There had been shock, fright, terror, anger, horror, revulsion and pain. But apart from those eardrum-bursting, vicious moments as the bus turned over, he had not been in fear for his life. What set the pulse racing and the stomach tightening – the stake, if you like – until now had been freedom, or the danger of losing it. Getting away with it. Or just getting away. The risk to life had always been around somewhere – the threat of falling from the building, of being shot during or after the break-in, of violence by the police, of violence in prison, of falling over a bloody cliff as they scrambled around in these dark forests – but either it seemed unlikely, undefined and remote, or he had simply expelled it to get himself through.
Now it was survival that seemed remote, a scenario both undefined and unlikely. They had been running because they didn’t know what else to do, knowing capture was inevitable, but ready to savour the liberty of each moment they could postpone it. Now these moments were the last of their lives, not of their freedom. Death was here, on this hillside. A brutal death, slaughtered like some beast of the forest.
No-one was going to save him. No-one was going to pull the rifle away from the sniper’s shoulder and say, “Stop! That young man is innocent! It’s all right, kid, we know the truth. We’ve sussed the plot and Jean-Claude is kicking fuck out the bad guys even as we speak.” No-one was going to know the truth. He was going to be shot dead on a mountain and forgotten.
He looked to his father again. Somewhere inside, a wee boy was wanting his daddy to stand up and tell him it was going to be okay. Tell him Daddy would look after him. Daddy wouldn’t let any bad men or big dugs hurt him. But Tam was still slumped, as if the life, the energy had gone from his body, drained away by exhaustion and resignation. Then he turned and looked at Paul, tears forming in his eyes, and behind the beads of water a look of . . . apology.
He looked broken and defeated, the way he had looked, Christ, the way he had looked in that horrible visiting room all those years ago. Broken, defeated and . . . weak. Sorry for his own weakness. Sorry for failing his son. And Paul had hated him so much. Hated that image of him, that version of him. Hated him for being that man and not the man he had grown up with.
He had blamed his dad for what he did back then, back when he was a kid with so many ideals and hopes and expectations, and fair enough. But Paul knew he had managed his own fair share of fuckups since then, and there comes a time when you realise that you can’t trace all your own failures back to someone else’s Big Mistake.
He hadn’t really been looking to his dad to save him, to rescue him. It was just another way of wishing someone else would come along and sort it all out for him. But now it was growing-up time.
He knew his dad wasn’t weak when no amount of strength could have fought off the forces that assaulted them, and he hated whoever had made Tam see himself that way. Back then, back in that visiting room, with the fag-burnt, moulded orange seats and the peeling-plastic tables, he had hated the man who took away someone he loved, admired and respected and turned him into a sorrowful, apologetic wreck. In recent months, maybe even years, he had grown to understand that he still loved his father, and over these insane weeks, he had once more added admiration and respect. Now someone had taken that man away again, and Paul hated whoever it was with a far greater rage.
He drew on the hatred, sucked it in, let it fill him. Let it invigorate him, stimulate him, chase the cold shadows of dread from within.
The despair had been at his own loss; his, Tam and Spammy’s loss. Defeat, and the unseen but inexorable approach of death. The hatred refocused Paul’s vision. Liberty was written off. Escape was written off. They had regarded their own survival as the final thing they could hope for, the final thing they could want, and therefore the final thing they had to lose.
They needed something to win.
“Fuck them.”
Paul stood up, brushing the needles and moss from the backs of his legs, both Tam and Spammy suddenly looking on in surprise at his unexpected deliberateness.
“We’re lookin’ at this all wrong,” he said. “If they want us deid so much, then what they really fuckin’ don’t want is us back in custody, alive and talkin’. We know we cannae give oorsels up to the polis or the soldiers oot here in the hills. But if we can make it to civilisation, that’s a different story.”
Tam looked at Paul with a mixture of confusion and anticipation, and maybe even a splinter of hope.
