by John Niven
Later, much later, I would realise that Old Sam had used the information I’d given him that night to look into my backstory pretty thoroughly. Indeed, he looked into it as thoroughly as you could look into the backstory of Donald R. Miller.
Which is to say, only so far.
Robertson and I took our coffee through the house and down the path towards the pool area, a couple of hundred yards away from the main house. The pool house was a low one-storey stone building, split into two halves: a changing room with showers, toilets and pine benches, and a workshop/storage space for gardening machinery, outdoor stuff and sports equipment. We came into the workshop half; an old barbecue set, the big petrol lawnmower Danny the gardener used in summer, an assortment of footballs and baseball bats, racks on the walls holding tools. There, on top of the chest freezer in the corner, was the green tarp containing what was left of Herby. It was very cold in there, our breath steaming as Robertson set his coffee down and lifted back the tarp. I looked away, fixing on a spot on the cinder-block wall as he gave a low whistle through his teeth.
‘Oh boy. Yeah. Really, uh, did a number on the poor thing, huh?’
‘Yeah. So, you think a wolf? Or wolves?’
‘Well, yeah. Or maybe a vehicle, but, it’s . . . Jeez. Oh boy.’
He dropped the tarp back over Herby and – unable to help myself – I looked down and caught one last terrible glimpse of the dog’s face: those empty black sockets rimmed with red, blood matted into his golden hair. ‘Well, I guess I’d better notify neighbouring properties of the incident. Tell them to be careful of pets and children.’
We shook hands as he got into the prowler. ‘I meant to ask you, which part of Scotland are you from?’
‘Oh, a little place near Glasgow.’
‘I got relatives over there myself. Motherwell. You ever been there?’
‘Once or twice.’
‘I keep meaning to get over and visit, but you know how it is. You get back there much yourself?’
‘No. Not much.’
I watched the car disappear into the trees and then reappear a moment later down on Tamora. The sun was brilliant, high in the sky now, and a bead of light flashed golden along the side of the police car as it turned the bend and vanished. From somewhere far off came the sound of a bandsaw, carrying on the still air. Someone cutting wood. Preparing for winter.
6
HERE WE COME, the fucking lads, walking down the main corridor during break time: me, Derek Bannerman – Big Banny – and Tommy McKendrick. Ma best buds. Ma true muckers. Hundreds o’ kids standing about – Ravenscroft was a big school – eating sweets, drinking ginger. Some wee first years walked past us. Targets. Fucking targets, man, scared wee rabbits in a field o’ lions. Tommy flung a leg out and just tripped one of them over, sending his books flying. We pished ourselves. We were only in second year; Tommy and me were thirteen and Banny was fourteen. He’d got held back a year. But he was a big kid, one of those fourteen-year-olds that looked like a man nearly. He’d even got served in the Boot one night. Half the third and fourth years shat it from Banny. He was mental. Every cunt knew this.
‘Ho,’ Banny nudged me. ‘Check it oot.’
There, over in a corner by the noticeboard outside the assembly hall, reading a poster, trying to look invisible, was Craig Docherty.
The fucking Professor himself.
Lord Anthony Parka zipped up all the way. Specs. Even had the fucking uniform on: tie, the lot. His Adidas bag clean, un-graffitied. No ‘Madness’ or ‘The Jam’ or ‘Skinz’ scrawled all over it. Always the first to answer in class. Top of the class for everything. Lived in a massive house on Kilwinning Road. ‘Bought houses’ we called them. ‘Spam Valley,’ my dad said, meaning that the idiots who bought their own houses, rather than renting them from the council, had to eat Spam to afford the mortgages. They had a car too, the Dochertys. You’d sometimes see his mum dropping him off near the school gates. She was classy. Fit. Big blonde. Into amateur dramatics and shite like that. Acted in plays doon the Harbour, at the arts centre. ‘Ho, Professor,’ we’d shout as she drove off. ‘Ah’d ride your maw daft so ah wid. Ride her till the fucken wean pushed me oot.’
