The Amateurs

by John Niven

  Pauline’s mobile trilled. She pulled it from her handbag and read the text message. Slowing down and pulling into the left-hand lane, she began thumbing a reply. One, two, four, six words, the longest (‘later’) not more than five letters. Not more than thirty characters then in the sentence that would have sliced her husband’s heart into bloody pieces. She hit ‘Send’, tossed the phone onto the passenger seat and crunched the accelerator all the way down to the floor. Nothing much happened.

  3

  GARY WALKED ACROSS THE FACTORY FLOOR ON HIS WAY to the office. A huge, loud space–many thousands of square feet filled with the sound of machinery; the rumble of the overhead tracks as they whirred large parts from one place to another, the heavy clank of metal on concrete, the hammering of rivet guns. You could comfortably hit a five-wood the length of the place. Plenty of height–the corrugated-iron roof in darkness over a hundred feet above him, pale sunlight coming through the filthy plastic skylights. The smells of the factory too–oil, spray paint and the smoky aroma of hot metal. He kept within the yellow lines and returned the ‘Mornings’ that came his way from the canteen area, an island of Formica tables and orange plastic chairs lit softly by the red, white and orange lights of the vending machines that guarded it. He knew some of the boys down here well, he’d gone to school with many of them, indeed–if it hadn’t been for his three Highers (History, Geography and Maths)–he might well have been one of them.

  Henderson’s Forklift Trucks was one of the very few companies that had come to Ardgirvan in the 1970s. It had weathered the recession of the early 1980s, the redundancies caused later by technological advances (the jerkily moving robot-welders Gary was passing now, their steel limbs oblivious to the blue sparks), and the market erosion caused by cheaper foreign competition. They had offered Gary a job in administration a few days after his seventeenth birthday.

  He returned an increasing number of ‘Mornings’ and two ‘Happy birthdays!’ (Big Sue from Accounts, wee Marion from Export) as he passed through the grey warren of cubicles towards his desk. There had been a moment, a long time ago, a year or two after he’d been here, when he’d thought about quitting. About going to college, or the uni, to study…something. But Pauline hadn’t been keen. Three or four years as a penniless student? What was the point of that exactly?

  With a sigh he sat down and began rearranging the piles on his desk: pink, yellow and green forms, bills of lading, customs documentation, invoices to be assigned purchase order numbers, the huge amount of paperwork that was created whenever a forklift truck rolled out of the factory below and was freighted somewhere in the world. He nudged his mouse and his screen lit up–his screen saver was a photograph of the famous eighteenth at St Andrews, the Swilcan Bridge a jut of grey stone in a sea of green grass. The clock in the corner of the screen told him it was 9.13, but before he got to work on the PO numbers he looked out of the window.

  The office overlooked the scarred brick wall of an old warehousing building, unused since the late 1980s. At the far corner of the wall, low down, faded but still clearly visible, someone had used silver spray paint to daub a five-foot-high matchstick man. Or rather, matchstick woman, for the figure had two gigantic, misshapen breasts jutting from its frame. The nipples–clearly an afterthought, or possibly rushed by the approach of a nightwatchman–were just quick dashes. A demented tangle of hair covered the pubic region. Next to her, crudely sprayed in the same silver paint and still perfectly legible despite several attempts to remove it, was the legend:

  TEGS BEGS AND HAIRY FEGS

  Sixteen years and it was still a rare day that it did not make Gary Irvine smile: the fact that someone among the youth of Ardgirvan, their veins fizzing with Merrydown or Buckfast, their synapses popping and expanding with glue or hashish, had so felt the biting need to share their love of tits, bums and hairy fannies with the rest of the population that they were forced to come here under cover of darkness and create their enduring masterpiece. He smiled, his reaction reminding him of one of Stevie’s sayings–‘Never trust a man who can’t raise a smile at the sight of a crudely drawn cock and balls.’ Yes, Gary smiled, but it sometimes troubled him that he’d been smiling at it for sixteen years now.

  A couple of hundred miles to the south the lorry climbed the off-ramp to Knutsford services. On a wooden pallet deep in the vehicle’s bowels the gleaming white Spaxons rolled backwards in their cardboard sleeves.

