Claire smiled amiably. Alison looked at the screen, where some sort of psychedelic dream sequence was unfolding. ‘What is it?’ Alison asked.
‘The Underground Man,’ Joe said. ‘Book’s good.’
‘I’m not bothered about watching it, myself,’ Claire said. ‘But there’s nothing else on this time of night.’
Joe turned up the volume.
‘Where’ve you been then?’ Claire asked, speaking a little louder. ‘Somewhere nice?’
‘High Green, miners’ welfare,’ Alison said, and Claire pulled a doubtful face, and when Daniel came in with four mugs of tea, she said, ‘High Green, Daniel? Funny place to take your girlfriend.’
He stood in front of Alison and she reached up, took a mug, and smiled at him. His hair had fallen across his eyes again and he blew upwards out of the corner of his mouth so he could see her properly, an unconscious habit, so familiar to her now. They held each other’s gaze for a moment; then Alison stood up.
‘Shall we take this upstairs?’ she said.
She woke with a jolt, as if she’d been prodded. Daylight. She was in Daniel’s single bed and he was sleeping beside her, on his back, with one arm flung above his head. His other arm cradled her to him so that to move, she had to carefully peel him away and ease herself from his warmth. She’d never stayed the night here, and told herself now that she really hadn’t meant to, although the last bus to Attercliffe was already long gone by the time they’d shrugged off their clothes and tumbled together on to the bed. Each time they had sex, Alison felt a little less self-conscious about it, Daniel a little more competent, each of them a little more at home. Last night, when the sex was over but their bodies were still pressed close, Alison had held her mouth against his ear and told Daniel she loved him, but he was on the very edge of sleep by then, and he didn’t really hear, he only murmured something incoherent in reply, hardly words at all. Then they’d both slept, deeply, until that slice of sunlight sidling in through a gap in the curtains had fallen across Alison’s face, making her acknowledge the day.
Now, she slipped from the bed and dressed swiftly, watching Daniel, wondering if she should wake him. She hovered over him for a moment, studied the contours of his mouth, considered a kiss, but decided against it. Daniel awake would only delay her departure and she’d see him again in just a few hours anyway; Steve was picking them all up from the bus station at one o’clock, then they were crossing the Pennines to the Mayflower Club. So instead, she tiptoed out of his bedroom, holding her shoes in one hand and their two mugs of last night’s tea, stone cold, undrunk, in the other. Down the stairs, cautious and light as a cat. At the foot of the stairs she placed her shoes carefully on the floor and went barefoot into the kitchen with the mugs; there was Daniel’s dad reading yesterday’s Star and, in front of him, a freshly brewed pot of tea waiting under a knitted cosy. He looked up and said, ‘All right, love?’ as if nothing was more natural than that Alison Connor should materialise before him at half past five on a Saturday morning. She blushed, feeling caught in the act, and ashamed, but he just said, ‘Sit down, lass, you need summat warm in your belly before you go. Any road, there’s no buses yet.’ So she tipped the cold tea into the sink and washed the mugs, while behind her Bill Lawrence poured two fresh ones.
She loved Mr Lawrence. She liked Mrs Lawrence too, and Mrs Lawrence liked Alison, on the whole; it was just she had a weather eye out for her younger son and this caused her to hold back, and wonder if this girl was too young, and too unsteady, to be trusted with Daniel’s heart. But Bill – he was smitten. Daniel said it was because Alison asked his dad questions about the pigeons, when nobody else was interested. This might have been true, but Alison didn’t need to know why she and Bill Lawrence had clicked; she only needed to know she could rely on his smile.
‘I’m really sorry, Mr Lawrence,’ she said now, taking a seat opposite him. ‘I should’ve left last night.’
‘Not likely,’ he said. ‘Not after dark, not after closing time. You did right, staying put.’
‘Well, thank you,’ she said. She knew he would never ask if she’d be missed, at home. He seemed to understand Alison’s taboos without being told.
She sipped her tea, he slurped his.
‘Do you always get up this early?’ Alison asked.
‘Aye. This time o’ year, any road.’
‘Because it’s light?’
‘Aye, and I like the quiet.’
‘And the pigeons wake early too, I expect?’
‘Aye, love, they do.’
There was a comfortable pause, then Alison said, ‘Could we have our tea in the loft?’
