by John Niven
‘Christ, Sam, you’ve another –’
‘Ah.’ He cut off whatever platitude I was about to utter with a wave of the cigar.
‘Well,’ I said, yawning myself now. ‘I’d better go find Sammy. Say goodnight. I’m driving back.’
He nodded. ‘And Walt’s coping OK with the dog business?’
‘I think so. He’s a bit shaken up. We all are.’
‘Damn shame. Anyway, you’d better get a move on if you’re driving, look . . .’ I followed his pointing, glowing cigar tip and saw that, behind me, the snow had started falling silently in huge powdery flakes.
‘Bang on cue,’ I said. ‘Well, thanks for the party.’
‘And we’ll see you all on the island in a few days?’
‘Twenty-second,’ I said.
‘Night, Donnie.’ We shook hands. ‘Drive safe.’
I found Sammy in the lounge, near the great fireplace, talking to Billy Vaughan, the paper’s Head of Advertising, and what looked like a gathering of favoured clients, middle-aged guys in tuxedos holding Scotches. Sammy was wearing a long black dress that clung to her, deeply décolleté, with a little diamond brooch, her hair down tonight, spilling over her shoulders. In her heels she towered over most of the men. She was in mid-sentence as I approached, saying the words, ‘. . . to drive more traffic to the website . . .’ I smiled at her and she said, ‘Excuse me a second, guys.’ Billy took up her speech as she came towards me, taking a few steps away from the group. The kept man.
‘I’m gonna take off.’
‘Really?’ Sammy said. ‘It’s only –’ She looked at her watch. ‘Shit.’
‘Yeah, time flies when you’re hanging with the big boys.’
She made a face and whispered, ‘I’m bored shitless listening to myself and my feet are killing me.’
‘That’s why you get the big bucks, baby.’ A line I used often. ‘Anyway, I want to get going before the snow gets any heavier.’
‘OK. I’ll – Hi, Graham,’ she said to a passing tuxedo. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. Give Walt a big kiss from me.’
‘Yep.’ I leaned in to peck her quickly on the cheek. Sammy wasn’t big on public displays of affection.
‘Drive safe.’ She turned and walked back off towards the fireplace. I watched her go, roughly hitching up one of the spaghetti shoulder straps of her dress with a thumb as she went, always something of the tomboy, the jock, about Sammy.
I got my overcoat, the valet brought the car round, and I headed down the drive, the heater cranked full, snowflakes whirring through the cones of the headlights. The great Edwardian house disappeared behind me, its many windows blazing with light in the rear-view mirror.
12
THE HOUSE I grew up in. Post-war pebble-dash. Woodchip walls and sworling, nicotine-baked Artex on the ceilings; the pine mantelpiece with its knick-knacks, geegaws and ornaments, the multicoloured glass clown, the glazed ceramic horse tiredly pulling its cartload of barrels, the white ashtray with Blackpool Tower etched into its base in gold; the squat television encased in plastic wood; the electric fire with its fake coals, glowing a soft tangerine on winter nights, pitch dark at four thirty as I lay on the carpet watching Roobarb and Custard, or Magpie, my face burning and my back freezing, icy pools of condensation on the windowsills.
They both drank, my parents. My dad openly, my mum more secretly. My dad worked in the timber yard. They’d finish work at 4 p.m. and go to the King’s or the Delta. Two hours in there, five or six pints, and home for his tea. Then the steady stream of cans of Tennent’s in front of the television until he passed out around ten. By the time he got in from the pub my mum would have been on the Martinis, not Martinis as I came to know them in later life, after I met Sammy – the chilled stem glass, the clear gin and the bobbing olive – just sweet vermouth with lemonade. She’d start on these in the late afternoon, keeping the bottle out of sight in the pantry, glugging them in the kitchen while she sweated over the frying pan and the boiling potatoes. By teatime she’d sometimes have put away half a bottle or more and the tea would be burnt or cold and the fights would start. One night, staggering, swaying, she dropped the plate into his lap accidentally, spattering hot fat over him. He smashed the plate to pieces off the wall and punched her in the stomach, screaming ‘YA STEAMING FUCKING MESS, YE!’ while I ran crying for my room. Later she came up, drunker, and told me they’d just had a ‘wee argument’, that it was all fine. I’d get the odd slap, punch or kick, but I didn’t really get hit. (I mean, I didn’t get hit like Banny got hit.) My dad lost his job in 1981, when the timber yard closed down, like so much else in Ayrshire around then (‘that fucken hoor Thatcher’) and the drinking and the fighting intensified in that last year I spent at home. My mum got a part-time job cleaning offices and my dad would go to the bookies, or do the odd day on building sites, his visits to the Delta or the King’s getting earlier, three o’clock, two o’clock.
