That feeling had been intensified by my call to Jan before I sat down to eat. I had phoned her at the restaurant and she was there and able to talk, though not for long. We agreed that we would meet at the Bona Sospira tonight for dinner.
‘How will I recognise you?’ she said.
‘It’s only four days, Jan.’
‘They’ve been long ones. Tell you what. Why don’t you just come as yourself? I hope you’ve worked out who that is by now.’
Had I? Maybe, in Tom’s sense, I had lost myself rather than lose the thing I was after – at least lost my comparatively familiar sense of myself. It wasn’t just time I had put between Jan and me but emotional distance as well. She obviously felt it. And so did I. I wanted very much to meet her but I wasn’t sure how fully we could meet. In examining the terms of Scott’s life, I had been examining the terms of my own. The price you pay for arriving at a personal vision is the loneliness of having to live with it. I had a suspicion that my bill was on the way.
I looked round the restaurant. I saw an elderly couple eating with dignified slowness, a family whose children were just managing to impose public standards on what was normally a domestic experience, what I assumed were three business women, an American couple nearby whose clothes suggested they had confused Glasgow with Miami. The apparent completeness of their involvement in ordinary things made me feel even more isolated and alien.
My hotel room didn’t help. I found myself opening drawers as if I might find there a clue to my identity, a personal equivalent of the Gideon bible. I found, appropriately enough, emptiness. I was reminded again of Tom Docherty. He has written a lot in hotel rooms. His theory is that they are such sterile and anonymous places that they make him write, if only to react against the void, to prove to himself that he exists. I looked at the hotel pen and the sheets of hotel paper. But I opted for the phone.
I phoned the BBC for the third time today. If Michael Preston were there, I was only a couple of hundred yards away. I could catch him before he escaped. But Mr Preston, it seemed, was still out on location somewhere in Glasgow. They couldn’t tell me where.
I switched to my secondary obsession, like a driver transferring to his emergency fuel-tank. Something Eddie Foley had said interested me. It had started up in my head the process of refining my raw determination to catch Matt Mason into the vague possibility of a method.
I phoned Edek Bialecki. Edek was a sound-recordist and a sound man. He had worked with the BBC for years until a general disillusionment and a very specific straitening of finances had encouraged him to move out into freelance. He worked for independent companies and sometimes contracted back into the BBC for particular jobs. His father had been a Polish prisoner-of-war in the early 1940s and had stayed on to marry a Scottish girl. Edek had three loves: his wife, his children, and machines. His wife and children sometimes struggled to keep up. Jacqueline kept his mania in perspective. She had once said to me solemnly, ‘The marriage is in trouble again. He’s seeing a new console.’ Jacqueline had also had an interesting effect on his speech. Edek had always been a terrible swearer and, after their marriage, it had led to rows until they found a compromise. Edek’s swearing was, as it were, put on a diet, allowed just the one indulgence. That was why he was sometimes referred to as Bloody Edek. Jacqueline was a woman of some will-power. You could have told that from her voice. One hullo was enough.
‘Hullo, Jacqueline,’ I said. ‘It’s Jack Laidlaw. Why are you not working?’
She was a freelance film editor.
‘Jack! You know another film editor that’s working, do you?’
‘I don’t know another film editor.’
‘They’ve probably all died off. If you’re looking for Edek, he’s working today. Praise the Lord.’
‘What is he doing?’
‘He’s at Black Cat. A studio discussion. But they won’t have started recording yet. Be setting up. They’re doing the programme this afternoon.’
‘I might try to get him there.’
‘Do that. The couch is still here, by the way.’
There had been a phase when I spent a few nights there, debating many aspects of the world with Jacqueline and Edek.
‘I’ll try it again some time.’
‘Good. If you give us some forewarning, we can buy a distillery. It took Edek three days to recover the last time. Cheers.’
Edek was at Black Cat Studios and able to come to the phone.
‘Hullo. Is that bloody you, Bloody Edek? Jack Laidlaw.’