“Now, we’ve managed to evade capture so far, so who’s to say we cannae show up in the nearest town or village – anywhere there’s civilian witnesses – wi’ oor hauns in the air. We’re seen surrenderin’. Unarmed. Alive. They cannae shoot us then.”
“We do go to jail, though,” Spammy added.
“Aye, but what aboot all those reasons they want us deid and the case closed? If what you were sayin’ is true, then us makin’ it to court is their worst fuckin’ nightmare.”
Tam stood up, seeming to grow and expand as he rose to his full standing height. He nodded his head, a look of powerful determination on his face.
“You’re right, son. Fuck them.”
Spammy untangled his limbs, like one of HR Giger’s aliens uncurling from slumber, and somehow assembled himself into a sedentary position.
“Well,” he said, “I suppose it’s that or leadin’ a pastoral existence, livin’ aff the fruits an’ berries of the forest. An’ I don’t fancy that, to be honest. Sooner or later we’d aw get terrible diarrhoea.”
Would it have been different, Paul wondered, feet padding softly along the forest floor, eyes scanning the periphery, ears searching beyond their footfalls and breathing for the sounds that might herald the end. Could it have been different? If Spammy had slept in, as usual, that morning. If he hadn’t risen at the unaccustomed hour of, well, daylight, bringing the post into the kitchen and slapping it down on the table as Paul devoured the reheated remains of last night’s take-away curry.
If the big yin hadn’t been there when he opened the envelope and the contents spilled on to the table, on top of the Daily Ranger and Spammy’s TAG. Grainy, blurry, poorly lit black-and-white pictures, date and time in a cheesy digital read-out on the bottom right-hand corner of each frame. Shapes that could be desks, computers, tills, melting into the background due to the low contrast of the image. But recognisable, unmistakable, in every shot, his dad’s face atop the figure that had been captured by the security camera. On the back of each picture was the name and address of the premises, and a list of articles, presumably those stolen.
“It’s your da,” Spammy had said, as Paul looked on, too stunned to speak.
Paul reached into the envelope and dislodged the last of its contents, a sheet of paper.
“Dear Paul,” it read, halfway down the page in very small type, one tiny line of print. “Stay by the telephone.”
They sat in silence, staring at the photographs, Paul speechless and Spammy just Spammy.
It couldn’t be true. He knew it couldn’t be true. Christ, one of the dates was just a week last Friday, and he had been at his parents’ house that night. Admittedly at the time stated on the photo, he was fast asleep on the couch, well stuffed with steak pie and Export, but he couldn’t quite envisage his dad getting up quietly in the middle of the night to go out to Paisley and screw some office in New Street. It was a wind-up. It had to be a wind-up.
“Was this you, ya lanky bastard?” he asked. “Fartin’ aboot wi’ the computers at Arlene’s work?”
Arlene was Spammy’s latest relationship-cataclysm-in-progress, a nerve-frazzled neurotic who worked as a copy-setter at a graphics bureau in Glasgow. Spammy looked back at him blankly, an almost unprecedented hint of worry in his eyes telling Paul he wasn’t lying. “I swear to God, Paul. I know fuck-all aboot this.”
The phone started ringing.
Paul and Spammy looked at each other for a second of shared trepidation, then Paul shot up from his chair and headed for the living room to answer it. Sp
ammy grabbed at his shirt from behind as he reached the living-room doorway, forcing himself in ahead of Paul and gesturing to him to let it ring as he fidgeted with the partially dismantled answering machine so that it would record the conversation.
“Hello?”
“Mr McInnes,” they heard, metallic, voice-disguiser tones emanating from the small speaker next to the rotating spools of the cassette, which seemed to be operational in spite of the contraption’s lack of casing and generally disembowelled appearance.
“You got the envelope?”
“Yes. What’s this . . .?”
“Just shut up and listen,” it said, the mystery caller’s breath crackling electronically as he paused. Despite the disguiser, they could make out that the voice was male, and there was enough tone in the accent for them to reckon he was English. Or from Edinburgh.