Now I can see that my parents disliked each other and perhaps blamed each other for the stagnation of their lives. They had no common interests; in fact, no interests at all; just the endlessly flickering telly, the pall of cigarette smoke, the silence broken now and then by the crack and hiss of a ring pull, a stilted conversation about something in the local newspaper. Locked in this sad battle, they barely noticed me and I came and went as I pleased. Later, much later, one of the therapists would suggest that, unable to break through to my parents, I went elsewhere for attention.
Banny, Tommy and me did the usual stuff. We smashed windows. We raided people’s gardens. Our friendship intensified over that hot, endless, Royal Wedding summer. Having watched the riots in Toxteth and Brixton on the telly, having seen those burning orange petrol bombs flying through the dark, we stole a length of rubber hose from chemistry class and went out one night siphoning petrol out of cars into empty milk bottles. I remember getting a mouthful of bitter, oily petrol, gagging and retching while Banny and Tommy laughed. We stuffed rags into the bottles and threw them at the wall of the church and watched the flames lick up the white pebble-dash. The burn marks were still there years later. We did that.
I threw the frog off the flyover onto the car below. I trained the airgun on the kid on the bike. I hurled the wee girl’s shoes into the pond. I asked the woman in the chippy for a swatch at her vag. I told the teacher to fuck off. And, as I did these things, as I heard the boys laugh and honk their approval. I felt their acceptance. I felt their affectionate gaze.
Yes, I felt their love.
* * *
I put the car in the huge garage, the headlights picking out the towers of packing crates towards the back – old furniture, stuff we never used, earmarked for charity shops and garage sales – and turned the ignition off. I breathed out. I’d felt anxious all the way back, every set of headlights that appeared in my mirror had seemed filled with significance, with menace. Even in the garage now, crossing the chill, empty breeze-block space towards the door that connected with the house, I felt jangled, nervy, fighting the urge to look over my shoulder.
Irene was reading a book in the vast living room, her feet folded up beneath her, and she looked up from her pool of light as I came in. ‘Hi, Donnie,’ she yawned.
‘Hi there. Well, how was he?’
‘A little angel. He went down just after you rang. Not a peep since. Were the roads OK? Looks like it’s getting pretty heavy out there.’
‘Fine really. Gritters were already out.’
I flopped down on the big sofa opposite her, loosening my bow tie.
‘And how was the big party this year?’ Irene asked, almost girlishly. She figured Sammy and me for local celebrities and I think she found our lives impossibly glamorous. Irene never went anywhere.
I made a face. ‘Not my thing really.’
‘Who was there?’
‘Oh, the usual – politicians and moneymen. Tell you what, I was going to have a little nightcap. Fancy one?’
‘Oh, just a ginger ale if you have some.’
>
‘Come on, Irene, live a little.’ That song, the summer of 1982, on the radio all the time, right after it all happened . . .
She laughed. ‘Doesn’t agree with me at all, Donnie. You know that.’
I crossed to the full wet bar in the corner: the stainless-steel sink, the little glass-fronted refrigerator for the beers, white wine and soft drinks. I reached in and took out a can of Canada Dry. I opened the double doors of the big drinks cabinet above the sink – row upon row of spirits, everything from amaretto to Campari to several different malt whiskies. Irene whistled behind me. ‘My,’ she said. ‘You could open a liquor store with all that!’
‘Yeah, Sammy keeps it well stocked,’ I said over my shoulder, pulling the cork from a bottle of Macallan. ‘I think she’s inherited it from her parents, you know? The kind of people who’re used to “entertaining”.’ I poured a hefty glug of the whisky into a crystal tumbler. The ice bucket was empty. ‘Do you want ice, Irene?’