  4

  CATHY IRVINE NERVOUSLY FLATTENED HER NAPKIN ON the table and wondered if it was too soon to go back outside for another cigarette. Bloody smoking ban. Cathy had never been a political woman–when she saw Braveheart she briefly regretted not voting SNP back in ’78–but the smoking ban had definitely radicalised her. ‘This is jist how Hitler started,’ she told Gary shortly after the ban came in, her finger jabbing the kitchen counter for emphasis.

  She tried to look as though she was thinking about something important and, in doing so, she actually did start thinking about something important. For Cathy that usually meant thinking about her eldest son. Lee. That boy. Two hundred pounds he’d borrowed last week. Three hundred the month before. Loans he had to pay off. Said he’d pay her back soon, that he had some job coming up. But doing what? If he…she’d talk to Gary about it, see what he said.

  Cathy didn’t like being in restaurants by herself. Scary. Especially somewhere like the Pepper Pot, Ardgirvan’s swankiest Italian. Well, Ardgirvan’s only Italian. Their father, Cathy thought dreamily, her mind sepia-tinted by half a glass of the house red, would never have left her sitting alone in a restaurant.

  Death had elevated her husband from a mere deity into something closer to all the gods of Greek mythology rolled into one: handsome as Apollo, as merry as Dionysus, wise as Zeus. Thirteen years gone and how often did he cross her mind? It would be far easier to ask how often he left it, for his memory occupied by far the largest part of Cathy’s consciousness. When she woke in the morning, from her dreams of when they were young and together, her stretching leg still registered the other side of the bed as being empty. Every night she fell asleep communing with him, whispering to his ghost, telling him what had happened that day, of her tiny triumphs and disasters, fancying she could feel him beside her in the dark–the nightly transubstantiation in which the pillow became his body. Thirteen years gone and she could no more see herself taking a lover than she could picture herself piloting a space shuttle. Thirteen years gone and, when faced with any decision, from serious financial ones to what to put in her weekly shopping trolley, Cathy’s first question was invariably ‘What would he have done?’

  What he wouldn’t have done, she thought, was leave her sitting on her own in the bloody Pepper Pot. But, Cathy reminded herself, her younger son had an important job. Office. Management. Three Highers. Could have gone tae the uni. Brains from his father. And, just as she thought this, as her dead husband was conjoined in her mind with her living son, here he was coming through the door, both of them coming through the door, the father’s echo in the face of the child, an apology already forming on his lips as she rose to greet him, her face exploding into the kind of terrifying super-happy smile Cathy used only on very special occasions.

  ‘Happy birthday, son!’ she beamed, kissing him on the cheek and pressing her face into his neck as she hugged him, savouring the smell of his hair as fiercely as she used to when he was little, when, freshly scrubbed from the bath, he would sit in her lap and she would read him Harry by the Sea, his tiny mouth quickly learning its way around the slippery vowels as they followed the wee dog’s adventures on the beach. Thirty years ago. It felt like yesterday afternoon to Cathy.

  ‘Aye, same to you, Mum.’

  Gary had been born on the morning of his mother’s twenty-fifth birthday. When he was younger he wondered what this might mean. He didn’t wonder any more, although Cathy was still convinced that this serendipity had marked him out for some great and special destiny. Events had proved her right so far, she thought. Gary
definitely represented progress for the Irvine clan: he was the first member of their family to earn a living indoors, to earn it without tearing and bloodying his hands. He was the first to live in a private house, who had a mortgage rather than rent to pay, and the first who didn’t smoke like a laboratory beagle.

  ‘Sorry ah’m late, meeting dragged on. You look nice, Mum.’

  Cathy was thoroughly made up and wearing one of her best dresses. Her reddish-brown hair, a victim of constant experimentation, had recently been streaked with yellowish highlights, the net result making her look as though something had frightened her half to death. ‘And what did Pauline get ye for yer birthday?’ As always when she used Gary’s wife’s name, Cathy experienced a tremor of anxiety, as though just saying it might be enough to summon up Pauline herself. Cathy feared her daughter-in-law, feared that she considered Gary’s family–meaning her and Lee–beneath her, unworthy to play a part in the kind of life Pauline was trying to create.

  ‘Gift vouchers for that new golf place up at the driving range.’