The Professor talked differently to us too. He said ‘seven’, not ‘seevin’. ‘Trousers’, not ‘troosers’. ‘Jacket’, not ‘jaykit’. When he was asked a question in class he wouldn’t not be listening. Or pretend to have misunderstood. He wouldn’t say, ‘Whit, Miss?’ Or shrug his shoulders and make some daft comment to his pals. (He didn’t have any pals.) He’d answer the question. Usually correctly and often with additional, unasked-for information. In break periods he didn’t stand around in a semicircle out by the bins, smoking and spitting. He went to the library and read fucking books. His every other word wasn’t fuck or cunt. He was neither Celtic nor Rangers. He used words in class that we didn’t understand. He didn’t attempt to hide or mask his intelligence. His entire character was just a mad, unidentifiable blur to us.
Yes, in almost every way the Professor had been custom-designed for bullying.
To have his books slapped out of his hands.
Cocks and baws drawn on his jotters and bag.
To be given unexpected dead legs and arms.
Five rapid to the coupon.
Booted in the baws.
The Professor had only been at our school for a few months. He’d been at some private school before that. One morning, just a few days after he’d arrived, me and Banny had been walking down the crowded art-class corridor, Banny tipping the powdery dregs of a bag of Quavers into his mouth. The Professor was coming towards us in the opposite direction. As we passed him Banny had turned and, casually, mid-sentence almost, spat a huge mouthful of thick, tangy saliva right into Docherty’s face. The Professor’s expression as the corridor erupted into laughter . . . it wasn’t rage, or shame, or hurt. It was just surprise. Stunned surprise that a world like this existed and that he had to live in it.
And yet Docherty still managed to carry a kind of air about him, an air of, if not exactly confidence, then at least of maybe dignity. As if he knew, as none of us did at that age, that one day all of this would end and he could begin his real life, one lived in sunlight and reason, far away from this terrible place of random cruelty and violence. And perhaps it was this air more than anything else that drove Banny mad.
‘C’mon,’ Banny said, cutting through the throng towards the Professor now, his thigh muscles straining against the ultra-tight iridescent Sta-Prest trousers, the trousers topped with a black Harrington bomber jacket. Our uniform.
Coming up from behind, unseen, Banny brought the flat of his hand up and smacked it into the back of the Professor’s head, bouncing his face off the noticeboard, sending his glasses flying. Without a word the Professor bent down to retrieve them as Banny tore the poster he’d been reading off the wall. ‘School orchestra?’ Banny spat. ‘School fucking orchestra? Whit instrument dae ye play then, Professor? The pink fucking oboe, ya bender, ye!’ Tommy and I laughed. A few others nearby too. Docherty just swallowed and stood there. Looking past Banny, as if fixing on something in the distance. ‘Ho!’ Banny said, shoving him. ‘Ye hear me, ya poofy wee cunt?’
Docherty nodded.
‘Come on then. Tell us ye play the pink oboe.’
Docherty adjusted his glasses, forefinger pushing them back on the bridge of his nose, and said nothing.
Banny grabbed him by the tie and pulled him towards him, towering over him, over a foot taller. ‘Docherty, ya fanny, tell every cunt ye play the pink oboe or I’ll stuff this fucking leaflet doon yer throat.’
‘Leave me alone,’ Docherty said, struggling.
‘Ya cheeky wee cunt.’ Banny smashed the A4 Banda-copied leaflet into Docherty’s face and started grinding it into his mouth, holding him down and around the neck.
‘Fight!’ a couple of people shouted.
‘Eat it! Eat it, ya fucking bentshot, ye!’ Banny shouted.
‘BANNERMAN!’
We turned. Wee Fulton,Adventure Kit Fulton, was striding towards us. The woodwork teacher and a right hard bastard. Called Adventure Kit ’cause of his belt with all his stuff on it; a tape measure, keys, pliers and stuff. Banny dropped the Professor, letting him fall to the ground, as Fulton grabbed Banny by the front of his Harrington. ‘Are you OK, Craig?’ Fulton asked Docherty.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Hey! Hands aff, man!’ Banny said, slapping at Fulton’s hand. People gasped. Aye, Big Banny was mental right enough, mental enough tae cheek Wee Fulton.