‘You haven’t got the style for it,’ he said. ‘No sense of timing. So where’ve you been?’
‘I’m not too sure. Listen, Edek. Are you free over the weekend? Say, tomorrow and Sunday?’
‘I’m not working. Why?’
‘I’m not sure yet. I just want to know if I could call on you, if it was necessary.’
‘You mean professionally?’
‘That would be the idea.’
‘So what’s this about?’
‘I don’t know entirely yet. It might never happen. But I’m working on something. If it turns out the way I think it might, you could do me a right favour. Wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. Are you game?’
There was a brief pause.
‘Here, Ah love mysteries,’ Edek said. ‘Are you a real detective, mister? Could Ah be helpin’ you to catch a criminal an’ everything? If Ah do it, can Ah get a gun home wi’ me? To play with. Just for the weekend.’
‘Thank you, Edek,’ I said. ‘Is that a yes or a no?’
‘Could be. Come on, Jack. Phone me once you know what it is you’re asking me to do. If it’s making a recording of a shoot-out, forget it. Those bullets ricochet. I’ll have to go here. Get in touch, will you? And, hey. What about sometimes getting in touch just to go for a drink or something? I like doing simple things sometimes.’
‘We’ll do that,’ I said. ‘So where do I get in touch with you?’
‘I’ll be at the house all day tomorrow. Bloody domestic bloody bliss.’
Talking to Edek hadn’t given my feeling of disorientation any significant point of connection with the things that were going on around me in the city. I was still left waiting for something to happen and I was still not sure what it was. But renewing contact with Edek gave me another idea.
He had introduced me to a woman who worked in the BBC. He and I had been in the Ubiquitous Chip when she came in. I had met her several times since, in there, and we had talked a lot. I phoned the BBC again and asked for Naima Akhbar. When she came to the phone, it took her a moment to locate me on her mental map. But the sounds of recognition sounded enthusiastic. I explained that I was trying to find out where Michael Preston was filming today. He knew my brother and there was a message I wanted to pass on. It was fairly urgent. Naima would see what she could do and call me back. I gave her my number at the hotel.
I lay on the bed and smoked a cigarette. I said, ‘Come on, come on, come on.’ Naima did. The phone rang.
‘Hello, Jack?’
‘Naima. Ya beauty. What’s the word?’
‘Sunny Drumchapel,’ she said. ‘It’s a programme on unemployment in Scotland. I got a look at the shooting schedule. This afternoon, it’s supposed to be Drumchapel. If they keep to the schedule. Which doesn’t always happen.’
‘What, in the streets? In a house?’
She gave me an address.
‘It’s a boy who’s unemployed. Michael Preston’s going to interview him. The schedule has them starting at two o’clock. They should be there by now. But these things take a long time to set up.’
‘Naima. Have I told you lately that I love you?’
‘You can tell me in the Chip some time.’
‘At great length.’
‘Uh-huh. We’ll see you there then. Take care.’
‘Thanks, Naima.’
30
Iknew Drumchapel, alias the Drum. A lot of people there wrestled with the bleakness of a badly conceived place
. The decrepit council houses were a past promise of social improvement that had turned into the fact of deprivation. Today I saw dogs roam like the disinherited spirit of the place. Jennifer Lawson, whom I had first met as a brutalised corpse, had lived here. The place had its associations for me. But Michael Preston was not one of them.
I had my sense of him though. Television can make us familiar with strangers. We often look at the faces on it with more concentration than we look on the faces of friends. He was urbane and very articulate and he appeared to put that articulacy at the service of more than his own career. I had read an article about him in a newspaper which claimed that he had never made a programme he didn’t believe in utterly. I had always liked him. He seemed sincere and his voice had the rhythm of natural speech – not the way voices sometimes sound on the box, as if they had been punctuated by computer. His public voice had the tone of integrity. If his private voice matched it, conversation with him should be less of a pin-ball game than it was with Dave Lyons.