He bestowed a beam of pure sunshine upon her. ‘Come on,’ he said, standing up. He unbolted the back door and held it open for her. ‘After you, twinkletoes,’ he said.
She laughed and, still bare-footed, picked her way gingerly down the garden path to the shed. Mr Lawrence followed her. He was training a youngster, called Bess, and he told Alison how she was doing – grand – and asked her if she’d like to come out with him in a week or so, on Bess’s first five-mile flight.
‘Oh, yes please!’ she said.
‘Right you are,’ he said, and they settled down with their tea in the warm, feathered fug of the converted shed. The birds perked up at the company, they danced and swaggered, and dipped their perfect little heads. Mr Lawrence and Alison chatted about A Levels, and the band, and the pigeons. Next January the two of them were going together to the Blackpool Winter Gardens, the Royal Pigeon Racing Association show, staying in two rooms of a boarding house near South Beach Promenade. Daniel thought she was mad, but it was all booked, and Alison said she couldn’t wait.
Back home, she paused at the threshold to try to gauge the lie of the land, but the house yielded no information; it was quiet, but this didn’t always signify peace. For a while this year, back in the spring, Catherine had come off the booze. It wasn’t the first time, but she did better than she ever had before. Early March through to mid-April. Six weeks with no wine or vodka in the house. No bed-wetting or soiled clothes. No futile rages or tearful atonement. No Martin, either, and no other strange, unwholesome men tagging along home with her after closing time, for a nightcap and a no-strings fuck on the sofa with a semi-comatose drunkard. But on 15 April – the date stuck in Alison’s mind, being her seventeenth birthday – her mother fell off the wagon again in grand style and embarked on an almighty bender, an extraordinary, destructive, desperate binge, a twenty-four-hour festival of annihilation. Since then, she’d been impossible to control or predict, and Martin Baxter was back, with his own key and a new, disturbing air of ownership, as if, having survived the brief exile, he’d returned triumphant, and stronger, to his private fiefdom.
She went in and shut the door, and Peter must’ve been listening for her because immediately she could hear his tread on the stairs, and by the time she’d shed her coat, there he was. He looked shocking, strained and whey-faced, and his eyes were red with fatigue or sorrow, she didn’t know which. She held her arms out to him and he stepped into them, and she hugged him for a while, without speaking. He stood in the circle of her embrace, half a foot taller than her but passive as a sad, sad child. Then he said, ‘There’s summat I need to tell you,’ and she let him go.
‘What?’ she asked, but he just walked away, through the kitchen and into the living room, so she followed him, her heart hammering. He didn’t sit, but paced about, back and forth.
‘Peter, please,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’
He stood still then, and looked at her. ‘There’s trouble coming,’ he said.
‘What kind of trouble?’ It seemed to Alison that there was nothing but trouble in the Connor household. There could be little else to come that hadn’t already been visited upon them.
Peter sniffed and sighed – a long exhalation, as if bracing himself for what he had to say.
‘Peter,’ Alison said. ‘Just tell me.’
‘OK, I will,’ he s
aid. ‘I will. I’m queer.’ There was a sort of challenge in his eyes now as he waited for a response. She was silent, but she stepped towards him and took his hand. He was trembling, as if he was very cold, and he said, ‘Me and Toddy, we’re …’ He stopped, shook his head furiously, then said, ‘And Martin fucking bastard Baxter knows.’ In his eyes, there were the beginnings of tears.
Alison tried to process what he was saying as swiftly as she could. He needed her, when, for as long as she could remember, it’d always been she who’d needed him. But now, for Peter, for him, she had to be steady and strong, and, after all, this wasn’t a disaster, this wasn’t something to fear. She hadn’t known though, she hadn’t known this about him, and she felt stupid and slow and thoughtless, as if all her life she’d looked only to herself and her own concerns, and had altogether missed the truth at the centre of her lovely, tender, patient, dependable brother’s being.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘You and Toddy … it doesn’t matter, Peter, does it?’
‘He’s been following us.’ His voice cracked with angry distress. ‘The bastard. He’s taken pictures, Alison. He’s shown me.’
She was horrified, appalled, confused. She wasn’t sure what Peter meant. Pictures? Why? Of what? She felt too young and too ignorant to deal with her brother’s obvious agony.
‘Pictures?’ she asked. ‘What do you mean?’