‘Oh, don’t worry, it’ll be fine as is.’
I filled a little jug from the tap, poured a splash of water into my whisky and brought the drinks over. ‘Mmmm,’ Irene said, sipping hers.
‘Cheers,’ I said, raising my glass as I sat back down.
‘Cheers,’ Irene chorused, raising her sugar water. I had noticed over the last year or so, when Irene came over for barbecues, or for dinner occasionally, or to use the pool in summer, that she never drank alcohol, but I’d never asked the question directly before.
‘Have you never drunk, Irene?’
‘Oh, I’ve tried it of course. Where I grew up, in Macon? It’s bootlegger country. A couple of generations back everybody had a pot still in the yard. Everybody drank back home.’
‘Not you though.’
‘Well, I just always hated that feeling of losing control, you know? As soon as the room started spinning or you felt yourself getting light-headed, I’d just think “that’s enough”. And considering it only took me about one drink to get there . . . it didn’t really seem worth it.’
‘I bet your friends loved you.’
‘Huh?’
‘Always having a designated driver on hand.’
‘Oh yes. That was always me all right!’
I took a long pull on my drink and looked at the wooden beams of the ceiling high above, holding the glass just below my chin, the rich fumes tearing my eyes.
‘Does it remind you of home?’ Irene asked.
It was my turn to say ‘Huh?’
‘The whisky?’
‘Oh, right. Well, a little bit, I suppose.’
Yeah, right. A fifty-dollar bottle of single malt – that was a regular feature round our way. I thought of the whiskies my father drank – the half- and quarter-bottles of Bell’s or Whyte & Mackay. The occasional full bottle of a supermarket’s own brand.
I took another long swallow, the alcohol hitting me now, everything slowing and relaxing, the anxiety of the drive, of the last few days, melting away.
‘You don’t talk much about back home, do you, Donnie?’
‘I, uh, I guess I don’t. No.’
‘I thought you Scots were meant to be ultra patriotic. Always talking about how great the old country was.’
‘I suppose they do. I guess because I left so young and I don’t have much in the way of family back there . . .’
‘Sounds sad,’ Irene said.
‘Nah. To be honest, I don’t really think about it much.’ This was true until recently.
‘Anyway, you’ve got your own little family here now.’
‘And the extended family,’ I said, gesturing to my tux. ‘Pain in the ass though they can be at times.’ She laughed. There was a pause. I watched the snow blowing by the tall window behind her. There was another question I’d never asked Irene. Braved by the whisky I went ahead. ‘Can I ask, and please don’t be offended, but how come you never had children, Irene?’
‘Couldn’t,’ she shrugged. ‘Jim and I wanted to. It just never seemed to happen.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, touched by the straightforwardness of her answer. She waved a hand.
‘Oh, it was such a long time ago. I suppose today we’d have been in and out of IVF clinics and goodness knows what but back then, the seventies, early eighties, it just seemed more that folks accepted what nature dealt them.’
‘You’re very good with Walt, you know.’
‘Oh, he’s a sweet boy.’
‘Mmm. When he wants to be.’ I looked at my watch. ‘Christ, speaking of which the wee bugger’ll be up soon enough.’
‘Yep, past my bedtime too.’ She put the half-drunk glass of ginger ale on a coaster on a side table and we both stood up.
‘Thanks again for babysitting.’
‘Any time, Donnie.’
I saw her out then walked along the hall to check on Walt. Pausing by the door to his room I looked through the hall window and saw Irene’s tail lights vanishing into the snow. Unexpectedly, I felt a little sad and protective towards her, going home alone, to a dark, empty, rented house. I’d talk to Sammy. Make a point of inviting her over for dinner more often. Maybe there was even someone we could introduce her to, a friend of Sammy’s parents or something. I’d talk to Sammy.
13
‘AWW, DADDY, MAKE pancakes. Please. Please!’
The morning after the party, Walt bent over in supplication in the kitchen, almost on his knees, knowing that a plea for this kind of doughy, fried breakfast on a school day would receive short shrift from his mother and that I was more malleable. Behind him the snow was falling steadily through the wall of glass, as it had been all night. I looked at the time on the bottom of the TV screen, next to the rolling news feed (‘oil prices set to hit 150 dollars a barrel, economists say . . .’) and saw it was 7.32. The bus came at 8.15. ‘I . . . shit, OK, Walt. Sit down and drink your juice.’