  ‘Oh, very nice,’ Cathy said, thinking, Vouchers? She couldn’t be bothered to get her arse in gear and buy her husband a proper bloody present?

  They fell to studying their menus and Cathy did her thing–reading out every single item in her ‘doesn’t-that-sound-yummy?’ voice, with special emphasis being placed illogically on certain words (‘with a cream and mushroom sauce’), any foreign words being agonisingly mangled (‘pancheetah’) and random ‘oohs’, and ‘mmmms’ being inserted here and there. (The ‘doesn’t-that-sound-yummy?’ voice had its opposite–Cathy’s ‘doesn’t-that-sound-revolting?’ voice, last used when Pauline had dragged them to that sushi place in Glasgow. ‘Sa…sash-mee? Raw slices of salmon? Pickled ginger?’ an incredulous Cathy had said, everything coming out in italics as she scanned the demented menu. The sushi idea had been a non-starter from the get-go–like many women of her time and place Cathy didn’t ‘take’ fish.) At some point, Gary was sure, probably when they were choosing dessert, he would hear the gratuitous use of the expression ‘tae die for’, an Americanism his mother and aunts had bafflingly picked up on over the last few years.

  They ordered–steak and chips for Gary, bolognese for Cathy–and sipped their wine and he caught the distant, cloudy look in her eyes. ‘OK, what’s wrong, Mum?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘I…och, I’m just worried about your brother, so ah am.’ (An interesting aspect of the type of deep Ayrshirese Cathy spoke: the double qualification, following the proclamation you have just made with an additional affirmative. The same technique also had a negative application–‘Ah didnae bother going down the town, so ah didnae.’ Its effect was to confirm the veracity of the original statement–even though it was usually appended to a statement no sane person would have ever doubted the veracity of, i.e. ‘Ah don’t like the cold, so ah don’t.’)

  ‘Christ, what’s he done now?’

  ‘Och, nothing…I just wonder what’s going to become of that boy sometimes. He’s no nearer finding a job. He’s those three weans tae feed. I couldnae take it if he ended up in wi a bad crowd again. If he ended up…going away again.’

  ‘Going away’, Cathy’s euphemism for prison.

  Lee Irvine. Hard man. Madman. Gary’s elder brother had served three years in Saughton for his part in the bungled armed robbery of an Edinburgh jeweller’s. Since his release seven years ago he’d managed to largely avoid the world of gainful, regular employment. He did ‘bits and pieces’ building sites, scrap-metal dealing, second-hand goods of questionable origin. Within a town of no more than 20,000 inhabitants Gary and Lee managed to lead very different lives and, apart from when Lee wanted to borrow a little money (‘thanks, bro’), Gary didn’t see a lot of him. The idea of going into one of the pubs Lee frequented–the Boot, the Cross, the Bam–made Gary feel faint. He tried not to spend too much time thinking about where whatever income his brother did have came from but there was one aspect of his brother’s life Gary did covet. True, his nephews and niece–Delta, Styx and Amazon–were appallingly raised and demonically behaved, but there they were all the same.

  ‘He does OK, Mum. He seems to manage.’

  ‘Aye, it’s how he manages I’m worried about, son.’

  ‘Oh stop it. Come on, how was your trip to Glasgow with Aunt Sadie?’

  ‘Och! She drives ye up the bloody wall so she does!’ Cathy was grateful for the diversion. Her tone brightened, her smile returning. ‘She goes oan like a book needing battered. She said she would pick me up at hawf nine, so that we’d miss the rush-hour traffick going intae Glasgow, ken?’

  With his mum safely onto recounting an anecdote Gary was free to stop listening. He could switch to AutoAye and plan the rest of his day off.

  ‘…because ye know there’s aw they roadworks oan the Kingston Bridge the noo?’

  ‘Aye.’

  Finish lunch in about an hour…go home and get changed.

  ‘So, anyway, ah’m still sitting there drinking ma cawfee and waiting for her tae show up at hawf past ten. If she’s much later it’s gonnae be lunchtime by the time we get up there and then we’ll huv tae eat before we go shopping–cause ye know whit yer Aunt Sadie’s like if she disnae eat…’

  ‘Aye.’