“There was another article stolen in each of the robberies,” he continued. “The security videotape. Consequently, the police have found it very difficult to proceed with their enquiries. If you do not do exactly as I say, copies of the pictures you have seen will fall rather serendipitously into their hands. I am also in the position to provide witnesses.”
“But, how . . .? My dad didn’t . . .”
“No, indeed, your father didn’t. You didn’t sell any smack to fourteen-year-olds in Glenburn, either, but I can supply pictures and evidence of that, too. But let’s not make this complicated. Here are your orders. Pay attention. You will go directly from here right now, to lot 12b, Gourlay Street, Renfrew. In there you will meet someone who will provide you with further information. If you go to the police, so do the photographs. And if you deviate from your instructions . . . well, as I’m sure you appreciate, if I can make things like these pictures happen, Paul, I can make other things happen. And I can make people die, too.”
The line went dead and the dialling tone trilled loudly out of the speaker a few seconds later.
Paul’s relationship with Spammy was one of the great mysteries in his life, constantly baffling him as to what each really got from the other’s company. Spammy often gave the impression that he wouldn’t exactly be daunted by the prospect of not having a conversation with another human being ever again, and when Spammy was feeling expansive, Paul often felt he wouldn’t exactly be daunted by the prospect of not having a conversation with Spammy ever again.
There’s always one weird kid in every neighbourhood, every school. Meiklewood had Spammy. Paul first remembered him from Meiklewood Primary, singled out for having singled himself out, ostracised for being a loner, and of course persecuted for the social sin of being a bit quiet. He was always awkward of appearance, even as a child looking as though he had been assembled from limbs and appendages intended for several other bodies of varied size and build. However, there were a few kids as quiet as Cameron Scott, and plenty more who could make him look a graceful exemplar of deportment by comparison. What made the difference, what sealed his categorisation, what turned Cammy into Spammy, was that he was “wan o’ the mental Scotts”.
In today’s parlance the Scotts would be described as a dysfunctional family, but as far as Paul could remember, as a family the Scotts functioned routinely and efficiently. Every morning, Mr Scott went out to his work, the weans went out to school, Mrs Scott stayed home, and in the evening they all returned, ate their tea and then knocked fuck out each other until bedtime.
There were three forms of communication in the Scott household: silence, screaming and physical assault. Spammy told Paul that the kitchen was a lot like Beirut, such was the tension between each of the potentially warring parties sharing the place, any two of which could escalate hostilities at any moment. Spammy had come along some years after his two brothers and his sister, not so much a late bonus for his parents as a consolation goal when they were already three down.
Spammy’s brothers weren’t really feared as hard cases around town because they seemed to expend so much of their aggression on each other that there was seldom much left for anyone else. It was as though the complex history of resentfully recorded Scott politics that sparked or fuelled their frequent inter-sibling atrocities made the notion of extra-familial violence seem a pointless frivolity, like casual sex when you’re in a consumingly passionate long-term relationship.
Spammy’s sister, Lizzy, was a far scarier prospect. Paul’s abiding impression of her was formed at the age of nine, having scaled the swingpark climbing frame and noticed with some distress that “Belter” Bums, a weasel-eyed and nasal-toned hard-ticket from the big school, was heading his way, past the see-saw, smoking as demonstratively as possible for the instruction and edification of junior on-lookers. Paul hadn’t noticed that Lizzy was among the crowd of “big lassies” standing near the roundabout, until she sprang from the group and assaulted Belter with a ferocity that Paul had never witnessed before, and seldom again. Not since Roy Aitken retired, anyway.
The ex-hard-ticket had staggered away, his T-shirt covered in blood from his nose, mouth and several cuts about his face, as three of her pals restrained Lizzy from committing further damage. Little as Paul understood it, he heard in school the next day that Lizzy was exacting punishment for Belter “puttin’ it aboot that he’d shagged her”.
Tales of further acts of retributive – or equally often, random – violence by Lizzy were legion. Unlike her brothers, Lizzy didn’t need that intimate, personal aspect to her brutality. This was because she was a psychopath.
