The Glasgow Coma Scale (7 page)

Angus loitered outside by the scaffolding tower, smoking a steadying cigarette, until some folk he felt certain were drawing-class attendees had entered. Matching jackets, matching portfolios; he knew the sort. After a brief wrangle with the revolving door, he followed them in.

A group had gathered at the far end of the main hall, beneath the vast church organ that dominated the whole wall, and beside the entrance to a temporary exhibition of Egyptian artefacts pilfered, he supposed, from the tombs of kings. No surprise, the blue-rinse brigade were present in droves, all fawn anoraks and fingerless gloves, more females than males. Angus approached, his rubber soles making a mortifyingly loud squealing on the marble floor. Orange plastic chairs had been set out in a semicircle, and the students were clustered, nattering, around a small guy with a shaved head who was doling out stationery and platitudes. ‘Who needs supplies? Alice? That’s a pretty dress, dear.’ He wore a sticker:
HI! MY NAME IS DEAN
. ‘Oh, and Campbell, I should have known – needing pencils again, right? Right.’ Didn’t the old dears realize they were being treated like bairns? Maybe that was how they liked it.

Of course Angus had no equipment either, and had to queue up with all the other losers for paper, pencil, eraser, talking-to. ‘You’re new!’ Dean greeted him when he reached the head of the line. ‘Did we speak on the phone this morning? Angus?’ Angus gruffly admitted it. ‘Well, welcome to our little gang. Here’ – applying to Angus’s jumper a sticker like his own, with Angus’s name felt-tipped on. ‘Now, you said you’d done some drawing before? Excellent. How it’ll work tonight is we’ll start out with some group work here first, and then after an hour or so people peel off and do some solo investigations, picking an object that interests them and drawing it. Then about nine o’clock I round everyone up, like a big old sheepdog, and we let the good people keeping the gallery open late for us go home. How does that sound?’

How it sounded was like death on toast, but Angus capitulated, choosing the last chair in the line, away from the others, where he sat silently, radiating, he hoped, a dinnae-speak-tae-me vibe. Everyone around him was gabbing away like ninnies. His chair was warped and he took pleasure in rocking back and forth on its misaligned feet. What had Lynne meant about it doing him good to imagine himself a student again? A bullshit thought experiment she’d lifted from her
How to Manage
book. All it made him feel, to be back in a classroom but not in charge, was as sullen as a teenager.

Dean clapped his hands. ‘Are we all ready? Campbell? Well, tonight I’d like to talk to you a bit about shading.
Shading
.’ As he spoke, Dean began sketching a portrait of the replica statue advertising the Egyptian exhibition: a serene androgynous face on a long, slender neck, bargain-basement Modigliani. ‘Now, that’s a start, but she’s a bit flat, isn’t she? So what I’ll do now is . . .’ He held his pencil on the angle and started to fill in a triangular area to one side of the nose. ‘And what else am I going to tell you? What is it I’m always saying is your most important skill?’

He mouthed the word, and ‘Ob-ser-
va
-tion,’ the old dears chorused back, kindling in Angus a crushing sense of purgatorial damnation, week in, week out the same call-and-response, a geriatric circle-jerk of mutual congratulation.

‘Right! So I want you to
observe
’ – Dean left his easel and began walking around the group, several already having embarked on their own drawings – ‘where light is coming from, and where it falls. What shadow is cast, heavy or faint. What shape it makes. Don’t just guess –
look
, properly look. You’re working from . . .’ Ruefully he waved a hand at the statue. ‘Well, from life.’

Although inclined to sneer at Dean’s manner, Angus found that both the tutor and the environment were actually helping him to relax, though the fact remained that a statue was a bloody silly subject for sketching. Picking up his pencil and beginning to make lines, he found himself navigating his way back into a mnemonic space he’d thought no longer accessible. An old desire reasserted itself: the wish to excel, to show how much better he was than the others. It did help, although he was not old – grizzled, that was how he liked to imagine himself, there being some wiggle-room for romance in that word – to be bossed around by someone so young. Antipathy was crucial, something specific to rail against. Maybe in Dean’s imagination his shaved head gave him more authority, but all the onlooker saw was a big-eyed neonate whose bare scalp gave the impression that he’d had problems with late-onset head lice.

