Strange Loyalties jl-3

by William McIlvanney

  He lived on the way out to Rutherglen. We put a car at each end of the street before we drew up at the door. It was a reconditioned tenement but the street door still opened without mechanical control. One floor up, the nameplate said ‘Brogan’, nothing else, as if telling the world not to get personal. Bob Lilley knocked at the door. The footsteps that came towards it were light. He opened up and took in the three of us, face by face.

  ‘If it’s for the Policemen’s Fund,’ he said, ‘Ah gave.’

  ‘Can we come in?’ Bob said

  ‘Well, Ah don’t know anybody that’s found a way to stop your lot from doin’ that yet.’

  He walked along the hall into the living-room. We closed the door and followed him. He was in his stockinged feet. I was surprised again at how comparatively small he was. His reputation exuded size. Seen now, he was quite small and neat, like a frame on film before it is projected. The projector was his preparedness for violence.

  He stood in the middle of the floor and looked at us. I saw him in his habitat. It was a very tidy room. The newspapers were in the elasticated newspaper-rack. The glass coffee-table had nothing on it. On the sideboard there was one large, framed photograph of an elderly woman. I assumed it was his mother. It was certainly someone who would never speak to strange men in pubs. It was a room where nothing would happen except what he decided, until today. The television, which he had perhaps turned down before he came to the door, was showing sports results. It broadcast a routine that was no longer audible.

  ‘Yes?’ Tommy Brogan said into the silence.

  ‘We’re here to arrest you for murder, Tommy,’ Bob said and gave him the official caution, word perfect.

  Tommy Brogan looked at the television as if he was checking an especially interesting result. He looked at Bob.

  ‘Ye wouldn’t happen to have the name of the murderee on ye, would ye?’

  ‘Meece Rooney,’ Bob said.

  ‘Meece Rooney? What kinda name is that?’

  ‘Put your shoes on,’ Bob said.

  ‘This is crap,’ Tommy Brogan said. ‘Ah don’t even know the man.’

  ‘We’ll show you photos,’ Bob said. ‘Get ready, Tommy.’

  ‘Who told ye this?’

  ‘We just know.’

  ‘No. You don’t know. Because it never happened. Ye’re makin’ a bad mistake here. Ye’ll finish up lookin’ pretty pathetic.’

  ‘Not quite as pathetic as Meece. Come on.’

  ‘Well, it’s your funeral. Ah’ll come with ye.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ Bob said.

  Tommy Brogan made as if to move and then paused. He assessed the three of us. He seemed to be making a decision. His look to me was saying something like, ‘If it wis just one against three, Ah would win. But there’s more of ye out there, isn’t there?’ The moment tremored on a dangerous silence. He stirred and crossed the floor and sat down to put on his shoes. The unfulfilled possibility he left behind him opened a chasm in my preconceived sense of things. It was a dizzying prospect. I would have thought there was no choice but to come with us. But he had, however briefly, imagined an alternative. In that realisation I glimpsed the terrible logic of his life. Faced with nothingness like stone, he was always tempted to paint on it in blood the violent shape of his will.

  When he went through to the bedroom to get ready, Brian went with him. Bob and I looked at each other. I walked about the room.

  I was angry. The anger came from a disproportion between the offence and the reparation. This was all? Those wilfully damaged lives, those invented deaths were to be paid for so casually. A small, unfeeling man would put on his shoes and jacket and be chauffeured to jail. In his indifference to what he had done, he enraged me even more than he had in the doing of it. This wasn’t enough. Something more, a black angel whispered in me. I hoped he came out of the bedroom fighting. But he walked calmly back into the room wearing a sports jacket, with Brian after him. He went to the television and switched it off and turned and smiled at us. The bright images of a football game fused into black behind him. As casually as he had darkened the lives of others, he would accept the darkening of his own. I understood he was in prison already. What more could we do to him but exchange one cell for another? Perhaps there are those who cannot be punished more because they are their own punishment.