He stared at her in abject misery. He really didn’t want to tell his little sister that Martin Baxter had Polaroid shots – in bad light, from far off, but nevertheless unmistakably Peter Connor and Dave Todd – from an alley behind the Gaumont, catching the two of them in a desperately compromising act. Indecent. Illegal. Oh Christ Almighty, Alison couldn’t know. He held his hands to his face and bellowed in a kind of private pain, and Alison stepped away from him and started to cry too, she couldn’t stop, and she couldn’t help it, because fear had her in its powerful clutches; she was cold with it, frozen. Outside in the street, a boy kicked a ball against a wall and the milkman shouted at him, ‘Watch them bottles! You break one, you’ll know about it.’ He swapped empties on the doorsteps for pints on the float, gold top, silver top; they clanked in their crates, and he whistled cheerfully, on this ordinary Saturday, at the end of July.
14
EDINBURGH,
2 DECEMBER 2012
Duncan was sleeping in Dan and Katelin’s spare bedroom, but Katelin couldn’t bring herself to speak to him. She told Dan to tell his friend that if Lindsay Miller set foot in the house, Duncan could sod off and sleep on the street, for all she cared.
‘I mean it, Dan,’ she said. ‘If I get so much as a whiff of her bloody cologne, he’s out.’
Dan didn’t say that Lindsay Miller wasn’t the cologne-wearing type; that instead she smelled of cigarettes and late nights at live gigs in dingy clubs. But he did tell Katelin she might try to be slightly less judgemental. He understood her feelings of loyalty to Rose-Ann; of course he did. But she’d known Duncan for a lot longer, he was a dear friend, and the guy was in turmoil. And this really was just a flash in the pan, he wasn’t with Lindsay at all, she’d just added him to her collection, and now his world had blown up.
‘Don’t make things worse for him than they already are,’ Dan said. ‘He’s suffering, but to her it’s a meaningless fling. Lindsay doesn’t need Duncan, and he’d probably be back home with Rose-Ann by now if everyone could just calm down.’
Katelin only shrugged at this. ‘He knows what to do then,’ she said.
‘What? Crawl back up to New Town in a hair shirt?’
‘Yes,’ Katelin said. ‘Why not? Those medieval Christians knew how to atone.’
‘Have you bothered to consider why he may have had his head turned?’ Dan asked, but Katelin only shrugged at this too, so he dropped it. He knew she wasn’t interested in the case against Rose-Ann, her occasional flint-eyed froideur, her tendency to slip into boardroom steeliness. In any case, this situation was as good as over. He’d met Lindsay two weeks ago, the day he travelled from London to Glasgow to see Duncan. She’d been with him in Gordon Street when Dan walked out of the station. Ripped jeans, biker jacket, Levi’s T-shirt, black Cuban heels, great cheekbones, bleach-blonde hair and a bold, unapologetic smile. She was lead guitarist, singer and songwriter for an indie-rock band called Many Minds. Together for ten years but still at the stage where even an ultimately unfulfilled promise of airtime on the radio was almost a cause for celebration. They’d had a drink together in a crowded pub, a shouted conversation over three pints of Tennent’s and a bag of cheese and onion crisps, and Lindsay sat opposite Duncan on a chair, not next to him on the bench, which Dan appreciated because it made the situation a little less odd. Duncan looked thinner, although it was only just over a week since Dan had seen him. His naturally pale complexion seemed almost bruised with fatigue, but there was a febrile energy about him, a kind of fervent light in his eyes. Lindsay chatted, laughed, asked Dan some questions, called Duncan Dunc, but didn’t really notice his evident desire to commune across the sticky wooden tabletop. She looked young and lithe and sexy, and if it hadn’t been totally out of order, Dan would’ve liked to ask her what she was playing at, hanging out with Duncan. When she’d drained her pint, she stood and made her excuses. They’d be wanting to talk about her and they couldn’t do that with her sitting there, she said, and gave a throaty smoker’s laugh, pure Glaswegian. So away she went, sashaying around the busy tables and pausing to light a fag before she’d quite made it out through the door.
‘Christ,’ Duncan said, heaving a sigh, watching until she’d gone.
Dan said nothing; instead he got up and went to the bar. He came back with two more pints, and sat down. ‘Right, Duncan, my lad. Is it all up with Rose-Ann?’
Duncan stared. ‘What kind of question’s that? I’m in love with Lindsay!’
