The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 (6 page)

‘Nor do I, Tommy . . .’ I tried to put force behind it but it didn’t even convince me. ‘It’s just that . . . I don’t know. The war. It messed me up. When something like tonight happens and I get into it with someone, I just lose my head. It becomes more than a punch-up. There’s just all this . . . all this
rage
.’

‘I know all that. You’re not the only one who was in the war. I had to do things I never want to talk about. Or think about. But I swore that I’d never do them again, or let anyone force me to do them again. I promised myself that I wouldn’t let all of that shite claim me. I saw your face tonight, Lennox. You didn’t just want to hurt that guy, you wanted to kill him.’

‘I just lost the place—’

‘There was more to it than that.’ Tommy cut me off. ‘I saw something in you I haven’t seen for a long while. I saw it in the war – men who wouldn’t have hurt a fly in civilian life suddenly finding a part of themselves they didn’t know existed. The part that enjoys killing. You’d see it in their faces – like they were hungry for it. Like they were glad the war had come along and shown them who they really were. I knew someone like that, someone in my unit during the war who called himself my friend too. He had that look.’ He took a sip of chicory coffee. ‘It’s been years since I saw that look but I saw it tonight. You had fucking murder in your eyes, Lennox.’

‘That’s not who I am. I know the type you’re talking about, but that isn’t me. It’s just . . .’ I struggled for the best way of putting it, then gave up.

‘Forget about it,’ said Tommy.

But I didn’t want to forget it. For some reason it was important to me that Tommy understood. ‘When I was a kid I used to go to Saturday matinees at the Capitol in Saint John. Westerns or Buck Rogers. Kids whistling and booing and chucking stuff at the screen whenever the bad guys rode into town. It was all so simple: black hats and white hats, heroes and villains, good and evil. I believed it. I believed I had to be one or the other. But life’s not like that. Christ knows you know that, Tommy. Nothing’s black and white: everything is shades of grey. You, me, everyone – we can be the good guy
and
the bad guy, depending on what life throws at us. I admit there were lots of things I did during the war that I’m not proud of – but I never, ever enjoyed killing. I hated it. In fact, that’s where that crap comes from: all that anger and fear I had to go through.’ I sipped the chicory coffee; regretting it instantly, I set the cup and saucer down on the table. ‘Sometimes I wear the black hat instead of the white. Because it’s been handed to me.’

‘You’re wrong,’ said Tommy. ‘You choose who you are, what you are. Whatever’s happened to you, whatever you’ve been through, whatever shitty deal you’ve been handed –
you
decide what you make of it. Because if you don’t, then there’s always some other bastard who’ll decide for you – officers, cops, judges, politicians. And you’re wrong about there being shades of grey. There are some bad fucking bastards out there, believe me. And not our kind of bad bastards . . . not some pissed-up hard cunt with a razor, or gangster from the Gorbals. I’m talking about people who have everything, who’ve had everything handed to them and have no reason to do the shite they do. And the shite they do is beyond fucking belief. Real evil.’

And there it was again, hiding in the shadows behind Tommy’s eyes. In that instant I saw Tommy, just like me, kept something locked up inside. Then it was gone. He smiled and shook his head as if annoyed at his own folly.

‘If you think I was – that I am – one of those guys you talked about, then you’re wrong,’ I said. ‘What you saw tonight is my own little demon that I’ve been fighting ever since the war. You wouldn’t have seen it if those guys hadn’t jumped me. What I really want to know is
why
they jumped me.’

‘You have no idea?’

‘None. Sometimes when I’m working on a divorce, an irate husband might turn up handy; but I haven’t got anything on remotely like that at the moment.’

‘Maybe they were simply after your wallet.’

I shook my head. ‘They weren’t the type. I got the impression that their experience of rough-and-tumble has more to do with the rugby club or amateur boxing than real street stuff. They weren’t pros and they got more than they bargained for. If they hadn’t jumped me from behind and got me on the ground, they wouldn’t have cut the mustard at all. The fact that they had me on the ground and that I managed to get to my feet and give them a hiding speaks for itself.’

‘Amateurs or not, they’ve given you something to think about for the next week or so.’ Tommy nodded to my chest. ‘There’s no way it could be connected to this ironworks job?’