I drove past Ardmore Crescent, where Jennifer Lawson had lived. That was the first case I had been on with Brian Harkness – strange bonus from a bad death. I worked my way through the cold geometry of streets that were like an industrial estate manufacturing disillusion. I knew I had found the house when I saw three cars parked outside, two of them estate cars. Someone had visitors, and visitors who needed space in their vehicles for a lot of equipment. As I locked the car, I saw a television light at an upstairs window.
The outside door of the house was ajar. Pushing it open, I saw a young man coming down the stairs. He was wearing jeans and a sweater and a Barbour jacket. He was carrying a canister of film. He nodded to me on the way past. He was with the BBC and obviously thought that in some way I came with the house. I decided to accept the freedom of the building he had bestowed on me.
The uncarpeted stairway led up to a long, dim hallway at the end of which the door was slightly open. Voices came from beyond it. The wooden floor creaked as I stepped on it, already haunted with departed people. I opened the door to the living-room and went in.
Strange image of the times: a kind of theatre made out of real hardship; designer deprivation. The room was so raw as hardly to suggest an interior at all but rather one of those make-believe houses children may put together on a waste lot from other people’s cast-offs. The walls bore the scars of previous failed attempts at decoration, overlaid with the scrawled graffiti of names. The uncovered floor had one patch of carpet in the middle – a raft of identity sinking in a sea of anonymity. A burst sofa and two chairs were all the furniture, looking as if they hadn’t been delivered but dumped.
Yet surrounding this construct of serious need was enough expensive equipment, had it been sold, to make the room a showpiece. There were powerful lights, sound machines, an impressive film-camera mounted on a tripod. Around these stood more than half a dozen people. Some of them obviously were there with the equipment. The others, two teenage boys, were friends who were there to see the show. Each side apparently took me as belonging to the other and my presence was barely remarked.
Beside the camera, out of range of its lens, Michael Preston sat on a metal box. The object of his attention, as of everybody else’s, sat on the sofa opposite him. They were a boy who might have been eighteen and a girl who could be hardly that. Between them a girl of maybe one year old was sitting. The child was the true denizen of the room, someone already being defined by her habitat. The pinched features had faint sores around the mouth and the unchildlike listlessness of the eyes seemed to lag behind the movements around them, a cripple trying to follow a parade. Even someone insensitive enough to miss the statement the room made about the way some people live couldn’t have missed its meaning as reflected in her face.
From Michael Preston’s interview, which was already in progress, I learned that the two older children were the parents of the third. The mother was wan and shy and didn’t say much. The father had the kind of youthful face one glance at which made me think, with a sinking feeling, that they could book the cell now. It might lie empty for a few years yet but it was going to be needed. I liked his face. It was a ‘so what?’ face. He had seen enough already to know that he wasn’t exactly born to win and, if his life was never going to have much in the way of material substance, it could at least have style. The old felt hat was a part of it. The expression beneath it was saying to every stranger, ‘Doesn’t bother me’.
Their names, it emerged, were Julian and Marlene. I wondered what unconsciously shared dream in different council houses had spawned the poignancy of the names. We call you Julian and Marlene and, by the sympathetic magic that is in names, you will grow mysteriously to fit them and be different from us. But the only difference was perhaps that, while their parents’ poorness had been part of a cohesive community that gave at least the support of shared values, theirs was part of a widespread rootlessness. The magic hadn’t worked the way it was supposed to. But then a few of the essential ingredients had been missing, like opportunity and social justice.
Michael Preston conducted the interview gently, establishing a trust. His accent gradually modified itself until it was hardly distinguishable from Julian’s. Seen in the flesh, he didn’t match the sense I had had of him. He looked smaller and more vulnerable. But then fame’s just borrowed clothes. I can’t imagine that anyone’s reputation fits them.