‘I can see that, pal. I just wondered if she feels the same? Lindsay, I mean.’
Duncan didn’t answer, although he seemed to ponder the question, but then all he said was, ‘So, what do you think of her?’
‘I like her,’ Dan said without hesitation. ‘But how’s it going to pan out?’
‘Pan out?’
‘Yeah.’
‘As in …?’
‘As in, pan out.’
They regarded each other solemnly for a while, then Duncan said, ‘How the fuck would I know?’ and they both laughed, although a little grimly.
Dan shook his head. ‘Ah, Duncan.’
Duncan nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I know.’
He’d been here before, standing stage right in the rubble and ruin of a relationship, with a new woman waiting stage left. Rose-Ann had once been the new woman, a wealthy American – a lawyer turned venture capitalist from Santa Monica with Scottish lineage, a house in New Town and a weakness for men such as Duncan, as unlike her as it was possible to be: engagingly down at heel, unmaterialistic, driven by hopelessly impecunious artistic ambitions. She got him because he didn’t mind being adored, but she perhaps should’ve been told that Duncan hadn’t been without a woman since he was twenty, and in the past fifteen years alone he’d left Alice for Rose-Ann, Sharon for Alice and Monica for Sharon. For a guy who by any conventional criteria was no catch, Duncan seemed to be irresistible. Lindsay, though, she was your archetypal rolling stone; there’d be no pinning her down.
‘So,’ Dan said, ‘has she asked you to move in?’
‘No! What, into the flat in Laurieston?’
‘Yeah, obviously.’
‘Och, well, it’s only a temporary thing, rent-free just now, but it’s all a bit vague. A tenement flat with, like, six or seven other people.’
‘Right, a squat?’
‘Och, well,’ he said again, wincing a bit. ‘She’s always on the move anyway, touring, y’know?’
‘Right.’
‘They do better on the continent than they do here, that’s where the work is.’
‘Yep, right.’ The picture wa
s crystal clear to Dan, and there was nothing more revealing than Duncan’s evasiveness. He thought about Rose-Ann’s beautiful, comfortable Georgian house, and no, granted, you couldn’t stick with someone just because they had a great house … but on the other hand, a woman would have to be pretty sodding special to justify following her to a squat in the Gorbals.
Dan sighed. ‘You need to come back to Edinburgh, mate.’
‘A-ha, I know, I know that.’ Duncan nodded sadly.
‘You’ve a business to run, and, I mean, sorry to be brutal, but it was only Rose-Ann’s money that stopped that shop going under a long time ago. Come back, mate. This Lindsay thing, it’s a pipe dream. She’d do your head in, in the end.’
Duncan didn’t reply, but he didn’t deny it, either. They sat in silence for a while, Duncan staring down into his lager, Dan staring up at the old nicotine stains on the ceiling. His mind drifted to other times, and they were many, that he’d been in Glasgow with Duncan, and it was always for a gig; he couldn’t ever remember coming to this city for any other reason, apart from today. After a while he said, ‘That Comsats gig, the one we saw at King Tut’s.’
Duncan looked up and brightened immediately. ‘June twenty-sixth, nineteen ninety-three,’ he said.
‘Great night, great night. Mind you, I didn’t love that album.’
‘No. I liked it though.’
‘Yeah, but it wasn’t the real deal, not if you’d heard ’em in seventy-nine, at the beginning.’
‘Well,’ Duncan said, ‘you got me there.’
‘King Tut’s though,’ Dan said.
‘Banging, then and now.’
‘Best venue I know,’ Dan said.
Duncan nodded, took a swig of his lager, then said, ‘Oh God though, that other night as well, the Oasis night …’
‘Yeah, oh man,’ Dan said. ‘You, me and only about twelve other people in the room, and Alan McGee on his third Jack Daniel’s and Coke, stood there saying are they good or am I pissed?’
Old story, but they both laughed anyway, and now it felt comfortable again, and safe to say goodbye. Out on the street, they hugged, briefly. Duncan said he’d be back in Edinburgh soon, the day after tomorrow, or the day after that, and Dan said, ‘Good, good, OK, call me if you need to, and stay with us if you can’t go home,’ then he walked back up Gordon Street to the station, and Duncan dipped his head against the late-evening cold and headed off towards the badlands of Glasgow, to find Lindsay.
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