  Get up to the driving range about three…

  ‘…So she finally shows up and, my God, she’s up tae high dough. Ah couldnae believe it–she’s late because she’d decided at seeven o’clock that morning tae defrost her freezer. Ye ken they’ve the big freezer oot the back?’

  ‘Aye?’

  Work on that shoulder turn, practise my wedges, get to the golf course for half four…

  ‘…so she’s goat aw this meat she’d forgotten wis in there scattered aw over the kitchen flair–she disnae think for a minute tae call ye and tell ye she’s gonnae be late, naw, no oor Sadie–she’s goat aw this newspaper doon tae soak up the water, I says tae her, Sadie, whit the bloody hell ur ye daeing defrosting yer freezer when ye know we’re gauin up tae Glasgow? Och, she says, ah didnae think it’d take long! Is she no aff her suffering heed?’

  ‘Aye.’

  Get a quick nine holes in before Pauline gets home…

  Gary drifted back into the conversation and realised his Mum had finished the story and was looking at him expectantly, that an actual question was being posed. That a rejoinder beyond ‘Aye’ or ‘Aye?’ was required of him.

  ‘Sorry, Mum?’

  ‘Ah said–how are things wi you and Pauline?’

  ‘Och, fine. Fine.’

  ‘Have you talked any more about…?’

  ‘A wee bit. She says she wants tae wait until her business is a bit more settled.’

  ‘Her business!’ Cathy snorted. ‘Whit, running aboot dressed as a bloody chicken or whitever? It’s no like you’re no making good money.’

  ‘It’s important tae Pauline, Mum.’

  ‘Aye, but having a family’s important tae you.’

  ‘Aye.’ Gary sighed.

  ‘Och, Gary son,’ Cathy said, squeezing his hand.

  Don’t say it, Gary thought. Please don’t say it.

  ‘Whit’s fur ye won’t go by ye,’ Cathy said.

  What-is-meant-for-you-will-not-pass-you-by: the haiku used by Cathy to cover everything from career frustration to National Lottery disappointments. Gary thought it possible she might even use it were they ever to find themselves in an antiseptic waiting room, keenly anticipating the results of his cancer test.

  ‘Aye,’ he said, managing a smile and sitting up in his chair as their steaming plates approached.

  ‘C’mon and we’ll enjoy oor lunch,’ Cathy said, spreading her napkin in her lap. ‘Ah’m gonnae have some pudding. That Death by Chocolate is tae die fur so it is…’

  As Gary cut into his steak, the motorway twisted and uncoiled before the speeding lorry, the concrete spools of the M74 bleeding into the concrete spools of the M8. There in the dis
tance, glowering and hulking beneath low, cloud-filled skies, was Glasgow. Just the one delivery to make, in the city centre. Should be finished by four o’clock, the driver thought.

  5

  LEE IRVINE HAD BEEN NAMED AFTER THE GREAT Mexican golfer Lee Trevino, his father having being much enamoured with Supermex in 1972–the year Trevino won his second Open at Muirfield. (Cathy remembered well the cold nights in a damp wee caravan, the East Lothian wind rattling the thin walls. Hardly a wink of sleep and then up at the crack of dawn to go and watch her husband watch golfers all day. Some holiday.) Trevino had been famed for his sense of humour on the course, his ability to stay calm and crack jokes under pressure. Alas, Lee Irvine was displaying none of his namesake’s traits as he tried to cope with a high-pressure situation of his own.

  ‘Fur fuck sake!’ he shouted to the empty house. ‘Is that it?’

  Lee was on his hands and knees on the living-room floor, kneeling in front of the dismembered sofa, its cushions scattered around him like the hacked-off chunks of some monster he had bested in combat. He’d been right through the fucking thing, even cutting into the lining with a kitchen knife in the hope that a few pound coins had somehow made their way into the interior. But no–the sofa had yielded him two ten-pence pieces, a twenty, and a few coppers. Forty-four pence to be added to his haul from the wee ceramic pot on the bedroom windowsill (eighteen pence), the pockets of various trousers (eleven pence), and the bottom drawer of his bedside cabinet (jackpot!–two twenty-pence pieces and a few more coppers). Breathing hard from the exertion he counted the money in his hand, moving the change around his palm with a trembling forefinger.