  The message from Macey was that Chuck Walker was in a bar with the sophisticated woman. Macey would be waiting outside. He had told us where to meet him. Driving there, with Tommy Brogan handcuffed in one of the cars behind us, I barely noticed the day. The sense of anti-climax in me was like inertia. The unexpected reawakened me.

  Macey wasn’t there. The three of us got out of the car to look around. Bob went and told the other policemen to stay in their cars. While Brian and Bob and I were standing in the busy street wondering what to do next, Brian suddenly said, ‘There he’s!’

  I thought he meant Macey. Some distance away I saw Macey’s sharply dressed figure signalling to us among the people. It was a few seconds later that I noticed what Macey’s signals meant. Chuck Walker was in the street with a tall, blonde woman. They were an interesting couple, the lady and the rottweiler. They were nearer to us than Macey was. They were coming towards us. Even as we saw him, he saw something else.

  It must have been an amazing image for him, like glancing sideways in a mirror and seeing a skeleton’s head. He had already passed the first police car when he looked casually into the second and saw Tommy Brogan in the back. Then he saw us over the heads of the crowds in the street. He spun and noticed the other car. He turned back towards us and then he wasn’t there. There were the people jostling in the street and there was the woman among them, still unaware of the suddenness with which relationships can end. Seeking to avoid bumping the passers-by, she was holding up the expensive plastic bag, which presumably contained something they had shopped for — instant memento.

  We were trying to force our way through the mob and the other policemen had come out of the cars and there was no sign of him. We were separated and moving around aimlessly when I looked through the window of a café. I saw the man behind the counter looking around him. Something had happened he didn’t understand. I went in. The place was busy and some of the people at the tables had the same ruffled appearance as the owner, as if a sudden wind had blown through the place. I stared at the owner. He was frightened. He looked towards his back shop.

  As I went through there, I heard the sound of a door being kicked open. Locating the sound, I saw the outline of Chuck Walker. His shoulders almost filled the doorway. He had his back towards me. Ahead of him was nothing but high wall. As he turned back, I thought I might just live long enough to regret that all he had had in front of him was wall.

  As he rushed me, his body filled my vision. I knew what I wanted to do but that isn’t always a great help. The punch I tried to throw was deflected like a gnat. He hit me in the stomach and then something, his fist or his forearm or his elbow, jarred into my neck. I fell through the doorway back into the space behind the counter. He was on top of me and he had a knife. I stayed very still. I saw the mole on his cheek. I saw the gargoyle malevolence of his face, the eyes lit eerily as if a torch were under them.

  ‘You’re ma hostage, polis,’ he said. ‘If they don’t let me pass, you’re dead.’

  For a moment I agreed. I could see my name in the obituary column. He trailed me to my feet and, as he did so, I jabbed my index finger and my forefinger in his face, one for each eye. Stumbling, he hit his hand on the hot-plate, where an abandoned egg was crisping. The knife fell. I kicked him in the balls. His body buckled. His head happened to be about six inches from the hot-plate when I caught it. I held it there. If my hands could feel the heat, his face must have been scorching.

  I had thought I was hunting evil. I had tracked the quarry down and found me. The café, the place where people eat and chat, volleyed away from me. I felt it disappear, sucked into darkness, and I was alone with my rage, and wi
th my hands on a man who stood for an almost total contempt for other people. In that moment I hated him in a way that frightens me still. There was nothing he could do to me now but I still held him there. I felt what I can hardly believe I felt. I said what I am ashamed to have said.

  ‘Do you want fried face?’ I said.

  He felt the seriousness of the offer. And he screamed. I was near in myself to what I had loathed in others. His animal terror broke down into garbled speech, the plea to be human.

  ‘It was Brogan,’ he was saying. ‘Tommy Brogan. Did it. He did it. Not me. Not me. He did it for Mason. Ah was just there. Ah’ll tell you. Ah’ll tell you.’

  ‘Not enough,’ I shouted.

  ‘Jack!’