Angus finished a preliminary outline of the statue, but its features were too inhuman to be satisfying. Bored already, he fell to wondering how Lynne was coping without him for a whole evening. Writing sonnets dedicated to him? Ha, no, probably glad to be rid of him – probably up to her tits in an orgy right this minute. He sniggered. Poor Lynne was so uptight she probably didn’t even like to
think
the word.

Footsteps approached from the entranceway, clopping like hooves on the marble. A chair scraped back and he heard Dean’s voice squeak out, ‘Come on in, China, we’re just starting.’

It was nearer seven than six. Are we fuck just starting, Angus thought, but when he saw China, he understood why Dean was cutting her this slack.

‘Sorry. Hi. Sorry.’ She came sidling into the group, long black coat and a nest of slate-coloured hair seamed silver, though she was maybe mid twenties at most. Angus wasn’t left open-mouthed by her beauty or anything, but then again, here was that Nordic colouring he liked, indigo eyes, skin so pale it neared blue . . .

‘We thought maybe you weren’t coming. Don’t worry, don’t worry, let’s just quickly get you set up. Wherever you can find a space.’ Angus, acutely aware of the spare seat beside him that no one had risked taking, dropped his head. ‘How about over beside, er, Angus there?’

Ha, that’s the ticket. He smiled sidelong at the newcomer, who looked back at him without expression. Then, as she manoeuvred her way into the circle, her bag struck the easel set up by one of the more enthusiastic students and brought it crashing to the ground. Equipment spilled and clattered – the old dears responding with wordless, vaguely censorious clucks and coos – and as China knelt to gather her pencil tin to her, ignoring the pensioner she’d jostled, Dean scurried to assist her with a solicitousness Angus recognized, understood, filed away.

Ruckus over, the older students returned to their work, showing one another their experiments in shading with as much delight as if Dean had demonstrated how to transmute base metal into gold. By contrast, the concentration on China’s face as she set to work was ferocious, though her line was light and fleet on the page. Seemingly she carried no more than three pencils, and to Angus’s mind this meant that she, alone among the amateurs overloaded with every coloured felt tip and set square you could buy, had come prepared to do some actual work.

Dean had been moving around the group, offering comments and correctives, unfailingly positive. He was soft, but the last thing a group like this needed was someone mean in charge – an Angus. When he came to the end of the line of chairs, he inspected Angus’s sketch in silence. Unnerved, Angus picked up his pencil again, pretending to have paused rather than given up; but without a word to him, Dean clapped twice. ‘All right, everyone, time to split up. Find something that inspires you, pick a good spot, and get to work. I’ll be around in an hour to see what you’ve come up with. Remember, it’s not a contest, so try to choose something nobody else is drawing. China, a word before you head off?’

‘Just one?’

Angus lingered too, unexpectedly wounded by Dean’s failure to praise him.

‘You were a bit late. I just wanted to check everything was okay.’

‘To be honest, I was swithering. I wasn’t all that sure I was going to bother.’

Dean, with what seemed to Angus misplaced gallantry: ‘It would have been our loss.’

‘Yes.’ The colouring, the petulant set to her mouth as her smirk developed – blue eyes, black temper, the right side of insolent to interest Angus, just as she herself surely knew that her cheeking Dean only boosted her allure.

He was all set to pursue the girl into the galleries when Dean stepped into his path. ‘And how’s Angus doing?’ Angus, who detested the con man’s trick of addressing you in the third person, rose on his toes over the wee guy and didn’t respond. ‘That was really rather good, what you drew. I didn’t want to say in front of the others, but it beats them into a cocked hat, if I’m honest. I’d make just one adjustment . . .’

Eraser in hand, he dived for the picture, but Angus snatched his sketch pad away. ‘Ah actually prefer it the way it is, if ye dinnae mind?’

‘Oh, of course. Of course. Now, did you need any help finding your way around?’

‘This place?’ he said with scorn, mimicking the high-handed tone China had taken with the guy. ‘Don’t you worry aboot me. This is familiar territory.’

Sketch pad under his oxter, pencil box rattling in his free hand, Angus stotted the Kelvingrove’s dim-lit halls and chambers in search of China. Compelled almost to mutter under his breath
jist looking fer ma friend
, in case anyone asked why he hadn’t begun working yet. When he did encounter other students – several had ganged together, in contravention of Dean’s instructions, and were accomplishing precious little work in between their yakking – he smiled, inspected their efforts and with great difficulty resisted pointing out their various shortcomings.