‘I can’t see how. Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity.’ I smiled, but then a thought occurred to me. I looked down at the suit trousers I now wore – the ones Tommy had lent me. He read my thoughts and laughed.

‘Aye . . . I thought about that too – I do wear that suit a fair bit, and we’re roughly the same height and build – but unlike you, Lennox, my disposition is famously sunny. No one has a grudge against me and everybody I do business with knows I’m fair and square. So no . . . they weren’t after me.’

I shrugged and my ribs shouted at my shoulders to be still. ‘Maybe we’ll never know. Tell me about your father.’

‘What?’

‘In the pub you said to remind you to tell me about him.’ I had sensed a thaw in Tommy and I wanted to steer the conversation away from the events of that night.

‘Oh, that . . . Forget it. Sometimes I get too philosophical for my own good.’

‘Tell me anyway. It’ll take my mind off my ribs.’

Tommy shrugged. ‘All right . . . you asked me about how I was able to do the prison time . . . how I was able to give up my freedom. Well my old da had freedom: he never spent a day of his life in a cell – born free, lived free, died free. Never
bent
a law in his life, never mind break one. But the laws and rules he lived his life by had fuck all to do with him, they were other people’s rules. Any freedom he had was what someone else decided was freedom. My old man died free all right – at fifty-three years old, coughing and spitting up black phlegm and blood. And he lived free too . . . a free life spent three fathoms deep working a coal seam, one eye always on the water seeping through the gallery walls or on the gas alert. Even the food we ate wasn’t up to us – the pit foreman would come knocking and looking for answers if you didn’t buy your groceries from the mine company store. Aye, my da lived free – free with the constant threat of drowning or suffocating and ended up doing both on his deathbed. Fuck that, Lennox. If you call that freedom, give me a Barlinnie cell any day.’ He took a drink.

‘I never took you for a Marxist . . .’

Tommy laughed. ‘They’re as bad as the bosses. Just a different set of rules. Just a different set of bosses.’

‘It doesn’t mean you have to turn to crime and accept being chucked in chokey. There are easier ways—’

‘Are there? Oh you mean education? Learning your way out of the pit? I must have missed the scouts from Oxford and Cambridge waiting for me when I left Dalziel Secondary at fourteen. The pit foremen were there though, looking for apprentices to bury in the mine.’

‘You’ve got brains, Tommy—’

He cut me off with a laugh. ‘Brains? Do you think they count for anything? My da had plenty to spare. Down the pit since he was twelve, practically no education – but he spent hours in the miners’ library, then the Motherwell library. Then the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. He used to learn stories and poems by heart so he could repeat them in his head when he was down in the dark.’

Tommy took another sip of his drink.

‘My da had brains all right, and you’re right to say he passed them on – to both me and my sister – but they never got him out of the pit. I could never understand why he lived his life by someone else’s rules. You know . . . why he worked so hard for fuck-all except to make rich private coal companies richer. Then I worked it out. Everything’s fucked up. The whole world is totally absurd and filled with people doing things the way they’ve always been done, just because it’s the way they’ve always been done. It was only after he died that I worked out that my da dedicated himself to what he did because he was trying to make some kind of sense of his life.’

‘But you’re not.’

‘No, I’m not. That’s why prison never bothered me: it’s just another place, just another room you’re in. Except prison makes more sense than the outside world. I’m a thief: I steal things and if I get caught I get punished for it. There’s nothing absurd about that. But the truth is that everyone is a thief. Everyone steals from everyone else and the whole system is run by the best thieves of them all – the ones who steal power and opportunity from you. Steal your life. You want to know the difference between prison and the outside world? The people you meet in prison are more fucking honest. If you knew—’

It was there again: something bigger, something more immediate and specific behind his anger, a brief shadow on the threshold. Tommy decided against sharing it and the fire in his eyes dulled.

‘And you’re the same as me, Lennox,’ he said. ‘People like us see things the way they really are because we’ve had the shite knocked out of us. We both see that everything is chaos and crap and we just go along for the ride. Play the game without playing it, if you know what I mean. Make the most of it.’

‘And what does your sister make of it? You said she has brains too.’

Tommy smiled. ‘Jennifer? Aye, she’s got brains too. But she’s well out of Glasgow. I used my earnings to send her to college in England. She’s got a good job in London. Nobody tells our Jennifer what to do, she’s her own woman. If there’s one thing I’m proud of, it’s that I got her the hell out of Glasgow. She has a life. A future.’