Fulton slapped Banny hard across the face with the back of his hand and squared up to him. ‘What did you say, son?’ he asked Banny through clenched teeth.
This is how it was, in Scotland, in 1982.
The two of them stared at each other, about equal in height. Silence in the hall. Banny held Fulton’s gaze a moment longer and then the bell rang, breaking the tension. Fulton let Banny go, prodding a finger into his chest and said, ‘Mr McMahon’s office. Now. The rest of you, get to your classes.’
As Banny followed Fulton down the familiar walk to the headmaster’s office I turned and looked the other way. The Professor was already far down the corridor, walking briskly, not looking back, lost in the sea of Harringtons, parkas and duffel coats.
7
AFTER ROBERTSON LEFT I sat in my office and thought for a while about doing some work on my screenplay, the thing I pecked at now and then to tell myself that I wasn’t just a two-bit regional movie reviewer, that I had big plans afoot. That some day a major motion picture would be fashioned from my current work in progress: a kind of science-fiction disaster story, set in a dystopian future, a post-apocalyptic world where society has been reduced to almost medieval levels. But I hadn’t touched the thing for a couple of weeks and trying to get back into it would be like jumping into a freezing sea. Instead I finished the DVD review, trying to airbrush in a patina of criticism that might survive subediting (‘while some might find the film’s exposition a little heavy-handed . . .’).
My office is basically a glass cube that juts out of the eastern side of the house, the side that faces towards the Bennett farmhouse about half a mile away, rented by Irene, Mrs Kramer, this past year or so. My desk is up against the glass and I get to watch some incredible sunrises in here. On my desk are framed photographs – of Walt and me, laughing together out by the pool, taken a couple of years ago; one of me and Sammy, both in full evening dress, taken at one of her parents’ Christmas parties; one of Walt and Herby when he was a puppy,Walt cuddling the dog, its huge tongue scarfing out of its mouth and almost round its neck. I took this photograph and stuffed it into the top drawer, unable to look at it any more. I toyed with the review, trimming it, cutting and pasting, moving sentences around, reordering paragraphs, until I found myself staring into space, remembering, thinking about Scotland.
I looked up from my desk, catching myself mid-thought, suddenly aware of how much I had been thinking about childhood, dwelling on specific moments and people, rather than in the general way we all think about childhood all the time – it flows through us unceasingly, like blood. Why had I suddenly started doing this? The answer came quickly: because you found the dog, ripped up like it’d been vivisected. Because violence came calling, didn’t it? And, quite before I knew what I was doing, I had clicked on Firefox and was typing his name into Google. I read down, expecting nothing. He was not, after all, a famous man; he’d be nearly seventy too, and unlikely to be one of the search results I was looking at now:
Follow PCardew on Twitter . . .
Paul Cardew is on Facebook . . .
Paul Cardew, President of Virginia Loan and Savings . . .
Share Spotify playlists with Paul Cardew using . . .
And then, right there at the bottom, the second to last result on the first page, were the words:‘Rutherglen man dies in house fire’ and a link to Glasgow’s Evening Times website.
My forearm was tense, my hand claw-like as I clicked on the link, still thinking, still allowing myself to think, ‘There’s got to be loads of Paul Cardews in Glasgow, surely . . .’
The page opening, scrolling down, the red-and-white Evening Times logo unfurling in the top left and then, below it, the photograph: a silver-haired man, smiling the smile I remembered so well. The two-paragraph story was dated from eighteen months ago and I read it quickly:
Police, fire and ambulance services were called to a blaze on 14 Mount Street, Rutherglen, late on Saturdaynight. The body of retired social worker Paul Cardew, aged 66, was recovered from the scene. The fire appears to have been caused by a cigarette.
Sergeant Malcolm Thompson of Strathclyde Fire Brigade said, ‘This tragic death is a reminder of the dangers of smoking in bed.’ He went on to say –
I gripped the edge of my desk, the sunshine suddenly too much, too bright around me. I crossed the office to the bookshelves and quickly found what I was looking for – two books, kept side by side low down. One was a tattered, much read paperback of Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. The other was much fatter, a hardback folio of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, but a cheap copy, the kind found in discount bookstores all over the world, with a little triangle cut off the inside bottom of the dust sleeve where the price had been. It was the kind of book that would have been bought by someone who had a love of culture but little money. I opened the Shakespeare at the title page and read the inscription that had been written there in neat copperplate more than twenty years ago.