Listening to Julian, I heard the banality of hopelessness. Futility had become so familiar to him that it was a casual idiom in his mouth. He told of a temporary job he had had, the small amount of money they had to try and live on, the incidence of mugging in the area, their incompetence in bringing up the child. The appallingness of his situation was muffled by two things: his cocky self-defeating acceptance of it and the mediating requirements of the camera. His life was being processed into a piece of television.
The way in which the reality of his life was being made over into a viewable artefact had come home to me when the camera-man suddenly said, ‘Oh God! No! Stop it there.’ There was, he said, ‘a hair in the gate’. The drama of his performance shattered any atmosphere of naturalness Michael Preston had managed to create. When the interview resumed, Marlene had become terrified of the moods of the camera and kept glancing at it as if it might sprout a headful of hair this time. Julian, invited to repeat the last thing he had been saying, started not to talk but to perform.
Looking on at the end of the interview, I felt I recognised where I had been several times this week – a place where people knew unjustifiable things had happened and were happening but had tried to give the truth they knew elocution lessons, so that form became the criterion, not content. I began to worry about the man who was central to the shaping of the truth that was emerging here. I didn’t want Michael Preston to give me a carefully packaged version of what I sought to know. As soon as he said, ‘That’ll do us. Cut’, I crossed towards him. I was beside him as he straightened up from his box.
‘Mr Preston,’ I said. ‘I’m Jack Laidlaw.’
His eyes took a moment to come back from his interview. He looked at the child, he looked at me.
‘It doesn’t matter how pure you think your motivations are,’ he said. He was talking to himself. ‘You always feel you’re exploiting people in these things. You’re Scott’s brother.’
‘That’s right. Could I talk to you for a minute?’
‘Well, just a minute. We’re going to set up outside for a piece to camera. I’ll have to look at my notes.’
While they were clearing up, we wandered through to the kitchen. It was no more homely than the living-room had been. You could believe that the main thing they cooked here would be stale air. We could hear the technicians prepare to move on, having plundered the room of its few minutes of voyeurism. Standing in this place of disadvantage with this man who exuded well-being, I felt at last as if the disparate lives I had been moving among recently were coming together. Public rectitude was meeting private accusation. It was
as if Dave Lyons were being introduced to Dan Scoular. But would they talk?
‘How did you find me here?’ he said.
‘Through the BBC.’
‘Nemesis, right enough,’ he said. ‘A Detective-Inspector calls. You’re persistent.’
‘I’ve had to be.’
‘I’ve been expecting you,’ he said. ‘But not in a house in Drumchapel.’
‘I suppose Dave Lyons would phone you.’
‘That’s right.’
The honesty of the admission was hopeful.
‘So you know what I want to talk about.’
‘I do. And we’ll do that. But not here. And not now.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s a long story. And I’m under the cosh to get this programme finished. I’ve another interview to do today. And we’ve got editing time tonight. Tomorrow I’m working as well.’
The hope I had felt receded. He must have seen it in my face. He wrote something on the back of one of the pages of notes he had in his hand. He tore it off and gave it to me.
‘That’s my address,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow. Late afternoon or early evening you can get me there. Bev, my wife’s having a dinner party. But I can talk to you before it.’
I thought about arguing but I had no choice.
‘You wouldn’t be going to synchronise stories, would you?’ I said.
The look he gave me was hard with pride.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I belong to me. When my mouth opens, it’s my words coming out. Nobody works me from the back.’
‘Mr Preston,’ I said. ‘I hope that’s true. I’ve been a long way round the houses here. And I’m getting tired of it. Somebody better speak to me straight. I hope it’s you.’
‘Well, you’ll find out tomorrow, won’t you? I’d better get out.’
He spoke briefly and kindly to Julian and Marlene, who were nervously elated with the experience of having been on television and seemed to be looking for somewhere to put their energy. He ruffled their daughter’s sparse hair. When I came outside with him, the camera was already set up in the middle of the road. He took up his position on the pavement. I walked to the car. I unlocked the door but stood and waited. Somebody checked that no vehicles were approaching and he began to speak to the camera.
Strange Loyalties Page 21