Spammy, therefore, was less a product of his environment than a by-product of it. He had been afforded some degree of protection amidst the Elderslie Crescent theatre of war by his parents’ indulgence of their wee yin and by the fact that they and his siblings regarded him as having nothing to do with their battles, a cross between a neutral state and a defenceless refugee. This didn’t stop him being a civilian casualty now and again, though.
Paul and Spammy had become pals at primary school, sort of. He could remember things they had done together, could remember being in the same classes, but couldn’t remember anything they had said to each other. Which was natural enough – that’s how kids get on. They strike up an unspoken rapport and can be happy to be around each other, even if not much is being said. What naggingly disturbed Paul was that their adult relationship seemed to work on much the same basis.
Spammy had taken Paul round to his house once when they were about ten, which was when he was shocked – and indeed, at first, horrified – to learn that Spammy lived in a cupboard. It was basically an alcove with a door on it off the upstairs hall, with room enough inside for Spammy’s single mattress and precious little else. Paul was only slightly relieved to learn that this had been Spammy’s decision, and not some parental cruelty or deprivation. There were three bedrooms in the wee council semi: Mr and Mrs Scott had one; “the boys” occupied another; and Lizzy had one to herself, ostensibly on the grounds that she was a girl, politely avoiding the reality that no-one of either sex would want to share close quarters with someone so terrifyingly unstable anyway. When he had grown too big to sleep in a cot in his parents’ room, Spammy had been moved in with “the boys”. And as soon as he was big enough to lift his mattress, he had moved into the cupboard. This seemed to suit everyone, particularly Spammy. His clothes and toys and stuff remained in The Lebanon, but the cupboard – with its shelves five feet up and its bare bulb hanging from the ceiling – was his sleeping quarters and, most importantly, his retreat.
Spammy had taken Paul there right away, to just sit and look through annuals and swap football cards. It had been okay. Weird, but okay. Then they had gone downstairs for a piece and jam, and the cupboard had suddenly revealed its sanctuary qualities. Paul often wondered, later in life, if his own fears and knowledge of the family’s reputation maybe projected something, but the tension in the fragile-ceasefire atmosphere of mutual suspicion, resentment and latent hostility as they walked through the living room and into that kitchen was like nothing he had ever imagined.
> Paul didn’t see so much of Spammy at secondary, and saw even less of him after his dad went to jail. That was when Paul started running about with that bunch of, well, arseholes. Stealing motors, getting into barnies.
Paul’s Wild Years.
Pathetic, really.
He had been pretty angry, right enough. Angry and confused and fragile, and a teenager, which was a volatile enough state under the best conditions. The shock and the loss hit him pretty hard, but it was the abuse that triggered off the anger. He had been one of the “good boys”, see. Got his sums right, read books, did what he was told. So that lent a truly malicious joy to the relentless slagging, as if he had been knocked off some perch he had never even bloody attempted to occupy.
“Watch, hide your gear boys, here comes McInnes.”
“Lock the windies, it’s the burglar’s boy.”
“Heh McInnes, your da been fucked up the arse yet?”
And so on.
And it was all his dad’s fault. Not just for being a criminal, not just for going to prison, but for everything. For making him work so hard at school. For drilling it into his head to be respectful and obedient towards the teachers. And for going on and on and fucking on about fucking Uncle Greig and his fucking physics professorship and how there were fucking brains in the fucking family.
Paul was shite at physics. Maths too. He had tried, Christ knew he had tried, especially as his dad was so bloody married to the idea that he had genetically inherited a genius-like aptitude for the sciences that would show in time if he worked hard enough. But he didn’t even like science. He liked history. He quite liked English, apart from interpretations. He liked to read. And he liked plays. The class had been taken to the Citizens Theatre in the Gorbals once, and he had expected it to be the most tedious evening since Hibs were last at Love Street. But it was wild, this ancient Greek thing. The language was a bit pompous, and everybody seemed to be English, but there was so much action. There was fucking blood everywhere and by the end there were only about three folk left alive. No monsters, but it pissed on Clash Of The Titans.
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