ She could have alluded to that retort now, reminding him; and lightly, without animosity, mention her regrets. What a laugh they’d have then about their younger selves, those two freaks.

It was all good and well, Angus thought, this blether, but you couldn’t help feeling that the chat was yawing constantly towards one inescapable nexus, a rowboat dragged towards a whirlpool at sea . . .

He’d missed the opportunity to claim total amnesia and he was running out of ways to forestall a conversation he sensed could only end badly. No remark was innocent here, no enquiry unfreighted with unspoken baggage. Nothing had changed; back then, Lynne’s ‘Stay the night’ had been code for a much deeper involvement, whereas for Angus, sex after a night’s pleasurable drinking and bantering was like a digestif: hardly essential, but a nice way to round off the evening. Nothing lost. That the memory still seemed to possess Lynne was sad – was too much. She had imprinted on him like a duckling.

His best tactic was to distract her. ‘Who’s the girl in the picture?’ he sprang on her as she served up store-bought cake for pudding.

‘Oh – you mean Siri?’

Miss S. McKenzie, thought Angus, immoderately pleased with his earlier feat of deduction. ‘You tell me.’

‘Raymond’s daughter – from a previous marriage. She was thirteen when I first met Raymond, so I’ve seen her grow up. She wasn’t very nice to me at first, but we’ve been close these last couple of years, really close, more than her father and me, maybe. Well, that’s probably definite now,’ she laughed uncomfortably. She went to refill her glass at the tap. She had not, to his relief, tried to serve wine with dinner tonight, though he sensed she’d taken his line about white-wine hangovers as covering up some more significant difficulties he had with alcohol. ‘We were friends, more than anything. She confided in me. But lately she’s been . . . well, I don’t know. Maybe she sensed things were changing with me and Raymond. But it’s like I can feel her pulling away. She keeps secrets from me now, which she never used to. She doesn’t come round so often, and when she does, it’s – different. I’ve started to dread her visits. I had to email Raymond this week, to tell him she was coming this weekend, and I . . .’ She laughed curtly, unhappily. ‘I felt so ashamed, like he might think I was trying to steal her away from him. Or poison her against him.’