In a front gallery he encountered the slate-grey dinosaurs he knew from his childhood visits. Still impressive, too: none of this modern-day animatronics shite you found elsewhere. These vast immobile sentinels had never changed – well, they wouldn’t, dinosaurs, nature’s losers – and still gave off their familiar freshly sculpted, coal-dust smell. One whiff of that, any time, anywhere, and Angus could’ve hand-drawn the creatures from memory.

He shook his head, moved on, remembering the routine of thirty-plus years back. After the appointment at Yorkhill, the treat: over the road to the Kelvingrove to see the monsters, the samurai, the knights in armour – the same exhibits each time, in the same sequence – and was it coincidence, it occurred to Angus tonight as he wandered from one gallery to the next, that these had all been fighters, figures of strength: had he been receiving tacit life lessons? The tour completed, he’d be allowed a jam doughnut or square of fly cemetery in the canteen, to boost blood sugar brought low by the morning’s tests and injections at the hospital. The canteen was fitted with fluorescent tube lights and a squeaky black vulcanized-rubber floor, and this made it, to Angus aged nine, the acme of sci-fi sophistication. The old man had had to tell him several times each visit to stand up off the clarty ground, since – though this had been as inexpressible as his troubling feelings on noticing the puncture marks in the rocking horse’s neck – to trace his finger around the embossed circles on the floor, sixteen per tile, was a highlight of Angus’s day, the hospital appointment for which this was compensation by now all but forgotten.

He passed spearheads and sidearms; Mackintosh chairs, ormolu clocks, stuffed reptiles; Beryl Cooks and the Dalí Christ. Artefacts from unrelated epochs, forced to mingle in the vast cold rooms like guests at a wake. A funny feeling stole over him in places like this: he heard footsteps in distant rooms, the metronomic plod of adult feet set against a child’s adagio, and felt just for a moment that he might round a corner and see, through an architraved doorway, his father and himself as a boy, the sickly child.

Someone blabbed, of course, the instant he’d achieved any measure of success. ‘Oh, you didn’t know? Yeah,
seriously
ill as a kid. They say he was lucky to survive.’ And oh, the critics’ relief, now that they no longer had to pretend to be divining hidden meanings, but could give anything they liked or disliked in his work the most banal, reductive biographical gloss. After that revelation all they saw in the underlit rooms and looming gronk faces he painted was the lingering psychological drip-down of childhood malady. At first, he’d been amused by the naïvety: he’d laughed at a review of the 1998 CCA exhibition in which he’d shown
The Losers
, not knowing that all subsequent reviews would resemble it: ‘Rennie contributes a vast and cinematically melancholic canvas, all austere deep Victorian browns and blacks, and, in faltering chalk marks, two huge malevolently grinning faces, personifications of disease bearing down on the feeble patient . . .’ Cheek, spouting all that claptrap then only awarding the show three stars. When reviews praised the work, the artist could take no credit; when they were harsh, he was the one felt the blame. Worse still, once the story had got around, Angus could no longer deliver his stock line about tragedies yet to befall him, all his interviewers now supposing they knew him better than he did himself – hence no bugger making the effort to find out whose double portrait
The Losers
actually was. One early death, one disappearance. Aye, well, maybe better that remain Angus’s secret.

He finally found China in one of the taxidermy rooms. She was sitting cross-legged with her back to the wall, before a vitrine in which various Arctic animals stood in unnatural proximity on jablite tundra. A sketchbook was open on her lap, and he keeked down to see what she was drawing: the Arctic fox, which, going by its dead dumb eyes, its snaggle teeth and bald muzzle, dated back to the flood. She had lightly pencilled in guidelines for herself: cylinders for its body and legs, a tangram of differently sized wedges for its head. He almost laughed. This was what Dean was teaching the poor fuckers?

‘That’s – interestin,’ he opined, nonetheless. She glanced up, unsurprised at his seeking her out, or feigning it. ‘Good, is what I mean.’ Her expression didn’t change. ‘Ah’ve been tourin aboot, ye see, and the other folk . . .’ He trailed off, and, either self-conscious or uninterested, China went back to her drawing, starting on the scraggy ruff of fur round the fox’s throat. ‘Even the ones drawin properly, like you – well, it’s still comin oot two-dimensional.’ A dim sense of propriety kept him from a more candid appraisal. ‘Nae understandin there’s anyhin beneath the skin.’