‘Yaayyy!’
I kept an eye on the TV weather while I slapped the small blue Le Creuset pan onto the hob and got the eggs and butter from the fridge. Now, in the morning light of the kitchen, last night’s anxiety – the headlights – seemed ridiculous. It was Friday. We had a clear weekend ahead of us: no parties or visits or engagements. Yaayyy, as Walt liked to say. We’d hang around the house. Maybe get the snowmobile out.
I beat an egg into the whisked flour and milk, the pan almost smoking hot now, and turned back to the TV. The weather girl was gesturing at a huge grey cyclone. ‘These very strong winds are going to keep pushing south, past Saskatoon and into the Regina area by mid-afternoon, driving this heavy snow into real blizzard conditions . . .’
‘Can I have chocolate spread on my –’
‘No way, dude. Lemon, OK?’
‘Aww.’
The phone rang and I picked up the one on the wall nearest to me, the caller ID saying ‘APARTMENT’. ‘Hi, Sammy,’ I said, reaching for the pan. ‘How’d it go – Ahh, fuck!’ The pan, already red hot.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I just burnt myself. Ow!’
‘Daddy swore.’ Walt, in the background.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I was just, uh, making us some pancakes.’ I was turning my hand under the cold water now, the phone cradled in my neck.
‘Oh, don’t give him pancakes, Donnie. Let him have his oatmeal or some –’
‘I just, look, if I don’t get a move on he won’t get any-fucking-thing!’
‘Again! Daddy!’
‘Sorry! Christ.’
‘OK, OK. I was just checking in.’
‘Have you seen the forecast by the way?’
‘Yeah, I’m watching it now.’ I pictured Sammy alone in the apartment, in the open-plan kitchen living room, eating her own oatmeal, watching the same channel I was. ‘I’m gonna try and leave around lunchtime. Looks like the worst of it isn’t gonna hit us until late afternoon.’
‘OK. Look, I gotta run, bus’ll be here soon.’
‘Give Walt a kiss from me.’
&
nbsp; ‘Drive safe.’
I threw the pan back on the heat, using an oven glove this time, and Walt ate his second pancake in his gloved hand as we struggled through the gently falling snow towards the bus stop. There was no trace of the mess where I’d found Herby. It was all covered by fresh, virgin snow. But the spot still made me feel uneasy.
Back at the house I remembered I had a saccharine romcom to review for the following week: two big teen stars in what looked like a Jane Austen rewrite with text messaging and iPods. I lay on the sofa for a long time, sipping tea and tapping the DVD against my knee, until I wandered down the hall to my office and stood over the desk, my finger tracing over the smooth plastic pad of the laptop, the cursor hovering briefly over the icon for Mozilla Firefox – that flaming orange-and-white beast encircling the globe, the pathway to Google, the mortal enemy of the stay-at-home writer – before moving along the toolbar and hovering over the Word icon. Fuck it. The review could wait. I slid the cursor further along and clicked on the foresty-green Final Draft logo and, with a heavy sigh, steeling myself, opened UNTITLED.
The last scene I’d been working on had been my first-act climax (falling around page 30 on a 120-page script, all the manuals said), where Welles, the hero, is rooting around in the ruined basement of an office building and he accidentally stumbles upon an ancient laptop, something he has never seen before, that has somehow (and how indeed, I hadn’t quite cracked this part yet) retained enough power to be turned on. I noticed that the scene was almost falling on page 40 (I had some fat to trim) and read through what I’d last written: squirming, sighing and occasionally letting out a small cry of pain at a particularly heavy-handed bit of dialogue. I deleted chunks, thought for a moment and then typed:
INT. BASEMENT – DAY
It’s dark. Shafts of murky daylight pour through cracks inthe ruined stone. Welles runs a hand over the strange object, accidentally hitting the ‘ON’switch. The laptop suddenly comes to life, the screen glowing a soft blue, looking as futuristic and alien in this world as the shining obeliskin 2001. Welles jumps back, astonished.