To Donnie,
You’ve made me proud. Now make yourself proud.
Best wishes for the future, Paul
28 August 1989
I ran my finger over the words, tracing their outline, remembering. Then I leaned my forearms on the bookcase, buried my face in the den they made, and I wept . . .
* * *
‘Hello there,’ he said. ‘I’m Mr Cardew.’
It was a warm morning, late summer of 1982. I was sitting at a desk in the meeting room of Auchentiber Young Offenders Institute. That desk – chipped grey iron legs, bolted to the floor in case it was used as a weapon, the wood surface an insane tableaux of graffiti, some of it scrawled in ink, some of it carved in, some of it carved and then filled in with ink, some of it dating from the 1960s, all of it screaming ‘I was here’.
Skinz, NaZareth, UDA, Rab McPherson takes it up the erse, IRA, Dae ye want a chicken supper, Bobby Sands?, UK Subs, Anarchy, Nigers go home, Stevie 12/3/72, Behind Greenhouse 4.30 if ye want yer cock sucked, Troops out 68, CELTIC, Fuck all Screws, NF.
In one corner someone had written a poem:
Sid is dead
But not for me
Because I know
Sid did it his way
The walls were slate grey, enamel paint over brickwork, chipped here and there, the red brick showing through, the sun coming blinding through the barred windows behind him as he loosened his tie and pulled an orange plastic chair up opposite me. ‘A fine day,’ he said. ‘Archie.’ He turned to the guard who was reading the Daily Record at the table at the far end of the room. ‘Do you think we could have a window open please?’
He was well spoken. Posh. ‘Up himself,’ my dad would have said. Had a blue folder under his arm and he put it on the desk. He took a pack of cigarettes out – Capstan Full Strength, untipped – and put them on top of the folder. I remember his smell, the aftershave I later found out was Old Spice, mixing with tobacco, mixing with the stale reek of the thousands of cigarettes that had been smoked in this room. Mr Cardew wore a dark suit of a heavy mat erial that even I could tell was old-fashioned. His hair was greying at the temples and slicked back with Brylcreem or something. His face was blotchy, with broken blood vessels around the cheeks and pouched, tired-looking eyes. ‘So, William,’ he yawned, ‘tell me a bit about yourself.’
I remember this very clearly. Because no one had ever asked me to do that before. ‘I, me and my pals –’ my voice was tiny, qu
iet – ‘we, we . . .’ I swallowed.
‘No, son.’ He leaned forward and tapped the file. ‘I know what you did. I meant, tell me about you.’
I looked at him properly for the first time. I could feel my face burning because I didn’t really know what he meant. ‘What about me?’ I said finally.
‘Well. What do you like to do? In your free time.’
I stared at the desk. Bob Marley, King Kenny, a cock and baws, its wiry hairs, the three drops of spunk around the tip, a stick woman with a massive pair of tits and a hairy bush, Poofs fuck off . . .
‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘Watch telly. Films and that?’
If Mr Cardew was depressed by the utter vacancy of my response he didn’t show it. He just nodded. ‘What’s your favourite film then?’ he said.
I fidgeted. Rubbed my nose. Searching for the right answer. Thinking of the hours, days, weeks, spent round at Banny’s with the stack of cassettes on the top-loading VHS: I Spit on Your Grave, The Boogeyman, The Burning, Friday the 13th, Driller Killer, Cannibal Ferox, The Boys in Company C,The . . .
‘OK,’ he laughed. ‘Just a film you liked then.’
The . . . What was the one, the one Tommy had wanted to switch off ’cause it was all just ‘cunts talking pish’? The one that had been really slow but had turned out to be really good in the end. With the guy from that other fi—
‘The Deer Hunter,’ I said. ‘That was good.’
A pause. He nodded, looking impressed. (You were always good at telling them what they wanted to hear.) ‘Mmmm,’ Mr Cardew said. ‘Don’t you think it was a little bit Walt Disney?’