  It was Brian Harkness. The café came back. The other policemen were with him. People were standing at their tables, staring at me. A woman was hiding her small son’s face. Brian pulled me away and Bob Lilley put handcuffs on Chuck Walker. I suddenly saw the separateness of Chuck Walker’s enormous hands, enclosed together in the metal, like a predator in a glass case. It was glass in which I could see my own reflection. As we came out, I felt it was like one of those occasions you see memorialised in newspaper photographs, when they’re leading the criminal to the car. But the way people were looking at me, I was the one who should have had the coat over his head. With Chuck Walker stowed in the second car, we stood in the street.

  ‘I wouldn’t have done it,’ I said.

  I was talking to myself.

  ‘No,’ Brian said.

  Bob didn’t say anything.

  ‘Anyway, let’s go, Jack,’ Brian said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You two get Mason on your own.’

  ‘What? Jack.’ Bob wasn’t taking me seriously. ‘Behave. You’ve got to complete the circle.’

  ‘There’s circles inside circles,’ I said. ‘I’ve got another one to complete. There’s a man I have to see. Brian, you do me a favour? When you’ve sorted this out, you dump my stuff at the flat? The bag’s in the boot. And there’s an ashtray I bought. And don’t forget what’s left of the Antiquary. I might need it. Oh, and a couple of paintings.’

  I gave him my spare keys to the flat. That was what made them accept that I wasn’t coming with them.

  ‘When’ll we see you?’ Bob said.

  ‘Monday at the latest.’

  ‘What about tonight?’ Brian said.

  ‘Maybe. We’ll see. Good luck. When you’re lifting Matt Mason, make sure you don’t drop him.’

  ‘You watch yourself, you,’ Bob said.

  They went into the car. I walked for a little, a very little, till I found the first bar. I took two whiskies fast, waiting to see if they would remind me of who I was. I felt strange to myself. I was still hollow with anger. I sat staring ahead and talking to no one and smoking and trying to calm myself. I came out of the pub and went by a very roundabout route to Michael Preston’s flat. But by the time I arrived I wasn’t significantly quieter. The flat had its own door to the street. It was a woman who opened it.

  ‘Jack?’ she said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’m Bev.’

  The accent was Australian. We shook hands. She preceded me up the stairs. She moved well. Michael Preston appeared in the hallway at the top. He shook hands with me.

  ‘Jack and I’ll talk in the study, Bev,’ he said.

  ‘He always hides the good-looking men from me,’ she said.

  ‘I must be the exception that proves the rule,’ I said.

  He took me into his study and closed the door.

  38

  The story of the fox in the tunic has haunted me since schooldays. I can’t remember which teacher told me it. But some forgotten day in some forgotten classroom, an adult casually told a boy a story, perhaps as incidental illustration of some more important matter, and the moment went into the boy’s mind clean as a knife and left a scar there. The scar may have healed into a fairly wilful shape, as scars will, but this is how I remember its origins.

  In Sparta, if I can trust that teacher, it was all right to steal. The crime was in being found out. A Spartan boy one day stole a fox. He hid it in his tunic. I wouldn’t mind going back now as an adult and asking that anonymous teacher a couple of questions. He stole a fox? He hid it in his tunic? I assume foxes were wild even then, so maybe he stole it from someone else’s land. Maybe what he did was poach it. But it must have been either a very small fox or a very large tunic. Perhaps it was a baby fox. I don’t recall.

  What I do recall is the impact of what followed. On his way home, the boy met a family friend who detained him in conversation. I’ve often wondered what they talked about — perhaps the price of sandals. As they passed the time, maintaining the social niceties, the fox began to eat the boy’s stomach. Not only did he avoid saying, ‘Wait a minute. I’ve got a problem here’. He also managed to keep his face so composed that his friend had no idea of what was happening to him. They talked. They parted. By the time the boy came home and could acknowledge what was going on behind his public image, it was too late. His very entrails had gone public. He died. He became, it seems, a kind of Spartan hero, representing the ideals of their society. Some society.