‘What about you, Tommy?’ I asked. ‘Do you think you’ll ever settle down? Get married? Have kids?’

‘Never. I’d never bring a child into this evil, fucked-up world. You don’t grow out of childhood here, you survive it. Or some bastard rips it away from you.’ Tommy gave an awkward laugh, embarrassed at his own sudden vehemence. He took another drink. ‘Sorry. I like kids. I just think they get the shite end of the stick.’

*

We drifted back into discussion about the foundry job and it was agreed that we’d do it a week Sunday night, when there would be the least chance of there being anyone around. In the meantime Tommy would survey the site and draw up his plans. All I had to do was act as a driver and lookout, Tommy providing the vehicle. Given the profit I was going to make, I readily agreed. After we had finished, Tommy offered me a couch for the night, but my ribs protested that they needed the comfort of my own bed and I drove home.

I had an allocated space in the parking lot outside the apartment. When I parked, I sat for a moment with the car’s engine switched off, checking parked cars for silhouettes or the tell-tale red glow of a cigarette tip, then searching the shadows between the pools of pale light from the lamps in the car park and the bushes that fringed it. As I got out and crossed to the building entrance, I kept checking the three a.m. darkness for lurking goons. No one jumped me and when I got into my flat, everything was in order.

I’d already begun to stiffen up and any movement of my arms seemed to send a jolt through my ribcage, making getting out of Tommy’s loaned suit a slow, cautious process. I swallowed some aspirin and swilled my mouth with water to cleanse it of the sour taste of Scotch and violence.

Easing myself into bed, I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but my ribs ember-glowed with a malevolent ache and the events of the evening kept running like an endless film loop against the screen of my closed eyelids. In a city where violence was common and generally senseless, I couldn’t understand why I was struggling so hard to make sense of my ambush.

The birds had already started singing by the time I fell asleep.

I spent the next two days recuperating. Irene and I had made no arrangement to meet because, it being the weekend, she was playing the role of mother and wife. In any case, the stiffness I was feeling as a result of my encounter with pavement and boot was not the kind of rigidity that would have been of any use to Irene.

By the Sunday, the pain had dulled into a persistent but manageable ache, but when I removed the strapping to soak my battered torso in the bath, I saw that both sides were covered with livid blossoms of purple, maroon and black. Amateurs or not, I’d taken a kicking all right. The bruise blooming out from my hairline onto my forehead was also diffusing into a fudged rainbow, and I was already planning out my Monday morning explanation for Archie, whose seemingly slow, dull, watery eyes missed nothing.

I hadn’t slept well either night, small electric jolts in my ribs wakening me regularly. When I had managed to find some sleep, it had filled with vivid dreams, including the one that had haunted me so often: a terrified face that was more boy than man desperately begging me. In German. The same dream that seemed to re-emerge every time I’d gotten myself into a fight, like some kind of echo reminding me how hollow I had become.

I eased myself gingerly into the day. I knew I had to be by the 'phone at one p.m. to take McNaught’s call, but first I wanted to pick up the newspapers and a supply of cigarettes. As the sun was making an unaccustomed appearance, I decided to walk instead of drive, thinking the activity might loosen me up. So, once I’d done my best to strap my ribs up tight, I headed out into the sunshine and down Great Western Road. The Glasgow sky rewarded my spirit of endeavour by clouding over before I had reached the newsvendor outside the Gaumont Cinema, which for some reason the locals still called the Ascot. I could hear him from half a mile away, shouting out ‘
Heeeeauheennyoooos! Geaytyooheeeeauheennyoooos
’ in that near consonantless language of newsvendors that was unintelligible everywhere, but in a Glaswegian accent was doubly encrypted.

Tucking the papers under my arm, I nipped into the foyer of the Gaumont: I’d been cultivating the redhead who worked the tobacco kiosk and while I picked up some cigarettes I shot her a line or two. It was less of an angling trip and more of a fish-shoot in a barrel and I got a note of her days off. She was cute enough all right, but had a smoked-deep voice and a grit-and-glass accent that made me hope desperately that she didn’t get vocal at times of passion. Generally, I found it off-putting for Finlay Currie to come to mind during intimacy.