  I don’t think that was so heroic. It was formidably tough, all right. But I think he would have come closer to heroism if he had breached the accepted rules. I don’t think the boy should have said, ‘That’s right’ and ‘Yes’ and ‘Really?’ No wonder the Spartans gave us the word laconic. I think the boy should have said, ‘Listen. I don’t want to talk about this shit. There’s a fox eating my guts away. All right, so I stole the bastard. Do what the hell you want. But I’m not having this.’ Something like that.

  For me as a boy the story was first of all simply a stunning event. It left my mind gaping. Subsequently, more meaning gathered around it in my head. The shock of disbelief became a slow sense of recognition. I thought I saw in the behaviour of the Spartan boy a metaphor for how we live. I realised that it wasn’t just in Sparta that people smile and nod and talk trivialities while their self is unseaming. It was what we were all taught to do. Certainly, in Scotland, I decided, a lot of us had evolved social conventions so cryptic they almost amounted to mime and must be sustained, no matter what tragic opera was unfolding in the head.

  I had come to think that the story had stayed with me so determinedly because it contained this central significance. After talking to Michael Preston, I began superstitiously to wonder if there was another reason why that anecdote from an old culture had claimed my attention beyond rationality. For it was the story of my brother’s life. It had lain about my awareness for many years, patiently, as if it knew its purpose and I didn’t. Then, suddenly, in the small, comfortable study of a spacious, attractive flat early on a Saturday evening, I looked at it again, that familiar hieroglyph, and saw in it the features of my brother’s face.

  The realisation brought a terrible stillness to me. I had knocked at all those doors and at last one had opened and brought me to a place from which I did not know how to go on. Michael Preston sat and told me what I had become so desperate to know. I had looked into so many blank faces, listened to so many unhelpful voices that I went to him ready to force my way past his defences. Instead, he simply invited me into the truth. Once there, I wasn’t so sure it was where I wanted to be.

  Discovery is not merely knowledge, it is obligation. I had decided that, sitting in the Red Lion in Thornbank. It came back to haunt me in the West End of Glasgow. I had gone into Michael Preston’s room with eyes like weapons. I came out with eyes like wounds. I strode towards his flat. But I wandered away from it. The streets I had known most of my life were strange.

  Since I didn’t know what was to be done, it didn’t matter what I did. I walked. I went into pubs. I observed the bizarre purposefulness with which other people moved and talked. I saw a man in passionate conversation with his friend and then, going to the bar, heard that he was discussing the ridiculous price he had b
een charged for garage repairs. I watched a woman watch herself in the mirror as she chatted. I went to several places. I drank a lot. I wandered through the evening like a wraith, feeling substanceless.

  Only my head was rabidly alive. I had to think that Scott had probably committed a kind of suicide — not through a deliberate, conscious act but through a deliberate carelessness that was inviting the worst thing to happen. I could imagine he had lived so long with the fox that he couldn’t take the pain any more. He, too, had died of a guilt he couldn’t declare.

  The anger I had set out with this week had found so much to feed on. I remembered talking to Jan at Lock 27 about Scott’s funeral. I had thought that was anger? Look at me now. My anger had grown on Dave Lyons and Sandy Blake and Michael Preston. And Anna. I remembered my feeling in the car after talking to the stranger outside Scott’s old house. Muzzle the dog, I had said to myself. How did you muzzle this one? That had been a chihuahua. This was a Great Dane. I felt such rage.

  But that day in the car I had also told myself that my rage had to find an address to which to go. Now I knew it never could. For it was a rage not just against certain people, Chuck Walker or myself, but against the terms on which we have agreed to live. My quarrel was with all of us. Where did you go to deliver that one?

  I went anywhere my feet took me. One of the places must have been the Chip, for I have a memory of talking to Edek and Jacqueline and Naima Akhbar. I have not much memory of what was said. I remember the concern on Naima’s sweet face. I think she told me a Muslim saying that was supposed to help me. But it couldn’t have worked because I have forgotten it. I’m left with an impression of many people jostling as we drank, as if someone had installed a gantry in a football crowd. And then I was outside again.